of two of the most despicable traits in human nature: the tendency to rationalize things to our own supposed advantage and the cowardly habit of turning upon those weaker than ourselves after we have been abused by those stronger than we are. "When a man of courage is outraged," he writes elsewhere, "he draws his sword against an oppressor stronger than he. When a coward is outraged, he draws his sword against a man weaker than he. Among a race of hopeless cowards, there must be heroes who specialize in browbeating children." This is Ah Q's way of trying to be brave when he first picked on Wang the Beard, and then on little Don when he found that he could not even afford to be brave even with Wang. But Ah Q excels especially in his ability to turn defeat into victory by such processes of rationalization as imaging himself a poor father who has been beaten by an unfilial son. He is a "philosopher" too in his placid acceptance of his fate. When arrested and thrust behind the grilled door of his prison cell and later forced to sign a confession that he could not read, he only reflected "philosophically" that "in a man's life there must be times when he would be seized and thrust behind grilled doors and be required to make a circle on a sheet of paper." When he finally realized that he was going to be executed, his only reaction, equally "philosophical," was that "it was in the nature of things that some people should be unlucky enough to have their heads cut off."
Ah Q is the only character out of contemporary Chinese fiction that has passed into contemporary Chinese thought. Such expressions as "That's Ah Q-ism," "That's Ah Q logic," "Don't be so Ah Q like," and "He is the perfect image of Ah Q" have become part of the living speech. Ah Q has become the symbol of everything that is undesirable and
