Title: The True Story of Ah Q and Other Stories Author: Lu Xun Creation Date: 1918-1926 Location: China
Summary
Lu Xun's short stories are surgical, unsettling dissections of Chinese society in the early 20th century. "A Madman's Diary" (1918), the first major work of fiction written in vernacular Chinese, presents a paranoid narrator who discovers that Chinese history is one long record of cannibalism — a metaphor for a culture that devours its own people. "The True Story of Ah Q" follows a village loser who transforms every humiliation into a "spiritual victory" through self-deception, a devastating portrait of national psychology. "Kong Yiji" depicts a failed scholar clinging to classical learning in a world that has moved on. "Medicine" shows revolutionaries being executed while the crowd buys their blood as folk remedy. Each story is short, ruthless, and unforgettable.
Why This Book Matters
Lu Xun is universally regarded as the father of modern Chinese literature. Writing in the aftermath of the 1911 revolution that overthrew the last dynasty, he used fiction as a scalpel to diagnose what he saw as the spiritual sickness of Chinese civilisation — its feudal mentality, its passive acceptance of suffering, its cannibalistic social hierarchy. His work was instrumental in the May Fourth Movement's project of cultural modernisation and remains the most powerful literary critique of traditional Chinese society ever written. Mao Zedong called him "the saint of modern China," and his stories are still required reading in every Chinese school.
Historical Context
Lu Xun (1881-1936) began writing after the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, when China was torn between warlord factions, humiliated by foreign powers, and searching desperately for a path to modernity. The May Fourth Movement of 1919 — a cultural and political uprising triggered by China's betrayal at Versailles — called for the wholesale rejection of Confucian tradition, the adoption of vernacular Chinese as a literary language, and engagement with Western ideas. Lu Xun became the movement's literary conscience, channelling its rage and hope into fiction of devastating clarity.
Literary Significance
Lu Xun imported European literary techniques — particularly from Gogol, Nietzsche, and Chekhov — and fused them with Chinese storytelling traditions to create something entirely new. His prose style, stripped of classical ornamentation and written in the living language of the people, helped establish modern Chinese as a literary medium. His stories achieve a compression and symbolic density that rivals Kafka (whom he predates). "A Madman's Diary" in particular inaugurated a tradition of modernist Chinese fiction that continues to the present day.
Research Notes
Julia Lovell's Penguin translation is fresh, sharp, and well-annotated. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang's older translations are also excellent and widely available. Lu Xun's importance is impossible to overstate — he is to modern Chinese literature what Dante is to Italian. Including the collected stories rather than a single piece allows the reader to see the range of his vision. His essays are also extraordinary but the fiction is the essential entry point.
The Reading
A Madman's Diary (1918)
The first story is the one that changed Chinese literature. It takes the form of a diary kept by a man whom everyone around him considers insane. The madman — never named — begins to suspect that the people around him want to eat him. He sees it in the way his neighbours look at him, in the way the dog on the street stares, in the way the children's eyes follow him. He reads through the old histories and finds, between the lines of every page, two words: "Eat people."
"I opened a history book and it was filled with the words 'benevolence, righteousness, and morality.' I couldn't sleep, so I read on carefully far into the night, until I saw two words between the lines on every page: 'Eat people.'"
The diary spirals inward. The madman realises that cannibalism is not literal (though he notes that literal cannibalism has occurred in Chinese history) but structural — the feudal Confucian system eats its own people, consuming their individuality, their freedom, their capacity for independent thought. The father consumes the son. The landlord consumes the tenant. The strong consume the weak. And the most horrifying discovery: the madman may have eaten human flesh himself, unknowingly. He may be complicit. "Perhaps I, too, have eaten human flesh without knowing it."
The diary ends with a plea that is also a scream: "Save the children..."
Lu Xun modelled the story on Gogol's "Diary of a Madman," but the content is entirely Chinese. The madman's paranoia is actually clear-sightedness: he sees what the "sane" people cannot or will not see. His madness is the truth. The story's postscript, written in classical Chinese, tells us that the madman has "recovered" and gone off to take an official position — meaning he has been reabsorbed into the very system he diagnosed. The cure is worse than the disease.
