Ah-Q Sings Peking Opera?

Ah-Q, protagonist of Lu Xun's novel The Story of Ah-Q and symbol of old Chinese society, liked to sing songs in his spare time. In the novel doesn't he sing "The Young Widow Goes to Her Husband's Tomb" or "Whip You with an Iron Chain" when he wants to take out his anger on somebody? Some suggest that because Lu Xun was from Shaoxing in Zhejiang, Ah-Q should be singing Shaoxing opera. That may be forcing things a bit, but certainly no one would have expected Ah-Q to be singing Peking opera--and singing it in Taiwan of all places.

(Prologue)

The Story of Ah-Q, a cross-strait collaboration that is the latest production by the National Fu Hsing Chinese Opera Theater, represents several firsts: The first time one of Lu Xun's works has been made into an opera, the first time contemporary subject matter has been used in a Peking opera staged in Taiwan, and also the first time that "Taiwan flavor" has been used in an opera here. All these have grabbed people's attention.

Who is Ah-Q

Lu Xun was one of the leading lights of the New Culture Movement in the early days of the Republican era. Originally he wanted to become a doctor and he went to Japan to study medicine. But then he happened to see a newsreel of Japanese beheading a Chinese while Chinese bystanders looked on seemingly unaffected. This image left a deep impression on him, and he resolved that treating people's minds was more important than treating their bodies.

It was an age when Chinese traditions were suffering under a Western assault. Everything was in a state of revolution, and all the scum was floating to the surface. Lu returned to the mainland to write fiction and essays. With a pen as sharp as a scalpel, he coolly exposed the ills of the age and the weaknesses in the Chinese character. His most famous work is without a doubt The Story of Ah-Q.

Ah-Q was a casual laborer in a village named Weizhuang at the end of the Qing dynasty and start of the Republican era. He liked to have a few drinks and tell a tall tale or two in his free time. Whenever he got himself into trouble, he would just passively submit to his antagonists' blows. To make himself feel better, he would say of his attackers that they were "sons beating their father," giving himself the upper hand. As a result he was always quite happy. This was his own special form of mental kungfu: "victory in spirit." Though on the one hand he would curse women, and insist that men and women keep the proper distance, at other times he would bow before them and beg for sexual favors. It was in this way that he terrified the housekeeper of a local bigwig named Zhao and became a persona non grata. With no way to make a living in his village, he went to the city, where he descended to a life of crime among robbers and thieves.

After Ah-Q made some money in the city, he returned home to strike a decidedly new pose. To rapt villagers, he would describe how he had witnessed revolutionaries being executed in the city. When he discovered that stories about "revolution and rebellion" would rivet local ruffians' attention (and earn their admiration), it made him think that he really wanted to foment rebellion. He even dreamt about beating up all those who had bullied him, about taking money from the wealthy and about women coming to his door and offering themselves. While he was sleeping, he mysteriously got caught up in a case involving a burglary of the Zhao Mansion. The loot was planted on him, and in a state of confusion he was brought to be publicly executed by the revolutionary party's firing squad.

Who are Ah-Qs

In late 1921 The Story of Ah-Q was published in nine installments in a morning paper in Beijing. Immediately it had people talking: What was the meaning of the "Q"? Exactly who was Lu Xun making fun of? Farmers? The old Qing officials? The revolutionary party? The intellectuals in the civil service? Or simply all Chinese? After all, the novel does point out that "Ah-Q always felt he won, which perhaps was proof of the supremacy of Chinese spiritual civilization in the world." And was Ah-Q's "victory in spirit" just a means of survival for poor farmers under feudalism, or was it pointing to an ethnic trait of the Chinese? Opinions varied.

In any case, that an odd-job laborer in an agricultural village attracted so much attention certainly makes him one of the most important characters in modern Chinese literature. The novel has not only been translated into 16 different languages but also has been the object of more than several million words of published criticism over 70-plus years. If Ah-Q is aware of all this from the grave, he is surely pleased as punch.

But then, has he truly died?

