Tihu Notes | Seeking Flowers, Asking Willows

Seeking Flowers

One weekend last June, Xiao Xie called me to say that her cellphone had once again gone missing in the study room. Xiao Xie was by nature hot-tempered and absent-minded, yet the fact that she so often lost things could not really be blamed on her alone; the true fault lay in the poor security at our school. Her phone was a fashionable new thing she had bought while traveling in Europa during the May Day holiday: a straight-bar model with a pink petal pattern. Though it had cost only two hundred euros, it was a new product made with environmentally friendly technology. Inside its casing there was a seed sealed away; once the phone was worn out, if you buried it in a flowerpot, a plant would grow, while the rest of the materials would be completely broken down.

Tihu Notes | Sha

When I was in college, there was a patch of woods in front of the dormitory building where I lived, and every year a flock of cuckoos nested and bred there. The cuckoos’ cries were rather interesting. At the start of mating season they sounded like, “Bachelor life is bitter! Bachelor life is bitter!” and once the season was over they changed to, “Not bitter! Not bitter!” In the spring of my third year, a large black bird appeared there briefly, circling above the woods. It was much bigger than an ordinary cuckoo, flew with astonishing speed, and its cry at night was even more terrifying, sounding uncannily like, “Who pushed him? Who pushed him?” The bird appeared for only seven days before vanishing. At first I was greatly puzzled by where it had come from.

Tihu Notes | Drowning

One summer vacation, while returning to school by train after visiting friends in Tianjin, I ran into my classmate Yang Shan, a native of Rongcheng in Shandong who lived directly across from me in the dormitory. Yang Shan was warmhearted, loved sports, and was especially skilled at swimming, with astonishing ability in the water, no doubt because she had grown up by the sea. The train from Tianjin to Yantai took a full day and night, and as we both had middle berths, we talked very happily together. It was August, the heat oppressive and hard to bear. In the middle of the night I awoke from the heat and could not fall back asleep no matter how I tossed and turned. Turning my head to look at Yang Shan, I heard her snoring like thunder. She wore only a T-shirt, the hem rolled up to expose half of her firm waist. I was shocked. On either side of her ribs there were plainly two openings, like mouths, opening and closing with her breathing, exactly like the breathing slits on the sides of a shark. I remembered that whenever she swam at school, she always wore a professional one-piece competitive swimsuit. We had only thought her very serious about the sport. It turned out she had been hiding the strangeness of her body.

Tihu Notes | Jiang Yong

Jiang Yong, a man from the neighboring county, used to say that he had loved the color red since childhood. From the inside out, from what he wore to what he used, he would have nothing that was not red; even at meals he preferred red peppers. One day Jiang Yong went into town to shop. A sudden gale rose up, and a billboard being installed by the roadside was blown down, knocking over a passerby walking beside him. A ruptured vessel in the man’s neck sprayed half of Jiang Yong’s face with blood, hideously bright red. Jiang Yong fainted on the spot from fright. From that day on he could no longer bear the sight of red. He dressed all in plain white from morning to night, and even changed his watchband to white.

Tihu Notes | Xu Hou

Xu Hou, a villager, was a miserly man. In former years he ran an inn in the county seat and kept more than a dozen hired hands there year-round, all of them honest and simple peasants, yet never once did anyone remain at his inn for long. Why was that? To save money, Xu Hou fed them only the leftovers that had failed to sell each day, and often delayed paying their wages on one pretext or another. His favorite trick was to tell new hands that they were still on trial, then dismiss them on some excuse just before the trial period ended, spending not a coin. He believed this saved him a great deal of money, but he did not realize that the workers all harbored resentment. Some stole ingredients, some wasted produce on purpose when chopping vegetables, and when pouring oil they would rather use two ladles than one and a half. By the end of the year, the cost of all this waste canceled out the inn’s net profits, leaving him more loss than gain.

Tihu Notes | The Ticket

When I was a sophomore, one day in April I went to the general shop beside the Seventh Canteen to photocopy some materials. I made four copies in all, at two jiao each. Reaching into my pocket, I found I had only a single ten-yuan note, so I handed it to the girl at the copier. She took one glance at the bill and said, “That’s quite a big one. Wait a moment, I’ll get your change.” I was still wondering since when ten yuan counted as “big,” when she turned back and handed me a whole stack of money: ninety-nine yuan and two jiao. It was the first time in my life I had ever been given too much change, and I simply turned and walked away.

Tihu Notes | Damp Bugs and Songdu

Damp Bugs

Dormitory 156, at the eastern end of the first floor, lay always in shadow and saw the sun only a few times a year. Outside its window grew a toon tree. On it lived a very strange kind of little insect, no bigger than grains of rice, crouching all day at the roots without moving at all. Then one spring these insects suddenly swarmed into Room 156 and settled over the bedboards of a student named Cui. They could not be killed with boiling water, nor with insecticide spray, and instead gathered in ever greater numbers. Someone from that dormitory came to ask me about them. I happened to know that the Records of Tang Marvels mentions just such a creature, called the damp bug, which feeds exclusively on the yin vapors hidden in the human heart. People who have done things unfit to see the light of day are especially prone to attracting it.

Tihu Notes | Preface, Cellphone, and an Online Game Dream

Preface

I turned twenty-three this year, and have already spent twenty years in this hall. Tihu Hall was built by my great-grandfather in the first year of the Republic. At first it was a private school. Later, when my great-grandfather grew too old to keep teaching, he dismissed the other tutors and spent his days reading and writing in the courtyard, or now and then traveling through the countryside of Jinzhong with his descendants for company. He loved telling stories even more than hearing them, and was especially fond of writing down the odd tales told by village women, peddlers, and wandering laborers. It is said that the Unwaking Court behind the hall was once piled high with his notebooks. Sadly, after the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, only a few scraps remained.