Ah Q and Others/Introduction
To the average American who gets his ideas about China from the movies and detective stories, China means Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu, and other nameless but equally familiar figures, it means chop suey, and Chinatown shop fronts covered with picturesque but meaningless hieroglyphics. Upon this fantastic hodgepodge of inventions and half-truths, sympathetic writers have in recent years superimposed a sentimental montage of a land where peace and tradition reign, where every earth-turning peasant is unobtrusively a philosopher. Now, sympathetic and flattering as this picture is, it has brought China no nearer to the American people and made China no more real. The fact is that there is no short cut to mutual respect and understanding between peoples any more than there is between individuals, the claims of the experts in how to perpetuate the honeymoon and how to win friends to the contrary notwithstanding.
One of the best ways of arriving at a real understanding of a country is undoubtedly through its literature, the richest, the most revealing and the most imperishable of national heritages. In these stories of Lusin, acclaimed the greatest of modern Chinese writers in his own country, the reader will be able to get glimpses of China through the eyes of one of its keenest and most original minds. Here he will find none of the considered sympathetic treatment at the bottom of which often lurks condescension; he will encounter no apologia that is invariably the earmark of Ah Q-ism and a sense of inferiority. Lusin was not constrained to be polite because he wrote primarily for a Chinese audience; he was not constrained to gloss over or to explain away China's sore spots or disguise her weaknesses because he had faith in China and was conscious of her strength.
The reader will find here not only the plainest speaking yet to come out of China, but some of the very plainest speaking anywhere since Swift hurled upon us the epithet of Yahoo and pronounced us the most despicable and unteachable of all God's creatures. Above all, he will find in Lusin, for the first time in all Chinese history, a full embodiment and expression of that quality of indignation and that spirit of revolt which we usually associate with the European temperament and without which it is impossible to achieve freedom and progress. At first glance it may seem far-fetched to link Lusin's indignation with the magnificent struggle for freedom that China has been carrying on against Japan. Nevertheless, just as the spirit of acceptance and resignation which until recently dominated China was responsible for her submission to the rule of alien dynasties in the past, so is the new spirit of indignation and revolt which found its fullest expression in Lusin responsible for her determination to carry on her battle for freedom.
Lusin was, indeed, the spiritual offspring of the West, though he had no first-hand contact with Western civilization. It was the spirit of revolt in Western literature that encouraged his rebel heart to speak out. It was the realistic and psychological fiction of the West that brought home to him that fiction could be made an instrument of social criticism and reform. It was, finally, by contrast with the Western temperament that he was able to see the weakness in the Chinese character and to apply to it the outspoken criticism it had so long needed. In him the modern spirit first matured in a Chinese mind and through him and others like him became the dominant spirit of the Chinese nation. In Lusin that spirit manifested itself in a revolt against and denunciation of "man-eating men"; in the Chinese people as a whole it manifested itself in the conception of nationalism. He represented the first real break from traditionalism that any Chinese has been able to achieve.
These stories of Lusin will not, therefore, interest those who think of China as a dead civilization with only a past to recommend it; they will interest even less those to whom China represents an idea and a perfection either because they happen to be enchanted with the grandeur and symmetry of the palace architecture of Peking or because they so thoroughly enjoyed what to them was the Chinese way of life during their stay in that land of idle and yet happy masters and of toiling and even happier coolies and servants. They may even shock and displease those Occidentals and Chinese who make it their profession to tell the Western world what a wonderful country China is (or was, if they happen to be those who pine for the olden times) and what a happy people the Chinese are in spite of their squalor and disease.
These translations are addressed, rather, to those whose interest in humanity goes deeper than its outward trappings and who are tired of the unreal and impersonal representations of life that the average admirer of China finds so charming in traditional Chinese literature and art. To them these stories of modern China will come like a breath of fresh air that sweeps across a putrid swamp, cleansing and revitalizing its atmosphere, and they will welcome Lusin as a symbol of China's awakening and as a promise that China will play its part, for better or for worse, in the unceasing drama of humanity.
Lusin's real name was Chou Shu-jen.[1] He was born on September 25, 1881, in Shao-hsing (the "city of S" in several of his stories), Chekiang province. At the time, China was very much as it had always been, self-satisfied and unwilling to learn in spite of the shocking revelations of the country's weakness in the debacles of Opium War in 1841 and the Anglo-French occupation of Peking in 1860. Attempts at reform along Western lines were sporadic and halfhearted: for example, in 1876 China sent abroad the first group of students to study Western methods of war and technology; at home, that same year, she reclaimed and destroyed a product of Western engineering—the country's first railroad, a ten-mile stretch between Shanghai and Woosung that had been built by British concessionaires. Throughout these years the country as a whole was as complacent as if nothing had happened; the Chinese took comfort in the Ah Q-ish delusion that though China was defeated in war she was nevertheless superior to the barbarians from the West and that in the end the superiority of her civilization would enable her to prevail by her famous process of assimilation.
Lusin belonged, therefore, to the older generation. During his early years, his family was well-to-do and he was prepared for the examinations as were most young men in similar circumstances. Family reverses, however, made it necessary for him to seek admission into one of those much despised "foreign" schools established by the government. These schools were not only free of tuition but also provided students with room and board and a small amount of spending money. In 1898 Lusin entered the Naval Academy at Nanking and later the College of Railway and Mines in the same city. Here for the first time he came into contact with Western learning. He was particularly excited by Yen Fu's translation of Huxley's Evolution and Ethics which appeared in 1898. Early in 1902 he went to Japan on a government scholarship, and after studying the Japanese language in a preparatory school in Tokyo, entered the Sendai Medical College in 1904. But he did not finish his medical course. The apathy of the Chinese in general toward the Russo-Japanese War (which was fought, it will be recalled, on Chinese soil) disgusted him and made him realize that it was just as important to stir a people out of its mental and spiritual lethargy as to cure its physical ills. He decided to give up the study of medicine and to devote his life to literature, which was, he was convinced, the best means of awakening the Chinese people.
His own preference had always been, as a matter of fact, literary matters. He was an omnivorous reader even as a child and had the industrious habit of the Chinese scholar of copying out extensive passages from the books he read, sometimes entire works that were not easily available or which he could not afford. After his arrival in Japan he devoted all his spare moments to reading Japanese translations of important European works, especially history, philosophy, and literature.
But he was, unfortunately, too far ahead of his time. His generation as a whole were still under the delusion that a new political window dressing was all that was necessary for the salvation of China, just as the generation before had labored under the delusion that China was superior to the West in everything but methods of warfare.
The students at Tokyo in those days were mostly interested in subjects that led to profitable jobs when they went back to China—in politics, law, police administration, and more rarely science and technology. They could not see why Lusin chose to follow so useless a pursuit as literature. His efforts to launch in Tokyo a literary magazine to be known as New Life ended in failure and his essays calling attention to the spiritual aspects of Western civilization went unnoticed.
Undoubtedly, however, these essays will be regarded as the most important documents in the history of the intellectual revolution in China. For here we have the first indication of a Chinese appreciation of the spiritual aspects of European civilization. The first essay was an exposition of the philosophy of Haeckel; the second a survey of the history of Western science. The third is perhaps the most important, because it furnishes a clue to Lusin's fundamental intellectual skepticism and sets forth at the same time Lusin's fundamental belief in the fostering and development of individual genius. Having outlined China's complacency in the past, due to her cultural isolation, and her rude awakening after defeat in the hands of the foreign powers, he goes on to point out that materialism, industrial development, and political democracy—panaceas recommended by reformers of the time—were by no means the ultimate or the currently accepted philosophies of the West, but only phases in its historical development. Since civilization is built upon the past, he argues, it is always in a state of flux and always subject to change and improvement. The materialistic character of nineteenth-century civilization in the West represented, he tells us, an extreme reaction to the life-denying tendencies of the Middle Ages which began with modern science, just as the rule of the majority was an extreme reaction toward the doctrine of the divine right of kings. These reactions, he declares, had gone too far, as reactions have a way of doing and must be rectified and remedied. In the course of his exposition he cites extensively Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Ibsen, Stirner and other rebel spirits of the nineteenth century and cautioned the Chinese not to follow too blindly the superficial aspects of Western civilization.