(The curtain rises)

In the more than seven decades since Ah-Q appeared, there have been continual efforts to make things in his image, including cartoons, comic strips, water colors, plays and movies. But Lu Xun has a very sparse style, and with just a few strokes of his pen he was able to outline a tragic character who didn't comprehend his own tragedy, and portray the character's inner life with great depth. Getting a true representation of the original onto the stage presents more difficulties than most adaptations, but this hasn't stopped people from trying, and to date there have been seven different stage adaptations of the novel. Some present Ah-Q as a farmer speaking Shaoxing dialect, others have turned the story into an historical drama in which all the characters wear ancient costumes, but most adaptations have been quite faithful to the original.

Targeting younger audiences

What exactly is involved with adapting a novel to become a Peking opera? Why is it that no one has tried to write a libretto for Ah-Q before? Besides the same problems facing any adaption of the novel for the stage, unique problems arise when using Peking opera--the realm of heroic emperors, generals and ministers--to interpret this petty little man.

Tracy Chung, the director of the National Fu Hsing Chinese Opera Theater, decided to give it a try. "Around me today I see too many Ah-Qs--defensive and self-deceptive--and so I thought of turning it into an opera and having a little fun with it." But she holds that Ah-Q's tragic flaw is his ignorance of his own Ah-Q-ness. She insists that we should at least be aware we are Ah-Qs. For instance, by turning The Story of Ah-Q into a Peking opera, she presents an heroic image of boldly going where no one has gone before and avoids suspicions that she copied someone else, but the truth of the matter is that Peking opera is the only kind of drama she can do, and so the choice was one of necessity. Is not turning this limitation into heroism "a first step toward 'victory in spirit'?"

That said, there were actually many difficulties to overcome. Back in the days of martial law Lu Xun's books were outlawed and people could only read poorly printed pirated editions of them, but now many young people have never even heard of Lu Xun. When Chung went into a bookstore to buy The Story of Ah-Q, the woman behind the counter corrected her: "Who's this Ah-Q? Surely you mean The Story of Ah-Gan [Forrest Gump]!"

Still, they reckoned that the subject matter would excite people's interest, and one of Fu Hsing's main concerns is attracting an audience, especially members of the younger generation. What's more, the theater company had been putting on a bunch of new Peking operas that had already premiered on the mainland, such as Xu Jiujing Rises in the Ranks of Officialdom, Pan Jin-lian, and Images of the Crowds at the Temple. Putting on several of these recently created operas whetted their appetites to create new works for themselves. Ah Q is their first taste of such creation.

Lightening the tragic load

Once the decision was made, Chung looked for someone to write the libretto: it was the start of a truly difficult journey. Some people thought that they had a lot of gall to try to adapt Lu Xun and that they would surely fail, and some famous librettists wouldn't take on the project. After various trials and tribulations, they found the mainland librettist Xi Zhigan, who wrote Xu Jiujing Rises in the Ranks of Officialdom, which has caused quite a stir on both sides of the Taiwan Strait in recent years.

Xi was startled to receive Chung's request. He has deeply admired Lu Xun ever since his student days, and The Story of Ah-Q had a deep and enlightening impact upon him. But he had never thought that he himself would one day be adapting it for the operatic stage--and for audiences in Taiwan of all places! But when he stopped to think about it, there was great potential for it as a Peking Opera. "Opera has many different kinds of performance modes that allow for both singing and action and can reveal a character's inner world. Non-musical drama may be more realistic, but it is worse at shaking people up."

With the Taiwan Strait between him and Chung, they relied on discussion via constant faxing, and the script went through five drafts before being finished. They decided on putting the main focus on Ah-Q's person, exposing much of his interior drama while strengthening much plot that Lu Xun had originally only sketched with the barest of outlines. For instance, at the beginning of the novel Ah-Q brags to his fellow villagers that he has the same surname as Zhao. In the novel it is mentioned in passing. But in the opera, Ah-Q sings and speaks a long list of great Zhaos, from the emperor Zhao Kuangyin, to the general Zhao Zilong, to the favored imperial concubine Zhao Feiyan.

In addition, between the New Literature Movement in the early Republican era on the mainland and today's open society in Taiwan, so much is different. And so they kept asking themselves, "Today's society isn't feudal, and we aren't the people of those times. Why do we want to perform Ah-Q now? How do we interpret him for today?" If we think that there are still Ah-Qs all around us, can we make Ah-Q up to date and give the script a feeling for Taiwan in the nineties, allowing audiences to enjoy a living Taiwanese-style Ah-Q?

And since the focus was on the younger generation, they figured they shouldn't make the opera too serious. They took the rather sober work of Lu Xun, put a comic wrapper around it, and turned it into a tragic comedy, asking Wu Hsing-kuo, who has been skipping back and forth between jobs in the movies, television and the stage, to return to his alma mater Fu Hsing and take the starring role. As expected, the opera was causing a big stir before it had even opened, and the entire run was almost sold out before opening night. As a result, they allowed audiences in for the rehearsals, and even these were well attended.

Modern Taiwanese Ah-Qs

This adaptation of Ah-Q is largely faithful to the original plot, with Ah-Q portrayed as a pig-tailed Chinaman of the late Qing dynasty, but the dialogue does include modern terms and slang (such as paying for something by "charging it.") And because it belongs to the realm of modern drama, the characters aren't in traditional costumes and make-up. Yet musically it transcends the conversations-and-songs format of modern-style musicals. It isn't quite a Peking opera, has sections quite like non-musical drama, and even some funny bits that resemble the comic skits for variety shows on television. For instance, women in the chorus wear the kind of clothes that women do in the nakashi singing troupes popular in Taiwan's saunas and brothels. And characters will suddenly step out of from their poses to make fun of themselves. Ah-Q's arch enemy Wang Hu is portrayed as a Taiwanese mafia don, who speaks Mandarin with a heavy Taiwanese accent--"a little boorish, but not too boorish." The "young lord" Qian, whom Ah-Q mocks as a "foreign wannabe," even sings word-for-word English translations of Chinese expressions: "people mountain, people sea" to mean crowded and "no three, no four" to mean not one thing or the other.

Wu Hsing-kuo, with 80 percent of the sung lines, puts his all into his performance, which proves to be a fabric, like his patched clothing, that is stitched from many different cloths. When Ah Q runs over to queue for the bread line at Old Man Zhao's, he "flies" over like a dancer in Swan Lake. When he has it out with Wang Hu, he adopts the kungfu stance of Jackie Chan's "hanging snake hand." And when he spars with the "young lord" Qian, he picks up a wooden cudgel like a sword in fencing, causing the mostly young sell-out crowd to squeal with glee. In the second act Ah-Q strikes it rich and returns home shouting about revolution. Finally, things take a sudden bad turn and Ah-Q is framed. Tied up, he is brought to the execution grounds. He looks around in confusion and suddenly, the moment before he is to be shot, says, "Now I get it. I was sentenced to death because my mark wasn't round enough. [The mark that illiterates use instead of signing their names.] I've kept drawing it and drawing it. . . . How do I make it round?" It's pretty depressing.

(Intermission)

"Wu's performance is too fantastic!" says a moved Chung Ming-te, professor of drama at the National Institute for the Arts, who praises Wu for "putting so much life into his performance." Tien Chi-yuan, director of the Critical Point Theater Phenomenon, is also very excited: "Whenever I have seen Wu Hsing-kuo act before, I have always felt that he seemed to be under a lot of pressure, but now he has finally found a place where he seems so carefree!" Tien even recommends that Wu Hsing-kuo act with even more disregard for taboos, allowing Ah-Q to be more repugnant: "Laughing and cursing at the moment of death might have an even deeper effect.

Wu is also excited about his performance, which is a personal breakthrough as well. On stage he used to play mostly tragic emperors, generals or ministers, and when he made the leap into television and film, he got typecast for leader-of-the-nation roles, playing the emperor Zhao Kuangyin one moment and Lee Teng-hui the next. People were very curious about how he was going to interpret this nobody.

