Strange Tales from Liaozhai--Volume 4

by Pu Songling

  The next morning, the Gan family discovered that the whole village had been burned and looted, till it was virtually demolished; the bandits had searched for groups of villagers, found everyone hiding along the waterways or in mountain caves, and either killed or captured them all. Thus the Gan family valued A-Ying’s advice even more—and in their eyes, she was a goddess.

  All of a sudden, A-Ying told her sister-in-law, “I came here only to show that I hadn’t forgotten all you’d done for me, and to help alleviate your worries about being separated from your husband in violent times. Brother-in-law Yu is on his way home now, and since my presence here, as the saying goes, ‘no longer matters,’ I’m superfluous now. Hence, I’ll be leaving, though I’ll see you again if I can seize an opportunity.”

  “Will my husband return safe and sound?” asked her sister-in-law.

  “As he draws near,” A-Ying replied, “he’ll face a great catastrophe. Since elder sister Qin received his gracious assistance, it’s no one else’s business, and she’ll certainly take care of it, so you can rest assured that he won’t be harmed.” The sister-in-law imposed on her to stay overnight, but before daybreak she had already gone.

  Gan Yu was returning home from eastern Guangdong when he heard about all the turmoil taking place there, and proceeded to hurry twice as fast. When he ran into bandits on the road, he and his servant abandoned their horses, though each of them kept the gold they had tied to their waists, and they hid themselves in some thorny bushes.

  A mynah bird landed on the thorny bushes and spread her wings to hide Yu and his servant. Gan looked at her foot, and noticed that there was a toe missing, which he thought rather strange. In moments, a mob of bandits surrounded them on all sides, circling the dense undergrowth, seemingly searching for them. The two men hardly dared even to breathe. When the bandits finally began to disperse, the mynah bird soared into the air and flew away.

  Once they arrived home, everyone described the things they’d seen, and they began to realize that the mynah bird was the beauty that Gan Yu had rescued on the mountain.

  After that, if Gan Yu needed to be away from home, A-Ying was certain to arrive after dark; she would calculate when Yu was about to get back, and would leave just before then. Gan Jue at times ran into her in his sister-in-law’s room, and would invite her back to his own room, and although she would promise that she’d come, she never did.

  One evening, Gan Yu had to go somewhere, so Gan Jue, reasoning that A-Ying would definitely show up, concealed himself to wait for her. Before long, A-Ying arrived, and Jue sprang up, blocking her way, so she had to return with him to his room. “Our relationship is already concluded,” she told him, “and to insist on continuing it, I fear, would be opposing heaven’s wish that we abstain. If you don’t try to detain me, maybe we can see a little more of each other in the future—how would that be?” But Gan Jue wouldn’t listen to her, and in the end he forced himself on her.

  At dawn, A-Ying went to visit her sister-in-law, who said it was odd that she hadn’t come during the night. A-Ying smiled and said, “Along the way, a strong bandit robbed me, so I appreciate your concern for me.” After some further words, she hastily left.

  Shortly afterward, an enormous wildcat appeared at the Gan residence, holding a parrot in its mouth as it passed the door to the bedrooms. The sister-in-law was horrified, strongly suspecting that it was A-Ying. She was bathing at the time, so she ceased washing herself and quickly screamed, bringing a crowd of servants who yelled at the animal and struck it, till it finally let go of the parrot. The bird’s left wing was wet with blood, but it was still feebly breathing.

  The sister-in-law held it on her knee, stroking it for a good long while, till it gradually began to revive. Then it took its beak and began cleaning its wings. In moments, it began flying in circles around the room, crying, “Sister-in-law, sister-in-law, goodbye! I hate Jue!” Then with a flap of its wings it was gone, and never came again.

  266. The Orange Tree

  A gentleman named Liu, from Shaanxi, was the county magistrate for Xinghua. There was a certain Daoist who came and presented him with a potted plant, but when Liu looked closely at it, he saw that it was a small orange tree, which he judged to be about the size of a finger, so he rejected it as unacceptable. Liu had a young daughter who at the time was six or seven years old, and it happened to be her birthday.

  The Daoist told him, “This isn’t an adequate gift for a great man to enjoy, but it can express my sincere wishes for your daughter’s good fortune and longevity.” Then Liu accepted the little tree.

  When his daughter saw it, she was overwhelmed with fondness for it. She put it in her bedroom, where she took care of it day and night, fearful that something might injure it. By the time Liu concluded his appointment as county magistrate, the orange tree’s trunk was large enough to reach one’s hand around. That was the year it began to produce fruit.

  Once everything was packed up and they were almost ready to go, he thought about how heavy and cumbersome the orange tree was, and decided to leave it behind. His daughter hugged the tree and began weeping tenderly. Her family members tricked her by saying, “It’s just a temporary separation, and then we’ll be back again.” The daughter trusted them and stopped her tears.

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  Xinghua: A county during the Qing dynasty, now the site of Fujian province’s Putian county.

  Then she became afraid that some big, strong fellow might carry it off after they’d gone, so she insisted that some of the servants immediately plant the tree in the ground—then they were able to leave.

  When the Lius returned to their original home, the daughter was betrothed to a man named Zhuang. In the forty-fifth year of Kangxi’s reign, Zhuang was certified a jinshi, and in recognition, he was named the magistrate for Xinghua county. His wife was overjoyed.

  Privately, she considered that since it had been over ten years since she’d left, the orange tree might no longer be living, but as she approached it on arrival, she could see that the tree was already ten arm-spans in circumference, and she calculated that there must easily be a thousand fruits clutered on it. She asked the former servants about it, and they all told her, “After Master Gong left, the orange tree seemed to flourish, but didn’t produce—this is its first fruit since then.” This seemed even more unusual to the daughter.

  During the first three years of Zhuang’s appointment, the orange tree bore large crops of fruit untiringly; in the fourth year, the tree withered, and failed even to flower. Zhuang’s wife told him, “Your appointment here will be over before long.” When autumn arrived, he was indeed dismissed from the appointment.

  The collector of these strange tales remarks, “Did the orange tree have an enduring relationship with the daughter? How fortuitous it was that they met. It’s truly as though the tree felt grateful to her, and its inability to bear fruit was like the wound of being separated. If even a tree can react like this, how should a human being behave?”

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  Forty-fifth year of Kangxi’s reign: The Qing emperor reigned 1662-1723, so the year in question is 1706/7.

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

  267. The Red Writing

  On a winter night, in the year 1655 of Shunzhi’s reign, there appeared in the sky some writing that was as red as fire. Its words read: “A white flower will signify tranquility once the court can no longer be criticized for engaging in excesses.”

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  Shunzhi’s reign: The first Qing emperor ruled from 1644-61.

  “A white flower . . . excesses”: There are contexts missing here, so this passage has been construed many ways by critics over the centuries, some of whom even consult the Confucian classic, the Yijing (Book of Changes), to try to determine the symbolic significance of the time of year being cited, of the white flower, etc. Popular belief is that t
he implicit criticism (“excesses”) here of licentiousness, or of cruelty, by the Qing emperor and his court had to be expressed in vague terms, for Pu to avoid the danger of official censure and imprisonment.

  268. Niu Chengzhang

  Niu Chengzhang was a cloth merchant from Jiangxi. He married a woman named Zheng, who gave birth to a son and a daughter. When Niu was thirty-three years old, he fell ill and died. His son was named Niu Zhong, and he was twelve years old at the time; his daughter was eight or nine years old. Their mother found herself unwilling to remain celibate and faithful to him, so she gathered all of their goods and belongings into bags, selling them for enough money to arrange another marriage for herself, and then left them.

  The two orphans she abandoned had great difficulty supporting themselves. There was a Niu sister-in-law who was a poor widow over sixty and had no other home, so she came to live with them.

  Some years later, the elderly lady died, and the household fell into even further decline. As Niu Zhong grew up over time, he wished to continue his father’s business, but he had no money to invest in it. His sister was married to a man named Mao, who happened to be a wealthy merchant. She pleaded with her husband to lend Zhong several dozen taels.

  Niu Zhong then went with a number of other men to Jinling, but they encountered bandits along the way to whom Zhong lost all of his travel money, forcing him to drift around, unable to afford to return home.

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  Jinling: Now known as Nanjing, in Jiangsu province.

  It happened that when he hurried into a pawnshop, he noticed that the owner reminded him of his own father; when he exited the shop and made some private inquiries, he learned that the man’s name was exactly the same as his father’s. He was so astonished that he didn’t say anything about it to the man. For some time he shadowed him, spying, but the man never turned around and asked him why.

  This went on for three days, till after observing the man’s speech, laughter, and bearing, concluding that there could be no mistake, he decided that the man was truly his father. Even so, he didn’t dare identify himself as the man’s son; so instead, Zhong identified himself to a servant who worked in the shop, begging him to introduce him to the owner on the pretext that they were from the same hometown, so he could work for him as a servant.

  As soon as Zhong had finished signing a contractual agreement, and the shop owner scrutinized his address and name, it was as though something about it had touched him, because he began asking about the place Zhong came from. Weeping, Zhong told him his father’s name.

  The shop owner seemed quite upset, as though he’d lost something. After a long time, he asked, “And is your mother in good health?”

  At that point, Zhong didn’t dare tell him his father had died, so he gently remarked, “My father went away on business six years ago, but never returned, so my mother remarried and left us. Fortunately, our aunt raised us, for otherwise, I’d have been buried in a ditch long ago.”

  Aggrieved, the shop owner replied, “I am your father.” Consequently, he clasped Zhong’s hand in sorrow. Then he led his son inside to pay his respects to his stepmother. The stepmother, Ji, who was over thirty and still childless, was honestly glad that Zhong was there, so she set up a banquet and sleeping quarters for him.

  Niu Chengzhang, who felt dejected and unhappy, simply wanted to return to his hometown. Ji considered how shorthanded the shop would be, so she stopped him from leaving. Then Niu Chengzhang showed his son how to conduct the shop’s business; after Zhong had been living there for three months, his father took all of the shop’s account books and turned them over to his son, choosing to pack his belongings and head west, from whence he’d originally come.

  After he left, Niu Zhong told his stepmother the truth about his father dying. Ji was mortified, and replied, “When he was formerly a traveling merchant who came through here, he was on friendly terms with a fellow who wanted to run this kind of business; it’s already been six years since he married me. So why are you saying that he died?” Zhong then told her everything, in detail. They shared certain doubts, but didn’t know what to suggest about it.

  A day and night went by, and Niu Chengzhang returned, bringing along a woman with long, disheveled hair. When Zhong saw her, he recognized her as his birth mother, Zheng. His father pulled at her ear, suddenly scolding her, “How could you have abandoned our children!” Zhong’s mother was so cowed by fear that she didn’t dare even move.

  Niu Chengzhang then bit her on the neck. The woman shrieked at Zhong, “Save me, son! Save me, son!” Zhong found this so unbearable that he interposed his body between them to keep them apart. While his father remained furious, his mother suddenly vanished from sight.

  Everyone there was terrified, and decided that she must have been a ghost. When they turned around to look at Niu Chengzhang, his expression underwent a terrible transformation, discardeding his clothing on the ground, then he changed into a black gas that immediately dissipated. The startled stepmother and son sighed, picked up Niu Chengzhang’s clothing and cap, and buried them.

  Zhong ran his father’s business so successfully that he amassed a huge fortune. When he later returned home and inquired about his mother, he learned that after marrying, she had died there—on the same day that everyone saw Niu Chengzhang talk to her.

  269. Qing’e

  Huo Huan, whose courtesy name was Kuangjiu, was from Shanxi. His father, a commandant of the district garrison, died when Huan was still a boy. The youngest of the elder Huo’s children, Huan exhibited an intelligence that distinguished him from everyone else. By the time he was eleven, the child prodigy had already been admitted to a government school. But his mother was so exceedingly protective of him that she refused to allow him to leave the house, so that by the age of thirteen, he was still unable to tell his own cousins, nephews, and uncles apart.

  There was a judicial case reviewer named Wu living in the same neighborhood, a Daoist believer, who went into the mountains and never came back. He had a daughter, named Qing’e, who was fourteen and extraordinarily beautiful. When she was young, she secretly read her father’s Daoist books, and came to admire He Xiangu. After her father withdrew from the world into the mountains, she resolved not to marry. Her mother couldn’t compel her to do otherwise.

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  Commandant of the district garrison: See Hucker (564).

  Judicial case reviewer: Working for the Court of Judicial Review, during the Qing dynasty the jurisdiction of these arbiters “came to be limited to cases involving the death penalty” (Hucker 387).

  Went into the mountains and never came back: That is, Wu decided to become a Daoist hermit.

  He Xiangu: Daoist figure who received instructions in a dream on becoming immortal, subsequently vowing she would remain a virgin, and spent her days wandering in the mountains gathering herbs, refusing to eat “the ordinary food of mortals” (Mayers 60).

  One day, Huo happened to be outside her gate, where he caught a glimpse of her. Even though he was a boy ignorant of adult desire, he only knew that he felt a deep love for her, one that he couldn’t put into words; he immediately told his mother she should send someone to arrange for a marriage. His mother realized it wouldn’t work, so she resisted doing so. Huo turned melancholic and discontented.

  His mother became worried about going against her son’s wishes, and thus she entrusted a go-between to convey her intentions to the Wu family, but unfortunately, no agreement resulted. Huo thought while he paced and calculated while he sat, but he just couldn’t come up with a plan of what to do.

  A little later, a Daoist came to their gate, holding a small spade that Huo judged to be about a chi in length. Huo borrowed the spade so he could examine it, and asked, “What do you use it for?”

  “This,” replied the Daoist, “is for digging up all kinds of medicinal herbs; it may be tiny, but it can slice through solid rock.” Huo didn’t believe him. The D
aoist then hacked at a stone on the wall nearby, and a piece easily fell away, like he was slicing tofu. Huo was so stunned, he started fondling it, not wanting to let loose of it.

  The Daoist laughed and said, “Since you’re so fond of it, sir, allow me to give it to you with my respects.” Huo was very pleased, and though he tried to offer some money for it, the Daoist refused to accept it, then departed.

  With the spade in hand, Huo returned home, and when he tested it on some bricks and rocks, it cut through them without any difficulty. All of a sudden he thought about using the tool to make a hole in the wall so he could see Qing’e again, not realizing that this would be an illegal act.

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  Chi: Equal to approximately 1/3 meter, so the spade is about 13 inches long.

  When things settled down that night, he climbed over his family’s wall and went out, heading straight over to the Wu residence; in all, he had to bore through two walls before he reached the family’s courtyard. He saw inside a small side-room, where a candle was burning, and as he hid himself in order to spy further, he observed Qing’e undressing for bed. In a little while, she blew out the candle, and everything was still.

  Boring through the wall of the room, Huo entered and discovered the girl already fast asleep. He carefully took off his shoes, and quietly climbed onto her bed; then, afraid that Qing’e might be startled awake, scream, and then chase him away, he decided to conceal himself beside her embroidered bedding, where he listened to the sound of her perfumed breathing, feeling himself both contented and comforted. By midnight, however, he’d experienced so much excitement that he was completely exhausted, and shutting his eyes ever so slightly, he unwittingly fell asleep.

  Qing’e woke up and heard the sound of someone’s soft, serene breathing; she opened her eyes, and saw light shining through the hole that Huo had made in her wall. Terrified, she covertly shook a maidservant awake, then unbolted her door and lightly went outside. She knocked on the window of the household’s other female servants, who lit some torches and returned with her.