Strange Tales from Liaozhai--Volume 6

by Pu Songling

  Before Yi could climb over the wall, however, Youyu caught up with him and struck him so he fell down. Xiao and his brothers then ganged up and pummeled Yi with their fists, brutally hitting him again and again. Youyu tried to interpose his own body to stop them. The angry Xiao was thus forced to yield. “I did what duty dictated to punish my brother’s impertinence,” said Youyu, “but his misdeed doesn’t justify killing him. I don’t approve of my younger brother’s crude disrespect, but neither can I condone my elder brother’s violence. If you’re unable to resolve your anger towards him any other way, strike me instead.”

  Hence Xiao turned and began beating Youyu, with with Zhong and Xin helping him strike their brother, and when the sounds of this aggression reached their neighbors, a group of them gathered, calling for them to stop till finally they ceased their beating. Youyu had to use a pole for support as he stood up, then he went over to Xiao and begged his forgiveness for his brothers’ actions. Xiao, however, drove him away, barring him from the house and from participation in the mourning for Xiao’s wife.

  But Yi was so badly injured that he was unable to eat or drink. Ren then took his part and filed a lawsuit with the magistrate, alleging that some of his brothers hadn’t participated in the funeral obsequies of his father’s concubine. The official consequently authorized the apprehension of Xiao, Zhong, and Xin, but also ordered Youyu to testify against them. Since Youyu’s face had been severely beaten, he couldn’t bear to appear in public, so he drafted a petition entreating the court to dismiss the suit, and the magistrate did declare the case closed.

  Yi soon recovered and returned to normal. From this point on, the hatred between the brothers became more intense than ever. Ren and Yi were both young and continued to be the victims of beatings. They blamed Youyu, complaining, “All men have brothers to stand up for them except us!”

  “That’s what you say, but I should be saying that about the two of you!” retorted Youyu. He tried once again to advise them carefully, but they took no heed of his words. As a result, Youyu then bolted his doors, taking his wife and son away with him to live elsewhere, hoping that once they were fifty li away from home, he’d no longer hear about the conflicts between his brothers.

  While Youyu was still living at home, he never intervened to aid Ren and Yi, yet Xiao and the others were still a bit intimidated by his presence; after he left, however, they no longer hesitated to mistreat his brothers, constantly shouting curses and insults about their concubine mother outside their doors. Ren and Yi realized that they had no protection against their brothers’ cruelty, so they just barred their doors, plotted how they might assassinate their brothers, and started carrying knives with them.

  One day, their elder brother Cheng, who’d been captured by bandits, suddenly escaped from them with his wife and returned home. Since the brothers had much earlier divided the home into living quarters, they met together and deliberated for three days about where to situate Zeng Cheng without reaching a decision. Secretly pleased by this, Ren and Yi invited Cheng to come and live with them. Then they went and told Youyu what had happened.

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  “All men have brothers . . . except us!”: An ironic allusion to Confucius’s Analects 12.5, since it misses the point of the passage wherein Sima Niu, who had his own problems with a treacherous sibling, laments, “Everyone has brothers except for me,” while Confucius’s disciple, Zixia, answers that righteous individuals earn the respect of others, such that “everyone in the world is their brother. Why would exemplary persons worry over having no brothers?” (154).

  Li: A distance equal to 1/3 mile.

  Overjoyed by his brother’s return, Youyu came back home and with the other brothers worked out a share of the land and housing for Cheng. Xiao and his brothers were irritated by what the others had done for Cheng, so they went to threaten and intimidate them.

  But Cheng had developed a violent temper from living with the bandits for so long, and in a furious voice he roared, “I came home, but none of you helped to find me a place to live; fortunately, the three younger brothers were considerate enough to treat me as their brother, but now you come to punish them for doing their duty. I suppose you’d also like to chase me away!” He took a rock and threw it at Xiao, knocking him to the ground. Ren and Yi meanwhile took out a pair of canes, grabbed Zhong and Xin, and started beating them mercilessly.