From handsome bloke to

low-life scum

Tracy Chung also felt that it wasn't easy turning this "handsome bloke" into a low-life scum. Wu was ahead of her at school, so she has witnessed his long-term development. Back in school, Wu was a well-behaved child with a special classical quality to him. Then Chung saw him dancing in a loin cloth for the Cloud Gate Dance Theater, establishing the experimental Contemporary Legend Theater, and acting in movies and on television. His creative ability and experience made her feel that he was the best choice for Ah-Q. At first she just worried that he would be too busy running back and forth between his various acting engagements. She didn't expect that he would fall into character as soon as he arrived and stir up the other actors. Rehearsals went ahead of schedule, allowing them to prepare more thoroughly.

Wu found much to relate to in Ah-Q: "I think I am Ah-Q!" He believes that Lu Xun didn't sympathize with Ah-Q but rather was just using him to embody what he disliked about the Chinese. But when Wu plays Ah-Q, he makes him much more human. "Just by looking at this 'spiritual victory method,' you can see that Ah-Q was no fool. He's actually very interesting. He shouldn't be played as an idiot--the whole play is really about a big Ah-Q leading a lot of small ones!"

For the role, Wu looked to two models: Charlie Chaplin and the petty thief Lou Ah-shu in the Kunqu opera Fifteen Coin Chains. Perhaps it's even harder to do comedy than tragedy. In particular, some comedy has to be written realistically to be funny and moving, but with too many songs and dances in the drama, the audience can lose their emotions, and so between realism and fancy "you've got to be able to jump back and forth and find a balance," says Wu.

What frame do you want to use?

If the point of putting on the opera was to attract a young audience, then it has been a success. After one performance, a bunch of college students were all abuzz: "I used to think that Peking opera was hard to understand; I never thought it would be so much fun," says one. Another gushes, "Wu Hsing-kuo is just so great." According to the statistics of the National Fu Hsing Opera Theater, among the 1200 people who returned questionnaires, more than 60 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 29 liked the show and all planned on reading Lu Xun's novel.

The arts community was also largely supportive of the results of Fu Hsing's experimentation, believing that whereas the merging of modern theater with traditional Peking opera still presents problems, any attempts to resolve them are always worthwhile. Interestingly, people from the theater world tended to think that the director could have been more bold in his approach, whereas people from the opera world split into two camps: one of supporters and the other of skeptics.

Old opera fans approached the performance with a combination of expectation and trepidation. Two of writer Chang Hsiao-feng's greatest loves are Lu Xun's The Story of Ah-Q and Peking opera. For the two to come together "is like having your favorite actor and actress get married. Inside I was a little nervous, not knowing which one was going to do the other in." After watching? "The show can't be called Peking opera, and it hasn't been faithful to the original, because Lu Xun was writing about Chinese people. What they've put on--who knows if it's comedy or tragedy--is all mixed up. Its style is so new that it's hard to know what to call it--just call it a good show."

Kong Min, the artistic director of the Kuo-kuang Opera troupe, holds that the whole show is a disunited jumble and lacks definition. He believes it reflects the attitudes of the younger generation that are best reflected in a soft drink ad: "As long as I like something, there are no no-nos." And so he describes the production with the label: "Post Modern Peking Opera." Peking opera expert Wei Tze-yun, on the other hand, believes that this work is an extension of traditional Chinese comic drama, a blend of realism and fancy. And the use of modern expressions and dialect are in keeping with the traditions of comic drama.

Wang An-chi, a professor of Chinese at National Tsing Hua University, who has written several modern-style plays herself, holds that this work uses many methods employed in modern drama, methods whose use must be explored when tackling modern subject matter. For instance, in the scene at the execution grounds, mannequins appear in the crowds of onlookers. When Ah-Q looks around and recalls several years before when wolves followed him in the mountains, the eyes of those mannequins flash with a green fire-like light. "Lu Xun described people's coldness as being like the 'gleams in wolves eyes.' This was a turning point in the novel and also a turning point in Lu Xun's life ambitions. Dealing with it in this way was excellent."

