2019-01-10 · 3 min read
There used to be an old man at Xinhua Park by Xiaolong Bridge, surnamed Pan and known to everyone as Pan the Immortal. Every day he set up a secondhand bookstall with many rare lianhuanhua booklets and thread-bound books. No matter which volume it was, if someone recited the text on the preceding page, Pan could recite the next page word for word without a single mistake. Everyone found it miraculous, and people often tested him on purpose. Pan would simply say that if he answered correctly, the questioner had to buy the book. No one ever stumped him. Later some people even brought books from home that were not from his stall at all, and Pan still recited them flawlessly.
2019-01-09 · 3 min read
In a certain village there was a young woman who had been born with a cleft lip, and for that reason had grown to adulthood without ever being given a name. She was gentle in temperament and dutiful to her parents, taking on her mother’s burdens without complaint and never fearing hardship.
One day she was carrying food to her father in the fields when she met an old woman on the road. The old woman looked at her and said, “What a lovely girl you are, with such well-formed features. It is only this cleft lip that hides your beauty.” The girl replied, “I was born this way. What can I do about it?” The old woman said, “I can cure it for you. Would you like that?” The girl bowed and thanked her, begging to be healed. The old woman took a steamed bun from the girl’s basket, peeled off a thin strip of skin, dabbed it with a little spit, and pasted it over the split in her lip. Then she instructed her not to smile. In three days, she said, it would be whole. Overjoyed, the girl bowed again in thanks, but the old woman’s figure had already gone vague and indistinct. The girl was astonished and thought she must have met an immortal. She carefully obeyed the instruction, and three days later her lip had indeed grown together. The mended place was pale in color, just as if powder had been dusted there.
2019-01-09 · 2 min read
In old times Chengdu was also called Turtle City because the shape of the old town resembled a great turtle. Its tail roughly corresponded to what are now Tongzilin and Yulin. Old people say that when the turtle’s tail shrinks, snow falls on Chengdu. Snow is rare enough there to count as an auspicious sign, so naturally there have always been people who made a trade of it.
Du Fen was one of them. He wore a thick long gown all year round and dressed his hair in a Daoist knot. The nails on all ten of his fingers were left long, so long that they had softened and looked like a pair of bird claws. He could not really do anything for himself and required attendants to serve him at all times.
2019-01-09 · 2 min read
Before the elevated road was built at Wugui Bridge, there used to be a row of little shops by the Shahe Road entrance to Tazishan Park. One of them was called Old Ma’s Home Cooking. Its owner, Ma Huaizhen, wore his hair in a Daoist topknot, and on the wall he kept talismanic charms of the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice. Old Ma’s signature dish was called “Eightfold Auspice,” a vegetarian braise of potato, taro, bamboo shoots, and peppers. Yet the taste was marvelous. Every mouthful seemed to turn into a different meat: first red-braised pork, then taro chicken, then chicken giblets, then ratfish. The poor people living nearby loved to go there for a treat, because the flavor was beyond compare and the price absurdly kind.
2019-01-08 · 3 min read
The third vernacular retelling from Zuicha Zhiguai.
There was a man surnamed Li in the county. One evening he was cooking lamb, and the fragrance carried even beyond the house. An old man with white hair pushed the door open and came in. “The lamb smells wonderful,” he said. “I wonder whether you might let me taste a piece.” Li gladly invited him to sit and laid out chopsticks. The old man took the seat by the window and said, almost to himself, “I have drifted far from home and am lodging at a nearby temple. I came for meat because I admired your refined bearing.” The two drank together. The old man could hold an extraordinary amount of liquor. He emptied ten pots without getting drunk, while Li, after drinking with him, slumped onto the bed and fell asleep.
2019-01-05 · 2 min read
In Xiangheli, Chenghua District, there was a white dog, magnificent in build and white from head to tail. No one in the neighborhood knew how old it was. Women now in their seventies said that when they were little girls playing in that lane, the dog had already been wandering there. City enforcers tasked with catching strays and layabouts who stole dogs alike had both tried to seize it, only to be bitten for no reason or else injured by one mishap after another. Once enough people had failed, no one dared lay hands on the white dog again.
2019-01-01 · 11 min read
When preparing a TED talk, there is one especially clumsy method called the verbatim-script method: you write out exactly what you plan to say, including the colloquial parts, word for word, then rehearse it and revise it again and again. It works for people giving TED-style talks for the first time. You get half the result for twice the labor.
What follows is one of my own failed examples.
Don’t Let Sheep Queue for You (Transcript)
2014-02-07 · 5 min read
In the courtyard of my wife’s family home in Linqiong there is a round chopping block, two chi across and one cun thick, mottled and dim, ordinarily used for mincing meat. I had always taken it for a tree stump. Only when I washed it today did I realize how astonishingly heavy it was. Its surface showed not annual rings but something like fish scales. Once rinsed clean, it turned the color of amber, and within it one could faintly make out dark red veins. When I asked where it had come from, my wife said that while her grandmother was still alive she often muttered that it was a dragon scale handed down through the family. No one had ever believed her.