In the fourth essay Lusin surveys at some length what he calls the power of Mara poetry, after the Hindu god of destruction and rebellion. Here we find, of course, the classic exposition of the spirit of man in terms of Apollonian conservatism and Dionysian rebellion, popularized a generation back by Nietzsche and his followers. Here we find also his admonition to his fellow country men that the way to raise the prestige of their country was by new achievements, not by boasting about its past.
These essays were published in obscure student magazines. Not only did they meet with no response at the time, it is doubtful that more than a handful of people have read them to this day, though they were included with others in Tomb, published in 1926. For one thing they were not only in the old literary style but also in a rather archaic literary style; but the real reason is that even to this day they represent a dissenting minority view.
Thus it was in a disillusioned mood that he went back to China in 1909. He taught for a while at Hangchow and then at his native city Shao-hsing. His experience as a teacher could not have been a happy one as reflected in "A Hermit at Large." The achievement of the political revolution of 1911 only depressed him further, for he found, as did the villagers of Wei in "Our Story of Ah Q," that things were much the same as they had always been except in name. The worst of it was that his experience in Tokyo and Shao-hsing had made him aware of his own limitations and convinced him that he was not one of those born leaders "at whose call people gathered like clouds."
In 1912 he accepted a post as counsellor in the Ministry of Education in the Provisional Government at Nanking and went to Peking in the same year when the seat of the government was transferred to the latter city. There in a secluded room in the Guild House of his native Chekiang he sought escape and forgetfulness in China's past. The Chinese scholar in him asserted itself and for the next five or six years he occupied himself in reading and literary research and in collecting and transcribing rubbings of ancient monuments. Lusin was always modest and self-deprecatory about these literary efforts, though his achievements were considerable and included the first and so far still the best history of Chinese fiction. He called this preoccupation his own form of opium smoking.
In 1918, however, he was awakened out of his "opium dreams" and dragged from seclusion by his friend Ch'ien Hsuan-t'ung, who was actively associated with Hu Shih and Ch'en Tu-hsiu on the New Youth which launched the literary revolution. Lusin's mood and the skepticism with which he viewed the prospects of the movement can best be told in his own words.
"Supposing [he is speaking to Ch'ien] there is an iron chamber which has absolutely no window or door and is impossible to break down. Supposing there are many people fast asleep in it who are gradually being suffocated to death. Since they will pass from sleep to death, they will not experience the fear and agony of approaching death. But you people start shouting; you rouse the few who are not sound asleep, only to make them suffer the agony of death. Do you think you are doing them a kindness?"
"But if a few should wake up [Ch'ien replied], you cannot say there is absolutely no hope of breaking down the iron chamber."
He was right. Although I had my own ideas about the prospects of the future, I had no right to dash to pieces the hopes of more sanguine spirits. I must not try to convince them that they were wrong, since they were happier in thinking they were right. Therefore, I ended by promising to write something for them.
The first piece he wrote for the New Youth was "The Diary of a Madman" which may be regarded as the overture and finale of all his writings. In it he branded the whole of Chinese history as a record of man-eating though it is apparently and ostensibly a history of the triumph of "benevolence and righteousness." He pronounced his everlasting curse upon man-eating men and insisted that the fact that "it has always been so" does not mean that "it is as it should be." He would not resign himself to the various forms of man-eating and accept them as "necessary evils" inherent in "human nature" (the most damnable admission of our impotence and defeatism). He refused to change the subject, as the wiser men in China and everywhere do, and talk about more pleasant things, such "eternal values" or the "moonlight and breezes" of traditional Chinese literature.
