[{"content":" 💡 Introduction:\nWhen people enter a temple to pay their respects, the first figure they usually see is the smiling Budai Monk. But if you stand in an empty hall and stare at him for thirty seconds, does that smile begin to feel a little too perfect, a little too uncanny? Behind this most familiar “auspicious symbol” there may be a hidden legend erased by official history, and at its core, a deeply unsettling form of Chinese-style Cthulhu horror.\nFor the podcast version of this piece, head to 2082ALT. Listen to “Gods and Spirits | Budai Monk: A Folk Prototype of Chinese Cthulhu” here.\n01 Don’t Stare at His Sack In the Jiangsu-Zhejiang region, there has long been a faintly mysterious saying in popular religion: “You may worship the Budai Monk, but do not stare at his sack, and do not ask what is inside it. It is inauspicious.”\nIt sounds like nothing more than old-fashioned superstition. But if you have ever stood in an empty Buddhist hall and fixed your eyes on a statue of Budai for more than thirty seconds without looking away, you may have felt an unease that is difficult to name.\nNo matter where you stand in the hall, it seems that he is looking at you.\nHis belly is absurdly large, as if it could swallow the whole world.\nAnd that sack, always slung behind him, what exactly does it contain?\nWe are told from childhood that Budai is an incarnation of Maitreya, a symbol of generosity, good fortune, and the famous ideal of “a belly broad enough to hold all things, a smile ever open.” But in fact, he originally had nothing to do with Maitreya at all.\nAs early as the Tang, even in the age of Wu Zetian, devotion to Maitreya was already flourishing, and the images of Maitreya from that period were all solemn and majestic. Budai, by contrast, first appears in the era of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, in the Wu-Yue kingdom of what is now eastern Zhejiang. The historical record says only that he was a wandering monk, “unrestrained in form and strange beyond ordinary men.”\nIt was Song-dynasty Chan monks who forcefully bound Budai to Maitreya. In order to promote the faith, official religion deliberately softened the eerie qualities of this “uncanny monk” and repackaged him as a benign emblem of good fortune. Yet in the oral traditions of eastern Zhejiang, the disturbing details never disappeared: his sack swallowing things whole, and eyes growing across his back.\n02 The Eyes on His Back and “Chinese Cthulhu” The legend of Budai’s back covered in eyes exists in several versions from different periods.\nThe earliest, in the Southern Song text Fozu Tongji, says that he had a single “heavenly eye” on his back. By the Yuan, in Biography of the Great Master Budai, it had become four eyes splitting open across his back, flashing with light. In a later legend from Hangzhou’s Feilai Peak, a curious boy reaches out to touch Budai’s sack. The sack opens, and inside there are nothing but eyes. The boy is struck mute on the spot.\nFrom one heavenly eye, to four eyes, to a whole sack filled with eyes, the horror escalates step by step.\nDoes that not sound very much like the Cthulhu mythos? Faced with a many-eyed being beyond human comprehension, the mind collapses at once. The difference is that the source of “Chinese Cthulhu” is not some unnameable thing from outer space. It is the deity you worship every day, the god at the corner of your own street. That feeling of the familiar becoming alien is precisely what makes it so chilling.\n03 The Only Mortal Who Dared Look at His True Form When ordinary people glimpse the true face of a higher being, both mind and body are usually unable to endure it. Yet history records one person who looked directly at Budai’s true form and did not break: his disciple Jiang Mohe, also known as Jiang Zongba.\nJiang Zongba had originally been a minor official in Mingzhou, present-day Ningbo, during the Five Dynasties. One day he received a report that a child had been swallowed by Budai’s sack. When the child was found, he had become vacant and dull, repeating only, “Inside it was all dark. There were eyes looking at me.” Jiang Zongba set out intending to arrest the monk, but Budai instead awakened him spiritually, and he immediately abandoned office to wander with him.\nThe strangest scene took place behind Xuedou Temple in Fenghua, Ningbo. In the dense fog of late autumn, master and disciple were bathing when Jiang Zongba noticed that Budai’s back did not resemble a human back at all. It looked more like old tree bark, marked with several dark red scars. When he reached out to touch one, the scar split open and revealed four eyes glowing with a blue-green light.\nJiang Zongba later said that in that instant his head rang, as if countless needles had driven into his temples, and his vision went black. Budai stopped him and told him that their karmic bond had reached its end. Jiang Zongba needed a full three days before his mind returned to normal. Before Budai died, he entrusted him with a wooden box containing a small cloth sack and left behind a prophetic line: “I do this in the hope that your descendants may endure like these objects I leave behind.”\n04 The Hundred-Year Fate of the Jiang Lineage A thousand years later, that sentence acquired an eerily concrete echo.\nReaders with a feel for history may already have guessed where this leads. Jiang Zongba’s bloodline eventually produced a figure who would shape modern Chinese history: Chiang Kai-shek.\nIn 1948, Chiang personally oversaw the revision of the Genealogy of the Jiang Clan of Wuling, explicitly naming Jiang Zongba as the second-generation ancestor of the Wuling Jiangs. He took the Budai legend extremely seriously all his life. His diaries mention Jiang Zongba repeatedly, and he even had the “Mohe Hall” dedicated to him restored.\nPopular rumor went further. It was said that when Mohe Hall was rebuilt in 1930, the statue of Budai inside had four eyes carved onto its back and normally concealed beneath a red cloth. On the eve of his retreat to Taiwan, Chiang allegedly visited Mohe Hall one last time and took away both a small Budai statue and the wooden box supposedly handed down from Jiang Zongba.\nThat line, “I hope your descendants may endure like these things I leave behind,” was thus given another deeply unsettling reading: that the descendants would be like objects stuffed inside the sack, unable to control their own fate, gathered and scattered only at the sack’s will. At the height of its power, the Jiang family seemed to hold the world in its hands. In the end it was confined to a single corner, as if trapped within that very sack.\n05 Conclusion: An Endless Question Put to the Unknown In truth, many Chinese folk deities that now seem wholly auspicious conceal a similarly terrifying underlayer.\nMazu is worshipped as a merciful sea goddess, yet there are also stories of fishermen who glimpsed her true form, half woman and half serpent, scaled from head to toe, and went mad. Many City Gods began as vengeful spirits who died with grievances unresolved. Even the character fu, pasted up for the New Year as a sign of blessing, originally carried an exorcistic force.\nBeneath all these tales lies the fear ancient people felt toward an unknown world and a fickle fate. In an agrarian society, famine and plague were beyond control, and people needed a deity both dreadful and worthy of reverence to explain what surrounded them. Budai’s power to “swallow things” corresponds to famine. The eyes on his back correspond to pestilence.\nWhen we look once more at that ever-smiling Budai Monk today, he may no longer be only a Buddhist image. He may also be the enduring question that Chinese culture has asked, for a thousand years, of the unknown itself.\nReader Prompt:\nHave you ever had a moment that became more frightening the more you thought about it? Or have you heard other uncanny folk legends like this one? You are welcome to share them in the comments.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2026/2026-04-18-budai/","summary":"\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e💡 \u003cstrong\u003eIntroduction:\u003c/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\nWhen people enter a temple to pay their respects, the first figure they usually see is the smiling Budai Monk. But if you stand in an empty hall and stare at him for thirty seconds, does that smile begin to feel a little too perfect, a little too uncanny? Behind this most familiar “auspicious symbol” there may be a hidden legend erased by official history, and at its core, a deeply unsettling form of Chinese-style Cthulhu horror.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Folk Cthulhu Horror: Why Is His Back Covered with Eyes?"},{"content":"Listen here → “The Co-Mother-in-Law”\nThe co-mother-in-law from the village never comes to the city,\nshe saw the New District by the sea-lake and stuck out her tongue in shock;\nhow many souls can this hive of cast iron hold,\nthose window-eyes, row after row, staring blankly at whom.\\\nThe co-mother-in-law from the city never comes to the village,\nshe saw a little potato and squeezed her eyes shut tight;\nall this dirt-caked roughness, and you do not even dust it off,\nstraight to the hearth it goes, buried whole, amen and all.\\\nThe co-mother-in-law from the village never comes to the city,\nshe saw an unmanned convenience store with its cold-lit sign;\nshe stepped in, then backed out again, muttering that it was strange,\nwithout a trace of living breath, how can a place like this sell a thing.\\\nThe co-mother-in-law from the city never comes to the village,\nshe saw a stack of wheat sheaves piled up like a mountain;\nshe circled it three times, her footsteps slowing down,\nsuch an enormous tribute offering, who could ever bite through it, heavens.\\\nThe co-mother-in-law from the village never comes to the city,\nshe saw the neck of a tower crane twist around toward her;\nits iron arm sliced open the belly of the sky and showed the white of bone,\nwith one hook like that, how many windowsills could it fish up.\\\nThe co-mother-in-law from the city never comes to the village,\nshe came to the wheat stubble field in October and stuck out her tongue again;\nshe took it for chives, cut once and planted once more,\nfried on both sides in a pastry pocket till it turned frost-pale white.\\\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2026/2026-04-12-co-mother-in-law/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eListen here → \u003ca href=\"https://suno.com/s/3na2CyHJ7gHb8KNz\"\u003e“The Co-Mother-in-Law”\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe co-mother-in-law from the village never comes to the city,\u003cbr\u003e\nshe saw the New District by the sea-lake and stuck out her tongue in shock;\u003cbr\u003e\nhow many souls can this hive of cast iron hold,\u003cbr\u003e\nthose window-eyes, row after row, staring blankly at whom.\\\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe co-mother-in-law from the city never comes to the village,\u003cbr\u003e\nshe saw a little potato and squeezed her eyes shut tight;\u003cbr\u003e\nall this dirt-caked roughness, and you do not even dust it off,\u003cbr\u003e\nstraight to the hearth it goes, buried whole, amen and all.\\\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Co-Mother-in-Law"},{"content":"I. When the Yellow River Captured the Ji\nIn medieval China, the state maintained ritual sacrifices to the Five Sacred Peaks, the Five Sacred Strongholds, and the Four Waterways. The Four Waterways were the Yangzi, the Yellow River, the Huai, and the Ji.\nAmong them, the Yellow River was always the most troublesome, for obvious geographic reasons. Seasonal flood zones had already begun to appear before the Five Dynasties. One hydrological danger of a Yellow River breach was that it could seize the channel of another river. In the Northern Song, the court, still able to control parts of the upper Yellow River basin, was constantly preoccupied with preventing the Yellow River from capturing the Huai and emptying into the sea by that route.\nDuring the Five Dynasties, the Wen River, a branch in the middle and lower Yellow River region, burst its banks at Huazhou, drowned the five prefectures of Bian, Cao, Shan, Pu, and Yun, and finally joined the Ji River north of Liangshan. Lakes then formed across the region. This became the Liangshan Marsh of the Northern Song. The lakes north of today\u0026rsquo;s Jining are its remnants.\nThe process by which the Wen captured the Ji continued until the late Qing, when the Ji River\u0026rsquo;s course was completely occupied by the Yellow River and the Ji disappeared for good.\nFrom its formation to its surrender, the Song Jiang rebel band in Water Margin remained active within the Liangshan Marsh region and therefore ought to count as a local Shandong insurgent force. Yet a closer look at the origins of the 108 Liangshan commanders shows that native Shandong men account for only 37.9 percent. In a Song dynasty world with strict household registration, where did the other sixty-plus percent of these migrant fighters come from?\nII. Da Song Xuanhe Yishi\nThe exact date of composition of the Ming vernacular novel Water Margin remains uncertain, but we can say with confidence that one of its source texts was the Southern Song storytelling work Da Song Xuanhe Yishi. That text already featured the Thirty-Six Heavenly Spirits, though its greatest difference is that it did not yet have Song Jiang.\nA second source was the historical Song Jiang band itself. To call it a righteous army is less accurate than to call it Song Jiang and his thirty-six fierce bandits. They plundered ten prefectures and ranged across Shandong, Hebei, and the Huai region, making them masters of Song-dynasty guerrilla warfare. The clearest feature of this group, aside from its small size, is that Song Jiang never possessed a fixed base.\nA third source was the great uprising of Zhong Xiang and Yang Yao at Dongting Lake. Its geography, its armed membership, and even the scale of its forces at their peak were strikingly close to Liangshan Marsh at the height of Water Margin, with its hundred thousand followers. As an aside, the Dongting Lake rebels were later crushed by Yue Fei.\nIn other words, over the course of several centuries Water Margin continually absorbed materials from all three sources, among others, before arriving at the version we know. That also helps explain why a local force occupying one corner of the map ends up with such a complicated human composition.\nIII. Where the Liangshan Leaders Came From\nAs a canonical text, Water Margin has inspired no shortage of studies on the question of native place. My own learning is limited, so I will not linger over evidentiary disputes. But some common mistakes concerning medieval geography appear often enough in related articles that they are worth pointing out.\nThe first is the need to distinguish places that share the same name. No fewer than five commanders in the novel are said to come from Beijing Daming Prefecture, but this does not refer to today\u0026rsquo;s Beijing. It refers to the area of present-day Handan in Hebei. \u0026ldquo;The Timely Rain of Shandong\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;the Jade Qilin of Hebei\u0026rdquo; do not become \u0026ldquo;the Jade Qilin of Beijing.\u0026rdquo; The only actual Beijinger in the book is Huangfu Duan, the Purple-Bearded Earl, ranked fifty-seventh among the Earthly Fiends, a proper man of Youzhou.\nAnother common mistake concerns the naval commanders of Liangshan Marsh. Aside from the Ruan brothers, who are locals, nearly all of them come from Jieyang in Jiangzhou. This Jieyang is not today\u0026rsquo;s Jieyang in Guangdong, but an older place-name in the Jiangzhou region. This whole group should be counted as Jiangxi men.\nLiangshan has no commanders from Guangdong, but it does have two from faraway Hainan Island: the brothers Sun Li and Sun Xin. They were able to integrate into Liangshan because they had joined the Dengzhou faction early on.\nA second problem arises when the text is vague about a character\u0026rsquo;s native place. Take Lu Zhishen, the Tattooed Monk. Many readers file him under Weizhou in Gansu. Yet the received text of Water Margin contains no definitive statement to that effect. What we do have is Lu the Constable calling himself a man of Yan\u0026rsquo;an Prefecture in Guanxi. Traditionally, \u0026ldquo;Guanxi\u0026rdquo; means the Guanzhong basin west of Tong Pass. Whether Lu was from today\u0026rsquo;s Gansu or Shaanxi, what is beyond doubt is that he was a northwesterner.\nA third problem is the complete absence of any native-place information. Most of the Thirty-Six Heavenly Spirits can be traced to some place of origin; a disputed case like Lu Da is already exceptional. Among the Seventy-Two Earthly Fiends, however, roughly ten figures are introduced without any birthplace at all, such as Gong Wang the Flower-Necked Tiger and Ding Desun the Arrow-Struck Tiger. For such men, the only thing one can do is assign them to the sphere of the faction through which they enter the story.\nIV. Three Regional Blocs\nProvince Earthly Fiends Heavenly Spirits Total Shandong 28 13 41 Henan 10 4 14 Hebei 7 4 11 Jiangxi 5 5 10 Jiangsu 8 1 9 Shanxi 2 5 7 Shaanxi 3 2 5 Hainan 2 2 Hubei 2 2 Hunan 2 2 Anhui 1 1 Beijing 1 1 Sichuan 1 1 Tianjin 1 1 Chongqing 1 1 Total 72 36 108 Looking at the distribution of Liangshan native places, I divide the roster into four tiers and three major regional blocs.\nThe first tier, naturally monopolized by Shandong, is the local power base. Thirteen of its men belong to the Heavenly Spirits, and they span every social stratum from scholars and farmers to artisans and merchants, though the real governing core consists of lower-level clerks and functionaries. Within the Shandong bloc there are again three factions: the indigenous Liangshan men, who later filled the lower officer ranks and the intelligence network; the founding Liangshan group; and, largest of all, Song Jiang\u0026rsquo;s own faction, which formed his real inner circle.\nThe second tier is made up of Henan, Hebei, Jiangsu, and Jiangxi. Quite clearly, this is the eastern main theater of war of the Northern Song, centered on the Jingdong circuits, with Shandong at its core.\nDefined by the Yellow River and the Huai as two hard geographic boundaries, this bloc can in turn be divided into three camps: Hebei, the Central Plain, and the Huai region. Yet among these thirty-five men, native place is not the primary bond. On the contrary, civil officials, military officers, and lower clerks are sharply distinguished from one another; status identity comes first.\nThe third tier has the fewest men, but they are all capable of holding their own or possessed of extraordinary skills. They came from the Shaanxi circuits, where warfare was more intense and conditions harsher: the frontier between Song, Liao, and Western Xia. Throughout the Northern Song, the fighting strength of the western armies was widely acknowledged. Commanders from western-army territory were often proud, unruly, and far more independent than men from elsewhere.\nThe fourth tier consists of eleven men from eight provinces. They are so scattered across the map that no separate power bloc could have formed from native-place ties alone. Their birthplaces are not meaningfully related to either their abilities or their role in the plot; they function as background information, nothing more.\nAppendix\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2022/2022-10-01-liangshan-origins/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eI. When the Yellow River Captured the Ji\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn medieval China, the state maintained ritual sacrifices to the Five Sacred Peaks, the Five Sacred Strongholds, and the Four Waterways. The Four Waterways were the Yangzi, the Yellow River, the Huai, and the Ji.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAmong them, the Yellow River was always the most troublesome, for obvious geographic reasons. Seasonal flood zones had already begun to appear before the Five Dynasties. One hydrological danger of a Yellow River breach was that it could seize the channel of another river. In the Northern Song, the court, still able to control parts of the upper Yellow River basin, was constantly preoccupied with preventing the Yellow River from capturing the Huai and emptying into the sea by that route.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Native Origins of Song Jiang's Liangshan Military Group"},{"content":"The Daoist pantheon did not gradually form a complete system until the Northern Song. This process showed itself mainly in several ways. First, the final ranking of the highest Daoist deities was eventually fixed. Before that, the order among the Three Pure Ones, especially the relative honor given to Primordial Beginning Heavenly Worthy and the Supreme Lord Lao, had never truly stabilized. Second, the borrowing and absorption of Buddhist concepts became systematic. Ideas such as the underworld and the Eighteen Hells had already sunk deep into popular consciousness and were therefore incorporated into Daoism. Third, Daoism retained many gods of older worship, such as City Gods and Earth Gods. Fourth, the proportion and influence of popular gods, figures transmitted in the folk sphere and then absorbed into Daoism and granted divine status, grew ever larger: Lord Guan, Lü Dongbin, Wang Lingguan, Mazu, Zhang Sanfeng, and many others.\nIn that process, the status of early Daoist gods inevitably declined, in some cases all the way to complete disappearance. Many can no longer be studied in any reliable way. One vanished deity who survives for special reasons is called Nüqing.\nIn 1997, tomb no. 3 at the new railway station in Nanchang, Jiangxi yielded a funerary inventory slip for Lei Gai\u0026rsquo;s burial garments, identified as dating to the eighth year of Yonghe in the Eastern Jin, 352 CE. It contains the phrase: \u0026ldquo;This inventory is as a Nüqing edict: it must not be violated.\u0026rdquo; This is the earliest excavated material presently known to contain the characters Nüqing. So far, more than a hundred land-purchase contracts, tomb-quelling texts, and related ancient documents have been excavated. They often bear inscriptions such as \u0026ldquo;Nüqing edict,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Nüqing statutes and ordinances,\u0026rdquo; and similar formulas. Their contents need not detain us here, but the closing stock phrase will sound strangely familiar:\nBy decree of the Supreme Lord Lao, Nüqing\u0026rsquo;s edict is to be carried out at once, in accordance with the statutes and ordinances!\nThere are many similar formulas, for example \u0026ldquo;as with the statutes and ordinances of Nüqing, emissary of the Five Emperors of the Five Directions,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;at once, as with the statutes and ordinances of Nüqing, emissary of the Five Emperors,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;at once, as with the subterranean statutes and ordinances of Nüqing.\u0026rdquo; In all of them, the deity who conveys the command is called Nüqing.\nThe deity Nüqing must have taken shape no later than the early Eastern Jin. By the Northern and Southern Dynasties, several major Daoist traditions, Zhengyi, Lingbao, and Shangqing among them, had all been influenced to varying degrees by the concept of Nüqing. The extant Orthodox Daoist Canon even preserves an important Daoist text, the Ghost Statutes of Nüqing. This work records the names of more than a thousand ghosts. Its authorship is unknown. It is said originally to have consisted of eight juan, though only six survive, and these are not a version formed in a single era but a patchwork compiled from different Daoist texts.\nHan legal codes were called lü, statutes, as in Xiao He\u0026rsquo;s Nine-Chapter Statutes. Judging by the source of the wording, \u0026ldquo;ghost statutes\u0026rdquo; here really means \u0026ldquo;Daoist statutes.\u0026rdquo; The Ghost Statutes of Nüqing presents itself as a code promulgated by the Great Dao. The scripture says: \u0026ldquo;The statutes say: Heaven\u0026rsquo;s Dao uses ghosts to assist the gods in dispensing qi. Men fear ghosts and do not fear gods, and therefore the name is entrusted to them, each taking its rank from that.\u0026rdquo;\nThis Ghost Statutes of Nüqing describes the many ghosts, their ghost-lords and dwelling places, their names, powers, and harms. It urges people to keep the prohibitions carefully so as not to offend the various ghosts, and teaches that by reciting talismans, spells, and the names of ghosts one may control them and ward them off. Put simply, its logic is that all ghosts in the world have proper names, and once you know a ghost\u0026rsquo;s true name you can subdue it. In this scheme, the Celestial Master Zhang Daoling commands the ghosts and spirits, while the one who administers this profound capital code of ghosts is Nüqing.\nAs for \u0026ldquo;Nüqing\u0026rdquo; itself, that is only an assumed name, not the true one. Nüqing is a divine messenger who transmits statutes and ordinances. At different times, what Nüqing transmitted were the decrees of a Heavenly Worthy, of the Supreme Lord Lao, or of the Five Emperors. My suspicion is that the principle is the same as in the Ghost Statutes of Nüqing: if you know a ghost\u0026rsquo;s true name, you can arrest it. By the same logic, if you knew the true name of the deity who transmitted the ghostly statutes, the statutes themselves would lose force. For that reason, Daoist Celestial Masters never directly spoke Nüqing\u0026rsquo;s true name. In the course of transmission, no one any longer came to know it. In truth, I have found no reliable evidence even for whether Nüqing was male or female. Nearly all texts and modern scholarship seem simply to assume, on the strength of the character nü, that this must have been a female deity. Some scholars believe Nüqing too was modeled on the green ghost of Buddhism. I remain doubtful.\nEarly Daoism, especially the Celestial Masters movement, was often called a \u0026ldquo;ghost way.\u0026rdquo; One reason was the profound influence of primal forms of worship among the people: ordinary folk believed in ghosts and spirits rather than serving the Great Dao. Before the appearance of the Ghost Statutes of Nüqing, the laws of heaven were only a vague idea. In Han tomb-quelling texts, the \u0026ldquo;statutes and ordinances\u0026rdquo; said to come from the Highest God, the Heavenly Emperor, had no actual written legal text corresponding to them, and this remained largely unchanged down to the Wei and Jin. \u0026ldquo;Statutes and ordinances\u0026rdquo; as heavenly law still existed only as a religious concept in the minds of believers.\nAfter the middle Northern Song, Daoist scriptures no longer mention Nüqing. From that point onward, the deity gradually disappeared from view.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2021/2021-11-21-nu-qing/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe Daoist pantheon did not gradually form a complete system until the Northern Song. This process showed itself mainly in several ways. First, the final ranking of the highest Daoist deities was eventually fixed. Before that, the order among the Three Pure Ones, especially the relative honor given to Primordial Beginning Heavenly Worthy and the Supreme Lord Lao, had never truly stabilized. Second, the borrowing and absorption of Buddhist concepts became systematic. Ideas such as the underworld and the Eighteen Hells had already sunk deep into popular consciousness and were therefore incorporated into Daoism. Third, Daoism retained many gods of older worship, such as City Gods and Earth Gods. Fourth, the proportion and influence of popular gods, figures transmitted in the folk sphere and then absorbed into Daoism and granted divine status, grew ever larger: Lord Guan, Lü Dongbin, Wang Lingguan, Mazu, Zhang Sanfeng, and many others.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Nüqing: The Hidden Official Who Vanished from the Daoist Pantheon"},{"content":"Most people know Jiang Ziya from Investiture of the Gods. The influence of that novel has been so immense that even divine figures wholly invented within it, Hongjun Patriarch for example, were later posthumously elevated by some temples and given statues for worship. Xu Zhonglin\u0026rsquo;s prose is admittedly rather poor, assuming Xu Zhonglin really was the author, which is no more certain than it is for the Four Great Novels. The plot is full of holes, and as literature it falls short. Yet because the materials connected with the Chinese divine world are so vast, and because the author truly did put enormous labor into assembling them, later readers who began to infer and investigate discovered a wealth of details. In that respect, it is no less rewarding than reading Journey to the West through a scholarly lens.\nToday I want to discuss one hidden matter concerning Jiang Ziya in Investiture of the Gods: everyone knows he distributed divine offices without assigning one to himself. In fact, that is not quite true. He also left himself a way out.\nEverything begins with the single character yue, \u0026ldquo;peak.\u0026rdquo;\nAmong the figures of high antiquity there is one called the Four Peaks, said to be descended from the clan of Gonggong. The Four Peaks lived a very long life, recommended Shun to Yao, then Yu to Shun, and later, for assisting Yu the Great in controlling the flood, was granted the surname Jiang and enfeoffed at Lü. Yes, this is the ancestor of Jiang Taigong.\nJiang Ziya\u0026rsquo;s full formal style should run like this: Taigong Wang; surname Jiang, clan Lü, personal name Shang, style name Ziya, courtesy title Feixiong, Flying Bear. The courtesy title is the strange part. Where did \u0026ldquo;Flying Bear\u0026rdquo; come from?\nThe Six Secret Teachings records that King Wen, famed for divination, once cast a hexagram and was told that if he went to the Wei River plain he would meet a man of great virtue who would assist him. What sort of man? \u0026ldquo;Neither bear nor grizzly, neither tiger nor wolf,\u0026rdquo; though some versions use pi in place of \u0026ldquo;wolf.\u0026rdquo; It was an omen of the highest fortune: once obtained, this man would not only help secure the realm but would benefit the Zhou house for at least three generations.\nThereafter, later generations often used the eight characters \u0026ldquo;neither bear nor grizzly, neither tiger nor wolf\u0026rdquo; as a metonym for King Wen\u0026rsquo;s discovery of Jiang Ziya. But eight characters are awkward, and the Chinese prefer four-character expressions, so it was shortened to the idiom \u0026ldquo;neither bear nor grizzly.\u0026rdquo; Li Bai, in his very long \u0026ldquo;Grand Hunt Rhapsody,\u0026rdquo; uses the allusion like this: \u0026ldquo;He gained heaven\u0026rsquo;s treasure at Chencang; he bore the Not-Bear by the Wei.\u0026rdquo; For the sake of balancing the parallelism, the allusion there is already compressed to two characters, and later writers did this more and more.\nBut here a problem arises. Scholars can play such games in old books; anyone who spends his days rummaging through paper piles can always produce a few obscure allusions from the bottom of the chest. Ordinary people, however, do not understand them. So as \u0026ldquo;Not-Bear\u0026rdquo; continued to be repeated, the phrase gradually drifted into \u0026ldquo;Flying Bear.