Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, page 36
‘Where have you sprung from?’ asked Zhong in great surprise. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘You and I once lived as husband and wife,’ replied Coral, with a smile, ‘in our own fashion. What need have you to ask such questions? I could not stay with you before, because the old bawd I worked for was still alive and she would never have let me do so. Now she is dead, and I have thought things through. If I stay single, I shall be a defenceless woman. But if I marry any man other than you, I shall feel unclean. After much reflection I have decided that the best thing is to be with you. So I have travelled all this way to join you.’
She unpacked her things, and there and then she took the boy's place at the stove. Zhong was delighted. That night, father and son shared a bed as before, and another room was set aside for Coral. The boy called her mother, and she was devoted to him.
When Zhong's relatives and neighbours heard of his new ménage, they wanted to celebrate, a proposition that the couple happily accepted. The guests duly arrived, and Coral produced all that was necessary for the occasion. Zhong did not even ask where it had come from. As the days went by, she sold her seemingly inexhaustible supply of silver and jewellery, and they were able to redeem Zhong's original property. Soon his was a prosperous household again, with maids and servants, horses and oxen.
‘If ever I drink too much,’ Zhong said to her more than once, ‘be sure to keep well away from me. Don’t let me near you then.’
She laughingly agreed. But then one day, when he had had more than usual to drink, he called for her urgently, and, far from keeping away, she came in to him dressed in her finest clothes. Zhong stared at her a long while, and then began dancing wildly for joy.
‘I am enlightened!’ he burst out.
Suddenly he felt completely clear in his mind, and in that instant the world around him was bathed in radiant light and their humble home was transformed into a palace of jade. In a little while the vision faded. From that day on, he never drank save when he was alone with Coral. She, for her part, abstained from meat and wine, and sipped a cup of tea to keep him company.
One day, again when he was already a little tipsy, he asked Coral to massage his legs for him. The old scars, where he had cut them so violently years before, both when his mother was delirious and after her death, had grown into the shape of two tiny crimson lotuses, budding from his flesh. They both marvelled at this strange sight.
‘The day these buds open and flower,’ said Zhong, with a strange smile, ‘our “marriage” of twenty years will be at an end and we will part.’
She took him seriously and believed his words.
The time came for the son Ah Xin to marry, and Coral entrusted the running of the household to his young wife, while she and Zhong lived separately in their own compound. There they received the young couple every few days, offering them advice only if some difficult matter arose. They themselves kept on two maids, one to warm his wine, the other to brew her tea.
One day, Coral went to see Ah Xin and his wife, and stayed with them for some time, discussing household matters. She returned with Ah Xin to see his father, and they found him sitting on his couch barefoot. When he heard them enter, he opened his eyes and smiled at them both.
‘I’m so glad that you and your mother have come!’
And with that he closed his eyes again.
‘What are you talking about, my dear!’ cried Coral.
She looked at his legs. The two lotus-buds were in full bloom. She felt him, and the life force had already gone out of him. Urgently she pressed the petals together again with both her hands, entreating him all the while. ‘I came so far to be here with you! It was not easy. I have raised your son and instructed your daughter-in-law. I have done what little I could for us. There were only two or three years left. Could you not have waited a little longer?’
A moment later, Zhong suddenly opened his eyes again and smiled.
‘You have your life to lead in this world,’ he said. ‘Why do I need to be part of it? But so be it, since it is your desire, I will stay with you a while longer.’
Coral took her hands away, and the lotus-flowers were little buds once more. The two of them laughed and chatted together as they had always done.
Three years went by, and Coral was now almost forty years old, though she looked hardly a day over twenty. One day, she said to Zhong out of the blue, ‘We must all die sooner or later. And when we do, our bodies will be moved around this way and that at the hands of others – it will be so unclean and undignified! We must make the necessary preparations.’
She gave instructions for two coffins to be made. Ah Xin was appalled and asked her what the meaning of this was.
‘You would not understand,’ she replied.
When the coffins were ready, she washed herself, put on her grave-clothes, and then she summoned Ah Xin and his wife.
‘I am going to my death now,’ she said.
‘All these years we have depended on you, Mother,’ protested Ah Xin tearfully. ‘Thanks to your wise advice we have never gone hungry. You yourself have never been able to enjoy a life of leisure. You deserve it. Don’t forsake us now!’
She replied, ‘Your father by his devotion sowed the seeds of the good fortune that you now enjoy. Your family's servants, maids, cattle, horses, have all been restored. This was the due repayment of the loans your father was tricked into making. I had no part in it. I am one of the Heavenly Apsaras, a Flower Fairy. My mind became too attached to worldly thoughts, and I was banished into the world of men for thirty years. My time is now finished.’
So saying, she climbed into her own coffin. They cried out, but her eyes were already closed.