But Lusin was neither a reformer with pet schemes nor an opportunist leader riding the "wave" of his time. He had too much intellectual honesty for the one and too much moral integrity for the other. He was primarily a humanitarian to whom everything seems pale and unimportant in the face of hunger and starvation, and all talk about first principles and eternal values idle and heartless in the face of man's inhumanity to man. It was because of this fundamental humanism in him that he took to his "opium smoking" in his despair, for in the last analysis the drunkard is a better man, morally, than those who try to justify the sorry parts that they have to play in society. It was this humanism, too, that made him, once he found an opportunity to command an audience, the ruthless critic dedicated to the unpleasant but necessary task of reminding us of our man-eating past and our man-eating tendencies of the present, and the relentless iconoclast who devoted his life to the destruction of old superstitions and ancient hypocrisies that tend to perpetuate the institution of man-eating. He never made any attempt to formulate and express his own beliefs regarding man's ultimate future. When pressed to do so, he invariably gave the laconic answer that he was only interested in the immediate objectives that must be achieved before everything else. These are, he said, (1) the right to life, (2) the right to food and shelter, and (3) the right to the unlimited development of the individual. "Everything that stands in the way of these three objectives," he declared, "must be trampled under foot and stamped out, whether it be ancient faiths or modern fads." The only elaboration that he would make on these three objectives was that by life he did not mean mere existence, by food and shelter he did not mean unnecessary luxuries, and by the free development of the individual he did not mean unwarranted licence.
If we bear these three touchstones constantly in mind as Lusin did, all the apparent inconsistencies in his writings will disappear and we shall understand his apparent quarrelsomeness. We'll understand why he quarreled with the "new gentry"—well-fed and well-washed students who returned from England and America with their "gentlemanly" ideas of moderation and compromise—as well as with the old gentry—men who had seen better times and would preserve the "national essence"; why he directed his scorn and irony against the art-for-art's-sakers as much as he did against the old "moonlight and breezes" school, though the former wrote in the new pai hua medium; why he made impartial fun of new slogans and ancient shibboleths; and why, finally, he joined the ranks of the Leftist writers himself when the only hope of progress and national salvation seemed to lie in that direction.
The most consistent object of Lusin's well-directed blows was naturally the national essence or heritage of the old gentry. In volume after volume of his notes and comments he exposed one by one what the reactionaries really mean by their precious national heritage. He was better qualified to expose the so-called "national medicine," the "national art of self-defense" (the hocus-pocus of the Boxers that precipitated the allied expedition of 1900), and "national learning"(which found sanction and inspiration in European "Sinology")—he was better qualified for this task than anyone else not only because of the "sharpness" of his pen, but also because he was himself a Chinese scholar without a peer and knew what he was talking about better than most of the reactionaries who made so much of their Chinese learning.
What is this national essence? [Lusin asks.] On the face of it it must mean something that one nation alone possesses, something which no other country can boast of, something, in other words, peculiar to the nation in question. But something that is peculiar may not necessarily be good. The question is, why should it be preserved.
For instance, a man who has a wart on his face or a boil on his forehead is different from one not so afflicted, and his wart or boil may be regarded as his "essence." But to my mind it is better for him to do away with this kind of peculiarity and be like others.
If you say that our national essence is both peculiar and good, then why is it that conditions are as terrible as they are, causing the new school to shake their heads and the old school to heave long sighs?
If you say that conditions are what they are because we have not been able to preserve our national essence, because we have been contaminated by the West, then things ought to have been different before the foreigners came, when the entire country was permeated with this national essence. Why is it, then, that we have had such periods of chaos and disaster as the Spring and Autumn period, the age of the Warring States, and of the Sixteen Kingdoms, that caused the ancients also to heave long sighs?
A friend of mine has once said: "Before we can be expected to preserve our national essence, our national essence must have qualities that will preserve us."
One of the trump cards that advocators of the national heritage have often played (and still play) is that China's national heritage must be good since even foreigners are interested in it. They point to the European Sinologists, for instance, in support of the revival of textual criticism and archaeological research. Lusin's retort was that it was one thing to study antiquities but another thing to "preserve" them.
There are some foreigners [he says] who want China to remain forever a huge curio for their enjoyment and delectation. This is, of course, detestable, but not so strange, for they are, after all, foreigners. What I can't understand is that there should be Chinese who, not satisfied with remaining curios themselves, want to encourage youths and infants to remain curios for the enjoyment or delectation of the foreigners. I wonder what sorts of hearts they have! . . . The advocates of the preservation of ancient ways must be familiar with ancient books. Surely they cannot condemn as bestial "Lin Hui, who threw aside a jade worth a thousand pieces of gold in order to rescue an infant." If not, then what do they say to abandoning the infants in order to rescue a piece of jade?
Nor would Lusin accept as valid evidence of the superiority of the Chinese national essence the testimony of foreign visitors who find the "Chinese way of life" so delightful because to them it means an infinite amount of leisure, interminable banquets, and an endless flow of languid and meaningless observations on what they call life and the art of living. To Lusin such banquets in the midst of famine and starvation are feasts of the man-eating men, as damnable as the actual cases of cannibalism reported with shocking frequency from the worst famine areas. "Only those foreigners who are qualified to attend such man-eating banquets and who nevertheless curse present conditions in China are men of feeling, men that we should admire," he declared, and not those who relish them.
Nor did he share the views of the Bertrand Russell school of visitors, which have become very popular of late, who, impressed by the apparent good humor of their sweating ricksha coolies and sedan bearers, call China an "artist nation" and attribute to the Chinese people that quality of "instinctive happiness" which makes it possible for them to lead a "life full of enjoyment" in spite of their squalor and misery. Lusin's retort to this was that "if the sedan carriers are not so smiling and contented in their attitude toward those who ride in sedan chairs, China would not be what it is today." Like Hu Shih, Lusin does not see anything spiritual in famine and disease and misery. As Hu Shih has eloquently argued in the symposium Whither Mankind, the civilization that substitutes the machine and the automobile for human labor is infinitely more spiritual than civilizations that still use men as beasts of burden.
It was this docile and smiling acceptance that made it impossible for the Chinese masses to be anything more than slaves. That they were as a matter of fact willing slaves, Lusin pointed out again and again; they were only unhappy during periods of war and dynastic change when it was not clear whose slaves they were, when they were slaughtered first by one set and then another set of masters. It was this spirit of resignation that we find reflected in the famous lines:
Than a man in days of war and separation.
The Bertrand Russell school of "instinctive happiness" might not have been shopping for a subject race when they praised the Chinese for that quality, but that is how it has worked out in practice.
Effective and important as are these notes and comments in which Lusin gave expression to his indignations and protests, he will probably be remembered for his short stories. These notes and comments were for the most part running commentaries on the contemporary scene, prompted by things he had seen or heard or read in the daily press. A great deal of this material would require extensive notes by the future generation of Sinologists before it is intelligible.
Of his stories, "Our Story of Ah Q" will stand out not only as his most important work but also as the most important single contribution to Chinese literature since the literary revolution, for in this story Lusin succeeded in translating his diagnosis of China's fundamental weakness in terms that everyone can understand. Briefly, Ah Q is the personification of two of the most despicable traits in human nature: the tendency to rationalize things to our own supposed advantage and the cowardly habit of turning upon those weaker than ourselves after we have been abused by those stronger than we are. "When a man of courage is outraged," he writes elsewhere, "he draws his sword against an oppressor stronger than he. When a coward is outraged, he draws his sword against a man weaker than he. Among a race of hopeless cowards, there must be heroes who specialize in browbeating children." This is Ah Q's way of trying to be brave when he first picked on Wang the Beard, and then on little Don when he found that he could not even afford to be brave even with Wang. But Ah Q excels especially in his ability to turn defeat into victory by such processes of rationalization as imaging himself a poor father who has been beaten by an unfilial son. He is a "philosopher" too in his placid acceptance of his fate. When arrested and thrust behind the grilled door of his prison cell and later forced to sign a confession that he could not read, he only reflected "philosophically" that "in a man's life there must be times when he would be seized and thrust behind grilled doors and be required to make a circle on a sheet of paper." When he finally realized that he was going to be executed, his only reaction, equally "philosophical," was that "it was in the nature of things that some people should be unlucky enough to have their heads cut off."