\u0026rdquo; By the time of the Song vernacular Pinghua of King Wu\u0026rsquo;s Attack on Zhou, King Wen\u0026rsquo;s dream had already become a dream of an actual flying bear entering his sleep.\nVery well, let us set Flying Bear aside for the moment. The reader will now ask: if the title claims there are two Jiang Ziyas in Investiture of the Gods, where is the other one?\nIn chapter twenty-three of Investiture of the Gods, King Wen says that he dreamed \u0026ldquo;a white-browed fierce tiger with wings growing from its flanks leapt toward my tent.\u0026rdquo; In other words, he dreamed of a flying tiger. Yet Sanyi Sheng insists on interpreting the flying tiger as a flying bear, which leads directly into the famous tale of Jiang Taigong fishing for the willing, and of King Wen pulling the carriage for eight hundred steps so that Ziya might preserve the Zhou for eight hundred years. At this point it is perfectly obvious. Xu Zhonglin comes within a hair of adding a footnote that says outright: Huang Feihu is Jiang Ziya\u0026rsquo;s alter ego.\n\u0026ldquo;Neither bear nor grizzly, neither tiger nor wolf.\u0026rdquo; Flying Bear. Flying Tiger.\nAgain and again, Investiture of the Gods tells the attentive reader quite plainly that Huang Feihu is Jiang Ziya.\nLike Hongjun Patriarch, Huang Feihu is an original creation of Investiture of the Gods. In the first chapter, when the personnel around King Zhou of Shang at Chaoge are introduced, we are told that civil matters have Grand Preceptor Wen Zhong, while military affairs have Huang Feihu, Martial Accomplishment King who pacifies the realm. Never mind the novel\u0026rsquo;s chaotic mixing of official titles from different dynasties. The real question is: who is the Martial Accomplishment King?\nIn the nineteenth year of the Kaiyuan reign, 732 CE, Emperor Xuanzong of Tang ordered the establishment of a martial temple, endowed with sacrificial dignity equal to that of the Confucian temple. Jiang Shang was enshrined there as principal deity and granted the title Martial Accomplishment King, while ten famous generals of later ages were installed to left and right as his accompanying spirits.\nSo the Martial Accomplishment King is Jiang Taigong. This is an imperial title issued by successive dynasties; it is not something anyone may apply casually.\nThen in chapter thirty-three, during Huang Feihu\u0026rsquo;s battle at Sishui, the introductory set-poem describing him says, quite directly, that the Flying Tiger is the same as the Flying Bear:\nFace like brushed gold, beard and hair red,\nStrange eyes, pupils crossing gold.\nTiger-skin robe over linked armor,\nJeweled belt, bright and fine.\nSecret arts transmitted, unmatched beneath heaven,\nMen call the Seven-Head one a Flying Bear.\nHuang Feihu also has two younger brothers, Huang Feibao and Huang Feibiao, making a full set of four \u0026ldquo;flyings.\u0026rdquo; As for the novel\u0026rsquo;s claim that Huang Feihu\u0026rsquo;s family had served the Shang for seven generations, is that not simply Jiang Ziya\u0026rsquo;s own Lü lineage in disguise?\nPerhaps Jiang Ziya already knew he would not receive a divine office and so cut off one soul and one spirit to leave himself a retreat. Or perhaps his teacher, Primordial Beginning Heavenly Worthy, pitied his beloved disciple and left him a hidden door. In any case, the Chan school clearly acquiesced in Jiang Ziya\u0026rsquo;s cheating.\nIn chapter ninety-nine, when Jiang Ziya returns home and confers the gods, he appoints Huang Feihu in these terms: \u0026ldquo;Chief of the Five Peaks, and with an additional decree, to hold authority over the Eighteen Hells of the Underworld. In all matters of life and death, transformation among men, gods, immortals, and ghosts, all shall first be examined by the Eastern Peak before action is permitted. By special decree you are hereby invested as Great Emperor of Heaven-Aligned Humanity, Eastern Peak Mount Tai, governing altogether the auspicious and baleful fortunes of heaven, earth, and the human realm.\u0026rdquo;\nThe importance of the Eastern Peak Emperor in the Chinese divine system is enough to support a whole graduate thesis.\nFirst, Eastern Peak Mount Tai: Jiang Ziya takes the glory of his ancestor, the Four Peaks, and overlays it onto the supreme rank among the Five Peaks, in some sense inheriting his ancestor\u0026rsquo;s title.\nSecond, Mount Tai becomes chief among the Five Peaks because of its special role. Before the Wei and Jin, before Buddhism had distilled and implanted in China the full notion of the Eighteen Hells of the Underworld, the divine geography of the Classic of Mountains and Seas placed the passage to the netherworld upon the southeastern branch of the peach tree on Mount Tai. The one responsible for the affairs of the dead there was the Lord of Mount Tai. Over time this office grew ever more important, eventually being elevated into the Eastern Peak Emperor. Both Mount Tai and the peach tree remain important places and implements within Daoist systems. In truth, that older underworld arrangement still runs in parallel even now.\nAs for the Eastern Peak Emperor\u0026rsquo;s other function, governing all auspicious and inauspicious fortune under heaven, that part is comparatively vague and not especially worth dwelling on.\nHuang Feihu\u0026rsquo;s son, Huang Tianhua, who rides the jade qilin, is enfeoffed as the \u0026ldquo;Bingling Duke, Orthodox God of the Three Mountains.\u0026rdquo; The three mountains are usually taken to be Yingzhou, Penglai, and Fangzhang, though because none of these have secure real-world referents, they are sometimes instead identified with Mount Huang, Mount Lu, and Mount Yandang. None of that matters very much. What matters is \u0026ldquo;Bingling Duke.\u0026rdquo; This figure is the historically famous, or rather infamous, Third Son of Mount Tai, notorious for abducting women and killing people at whim. Accounts of his misdeeds appear with remarkable frequency in Wei-Jin anecdotal literature. And the father of that Third Son of Mount Tai is precisely the righteous god of Mount Tai, the Eastern Peak Emperor.\nXu Zhonglin was remarkably exacting with these small details. They leave a lingering aftertaste in the mind, and this is one reason why Investiture of the Gods, despite its poor prose, remains hard to put down.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2021/2021-11-10-jiang-ziya-two-jiangs/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMost people know Jiang Ziya from \u003cem\u003eInvestiture of the Gods\u003c/em\u003e. The influence of that novel has been so immense that even divine figures wholly invented within it, Hongjun Patriarch for example, were later posthumously elevated by some temples and given statues for worship. Xu Zhonglin\u0026rsquo;s prose is admittedly rather poor, assuming Xu Zhonglin really was the author, which is no more certain than it is for the Four Great Novels. The plot is full of holes, and as literature it falls short. Yet because the materials connected with the Chinese divine world are so vast, and because the author truly did put enormous labor into assembling them, later readers who began to infer and investigate discovered a wealth of details. In that respect, it is no less rewarding than reading \u003cem\u003eJourney to the West\u003c/em\u003e through a scholarly lens.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Supplement on the Grand Duke: There Are Two Jiang Ziyas in *Investiture of the Gods*, and One of Them Deifies Himself"},{"content":"After the Song, Daoism\u0026rsquo;s immense and unruly pantheon began to take on stable shape. The Taiqing and Lingbao traditions, among others, compromised with one another, and under the influence of the Song imperial house the ranks of the immortals were gradually fixed. At the summit stood the Three Pure Ones, the Four Sovereigns, the King Father of the East, and the Queen Mother of the West.\nThe Queen Mother of the West had, so far as records tell us, more than twenty daughters. One of the younger ones was called Lady Taizhen. She married Wang Youzi, the True King of Xuandu Taizhen. Wang Youzi originally held what amounted to an enviable central-government post, but after mishandling some affair he was demoted to become Lord of the Eastern Peak. In that age Buddhism had not yet entered China, so there was still no King Yama and no Eighteen Hells. The Lord of the Eastern Peak, who governed the underworld and its passages to the unseen realm, was in fact a very promising office. Lady Taizhen moved with her husband\u0026rsquo;s change of post, and so came to be known as the Lady of the Eastern Peak. She bore a son of thoroughly bad reputation, the famous Third Son of Mount Tai. We will leave him aside for now.\nOnce, while the Lady of the Eastern Peak was traveling home to visit relatives, she passed through Linzi and came upon a dying petty official who had been wounded by bandits. His name was He Junxian. Moved by compassion, she took out a pellet of immortal elixir and revived him. To her surprise, this minor clerk believed in repaying even a drop of kindness with a spring in return, let alone a life-saving favor. Without hesitation he offered himself as a servant, changed his name to Ma Mingsheng, and followed her away. She brought him back to Mount Tai, had him cultivate in a stone chamber for five years, and, finding him truly loyal, bestowed a piece of good fortune on him by recommending him to study immortal arts with the neighbor next door.\nThat neighbor, who lived in Langya, was none other than Anqi Sheng. Anqi Sheng\u0026rsquo;s own genealogies do not record Ma Mingsheng, which suggests that at the time Ma was no more than an informal disciple. Even so, Anqi Sheng naturally had to show respect to the daughter of the Queen Mother of the West, so he took this unofficial disciple on travels through the famous mountains of the realm and transmitted to him his household specialty, the art of long life. Only now, at this point, did that art finally acquire a formal name: the Formula of the Divine Elixir of Golden Liquids of the Great Purity. After successfully completing his course, Ma Mingsheng took leave of Anqi Sheng and the Lady of the Eastern Peak and went off on his own to Huayin Mountain to refine elixirs and cultivate. On the day the elixir was completed, he swallowed only half a pellet, becoming half-immortal and continuing to roam the world in order to convert and guide mortals. Only in the early Jianning era, after Emperor Ling of Han, Liu Hong, took the throne in 168 CE, did he finally consume the remaining half and ascend completely as an immortal.\nDuring Ma Mingsheng\u0026rsquo;s wanderings among the mortal world, he accepted a disciple who later became more famous than he himself: Yin Changsheng. Yin came from a great family; his great-granddaughter would later marry Emperor He of Han, the fourth emperor of Eastern Han. Ma Mingsheng already had more than a dozen students at the time, and, following the example of his benefactor the Lady of the Eastern Peak, he decided to test the loyalty of these eager learners. Day after day he made them do nothing but water flowers and sweep the ground, transmitting not a single technique. Unexpectedly, Yin Changsheng proved to have the same stubborn kind of foolish loyalty that Ma himself had shown in youth: he spent more than a decade quietly sweeping, until all the other students had given up and only he remained. Ma decided the test had gone far enough and passed on to him the Formula of the Divine Elixir of Golden Liquids of the Great Purity. Evidently the face of the Queen Mother of the West really did carry weight. Anqi Sheng made not the slightest objection, even when an unofficial disciple went around casually transmitting the master\u0026rsquo;s own secret methods.\nYin Changsheng followed his teacher\u0026rsquo;s pattern. He found a mountain at Fengdu called Mount Pingdu and refined his elixir there. That mountain later became one of the Seventy-Two Blessed Lands listed in the diagrams of celestial palaces. When his elixir was completed, he too consumed only half and remained in the human world, turning tens of thousands of jin of things into gold and using it to relieve the poor, a kind of supernatural model worker for centuries on end. Later, when the time for his ascent had at last come, he judged the day ripe, swallowed the other half of the pill, and rose into the sky in broad daylight. Up to that point, Yin Changsheng\u0026rsquo;s immortal biography ran much like his master\u0026rsquo;s. Yet because his surname was Yin and because he had refined elixirs in Fengdu, later generations of Daoist descendants enshrined him in the Fengdu Ghost City and gave him a resounding title: the Great Emperor of Fengdu.\nThe exact date of Yin Changsheng\u0026rsquo;s ascension is uncertain, but it must have been no earlier than Eastern Jin and perhaps as late as the early Northern and Southern Dynasties, because in the first year of Daxing, 318 CE, he was still in the mortal world taking on a disciple, the real subject of this essay: Bao Liang.\nBao Liang, style name Taixuan, descended from Bao Xuan, a major Western Han statesman later killed by Wang Mang. The Bao line transmitted itself in orderly fashion, with nearly every generation producing high office and conspicuous rank. Bao Liang was one of those people said to possess suhui, memory from former lives. Presumably this was because the legend of Lady Meng had not yet fully formed in those days, and so he had missed the bowl of Meng Po\u0026rsquo;s soup. At age five he told his family that he had been the son of the Li family in Quyang, and that at age nine he had forgotten everything after falling into a well. His family sent people to investigate and found the facts exactly as he had said. Historical records say he was broadly learned in astronomy and the books of the River Chart and the Luo Writing. He first served as Central Commandant in Nanyang and was later transferred to become Governor of Nanhai. While serving in Nanhai, he met the teacher who would alter his life: Yin Changsheng.\nWhy Yin Changsheng had appeared in Nanhai, I suspect, is because he had gone to pay respects to his own grand-teacher, Anqi Sheng, who was then cultivating on Mount Luofu. At that time southern immortal Daoism was thriving as never before, with figures frequently visiting one another and often linked by lines of transmission. Better-known names such as Zuo Ci and Chen Mu all show ties to practitioners who traced themselves back to the Qi region.\nCuriously enough, Yin Changsheng did not pass the Formula of the Divine Elixir of Golden Liquids of the Great Purity on to Bao Liang. My guess is that Anqi Sheng had spoken up: Ma Mingsheng was allowed to transmit it once, but to pass it on yet again would have been going too far. Bao Liang later lived to more than a hundred, but of course that is still not the same as the art of true immortality. What Yin Changsheng did hand on to Bao Liang, however, was another great Daoist secret of transcendence: shijie, release through the corpse. He explained in detail two forms of it, release by blade and release by bamboo. After Bao Liang\u0026rsquo;s death, his body was buried at Shizigang.\nWhy did Yin Changsheng know corpse-release? Do not forget Li Shaojun, who cultivated together with his grand-teacher Anqi Sheng on Mount Luofu. Li Shaojun was a master of that very technique, so it is hardly strange that Anqi Sheng\u0026rsquo;s descendants in the line should also possess it. While he was still alive, Bao Liang often ran off to Mount Luofu in the evening and would not return to Nanhai until daybreak.\nIn the second year of Xianhe, 327 CE, the rebellion of Su Jun erupted. Su Jun, that traitor\u0026rsquo;s son, deserves a full essay of his own, because he later became a notorious southern evil god of the Northern and Southern Dynasties period, generating the cult of Lord Su for several centuries. We will put that aside for now.\nLike Cao Cao, the Lord Su god loved to play tomb-raiding general. He sent troops to dig up Bao Liang\u0026rsquo;s grave. When they opened the coffin, there was no corpse inside, only a great broadsword. The thieves tried to take the sword, but suddenly around the grave there erupted the sounds of clashing troops, battle cries, and men shouting in the charge. The robbers fled in terror. From this came the later belief that Bao Liang could command ghost soldiers. The logic is simple enough. As a descendant of the Eastern Peak lineage, he naturally had close dealings with the underworld. And once that is granted, it becomes much easier to understand the stories of Bao Liang boiling white stones as military rations for his troops.\nThe story still does not end there. Bao Liang\u0026rsquo;s line continued, and its reputation only grew greater.\nFang Xinru, who made three embassies to the Jin in the Southern Song, was a man of great courage and unusual eloquence. He wrote a poem:\nSeeking cinnabar, I came to the seashore;\nIn the empty hills the ruined well has gathered dust.\nHad there not been one drop to revive the scorched,\nThe sacred mugwort\u0026rsquo;s fame for reviving life would be vain.\nThe poem is titled \u0026ldquo;The Well of Lady Bao.\u0026rdquo; It concerns Bao Gu, one of the four great women physicians of ancient China. Her medicine was wonderfully efficacious: a single dose brought results, and the people called her Immortal Lady Bao. Her father was Bao Liang.\nBao Liang doted on his daughter and specially built for her a place called Yuegang Cloister, honored as the Northern Temple. The Northern Temple has stood unshaken for a thousand years and is still in Guangzhou today, with incense thriving. It is what is now called Sanyuan Palace, where the Three Officials are enshrined: the Heavenly Official, the Earth Official, and the Water Official. Even from the deities worshipped there one can glimpse the pattern of early Daoist reverence.\nAnd still the story does not end. Bao Liang loved this daughter dearly, but he loved an especially gifted disciple as well, and so he married Bao Gu to that disciple. The disciple was Ge Hong. Without the Biographies of the Immortals written by Ge Hong, the Daoist genealogy of immortals would have remained a mess for several hundred years longer.\nGe Hong is too famous to detour over here. Bao Liang also had a close friend, Xu Mi, revered in Daoism as a Shangqing Perfected and the third patriarch of the Shangqing school.\nBy this point, the great shape of southern Daoism had taken form. The historical outlines of the Way of Great Peace, the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice, and the Northern Celestial Masters all became increasingly blurred.\nThe line of the Old Man by the River, Anqi Sheng, Ma Mingsheng, Yin Changsheng, Bao Liang, and Ge Hong formed the cinnabar-and-elixir branch of southern immortal Daoism. All who came after in that current were descendants of this line.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2021/2021-11-07-bao-liang/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAfter the Song, Daoism\u0026rsquo;s immense and unruly pantheon began to take on stable shape. The Taiqing and Lingbao traditions, among others, compromised with one another, and under the influence of the Song imperial house the ranks of the immortals were gradually fixed. At the summit stood the Three Pure Ones, the Four Sovereigns, the King Father of the East, and the Queen Mother of the West.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Queen Mother of the West had, so far as records tell us, more than twenty daughters. One of the younger ones was called Lady Taizhen. She married Wang Youzi, the True King of Xuandu Taizhen. Wang Youzi originally held what amounted to an enviable central-government post, but after mishandling some affair he was demoted to become Lord of the Eastern Peak. In that age Buddhism had not yet entered China, so there was still no King Yama and no Eighteen Hells. The Lord of the Eastern Peak, who governed the underworld and its passages to the unseen realm, was in fact a very promising office. Lady Taizhen moved with her husband\u0026rsquo;s change of post, and so came to be known as the Lady of the Eastern Peak. She bore a son of thoroughly bad reputation, the famous Third Son of Mount Tai. We will leave him aside for now.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Bao Liang"},{"content":"Xie Lingyun of the Eastern Jin once wrote a poem, \u0026ldquo;Climbing the Islet in Mid-River,\u0026rdquo; which includes these lines:\nLong have I wearied of ranging through Jiangnan,\nYet in Jiangbei broad circuits still remain.\nCherishing the new, the paths grow winding;\nSeeking the strange, the sights do not delay.\nTumbling waters rush and then cut straight;\nA lone islet charms the middle stream.\nCloud and sun shine into one another;\nEmpty water and sky share one bright freshness.\nWondrous things show themselves, but none may prize them;\nTruth lies hidden, and who can pass it on?\nI imagine the bearing of Kunshan\u0026rsquo;s immortals,\nRemote beyond all worldly ties.\nOnly then do I believe in the arts of Anqi,\nBy which one may fully nourish the years of life.\nThe rough meaning is that after staying long amid the beauty of Jiangnan, Xie Lingyun still felt there were too many marvelous scenes he had yet to enjoy. Thinking of the immortal bearing of the sage on Mount Kun, he finally came to believe that there truly must exist an Art of Anqi, one by which a person might live out the full span of years.\nThat \u0026ldquo;Art of Anqi\u0026rdquo; refers precisely to the longevity methods of Anqi Sheng. Anqi Sheng was a genuine immortal, the sort who shows the dragon\u0026rsquo;s head but never the tail. In the Daoist divine hierarchy, which did not fully stabilize until the Song, he held a place among the immortals but never acquired wide fame. Across the long course of history he appeared only in scattered glimpses, and was even at times mistaken for two different people, Anqi Sheng and Master Anqi.\nChronologically speaking, Anqi Sheng first becomes visible during the Warring States era. In 284 BCE, the Yan general Yue Yi swept across Qi, took more than seventy cities, and was enfeoffed as Lord of Changguo. The ruins of Changguo are in present-day Zibo, Shandong, presumably one of those seventy-odd cities. Later history classed Yue Yi among the Legalists. How formidable was he? Think of Zhuge Liang: before he ever entered public life, while still tilling the fields in Nanyang, he boasted of himself as the equal of Guan Zhong and Yue Yi. Shu Han later maintained a state of permanent military mobilization, so it seems Kongming really did see himself as Yue Yi\u0026rsquo;s heir.\nYue Yi took five years to conquer Qi. He was later driven out by Tian Dan\u0026rsquo;s counterintelligence scheme, fled to Zhao, and died in frustration. His son Yue Jian, however, inherited the title of Lord of Changguo. Though he served as a general in Zhao, the family kept its people and interests in the Qi region. One descendant of that line was called Yuecheng Gong. When Qin broke Zhao, he fled to Gaomi, next to Changguo, and gained some fame by studying Huang-Lao thought. His teacher was a mysterious figure known only as the Old Man by the River. He had no recorded surname and no known origins. The one thing certain about him is that he excelled at longevity techniques.\nMore than eighty years later, an old man built the Terrace of Watching for Immortals at Sanmenxia in order to visit another old man. The one who built the terrace was Emperor Wen of Han. And yes, the date is correct: only about eighty years separate Yue Yi from Emperor Wen. The man he went to see was that same Old Man by the River. Emperor Wen found many passages in the Laozi difficult to understand, so the old man presented him with his own two-volume reading notes and said, \u0026ldquo;I have been writing these notes for seventeen hundred years. Counting you, only four people have ever read them. Do not go showing them around casually.\u0026rdquo; A godlike being over a thousand years old was, unsurprisingly, very skilled indeed in the art of long life.\nThe Old Man by the River said he had taught only four students. Yuecheng Gong counted as one, Emperor Wen as another, and a third known by name was Anqi Sheng. Anqi Sheng also lived in the Qi region, at Langya by the sea. He studied under the old man in the proper line of transmission and also sold a little elixir medicine on the side. By the time Yuecheng Gong studied with the Old Man by the River, Anqi Sheng was already an old man himself. How old? Locals called him the Elder of a Thousand Years.\nA few years later, the First Emperor had unified the realm and was making his eastern tour along the seacoast. He came specifically to see Anqi Sheng. They spent three days and three nights in conversation and clearly enjoyed one another\u0026rsquo;s company immensely. It was presumably then that the First Emperor formed his indelible impression of the sea-borne immortal mountains and of longevity arts, for he immediately organized fleets under Xu Fu, Lu Sheng, and hundreds of others to sail off in search of immortals. When Anqi Sheng took his leave, he told the emperor, \u0026ldquo;For the next thousand years, if anything comes up, send someone to find me on Mount Penglai.\u0026rdquo; Evidently the First Emperor never had the chance.\nThough Anqi Sheng failed to save the Qin, he evidently thought very highly of the First Emperor as a friend. Later, when Xiang Yu of Western Chu invited him out with great rank and riches, Anqi Sheng ignored him completely and brushed his sleeves away. At the time, Anqi Sheng also had a friend who was Han Xin\u0026rsquo;s chief strategist, Kuai Che. When Han Xin was destroyed by Empress Lü, he uttered the famous last words, \u0026ldquo;I regret not using Kuai Che\u0026rsquo;s advice.\u0026rdquo; That was the very same man. Liu Bang naturally wanted to eliminate Kuai Che as well and cut off any future trouble, but Kuai Che saved himself by sheer eloquence and came safely ashore.\nSeveral decades later, there was another fangshi, Li Shaojun, also an immortal, who won the favor of Emperor Wu of Han, himself endlessly obsessed with longevity. Li Shaojun said, \u0026ldquo;The last time I wandered by the Eastern Sea, I visited Anqi Sheng on Mount Penglai. The dates he served me were as large as watermelons. This immortal usually dwells in the mountain, though he does not easily show himself. He appears only to those he finds suitable.\u0026rdquo; Emperor Wu then did as the First Emperor had done and sent out a great fleet to search for Anqi Sheng, but without result. Li Shaojun perhaps found the failure embarrassing, for not long afterward he too departed by shijie, release through the corpse. It was a decisive way to go. Ordinary people escape through water or earth; he escaped through the corpse itself.\nAfter Li Shaojun left, he followed Anqi Sheng in cultivating immortality. Perhaps they had spent too long at sea and grown weary of it, for together they carried off one peak of Mount Penglai and flew south to Lingnan, where they opened a Daoist center. That center later became one of China\u0026rsquo;s Ten Great Daoist Mountains, praised as the foremost mountain of Lingnan and honored by Sima Qian as the Yue Sacred Peak. This was Mount Luofu. Later, both monks and Daoists thrived there. At one time it was said to contain \u0026ldquo;nine monasteries, eighteen temples, and twenty-two hermitages.\u0026rdquo; The most prominent deity there became Earth Mother, who is in fact Nüwa, revered in Daoism as the Boundless Compassionate Heavenly Sovereign, Mother of the Great Void. Whether Nüwa simply took over the place, or Anqi Sheng had actually opened a new branch for Earth Mother from the start, no one can now say.\nFrom that point on, no further news of Anqi Sheng appears in the human world. A true immortal style, one might say.\nThe famous Shangqing Daoist Du Guangting of the Tang was an extraordinary figure. In official life he served as Grand Master of Splendid Emolument; in withdrawal he was called the Chancellor of the Mountains. The Daoist canon preserves twenty-seven of his works. One especially important compilation is the Record of Grotto-Heavens and Blessed Lands, which gives detailed accounts of the celestial palaces and charts, the Ten Great Grotto-Heavens, the Thirty-Six Lesser Grotto-Heavens, and the Seventy-Two Blessed Lands. Anqi Sheng alone is said to possess two of those blessed lands: the twentieth of the Seventy-Two, Mount An, north of Jiaozhou, \u0026ldquo;the hidden dwelling of Master Anqi, governed by the Master\u0026rdquo;; and the fifty-first, Mount Yuanchen in Duchang County, Jiangzhou, now Duchang in Jiangxi, likewise \u0026ldquo;administered by Anqi Sheng.\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2021/2021-11-06-anqi-sheng/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eXie Lingyun of the Eastern Jin once wrote a poem, \u0026ldquo;Climbing the Islet in Mid-River,\u0026rdquo; which includes these lines:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLong have I wearied of ranging through Jiangnan,\u003cbr\u003e\nYet in Jiangbei broad circuits still remain.\u003cbr\u003e\nCherishing the new, the paths grow winding;\u003cbr\u003e\nSeeking the strange, the sights do not delay.\u003cbr\u003e\nTumbling waters rush and then cut straight;\u003cbr\u003e\nA lone islet charms the middle stream.\u003cbr\u003e\nCloud and sun shine into one another;\u003cbr\u003e\nEmpty water and sky share one bright freshness.\u003cbr\u003e\nWondrous things show themselves, but none may prize them;\u003cbr\u003e\nTruth lies hidden, and who can pass it on?\u003cbr\u003e\nI imagine the bearing of Kunshan\u0026rsquo;s immortals,\u003cbr\u003e\nRemote beyond all worldly ties.\u003cbr\u003e\nOnly then do I believe in the arts of Anqi,\u003cbr\u003e\nBy which one may fully nourish the years of life.