  Cheng then filed a lawsuit against the three brothers with the magistrate, and the magistrate in turn sent a man to ask Youyu to present his opinion on the matter. Youyu came to see the magistrate, bowing respectfully while saying nothing, as tears flowed down his cheeks. When the magistrate asked him what should be done with the brothers, he replied, “There’s nothing to do but ask the court for its decision.”

  The magistrate then ruled that Xiao and his brothers each had to take a share of their land and possessions and give them to Cheng, such that the seven brothers would each own approximately the same amount. After this, Ren, Yi, and Cheng grew even closer in mutual love and respect. When the younger brothers spoke of the business regarding their mother’s burial location, the three of them all wept together. In disgust, Cheng exclaimed, “That wasn’t the behavior of human beings, but of beasts!”

  He wanted to reopen the tomb and resituate the concubine’s body. Ren hurried off to impart this to Youyu. Youyu, in turn, rushed home to implore his elder brother not to pursue his plan. Cheng, however, refused to listen, and set a date to reopen the tomb, performing a ritual purification at the site.

  Then he took a sword and split a tree with it, informing all of his brothers, “What happened to this tree will happen to anyone who fails to attend the ceremony!” The others anxiously affirmed that they would be there. Consequently, they were all in solemn mourning as the concubine’s coffin was relocated with all proper ceremony.

  Following this, the brothers got along peacefully. Cheng’s temperament, however, remained tough and unyielding, and he regularly slapped or beat his brothers, targeting Xiao in particular. He only deferred to Youyu, so if Cheng was in one of his rages, Youyu would come and speak to him, immediately calming him down. Everything Xiao did would irritate Cheng, which meant that a day didn’t go by without Xiao coming to see Youyu, privately ranting to him in complaint.

  Youyu tried gently to advise him, but it did no good. Unable to bear Xiao’s continual griping, he moved his family to Sanbo, further distancing himself from the others to avoid their conflicts.

  Two years passed with the brothers all living in fear of Cheng, though in time they got used to his behavior. By the age of forty-six, Xiao had five sons: the eldest, Jiye, and his third son, Jide, he had with his wife; his second son, Jigong, and his fourth son, Jiji, he had with his concubine; and a maidservant gave birth to his youngest son, Jizu. All of them had established their own households. Following the example of their father, they quarrelled with each other, and nothing Xiao said or did could stop them.

  _________

  Sanbo: A prefecture in Pu’s day, now a county in Yunnan province.

  Since only Jizu had no other brothers by his mother, and he was the youngest of Xiao’s sons, all of his older brothers were mean and picked on him. His wife’s parents lived near Sanbo, so he went to pay them a visit, then took a side trip to see his uncle Youyu. As he approached, he saw his two older cousins and one younger cousin singing together gleefully, which made him so happy that for a long time he didn’t say anything about returning home.

  When Youyu urged him to go back, Jizu begged pitifully that he be allowed to stay. “Regardless of the fact that I’m perfectly able to offer you food and drink,” replied his uncle, “your parents don’t even know that you’re here!” Thus Jizu returned home.

  Several months passed, then Jizu accompanied his wife to celebrate her mother’s birthday. Before leaving, he told Xiao, “After I go, I’m not coming back.” His father asked him why not, so he blurted out what he’d been keeping bottled up inside. Xiao pondered this,
considering their long-standing differences, then observed that he didn’t think Jizu would be allowed to stay with Youyu for long. “That’s not a problem,” said Jizu. “Uncle Youyu is a kind and virtuous man.” He left then to take his wife to Sanbo. Youyu gave them a place to live in his home, treating them like his own children, and sent Jizu to study with his oldest son, Jishan.

  Jizu was extremely intelligent, so the following year he was sent to Sanbo to enroll in the prefectural academy. Whenever he and Jishan shut their door and studied together, Jizu’s recitations were always superior to Jishan’s. Youyu became very fond of him.

  After Jizu went to live in Sanbo, his brothers at home began to fight more and more among themselves. One day, in a slight affront, Jiye happened to insult his father’s concubine. This made Jigong so angry that he stabbed Jiye to death. An official took Jigong into custody, subjected him to severe torture, and after several days, he died in prison.

  Jiye’s wife was from the Feng family, and every day she cursed and wept. When Jigong’s wife, Liu, heard this, she furiously cried, “Your husband’s dead, but what about mine!” She proceeded to grab a knife and fatally stab Feng, then committed suicide by hanging herself.

  Feng Dali, her father, was so miserably grieved by his daughter’s death that he led all of his sons and younger male relatives, disguised as soldiers, to seize Xiao’s concubine, whom they stripped naked and whipped in public disgrace. Cheng furiously screamed, “My family’s been numbed by so many deaths, what is there that we dare not do to you!” Roaring thus, he ran off. All the Zengs followed after him, anxious to destroy the Fengs.

  Cheng had them seize Feng Dali and cut off both of his ears. Feng’s son came to rescue him, whereupon Zeng Jiji violently struck him with an iron bar, breaking both of his legs. Every member of the Feng family received some kind of wound and scattered in raucous panic.

  Only Feng Dali’s son was left behind, lying in the road. Cheng picked him up by the elbows, hauled him off to the Fengs’ village, then returned. He proceeded to call for Jiji and the others to report what they’d done to an official. The Fengs meanwhile had already gone to file a complaint. Hence almost all of the Zengs were taken into custody.

  Zeng Zhong alone managed to get away without being arrested, so he went directly to Sanbo, where he paced back and forth outside his brother’s gates. Zeng Youyu happened to be returning from the provincial civil service examinations with a son and a nephew, and was so surprised to see Zhong waiting for him that he asked, “Brother, what’re you doing here?” At first, Zhong was unable to speak and could merely weep, kneeling in the road for a long while.

  Youyu took him by the hand and led him inside, where Youyu asked him what had happened, and upon hearing his brother’s account, he cried in shock, “I knew this would happen! With such perverse behavior within the family, I knew that disaster was eventually inevitable; but that’s precisely why I got away before it came to this. Since I’ve been away from home for a long time, the country magistrate will have no information about what I’ve been through, so for me to go to him now and prostrate myself would only invite disgrace. If the men in the Feng family don’t die from their injuries, and one of the three of us who just took the examinations proves lucky and succeeds in passing them, then perhaps we might just be able to minimize the damage that’s been done.”

  Then he entertained Zhong in his home, feeding him generously during the day, and drinking together with him at night. Zhong was quite touched—and shamed—by Youyu’s kindness. He stayed there for ten days, during which time he came to see that Youyu and his nephew treated each other like father and son, while Zhong’s cousins behaved like they were all born from the same mother, moving him to tears as he commented, “Now I understand how brutish my former behavior was.” Youyu was happy to see that Zhong felt remorse for his misdeeds, but he was also distressed by the continuing enmity in his family.

  Just then, the announcement came that Youyu and his son had shared the top spot in the civil service examinations, while Jizu had claimed the second-place spot among the candidates. They were overjoyed. But rather than attending the party that was held to celebrate the success of the examination candidates, they went to visit the tombs of their ancestors.

  During the Ming dynasty, success in the imperial civil service examinations was a powerful boon, so the Feng family curtailed all further hostility against the Zengs. Youyu then had his relatives offer the Fengs money and grain by way of mollifying them, while he personally put up the money to cover their medical care, in order to resolve the families’ disputes.

  Youyu’s entire family, sincerely grateful for what he’d done, begged him to come home. With his siblings, Youyu burned incense and swore renewed oaths of brotherhood that they might free their minds from the past and start over together, and then he moved his family back to Kunyang.

  Jizu went with his uncle, not wishing to return home to his own family. Xiao then conceded to Youyu, “I’m not a virtuous man, so I don’t deserve to have a son who’ll bring glory to our family’s reputation; you’re a good teacher, and that’s why he should be your son. Once he’s qualified as a jinshi, then you can allow him to return home.” Youyu did as his brother asked.