Kong Yiji (1919)
A brief, perfect story about a man destroyed by the system he reveres. Kong Yiji is a failed scholar — he has never passed the civil service examinations that would have given him a position and an income. He is tall, pale, and wears a long scholar's gown that is filthy and tattered. He comes to a wine shop where the working men drink standing up (they cannot afford to sit) and insists on his scholarly credentials, quoting classical texts to people who neither understand nor care. He steals books and is beaten for it; he protests that "taking books" cannot be called "stealing" — a pathetic distinction between the literary and the vulgar.
The story is told by a boy who works at the wine shop. He observes Kong Yiji with the detachment of youth — noting the man's absurdity but also, without sentimentality, his isolation. When Kong Yiji tries to teach the boy the classical character for "fennel," the boy is indifferent. "Who wants to know?" The classical knowledge that Kong Yiji has spent his life acquiring is worthless.
Kong Yiji disappears. His legs have been broken (beaten for stealing again), and he drags himself to the wine shop one last time, his face gaunt, to drink with the last of his money. After that, he is never seen again. The wine shop owner remembers him only because he still owes nineteen coppers. The story's final line: "I have not seen Kong Yiji again — he must certainly be dead."
Medicine (1919)
Two stories run in parallel, connected by a single object. In the first, Old Shuan, a tea-house owner, buys a bread roll soaked in human blood — the blood of an executed criminal — as a folk remedy for his son's tuberculosis. He pays for it before dawn at the execution ground, receiving the steaming roll from the executioner. The superstition is that the blood of a criminal has curative power.
In the second story, we learn that the executed man was a young revolutionary — a member of the anti-Qing resistance who was turned in by his own uncle. The revolutionary dies for a cause that the common people neither understand nor care about. His blood is consumed not as a political act but as folk medicine, by a father desperate to save his dying child.
The child dies anyway.
Lu Xun's point is layered and merciless. The revolutionaries sacrifice themselves for a people who use their blood as superstitious remedy. The people are trapped in ignorance so deep that they cannot recognise their own liberators. The system perpetuates itself not through force alone but through the complicity of the ignorant. And the folk remedy — the blood-soaked bread — is a perfect metaphor: the revolution is literally consumed and digested, turned into nothing.
The final scene takes place in a graveyard where the mothers of the dead child and the dead revolutionary happen to visit at the same time. They do not speak to each other. A wreath of flowers has appeared on the revolutionary's grave, placed by someone unknown. It is the story's single gesture of hope — fragile, anonymous, unexplained.
The True Story of Ah Q (1921-1922)
This is Lu Xun's masterpiece of sustained fiction, published serially over several months. Ah Q is a peasant in the village of Weizhuang — a man with no surname, no family, no property, no education, and no face (the Chinese concept of social standing). He is a day labourer who sleeps in the village temple. He is dirty, ignorant, boastful, cowardly, and possessed of one remarkable psychological talent: the ability to transform every defeat into a "spiritual victory."
When Ah Q is beaten by a stronger man, he tells himself: "I have been beaten by my own son." When his head is knocked against a wall, he thinks: "It is as if I were beaten by myself." When he is humiliated, he forgets it within minutes and walks with renewed confidence. This mechanism — which Lu Xun presents with a combination of comedy and horror — is his diagnosis of the Chinese national character: the capacity to absorb any amount of suffering by reinterpreting it as triumph.
Lu Xun narrates with mock-scholarly formality, claiming to write a "true biography" of Ah Q while noting the difficulties — Ah Q's surname is uncertain, his given name is uncertain, even the character "Q" is an approximation. This apparatus of scholarly authority applied to a man of complete insignificance is itself a devastating satire of Chinese intellectual culture.
Ah Q's adventures are a picaresque journey through the grotesqueries of village life. He bullies those weaker than himself — a nun, a young widow — and grovels before those stronger. He is thrown out of the Zhao family's house for claiming to share their surname. He goes to the city and returns with stolen goods, briefly achieving a kind of respect. He attempts to join the revolution when it reaches Weizhuang — not from conviction but from the hope that revolution will allow him to steal more effectively.
