quence than Ah Q. Autobiography? But I am certainly not Ah Q. Though there is nothing official about the so-called "outer biography," it is usually used when an earlier composition has preempted the term "inner biography," another type of informal writing about the life of an individual. "Inner biography" will not do either, since Ah Q was decidedly not an immortal; nor is unofficial biography appropriate since it is used in contradistinction to official biography and as far as I know there has been no Presidential decree commanding the Institute of National History to write an official biography of Ah Q. It is true that the great English writer A. Conan Doyle gave to one of his novels the title of "The Unofficial Biography of a Gambler"[1] when there is no official biography of the said gambler in the official history of England, but such licence is permissible only with great writers and not with us. Family biography, the next possible term, is also ruled out, for neither do I know whether Ah Q and I come from common ancestors nor have I been commissioned by his descendants to write his life. Short biography is also unsuitable since there does not exist any long biography from which it must be distinguished.
This piece may possibly be considered an official biography, but since it is written in the vulgar language of the street, I dare not usurp that title. I have, therefore, borrowed the term "our story" from the stock phrase of humble storytellers: "Let us be done with digressions and return to our story."
My second difficulty is with the established formula for writing biography, which calls for an opening sentence something like this: "So and so's derived name is such and
- ↑ The title by which the Chinese version of "Rodney Stone" is known. Lusin attributed the novel to Dickens.