Ah Q is the only character out of contemporary Chinese fiction that has passed into contemporary Chinese thought. Such expressions as "That's Ah Q-ism," "That's Ah Q logic," "Don't be so Ah Q like," and "He is the perfect image of Ah Q" have become part of the living speech. Ah Q has become the symbol of everything that is undesirable and contemptible in the Chinese character and a watch word to put people on their guard.
In 1926 Lusin left Peking, which had become the stronghold of reaction and where he was in danger of being arrested as a Bolshevik, and went to lecture at the University of Amoy at the invitation of Lin Yutang, then dean of the College of Letters in that institution. He did not find the atmosphere there congenial and went to Canton, "the home of the Revolution," early in the following year, only to discover that he had either to follow the line laid down by the faction in power at the moment or get out. He got out, and went to Shanghai, where he lived until his death on October 19, 1936.
The year 1927 was a crucial one for China. It will be recalled that it was the year in which the triumph of the Nationalist Revolution was followed by the triumph of the conservative element in the Kuomintang over the more liberal element within the party and the split between the Kuomintang and the Communists. Lusin witnessed the bloody purge at Canton and was constrained to write:
Revolution, counter-revolution, non-revolution.
The revolutionaries are executed by the counter-revolutionaries and the counter-revolutionaries by the revolutionaries. The non-revolutionaries are sometimes taken for revolutionaries and executed by the counter-revolutionaries, sometimes taken for counter-revolutionaries and executed by the revolutionaries, and sometimes executed by either the revolutionaries or the counter-revolutionaries for no apparent reason at all.
He felt that the masses had again been betrayed just as they were betrayed after the 1911 revolution, which made no change in their slave status except to make them into "slaves of ex-slaves."
Following the victory of the reactionary forces, free speech was totally suppressed, all opposition forces were branded as Communists or counter-revolutionaries and were ruthlessly persecuted and "purged." Revulsion at these events drove Lusin farther and farther to the Left. In 1930 he joined the League of Left Wing Writers and soon came to be known as the foremost revolutionary writer of China in Leftist circles both in Europe and America. Articles by and about him appeared, for instance, in the New Masses and China Today. (It was in the latter magazine, incidentally, that Ah Q was first introduced to the American reading public.) Since his death he has been, ironically, deified by the Communist literati as their patron saint; the principal cultural institution at Yenan, capital of the Chinese Communists, is named after him. But Lusin was a revolutionary only in the sense that all great writers of the past of any vitality and influence were revolutionaries. No one familiar with his writings—even though the extent of his familiarity does not go beyond the present collection—could conceive of him as a revolutionary in the orthodox Stalinist, or even the Marxist, sense.
Lusin had only a very modest conception of his role as a writer. He regarded his own utterances as "cheers from the sidelines," always making certain, to be sure, that he was in the right cheering section as measured according to the three principles that he had laid down for himself. He never thought of himself as an "artist" or his short stories as "art."
I have nothing that cries to be said [he confesses in "How I Came to Write Our Story of Ah Q"], nothing that needs to be written. But I have one bad habit. It is that I sometimes cannot help cheering from the sidelines in order to make things merrier. I am like a tired ox. I know that I am not much good for anything, but there is no harm in trying to make the best use of a useless thing, and so when the Changs want me to plough a piece of land, it's all right with me; when the Lis want me to take a turn at the mill, it's all right with me, too. I am willing to give in without protest even when the Chaos want me to stand in front of their shop with a sign stuck on my back saying: "We sell high-grade pasteurized milk from our own fat cows," that is, so long as their milk is safe and uncontaminated, although I know very well that I am terribly lean and that I am a bull at that and have no milk. For I can appreciate the fact that business must go on. But I won't stand for it if they try to work me too hard, for I have to have time to breathe and to look for grass to eat. It won't do either if they try to make me their exclusive property and shut me up in their cowshed, for I may want to help some one else who has grain to be ground. If they should go so far as to want to cut me up and sell me for meat, it certainly won't do for reasons too obvious to go into.
In conclusion let us quote the last article of Lusin's "testament," written in jest shortly before his death. It will make explicit what I have already implied in the foregoing pages—his deep hatred of all forms of hypocrisy.
"You must under no circumstances have anything to do with those who profess opposition to revenge and advocate forgiveness, even as they are engaged in the act of doing harm and injury to other people's eyes and teeth."
Translating from the Chinese is a difficult task at best. Lusin offers special difficulties as the humor and the effectiveness of his style depends so much upon the ironical twists and turns that he gives to classical allusions and contemporary slogans. It is hoped that the present translator has succeeded in conveying some of these effects here and there, though he realizes only too well that to render Lusin effectively into English requires greater resources than he has at his command.
Lusin's published writings may be divided into four groups. There are five titles in the first group, consisting of the two collections of short stories from which the present selections are made, one volume of old legends in modern dress, one of reminiscences and one of "prose poems" and other miscellaneous material. The second group contains fourteen volumes consisting mostly of his notes and comments, and two volumes of his letters. In the third group are found his studies in Chinese literature, consisting of seven titles, including his History of Chinese Fiction. Thirty-two volumes of translations make up the last group; they consist mostly of Russian fiction, with occasional stories by Balkan authors and of essays and other prose miscellanies. Most of the translations are made from Japanese versions, though in many cases Lusin consulted the original versions. The European authors represented in his translations included the following: Artzibashev, Andreyev, Chekhov, Eroshenko, Pio Baroja (Idilios Vascos), Fadayev, Gogol (Dead Souls), Gorky, Lunacharsky (art and criticism), Panteleev, Plekhanov (on art), Yakovlev (October) and others. The twenty volumes of his Collected Works were published in 1937. With but two exceptions, these contain all of his writings previously published, and also a few items not previously published. The present selection constitutes more than two thirds of Lusin's original fiction as far as bulk is concerned, though it contains less than half in number of stories.
Some of Lusin's stories are included in Edgar Snow's Living China (London, 1936) and Kyn Yn Yu's The Tragedy of Ah Qui (London and New York, 1931). Snow's volume contains five stories and two typical miscellaneous pieces by Lusin, together with a biographical note by Snow himself and a survey of contemporary Chinese literature by Nym Wales. Kyn's volume first appeared in French in 1929 and contains three stories by Lusin. Of the translations included in the present volume, "The Divorce" and "The Widow" appear also in Snow's anthology, while "Ah Q" and "My Native Heath" are also found in Kyn's selection.
For the convenience of those who wish to read more of Lusin, the following translations are suggested: "Medicine," "A Little Incident," "Kung I-chi" (Snow, in Living China); "Kung I-chi" (Kyn, in The Tragedy of Ah Qui); "The Dawn" (Wang, in The Far Eastern Magazine, New York, March, 1940); "Warning to the Populace," "Professor Kao," "A Happy Family" (Wang, in The China Journal, Shanghai, June, July, August, 1940, respectively); "Dragon Boat Festival" (anonymously translated, in People's Tribune, Shanghai, March 1, 1936); and "Looking Back to the Past" (Feng Yu-sing, in T'ien Hsia Monthly, Shanghai, February, 1938).
Chi-Chen Wang
Columbia University
April 15, 1941
- ↑ Lusin is also given as Lu Hsin or Lu Hsün. The last is the correct rendering as far as the Wade system of transliteration is concerned, but the first is more pronounceable for English readers and was the author's own choice. For a more detailed account of Lusin's life see Wang, "Lusin: a Chronological Record," in China Institute Bulletin, Jan., 1939.