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Anqi Sheng"},{"content":"Applicable household size: 1-3 family members\nIntended duration of use: noted item by item where relevant\nItems to keep in a single bag that can be grabbed at any time:\nOne 45L backpack kept ready year-round; in the bedroom there is also a fully loaded 25L hiking pack. Identification documents, ID card, passport, and so on. Important household papers such as the property deed are usually stored together so they can be picked up quickly if necessary, though preserving life always comes first. A certain amount of cash, including some coins usable for coin phones and vending machines, plus bankbooks and tickets/cards. I keep one bank card and several hundred yuan in a Dolfin waterproof case every day. Emergency phone charger. I have two power banks with different ports for all handheld devices, one carried daily and one in the emergency bag, charged once a week. I am obsessive about this. Family photos, for contact in case of separation. I keep one family photo in my wallet. Contact notebook, with important phone numbers copied down in case the phone runs out of power or fails. A backup phone is essential. A Nokia 1100 is especially valuable and also has a flashlight function. Paper and oil-based marker, for leaving notes and keeping records. Flashlights, one ordinary and one hand-crank, plus batteries. I keep several light sources and recommend a daily-carry flashlight using AA batteries, a squeeze-charge flashlight, and an outdoor camping lamp. Radio, for receiving outside information, plus batteries. Mine is a Tecsun full-band model with hand-crank charging. Tissues, wet wipes, sanitary pads, which can also be useful for stopping bleeding. Aluminum foil, 1.5 x 2 meters, for heat insulation, warmth, and waterproofing. A large plastic sheet can serve as well. Several plastic bags, for handling garbage and waste, and for windproofing and waterproofing. I keep a small roll of food-storage bags. Whistle, for survival use. I recommend an aluminum-alloy emergency whistle as part of the everyday keychain, and outdoor packs usually have whistles too. Swiss Army knife. In addition to a genuine Swiss Army knife, counterfeits are a disaster when things matter, we also need a straight-blade knife and a multitool pliers set just in case. Road atlas. A few energy bars and one bottle of water. I use a 3L hydration bladder. At home it is a good habit to make sure kettles and dispensers always have backup water ready. This comes from being used to water outages. Special items for particular family members. For example, my bag also contains diapers and an unopened can of stage-two baby formula. Prepare according to the needs of the specific household. Home medical kit. The main point is to ensure sterile gauze, alcohol, common medicines, and adhesive bandages are available. Stored food:\nFour military compressed biscuits with a five-year shelf life are the bottom-of-the-box reserves, to be used at the last moment. Several cans. Do not keep too many; every few months, eat them and replace them with fresh ones. Two self-heating instant rice meals. These are generally available in supermarkets, and standard-issue versions are even better if you can get them. Pickles. Chocolate. Dry instant noodles. All of these can be steadily rotated through normal daily life and replaced with new stock.\nWater storage:\nThe 5L small bottled-water containers. ","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2020/2020-01-30-family-edc-psk/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eApplicable household size: 1-3 family members\u003cbr\u003e\nIntended duration of use: noted item by item where relevant\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eItems to keep in a single bag that can be grabbed at any time:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eOne 45L backpack kept ready year-round; in the bedroom there is also a fully loaded 25L hiking pack.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eIdentification documents, ID card, passport, and so on. Important household papers such as the property deed are usually stored together so they can be picked up quickly if necessary, though preserving life always comes first.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eA certain amount of cash, including some coins usable for coin phones and vending machines, plus bankbooks and tickets/cards. I keep one bank card and several hundred yuan in a Dolfin waterproof case every day.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eEmergency phone charger. I have two power banks with different ports for all handheld devices, one carried daily and one in the emergency bag, charged once a week. I am obsessive about this.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eFamily photos, for contact in case of separation. I keep one family photo in my wallet.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eContact notebook, with important phone numbers copied down in case the phone runs out of power or fails. A backup phone is essential. A Nokia 1100 is especially valuable and also has a flashlight function.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ePaper and oil-based marker, for leaving notes and keeping records.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eFlashlights, one ordinary and one hand-crank, plus batteries. I keep several light sources and recommend a daily-carry flashlight using AA batteries, a squeeze-charge flashlight, and an outdoor camping lamp.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRadio, for receiving outside information, plus batteries. Mine is a Tecsun full-band model with hand-crank charging.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eTissues, wet wipes, sanitary pads, which can also be useful for stopping bleeding.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAluminum foil, 1.5 x 2 meters, for heat insulation, warmth, and waterproofing. A large plastic sheet can serve as well.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eSeveral plastic bags, for handling garbage and waste, and for windproofing and waterproofing. I keep a small roll of food-storage bags.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWhistle, for survival use. I recommend an aluminum-alloy emergency whistle as part of the everyday keychain, and outdoor packs usually have whistles too.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eSwiss Army knife. In addition to a genuine Swiss Army knife, counterfeits are a disaster when things matter, we also need a straight-blade knife and a multitool pliers set just in case.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRoad atlas.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eA few energy bars and one bottle of water. I use a 3L hydration bladder. At home it is a good habit to make sure kettles and dispensers always have backup water ready. This comes from being used to water outages.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eSpecial items for particular family members. For example, my bag also contains diapers and an unopened can of stage-two baby formula. Prepare according to the needs of the specific household.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHome medical kit. The main point is to ensure sterile gauze, alcohol, common medicines, and adhesive bandages are available.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStored food:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Family EDC/PSK Gear Checklist"},{"content":"On Shangchi Main Street there is a noodle shop called Shangchi Noodles. It was once an ordinary little place, known only to people nearby for being tasty, until food accounts on social media suddenly made it famous. Shangchi Main Street itself is a short lane, barely a hundred meters long, lined on both sides with neat rows of Chinese banyans. The noodle shop sells noodles only in the morning and at noon, and only in limited quantities, closing as soon as everything is sold out.\nEven when the shop is not open, passersby can still smell a thick, seductive aroma of meat sauce. The whole street smells as though everyone at once were eating double-pepper beef noodles. At first you assume the scent is simply drifting out from the shop\u0026rsquo;s kitchen, but if you pluck a leaf and smell it, you discover that the banyan leaves themselves give off the fragrance of braised topping. The noodle shop explains this by saying that after decades of frying its meat sauce beneath the trees, even the trees have absorbed the smell.\nYet busybodies tell another story. They say that if you take a few of those leaves home and throw them into a stir-fry, the result tastes astonishingly good, with exactly the savor of Shangchi Noodles\u0026rsquo; topping. These days the leaves are protected by local food associations as a kind of magical foliage, so much so that even Shangchi Noodles can no longer obtain them easily. And yet the flavor of the shop remains unchanged, and still there is only one Shangchi Noodles, quietly open on that same short street.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2019/2019-01-16-sauce-tree/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eOn Shangchi Main Street there is a noodle shop called Shangchi Noodles. It was once an ordinary little place, known only to people nearby for being tasty, until food accounts on social media suddenly made it famous. Shangchi Main Street itself is a short lane, barely a hundred meters long, lined on both sides with neat rows of Chinese banyans. The noodle shop sells noodles only in the morning and at noon, and only in limited quantities, closing as soon as everything is sold out.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | The Sauce Tree"},{"content":"In Shanbanqiao there was an old resident named Feng Hao, known to all as Mad Feng. He often wandered through the lanes in an oversized, tattered Mao jacket and loose straw sandals. Around his neck hung a dozen or more senior bus cards from neighboring counties and towns, the farthest reaching all the way to Mianzhu. If anyone asked, he would jut out his chin and say, \u0026ldquo;I use them when I go strolling.\u0026rdquo; Neighbors also often saw him ambling home with half a jin of rice noodles from Shifang or a bowl of pepper-numbing chicken from Ya\u0026rsquo;an in hand.\nOne year, an old friend of Mad Feng\u0026rsquo;s came to visit and stayed at his house for two days before leaving. Mad Feng\u0026rsquo;s face turned dark. He fetched brushwood into the room and told the neighbors, \u0026ldquo;Every bamboo thing in my house has to be burned at once. There will be thick smoke in a moment, but don\u0026rsquo;t panic. Nothing will happen.\u0026rdquo; The neighbors were horrified and tried to stop him. \u0026ldquo;These are old buildings,\u0026rdquo; they said. \u0026ldquo;The floors are wooden and the hallways full of flammables. You absolutely cannot light a fire.\u0026rdquo; Mad Feng paid no attention. Before long a great blaze rose up, sparks flying and black smoke billowing so thick it could be seen from outside the compound. Yet before the fire brigade even arrived, the flames went out on their own. Every bamboo chopstick, basket, and strip in the room had burned to ash, but everything else remained untouched, not even smoke-stained. Half a cigarette in the ashtray by the bed was still sending up a thread of blue smoke.\nAnother time, some children were selling little crucian carp they had caught in the Sha River at the mouth of the lane. Two city enforcers came over and, without a word, overturned the basin. Fish flopped all over the ground. Mad Feng was furious. He blocked their way and cursed them roundly. One of the enforcers, unable to contain his anger, struck him with a flashlight, drawing blood from Feng\u0026rsquo;s cheek and arm. Mad Feng sneered at one of them and said, \u0026ldquo;You hit me fifteen times. You have fifteen days left to live.\u0026rdquo; To the other he said, \u0026ldquo;You hit me twice. That earns you two more years.\u0026rdquo; The pair laughed him off and left. Two weeks later one of them died of a sudden illness. The other, terrified, came to Feng\u0026rsquo;s door and knocked his head to the ground in apology, but Feng ignored him completely. No one knows what became of him in the end.\nDuring one of the neighborhood censuses, Mad Feng died two or three different times. On one occasion his body had already turned blue and begun to rot, and the coroner was just about to move him when he drew a long breath and came back to life. The community workers were frightened nearly out of their souls every time. Later people heard that Mad Feng had returned to relatives in Langzhong. Not long after, he died there for good. His grave lies not far from the tomb of Lord Huan.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2019/2019-01-13-mad-feng/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIn Shanbanqiao there was an old resident named Feng Hao, known to all as Mad Feng. He often wandered through the lanes in an oversized, tattered Mao jacket and loose straw sandals. Around his neck hung a dozen or more senior bus cards from neighboring counties and towns, the farthest reaching all the way to Mianzhu. If anyone asked, he would jut out his chin and say, \u0026ldquo;I use them when I go strolling.\u0026rdquo; Neighbors also often saw him ambling home with half a jin of rice noodles from Shifang or a bowl of pepper-numbing chicken from Ya\u0026rsquo;an in hand.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Mad Feng"},{"content":"Ma Sheng of Wenjiang was executed in the late 1990s during the campaign against organized crime. As a child he had been deeply introverted, always by himself and sparing with words. His family had been butchers for generations. Each day while his parents worked at the meat stall, Ma Sheng played by himself nearby. When he was eight or nine, he encountered someone at the marketplace. Later no one could remember what kind of person it had been, and Ma Sheng himself refused ever to speak of it. But from that point on, he stopped eating meat and spoke less and less.\nAt the age of twelve, Ma Sheng left home for school one morning and never came back that afternoon. He never returned at all. His family reported the case, but it was never solved. The uncanny thing was that neighbors, and even members of his own household, would sometimes catch sight of Ma Sheng from a distance on the street, looking exactly the same as before. He would smile faintly and vanish in an instant.\nTwenty years passed like that. Then Ma Sheng suddenly came home. He was wearing the very same clothes he had had on at twelve, now so tattered that they barely hung from his neck. When his family questioned him, he said little beyond this: he had gone off with a master to learn skills. They took him to the hospital for examination and even had his mental state assessed, but nothing appeared wrong. Yet now a man in his thirties, Ma Sheng still did not go out to work. He simply stayed at home, and whatever skills he had acquired were not obvious.\nOne evening the whole family was eating dinner. As always, Ma Sheng kept his head down and ate in silence. His grandmother muttered, more to herself than anyone else, that she was craving loquats from Longquanyi. Ma Sheng\u0026rsquo;s ears twitched. He set down his chopsticks and went out without a word. The family called after him, but he did not answer. Not long later he returned, still with his head lowered, carrying a basket. He placed it at his grandmother\u0026rsquo;s feet. It was full of loquats, some of them hurriedly torn off with twigs and leaves still attached. From Wenjiang to Longquanyi is at least seventy kilometers. At that time there was no expressway. Even by car it would have taken two hours or more.\nLater Ma Sheng\u0026rsquo;s father wanted to open a shop, only to be cheated out of his money. Ma Sheng had his father remain seated at home, asked for the debtor\u0026rsquo;s name and address, then took out a thick stack of paper and wrote characters on it with a brush before tossing the pages into a brazier. The paper burned and the fire went out. From the ashes he drew several gold ingots, took them to a gold shop, and exchanged them for exactly the amount that man had owed. Swindles were common in those years and the victims were many, so Ma Sheng used the same method to help several other relatives recover debts they had long since failed to collect. Not long afterward the police came to the house. A few days later came the news that Ma Sheng had been executed by firing squad.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2019/2019-01-12-ma-sheng/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMa Sheng of Wenjiang was executed in the late 1990s during the campaign against organized crime. As a child he had been deeply introverted, always by himself and sparing with words. His family had been butchers for generations. Each day while his parents worked at the meat stall, Ma Sheng played by himself nearby. When he was eight or nine, he encountered someone at the marketplace. Later no one could remember what kind of person it had been, and Ma Sheng himself refused ever to speak of it. But from that point on, he stopped eating meat and spoke less and less.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Ma Sheng"},{"content":"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.\nIn autumn, when fallen leaves carpeted Xinhua Park and elderly men practiced calligraphy on the paving stones with brushes dipped in water, Pan the Immortal often joked around with them. He would pick up a few leaves from the ground and toss them into the water bucket, and at once they would turn into koi and dart about in the water. Reach in to catch them and they turned back into leaves. Pan had another talent as well. When no one was around, he loved to climb up into the fork of a tree and rest there. But once he was up in the tree, unless he chose to move on his own, no matter how intently people searched, even if afterward they realized he had been right before their eyes, they could never actually see him there.\nWhen he was in a good mood and really talking, Pan would tell this story: when he was young he worked as a boatman in Luzhou and met an old man who later became his master. At the time, the old man was standing on the riverbank and begged Pan to ferry him across because he had urgent business on the other side. Pan took him aboard. Midstream, seeing how frail the old man looked, Pan brought out his own lunchbox and shared his meal with him. The old man narrowed his eyes and smiled. \u0026ldquo;What is eating without wine?\u0026rdquo; he said, and pulled from his bag a little gourd no bigger than a palm, inviting Pan to drink with him. Though tiny, the gourd could never be emptied. The two of them talked joyfully all the way across. Once they reached the far bank, the old man said that Pan was kind at heart and had the bones of the Dao in him, and so took him as a disciple. From then on they traveled all over the rivers and mountains of Ba and Shu.\nAt the beginning of this year, Pan the Immortal received a letter. After reading it, he told everyone that his master was calling for him. Then he packed up his stall and left. From that day on he was never seen again. Judging by his face, he had to be at least seventy. One can only wonder how old his master must have been.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2019/2019-01-10-pan-the-immortal/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThere 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.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Pan the Immortal"},{"content":"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\u0026rsquo;s burdens without complaint and never fearing hardship.\nOne 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, \u0026ldquo;What a lovely girl you are, with such well-formed features. It is only this cleft lip that hides your beauty.\u0026rdquo; The girl replied, \u0026ldquo;I was born this way. What can I do about it?\u0026rdquo; The old woman said, \u0026ldquo;I can cure it for you. Would you like that?\u0026rdquo; The girl bowed and thanked her, begging to be healed. The old woman took a steamed bun from the girl\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;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.\nNote: Zuicha Zhiguai, by Li Qingchen.\nThe Chinese short tale passed from the Former Qin through the Wei and Jin, the Tang and Song, and the Ming and Qing, continually taking on new meanings and new forms. The earliest sense of xiaoshuo as \u0026ldquo;brief jottings\u0026rdquo; survived across that long history through notebook fiction devoted to odd anecdotes, variant accounts, and scattered talk. The body of such writing is immense and fascinating, covering history and geography, astronomy and calendrics, crafts and techniques, institutions and customs, and popular legend.\nBecause notebook fiction was written across so many different periods, its diction varies enormously. Add to that the modern decline in classical literacy, and a great deal of marvelous material has slipped out of common view.\nFor that reason, I want to recast many lesser-known notebook collections into plain modern prose and offer them to readers, especially works less famous than Youyang Zazu, Yuewei Caotang Biji, or Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio.\nNotebook fiction is brief, taut, and perfectly suited to the fragmented reading habits of the internet age. I hope every reader can find a small measure of delight in a minute or two of reading.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2019/2019-01-09-village-girl/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIn 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\u0026rsquo;s burdens without complaint and never fearing hardship.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne 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, \u0026ldquo;What a lovely girl you are, with such well-formed features. It is only this cleft lip that hides your beauty.\u0026rdquo; The girl replied, \u0026ldquo;I was born this way. What can I do about it?\u0026rdquo; The old woman said, \u0026ldquo;I can cure it for you. Would you like that?\u0026rdquo; The girl bowed and thanked her, begging to be healed. The old woman took a steamed bun from the girl\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;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.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Records of Strange Translations | The Village Girl"},{"content":"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\u0026rsquo;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.\nDu 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.\nIn the winter of the wuzi year, heavy snow fell on Chengdu, and large numbers of disaster victims were still sleeping out in pits dug into the snow. Du Fen brought out a whole cartload of empty cloth sacks, called together a dozen or so young men from the surrounding streets, and had them sweep up the snow, stuff it into the sacks, and flatten them out. These he distributed to the worst-hit households as quilts. The people who carried the sacks home found them wonderfully warm and comfortable. When they opened them up, the snow inside had turned into white cotton batting.\nDu Fen also sought out families in urgent need of money, set up braziers for them, and shaped snow into little balls that he tossed into the fire. Once the flames died down, silver ingots could be fished out of the ashes, bright and gleaming, with the very pinch marks of Du Fen\u0026rsquo;s fingers still visible on them. Families in need were allowed to take two ingots each. If they took more than that, even the first two would melt back into slush. My family still has two of those ingots today.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2019/2019-01-09-snow-silver/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIn 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\u0026rsquo;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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDu 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.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Snow Silver"},{"content":"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\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;s signature dish was called \u0026ldquo;Eightfold Auspice,\u0026rdquo; 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.\nOnce, on his child\u0026rsquo;s birthday, Ma Huaizhen was in such high spirits that he laid out a table of food and wine and invited seven or eight friends and neighbors. After several rounds of drinking, Old Ma brought out a black ceramic dish from the inner room, glossy as lacquer, and inside it lay five or six black soup ladles. He casually twisted open a bottle of mineral water and poured it into the dish, then waved for the guests to taste it. Each guest dipped up a spoonful of the water and found, once it entered the mouth, that it tasted like mellow strong liquor going down the throat, fragrant and powerful. That night they drank seven or eight buckets of purified water dry and went home completely satisfied.\nNot long afterward, thieves broke into Ma Huaizhen\u0026rsquo;s house. The black ceramic dish and the black ladles were stolen. Ma cursed in the street for five or six days, weeping bitterly all the while. A few months later he sold off the shop and left, and from that day onward no one ever heard of him again.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2019/2019-01-09-black-ladle/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eBefore 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\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;s signature dish was called \u0026ldquo;Eightfold Auspice,\u0026rdquo; 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.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | The Black Ladle"},{"content":"The third vernacular retelling from Zuicha Zhiguai.\nThere 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. \u0026ldquo;The lamb smells wonderful,\u0026rdquo; he said. \u0026ldquo;I wonder whether you might let me taste a piece.\u0026rdquo; Li gladly invited him to sit and laid out chopsticks. The old man took the seat by the window and said, almost to himself, \u0026ldquo;I have drifted far from home and am lodging at a nearby temple. I came for meat because I admired your refined bearing.\u0026rdquo; 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.\nWhen Li woke, the old man had already gone. In his place he had left a tiny stone, no bigger than a pellet, shining with five-colored light. Li set it into a porcelain cup, and the cup turned to gold. He rushed outside to search for the old man, but could not find him anywhere nearby, which only made him surer that the visitor had been an immortal. When he returned home to look for the little stone, it was gone. He asked his family about it, and they said they had thrown it into the water. Li regretted it for a long time, and so stored the golden cup away in a chest.\nNote: Zuicha Zhiguai, by Li Qingchen of the Qing dynasty.\nThe Chinese short tale passed from the Former Qin through the Wei and Jin, the Tang and Song, and the Ming and Qing, continually taking on new meanings and new forms. The earliest sense of xiaoshuo as \u0026ldquo;brief jottings\u0026rdquo; survived across that long history through notebook fiction devoted to odd anecdotes, variant accounts, and scattered talk. The body of such writing is immense and fascinating, covering history and geography, astronomy and calendrics, crafts and techniques, institutions and customs, and popular legend.\nBecause notebook fiction was written across so many different periods, its diction varies enormously. Add to that the modern decline in classical literacy, and a great deal of marvelous material has slipped out of common view.\nFor that reason, I want to recast many lesser-known notebook collections into plain modern prose and offer them to readers, especially works less famous than Youyang Zazu, Yuewei Caotang Biji, or Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio.\nNotebook fiction is brief, taut, and perfectly suited to the fragmented reading habits of the internet age. I hope every reader can find a small measure of delight in a minute or two of reading.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2019/2019-01-08-touchstone/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe third vernacular retelling from\u003c/em\u003e Zuicha Zhiguai.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere 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. \u0026ldquo;The lamb smells wonderful,\u0026rdquo; he said. \u0026ldquo;I wonder whether you might let me taste a piece.\u0026rdquo; Li gladly invited him to sit and laid out chopsticks. The old man took the seat by the window and said, almost to himself, \u0026ldquo;I have drifted far from home and am lodging at a nearby temple. I came for meat because I admired your refined bearing.\u0026rdquo; 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.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Records of Strange Translations | The Touchstone"},{"content":"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.\nIn the year of the Wenchuan earthquake, on the seventh day of the fourth month, the white dog went mad with barking in Xiangheli, then drew back and whimpered, making a sound like grief itself. The next day the great quake struck, and people all thought the dog had foreknown it. The white dog had no fixed home. Neighbors sometimes took it in, but at most it would stay three or five days before vanishing again. Cats, dogs, turtles, and sparrows often followed it as it moved across the neighborhood\u0026rsquo;s roofs and wall cracks.\nLast year, at last, there came a day when the white dog lay down before a sundries shop in Xiangheli and did not move again. A moment later it was dead. The shop owner was already in his forties and had known the dog since childhood. Saddened, he found a solid wooden crate once used for freight, placed the dog\u0026rsquo;s body inside, and prepared to take it to the fields of his old home in the countryside for burial. At first the crate felt astonishingly heavy, far heavier than a dog ought to weigh. Halfway there it grew lighter and lighter until at last it seemed empty. When he shook it, something rattled inside. Opening it, he found that all that remained was a jade hound the size of a palm, warm and glossy all over, with liquid light shifting inside it. He dared not keep it for himself. Instead he presented it to the abbot of Hongwasi, where it was placed beneath the seat of Maitreya.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2019/2019-01-05-jade-hound/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | The Jade Hound"},{"content":" 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.\nWhat follows is one of my own failed examples.\nDon\u0026rsquo;t Let Sheep Queue for You (Transcript)\nHello everyone. I\u0026rsquo;m T, from a very small business team. Twelve years ago, the first work I helped plan was a smash hit, but only within a small circle. People outside that circle had no idea it existed. Then, a few years later, that book suddenly became inexplicably, overwhelmingly famous. It became so famous that KOLs everywhere began citing it, elevating it into a grand theory and turning it into a classic handbook of business warfare. That book was The Three-Body Problem, winner of the Hugo Award.\nIf you listen closely, this story probably sounds familiar. We are never short of this kind of story. Take websites: Douban before, ACFun and Bilibili later, and now all kinds of short-video platforms. Originally they were all products with very narrow audiences, but once some new variable suddenly entered the picture, whether by accident or simply through the ferment of time, their audiences changed and broke through their old boundaries.\nIf that change happens to you, good. If it happens to your competitor, then it is very likely time for a requiem. In today\u0026rsquo;s language, borrowing again from The Three-Body Problem, it becomes a so-called dimension-reduction strike. Some people, for instance, say that short video dealt a dimension-reduction strike to what we thought was our real battlefield: social products. No one saw it coming.