When Taiwan Opera meets Peking Opera

Even if the result strayed a bit from convention, the long passages of singing allow the show still to be considered as "opera." It's just that in addition to the xipi and erhuang tunes from Peking opera, at times you can hear fleeting bits of duma diao from Taiwan opera; and the theme song of the opera is the Taiwanese folk song "The Grasshopper Toys with the Rooster," which is played for both the prologue and conclusion.

In which case, can it really be said to be "Peking" opera? "It's a question of proportion," says Liu Nan-fang, who is head of a Taiwan opera troupe. From its very birth, Peking opera has had a tradition of embracing other performance traditions. It has based its music around xipi and erhuang tunes, but it absorbed many local musical styles in building up the canon that we know today as traditional Peking opera. So today Peking opera is taking the same road it took at its beginnings, absorbing tunes that local audiences are familiar with, and by so doing trying to integrate local emotions and feelings. This "localization of Peking opera" is a first for Taiwan, but on the other side of the strait it is old hat. Take The Tragic Song of the Xia King that the Peking Opera Troupe of Gansu performed in Taiwan not long ago. Because it was set in the Western Xia Kingdom in the Helan Mountains, its music integrates qinqiang and the folk songs of northwest China, making it something distinct from Peking opera--call it "Western Peking Opera."

Time passes. . . .

Has Ah-Q departed?

But besides the clear musical borrowings from Taiwan opera, the Taiwanese-accented Mandarin, and the current slang, does the localization go to deeper levels? What is Ah-Q-like about modern Taiwanese? How does "this" Ah-Q differ from "that" Ah-Q?

Back when Lu Xun wrote the novel, the leaders of the New Culture Movement were saddened that their Chinese compatriots were so feeble in the face of the Western assault, and even went as far as completely rejecting traditional Chinese culture. From today's perspective, they seem a bit rash and impatient, and some of their basic principles were not well founded. Does Ah-Q's behavior--ignorant, foolish, and at once self-belittling and self-important--represent the Chinese ethnic character? Ma Sen, a professor and playwright, says not, holding that so-called "ethnic character" is really just characteristics that people in a certain social environment will display; other ethnic groups would react similarly in a similar environment. The French writer Rolland Romain has said, "During the French Revolution, we also had many Ah-Qs. Ah-Q is a universal character."

Regarding stage adaptations, Lu Xun even suggested adapting Ah-Q to the place, because he didn't want people to think that this was a funny story about one place and one time, but rather wanted them to "suspect themselves and everyone else of being Ah-Q-like, and from there begin to reflect about things."

Different eras have different focuses of adaption. For instance, for a play adaptation by Tian Han in 1937, Ah-Q's tragedy was viewed as being affected by the greater environment, as the play encouraged a revolution against the old society. In Chen Baichen's 1980 play, on the other hand, the focus was on changing human nature, and at the very end of the play there was a section when a narrator said, "Although Ah-Q is dead, he is not without descendants, who are all around us today."

Heartless audience?

What about today's Taiwan? After seeing the show, one high school teacher said that Ah-Q was pitiable and doubted whether modern society had illiterates like him. Nevertheless, in regard to the nouveau riche smugglers, and the respect that money brings, she said, "It's just the same today."

As for whether the play conveys Lu Xun's critical spirit, Kung Min feels that it's overly festive and not deep enough, turning Ah-Q into just a clown character, without handling his inner world to a deep enough degree. He holds that so using him only amuses the audience, and an immature audience at that.

The senior writer Bo Yang, on the other hand, was very happy with the performance. "Ah-Q is a very difficult character to act. If the leading character isn't lovable, then any drama will be a little like painting feces. No matter how good the rest of the performance is no one is going to like it." He feels that Fu Hsing handled it very well. Yet he has some reservations about the audience, thinking that perhaps they laughed a little too much, a little "too heartlessly"--was this not the "onlookers' mentality" that Lu Xun was criticizing?

