Word: ah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...about Chinese literature - good news if you think, as I do, that the country's growing global profile should be matched by greater awareness of its cultural offerings. But to me the best news of all is the recent publication, as a Penguin Classic, of The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China. It's a work that has nothing to do with introducing an up-and-coming writer, but rather seeks to widen appreciation of the long-dead Lu Xun - the pen name of Zhou Shuren, who succumbed to tuberculosis...
...Chinese letters who deserves to be much more widely read outside his homeland. This affordable volume comprises, over 416 pages, his complete fiction. Julia Lovell's are arguably the most accessible translations yet of such famous stories as "The Divorce," "New Year's Sacrifice" and the eponymous tale of Ah-Q (an opportunistic, inept sometime participant in the 1911 Revolution). Together, they give Lu Xun his best shot to date of achieving renown beyond the Chinese world. If it succeeds in this, the book could be considered the most significant Penguin Classic ever published...
...England's George Orwell is another essential writer, and one with whom Lu Xun shares important traits. Each introduced new terms into the political lexicon: Ah-Q-ism (a proclivity for self-delusion) is as readily understood in China as references to Big Brother are elsewhere. Each author spent most of his adult life as an independent thinker of the left, criticizing dogmatism and hypocrisy wherever it appeared on the political spectrum. Each championed plain forms of writing. And each penned an ironic novella about a revolution that claimed to be about changing everything, but ended up altering only...
...Samoa and the South Seas was in 1916 and he kept exploring - visiting French Polynesia, Japan, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Peking, Singapore and what was then Malaya - with absolute fascination until the early 1920s. His finest short-story collections, The Trembling of a Leaf (1921), The Casuarina Tree (1926) and Ah King (1933), were inspired by these wanderings. They were all undertaken in the company of the colorful Gerald Haxton, the man who was his lover, secretary and companion for 30 years. His other significant homosexual relationship, with Alan Searle, a working-class boy 30 years his junior, began...
...Ah yes, maybe the medical school is a bastion of young adult tension and angst, rife with raunchy relations between that kid who spent every waking second studying for orgo and that girl who published an article in Nature junior year and got a perfect score on the MCATs...