Ah Xin went in tears to inform his father, but found him lying formally clad in hat and gown, cold and dead. Weeping fierce tears, he placed his father in his coffin and had both coffins put out in the main hall, delaying the wake for several days in the hope that they might still come back to life. A bright aura emanated from Zhong's limbs and lit up the hall, while Coral's coffin gave off a richly perfumed mist that permeated the whole house. When they finally closed up the coffins, the brightness and the perfume gradually faded away.
After the funeral, various male relatives of the Yue family began eyeing Ah Xin's wealth, and conspired together to disown him of his inheritance, claiming that he was not Zhong's true son and heir. The case came before the Magistrate, who felt unable to reach a decision and proposed as a compromise to divide the property in two, giving half to Ah Xin and half to the relatives. But Ah Xin appealed to the district court, where the case remained a long while unresolved.
Now, many years earlier, as has already been told, after the summary divorce of his daughter, Gu Wenyuan had remarried her – to a certain Mr Yong. A year later, this Yong had moved south from Xi’an to the province of Fujian, and Gu lost touch with them altogether. At the time of Coral's death, Gu was an old man, whose one desire left in life was to see his daughter, his only child, again. He set out for Fujian to find her, only to be told on arrival at the son-in-law's house that his daughter was dead and that his grandson (Ah Xin) had been driven out of the house by Yong and his new wife. Gu informed the local Magistrate of this injustice, and Yong, fearing the consequences, offered his father-in-law a bribe. Gu refused to accept the money, insisting that what he wanted was his grandson, and the two of them sought the boy out everywhere without success. Then, one day, Gu saw a gaily coloured carriage coming down the road, and was just standing aside to let it pass, when a beautiful lady called to him from within the curtains, ‘Is that you, Grandpa Gu?’
‘It is,’ he replied.
‘Your grandson is my son,’ continued the woman's voice, ‘and is now living in the Yue household. Leave your lawsuit here and hurry to your grandson's aid. He has need of you.’
The carriage was gone before Gu could ask any questions. Resolving to accept Yong's money after all, he used it to make his way back to Xi’an, and arrived as the court was in the throes of coming to a judgement on Ah Xin's appeal. Gu went straight to the judge and presented him with all the information he had at his disposal: the date of his daughter's divorce, the date of her remarriage and the date of her son's birth. The facts were conclusive. As a result, the Yue cousins were given a caning and sent packing, Ah Xin was reinstated in his inheritance, and the case was declared closed.
Grandfather Gu went home with his grandson, and told him about the beautiful lady he had seen in the carriage. The encounter had occurred, so Ah Xin informed him, on the very day Coral died.
Ah Xin invited his grandfather to come and live with him, and provided him with quarters of his own and a maid to wait on him. Gu was already sixty years old, and in his old age the maid bore him a son, to whom Ah Xin showed great kindness.
102
MUTTON FAT AND PIG BLOOD
Mi Buyun – ‘Cloud-Walker’ – of Zhangqiu was an adept of the occult art of spirit-writing known as Ji. Whenever his friends gathered together for a social occasion, they would ask him to communicate with some Immortal or other and produce lines of supernaturally inspired verse.
One day, one of his friends was moved by the sight of a subtle cloud formation in the sky to compose a line of verse, to which he asked Mi to ‘receive’ an ‘answer’, so that the two lines could form a couplet. The line the friend composed was:
Mutton-fat-white jade-sky.
The planchette's cryptic response was:
South of the town, seek out Old Man Dong.
At the time they all thought this was meaningless gibberish.
Some time later, for some reason or another Mi and his friends happened to take a stroll south of the town and came to a place where they noticed that the soil had a strange reddish tinge, like the mineral cinnabar. Nearby they saw an old man with his herd of pigs, and they asked him about the strange colour of the earth.
‘Oh that!’ he replied. ‘That be pig-blood-red mud-earth…’
Whereupon they suddenly remembered the planchette reading, and marvelling greatly, asked the old man his name.
‘People call me Old Man Dong,’ he replied.
The five-word response – Pig-blood-red mud-earth – was
Caption
‘That be pig-blood-red mud-earth.’
certainly no brilliant line of poetry, but it matched the friend's original line word for word and made a good couplet. And the prescience of the planchette in knowing that they would find Old Man Dong south of the town and that he would give them the line – that was something truly extraordinary!
103
DUNG-BEETLE DUMPLINGS
Du Xiaolei lived in the hills west of Yidu. His mother was totally blind, and he looked after her with great filial devotion. Though they were a poor family, he saw to it that she never lacked good things to eat.
One day, he had to go out, and he bought some meat and gave it to his wife, telling her to make some dumplings with it. His wife was an extremely wayward and undutiful daughter-in-law, and when she chopped up the meat she threw in some bits of dung-beetle. Du's mother found the smell of the food repulsive and refused to eat it, putting it aside to show her son on his return.
His first question when he came home was ‘Did you like the dumplings?’
His mother shook her head and produced the evidence. Her son opened the dumplings, and when he saw the bits of dung-beetle, he flew into a mighty rage and stormed into the bedroom, intending to give his wife a good beating. But in the end, afraid that his mother might hear, he climbed into bed and lay there brooding. When his wife spoke to him he remained silent, whereupon she became apprehensive and began pacing up and down beside the bed. After a while, Du heard a sort of panting and snorting.
