Source: Writing Chinese (1/30/25)
Ah Q, Big Brother, and a Californian’s Atlantic Crossing
By Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine and co-editor of the China Section of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the author, most recently, of Vigil: The Struggle for Hong Kong (Brixton Ink, 2025). We unfortunately had to cancel Jeff’s planned research salon in Leeds due to the Great British Weather, but he has kindly provided a blog post to compensate while we arrange a future date!
Jeffrey Wasserstrom.
I recently crossed the Atlantic to spend two days in Berlin and a week in England doing launch events and panels associated with a book that has just been published, a book coming out in June, and a book I’ll be spending the next two years writing. The books are different in many ways, but they have two things in common: all have to do with Asia; and all are concerned with autocratic systems and those who criticize or actively oppose these systems. The just published book is Vigil: The Struggle for Hong Kong, an updated Brixton Ink edition of a very short volume that originally came out in 2020 from Columbia Global Reports. The one publishing in June is The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing, a very short volume that profiles several young activists in and exiles from Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Burma. The working title for one I am writing, which is under contract with Princeton University Press, is Orwell and Asia: A Continent’s Connections to an Author’s Life, Legacy, and Literary Creation.
This is a U.K.-only updated edition of Wasserstrom’s Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (Columbia Global Reports, 2020), featuring two new parts, each written by a journalist, covering developments post-NSL : a “Foreword” by Amy Hawkins of The Guardian and an “Afterword” by Kris Cheng who did not move from his native Hong Kong to London until 2021.
I did not expect that talking about these three books in Germany and England would lead me to spend time thinking about the inventor of Ah Q as well as the inventor of Big Brother–but for curious reasons, it did. I thought about Lu Xun a lot as I made my way from Berlin to London and from there to Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester, and Sheffield. I would also have thought about him on my way to Leeds to speak at the celebrated Centre for New Chinese Writing there, but a storm that played havoc with some rail routes led me to put off speaking there until the next time I am in the U.K. Had I reached the Centre, I was scheduled to give a talk on the Orwell book-in-progress, but Lu Xun was so much on my mind that I planned to shift gears and speak there as much about the author of The True Story of Ah Q as about the author of Animal Farm. In doing that, I would have revisited and expanded on an old essay of mine on Lu Xun that I kept thinking about throughout my trip, even though it was not among those I had on my mind when I set out to cross the Atlantic. Continue reading Ah Q, Big Brother, and a Californian’s Atlantic Crossing