The revolution of 1911, which overthrew the Qing dynasty, arrives in the village as farce. The local gentry cut off their queues, hang up a few new signs, and carry on as before. Ah Q tries to align himself with the revolutionary party but is rejected — the revolution, too, has its hierarchies, its gatekeepers, its insiders and outsiders. When a robbery occurs, Ah Q is arrested as a convenient scapegoat. He is tried before a court he does not understand, forced to sign a confession he cannot read (he draws a circle, unable to write), and sentenced to death.
He is paraded through the streets to the execution ground, and the crowd gathers to watch. Their eyes are hungry, eager — the same eyes the madman saw. Ah Q's last thought, as the rifles are raised, is annoyance that his circle was not round enough. He is shot. The crowd is satisfied. The narrator reports that public opinion in Weizhuang was that Ah Q deserved his fate because he was, after all, a bad man.
Tomorrow (1920)
A widow named Shan Si's Wife nurses her dying child through the night. She takes the boy to a doctor who prescribes useless traditional remedies. The child dies at dawn. The women of the village come to help with the funeral preparations — it is one of Lu Xun's rare moments of community — but the widow is left alone in her grief. "Tomorrow" is the word she repeats to herself: tomorrow, it will be different. But Lu Xun offers no tomorrow. The story ends in silence.
A Small Incident (1920)
A brief sketch in which the narrator, a jaded intellectual, is riding in a rickshaw when the puller accidentally knocks down an old woman. The narrator wants to move on — the woman is probably faking her injury — but the rickshaw puller stops, helps the old woman up, and walks her to a police station. The narrator is ashamed. The incident is small, but it is enough to make him question his own superiority. "This incident keeps coming back to me, often more vivid than in actual experience, teaching me shame, spurring me on to reform, and imbuing me with courage and hope." Lu Xun's most affirmative story — and even here, the affirmation is laced with self-reproach.
The New Year's Sacrifice (1924)
Xianglin's Wife is a peasant woman whose story is told by a narrator who returns to his hometown for the New Year. He learns that Xianglin's Wife has died — and the story of her destruction unfolds in flashback.
She was first married to a man who died young. She fled her in-laws and found work as a servant, where she was valued for her strength and diligence. But her mother-in-law tracked her down and sold her into a second marriage with a man in the mountains. This second husband also died, and her young son was eaten by a wolf. She returned to the town, broken, endlessly telling the story of her son's death to anyone who would listen. At first, people were moved. Then they grew bored. Then they avoided her. Her employer fired her because she was considered unlucky — a woman twice widowed, touched by death.
She went to the temple and donated her life savings to buy a threshold stone, hoping that being trampled by thousands of feet would atone for the sin of having had two husbands. It did not work. She was still refused participation in the New Year rituals. She became a beggar. She died in the snow on New Year's Eve, while the town celebrated.
Lu Xun's fury is controlled but immense. Xianglin's Wife is destroyed not by any single villain but by the interlocking cruelties of Confucian morality, superstition, and economic exploitation. The system crushes her from every direction simultaneously, and her own attempts to appease it — the threshold stone, the endless retelling of her suffering — only confirm its power over her.
The Weight of the Whole
Lu Xun's stories, taken together, constitute the most devastating literary indictment of a civilisation by one of its own members. He loved China — his rage is the rage of love disappointed — but he refused to lie about what he saw. The feudal system, the superstitions, the passive acceptance of suffering, the habit of converting humiliation into "spiritual victory" — these were, for Lu Xun, the sicknesses that kept China prostrate while the modern world advanced.
His prose style — terse, ironic, precisely controlled — was itself a revolutionary act. He wrote in baihua, the vernacular Chinese that the May Fourth Movement championed as the replacement for the classical literary language. Every sentence was an argument: that modern Chinese could be a vehicle for serious literature, that the old forms were part of the old oppression, that to write clearly was itself a form of liberation.
"Lies written in ink," Lu Xun wrote elsewhere, "can never disguise facts written in blood." His stories are written in both.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
Julia Lovell's Penguin Classics translation, The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China (2009), is the recommended edition — fresh, sharp, and well-annotated. The older Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang translations are also excellent and widely available.
By Lu Xun, translated by Julia Lovell. The most accessible modern English translation, with extensive notes on the historical and cultural context of each story.
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