Then there's something that both confuses the audience and presents a dilemma for the actors: When the main character, who was originally an object of criticism, acts and sings too well, it's hard for him not to gain the audience's affection and sympathy. Yan Hong-ya, who works in a small theater group, points out that because the focus of the entire opera is on Ah-Q, the best songs and most moving bits of the performance are naturally all his, and Wu Hsing-kuo is also simply too good looking. As a result, it's too easy for the character to be made into a "tragic hero" and for the audience to start treating him as an idol and object of their adoration. They become inclined to forgive the shameless and dreadful side of his character. But in Lu Xun's rendering, neither the ignorance of Ah-Q nor the relative sophistication of the Weizhuang villagers escaped his criticism.

In regard to these points, Tracy Chung holds that if the play isn't deep enough, it's because she didn't do a good enough job refining it, but her ideal is "a deepness that doesn't seem deep." First let people understand and enjoy, she believes, and then in the midst of all that laughter, they will gain a sense of sadness about the twisted sides of human nature. Perhaps one day, when their spirits sink, they will suddenly reflect on the play and say, "Yeah, life's like that."

At the point of transition

That one opera can stir up so much response is deeply moving to Tracy Chung, but she feels that the production was far from perfect. The biggest problem is that there were too many lines they felt they needed to include, and as a result it is a little overstuffed, with insufficient breathing room for the audience to reflect on what's going on. "Control of time is a major concern when modernizing Peking opera." Others hold that the half-fanciful and half-realistic sets needed improvement, and were the show's greatest flaw.

Chung is very proud that almost everyone working on the production had studied drama. "Tradition was our greatest source of strength, but this is also an open society, and we are at a turning point in time. We could reflect on this some more; we could also trip up a lot more." Seeing that the audience's reaction was very enthusiastic, many people recommended that they extend Ah-Q's run. Chung, however, says that she thinks they should put it aside for a half year, letting things settle down "and not thinking about it at all." This attempt at modernizing Peking opera was successful. But if the play is to be turned into a future classic, it will require further shaping.

(Curtain call)

In the opera's closing scene, Ah-Q, all tied up, is brought onto the execution platform. At that moment, bent circles fall onto the stage like countless "Q"s, the largest of which falls right on Ah-Q's head. Ah-Q, "suddenly ashamed of his silence," struggles to sing, "20 years from now I will return . . . ." Not waiting for an onlooker to ask "as an insect or hero," the guns fire. Up to his death, Ah-Q still isn't clear why he is being executed. He just keeps mumbling about how he didn't make his "mark" round enough.

The curtain finally falls, and as the cast take their bows to the sound of "The Grasshopper Toys with the Rooster," Ah-Q walks out at a loss, perplexed by the audience's applause. He didn't die?!

p.40

The Story of Ah-Q is one of the most famous works by Lu Xun, a leading figure in the New Literature Movement during the early Republican era. The deeply sketched main character of Ah-Q (of the "ugly Chinese" type) personifies the ignorant and simultaneously self-effacing and self-important attitudes of people under feudalism. But what should Ah-Q look like? Under the rendering of the modern master Feng Tze-kai, Ah-Q appears both simple and sleazy. Viewers all say that the work truly captures Ah-Q's spirit. (Lu Xun's photo courtesy of Fengyun Shihtai Publishers) (Feng Tze-kai's cartoon courtesy of Haifeng publishers)

p.42

Ah-Q gets pushed up against the wall by Wang Hu and then starts hitting his own head against the wall. Feng Tze-kai's The Story of Ah-Q, #2.(courtesy of Haifeng publishers)

p.43

The new Story of Ah-Q has arrived. "I'm a cousin three generations senior of the great Zhao who finished first in the civil service exams," Ah-Q tells the villagers, boasting of his high pedigree. Every so often his arch enemy Wang Hu throws Ah-Q on the ground, where he cowers. Afterwards he uses his own special kungfu: "victory in spirit." He calls his left hand the father and his right hand the son, and starts slapping himself: "These days sons beat their fathers so often. How shameless!" (photos above left and right by Hsueh Chi-kuang)

p.44

After the sexual harassment incident, the women of Weizhuang view Ah-Q as a dangerous beast. Feng Tze-kai's The Story of Ah-Q, #3. (courtesy of Haifeng publishers)