\nSo have you noticed that in the internet age, the society we inhabit is not much like industrial civilization, which demands massive construction costs? Nor is it like agricultural civilization, because you do not even own your own small plot of land. What is it like instead? A nomadic civilization. The internet shares several features with nomadic life. If every internet team is a shepherd, and every internet product is a sheep being raised by that shepherd, then you discover:\nBorders are unstable. No one\u0026rsquo;s pasture is permanent. Today you win and stand on a broader field; tomorrow you may lose everything and see the pasture ceded away. Income is unstable. Any pasture may contain countless shepherds all trying to graze there. Once too many people arrive, the field becomes a red ocean. The stronger your sheep, the more fodder it can seize. The size of the flock determines whether the family survives. If you have only a few sheep, it may be very hard to endure the winter. No matter how sturdy one sheep is, its output is still limited. Enemies surround you. Shepherds fight over pasture and over sheep. Beyond the pasture roam foreign cavalry and packs of wolves, all staring directly at your life. Seen that way, we undoubtedly occupy a very fertile piece of pasture. Everyone here, like me, is a shepherd. Then as shepherds, we first have to solve a few problems.\nFirst, we must learn how to herd sheep. Herding sheep is difficult. A flock may be the hardest team in the world to manage. It is loose and disorderly. Left to itself, it blunders blindly in all directions. Yet once one lead sheep starts moving, all the others charge after it without a second thought, never mind that wolves may be ahead or better grass not far away. The image is vivid, isn\u0026rsquo;t it? Look at our company, or at many products outside it. The group-buying wars in the distance, live streaming and short video nearby: all of them feel like classic \u0026ldquo;flock effects,\u0026rdquo; rushing in together and scattering together.\nSecond, the flock must keep expanding so that it occupies enough safe space. You need constantly to breed lambs of your own, or capture new wild sheep from outside. How to discover those new wild sheep is an enormous challenge.\nThird, you need sheep of your own. If you are always herding for someone else, then the day that sheep is slaughtered or requisitioned, your own value disappears and you are expelled from the tribe.\nSo let us try to look at our work through the logic of raising sheep. I hope this way of thinking can help shepherds avoid rigid obedience, let us test new herding methods more proactively, and improve our chances of survival.\nLet us begin with the question of learning to herd. Why sheep in the first place?\nOur pasture has to grow; we shepherds have to survive. So your boss gives you a task: go herd sheep. Fine. But what is the boss\u0026rsquo;s real need? One sheep, or a whole flock? What if he needs to march out to war? Then what he needs is a warhorse. But does he really need a horse? His final goal may simply be to keep the pasture alive. He may be going out to raid, to negotiate a marriage alliance, or to hunt. What matters is achieving those ends. In other words, what I said just now was deliberately misleading. Everyone here is not necessarily a shepherd. You may be a horse breeder. You may be cavalry. Your identity changes with the performance target. It is not fixed forever.\nSo a clear sense of your current role, and a clear sense of how that role can change, are both crucial.\nThe second problem is our greatest personal confusion. Once you enter such a gigantic pasture, you discover that it looks nothing like what I described. There is no so-called flock effect, no noisy masses of sheep, no pellet droppings smelling of grass, no shepherds in sheepskin coats. Instead you find a huge, orderly, modern workshop. All the sheep are raised mechanically, lined up in neat rows. They eat when they are meant to eat, they are milked by machines when it is time, and they are shorn when their turn comes. It is like a German documentary on the age of machinery: everyone is simply a worker on an assembly line. All you have to do is squat at your station, and when the sheep passes by, you reach out, pluck a tuft of wool, and clean its tail.\nThat may be the most frightening fact of all. Sometimes it frightens me in dreams. But it is already happening. I believe everyone here can sense it, at least a little. The engineers who exited the stage in great companies like IBM, Nokia, and Siemens are our fallen predecessors. Leaving aside personal gain or loss, the trend is obvious: the pastoral workers on the assembly line will sooner or later be replaced by AI colleagues like Tingting, YouTu, and Dreamwriter.\nBut for a giant pasture, that may not even be a good thing. If everyone advances in orderly fashion, the pasture may still be moving forward, yes, but no one will be trying anything new. We already have several sheep so gigantic they may be larger than African elephants. Sheep like that require preplanned routes, material schedules, huge teams to support and assist them, just so they can keep moving.\nBut where is the next frontier? No one knows. Finding it requires cavalry willing to charge, not merely logistics troops who know only how to transport supplies.\n[Section omitted below.]\nNow let us turn to the problem of expanding the flock. Sheep look slow. They seem to spend their lives serenely lowering their heads to graze in place. That image is deeply misleading, and it causes many people to slow themselves down to the sheep\u0026rsquo;s rhythm. But if you slow down, your sheep will slow down too, because sheep are a species shaped by adaptation, not by brute dominance. In fact, sheep can run extremely fast, or they would never survive encirclement by wolves. Their impact is also tremendous. If you have ever seen the folk sport of ram fighting in the villages of northern Shaanxi, you know the appalling crash that erupts when two rams collide headfirst. You do not want to be the one they hit.\nIf a flock wants to expand, internal breeding and reproduction are not enough. It is even more important to domesticate and bring in new sheep from outside. Internal breeding alone, breeding among close kin, is deadly. Everyone understands that. Ancient royal houses loved inbreeding because they believed their bloodlines were exalted beyond compare. In A Song of Ice and Fire, the Targaryens kept marrying among themselves and eventually produced the Mad King, Aerys the Mad. During the Northern and Southern Dynasties, Liu Song in the south also practiced close-kin marriage, and several emperors in a row turned out mad, ending at last in dynastic collapse.\nSo if we want our flock to expand, \u0026ldquo;new business\u0026rdquo; is inevitable. That means going out into the wilds to domesticate and discover new sheep.\n[Section omitted below.]\nIn 1992 there was a cyberpunk novel called Snow Crash. What was it about? In Snow Crash, a virus spreads quietly through the world, and those infected collapse into a vegetative state. The way it spreads is by tricking you into scanning a QR code it displays. That was in 1992. The people in that novel all live inside an internet-like space called the Metaverse and access it through goggles. Looking back now, it is almost identical to our AR glasses, and one small step farther gets you the world of Ready Player One.\nAnother example: the Hugo-winning science fiction masterpiece A Fire Upon the Deep was written in 1993. In that book, civilizations throughout the universe communicate through a network called the Net of a Million Lies. How do they communicate? By posting messages, or what we would simply call shitposting. Twenty-five years later, we discovered that all the essential elements of our social tools were already exhausted there. There was no real breakthrough at all. That interstellar net was a Moments feed twenty-five years ahead of schedule.\nWhy? Why were science-fiction writers back then so formidable? They sound almost like prophets.\nOne hypothesis goes like this: the explosive technological development of the last twenty years happened because humanity was digesting the fruits of science that had accumulated since the Third Industrial Revolution. The theoretical groundwork was already in place. What followed was harvest season, so naturally there was an explosion. Likewise, the explosive growth of the internet in the last decade came because we were still digesting the previous era\u0026rsquo;s achievements. As time passes, because there have been no fundamentally new changes in basic science, stagnation becomes unavoidable. We are drawing infinitely close to the technological singularity. After the singularity, human-era intelligence and technology will become incomprehensible to us, just as goldfish cannot understand human civilization. But before the singularity, human creativity will keep declining. We are now on that road.\nThat seems to explain why innovation is hard, why expanding into \u0026ldquo;new business\u0026rdquo; is hard: every idea you have already feels as though someone else has had it first. Four-legged sheep are easy to find. Sheep with three eyes are not.\nIs that really true? My answer is no. The singularity hypothesis exerts very little real influence outside basic science. In every other field, what actually matters is what I would call the rearview-mirror theory: every invention, innovation, and strategy depends on mature, already existing technologies. Take Douyin. Once that model caught fire, and even produced major effects on the to-B side of business, did we discover any profound new technical breakthrough or patent behind it? Not really. Every feature, once you saw it, made you say: oh, that\u0026rsquo;s all? When we thought variety shows had already exhausted every possible trick, Produce 101 appeared, and it was even licensed from Korea. Did it use some radically new camera system or 3D pipeline? No. They were still sheep. Perfectly normal sheep. We, by contrast, had been looking for an entirely new species. The difference is obvious.\nThis year marks more than six years since we entered the mobile internet era. So what I want to say is this: we need to find sheep, new sheep, not new species. No one is asking us to go out into the wilderness, discover a dragon egg, bring it home, and hatch a black dragon. What we need are endless new bloodlines of sheep. Countless flocks of sheep. That is how we move infinitely close to the singularity.\n[Section omitted below.]\nYes, we are the herdsmen of the internet, the light cavalry of Tencent, resisting incursions from alien tribes, guarding the wealth of the herders, summoning formations beneath the stars, and pushing past the singularity\u0026rsquo;s waterdrop. We have to find our own borders, keep trying, and try again, so that our flocks can keep expanding and produce fighting rams able to survive on their own.\nThank you.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2019/2019-01-01-sheep/","summary":"\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen preparing a TED talk, there is one especially clumsy method called the \u003cem\u003everbatim-script method\u003c/em\u003e: 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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat follows is one of my own failed examples.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eDon\u0026rsquo;t Let Sheep Queue for You (Transcript)\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Transcript | Don't Let Sheep Queue for You"},{"content":"In the courtyard of my wife\u0026rsquo;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.\nThe cooks of the Li family at Xiaoguan Temple are never permitted to trim their nails in the ordinary way. Their nails must be pared while slicing fine shreds, until each edge is rounded, smooth, and without flaw; only then may they be considered properly trained. The scrapings are gathered and used to nourish a potted plant called jing, which absorbs the grease-laden fumes of the kitchen.\nOn Taisheng Road there is an old shop called Mouse Hole, best known for its sweet-skinned duck. A cook who once apprenticed there in his youth said that the back kitchen really did contain a mouse hole, where several red rats were kept. Whenever cured or braised goods were prepared, a few whiskers had to be taken and cooked in by secret methods, giving the food an extraordinary savor. Later the neighborhood committee launched an anti-rat campaign and the old technique was broken. The owner of Mouse Hole then turned to franchising, and now branches of the place can be found across all Chengdu, which one can only admire.\nDeep within Zijing there is a private kitchen serving roast meats, braises, and the like. Buried in the courtyard are six golden jars. No one can tell how large they are, for only openings the size of sea-bowl lids show above the earth. The wine inside is called Xulu Cui Tao, \u0026ldquo;green waves of filtered jade,\u0026rdquo; said to be a method of brewing left behind by Wei Zheng. I have tasted it only once. It was probably some variety of grape wine.\nOn Zhijishi Street there are hawkers who specialize in snacks such as ice jelly, liangxia, and guiling jelly. At lamplight they push handcarts through the Broad and Narrow Alleys, crying out their wares. Their wheels are studded so densely with Dashun Tongbao coins that the carts sound metallic even before they are seen. Among their drinks is a purple one called Three-Worm Lure. Slightly sour, it is sold only on the first day of each lunar month. It expels parasites and wards off illness; spilled on clothing, it keeps mosquitoes away. Older people often bought it to feed small children.\nThe Xichang brazier barbecue on Taiping New Street uses a roasting basin shaped like a square bronze nao bell, covered by a latticed grill. The heat is tremendous, enough to cook chunks of meat in moments, and yet no charcoal is used. Add only water, and heat rises from it as if from a sauna. What lies inside the bronze bell are in fact black worm-like creatures called weile. Once they touch water, they glow like burning coals. Very few people still know how to raise them.\nQingshiqiao Seafood Market is crowded with merchants and rich in aquatic produce. One often encounters fishermen speaking in the accents of Jiaodong and reed-cloaked water folk from Yunmeng Marsh. If you come here late at night for seafood barbecue, and if the date happens to be the seventh and you have not yet drunk too much, you may just make out swaying fishing lamps in the distance, a wharf paved in blue stone, bridges carved with shell-backed bixi and pixiu, and perhaps even the sound of waves.\nOn the snack street of Haijiao City, every night there appears a bent old man carrying a shoulder pole full of green fruits. His prices are absurd, and yet buyers crowd around him. The reason is this: among every hundred fruits there will be one with a silver pit, among every thousand one with a golden pit, and among every ten thousand one that can cure all illness. He sells only two hundred fruits a night, and they are gone in less than the time it takes to steep a cup of tea. No one knows his surname or where he lives. The Bencao Gangmu says that these are not really green olives at all, and that they can cure the drooling sickness of infants.\nNorth of Shimian there was once a breed of black domestic fowl called the Shimian Iron General. From comb to claw every part of it was pitch black, without a single stray color; even its eyes were black points of lacquer. The region used to be famous for cockfighting. In recent years the Iron General has nearly vanished, only to acquire a reputation for excellent meat. There is a taro chicken restaurant in Shiyangchang that uses Shimian black chicken, and now and then one can still buy a live bird there.\nOn Hongwasi Street there is a Korean restaurant run by the Xiong family, best loved for six kinds of pickles made from jade yams, golden squash, scallions, cabbage, green spinach, and carrots, all adjusted to suit Sichuan tastes. Upstairs the little restaurant has an east room and a west room. From the eastern window one can see flying eaves and bracket sets in the distance, said to be the very site of the old Deyun Chan Monastery, Hongwasi, destroyed in war. From the western window one can gaze far off toward a towering snowy range, unmistakably Changbai Mountain.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2014/2014-02-07-keystories-chengdu/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIn the courtyard of my wife\u0026rsquo;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.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Keystories | Eating Chengdu"},{"content":" In the autumn of the Renchen year, a certain Shao of Qingyang suddenly turned into a snake, swallowed a bailiff, and burrowed into the ground to escape, all because his fruit-and-melon cart had been confiscated and his livelihood left with nothing to stand on. His wife and daughter later saw him online on his phone and asked where he was. He replied only: in the mountains. Two months later, the wife and daughter also vanished.\nStudents of the prefectural school say that on Qintai Road there is a seamstress of extraordinary skill. Her clothwork is so fine that the pencil cases she makes circulate widely through the markets, priced at three hundred in gold; if one carries them, they say one\u0026rsquo;s brush income rises by thirty percent. By chance I once obtained one of her tablet sleeves: tea-colored cloth, blue cord, and a small character for \u0026ldquo;rainbow\u0026rdquo; sewn at one corner. Even without a VPN, it could still post to Twitter.\nThere was once a beggar by the Jin River who scavenged along Chunxi Road. One day he heard someone whisper into his ear: don\u0026rsquo;t pick that up. He turned at once to look for the voice and saw a red can, though he could not read the writing on it, and there was still a little liquid left inside. So he picked it up and drank it. For twenty years afterward he never once fell ill.\nLuodai has long been a Hakka settlement, and in recent years has become famous for sorrowful liangfen. To the west of town there is a shop called Black Liangfen. The owner\u0026rsquo;s face is as dark as black jade, and everyone assumes he must be African. He himself says he is descended from the Kunlun slaves. In the kitchen there are no knives to be seen, only a matched pair of double-edged swords.\nAt the Stone Chamber Academy of Wen Weng there was a boy named Qiao, twelve years old, who made a client-based online game with three hundred thousand users online and angel money behind it. At times he would eat several books in a day, mostly programming manuals and study guides, saying that one comes to know things by eating them.\nIn Mengjia Alley there lived an old man surnamed Yu, ninety years of age, with three nostrils, the middle one plugged with beeswax. He loved tobacco and sat alone at the mouth of the alley all day long. Once snow fell over Chengdu for three days, yet within three zhang of his body the paving bricks stayed dry as ever.\nA certain Gong, a native of Qionglai who made his living as a web editor, was once discussing the Way of Yanhuang Wuxiang when suddenly the screen went black. Then something passed outside the window, scales reversed and blue-black, dozens of zhang in length, with neither head nor tail in sight; only after some moments did it finish passing by. Gong was on the twenty-first floor. The whole room was terrified, but his expression alone did not change.\nThe post of final proofreader in a newspaper office is perilous work. Men have lost their positions over taboo strokes of the brush, or even landed in prison. Zhou Kai of the Shu Daily kept a gray bird, crow-shaped, that could speak human words. Whenever an issue was about to go to print, Zhou would first let the bird look over the copy. If nothing taboo had been violated, it would make a sound like \u0026ldquo;proper, proper\u0026rdquo;; if some forbidden matter had been touched, it would spread its wings as if preparing to fly far away. Later the Classic of Mountains and Seas recorded this creature as the tuo-bird, named for its cry, born of carrion and feeding on decay.\nA man surnamed Feng from Bazhong was drinking with companions over a chicken casserole in broth. At a single glance, Feng at once set down his chopsticks, flung them to the ground, and shouted in anger: this is a forbidden bird, how can anyone eat it? His friends doubted him, and Feng said that in the old school days, whenever this bird appeared and made its chattering sound, disaster would follow in the examination halls and one would surely fail. A few days later, a work by his friend Yansheng was indeed banned because the ruling surname had been written one stroke short.\nSoutheast of Turtle City there is Lion Mountain. Following the official road by Jingju Temple from north to south, one is ascending the mountain, though the slope is gentle. Yet the mountain folk say that on horse days in an intercalary month, at the hour of zi, if one travels from south to north, that too is uphill, and even a bicycle struggles painfully on the grade.\nOn Shangchi Main Street there is a human market by day and a ghost market by night. In the day market, amid old goods and curious objects, some sell truth, some sell obsessions, some sell medicine for regret, and some sell gu. As for the ghost market, it fences stolen goods; many there have strange and magnificent features. Cards are accepted, delivery is supported, and one may pay on arrival. I once received several books from it, so heavy they were hard to lift. A man brought them to my schoolroom, with half a horn growing from his forehead, and he could speak with beasts.\nMy colleague Qiu Xin was fond of online games, and especially good at League of Legends. He bought a Razer keyboard and mouse to aid him in battle. Two days later he told people that there was a tiny phosphorescent green snake on the mouse: if its head pointed right, he would certainly lose, and if it pointed left, he would certainly win. It never failed. I did not believe him and tried a match myself. Barely five minutes in, the mouse stopped responding. I lowered my head to look, and the green snake had disappeared without a trace. Several days later it showed itself again, seeming larger than before.\nMy fellow townsman Deng Xiao was born with a doubled left foot and walked with a slight limp. He always bought shoes in pairs but wore only the two left ones. When Deng ate or wrote letters, he used his right hand; when he carried water or played basketball, he used his left; even his mouse and his League controls were set to left-handed mode.\nA web editor named Fu Yang had been on night duty every other day for nearly three years, and his face bore the look of illness. One day he fainted. After waking and returning for examination, he was thought to be anemic. Yet from that day on Fu became strikingly alert, especially at night: he could spot sick sentences and wrong words, and judge them in an instant. Only he no longer understood shapes, and could not tell square from round or flat from raised. Such was the lingering damage of his affliction.\nOur company had wireless internet. One day the connection suddenly slowed, leaving only a single bar of signal, and even restarting the router did no good. The assistant manager investigated and found a bracket-leaf ironwood tree standing in the hall, newly put there by the property management. He ordered it removed. Once it was taken out of the hall, the signal recovered by twenty percent; once it was moved out of the building, the bars returned full.\nAt Lotus Pond there was a King of Beggars, replaced once every five years: sometimes a young wife dragging children behind her, sometimes a beautiful scholarly youth. Such a one could summon wealth and ward off disaster. The merchants all treated the beggar with respect, and so none dared harbor thoughts of harm; the beggar too was content in the place. Later the city inspectors drove the King away, and Lotus Pond declined.\nAt Liulichang they bridged the thoroughfare, felled trees, and filled in the lake. Earlier an imperial inspector had come to Chengdu on tour and met an old woman, who said to him: Chengdu\u0026rsquo;s old name was Turtle City; this place is the turtle\u0026rsquo;s tail, and it should not be built high, lest it sink into the earth. The inspector summoned geologists and relayed her words in full. In the end the bridge was abandoned and the place turned into a cut through which the Chengdu-Chongqing line now passes.\nUnder the jurisdiction of Qingyang there were the Qingyang Guards: in the temples they were Daoists, outside them they served as overseers. All wore black garments inset with bronze chips. Whenever they came upon a merchant whose chip glowed red, there would surely be tax fraud involved. The overdue payments they collected were used by the Guards to support widows, widowers, orphans, and the solitary elderly, and the merchants bowed to them in admiration.\nIn a certain year, four floors of a Grade-A office tower by the Jin River were sold, and soon renovation crews entered, while a telecom operator came in to build a server room. Yet the owner never once showed up in person, claiming only to be named Caiwei and that the company did work in networking. Another year, a bank in Luzhou retired an old server during an upgrade cycle. That server\u0026rsquo;s codename was also Caiwei.\nIn the seventh year of Jinbao, a man from Jiangyou named Gan Du built a website with a group-buying section, and each day he brought in gold by the thousand. Two months later the goods grew steadily worse, and when customers sought refunds or returns, Gan Du refused them. From then on, whenever users opened his site, white maggots would crawl out from the top and bottom of the screen, no matter how thoroughly the code was examined. Within days, the site was dead.\nA director surnamed Fan from a certain intermediary company was posted to Chengdu. He believed in feng shui, and mirrors stood everywhere in his residence. When winter came, he met one ill omen after another: office mice snapping, cola spilled into the computer case, his surname arriving on a fax with a stroke missing. He took it all as prophecy of misfortune. The next year he was indeed dismissed.\nYuan Miao was fifty-eight years old and had a tail growing from his left hip, a full foot long. He had once been a worker, but after losing his job he made a living sweeping streets. When his mother lay gravely ill and dying in their poor room, Miao cut off his tail inch by inch, braised it into soup, and fed it to her. Once she had eaten it, her spirits greatly revived, and she lived on to ninety-six.\nProduct manager Wang Kui held a night banquet for plain folk, serving ten black fish, long-whiskered and patterned like snakes. Some were eaten raw, some grilled over charcoal, some cooked in oil. To each guest the flesh tasted different. When the feast was over, those who had eaten the raw fish became skilled in design; those who had eaten the grilled fish understood development; those who had eaten the fried fish excelled in testing.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2013/2013-03-03-keystories-tiger-month/","summary":"\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the autumn of the Renchen year, a certain Shao of Qingyang suddenly turned into a snake, swallowed a bailiff, and burrowed into the ground to escape, all because his fruit-and-melon cart had been confiscated and his livelihood left with nothing to stand on. His wife and daughter later saw him online on his phone and asked where he was. He replied only: in the mountains. Two months later, the wife and daughter also vanished.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Keystories | Tiger Month of the Renchen Year"},{"content":" In the autumn of the renchen year, a man surnamed Shao of Qingyang suddenly turned into a snake, swallowed a court runner, and burrowed into the earth. The cause, they said, was that his fruit cart had been confiscated and his livelihood destroyed. His wife and daughter sometimes saw him online on his phone. When they asked where he was, he replied only: in the mountains. Two months later, the wife and daughter also vanished.\nStudents of the prefectural school say there is a weaving woman on Qintai Road whose clothwork is extraordinarily fine. Pen pouches from her workshop circulate all over the city, three hundred cash apiece, and carrying one is said to increase a writer\u0026rsquo;s fees by thirty percent. I once happened upon one of her tablet sleeves: tea-colored cloth, blue cords, and a tiny rainbow character hanging from the corner. With it, one could post online even without a VPN.\nThere is a beggar by the Jin River who scavenges in Chunxi. Once he heard a voice whisper by his ear, \u0026ldquo;That one should not be taken.\u0026rdquo; He turned to look and saw a red can. Not recognizing the words on it, and finding some liquid still inside, he picked it up and drank it. In the twenty years since, he has never once fallen ill.\nLuodai has long been home to Hakka settlers, and in recent years has become famous for its heartbreak liangfen. West of the town there is a shop called Black Liangfen. The owner\u0026rsquo;s face is dark as black jade, so everyone takes him for an African. He says he is descended from the Kunlun slaves. There are no kitchen knives in his back room, only a matched pair of double-edged swords.\nQiao, a twelve-year-old student at the Wenweng Stone Chamber, writes mobile games. He has three hundred thousand users online and angel investment besides. He regularly devours several books a day, mostly programming manuals and tutoring guides, saying that he learns by eating them.\nOld Yu of Mengjia Lane is ninety years old and has three nostrils, the middle one plugged with beeswax. He loves tobacco and spends all day sitting alone at the mouth of the lane. When Chengdu saw three days of snowfall, the paving stones within a ten-foot radius of him stayed perfectly dry.\nGong Wei of Qiongya makes his living as an online editor. Once, while discoursing online about Yanhuang and Wuxiang, his screen went black. Something then passed outside the window: reverse scales, dark green-black, dozens of yards long, with neither head nor tail in sight. It took quite a while to pass. Gong lived on the twenty-first floor. Everyone in the room was terrified. Gong alone did not change expression.\nThe final proofreader\u0026rsquo;s post at a newspaper has always been perilous. One might lose the job over a taboo character, or even be imprisoned. Zhou Kai of the Shu papers kept a gray bird, crow-shaped, that could speak. Before each issue went to press, Zhou would let the bird read the manuscript. If nothing in it offended a taboo, the bird would cry, \u0026ldquo;All right, all right.\u0026rdquo; If there was danger, it would flap its wings as though flying off. The Classic of Mountains and Seas says this is a tuo-bird, named for its voice, born from feeding on carrion.\nA man surnamed Feng from Bazhong was drinking with friends when a chicken hotpot was served. He glanced at it, set down his chopsticks, hurled them to the ground, and shouted, \u0026ldquo;This is a forbidden bird. How can anyone eat it?\u0026rdquo; His friends doubted him. Feng said that in the old school days, whenever this bird appeared and made its chattering cry, it foretold disaster in the examination hall. A few days later, a book by one of his friends was indeed banned for omitting a stroke from the national surname.