Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, page 49
rid himself of his wife: In traditional Chinese law, a husband could unilaterally repudiate (i.e. divorce) his wife on any one of seven grounds: sterility, lewdness, disobedience to her parents-in-law, loquacity, stealing, jealousy and any repulsive disease. We are not told what the grounds were in this particular instance.
The fact of his own childlessness… on his mind: In the words of Herbert Giles:
The importance of male offspring in Chinese social life is hardly to be expressed in words. To the son is confided the task of worshipping at the ancestral tombs, the care of the ancestral tablets, and the due performance of all rites and ceremonies connected with the departed dead. No Chinaman will die, if he can help it, without leaving a son behind him. If his wife is childless he will buy a concubine.
(Strange Stories, p. 39, note 10)
Coral: The young lady's name, Qiong Hua, literally ‘beautiful reddish-jade, or agate’, has a poetic resonance suggestive of the immortal realms from which she has been banished. He who savours the flowers of the mythical Qiong tree, growing to a towering height on the slopes of the fabulous Kunlun Mountains, is supposed to live for ever.
sea at Nanhai: Pu Songling seems to be more than a trifle vague here about his geography. In ordinary speech, Nanhai can simply mean the Southern Sea, what foreigners call the South China Sea, the stretch of ocean between the provinces of Fujian and Guangdong and the island of Taiwan, in which case it would be perfectly plausible for Yue Zhong to travel from his home in Xi’an (in the north-west) through the province of Fujian to the coast. But the place of pilgrimage referred to here must surely be the Holy Island known as Mount Putuo farther north off the coast of Zhejiang Province, which since the ninth century has been a centre for the cult of the Bodhisattva Guan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, whose ‘special work is to receive the spirit as it leaves the body and place it in a lotus-blossom which opens in the Sacred Lake of the Western Heaven’ (Plopper, Chinese Religion Seen through the Proverb, p. 156). In this story both Yue Zhong's mother and his companion Coral are linked to the icon of Guan Yin, and to the Bodhisattva's qualities of beauty and compassion. Guan Yin and the lotus-flower are the keynotes of the story. Guan Yin is commonly represented in Buddhist devotional art as a beautiful woman seated or standing on a lotus-blossom.
Her island shrine is spoken of in Buddhist parlance as Nanhai or Mount Putuo, a reference to the Potala Mountains near the southern coast of India, supposed home of the original male Boddhisattva Avalokitesvara, of whom Guan Yin is the Chinese female transformation. H. C. Chang, in a long and very interesting note on Mount Putuo in his Tales of the Supernatural, quotes a 1913 eyewitness account of one of Guan Yin's apparitions by Sir Reginald Johnston (tutor to the last Manchu Emperor):
At certain times, when atmospheric and tidal conditions are favourable, a shaft of sunlight streams into the cave through a gap in the roof called the tian-chuang or Heaven's Window, and strikes athwart the flying foam. The cave then seems to be filled with a tremulous haze, in which the unbeliever sees nothing but sunlit spray, but which to the devout worshipper is a luminous veil through which the Bodhisattva of Love and Pity becomes visible to the eyes of her faithful suppliants.
One cannot help but be reminded of Lourdes, and the apparitions of the Virgin Mary at the grotto.
In a sense, Nanhai, or South Sea, is ‘wherever Guan Yin is’. Feng Zhenluan (1818) quotes the lines:
That home wherein Guan Yin dwells
Is a Southern Sea before our very eyes;
But where men know her not,
Their prayers are all in vain.
Apsaras: See note to Tale 6, ‘The Painted Wall’.
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MUTTON FAT AND PIG BLOOD
Ji: A Chinese form of spirit-writing or planchette that still takes place in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Two people, normally the medium and his assistant, hold a carefully selected wand of peach-wood or willow, forked or sometimes T-shaped, over a tray of sand. A spirit is called upon to descend, whereupon the wand traces characters (or marks which can be interpreted as characters) on the sand. ‘Suddenly the tip comes down, like a hammer it jumps up and down, two, three, even more times’ (de Groot, The Religious System of China, VI, pp. 1295–1322). The marks are then used to predict the future, or to answer some specific question. Sometimes the exchange between the spirit and the medium takes the form, as in this story, of an incomplete couplet.
couplet: Literally ‘opposites’. Writing these perfectly matching couplets is a peculiarly Chinese pastime. Arthur Smith explains that ‘Its essence is thesis and antithesis – antithesis between different tones and different meanings, resemblances in the relations between the characters in one clause and those in another clause… The construction of antithetical sentences affords a fertile field for Chinese ingenuity, a field to which we have nothing in English even remotely correspondent’ (Proverbs and Common Sayings from the Chinese (Shanghai, 1914), pp. 47–50).
Mutton-fat-white jade-sky: Mutton-fat-white jade is one of the most valuable sorts of jade, a pure white nephrite, which when well polished resembles congealed mutton fat. It is sometimes known in the West as Imperial White Jade.
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STIR-FRY
put it to soak in a bowl of water: Van Gulik (Erotic Colour Prints, pp. 146–7), quoting the erotic novel Wild Tales of the Bamboo Grove, describes another type of dildo, called the ‘Cantonese Groin’, which had to be soaked in hot water before use. He thinks it was filled with the dried stalks of a plant, which swelled when moistened.
the two of them had a good laugh about it: Feng Zhenluan (1818) jokingly quotes the Taoist sage Laozi, a legendary figure, thought by some to have been a contemporary of Confucius in the sixth century BC: ‘If they hadn’t laughed, it would not have been worthy of being considered the Tao.’
Pu Songling, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio
