Guest Blog: "Ah Q, Big Brother, and a Californian’s Atlantic Crossing"

I recently crossed the Atlantic to spend two days in Berlin and a week in England doing launch events and panels associated with a book that has just been published, a book coming out in June, and a book I’ll be spending the next two years writing. The books are different in many ways, but they have two things in common: all have to do with Asia; and all are concerned with autocratic systems and those who criticize or actively oppose these systems. The just published book is Vigil: The Struggle for Hong Kong, an updated Brixton Ink edition of a very short volume that originally came out in 2020 from Columbia Global Reports. The one publishing in June is The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing, a very short volume that profiles several young activists in and exiles from Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Burma. The working title for one I am writing, which is under contract with Princeton University Press, is Orwell and Asia: A Continent’s Connections to an Author’s Life, Legacy, and Literary Creation.

This is a U.K.-only updated edition of Wasserstrom's Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (Columbia Global Reports, 2020), featuring two new parts, each written by a journalist, covering developments post-NSL : a “Foreword” by Amy Hawkins of The Guardian and an “Afterword” by Kris Cheng who did not move from his native Hong Kong to London until 2021.

I did not expect that talking about these three books in Germany and England would lead me to spend time thinking about the inventor of Ah Q as well as the inventor of Big Brother--but for curious reasons, it did. I thought about Lu Xun a lot as I made my way from Berlin to London and from there to Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester, and Sheffield. I would also have thought about him on my way to Leeds to speak at the celebrated Centre for New Chinese Writing there, but a storm that played havoc with some rail routes led me to put off speaking there until the next time I am in the U.K. Had I reached the Centre, I was scheduled to give a talk on the Orwell book-in-progress, but Lu Xun was so much on my mind that I planned to shift gears and speak there as much about the author of The True Story of Ah Q as about the author of Animal Farm. In doing that, I would have revisited and expanded on an old essay of mine on Lu Xun that I kept thinking about throughout my trip, even though it was not among those I had on my mind when I set out to cross the Atlantic.

There were quite a few old essays unrelated to Lu Xun that I had thought giving talks in Germany and the U.K. would lead me to reflect on. I have written a lot of short pieces during the last decade that are about Hong Kong, the transnational aspects of youth movements, or Orwell. While giving presentations, hearing what my interlocutors and co-panelists had to say, and fielding questions across the Atlantic, I thought, as I left California to fly to Germany on 18 January, I might well end up rethinking the arguments that I had made in some of those, finding new things I could add to them if I ever revised them for including in a collection, or both.

That did indeed happen. What caught me by surprise was that the essay I thought about most of all was one on Lu Xun that I wrote not in the last decade but back in 2009. It is one that, while it features a cameo by Orwell, was not really about the subject that is the focus of any of my recently completed or in progress books. The essay in question was for TIME Asia. It was a review of the first Penguin Classics volume of works by one of my favorite authors, The Real Story of Ah Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun, a work edited and translated by Julia Lovell.

The first thing that brought that old review to mind was sharing a stage with Lovell at the first British launch event for Vigil. What kept the old essay on my mind was that, as I reflected on the Orwell events I had done just before that book launch and the ones I was preparing to give later in the trip, I kept coming up with ideas for how the cameo that the author made in my TIME Asia review could be expanded. If I ever revised it for inclusion in a collection of essays, I decided, I would pay equal attention in it to two of my favorite twentieth-century authors, Zhou Shuren (1881-1936) and Eric Blair (1903-1950), the talented, often acerbic writers who gained fame writing under the pen names Lu Xun and George Orwell.

The best way to begin describing what such a chapter might look like, if someday I do write it, is by summing up briefly the way Orwell came into the TIME Asia review. In that piece I described the Penguin Classics volume, mentioned what I liked about Lovell’s editor’s introduction and translations, but also brought up the idea that there were parallels between the works of the authors of “Diary of a Madman” and Nineteen Eighty-Four. I noted, too, that there were similarities between the exalted place the former had in the literary history of modern China and the latter had in the literary history of twentieth-century England. I pointed out as well that each had contributed new words and phrases to the political lexicons of their homelands. One specific point I made had to do with The True Story of Ah Q and Animal Farm. Each can be read, I argued, as novellas about revolutions (the real 1911 Revolution in one case, an imaginary uprising led by pigs in the other) that do not change things as much as those who led them claimed they would.

I did not think I was being completely original in 2009 in placing the two authors side by side. I had never seen anyone bring up a point that particularly interested me, though, which was a contrast between them that seemed especially significant when their impact on political languages was kept in mind. Namely, while Orwell’s characters and catchphrases have become globally familiar, Lu Xun’s have not. The figure of “Big Brother” and phrases such as “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” are not just understood within Britain or even just within that country, Western Europe, and North America. By contrast, many people in China and other parts of the Sinosphere, but few other people, aside from specialists in Chinese studies, understand without explanation what it means to describe someone as an Ah Q type of fool or to a dilemma being like that of deciding whether to wake people sleeping in an iron house that is on fire.

When I wrote my TIME Asia review (which ran under the title “China’s Orwell”), I had no illusions that Lu Xun would ever going to end up as widely read across the globe as his British counterpart and that his characters, phrases, and situations would become ones that could be dropped into newspapers published far from Beijing without glosses the way that “Big Brother is Watching You” can be dropped into newspapers published far from London. I did express the hope, though, that the imbalance between the extensive reach of the English author and the more limited reach of the Chinese one might become a bit less dramatic in the wake of the latter finally getting the Penguin Classics treatment, and having it take the form of a publication as accessible, lively, and attractively produced as The Real Story of Ah Q and Other Tales from China.

I now feel that I was too optimistic about the impact that book would have. It was warmly received but hardly transformed Lu Xun and his characters into household names outside of quite specific circles. What struck me during my recent time in England, though, was that there is more to say about the parallels between Zhou and Blair and what they wrote under their pen names than I had said in my 2009 essay.

Each considered himself a man of the left, for example, yet did not join a Communist Party. Each lived at the time of and thought about some of the same pivotal events, including World War I and the Russian Revolution. Each died relatively young. Each had a pivotal experience in a country other than their own as young adults, Lu Xun in Japan, Orwell in Burma. Each had prize named after him in the 1990s (well, a set of prizes in Orwell’s case). Each left behind a young son when he died (a biological one in Lu Xun’s case and an adopted on in Orwell’s), and these sons took up professions unrelated to literature, but then later in life become involved in activities associated with the legacies of their fathers, including the prizes named for them.

Two specific things about my recent trip led to me notice or at least fully appreciate some of these parallels. One was that I almost had the chance to interview Orwell’s son, Richard Blair, now in his eighties, while in England. My plan to do this had to be cancelled when he and his wife were injured in a car accident not long before I arrived, but I had him on my mind throughout the trip. In addition, my first event in England related to the book I have just started writing for Princeton was a panel held on the 75^th anniversary of the Orwell’s death that put me in dialogue with D.J. Taylor (whose many publications include two biographies of the author) and Sandra Newman (whose novels include one title Julia that reimagines Nineteen Eighty-Four with its female protagonist at the center of the story), and it was sponsored by the Orwell Foundation that awards the Orwell Prizes.

There may be still more Orwell and Lu Xun parallels to explore. There are probably authors they each admired greatly, as well as perhaps some they both disliked. I plan to keep a look out for these sorts of things as I go more deeply into Orwell’s writings and talk about what I find out with various friends steeped in Lu Xun’s oeuvre, such as Eileen Cheng, who has recent published two excellent volumes of translations of his essays, Jottings under Lamplight and Wild Grass & Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk.

If I expand that old TIME review into a chapter for a volume, I know one connection between the two authors I will add in that could not have been part of a 2009 essay. In 2014, at least one Hong Kong activist had Lu Xun on his mind on the eve of the Umbrella Movement. He gave a speech at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in which he told the crowd that it was important to try to mobilize people to fight for democracy even if chances for success seemed slim--just as it is worth waking people sleeping peacefully in an iron house that’s on fire, even if it is hard to see how they will escape. As the movement grew, meanwhile, one slogan drew on the phrase “some animals are more equal than others” to convey anger at a situation in which Hong Kong’s top official had gone from being a Briton appointed by London to someone of Chinese descent who had to be vetted by Beijing and was from or able to work with the local tycoon class.

I plan to keep working on these issues. With luck, by the time I finally get to Leeds I’ll have a lot to say about way that Lu Xun can be seen as China’s Orwell. Or perhaps I should say, since, the Chinese writer was born and died before the British one, I will be able to make a wide ranging case for seeing Orwell as Britain’s Lu Xun