\nSoutheast of Turtle City there is Lion Mountain. If you take the old Jingju Temple road and ride from north to south, the climb is gentle enough. Yet mountain folk say that on leap-month horse days, at midnight, if you travel from south to north, you are still going uphill, and even bicycles struggle against the slope.\nShangchi Main Street has a day market and a ghost market by night. The day market sells curios and secondhand things: truth, obsessions, regret medicine, gu poison. The ghost market fences stolen goods. Its merchants are often magnificent in face and form. They take bank cards, support delivery, and even allow cash on arrival. I once ordered several books from there, very heavy ones. A man delivered them to my study with half a horn growing from his forehead and the ability to speak with beasts.\nMy colleague Qiu Xin loves online games, especially League of Legends. He bought a Razer keyboard and mouse for the edge they gave him in matches. Two days later he said there was a tiny phosphorescent green snake on his mouse. If it coiled on the right side, he always lost; if on the left, he always won. I did not believe him and tried the mouse myself. Five minutes into the game, the mouse failed. I looked down. The green snake had vanished. Several days later it reappeared, looking larger than before.\nMy fellow townsman Deng Xiao was born with two left feet and walks with a slight limp. He has always bought shoes in pairs and worn only the left ones. He eats and writes with his right hand, but carries water, plays basketball, and uses a left-handed mouse setup with his left.\nAn online editor surnamed Fu worked the night shift on every even-numbered day for almost three years, and his face took on a sickly cast. One day he fainted. On waking, he was diagnosed with anemia. Yet from then on Fu became astonishingly sharp, especially at night. He could identify bad grammar and wrong characters at a glance. Only he could no longer understand diagrams, nor tell square from round or flat from raised. That was the lingering damage of the illness.\nOur company had wireless internet. One day the speed suddenly slowed to a crawl and the signal dropped to a single bar. Restarting the router changed nothing. The manager investigated and saw a bracketleaf hardwood plant placed in the lobby, newly installed by property management. He had it moved. Once it left the lobby, the signal returned by twenty percent. Once it left the building, the connection sprang back to full strength.\nAt Lotus Pond there is always a king of beggars, replaced every five years. Sometimes it is a young woman dragging children behind her, sometimes a beautiful scholar. Such a beggar can attract wealth and ward off disaster. The merchants treat them with great respect and do not dare bear them ill will, while the beggars themselves are perfectly content. Later the city inspectors drove the beggar king away, and Lotus Pond declined from that day on.\nOn the Liulichang thoroughfare they once planned an elevated bridge and felled timber to fill the lake. Earlier, however, an inspector had come on tour of Chengdu and met an old woman who said, \u0026ldquo;Chengdu was once called Turtle City. This place is the turtle\u0026rsquo;s tail. It should not be built high, or the ground will cave in.\u0026rdquo; The inspector summoned geological experts, heard them out, and finally scrapped the bridge in favor of a tunnel. The Chengyu line now passes through there.\nUnder Qingyang\u0026rsquo;s jurisdiction there is a Qingyang Guard. In the temple they are Daoists; outside it they serve as inspectors. All wear black, stitched with bronze chips. Whenever they come upon a merchant whose chip glows red, there is certain to be tax evasion. The money they recover is used to support widows, orphans, the elderly, and the solitary poor, and the merchants submit in awe.\nOne year, four floors in a Grade A office building by the Jin River were sold. Renovation crews came in, and a telecom operator installed a server room. Yet the owner never once showed up. She called herself Caiwei and said the company dealt in networking. A year later, a bank in Luzhou retired and replaced some old servers. One of them bore the codename Caiwei.\nIn the seventh year of Jinbao, a man from Jiangyou named Gan Du founded a website with group-buying features and was making a thousand gold a day. Two months later the goods declined in quality, and when customers demanded refunds and returns, Gan refused. After that, whenever netizens opened his site, white maggots crawled out of the screen from above and below. The code was thoroughly checked, but nothing could be found. Within days, the site was dead.\nA media company\u0026rsquo;s director, Fan, was stationed in Chengdu. He believed in fengshui and kept bright mirrors all over his residence. When winter came, his office mice kept breaking, cola soaked one computer tower, and even his name was printed missing a stroke on a fax. He took it as a bad omen. The next year he was fired.\nYuan Miao, aged fifty-eight, had a tail growing from his left hip, a foot long. He had once been a factory worker, but after losing his job he survived by sweeping streets. When his mother lay dying in their shabby room, Yuan broke off the tail inch by inch, braised it into a soup, and fed it to her. Her spirits revived at once, and she later lived to ninety-six.\nOne night Product Manager Wang Kui held a feast for ordinary folk. Ten black fish were served, long-whiskered and snake-patterned. Some were eaten raw, some charcoal-roasted, some fried in oil. Every guest found the flesh tasted different on the tongue. After the meal, those who had eaten the raw fish understood design; those who had eaten the roasted fish understood development; those who had eaten the fried fish excelled at testing.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2013/2013-03-03-tiger-month/","summary":"\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the autumn of the renchen year, a man surnamed Shao of Qingyang suddenly turned into a snake, swallowed a court runner, and burrowed into the earth. The cause, they said, was that his fruit cart had been confiscated and his livelihood destroyed. His wife and daughter sometimes saw him online on his phone. When they asked where he was, he replied only: in the mountains. Two months later, the wife and daughter also vanished.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Keystories | Tiger Month, Year of Renchen"},{"content":"Rain Bell Extra | Fufonfia\nDark Fragrance Thursday, December 16. PLA 452 Hospital, Surgical Ward Three, Orthopedics Inpatient Department.\nThis wasn\u0026rsquo;t originally Old Mo\u0026rsquo;s night shift, but since the weekend was coming and he wanted to head back to his hometown in Nanchong tomorrow, he traded shifts with another doctor.\nUnder normal circumstances, orthopedics at night either had nothing to do or a major operation. Small injuries that just needed plaster casts and bandages could always be put off until dawn under the excuse of \u0026ldquo;observation\u0026rdquo; and then dumped on the interns for practice. As for the really big cases, the sort that required plasma, power saws, and steel pins, those never fell to him. The department chief would certainly take the lead himself. So when Old Mo was on night duty, he played PSP and watched soap operas.\nThat evening, just as Old Mo was about to slip back into the duty room, emergency sent over a patient. A girl. Pain in both upper arms. X-rays had already been taken in emergency. On the chart was written: no obvious fracture visible; suspicious fine fissures in the midshaft of both humeri; recommend admission for observation.\nShe was probably twenty-one or twenty-two, with big eyes and a pointed chin, very pretty. Old Mo couldn\u0026rsquo;t help taking an interest. In their ward there were already more than a dozen doctors who had ended up dating patients. It was practically tradition. So he personally arranged her bed, prescribed medication, set up the IV drip, did the routine checks, and asked about her condition.\nHer classmates had come with her, but once she was admitted they all left, leaving her alone in the chilly ward. Old Mo asked, \u0026ldquo;What happened to you? How do you end up with stress fractures in both arms? You don\u0026rsquo;t look like a weightlifter.\u0026rdquo;\nShe said, \u0026ldquo;I stayed up all night watching the meteor shower. When I got back and woke up this morning, my arms hurt so much I could barely lift them. It feels like nails are chiseling into the bones inside the flesh. It hurts terribly.\u0026rdquo;\nOld Mo said, \u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s just a stress fracture. Nothing serious. Don\u0026rsquo;t lift anything heavy for a while, get more calcium, rest up, and you\u0026rsquo;ll recover quickly.\u0026rdquo; While saying this, he was thinking about her X-ray films. The pattern on those arms looked like geometric motifs on blue-and-white porcelain, encircling both bones, as if some tattoo master had etched the design directly into the periosteum.\n\u0026ldquo;Thank you, doctor-brother, you\u0026rsquo;ve been so kind. The meteor shower last night was beautiful. I even picked up a bit of meteor grit. One of my classmates gave it to me. It\u0026rsquo;s in the pocket of my coat. You can take it out yourself.\u0026rdquo;\nOld Mo agreed and bent his head to search her coat pocket for the meteor. His face came very close to hers. He could feel the warmth radiating from her body, and there was also a faint dark fragrance. It smells just like Xu Xiaozhu, the girl who sat beside me in middle school, he thought.\nThe meteor grit was black and unimpressive at first glance. Only when Old Mo held it up close did he see that it had an irregular diamond shape, deep and dark like obsidian, reflecting the cold light. \u0026ldquo;You could drill a hole in it and wear it as a pendant someday. It would look very nice with a sweater.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Really? I was thinking the same thing.\u0026rdquo; The girl looked delighted. Her face was a little too flushed, but her eyes gave away how exhausted she was. Every now and then, while speaking, she had to force them open wider.\nOld Mo got up to leave. The girl nodded weakly, and the ward fell quiet again. Then in an instant the air seemed to quiver. A tiny cracking sound arose in the room, almost inaudible, like the sound a plump bamboo stalk makes after summer rain when it stretches lazily and splits its skin. The girl gave a low moan, then suddenly began screaming and rolling wildly on the bed. Her cries were agony itself. She clawed frantically at her own arms as though she wanted to snap them off with her bare hands.\nOld Mo hurriedly pushed her back to radiology for more films. The result left him stunned. Compared to an hour earlier, the fracture lines in her arms had lengthened, and widened too. Like, like the skin of soybeans after soaking overnight.\nWhen she came back she was transferred straight into ICU, and from that point her screaming never stopped again. Old Mo stayed anxiously by her bedside in ICU, watching her smooth, rosy skin shrivel in fast motion, as if he were watching the making of raisins on fast-forward.\nBy the time dawn approached, the girl\u0026rsquo;s cries were already weak and fading. No trace remained in her face of the youthful brilliance of a girl in her prime. It was as if old bark had been stretched across her skull. Through the cotton T-shirt, Old Mo could see broken bone spurs thrusting outward beneath her arms, and he knew how much that must hurt. Bracing himself, he took scissors and cut open the shirt. What he saw was several gnarled bone spurs punching up through the flesh like newly sprouting branches. The tips were forked, and on them were several petal-like calcified growths, giving off waves of rich pollen scent.\nMore bone spurs were poised to burst forth, as if someone had stuffed countless bottle caps beneath the skin.\nOld Mo staggered backward in terror and hit the wall, staring at the girl in horror. Somewhere along the way he had lost the meteor grit.\nHer ruptured blood vessels were pumping blood steadily out, staining the sheet and clothing red. Her brows were tightly knotted, her body warped and twisted on the bed. Seen from a distance, she looked like a red plum tree in full bloom.\nRain Bell Mainline\nSlow-Rolled Sleeves Monday, January 3, sleet. Day 19 after the meteor shower, Day 17 of the Twitter record.\n\u0026ldquo;Please give me two more pieces, I\u0026rsquo;m begging you, there are two little grandsons at home.\u0026rdquo; The old woman clutched at the young soldier\u0026rsquo;s sleeve with both hands and pleaded bitterly. Great black flakes of ash whirled down through the air and settled on her gray-white hair, making the deep wrinkles in her face look even more worn and haggard. The soldier shook his head helplessly, both hands clamped around the box of compressed biscuits. \u0026ldquo;No. That\u0026rsquo;s all each person gets. Children count as half.\u0026rdquo;\nThe old woman kept begging, but the people waiting in line behind her grew impatient and began calling out for her to move. At last she could only turn away, bent over, carrying her basket with effort. Half a box of military compressed biscuits and a four-liter jug of drinking water should not have been much, yet she carried them as though she were fighting a duel with gravity at every step.\nSuddenly the basket grew lighter. A large hand had caught the handle. Startled, the old woman reached to cover it at once, but another large hand dropped seven or eight extra biscuits into the basket and let go again. The basket became heavier than before, so heavy that it nearly threw her off balance.\nShe looked up to find the owner of those hands, but all she saw was the receding back of the man who had been standing in front of her in the line just now, wearing an army-green overcoat and a 3M mask that hid his face. The old woman wiped the moisture from the corners of her eyes and hobbled laboriously back toward her apartment block.\nThe man in the green coat carried the water in one hand and the few remaining biscuits in the other. He had only just reached the entrance to the flowerbed in the middle of the compound, the end of the queue and the choke point every resident had to pass to get in or out of the buildings, when a hand shot out from atop the flowerbed and blocked his path.\nHe frowned, sidestepped in disgust to avoid the reaching hand, only to be blocked again by several more men and forced to stop. They were security guards in gray woolen uniform coats, holding electric batons. One of them had a notebook and pointed to the things in the man\u0026rsquo;s hands. \u0026ldquo;Army supplies. By compound regulations, you hand over half. It will be used to relieve other households in difficulty.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I am a household in difficulty.\u0026rdquo; The man moved to walk on.\n\u0026ldquo;Hold on,\u0026rdquo; said the head of security, barring him with an electric baton. \u0026ldquo;In extraordinary times, everyone has to hand it over, for the stability and harmony of the compound\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Not handing it over. The military gives supplies to the compound so everyone has a share. Go line up yourselves if you want yours.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;What, nice words don\u0026rsquo;t work on you? Let me tell you, it\u0026rsquo;s chaos outside right now. If you don\u0026rsquo;t cooperate with property management, we can mess you up like it\u0026rsquo;s noth\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Mess up your granny!\u0026rdquo; The man in green shoved him hard. \u0026ldquo;The supplies the soldiers handed out here on Christmas Eve, where\u0026rsquo;d they get \u0026lsquo;stabilized\u0026rsquo; to? The water and food you collected door to door a couple days ago, where\u0026rsquo;d they get \u0026lsquo;harmonized\u0026rsquo; to? Your property office works for us homeowners because we pay you. We didn\u0026rsquo;t hire you so we could serve you!\u0026rdquo;\nHe used real force in the shove. The head of security staggered backward and cracked into the edge of the flowerbed, instantly turning from anger to fury. \u0026ldquo;You Jap bastard! Beat this son of a bitch!\u0026rdquo;\nThe other guards had already moved. The man in green only saw a blur and instinctively twisted aside, but still took a vicious hit across the right cheek. Fire exploded across his face. His mask was broken, hanging from one ear. He dodged the second blow, drove a kick straight into the chest of the guard in front of him, and with his right hand yanked a telescopic baton free from his belt buckle. With a metallic snap it extended to twenty-six inches, the titanium rod throwing sparks as he swung it straight at the guard\u0026rsquo;s head.\n\u0026ldquo;Hit him! Damn it, hit him!\u0026rdquo; More guards swarmed in, the tips of their electric batons spitting blue sparks as they struck at the man in green from all sides. In an instant he took several shocks, clutched his head, and went down face-first.\nThe guards closed around him, their electric batons raining down on his back and legs. Holding the notebook, the head of security turned and shouted at the homeowners in the line, who had all twisted around in shock to watch. \u0026ldquo;What are you staring at? If people don\u0026rsquo;t cooperate with the property office, who\u0026rsquo;s going to keep the compound safe? Who\u0026rsquo;s going to stand watch for you? Huh? Every household has to hand over half, and the property office will redistribute it!\u0026rdquo;\nSuddenly a scream burst out from the brawl. One of the guards hopped backward on one leg, blood gushing from the top of his foot. \u0026ldquo;He, he pulled a knife!\u0026rdquo; Then came more cries, \u0026ldquo;Ow!\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Shit!\u0026rdquo; Several guards dropped almost at once. The beaten man was down on one knee now, a gleaming M9 bayonet in his right hand. He drove the blade straight through boots into feet, one after another, turning cowhide inside out in bright red. One guard took advantage of the fact that the man hadn\u0026rsquo;t fully risen yet and brought his baton smashing down toward the back of his head. The man in green rolled sideways to dodge, smashed the guard upward with an elbow, seized the man\u0026rsquo;s right hand in both of his own, and bent the index finger back with a sharp crack. The guard howled and collapsed, writhing on the ground.\nBetter to break one finger than wound all ten. That sentence filled the man\u0026rsquo;s mind.\nSeeing the tide turn, the head of security bolted. \u0026ldquo;Just you wait,\u0026rdquo; he shouted, heading for the other security booths to call for reinforcements, only to slam straight into somebody coming the other way. \u0026ldquo;Motherf\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; he cursed as he looked up, only to meet another pair of furious eyes. By now the other homeowners in the queue had all closed in, especially several grown men who were slowly rolling up their sleeves and showing what they had in their hands.\n\u0026ldquo;Damn it, the property office is supposed to be the dog we feed, and now the dog wants to eat the owners\u0026rsquo; flesh!\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Beat the bastards to death! Throw the property office out! We want a new one!\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;What the hell do we even need a property office for anymore?\u0026rdquo;\nThe crowd exploded. Days of pent-up grievance were finally set alight. Enraged homeowners beat any property staff they could find, stormed into the management office and smashed it to pieces, then hauled every drop of water and every scrap of food from the storerooms out onto the little square.\n\u0026ldquo;Please give my grandsons something to eat.\u0026rdquo; The same old woman squeezed around the edge of the crowd, pleading for a share.\nNo one paid any attention to her. Everyone was going mad over the spoils.\nOutside the compound wall, the military police watched everything with cold detachment. No one stepped in. The beaten security guards had curled up on the ground whimpering, and only then was it obvious that they were really no more than half-grown kids.\nThe man in the green coat did not join the beating that followed. He picked up the water and biscuits that had fallen to the ground, put away his baton and bayonet, and limped home. His wife sprayed Yunnan Baiyao on his wounds, her eyes full of tears.\n\u0026ldquo;You, you could\u0026rsquo;ve just given it to them. We still have plenty of food and water at home.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Someday it\u0026rsquo;ll run out. Every little bit extra means one more day of peace of mind.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Jap bastard\u0026rdquo; is a Chengdu colloquial curse, roughly like \u0026ldquo;motherfucker.\u0026rdquo;\nFar Road Ahead Mainline 2\nMonday, January 3, sleet. Day 19 after the meteor shower, Day 17 of the Twitter record.\nIn the night, the man made a final inspection of his home. The weatherproof wooden table and chairs on the terrace had been covered with oilcloth and pushed into a corner, the door locked with an iron chain. The rappel device still hung on the balcony wall, but the safety rope had been taken away. The furniture in the living room stood shrouded in striped cloth, except for the shattered dining table. The giant power strip in the study looked strangely empty, but not a single book was missing from the shelves. Though the water, electricity, and gas had been out for a long time, the breaker, water valve, and gas meter had still been carefully shut off. All the appliances had been unplugged, the curtains drawn, and the house had fallen into its own staggered, sealed-off time.\nCaches of remaining water and canned food were hidden in the corners of every room. The man could not take all the supplies with him, so he dispersed them through the house in pieces. He still felt certain he would one day return here. Whatever the place became, it would still be his home. The litter box at the bedroom door had been changed with fresh sand. The cat food and water were fresh too. Everything was arranged as neatly and methodically as if they were only leaving for one of the long holidays they used to take, except that now there was a finality to it.\nRain was still falling outside, the drops falling into the ink-black night and stirring only wave after wave of piercing cold. The man looked at his watch and woke his wife.\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s time to go,\u0026rdquo; he said softly.\n\u0026ldquo;Are we really leaving?\u0026rdquo; his wife asked reluctantly.\n\u0026ldquo;Yes.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Where are we going?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t know. But it\u0026rsquo;s better than sitting here waiting to die.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;How long will we be gone?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t know.\u0026rdquo;\nThe two of them shouldered their packs and slipped quietly out of the apartment. The couplets from last Spring Festival were still pasted to the door. Harmony for the whole family, blessing for the whole household. Auspiciousness fills the hall, spring fills the hall.\nThe young father carried a close-fitting backpack with his laptop inside, and in his arms he held a child not yet a year old. The child\u0026rsquo;s mother was searching nervously through the room, as if terrified she might still leave something behind.\n\u0026ldquo;Can you hurry up? It\u0026rsquo;s time,\u0026rdquo; the father urged from the doorway.\n\u0026ldquo;What if the baby gets hungry on the road? You\u0026rsquo;re a man, you never think about these things. How would you know what a baby needs?\u0026rdquo; the mother said as she stuffed yet another bag of milk powder into her shoulder bag and tucked the child\u0026rsquo;s little cloak under her arm.\n\u0026ldquo;Hurry up, hurry up. The car is packed as it is. Enough stuff to drive from Xi\u0026rsquo;an and back twice.\u0026rdquo; The man reached out and pulled the door open.\n\u0026ldquo;All right, all right, let\u0026rsquo;s go. Honestly.\u0026rdquo; The mother gave the light switch one last check, stepped into her shoes, and came out. \u0026ldquo;Do you think I should bring those leather shoes I bought at Moore?\u0026rdquo;\nThe man loaded everything into the trunk. The rear windshield had been smashed, and a perforated tarpaulin covered the opening, tied to hooks at the doorframe with rope. Inside the car it was bitterly cold, with wind constantly seeping in.\nThe others arrived one by one. Five vehicles in all. Men and women, and two children, one of them not even able to walk yet. The mother of that child had clothes tucked under her left arm and in her right hand held a blue-and-white porcelain vase about a foot high. The man frowned slightly.\nWe\u0026rsquo;re fleeing for our lives, not moving house. But he didn\u0026rsquo;t say it aloud.\n\u0026ldquo;Let\u0026rsquo;s go.\u0026rdquo; He waved his hand and everyone started their engines.\nThe father fastened his seat belt and saw the companion on watch in the distance flash a signal with a flashlight. One by one the five vehicles started and rolled out in file. His Subaru was last. The mother strapped the child into the car seat, the family heirloom blue-and-white vase clutched in her lap.\nThe lead Grand Cherokee slammed the accelerator to the floor. The steel cable at its rear drew taut as a rod. With a few sharp metallic snaps that tore through the night, the ornamental European iron fence bent and broke from the base. The orange Land Rover leaped first over the forty-centimeter concrete footing, followed by the Grand Cherokee after it reeled in the cable. The violent jolting flung the water bucket from its roof. Then came the Tiggo. Its chassis was too low, and it failed twice before finally scraping over with a howl from the underside, leaving a deep gouge on the front wheel.\nWhen the man saw that even the Tiggo had made it out, he let out a breath and ran back to his own car. His wife slid out of the driver\u0026rsquo;s seat to let him take over.\n\u0026ldquo;Go on. It should be fine now. I was just afraid this car wouldn\u0026rsquo;t make it over.\u0026rdquo;\nAt that moment, a shot rang out.\nThe alarms along the compound fence went off one after another like beacon towers, and from far away came the confused sound of running feet.\nThe man shifted into four-wheel low. The Wrangler\u0026rsquo;s thick tires bit into the concrete ledge and climbed over with ease. Ahead, the other three vehicles had already lined up, white exhaust billowing from their tailpipes as if they could not wait to disappear into the night.\nThe father\u0026rsquo;s palms were slick with sweat. The child had been frightened by the gunshot and was now bawling. The mother wedged the blue-and-white vase between her legs and bent over to soothe the child. \u0026ldquo;Move! Go! What are you doing?\u0026rdquo;\nStall. Start. Stall. Start. Stall.\nThe man suddenly felt as if he had been thrown back into driving school. His legs trembled. He could no longer work the clutch properly. He had been licensed for exactly one month and three days.\nThe gunfire grew more intense.\nA ricochet struck the Cherokee\u0026rsquo;s rear right window. Its driver laid on the horn, frantic with impatience.\nThe man rolled down the window and shouted, \u0026ldquo;Don\u0026rsquo;t panic! Hurry up! Everyone\u0026rsquo;s waiting for you!\u0026rdquo;\nHis voice passed through the gunfire and alarms and became almost impossible to hear, like a stone skipping desperately across the surface of water before being swallowed.\nAt last the Forester caught. The father floored the accelerator and the car lurched sideways up onto the wall.\nThe front right wheel and rear left wheel hung across the wall like a seesaw. The tires spun madly in the air, then suddenly jerked forward, only to slam hard back into the wall.\nThe child was hurting from the plastic bag cutting into him and cried even louder. The mother began to cry too.\nThe father looked at the military policeman who had jumped onto the hood and switched off the headlights.\nWith their lights extinguished, they left the compound as fast as they could. Just as expected, no pursuers came.\nThe father, carrying the child, opened the door once more and went back inside. He collapsed onto the sofa as if released from a sentence.\n\u0026ldquo;Be good, baby. We\u0026rsquo;re not going anywhere after all.\u0026rdquo;\nThe mother crouched beside him in distress, staring blankly at the tiny chip in the blue-and-white porcelain.\nStay Home Fufonfia2\nFriday, December 31. Eastern Jianshe Road, SM Square.\nAt dawn, before the first thread of gray light had even appeared on the horizon, the air already carried a scorched smell. A cold, slick film of mist had condensed on the car windows, as if even the sound of the engine had frozen stiff.\nThe boy sat behind the front passenger seat, wedged tightly between his mother and the auntie from next door. His father drove with total concentration. The neighbor uncle sat in the front passenger seat, constantly pointing out directions.\nThe boy wasn\u0026rsquo;t fully awake yet, but after curling up in the car all night, every part of him ached, and he couldn\u0026rsquo;t fall asleep again no matter how hard he tried. Outside the window everything was gray and dim. At first they had been in the countryside, with construction sites flashing past one after another, but later it became city again. Yet it wasn\u0026rsquo;t a city the boy knew. Here there were burned-out towers everywhere, leaning power poles, dead trees. Whenever people saw his father\u0026rsquo;s big Hummer go by, they hurled stones that struck the outside of the vehicle with loud bangs. The boy remembered how when his father drove the Hummer to pick him up, other children had shown only envy and fear. Why were people here so different?\nHe asked his mother, \u0026ldquo;Why didn\u0026rsquo;t we spend the night at home?\u0026rdquo;\nHis mother said, \u0026ldquo;We\u0026rsquo;re going somewhere very far away. There\u0026rsquo;ll be electricity there, and you can watch Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf.\u0026rdquo;\nOh, so that\u0026rsquo;s it. The boy suddenly understood. Then he asked, \u0026ldquo;So Chengdu won\u0026rsquo;t have electricity anymore?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;This is Chengdu,\u0026rdquo; his mother said, pointing out the window. \u0026ldquo;And it won\u0026rsquo;t ever have electricity again.\u0026rdquo;\nWhat? This was Chengdu? It looked like a completely unfamiliar city. The boy stared out in amazement. Still, his mother had told him before that Chengdu was huge, and there were many slums he would never set foot in. Maybe this was what she meant by \u0026ldquo;lower Chengdu.\u0026rdquo;\nHis father drove around the city for a long time, as if looking for something. The boy began to feel hungry, so he asked his mother for food. She gave him a piece of compressed biscuit. It tasted terribly, terribly bad, but the boy knew his mother would be angry if he refused to eat it, so he forced himself to chew.\nAfter who knew how much longer on the road, the fathers and mothers, the uncle and auntie, discussed things for a long time, and then suddenly they drove into an underground parking garage. It was pitch-black inside, but the boy recognized the place from the special cartoon direction signs: SM Square. His mother had taken him here to watch a movie not long ago. So they must be here to eat. There\u0026rsquo;s a KFC on the first floor. I want a family bucket, a pair of New Orleans wings, and a box of egg tarts, the boy thought happily.\nThe car stopped on basement level one. His father and the uncle got out with flashlights in hand. The boy knew his uncle was a policeman and carried a black handgun. The boy had always wanted to touch it once, but had never had the chance.\nHis mother and the auntie sat with him in the dark car and turned off the lights. It was so black you couldn\u0026rsquo;t see your hand in front of your face. Only the beams from his father and uncle\u0026rsquo;s flashlights swayed in the distance, then vanished from sight.\nHe had no idea how much time passed.\nThe boy fell asleep, then woke, then fell asleep again. His father and the uncle never returned.\nThe auntie began to sob quietly. His mother\u0026rsquo;s hand gripped his clothes tightly. The boy pricked up his ears to listen, and it was as if his hearing had suddenly grown much sharper. He could hear countless tiny sounds: dripping water, air moving through pipes, footsteps. He couldn\u0026rsquo;t tell whether these sounds were really there or only in his imagination.\nThen suddenly gunfire broke out in the distance, followed by screams. Someone came running without any attempt to hide his footsteps, with heavy pursuers behind him. It was the uncle. He was shouting \u0026ldquo;Run!\u0026rdquo; while stumbling over and over and crying out in pain. The auntie climbed into the driver\u0026rsquo;s seat and started the car. In the brief moment the headlights lit up, the boy saw more than ten figures beating the uncle. His father was nowhere to be seen. His mother was crying or shouting something, then jumped out of the car and locked the boy inside. The auntie started backing up. The attackers stopped beating the uncle, because by then he lay motionless on the ground, and turned to run toward the car. The auntie backed it into the elevator bay, and the rear of the Hummer dropped down several steps. She didn\u0026rsquo;t know how to use the off-road differential lock. She only stomped on the gas, and the Hummer roared in place with a deafening wheel-spin.\nA cold hand yanked the boy out of the car. The hand was so skinny it felt almost skeletal, and its grip hurt him badly. The boy was dragged a long way through the dark until he came to a door. When it opened, white light spilled out. The hand shoved him inside, then shut the door at once. In the instant before it closed, the boy saw that the hand was not like his own.\nOne, two, three, four, five, six. The boy could now count all the way to one hundred and twenty-three. He had seen that hand had six fingers.\nAfter another little while, the door opened again, and his mother was dragged in too. In the endless blackness, the boy kept shaking her body, but he never got any response.\nIf only we could always stay at home, the boy thought.\nSantai Fufonfia3\nSunday, January 16. Jiacang Village, 58.8 kilometers from Luqu on National Road 213.\nFrom this slope, if you lay flat, you can see the winding highway several kilometers away. The sun was small and high, with no clouds at all. The gravel on the ground was sharp and freezing, and the cold wind was hard to bear. Wangdui rubbed his reddened hands together and squinted into the distance, still watching intently.\nThis was Gahai, a purely pastoral township under Luqu County with barely more than three thousand people. More than twenty days earlier, the pasture grasses had begun dying in swathes as if bewitched. Even the least picky yaks refused to eat the diseased dead grass. Wangdui\u0026rsquo;s family owned ten yaks and more than two hundred Tibetan sheep, enough to consume over a thousand kilograms of forage in a day. In only a few days the yaks\u0026rsquo; shoulder blades had begun jutting out sharply, and the starving sheep had even started chewing on the family\u0026rsquo;s yak-hair tent.\nThe home of herders is on the grassland. Many households had followed whatever patches of pasture had not yet died, but the speed of men and livestock could not keep up with the pace of the \u0026ldquo;grass plague.\u0026rdquo; Wangdui watched their neighbors move and watched their animals drop dead one by one along the way. After more than ten days, most families had given up trying to save their herds and instead turned to preserving their own lives, because before long they discovered that vegetables had stopped coming from the Han areas altogether, and even the fields of the few households that had shifted from herding to farming had withered to nothing.\nWangdui had already been eating mutton for several days. When he was hungry enough, even meat dipped in a little salt was still unbelievably delicious, but these were his own sheep, and every one eaten was one less remaining. The living Buddha of the township and the wealthy households had all left. Wangdui did not know where he himself should go. All he could do was follow his older brothers on their \u0026ldquo;hunts.\u0026rdquo; The blood of a Khampa man ran in his veins.\nFar away, the highway kicked up a plume of yellow dust. A vehicle was coming. Wangdui let out a whistle, and the three Tucsons lying hidden in the ravine behind him sprang to life. They were the \u0026ldquo;Calf Team,\u0026rdquo; made up of his brother Gesang and five or six other young men from the area. The Tucsons circled toward National Road 213 along a side track, and Wangdui sprinted down from the slope, diving into his brother\u0026rsquo;s car at the exact moment it swept around to him. Not a second off.\nHis brother Gesang was twenty-three, with curly hair hanging loose to his shoulders, and he wore fingerless gloves his mother had mended many times over. His hands gripped the steering wheel tightly. The inside of the car was filthy. The seat covers were already tattered, and even the lid of the glovebox was gone. Some Han thief had driven this vehicle here to sell off cheap, and it had cost only three yaks. But Wangdui\u0026rsquo;s family was too large. A little car like this could never take them all away.\n\u0026ldquo;Basang, the two of us take the first car and force them out, that\u0026rsquo;s all. Don\u0026rsquo;t stab anybody. Zhaxi, you and Xiaobai block the wheels on the cars behind so they can\u0026rsquo;t turn around. Wangdui, you stay in the car and don\u0026rsquo;t get out, understand?!\u0026rdquo; Gesang shouted as he handed out the assignments. \u0026ldquo;Got it,\u0026rdquo; Wangdui muttered, so quietly that even he barely heard himself.\nBy the time the three Tucsons cut onto the highway, the convoy they meant to intercept had already driven past. Gesang could only slam on the gas and chase hard from behind. The Tucson\u0026rsquo;s suspension was terrible and the car bucked violently over the road. The convoy had only four vehicles in it. Wangdui recognized one of them as a Cherokee; the neighbors had one just like it.\nThe vehicles ahead either didn\u0026rsquo;t notice them or simply didn\u0026rsquo;t care, because they kept moving at an unhurried pace. Before long Gesang had overtaken the lead vehicle, then stamped on the brakes and swung sideways across the highway. A string of shrill braking sounds rose from behind, and yellow dust billowed up until everything around them was shrouded.\nGesang, Basang, and the other boys leaped out of the car, brandishing bright Tibetan knives in their hands, the magnificent turquoise-inlaid sheaths hanging at their waists. \u0026ldquo;Leave the cars, you can keep your lives,\u0026rdquo; Gesang shouted in Chinese, though he had no idea whether the others understood him. The door of a Jeep slowly opened, and a bearded man climbed out holding a steel crossbow, glaring at them warily.\n\u0026ldquo;Leave the cars, you can keep\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; Gesang had not even finished saying it a second time when there came a bang. Everything in front of him went black and his body toppled backward. In that same instant he heard two or three more bangs. Those were gunshots.\nWangdui, still in the car and just about to watch how his brother hunted, suddenly heard a sharp crack and saw a spray of blood burst behind his brother\u0026rsquo;s head. Gesang\u0026rsquo;s body crashed heavily to the ground. Basang dropped sideways too. Blood poured down their faces in streams and was instantly drunk up by the desperately dry yellow earth.\nWangdui\u0026rsquo;s mind went blank, his ears ringing. He tried to figure out where the shots had come from, but all he saw was chaotic movement. Zhaxi shot back into the car like an arrow, then drove down off the roadbed and fled for his life.\n\u0026ldquo;Brother\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; Wangdui turned back and saw only two brilliant red blossoms of blood still spreading wider and wider across the desolate surface of National Road 213.\n\u0026ldquo;Your brother didn\u0026rsquo;t die for nothing,\u0026rdquo; Zhaxi said fiercely as he drove. \u0026ldquo;Remember this, Wangdui: a Khampa man never dies for nothing.\u0026rdquo; He drew out an urdo from his belt and handed it to Wangdui.\nWangdui scrubbed the tears from his face hard with his sleeve, took the urdo, and nodded with all his strength. Zhaxi drove the Tucson in a great sweeping arc across the yellow plain, turned back onto the highway, and rejoined the other two Tucsons. Like a pack of wolves, they clamped down tight on the convoy ahead.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2011/2011-05-20-rainbell-fufonfia/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eRain Bell Extra | Fufonfia\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"dark-fragrance\"\u003eDark Fragrance\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThursday, December 16.\nPLA 452 Hospital, Surgical Ward Three, Orthopedics Inpatient Department.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis wasn\u0026rsquo;t originally Old Mo\u0026rsquo;s night shift, but since the weekend was coming and he wanted to head back to his hometown in Nanchong tomorrow, he traded shifts with another doctor.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUnder normal circumstances, orthopedics at night either had nothing to do or a major operation. Small injuries that just needed plaster casts and bandages could always be put off until dawn under the excuse of \u0026ldquo;observation\u0026rdquo; and then dumped on the interns for practice. As for the really big cases, the sort that required plasma, power saws, and steel pins, those never fell to him. The department chief would certainly take the lead himself. So when Old Mo was on night duty, he played PSP and watched soap operas.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Rain Bell | Fufonfia"},{"content":"2011-04-02 10:29 Over the past two days we risked passing through heavily irradiated ground, retracing our way along the Qinghai-Tibet Railway through the contaminated region of Gangca county, hoping to reach Hargai and find a rail line leading into Gansu. But by the time we reached the Qinghai Lake farm, my wife and both Blade and his wife had fallen ill at the same time, burning with high fevers. To make matters worse, Blade\u0026rsquo;s car finally ran out of engine oil and blew the block. Five people became two, and we were stranded on this dangerous scorched earth.\n2011-04-02 10:30 Near the farm there is a fishing village once used by fishing crews. I came here as a child. We had no choice but to stay and nurse the sick. Judging from the angle at which the houses lean and the traces of cracks on the ground, the center of the great explosion must have been somewhere around twenty kilometers east of Gangca county. That also means that whatever route comes next, we will still have to pass through places even more dangerous than this one.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2011/2011-04-05-rainbell-april/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e2011-04-02 10:29 Over the past two days we risked passing through heavily irradiated ground, retracing our way along the Qinghai-Tibet Railway through the contaminated region of Gangca county, hoping to reach Hargai and find a rail line leading into Gansu. But by the time we reached the Qinghai Lake farm, my wife and both Blade and his wife had fallen ill at the same time, burning with high fevers. To make matters worse, Blade\u0026rsquo;s car finally ran out of engine oil and blew the block. Five people became two, and we were stranded on this dangerous scorched earth.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Rain Bell | April"},{"content":"2011-03-01 09:12 We spent another day sitting in the sun, and my leg wound is nearly healed. I learned from one of the young soldiers how to disassemble a Type 81 automatic rifle, and with my clumsy hands I ended up smeared all over with gun oil. Charging my gear with the solar panel brought trouble. At first a few people came over with laptops and flashlights to top up their batteries. Later someone tried to carry off my solar panel with a bucket of water in hand, and when I stopped him he said, \u0026ldquo;Didn\u0026rsquo;t I give you water?\u0026rdquo; I later found out he was the driver of Vice Mayor Xu.\n2011-03-01 22:45 Two nurses, while searching the hotel storeroom, went down into the basement of the north building of the Xining Hotel and accidentally found a civil-defense blast door half a meter thick. In other words, this place probably connects directly to the vast underground civil-defense network beneath East and West Street, and to those \u0026ldquo;people\u0026rdquo; drowned in vines. Everyone broke out in a cold sweat. Captain Jin had his men barricade the door tight, splash it with disinfectant, seal off the basement level, and add an internal guard post.\n2011-03-01 23:04 There\u0026rsquo;s a well in the hotel courtyard. We used to draw water from it with a pump, but now we use a hand crank. This afternoon, while Old Ma was drawing water, Zhou, the driver of Vice Mayor Xu\u0026rsquo;s daughter, again set his eyes on the simple water filter we had picked up in Xunhua and pestered us relentlessly until he nearly snatched it away. Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s injuries still aren\u0026rsquo;t healed, but even so he pulled a gun and fired a shot into the ground before getting it back. Zhou is probably used to getting his way. He was about to draw his own gun when the vice mayor\u0026rsquo;s daughter called him back.\n2011-03-02 18:10 This morning I saw Zhou with his arm in a sling. Who knows whom he offended last night. Around noon a column of black smoke rose in the distance, and I couldn\u0026rsquo;t tell what building had caught fire. It made me think again of smoke-swamped Chengdu and wonder whether the city\u0026rsquo;s lawless fires had ever burned out. Captain Jin, however, was on high alert. He immediately ordered everyone to dig firebreak trenches all around the hotel. The main buildings of the Xining Hotel are old-style structures, with wooden floors and wooden corridors throughout.\n2011-03-02 18:15 It turned out Captain Jin was not being paranoid. By four in the afternoon the dense black smoke had already swallowed half of Xining. This long narrow city is only five kilometers wide at its narrowest point from north to south. Standing in the hotel courtyard, we could already see huge red tongues of flame licking building after building as they advanced northward. The air was filled with the smells of charcoal, steel, and polyethylene. Everyone was desperately clearing flammable debris from around the hotel.\n2011-03-02 21:48 Before night had even fully fallen, the city fire had already reached the end of North Street and was staring at us across Qiyi Road. The air was so thick with ash that no one dared breathe deeply, and we all put on masks. The black smoke made the night itself even darker, firelight flickering sharply, each person\u0026rsquo;s shadow twisting and dancing on the ground. Many people in the hotel had no masks. Twelve was running around with only a towel over his face, so I gave him a 3M respirator.\n2011-03-02 22:37 The wall of fire spread across the footbridge at the end of North Street and reached our side. On both sides of the Xining Hotel were low two-story shopfronts, and their signs went up the instant they caught flame. In the evening wind, embers were already landing inside the hotel courtyard. Everyone rushed about with buckets of sand like worker bees, smothering one spot only to run to the next. Perhaps I was hungry, but in the middle of the fire I thought I could smell roasting meat. Twelve came running over to warn us to strike all the tents. A single spark would be enough to destroy them.\n2011-03-03 22:39 The city fire is still going. After more than twenty hours of ravaging the place, it has left behind only charred walls and blackened ruins. Gray flecks drift down through the air, and the Xining Hotel feels like a baked flatbread tossed into a scorching black desert. The open flames may already have spread into the western district. The eastern district, by contrast, had long since been put out. From the hotel building we could see many Dongguan people running about in the distance.\n2011-03-03 22:51 Quite apart from the fire, the temperature has clearly risen. It\u0026rsquo;s abnormally warm. Today I even took off my sweater. In other years at this time, many people would still be wearing padded long johns. By noon the blaze had already moved far away from us. During a break I looked toward the North Mountain behind us and was startled to find patches of pale growth on the slopes. Through binoculars they looked almost like little white flowers. We all stayed indoors with the doors and windows shut tight, and the place felt like a steaming oven.\n2011-03-06 23:07 The city fire burned for a full two days before finally beginning to die down, and it took another half day before the ash-filled sky gradually cleared enough to see. The sky looked like cloisonne hammered in hell, growing clearer and clearer, while the tufts of cloud scattered across it looked like the strange white flowers that had suddenly appeared in the mountains, beautiful and unsettling. By sheer luck the hotel camp survived the disaster. We walked over roads of scorched gravel to the bank of the Huangshui River to wash the filters of our masks.\n2011-03-06 23:15 From the foot of North Mountain, on slightly higher ground, we looked out over the whole city. The center and west of Xining were a sheet of scorched wasteland, with only the occasional district left untouched by the fire, yet even those were smoke-stained yellow and black. The eastern district, by contrast, was almost entirely new, sharply divided from the burned sea by a winding defensive line. The dark green oval domes stood out vividly on the horizon, and the prayers of the believers drifted through the dust-choked air as if an invisible barrier were protecting that territory.\n2011-03-07 10:59 At dawn, dew had gathered on the bare rocks but still had not soaked through the charred soil. We had returned late last night from North Mountain, and I had meant to sleep a little longer. Then I was jolted awake by the roar of engines and a burst of noise, with a few muffled gunshots mixed in. I rushed out to call for Blade and instead ran headlong into an armed stranger standing in the corridor, his face wrapped in a camouflage Arab scarf and his arm thickly bandaged.\n2011-03-07 11:54 Everyone was bound and driven into the first floor. It seemed the invaders were afraid of being discovered by Dongguan scouts in the distance outside, because even the posts outside had been replaced with their own men. Through the mottled glass I saw a nameless convoy of all kinds of off-road vehicles in the courtyard. What chilled me most was that the Hummer H5, which had haunted me like a ghost since Chengdu, was parked among them. The invaders all wore goggles and kept silent as they watched us like predators.\n2011-03-07 12:37 The invaders had dealt with Captain Jin\u0026rsquo;s men at dawn, then spent another hour crossing the Dongguan defensive trench and seizing the Xining Hotel. Our sentries were hopeless. There were roughly a dozen vehicles in the yard, all hidden beneath camouflage netting. I saw the bald man. He still wore no hat. After all this time not only had no stubble grown back, but ridged veins had begun to rise across his scalp, as if metal had been implanted beneath a punk\u0026rsquo;s skin.\n2011-03-07 21:18 A little after two in the afternoon another coach bus drove into the courtyard and backed directly up to the doorway of the first floor of the north building. All afternoon, seven or eight men wrapped in black bandages moved busily between the coach and the basement, carrying laptops and coils of optical cable. Orange and silver lines covered the ground as if the place were a mobile-base-station construction site. A little while ago there was a stir below, and they opened the civil-defense iron door.\n2011-03-07 22:08 The man who looked to be the invaders\u0026rsquo; leader began demanding guides familiar with the layout of the underground shopping streets beneath Ximenkou. Only then did I realize they had not come to seize food and supplies. The men in black had been working in an orderly way all afternoon. When no one answered, the leader shot dead the prisoner nearest him, then asked again, then shot another. Several hands went up, trembling.\n2011-03-07 22:13 I was one of the people who raised a hand, because the leader was the bald man. Midway through the journey he had warned us once, yet later drove off in a stolen vehicle. He seemed either not to recognize me at all, or to be mocking me. In the end he chose Twelve. They put a gas mask and headlamp on him, gave him a heavy toolbox, and took him down to the basement with the men in black. The rest of us remained under guard. From time to time a phosphorescent green flash swept past outside the window. That was the invaders\u0026rsquo; night watch.\n2011-03-08 10:26 Today is International Women\u0026rsquo;s Day. On March 8, 1976, a rare meteor shower fell in Jilin Province. I found that note in the offline wiki on my phone. The reason it came to mind at all was that I noticed several of the invaders wore simple 3M masks and all spoke with a slight northeastern accent. Sure enough, a few of the off-roaders in the courtyard carried Ji-C plates. Twelve and the men in black had been underground all night and still had not returned.\n2011-03-08 14:23 The hotel guards were not strict. Our hands and feet were not tied; only our guns and knives had been taken. They knew we wouldn\u0026rsquo;t run, because there was nowhere to run to. At noon the people in charge of cooking made two huge pots of mutton soup, but the invaders did not touch any of it. In fact, in twenty-eight hours I had not seen them rest. As I sat dozing in a corner, my phone suddenly vibrated several times. The mobile network has been down for more than two months.\n2011-03-08 14:24 I received two text messages, and when I opened them both were gibberish. Plainly, a nearby mobile base station had been reactivated. At the same time, the invaders working over the laptops let out a low cheer. In the instant the bald man clenched his fist, he shot me a hard look. Seeing the phone in my hand, he gave the faintest shake of his head. I hurriedly put it away. The team that went into the basement last night still hadn\u0026rsquo;t come back. What connection could there be between the phone signal and them?\n2011-03-08 22:13 Twelve didn\u0026rsquo;t return until five in the afternoon, filthy and looking utterly exhausted. They did not leave him with us, but shut him by himself in a tent, though they treated him well enough, sending in roast mutton and milk tea. When he passed in front of me on his way to wash in the courtyard, he gave me a quick wink and dropped something at my feet. It was a small twig, or something like one.\n2011-03-08 22:16 It really was a small twig. I couldn\u0026rsquo;t tell what kind of wood it was. White skin, green flesh, with a star-shaped pattern, so fresh it seemed you could wring juice from it. That evening I received several more text messages. They were no longer gibberish, but shifted again and again among many languages, including salve mundi and прывітанне свет. One message I recognized. It had only two words: hello world.\n2011-03-08 22:21 Captain Jin\u0026rsquo;s remaining men launched a futile resistance during dinner. Several soldiers tried to overpower the guard standing nearby, but the invaders threw them to the ground with impossible strength. The resisters were stripped of all their gear and driven out of the hotel until they vanished from sight. In this enormous city, silent as a cremation ground, I do not know what waited for them. Over the past few nights the sound of prayers has seemed to grow fainter, and the people of Dongguan too have fallen silent.\n2011-03-10 15:29 A fine rain began falling today. The air feels much cleaner, though there has been no real drop in temperature. From a distance North Mountain looks even whiter now. Yesterday, besides Twelve, several more \u0026ldquo;volunteers\u0026rdquo; were taken underground, and by this morning only one of them had come back, apart from Twelve. I am certain that the invaders have somehow restored a strange kind of communication with the outside world, by means we cannot understand.\n2011-03-11 23:56 At a little past one in the afternoon, a dull boom rose from underground, followed by a shaking that made heaven and earth seem to rock. I don\u0026rsquo;t know whether it was an earthquake or something else. Everyone panicked and ran into the courtyard, only to be shouted back inside by the invaders. The lines they have been working on these past two days seem to have been repaired. The men in black and the guides have still not come back to the surface, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen them use any radios. It seems they are now able to communicate by way of the network.\n2011-03-13 14:39 The captivity has now lasted six days. There are thirty-six invaders, not counting the men in black who went underground and never came back, and thirteen vehicles. No new strangers have appeared. They are obsessed only with optical cables and computers. The prisoners have grown docile as lambs, and the guards seem to have relaxed. In these six days, apart from drinking water, I have never seen them eat. They do, of course, change shifts at regular intervals, disappearing into the coach bus draped in black cloth.\n2011-03-13 14:52 Panic and unease gradually ebbed, and agitation began to spread. When the soldiers who had been driven off a few days earlier quietly reappeared among the ruins around the hotel, Captain Jin and his remaining men rebelled once again. They managed to kill two guards, but were immediately wiped out by reinforcements. The invaders moved cleanly and quickly, judging everything with uncanny accuracy, as if they all shared one pair of eyes. Camouflage uniforms were dragged off and buried among the ruins. Captain Jin was taken down to the basement and never came back.\n2011-03-13 14:58 Terror returned to the prisoners\u0026rsquo; faces. Xu Hu tried to prove his loyalty and join the invaders, but the bald man coldly refused him. Yet my unease came from somewhere else. The invaders are here for the entrances to the underground municipal civil-defense works, not for us. The truly terrifying thing is nature. In only a few days, even the flowerbeds in the hotel courtyard have begun to sprout the same white blossoms as on the mountain. This is the far northwest. By all logic, the first flowering season should not arrive until after May Day.\n2011-03-13 23:12 The bald man finally came to speak to me, though he pretended not to know who I was. He asked whether the VSAT on the off-roader in the courtyard was mine. He needed me to connect the satellite router to their cables. Thinking it might let me glimpse what they were doing, I agreed. A guard escorted me back to my own car and opened the laptop. Only then did I realize that their silent coach bus had been supplying electricity outward the whole time. #RainBell\n2011-03-14 10:48 I haven\u0026rsquo;t slept all night and still haven\u0026rsquo;t slept now. The bald man\u0026rsquo;s men replaced the feed horn on my VSAT dish, then used my laptop as a relay to download data into their system. My part in it was tediously simple: following instructions, I kept switching the server ports in the download software on and off. I have no idea what kind of network they connected to through the VSAT, but over the course of a single night we downloaded sixteen petabytes of files with the extension .yll.\n2011-03-14 22:58 Today I did no more than doze a little. The rest of the time I was on the VSAT. My laptop burned out this morning, and the fiber line was connected directly to the invaders\u0026rsquo; computers. About eleven PCs formed a small network. After receiving and processing the data packets, they fed them down through the optical cables into the depths below. On the screens I saw broken fragments of images: silver-painted Hong-8 bombers diving to attack cities covered in gray vegetation.\n2011-03-15 10:05 At dawn I finally returned to my wife\u0026rsquo;s side. The long download was finished. My vehicle, together with the VSAT, had of course been taken over by the invaders. While washing up this morning, I discovered that one of the men in black had died during the night. The invaders cut the corpse into small pieces, almost like a sky burial. A few of the pieces were buried in the flowerbed, and the rest were carried up North Mountain. There was no great amount of blood from the severed flesh, only a little cloudy fluid.\n2011-03-21 21:50 It feels as though only the blink of an eye has passed, and yet it has somehow been six days. Ever since the bald man \u0026ldquo;commandeered\u0026rdquo; my car, I lost both electricity and my other supplies, so there is a gap in the record and I have had to write in pencil in a notebook. The invaders are like a pack of internet-obsessed programmer shut-ins. Every day they are either hunched over their laptops or going in and out of the basement blast door, and they die off at the rate of one every eight hours.\n2011-03-21 22:05 Just like the first invader who died, every corpse was buried in the black scorched soil around the hotel. In only half a day, the ground would sprout a dense white fuzz like fine grass. Within two days, six-petaled white flowers with claw-like shapes would bloom among the pale grass at about the height of a hand. In sunlight the leaves and stems turned translucent, their edges irregular, like magnified phytoliths under a microscope.