Am reading Lu Xun's The Real Story of Ah-Q about a village idiot's life that ends as a dead rebel. Lu Xun is a Chinese literary hero for his short membership in the Shanghai Circle of Communist writers in the early 1920s. I remember reading the same story, probably in Hungarian, under the Stalinist regime. That or a similar story set in the Hungarian countryside. Lu Xun makes fun of traditional Chinese civilization. He hates Chinese Opera, with its noisy gongs and choreographed fights. Mao's Cultural Revolution roots may be found in Ah-Q.
A nun said to Ah-Q : "May you die without descendants!" If I die without descendants, Ah-Q said to himself, I'll have no one to offer a bowl of rice at my grave... and then "There are three ways of betraying your parents, of which dying without descendants is the most serious". They become hungry ghosts.
The Chinese were always a most prolific civilization, how is it that today, the Chinese are not marrying and have no children? The Communist government thinks that the cause is Western influence and contra-Mao's Cultural Revolution, has adopted a pro-children traditionalist attitude. If they follow to the very end of this new tendency, Party cadres - the new mandarines - will have two-three wives and concubines, and clan tombs will be visited yearly to feed a steaming bowl of rice to the ancestors. Illustration: The Hungry Ghosts Festival refers to the opening of hell's gate for one month allowing all the ghosts full liberty to make trouble in the human world of existence. After the one-month period, the ghosts return to hell and the gate is shut for another year.
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