  Three years later, Jizu succeeded in passing the imperial examination at the provincial level. Youyu then decided to send him home, with Jizu and his wife crying pitifully as they departed. Not many days after this, Jizu’s son, who was then three, ran away from home and returned to Youyu’s house, where he hid in his uncle Jishan’s room, refusing to go back; whenever someone tried to make him leave, he always ran back in.

  Xiao then found a house nearby for Jizu to occupy, with Youyu as his neighbor. Jizu opened a passageway between his house and his uncle’s, so the two households could exist as one.

  In time, Cheng gradually grew old, so the family depended on Youyu to take care of its business matters. Ever after this, the family behaved civilly, living in filial piety and brotherly love.

  The collector of these strange tales remarks, “In this world, only bestial persons recognize their mothers but fail to respect their fathers, and even in such a well-educated family you can find sons who display this kind of behavior! A father showed his family how to comport itself, till over time his example was imbued in his children and grandchildren, becoming second nature to them. As the ancients said: if the father steals, the son will certainly become a thief, for that’s how corruption works. When Xiao was heartless, his reward was to be miserable; but he knew that he was morally deficient, so he sent his son to his brother who had the ability to take care of that son’s future. If this was Xiao’s punishment for his actions, it was certainly an indirect one.”

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  Jinshi: A successful candidate in the highest level of the imperial civil service examinations.

  452. The Jiaping Gentleman

  There was a certain affluent young man from Jiaping of noble appearance and graceful demeanor. When he was seventeen or eighteen, he went to the prefectural capital to take the civil service examination. He happened to be passing the gate of a popular brothel when he noticed a sixteen-year-old beauty standing there and found himself gazing fixedly at her. The girl gave him a little smile and a nod, so he came closer in order to speak with her.

  “Where do you live?” she asked him. The young man proceeded to inform her. “Is there anyone else living with you?” she inquired.

  “No,” he replied.

  “I’ll pay you a visit tonight,” she told him, “as long as no one else knows about it.” The young man went back then to where he was staying, and as evening approached, he dismissed his boy servant.

  When the girl arrived, she informed him, “My name’s Wenji. I admire your refined elegance, so I snuck out behind my madam’s back and came to you. To be frank, I hope you’ll want to make love with me.” The young man was overjoyed by her words.

  Following this, she came to be with him every two or three nights. One evening,
she braved the rain to see him, and when she entered his door, she took off her wet clothing, hanging everything on a clothes rack; then she slipped off her small boots and begged the young man for something to wipe off the mud that had splashed up on her. Afterwards, she took a blanket from his bed and covered herself.

  _________

  Jiaping: The southwest territory of modern Quanjiao county, Anhui province.

  The young man examined her boots—which were quite new and sewn from multicolored brocade, the glistening moisture on them now almost dry—and was quite attracted to them. She explained to him, “I don’t dare wear anything cheap when I’m serving my patrons, but I want you to know that I’m crazy about you.”

  As they listened to the sound outside the window of the rain pouring down, the girl recited, “A chilly wind and cold rain fill the town by the river.” Then she implored the young man to add his own line to match it. He said he was sorry, but he couldn’t think of anything. “A proper fellow like you,” she decried, “how can you not know how to engage in literary invention! What a letdown!” Consequently, she urged him to practice composing poetry, and the young man promised to do so.

  She came to see him so often that the young man’s servants all knew what was going on. His sister’s husband, Song, who was also the scion of an influential family, heard about this, and privately asked his brother-in-law if he might have a peek at Wenji. The young man spoke to her about it, but Wenji insisted that Song mustn’t be allowed to see her.

  Song hid himself in the servants’ quarters, waiting for the girl to arrive, then from his hiding place beneath a window peered out and was instantly smitten with a mad desire for her. He quickly pushed the door open, which startled Wenji into scrambling over the wall and running away.

  Song desired her so badly that he took gifts and went to see the brothel madam, naming Wenji as the woman he wanted. “There was a Wenji here once,” she told him, “but she died a long time ago.”