\n2011-03-21 22:37 The bald man slipped away this morning with his last remaining subordinates while we were struggling in a long narrow corridor of the civil-defense works with the cables spreading at our feet. He had run into something even they could not solve, though I cannot describe it all in detail just now. In any case, the invaders drove us into the tunnels and ordered us to swing knives and scissors to cut short all the optical cables, or perhaps vines, that had spread to our feet.\n2011-03-21 22:37 The corridor held only the sound of breathing and the harsh scrape of metal. The air reeked of choking plant sap. From deep in the passageway came a rustling, as though something were running underground. Twelve, who had once gone deep into the works before, had turned ashen and refused at all costs to stay there again. When everyone finally scrambled back to the surface in confusion, the invaders had vanished without a trace.\n2011-03-21 22:55 The invaders never once explained why they had come or why they had left, and they took none of our supplies except for the VSAT they stole from me. The captives sorted through their belongings, and some actually came to blows over whose things were whose, fighting more desperately than they had ever resisted the invaders. Before noon the camp had already scattered like birds and beasts. We had planned to stay and study the data packets downloaded from the network, but the reappearance of Dongguan scouts forced us to abandon that idea.\n2011-03-21 23:17 Because the temperature had risen abnormally, the upstream snow had melted early and the Huangshui River had swollen, its muddy water blocking our route out of the city. We could do nothing but search the ruined city for some place to hide. Everywhere there were either burned-out houses or ground overrun with white flowers. We decided to head for the eastern suburbs and see whether any survivors remained at the Army Fourth Hospital. In truth there were survivors everywhere. The people of Dongguan were exchanging gunfire in the streets with people of unknown origin.\n2011-03-21 23:26 The farther east we went, the denser the gunfire became. It was fighting over supplies. The mutton we had left was already spoiled. Besides time, temperature too is an invisible blade. The great fire had reduced the city\u0026rsquo;s remaining resources to ash. Even the well-prepared people of Dongguan had begun turning their knives on one another. We had to be even more careful. We could not afford to be captured again. We settled in an auto-parts shop near Xining Railway Station, in a district filled with similar stores.\n2011-03-22 10:01 In the morning we were woken by gunfire just two walls away, loud enough to make our ears ring. We held our breath and waited until it died down before daring to lift the shop\u0026rsquo;s rolling shutter. One unexpected gain was that the shop contained a whole box of squeeze-powered flashlights printed with some company\u0026rsquo;s logo, probably leftover promotional gifts that had never been given out.\n2011-03-22 12:33 After entering the heart of Dongguan again, I found that the place had changed enormously from a month ago. The eastern district had not been damaged by the fire, but streets that had once stood empty had now become chaotic and filthy. Abandoned luggage, shell casings, severed limbs. It looked like some Middle Eastern city beneath a giant Boston photo spread. Since December, this was the first time I had actually seen travelers shot down in the street and their luggage seized.\n2011-03-22 16:59 The newly built Xining Railway Station, only a few years old, was the only structure in the eastern district that had burned, obviously destroyed in some earlier catastrophe. Several enormous cold-storage warehouses lined the rail corridor, and we wanted to see whether any supplies could still be found there.\n2011-03-22 18:20 Zhongzhuang is a large area where railway employees gathered, mostly six- or seven-story apartment buildings from the early 1990s. The cold stores of the eastern freight yard were all empty. Judging from the marks on the ground, their contents had been moved in bulk by mechanized work. We crept into the freight yard east of Xining Railway Station. The tracks were bare. I thought of that last train from Kumbum Monastery. We kept going toward Tuanjie Bridge.\n2011-03-22 23:19 There were too many cold stores along the freight-yard road to count. More horrifying still, several of them were packed with body bags. Everyone\u0026rsquo;s appetite had been ruined, and none of us ate much that night. At Tuanjie Bridge there was a bus dispatch station crammed with old buses already blotched with rust. We parked among them and stayed there for the night.\n2011-03-23 09:25 We left the bus depot at dawn. The ground was slippery because a thin layer of frost had fallen overnight. The air felt like a lump of soft rubber blocking the throat, deeply uncomfortable. In the distance some people wearing orange scarves spotted us and ran toward us waving something in their hands, though I couldn\u0026rsquo;t make out what. I hit the accelerator and shook them off. We were not far now from the Army Fourth Hospital.\n2011-03-23 11:16 The old site of the Army Fourth Hospital was on Kunlun Road, though by now it had long since relocated to Xiaoxia. We drove east along Bayi Road. Now and then ricochets struck the hood and bounced away. When we reached the hospital, we found it already reduced to ruins, with oil stains and dried blood everywhere. Not far away, on the Lanzhou-Xining Expressway, hung the wreckage of a helicopter.\n2011-03-23 13:40 There were still some medicine crates left in the hospital pharmacy, and everyone rummaged through them to see what might be useful. In the ruins of the inpatient building there were a few places covered with striped tarpaulins. It was only when we came close that we realized there were still people there. Most were women, already emaciated beyond recognition. At their feet were piles of Styrofoam and shredded plastic bags. Their faces were covered with rags, leaving only their eyes exposed. When they saw us, they showed no reaction at all, simply sat there blankly.\n2011-03-23 18:15 We spent the whole afternoon scavenging through the ruins and found quite a few \u0026ldquo;good things.\u0026rdquo; There were probably still people at the nearby farms. A man came out from a farmhouse and shouted from far off, \u0026ldquo;Be careful! Stay away from those polluted ones!\u0026rdquo; I turned back to look at the people under the tarps, and it seemed as though tears were rolling down behind the rags over their eyes.\n2011-03-23 21:37 After dark we stayed at a nearby farm. The man who had shouted to us was surnamed Bai. He was warm enough, helping us cover the vehicles with cut-open fertilizer sacks. \u0026ldquo;Your cars will attract thieves,\u0026rdquo; he said. \u0026ldquo;There are a lot of them around here now, all driving jeeps.\u0026rdquo; Hearing the way he spoke, I guessed he must be Mongolian. Supper was boiled beef, a big steaming pot of it. Though it was bland and short on oil, it still felt almost like hotpot to us.\n2011-03-23 21:40 While we were eating, Blade asked why the people in the ruins were called \u0026ldquo;the polluted.\u0026rdquo; Old Bai lowered his voice mysteriously and said those were all people who had been saved from death but never quite died, and for some reason they were all women. With the recent warming spell, grass had started growing out of them. Old Bai\u0026rsquo;s wife cut in from the side and said they didn\u0026rsquo;t eat food at all anymore. All they did was gnaw on plastic.\n2011-03-23 22:06 Old Bai said that at the end of January a batch of newly developed vaccine, some kind of isotope, had supposedly arrived in Xining, and only the army hospitals had it. At the time people were breaking their heads trying to get injected. But without exception, everyone who received it later fell ill. Most died. Those who survived all underwent pathological changes, their appetites fading and their movements slowing. We all thought of the isotopes we had been injected with, yet what he described was different from our own experience.\n2011-03-24 11:48 We bandaged our wounds and discussed where to go next. At dawn Blade, who had been only pretending to sleep, was the first to sense something wrong and felled Old Bai with an arrow just as he was creeping into the yard with some villagers. There were more than ten of them. Fortunately they had no guns. We fought them off and in the end, relying on firearms, shot down six and drove the rest away. My neck was cut in the struggle. Old Ma said that what we ate last night probably wasn\u0026rsquo;t beef. Everyone was retching in the yard.\n2011-03-24 12:42 We decided to head west. Since the weather is warming, the plateau may not be as desolate as we imagined. Trees of some strange kind had grown up through the middle of the Lanzhou-Xining Expressway, splitting the asphalt by sheer force. None of us recognized what sort of trees they were. Their trunks twisted and their crowns were stark white.\n2011-03-24 13:59 We parted from Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s family at the toll station on the Lanzhou-Xining Expressway. They headed toward Lanzhou, while we turned toward Haiyan. By then their injuries from the fall had almost completely healed. We had spoken little to one another for many days, and they were resolved to go. Before leaving I gave Old Ma our last can. As I watched their vehicle drive away, there were only five of us left. Twelve was in my car.\n2011-03-24 18:19 Passing through Xigang, the stench of corpses forced us to put on masks. Huangzhong too had recently been put to the torch. We left the expressway and took the old mountain road, continuing on toward Haiyan. The Huangshui River was in flood, and in many places we had to drive through water. We might not even reach Huangyuan tonight.\n2011-03-24 21:46 We spent the night more than ten kilometers short of Huangyuan, where there stood a magnificent temple to Nüwa halfway up the mountain. The hills here too were covered in white flowers, though they were different from those on North Mountain in Xining. After dark, little motes of phosphorescence drifted in the wind. I remember countless journeys westward here in childhood, the rolling mountain ridges in the distance like the backs of ancient beasts. Deep in the mountains came the cries of some beast, carrying very far. Farther off still, at an impossible distance to measure, firelight trembled.\n2011-03-25 16:13 We passed through Huangyuan this morning. This major town on the old Tang-Tibet Road remains largely intact, but it is already empty. Only a few Han Chinese were there, crouching in the sun in padded jackets, their faces and hands wrapped in rags, looking at us with obvious ill will. The lama temple in the old city of Dangar was empty too.\n2011-03-26 08:15 The shores of Qinghai Lake are overgrown with gray thornbushes as high as the waist. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t look like spring at all, but like the desolation of autumn. Not far from us on the lakeshore stands a broken sign reading \u0026ldquo;Torpedo Testing Base.\u0026rdquo; We did reach Haiyan yesterday, but our instruments showed radiation levels there were seriously over the limit, so we kept well clear of it.\n2011-03-27 22:26 We are now at Hainaihai, south of Qinghai Lake. There are many bird eggs on the lake shore, enough to feed us for a while. The herders who once grazed animals here have all gone west along the Tang-Tibet Road. Judging by the traces left on the mani cairns by the roadside, they departed together with refugee convoys bound for the holy city. Here the radiation index has dropped back to normal. We are preparing to circle Qinghai Lake clockwise toward Haixi. But since food is plentiful here, we may as well stay a couple more days.\n2011-03-28 21:25 Vast fields of white mushrooms grow along the western shore of Qinghai Lake. I know they are one of the region\u0026rsquo;s famed delicacies and extraordinarily delicious, but when I saw the claw-boned white flowers growing among them, I swallowed hard and looked for something else to eat. The farther north we went, the more ruined tents and traces of camps we saw on the grassland. Over the shallows of the lake a layer of downy petals drifted, and naked carp were greedily swallowing them.\n2011-03-29 09:28 Qinghai Lake may be immense, but it is a salt lake. These past few days we have been collecting dew at night by spreading out sheets of plastic. Only by continuing north will we reach streams of fresh water flowing into the lake. This morning, when we went to gather water, we discovered that the little mounds we had seen last night were actually several fresh graves. Broken entrenching shovels had been stuck into the tops, and beneath stones lay shoulder insignia, standard-issue Second Artillery tabs, one of them even for a lieutenant colonel.\n2011-03-29 12:48 Like herders, we followed West Ring-Lake Road north. In the distance we saw that every pane of glass in the Bird Island Hotel had shattered, and purple curtains streamed out of the rooms and waved in the wind. The Buha River flowed beneath our feet, splitting like leaf veins into countless branches before finally emptying into Qinghai Lake. Only when we got closer did we discover that the northeastern outer walls of every building in the Bird Island tourist center were covered with fine cracks. They had been caused by the shock wave of a huge explosion.\n2011-03-30 22:35 Plenty of food always breeds inertia. We lingered along the rich shores of Qinghai Lake, and it was hard to imagine how much resolve the herders who had lived here for generations must have summoned to abandon it. When the Qinghai-Tibet Railway finally appeared before us, the track bed, untended for two months, had already begun to sag and warp. We hesitated again: should we continue west along the Qinghai-Tibet line, or turn north here and enter the Hexi Corridor?\n2011-03-30 22:40 At that very moment, however, my car chose to break down. Wrangler parts are not exactly found lying around everywhere. After weighing our options, we turned east toward Gangca, the nearest county town. I still hadn\u0026rsquo;t abandoned my vehicle entirely. We hitched it behind Blade\u0026rsquo;s car with a tow rope and crawled forward at a miserable pace. Before we even reached Yikewulan Township, we discovered that Gangca county seat, more than ten kilometers away, had long since been destroyed by shock waves.\n2011-03-30 22:59 We hurriedly measured the radiation in the air with our simple instrument. It came to about 236 millisieverts, more than twice the safe level. Given that this area had fallen within the old Zone 452 nuclear unit many years before, a somewhat elevated reading was not entirely surprising. I cannot fathom what kind of attack destroyed Gangca. The cracked walls of the Bird Island Hotel must have been caused by the aftershock from here. But what in a small plateau town on the edge of the Gobi could possibly have been worth destroying?\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2011/2011-03-31-rainbell-march/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e2011-03-01 09:12 We spent another day sitting in the sun, and my leg wound is nearly healed. I learned from one of the young soldiers how to disassemble a Type 81 automatic rifle, and with my clumsy hands I ended up smeared all over with gun oil. Charging my gear with the solar panel brought trouble. At first a few people came over with laptops and flashlights to top up their batteries. Later someone tried to carry off my solar panel with a bucket of water in hand, and when I stopped him he said, \u0026ldquo;Didn\u0026rsquo;t I give you water?\u0026rdquo; I later found out he was the driver of Vice Mayor Xu.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Rain Bell | March"},{"content":"2011-02-01 00:45 Overnight the government set up porridge kitchens all along the main streets of the county town, serving pilaf and clear noodle soup. Unexpectedly, I even saw blue tents marked with the United Nations emblem. At last, medical vehicles were visible again, and my wife ran off to collect some glucose and cold medicine. It was already after midnight. The smell of roasting mutton was drifting everywhere, and for a moment I felt as though I had slipped back many years into a night market in the northwest. I have a feeling we\u0026rsquo;re going to be staying here for a while.\n2011-02-01 00:53 There are more guns on the streets now, and oddly enough they act as a kind of balance. The little town has grown quite peaceful. Everyone has relaxed for the moment, as if this place were the end of the road. Blade found the black market and traded canned fish for a few boxes of ammunition. We\u0026rsquo;ve parked on the outskirts, far from the town center, where there used to be potato plots. Many travelers without shelter are camped along the roadside, mostly people who got here by hitching rides after their electric scooters ran out of power. They\u0026rsquo;re too exhausted to move and short on supplies.\n2011-02-01 21:37 Today is the first day of February. In another two weeks it will be Spring Festival, and I have no idea what state we\u0026rsquo;ll be in by then. This morning we went to the tents bearing the UN insignia. They\u0026rsquo;re UNDP people, and today they were recruiting UNVs. Our motives, of course, were anything but pure. We only wanted one more layer of protection. Plenty of others had the same idea. When we signed up, military police were handing out application forms. My instincts screamed at me not to fill them in honestly.\n2011-02-01 21:44 In the end, only my wife and Old Ma got UNV assignments. My wife is helping distribute drinking water, and Old Ma, along with many other volunteers, has been assigned to group and register the outsiders in Xunhua county who show cold symptoms. UNV work comes with meals: self-heating military rice packs. I was actually selected too, but they wanted me to guard refrigerated trucks filled with samples taken from the disease dead, and I refused.\n2011-02-02 13:03 Before dawn this morning, a dense burst of gunfire tore through the little town, like a string of ten thousand firecrackers going off at once. By late morning we learned that several military police on the night shift had had their throats slit and their weapons stolen. Supposedly the robbers all wore V-shaped badges pinned to their upper arms. That\u0026rsquo;s a remarkably stupid way to make yourself conspicuous. Around noon military police inspected our cars, but because we had UNDP-issued badges, they didn\u0026rsquo;t siphon our tanks dry. Old Ma says there are a lot of people running low fevers.\n2011-02-02 23:56 Tonight they handed out a yellow medicinal liquid and ordered us to drink it in three doses. Since we\u0026rsquo;d already been injected with isotopes, none of us drank it, except Blade, who swallowed his without a second thought. Last night it wasn\u0026rsquo;t only the throat-slittings. Several cars were stolen too. We don\u0026rsquo;t dare sleep in the tents anymore, so we\u0026rsquo;ve parked our three vehicles pressed tightly side by side in a line, with only the cab on the far left usable for getting in and out. On the iPod we watched Zhao Benshan\u0026rsquo;s old comedy sketches. The final year of them was unexpectedly sad to watch.\n2011-02-03 12:55 This morning at the porridge station it was clear noodle soup again, though this time there was actually cabbage in it, and I couldn\u0026rsquo;t decide whether it was safe to eat. A few more medical tents marked with the blue Star of Life have appeared on the main street, and a lot of people are on IV drips. Fortunately there don\u0026rsquo;t seem to have been any deaths yet. The local Salar people are very wary of us outsiders, though they\u0026rsquo;re perfectly cordial to other Qinghai natives. Some people who can speak Qinghai dialect have even managed to move into private homes. I\u0026rsquo;m going to try my luck too.\n2011-02-03 18:04 Something happened to Blade\u0026rsquo;s wife today. During the lunch break she suddenly developed a fever, accompanied by mild convulsions, darting eye movements, and a racing pulse. Blade tried to take her to a medical tent, but the symptoms vanished halfway there. In the afternoon she had two more episodes, both lasting only a little over ten minutes, and afterward she felt completely normal. Blade didn\u0026rsquo;t dare ask a doctor directly. He could only inquire in private whether anyone else had shown similar symptoms and what the consequences might be.\n2011-02-03 23:57 Tonight I traded a forty-five-liter Pathfinder backpack to a stranger who also drives a Sahara in exchange for two single-beam laser emitters, shaped like flashlights and capable of firing green laser beams. Supposedly they\u0026rsquo;re especially useful at night, enough to blind someone in an instant. Blade\u0026rsquo;s wife had two more episodes this afternoon, though still no other symptoms. At dusk the military police forced two robbers at the county courthouse, and half the town went to watch.\n2011-02-03 23:58 Xunhua is only one hundred and sixty kilometers from Xining. Even with detours it shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be more than two hundred. We agreed to leave tomorrow. We can\u0026rsquo;t stay here forever. We need to keep moving west. Around nine o\u0026rsquo;clock tonight, army engineering vehicles started rolling down Provincial Road 202. The lead vehicle carried a huge placard reading \u0026ldquo;Convoy Begins.\u0026rdquo; The line kept roaring past until just now, when the tail vehicle finally appeared, also carrying a big sign, this one with \u0026ldquo;Convoy Ends\u0026rdquo; spelled out in glowing batons.\n2011-02-04 08:39 Before dawn we were jolted awake by an enormous roar. Outside it was bright as day. Several blinding white arcs rose from a valley more than ten kilometers away and streaked east across the sky. PL said they were Dongfeng-25B medium-range surface-to-surface missiles. I know Second Artillery units of Lanzhou Military Region are deployed in Haidong. No one knows what happened or where those missiles were headed. A moment later several more white trails rose, this time flying southeast.\n2011-02-04 08:52 Note: the Dongfeng-25B medium-range conventional surface-to-surface missile, an upgraded version of the Dongfeng-25, also known as the Dongfeng-21C, with an effective range of 3,200 kilometers, enough to cover most targets in Asia. It can carry three warheads but has no guidance module. It uses a five-axle semi-trailer launcher for mobility.\n2011-02-05 00:27 I spent the whole day in dread, with images of Judgment Day filling my head. I had never before seen a missile launch so magnificent and so terrifying. The radio says the purpose was to completely destroy the contaminated forests of Shennongjia and Zhangjiajie. But against forests, what good are missiles compared to incendiaries? Even though no formal martial order has been announced, no one in Xunhua dares leave now. Another two engineering convoys passed through this afternoon and evening.\n2011-02-05 00:37 Ever since the business in Sangke, there\u0026rsquo;s been a layer between us and Old Ma. Even ordinary conversation has become stiff. I don\u0026rsquo;t want to force myself to act more magnanimous than I feel, but I do hope we can close this gap somehow, because all of us understand more clearly now how important it is to survive together, and we need to know one another better than before. So a strange but somehow sensible thing has started happening: every day everyone competes to take on work, trying to dissolve something unspoken. Blade alone remains stubbornly himself.\n2011-02-05 10:34 This morning more than a dozen military trucks rolled into the county town. A man in his fifties wearing a major general\u0026rsquo;s insignia broadcast over the loudspeakers, recruiting construction workers for fortification work in Guide. He wouldn\u0026rsquo;t say exactly what they were building, only that food and lodging were covered, immunity guaranteed, and military goods issued. I suspect those engineering convoys from the past two days were all headed there. Now they must be short of engineers, so they\u0026rsquo;re recruiting civilians. What could they possibly be doing in Guide? That\u0026rsquo;s downstream from Longyang Gorge.\n2011-02-05 10:35 None of us intends to go, but many people signed up, especially those with no car and no remaining baggage. The major general said a convoy would come at noon to collect them. The military police under his command were wearing black steel helmets, and on those helmets I saw that familiar emblem again: a soldier in a helmet holding a stalk of wheat. They spread out and began explaining the policies for the construction site. We all hid ourselves away with the UNDP people.\n2011-02-06 00:21 It\u0026rsquo;s midnight, and the county town is still thick with shifting headlights, elongated shadows sliding across the endless black backdrop. All day long military trucks have carried people away, only to unload even more, apparently redirected here in an organized way from other jammed provincial roads. The officers recruiting laborers are still moving among the travelers, stressing more and more the guarantee of food. Longyang Gorge. I\u0026rsquo;d heard stories about it as early as primary school.\n2011-02-06 00:36 Blade\u0026rsquo;s wife has now been having these episodes for two full days. Blade says she is generally normal in the car, but more likely to have an attack while standing on sandy ground. It suddenly occurred to us that she is the only one who neither received the isotope injection nor drank the yellow medicine. At dusk we had her drink the dose she\u0026rsquo;d skipped that day, and sure enough she was much better by evening. Too many new arrivals have crowded into the county town now; even the open ground beside our cars is full, and things have become oppressively cramped. Even going out to relieve yourself means a long walk.\n2011-02-06 14:23 Today more travelers, though by now they probably ought to be called drifters, kept pouring in. From Qingshui to Jiezi the place was packed with people, and the banks of the Yellow River were covered in tents of every bright color. Soot-streaked, dust-caked people could do little besides chop wood and drink boiled river water; most survived only on relief from the porridge kitchens. We decided to leave here and head west along the Yellow River. If all went well, once past Lijia Gorge we could take the Xita Expressway straight to Xining.\n2011-02-06 15:51 UNDP\u0026rsquo;s bottled drinking water had long since run out. My wife was helping distribute a simple water-filtering device that let people drink straight from the Yellow River. It was just a plastic tube containing seven layers of filter mesh; short of heavy-metal contamination, it could purify any water source. Unfortunately the supply was tiny, at most only a few thousand units. My wife was told that once they were all handed out, her appointment would end as well, and someone kindly advised her to move farther upstream.\n2011-02-06 16:05 I went to the temporary military service depot to buy matches and unexpectedly ran into my middle-school classmate Gajian. He\u0026rsquo;s from Ledu, and his whole family fled to his grandmother\u0026rsquo;s place in Xunhua on January 20. I asked why he hadn\u0026rsquo;t headed toward Xining, and he said, \u0026ldquo;Who still goes to the cities now? Our house is already full of relatives who ran from Xining and Lanzhou.\u0026rdquo; I was stunned. Wasn\u0026rsquo;t Lanzhou supposed to be the \u0026ldquo;rear area\u0026rdquo; on the radio? If even the locals had fled, what kind of scene must the city be in now?\n2011-02-06 19:22 After my wife finished up a little after five, we drove out of the county town. Old Ma hadn\u0026rsquo;t gone back to work for UNDP yesterday; he said the job was too dangerous. When we reached Yimamu Bridge, we found that only military vehicles were allowed through. So we kept following the Yellow River bank. The road was swarming with people, so chaotic that we couldn\u0026rsquo;t build up any speed at all. We crept all the way to Zanzhongzhuang only to find that we couldn\u0026rsquo;t cross the river there either. They couldn\u0026rsquo;t seriously expect us to take sheepskin rafts, could they?\n2011-02-06 19:38 While we were hesitating by the bridge about whether to keep going or what to do, we ran into Gajian again. He was driving a Great Wall pickup back to his home on Gandu Street. After seeing our situation, he whispered a few words to the sentry on the bridge, then waved grandly for us to follow him, and we crossed without trouble. Only then did I realize that the guards on this bridge were Hui and Salar militiamen, wearing green badges painted with a star and crescent.\n2011-02-06 19:48 Gajian said it was already so late that we might as well stay at his place. His grandmother\u0026rsquo;s home on Gandu Street was a large riverside compound, with a front courtyard big enough to serve as a parking lot for more than twenty cars. Back in school Gajian had always been low-key and honest; I never imagined his family was this well-off. Plenty of vehicles were already parked in the courtyard. Besides local plates, there were several off-roaders from Sichuan and Shaanxi too, apparently other outsiders like us.\n2011-02-07 00:03 We were settled into three single-story rooms in the west yard. It had been so long since we\u0026rsquo;d slept in a warm house. Freshly washed socks were drying on the heater pipes, and outside, parachute cord was strung from car to car with clothes that had been washed all evening hanging from it. We spoke with Gajian and confirmed it would be no problem for us to stay two days. Even though his family certainly wouldn\u0026rsquo;t mention money, we had to show something. We scraped together a roll of dollars from Blade and pressed it on him. He didn\u0026rsquo;t refuse.\n2011-02-07 00:41 Gajian\u0026rsquo;s grandmother\u0026rsquo;s household runs a farmhouse inn, which explains why there are so many rooms. I had just gone to the toilet and tripped over something; when I got up I realized it was a person lying on the ground. I helped her up and found it was a woman staying in the next room. When I helped open her door, I saw she was by herself, having made it here alone all the way from Chengdu. Remarkable, really. From the way she described it, her symptoms were the same as Blade\u0026rsquo;s wife\u0026rsquo;s.\n2011-02-07 00:48 There are actually militiamen standing watch around Gajian\u0026rsquo;s courtyard, three to a group, and they\u0026rsquo;re well equipped. He explained that after the situation turned chaotic, nearby people of the same community had formed a collective. I know the ethnic makeup here is complicated, with Salar, Hui, Tibetan, and even Bonan and Dongxiang communities, each with its own groups. It\u0026rsquo;s hard to believe such disciplined paramilitary forces were assembled in so short a time. They must have existed all along.\n2011-02-07 11:39 This morning I finally had a satisfying bath in the yard\u0026rsquo;s washroom, using water pumped straight from the Yellow River. After eating two kunguo flatbreads, I carried a little folding stool into the courtyard and chatted away with the other travelers. There were people from Chengdu, Mianyang, Guangyuan, Xi\u0026rsquo;an, Baoji, and Tianshui. It felt very much like years ago in a little guesthouse in Motuo, talking with strangers. Conditions were much the same everywhere; only Mianyang still had garrison troops. In Shaanxi, many people had evacuated toward Inner Mongolia.