Chapter 79: Is It a Willow Tree, or Some Other Tree

Liu Guozong

I've long felt that I'm a bit like Ah Q, or maybe I am Ah Q.

Or perhaps I'm not even as good as Ah Q. Because no matter how you say it, Ah Q still has someone who wrote a biography for him, titled *The True Story of Ah Q*, but so far, no one in this world has proposed to write a biography for me.

Someone said, ordinary people have no history. That statement makes sense and is also realistic.

If everyone in this world had history, then it wouldn't be called history; it would just be chaos.

Those who can push history forward, or rewrite history, are the ones who can be written into history and thus have history. But this is not something everyone can do.

So ordinary people have no history; ordinary people are just ordinary people. Ordinary people are merely a form of life; when they are alive, they are merely an existence of life. They are a screw that drives history forward, a punctuation mark in the writing of history.

Ah Q was fortunate; the great Lu Xun wrote a proper biography for him. He just didn't have a surname; maybe his surname was Zhao, but the Grandfather Zhao of Weizhuang wouldn't let him use it. But that doesn't matter. There are many people in this world without surnames.

When Tao Yuanming wrote *The Tale of the Five-Willow Mr. *, he didn't know the Five-Willow Mr.'s surname or name. Following the record, he wrote his biography: 'Mr. Unknown where he came from, and his surname and given name are not known. There are five willow trees by his residence, which he therefore liked.'

Mr. Lu Xun knew a bit more than Tao Yuanming. He also knew that Ah Q was a person from Weizhuang.

Living in the Earth Valley Shrine, but Mr. Lu Xun didn't make it clear whether the trees around the Earth Valley Shrine where Ah Q lived were willows or other kinds of trees.

I don't know whether this was Lu Xun's oversight, or because he never personally visited the Earth Valley Shrine to observe.

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