‘Can’t you go to sleep?’ he cried out. ‘What are you staying awake for? A good hiding?’
There was complete silence. He rose, lit a candle and there before him he beheld a pig. Looking closer, he saw that it had two human feet, and knew that it was his wife metamorphosed.
When the Magistrate came to hear of this, he ordered the pig
Caption
There before him he beheld a pig.
to be bound and paraded through the streets, as a lesson to all and sundry.
Tan Weichen saw this with his own eyes.
104
STIR-FRY
A certain scholar was staying in the provincial capital for the examinations, and returned to his lodgings as night was falling. He had brought back with him some lotus seeds and pieces of lotus root, which he placed on the desk in his room. He also took out a dildo he had acquired, made of rattan, and put it to soak in a bowl of water.
At that very moment, his neighbours, hearing that he was back, came round with wine to spend the evening carousing with him, and he quickly hid the bowl underneath the bed and hurried out to greet them, instructing his wife to prepare some food. After the meal, he went back into his room and shone a lamp under the bed, only to discover that the bowl was empty. He asked his wife what had happened to the contents of the bowl, and she replied, ‘Oh that – I cooked it just now for our guests, to go with the lotus root. Why, were you keeping it for something?’
When she said this he recalled a dish that had been set before them on the table with something black all chopped up in it, which none of them had been able to recognize. He laughed.
‘You foolish woman! How could you think of serving such a thing to our guests!’
‘I was wondering why you never gave me a recipe for it,’ replied his perplexed wife. ‘It was such a nasty-looking thing! I had no idea what it was. All I could think of doing was chopping it up into little pieces and stir-frying it…’
He proceeded to tell her what the ‘nasty-looking thing’ really was, and the two of them had a good laugh about it.
This man went on to become a man of rank. His good friends still joke with him about this story.
Author's Preface
Translator's Note
This is a dense and highly wrought text, a ‘crazy quilt of disembodied images’ (Judith T. Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale (Stanford, 1993, p. 50)). Almost every phrase contains an allusion of one sort or another, and every allusion tells a tale. It is in a sense a miniature anthology in its own right, of writers, tales and poems, all of them hinted at obliquely. The standard modern edition (Zhu Qikai, 1989) devotes a single page to the main text, followed by five pages tightly crammed with thirty-two explicatory footnotes in small type, mostly based on the glosses of Lü Zhan’en (1825). I have consulted these annotations and those of others, including Herbert Giles, André Lévy, Jacques Dars and Chan Hingho, Judith T. Zeitlin, and Chang and Chang. My purpose in translating this Preface has not been to parade the author's learning, but to bring into focus the lineage in which he saw himself, the Chinese pedigree of his tales. We see several things in this self-portrait: a fascination with the supernatural for its own sake, an almost obsessive love of the richness of the Chinese classical language, enlivened by a pervasive and subtle sense of humour, and tinged by an intensely lyrical melancholy, a mood of ‘lonely anguish and spleen’. The literary figures the author evokes (sometimes in no more than a couple of words) are his friends and mentors across the ages. At the same time (and this is typical of his extraordinary versatility) in this Preface he is ‘performing’ in (parodying would too strong a term) the formal, parallelistic style fashionable in his own day. I have broken the prose into lines to indicate something of this formal quality.
In my annotations I have added fragments by some of the authors referred to, to make the implied literary community more real. Today's reader, unlike the scholar-gentlemen of the late seventeenth century, cannot be expected to understand, from Pu Songling's brief and highly allusive snippets, how this lineage of writers formed a spiritual continuum and how Strange Tales evolved out of it.
The second half of the Preface is largely autobiographical. It is worth remembering that in 1679, when it was written, Pu Songling was thirty-nine years old and had only completed a part of the Strange Tales collection. Modern scholars estimate that he went on adding tales for well over twenty years.
*
Ivy-cloak and mistletoe-girdle!
Thus was the Lord of the Three Wards
Moved to
Rhapsodize.
Ox-ghosts and serpent-spirits!
Thus was the Bard of the Long Nails
Driven to
Versify.
Each played his
10 Pipes of Heaven,
Seeking not beauty of sound,
But music that is what it is
For reasons of its own.
My desolate autumn firefly
Is eclipsed by goblins;
My insatiable speck of dust
Is mocked by trolls.
My talents pale beside
Those of Gan Bao,
20 Whom I follow
In his quest for weird spirits.
My mood mirrors
That of Su Dongpo,
Whom I resemble
In his love of strange tales.
Of tales told
I have made a book.
With time
And my love of hoarding,
The matter sent me by friends 30
From the four corners
Has grown into a pile.
Here in the civilized world,
Stranger events by far occur
Than in the Country of Cropped Hair;
Before our very eyes
Weirder tales unfold
