Eva Shan Chou

City Univeristy of New York

Baruch College

 

“Living Without a Queue: How Lu Xun Faced Hostility”.

 

            My paper comes from a chapter I am working on about Lu Xun cutting his queue. He did this in 1903, while he was in his first year as a student in Japan. Hostility to his short hair was not recorded until his return to China in 1909, when he endured suspiciousness at least until the 1911 Republican revolution made queue-cutting mandatory.

This paper discusses the intolerance Lu Xun met with on his return from Japan and the inconsistent responses he had to them. All this took place ten years before he began to write, so the evidence is necessarily delayed, indirect, and literary. Nonetheless it is possible to uncover some interesting information about his responses. I will use primarily the three short stories that feature queues, “A Story about Hair,” “Storm in a Teacup,” and “The True Story of Ah Q,” and show that there is more personal applicability in the stories than has hitherto been recognized. Using these stories, I will show that his responses to the hostility he encountered were disguised, inconsistent, and very strongly felt. One consequence is to alter, to differing degrees, interpretations of these stories.

Lu Xun’s responses lead us bbto the applicability of the concept of tolerance to other parts of his life. It is well known that after he became famous, Lu Xun was embroiled in many controversies, in which he often participated with what seems like excessive vehemence. Like the queue, the controverted points often have little currency today (although the queue has retained its grip on the imagination). Unlike the queue, the intolerance displayed was immediately and mutually expressed. But disguise and delay via literature remained salient features in Lu Xun’s dealings with the world. This paper briefly touches upon later controversies to establish some lines of similarity.

 

Eva Shan Chou