p.45

Ah-Q, finding the life of a bachelor hard to endure, makes advances to Mama Wu, the housekeeper of local big shot Zhao. The incident not only scares the wits out of Wu and brings calls to beat Ah-Q up, but it also earns him a brutish reputation that terrifies all the women of Weizhuang, so that no one is willing to hire him. With no future in the village, Ah-Q packs his things and goes to the city. (above and middle photos by Hsueh Chi-kuang)

p.46

In his dream, Ah-Q puts on haughty airs, and all of the leading personages of the village treat him with the greatest of respect. Feng Tze-kai's The Story of Ah-Q, #4. (courtesy of Haifeng publishers)

p.47

After Ah-Q strikes it rich in the city, he returns to Weizhuang, where he is welcomed by villagers who curry his favor. In a drunken stupor, he dreams of revolution in which he is crowned the Great Emperor Q and has everyone who has ever bullied him given a good beating. In this half-realistic, half-fanciful scene appears a chorus line of women made up like the nakashi singers that frequent Taiwan's saunas and brothels. (above photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang)

p.48

With onlookers lining the streets, Ah-Q would very much like to sing something. After pausing for thought, he is only able to utter half a sentence. Feng Tze-kai's The Story of Ah-Q, #10.(courtesy of Haifeng publishers.)

p.49

After a robbery at the Zhao mansion, someone plants the loot on Ah-Q, and in a state of confusion he admits to his "guilt" in court. When making his mark, the illiterate Ah-Q struggles to make a circle. It is only when the revolutionary party pulls him to the execution grounds that he realizes the urgency of the situation. In the moments before he is to be shot, he regrets that he didn't make his mark round enough. (bottom photo by Hseuh Chi-kuang)

The new Story of Ah-Q has arrived. "I'm a cousin three generations senior of the great Zhao who finished first in the civil service exams," Ah-Q tells the villagers, boasting of his high pedigree. Every so often his arch enemy Wang Hu throws Ah-Q on the ground, where he cowers. Afterwards he uses his own special kungfu: "victory in spirit." He calls his left hand the father and his right hand the son, and starts slapping himself: "These days sons beat their fathers so often. How shameless!" (photos above left and right by Hsueh Chi-kuang)

After the sexual harassment incident, the women of Weizhuang view Ah-Q as a dangerous beast. Feng Tze-kai's The Story of Ah-Q, #3. （courtesy of Haifeng publishers）

Ah-Q, finding the life of a bachelor hard to endure, makes advances to Mama Wu, the housekeeper of local big shot Zhao. The incident not only scares the wits out of Wu and brings calls to beat Ah-Q up, but it also earns him a brutish reputation that terrifies all the women of Weizhuang, so that no one is willing to hire him. With no future in the village, Ah-Q packs his things and goes to the city. （above and middle photos by Hsueh Chi-kuang）

In his dream, Ah-Q puts on haughty airs, and all of the leading personages of the village treat him with the greatest of respect. Feng Tze-kai's The Story of Ah-Q, #4. （courtesy of Haifeng publishers）

After Ah-Q strikes it rich in the city, he returns to Weizhuang, where he is welcomed by villagers who curry his favor. In a drunken stupor, he dreams of revolution in which he is crowned the Great Emperor Q and has everyone who has ever bullied him given a good beating. In this half-realistic, half-fanciful scene appears a chorus line of women made up like the nakashi singers that frequent Taiwan's saunas and brothels. （above photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang）

With onlookers lining the streets, Ah-Q would very much like to sing something. After pausing for thought, he is only able to utter half a sentence. Feng Tze-kai's The Story of Ah-Q, #10.（courtesy of Haifeng publishers.）

After a robbery at the Zhao mansion, someone plants the loot on Ah-Q, and in a state of confusion he admits to his "guilt" in court. When making his mark, the illiterate Ah-Q struggles to make a circle. It is only when the revolutionary party pulls him to the execution grounds that he realizes the urgency of the situation. In the moments before he is to be shot, he regrets that he didn't make his mark round enough. (bottom photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang)