The Real Story of Ah-Q Read Online Free PDF Page B

Naval Academy in Nanjing: to go in search of different people, different paths. My mother was left no choice but to scrape together the eight dollars I needed to cover my travel costs. Though shesaid that I should do as I please, she still wept, which was natural enough, because back then a Confucian education was still the route to respectability. Only the utterly desperate, society deemed, stooped to studying Western sciences. By following the course I had fixed upon, I would be selling my soul to foreign devils, only intensifying the contempt in which we were already steeped. I was also imposing upon her long separation from her son. But I had no time for such misgivings. When finally I arrived at the Naval Academy, I made many new discoveries: natural sciences, mathematics, geography, history, drawing and physical education. Though physiology was not on the curriculum, we caught glimpses – as wood-block prints – of works such as
A New Treatise on the Human Body
and
Essays on Chemistry and Hygiene
. When I compared what I remembered of the diagnoses and prescriptions of our traditional doctors with what I had come to learn of modern medicine, it gradually dawned on me that practitioners of Chinese medicine are – intentionally or otherwise – conmen. I began also to feel a powerful sympathy for those they had deceived – both the sick and their families. The translated histories I read, meanwhile, informed me that much of the dynamism of the Meiji Restoration 1 sprang from the introduction of Western medicine to Japan.
    Thanks to the rudimentary knowledge I picked up in Nanjing, I found my name subsequently fetching up on the register of a medical school in rural Japan. A glorious future unfurled in my mind, in which I would return to my homeland after graduation and set about medicating its suffering sick – people like my father, to whom Chinese doctors had denied a cure. In times of war, I would become an army doctor, all the while converting my fellow countrymen to the religion of political reform.
    I have no idea what progress has been made in the teaching of microbiology since my time, but back then we were shown the outlines of microbes as images on lantern slides. Because lectures sometimes finished early, the teacher would make up the remaining minutes by entertaining students with slides depicting picturesque landscapes or current affairs. As it sohappened that the Russo-Japanese War 2 was ongoing at the time, our lectures were often concluded by scenes from this conflict. In this classroom setting, I found myself obliged to echo – with my own claps and cheers – my classmates’ jubilation. There came a day, though, when I suddenly found myself staring at a great mass of my fellow Chinese – a people I had long been deprived the pleasure of encountering. One stood in the middle, tied up, surrounded by a crowd of his countrymen. Though they were all of them perfectly sturdy physical specimens, every face was utterly, stupidly blank. The man tied up, the caption informed us, had been caught spying for the Russians and was about to be beheaded by the Japanese as a public example to the appreciative mob.
    Before the academic year was out, I had left for Tokyo. For I no longer believed in the overwhelming importance of medical science. However rude a nation was in physical health, if its people were intellectually feeble, they would never become anything other than cannon fodder or gawping spectators, their loss to the world through illness no cause for regret. The first task was to change their spirit; and literature and the arts, I decided at the time, were the best means to this end. And so I reinvented myself as a crusader for cultural reform. The majority of the Chinese students in Tokyo at that time were studying law, political science, physics, chemistry, policing or engineering; no one had any interest in the humanities. Nonetheless, despite the prevailing apathy, I managed to search out a few