Lu Xun’s The true story of Ah Q and cross-writing

Abstract

Like many realist works written during the 1920s and 1930s, Lu Xun's True Story of Ah Q has been read as a satire of Chinese national characteristics. The problem with interpreting the work as a social satire is that it tends to perpetuate the set of essentialist cultural myths that many Chinese authors used for self-representation. Upon close examination, Lu Xun's story, an attempt to indict Chinese traditions, is really mediated through such discourses as popular social Darwinism and Eurocentrism. By identifying and registering these pseudo-scientific views of history and racist notions of culture as they have functioned in Chinese literature, the paper resists the conventional reading of Ah Q as an average Chinaman and interprets the hero as the colonial subject invented and seen through the lens of European cultural imperialism.