The Real Story of Ah-Q by Lu Xun

knew.
    I think she must have known, even though she didn’t say a word about it as she wept – maybe she just accepted it. When I was three or four, I remember my brother telling me, as I sat in the courtyard enjoying the cool of a summer evening, that a filial son should cook a piece of his flesh for a sick parent. Mother said nothing to contradict him. If it’s all right to eat a piece of flesh, then why not a whole person? But the way she wept that day; the memory of it, even now, is painful. How inconsistent people are!

XII
     
    Further thought is painful.
    I now realize I have unknowingly spent my life in a country that has been eating human flesh for four thousand years. My sister, I remember, died while my brother was managing the household. He probably fed her secretly to us, by mixing her into our food.
    I, too, may have unknowingly eaten my sister’s flesh. And now it’s my own turn…
    With the weight of four thousand years of cannibalism bearing down upon me, even if once I was innocent how can I now face real humans?

XIII
     
    Are there children who have not yet eaten human flesh?
    Save the children…
    April 1918

KONG YIJI
     
    The taverns in Luzhen were rather particular in their layout. Facing out to the street was a substantial bar, squared off at the corners, behind which hot water was always at the ready for warming up wine. Lunchtime or evening, when they got off work, the town’s labourers would drift in, each with their four coppers ready to buy a bowl of warmed wine (this was twenty years ago, remember; now it would cost them ten), then drink it at the bar, taking their ease. An extra copper would buy them a bowl of salted bamboo shoots, or of aniseed beans, to go with it. If their budgets stretched to ten coppers or more, a meat dish would be within their reach. But such extravagance was generally beyond the means of short-jacketed manual labourers. Only those dressed in the long scholar’s gowns that distinguished those who worked with their heads from those who worked with their hands made for a more sedate, inner room, to enjoy their wine and food sitting down.
    When I was eleven, I was taken on as assistant-barman at the Universal Prosperity, at the edge of town. But the manager said I looked too dull to wait on his prized long-gowned customers, and deployed me instead around the main bar. Though I found the regulars easy enough to talk to, they were also quite capable of making life difficult for me. They would insist on watching the yellow liquor being ladled out of its jar, checking for water in the bottom of their wine kettles, hawkishly scrutinizing the progress of the kettle as it was lowered into its warming surround of hot water. Supervision as exacting as this made watering down the wine something of a challenge, and after a few days, the manager retired me from this line of work, too. Fortunately, the connection who had wangled me the position was too powerful for the manager to sack me outright; all the same, he kept my duties as tediously simple as possible – warming the wine.
    All day, every day I spent behind the bar, devoting myself to this task – bored senseless, even though I never made any mistakes. The manager had a terrible temper, and our customers weren’t a particularly civil bunch either, so fun tended to be thin on the ground – except when Kong Yiji rolled up, which is why I still remember him.
    Kong Yiji was the only long-gowned drinker who took his wine standing up. He was a great lanky fellow, his peaky white face pitted with scars and wrinkles and fringed by an untidy grey beard. His gown was filthy and torn, as if it hadn’t been mended or washed for over a decade. His speech was so dusty with classical constructions you could barely understand him. Kong Yiji wasn’t even his real name: it was the first few characters –
kong
,
yi
,
ji
– in the old primer that children used for learning to write. Kong was his surname, all right, but someone