\n2011-02-07 11:48 The woman I met last night was there too. She wore an olive quick-dry shirt, and the exposed stretch of one arm was covered in scars. Her Twitter handle, @leftry, was embroidered on her cuff. Her companions had all been lost on the road, and only she had made it this far. Mentioning Twitter reminded me to prop up the VSAT from the car and get online. Twitter wouldn\u0026rsquo;t open. I tried sending a message through a client I\u0026rsquo;d built myself, but it failed. Those base stations must all be down.\n2011-02-07 16:09 Though Gandu lies only a river away from Xunhua county town, its streets are much quieter, with none of the dust-colored drifters in sight. The white courtyard walls glare under the plateau sun. Sitting in the yard, I can see a tall tower capped with a crescent spire, and even a lama temple in a hybrid Han-Tibetan style. At noon I slipped out alone to spin the prayer wheels and light two butter lamps. Afraid of offending Gajian\u0026rsquo;s family, I didn\u0026rsquo;t go straight back, and instead strolled along the river for a while.\n2011-02-07 16:30 More than a dozen large SUVs were jammed at the bridgehead we crossed yesterday, all luxury models like Lexuses. The people inside were waving submachine guns, trying to force their way across, but the bridge guards refused to yield. Dozens of guns came up in unison, and there were even rocket launchers. After a tense standoff, a Q7 with Lanzhou plates drove up and led the convoy back toward Yimamu Bridge to cross there instead. Then I suddenly spotted a familiar vehicle at the tail end: that Hummer H5.\n2011-02-08 00:06 Toward evening I went to the lama temple again, hoping to ask the geshe for some Tibetan medicine. Instead I found that the convoy of luxury SUVs that had crossed the river this afternoon had settled there. Three of the vehicles carried military plates. There had to be twenty or thirty people in thirteen cars, yet only a dozen or so were drawing water and cooking; the rest never got out. They all wore hoods and monk-like robes, and several even had gas masks on. The bald man was among them too.\n2011-02-08 00:12 Afraid the bald man would spot me, I backed out. But I had already realized that this convoy must have been assembled piece by piece along the road, because the plates were from different places and the conditions of the cars and the wear on the tires didn\u0026rsquo;t match. But the military vehicle that had led them across the bridge had to belong to real military people, and important ones at that. Otherwise how could it possibly have passed Yimamu Bridge? The whole thing was baffling: they were so secretive, and staying here of all places.\n2011-02-08 00:15 That evening Gajian invited me to his family\u0026rsquo;s dinner. I grew up in the Muslim quarter of Dongguan in Xining, and I even had a distant grandmother from a Hui family, so I still know some of the etiquette. Gajian\u0026rsquo;s elder brother Naibao asked me in great detail about what we\u0026rsquo;d seen along the way. When he finished listening, he said that Xining and Chengdu were not the same, and that they were preparing a convoy to return there, because in the coming months Xining would become even safer.\n2011-02-08 00:26 I asked in astonishment why, but he would say no more, only that the Dongguan Great Mosque was a place under Allah\u0026rsquo;s protection. After dinner, though, Gajian quietly told me that this had to do with military engineering works in the upper Yellow River. Supposedly they were carrying out a quarantine measure called \u0026ldquo;Green Dam\u0026rdquo; to secure the water sources upstream. Once that happened, the banks downstream from Lijia Gorge would become unsafe, and Lanzhou itself might even be abandoned.\n2011-02-08 00:26 Xining, by contrast, depends on the Huangshui River, which has strong natural self-filtration, and it was not directly struck by the meteor shower. The earlier wave of retreat had been caused entirely by mass panic. West of Xining there is only boundless Gobi and the dried-up Qinghai Lake; apart from Golmud, hundreds of kilometers away, there is no major region left where humans can survive. To go farther west would be suicide. So they had decided to set out within two days and return to Xining.\n2011-02-08 00:32 After I went back and discussed it with the others, we quickly decided to go with Gajian\u0026rsquo;s group, since it matched our plan anyway. To my surprise, he refused flatly. His reason was that, for certain religious reasons, his family would not travel together with outsiders. But he added that we could follow far behind them. That made little practical difference, so I agreed and thanked him. We would stay here two more days. What exactly was this \u0026ldquo;Green Dam\u0026rdquo; quarantine plan?\n2011-02-08 13:59 At noon we sat in the courtyard and ate a proper bowl of lamb mianpian. I noticed @leftry sitting off by herself and quietly asked whether she would like to come with us. I\u0026rsquo;d asked Gajian about her; the reason she could stay here was that she had long traded dark tea between Qinghai and Hunan and knew many of the local merchants well. She looked at me in surprise, and after making sure I wasn\u0026rsquo;t joking, happily agreed. I arranged for PL to share a car with her.\n2011-02-08 14:09 Of course, I had my own calculations. It was inconvenient for PL to stay crammed together with Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s family, so it would be better to split him off. And if @leftry knew the merchants here, chances were she knew people in other parts of Haidong as well. With the future so uncertain, one more person meant one more chance. Besides, the fact that she was the only one of her companions to survive surely wasn\u0026rsquo;t mere coincidence. She drove a battered old Jetta and didn\u0026rsquo;t mind taking one more passenger. PL wore a blank expression and made no comment.\n2011-02-08 22:21 The lama temple outside has caught fire. Everyone is helping put it out. For all that these different groups normally keep apart, almost like fire and water, when trouble comes they don\u0026rsquo;t hesitate. There\u0026rsquo;s no relying on a fire brigade here; the town has its own civilian mutual-aid fire teams. We\u0026rsquo;re helping drag hoses.\n2011-02-08 23:25 Fortunately the fire only burned one of the temple\u0026rsquo;s side buildings. It was probably just someone cooking a late-night meal and letting it get out of hand. The SUV convoy that had been in the courtyard was already gone; I have no idea when they left. The lamas and Tibetan locals were clearing the fire scene, and the militia withdrew of their own accord to avoid giving offense. Near the flowerbeds in the courtyard I saw a great deal of gauze thrown aside, as though it had just been unwound from patients\u0026rsquo; bodies, stiff with dried blood.\n2011-02-08 23:33 The lamas carried strange charred bones out of the burned building, just barely identifiable as having four limbs, and giving off a nauseating scorched smell. I didn\u0026rsquo;t know what they were. Probably human, I guessed, yet in many ways inconsistent with human skeletons. More and more Tibetans living nearby were arriving, so I withdrew uneasily. We are leaving here first thing tomorrow morning. Gajian\u0026rsquo;s group will set out before noon, and we have been told to leave ahead of them.\n2011-02-09 11:23 On the road again. Setting out once more. This route is somewhat more familiar, but because of the season and the altitude, supplies will be even harder to find. There are still ten days left until Spring Festival. The other travelers staying in Gajian\u0026rsquo;s courtyard were also turned out. Lacking preparation, some went looking for other shelter, while others fell in behind our convoy. We plan to drive a few miles ahead and wait in place for Gajian\u0026rsquo;s convoy to pass.\n2011-02-09 13:11 After waiting more than two hours, we finally saw dust rising on the road and a convoy hurtling toward us. There were more than twenty vehicles, all kinds of them, including even a black riot-control truck. At the front and rear were armored cash vans. Once the convoy had passed, we hung far behind it. I found their frequency on the radio; it wasn\u0026rsquo;t encrypted, but they were speaking in Xunhua dialect mixed with Arabic, making them very hard to understand.\n2011-02-09 15:24 We had not driven long along Provincial Road 202 before, near Hequn Reservoir outside Hualong, we saw the Salar convoy come to a stop in the distance. Through binoculars we could see that local Hui militiamen had set up a roadblock. Hualong is a Hui autonomous county. Though they follow the same religion, the two sides did not seem to be getting along very well. After arguing for a while, the convoy drove down off the roadbed and turned left onto Provincial Road 203 to the west. They were evidently going to bypass Hualong.\n2011-02-09 15:28 Once the convoy ahead had gone, the Hui militia from Hualong quickly spotted us, and several pickups belching black smoke came charging our way. I knew that in a place and time like this there was no point trying to reason with anyone, so I shouted for everyone to turn around and floored the accelerator. They gave symbolic chase for a few kilometers, fired several shots into the air, and then turned back. We found a small road leading west and felt our way toward Provincial Road 203.\n2011-02-09 16:23 The eight counties of Haidong are the most prosperous part of Qinghai. Even the country houses are fairly decent; at the very least you don\u0026rsquo;t see any of those old earthen-brick dwellings. Because of the historical influence of Han settlers who moved inland here, many courtyards have the habit of keeping flowerbeds. But because of the climate the fields are utterly barren, and the rolling mountains show nothing but dry yellow-brown soil. Only the patches of white mottling on the poplars remind us that the plants here are all dead.\n2011-02-09 22:49 A little after five in the afternoon we caught sight of the Xunhua convoy again. They had planned to take Provincial Road 203 to the Ping\u0026rsquo;a Expressway, but near Zhaba they ran into another group of local armed men. With no alternative, they turned back again and continued west, moving along the Yellow River toward Provincial Road 101. Once they reached Huangzhong they could take the Xita Expressway into Xining. But that area is traditional Tibetan turf, and if the Xunhua convoy was already this tense with the Hui of Hualong, then what awaited them in Huangzhong was even harder to predict.\n2011-02-09 23:15 That night we stayed in a village halfway up the mountain north of Lijia Gorge. The Xunhua convoy was in another village only a few hundred meters away. Though this place is close to both Xunhua and Hualong, the mountain villages here were strangely abandoned, without a single villager. The magnificent Lijia Gorge Dam blazed with lights, guarded all around by People\u0026rsquo;s Armed Police. From afar we could see warning lines glowing orange. We didn\u0026rsquo;t even dare light a campfire, for fear of drawing trouble.\n2011-02-09 23:40 We picked a random farmhouse, and everything inside was still there: bedding, household things, as if the people had left in a hurry. We had just fallen asleep when Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s wife came knocking to say that @leftry was having another episode. Luckily we still had some of the yellow medicine left over from before, so we gave her a bottle to drink. Blade\u0026rsquo;s wife has been all right these past few days, though she has grown somewhat dull. A Salar scout stopped by to look us over that night and tacitly accepted our shadowing them.\n2011-02-10 09:13 Daybreak. From here we could overlook the grand sweep of Lijia Gorge Reservoir. The Yellow River here ought still to have been a clear, gleaming expanse of blue-green water. At the moment it wasn\u0026rsquo;t muddy, yet it somehow looked lifeless. Through binoculars I could see armed-police engineering troops busy on the dam. Tanker trucks stood in a long line, pouring yellow liquid from the dam into the reservoir. I have no idea what they were doing. Could they really be trying to disinfect the entire reservoir? It seemed hopelessly inadequate.\n2011-02-10 13:48 North of Lijia Gorge the mountain country is all Tibetan townships. Fortunately no one was left here; otherwise the Salar convoy, which their scout insisted last night we refer to by the full name \u0026ldquo;Salar,\u0026rdquo; would probably have run into serious trouble. This stretch of road was hard going, and it was noon before we reached Ashigong and got onto Provincial Road 101. Farther west lay Longyang Gorge. The Salar convoy stopped here to cook, while we refilled our water by the river. We were running low on fuel.\n2011-02-10 21:18 Like the Chengdu-Mianyang Expressway, the Xita Expressway was completely blocked by abandoned vehicles and shell craters. It was impossible to pass. So we followed the Salar convoy along the old road northward. Here and there you could still see occupied houses with lights on, and the air smelled of butter tea. Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s car ran out of fuel, so we picked a house and made camp there, then took jerrycans and drove Blade\u0026rsquo;s car up to the Xita Expressway to siphon gasoline from the tanks of abandoned vehicles.\n2011-02-11 07:17 In the middle of the night we were awakened by dense gunfire and explosions. We stood in the courtyard peering out. It seemed the Salar convoy was exchanging fire with someone. Both sides had heavy weapons. We didn\u0026rsquo;t light a single lamp, afraid of exposing ourselves, like children watching fireworks in the dark. The fighting lasted nearly two hours before ending. It looked as though Gajian\u0026rsquo;s people had lost. Night swallowed everything. None of us slept again. We kept watch in every direction.\n2011-02-11 09:06 At first light, Blade and I took our guns, found a pedal tricycle at the farmhouse, and cautiously rode over to the site of the battle. The riot-control truck had had its roof blown off and was smoking with a scorched, foul farmyard stench. The Salar convoy had been wiped out to the last person; even the women and children had been spared no mercy. Whoever attacked them in the night struck hard and had plenty of firepower. It was pure revenge, because they hadn\u0026rsquo;t even bothered to clear the battlefield. The two of us picked through the dead for useful things.\n2011-02-11 13:14 In the morning we planned to observe the situation around us before moving on, especially since Xining was already close. But very quickly a small squad of Tibetan soldiers found us and surrounded us with two Land Cruisers and some motorcycles. While we were still at a loss, @leftry explained in halting Tibetan that we were refugees from Sichuan. I hurriedly showed them the Buddhist beads hanging from my medal ribbon and the khata in the car, and as it happened I really did have a khata blessed by a living Buddha from Kumbum Monastery.\n2011-02-11 13:21 The Tibetan soldiers said a few words about being careful and were just about to leave when they spotted the guns we had picked up that morning lying on the ground. Instantly they all raised their weapons again. Blade\u0026rsquo;s Tibetan has a Jinchuan accent, and he hurried to explain that we had only picked up a few firearms for self-defense, though I don\u0026rsquo;t know whether they understood him. In a few swift moves the soldiers confiscated our pistols too. After speaking over the radio for quite a while, several of them jumped into our vehicles and said they were taking us to Kumbum Monastery.\n2011-02-11 14:46 The cars had not driven long before they stopped, short of the monastery itself. In the distance I could see a great golden roof flashing brilliantly in the sun. This was a small town on the outskirts of Lushaer county, and at last we understood why all the Tibetan villages along the way had been empty: everyone had gathered around the monasteries, settling in an orderly way into farmhouses or tent camps in groups. Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s wife, PL, and the others, who couldn\u0026rsquo;t stand the smell of butter tea, all covered their noses.\n2011-02-11 14:51 We were left sitting in the cars with the keys removed and no one paying us any attention. Two Tibetan soldiers kept watch over us with their guns while chatting with nearby villagers. The local children gathered around to stare at us curiously, but without hostility. One Tibetan woman even brought us a pot of butter tea, which moved me almost to tears. But why were they detaining us? In the distance came the low, mournful blare of dungchen horns. People prostrating themselves in long bows were everywhere.\n2011-02-11 22:01 It was fully dark. We were eating boiled cured pork with butter tea when at last a group of Tibetan soldiers arrived escorting a high lama. We put on our most pitiful expressions and explained ourselves at length. After checking our ID cards, the lama agreed to let us go, but advised us not to enter Xining. The Tibetans near Kumbum Monastery were evacuating in an organized way toward Yushu, and the resourceful monks of Kumbum had even managed to secure a train that would depart west along the Qinghai-Tibet line for Tibet.\n2011-02-11 22:21 Since the neighbors here were friendly, we decided to stay the night. Even if we could still reach Xining, charging into a silent city in pitch darkness would not be wise. Leftry suggested that instead of doing that, why not simply head into Tibet? If we missed this train, we would never get another chance. She was right. Blade went after the high lama to ask when and where the train would depart. Before that, though, if time allowed, we still wanted to take a look at Xining.\n2011-02-11 22:58 Blade found out that the train would leave from Duoba on the afternoon of the 13th, but the number of passengers it could take was extremely limited, and there was no guarantee the railway ahead was even intact. Many of the men had chosen on their own to drive or even go on foot, giving the places to women and children. Others had no intention of leaving at all, especially the devout believers prostrating themselves beneath the bodhi tree. Tibetan Buddhism is about the next life. Blade really is impressive: he even managed to get back the pistol that had been confiscated.\n2011-02-12 10:46 When we woke in the morning, more than half the Tibetan tents around us were already empty. From afar came waves of chanting, and the crowds had all converged on the square at Kumbum Monastery. We packed up and left without a word. Since the Xita Expressway was impassable, we needed to go from Lushaer to Duoba and circle into Xining from the west side. Many place names in Qinghai are Mongolian in origin; after Liberation many were given Han names, while Tibetans have their own separate set of names for them.\n2011-02-12 12:26 Duoba Station has only a tiny platform. It\u0026rsquo;s a freight station; even the slow local passenger trains don\u0026rsquo;t stop here. At that moment an old green train was standing there, about twenty carriages long, though I couldn\u0026rsquo;t see a locomotive. Repair workers were crawling in and out underneath it like ants. The high lama had said yesterday that anyone with prayer beads could board, so long as you could physically get yourself onto it. After checking the route, we continued on toward Xining.\n2011-02-12 14:58 As we approached Xining, my heart started beating faster for no clear reason. Its western outskirts are a satellite town called Xigang, inhabited by workers originally sent west from the Northeast, speaking Northeastern dialect and living lives oddly out of place in this northwestern city. It has Xining\u0026rsquo;s only piped gas network, and used to be called the least painful place to commit suicide, because the gas there was odorless. But now the streets were full of corpses already beginning to rot.\n2011-02-12 22:36 Xining is even more desolate than Chengdu was; probably we simply left Chengdu much earlier in the collapse. Burned-out buildings, abandoned cars, looted shopping centers, skeletons no longer identifiable. I have no idea what the Salar were basing their judgment of Xining on. Plainly this is a gigantic concrete tomb. I have deep feelings for this city, yet even so I was beginning to regret coming here.\n2011-02-12 22:45 The Huangshui River had once run completely dry when I was a child. Later, after remediation, though the water remained badly polluted, the current grew much stronger. It is the only environmental improvement I have ever seen with my own eyes. Since Gajian said the Huangshui was central to Xining\u0026rsquo;s natural water filtration, we decided to find somewhere along the river to stay. Before dark we found a residential compound on Haiyan Road. The area was fairly clean, with no collapsed corpses nearby.\n2011-02-13 10:03 When I woke in the morning and breathed the cold plateau air, I could still see blue sky overhead, even though it was full of urban particulates. It was almost mocking, that in such a ruined environment the weather could be finer than in normal times. We packed up and planned to drive around nearby a bit before heading to Duoba Station. Coming into the city from the west, we hadn\u0026rsquo;t seen many cars or much abandoned luggage. I believe most people must have fled out of the city toward the southeast.\n2011-02-13 16:09 The high lama deceived us. We reached Duoba Station before noon, only to find the platform empty and the train long gone from the tracks. A few elderly Tibetans with graying braids were moving along the railway in full-body prostrations. We went over to ask them, and they said the train had left this morning. It simply could not hold any more people; even the roof had been packed with people and sheep. They had yielded the chance to their sons and grandchildren and would go on foot as far as they could.\n2011-02-13 16:21 We returned to Xining crestfallen. Even if the gasoline never ran out, driving deeper into the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau at this point would amount to seeking death. Passing through Xigang again, Blade suddenly cried out over the radio: \u0026ldquo;Don\u0026rsquo;t you think something\u0026rsquo;s wrong?\u0026rdquo; I slowed down and looked carefully. The rows of matchbox-like old apartment blocks, the snapped gas pipes, looked no different from yesterday, except that the corpses on the ground seemed, somehow, fewer.\n2011-02-13 16:26 We stopped at an intersection, and I put on rubber gloves to examine the bodies by the roadside while Old Ma and Blade stood guard with their guns. I turned over two or three of them. They were already decomposing and giving off waves of stench. But they did not seem likely to turn into wandering zombies after dark like in the movies. The only conclusion I could draw was that someone had been clearing corpses here last night. But who would do that? The whole city had been abandoned. What possible gain could there be in it?\n2011-02-13 22:24 We waited in Xigang until dark but saw no sign of living people. Our whole group trudged back dispirited to the place where we had spent the previous night. Tomorrow we need to think seriously about the days ahead. We still haven\u0026rsquo;t been to central Xining. At dusk we had planned to drive around there, but when we reached the Xinning intersection and saw great swaths of bodies lying on the ground, we simply didn\u0026rsquo;t have the nerve to go farther. My wife and I both put on masks. I fear there may be an epidemic here.\n2011-02-14 11:16 This morning everyone gloomily discussed what to do next. No one spoke. Each of us sat with head lowered, thinking our own thoughts. I almost wished someone would start a shouting match. After a long while, LR, Leftry, said she wanted to go take another look around the city center, and left by herself. Old Ma said he and his wife wanted to return to Xunhua, where they might be able to find work, or at least other people. PL sat there in his usual dull stupor. Blade looked at me without comment. As for me, I wanted to stay here a while longer and see.\n2011-02-14 15:30 The residential compound where we had camped was made up of buildings from the early 1990s. It was probably awaiting demolition; several blocks facing the street had already been emptied out. At noon we drew water from the Huangshui River with the simple filter and, after boiling it, found no suspended matter. There were animal tracks in the sandy ground by the river. Then I remembered that less than a kilometer along the bank stood Xining\u0026rsquo;s only zoo. In the afternoon we went to Xinning Square, where there were several large supermarkets. There ought to be some supplies left.\n2011-02-14 18:14 A major fire had swept the area around Xinning Square, taking dozens of nearby buildings with it. We got nothing from the ruins, but on the way back we took a case of Tianyoude liquor from a tobacco and alcohol shop, which could serve as alcohol if needed. If you looked closely, you could see that the distribution of bodies outdoors followed a pattern: they appeared only on roads leading to the city\u0026rsquo;s ring routes, while the inner side streets were all empty. Had the bodies been cleared away, or deliberately left there?\n2011-02-14 22:31 In the evening Blade and I drank in silence. There was nothing to go with the liquor, so after every sip we carved one character into the concrete with a small blade. By now we had almost finished inscribing \u0026ldquo;Bring in the Wine.\u0026rdquo; Blade joked that tomorrow we should go hunting at the zoo. I said sure, the lake\u0026rsquo;s still frozen, maybe there are fish. In truth, finding other supermarkets was more urgent. LR had been out all day and still hadn\u0026rsquo;t come back.\n2011-02-15 09:00 I woke very early this morning and got up to write my diary. Only when I saw the date, the fifteenth, did I remember yesterday had been Valentine\u0026rsquo;s Day. 2011-02-15 22:49 All festivals are luxuries humanity indulges in only when life already has its brocade. On this same day last year, my wife and I were eating fajitas and drinking red wine in a Mexican restaurant. A year later, all we have left is rock-hard cured pork. LR didn\u0026rsquo;t come back all night. Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s son has come down with a yellow, wasting sickness and has had diarrhea for two days. If it doesn\u0026rsquo;t stop soon, we\u0026rsquo;ll have trouble.\n2011-02-15 22:49 Today we found a little shop that had not been pried open. Inside were instant noodles with pickled vegetables, which to us tasted like food from heaven. Old Ma rummaged through the rooms upstairs where we were staying and found a few bottles of Vitamin C, cod-liver oil, and other capsules. Whether they would help or not, he gave them all to his son. After more observation we confirmed yet again that the bodies in the streets had not simply collapsed where they stood. They had been deliberately arranged as roadblocks. Why? To stop cowards like us?\n2011-02-15 22:56 We also went to the zoo. It had already been relocated, leaving behind only empty cages and artificial caverns. In the dead gray-white woods there were animal tracks. Tomorrow we plan to cross the city and take a look at the eastern district. For two days now we\u0026rsquo;ve been saying that it\u0026rsquo;s the traditional Hui quarter. If the Salar ever reached Xining, I think they would certainly have gone there. LR still hasn\u0026rsquo;t come back. Two days now.\n2011-02-16 22:59 I was in terrible spirits today, with no mind to record anything, not even any appetite. Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s end-of-days depression. Like PL, I found myself thinking that once the remaining water was gone, that would be that. Just now Old Ma said the three of them plan to head for Lanzhou tomorrow morning. Blade said in that case they might as well go to Longyang Gorge, where there should be plenty of workers from the earlier engineering projects. I don\u0026rsquo;t want to go anywhere. This city is where I grew up. I don\u0026rsquo;t want to leave. I just want to stay here and die.\n2011-02-16 23:04 LR still hasn\u0026rsquo;t returned. I\u0026rsquo;m afraid either something happened to her or she has already left. The places where we marked corpses yesterday have changed again. Some bodies have shifted position, and some have even turned into different bodies altogether. Could they really be zombies? But there has been no movement at night, only the sound of running water. During the day my wife saw animal tracks by the river again. Tonight I told everyone to pitch tents inside the rooms so that no light would leak out.\n2011-02-16 23:06 Without light interference, you can see that deep within the city there are lights in many places after all. Even in the building across the street from us, just one block away, faint pinpricks of candlelight seep through, invisible unless you look very carefully. All day we have been striding about boldly through empty streets, not knowing how many eyes were watching us through windows. But what are they hiding from?\n2011-02-17 12:23 Last night we agreed to set out together: Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s family would go to Lanzhou, while we would swing by the eastern district. He dragged things out for more than an hour this morning, urging me several times before I finally came downstairs. PL didn\u0026rsquo;t want to go and stayed behind to guard our camp. The sky was blue, honestly far better than Chengdu\u0026rsquo;s oppressive haze, but somehow that only made it lonelier. A helicopter passed overhead, circled once above us, and flew away.\n2011-02-17 17:34 Xining\u0026rsquo;s condition is far worse than Chengdu\u0026rsquo;s. On West Street we found a huge pit leading straight down into the underground civil-defense works. At first I thought it had been shelled or blown open, but when I looked closer, the lip was unlike a blast crater. In the broken rebar and concrete at the bottom were scattered chunks of gray-black stone. Blade was about to bend down and pick one up when I grabbed him and said, \u0026ldquo;Doesn\u0026rsquo;t it look familiar?\u0026rdquo; He looked again and cried out: \u0026ldquo;A meteor crater!\u0026rdquo;\n2011-02-17 17:47 We withdrew from the crater as quickly and carefully as we could, afraid of getting contaminated by meteor grit. Only then, looking around, did we notice that the vast central square at Ximenkou did not have a single tree. The dead grass in the flowerbeds stood upright as if full of life, and what made it uncanny was that every blade was gray-white. Only then did we think to yank the chemical masks from our packs and put them on, though it was probably already too late.\n2011-02-17 18:37 We said goodbye to Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s family at Ximenkou. Before leaving, his eyes still held that same guilt. I reminded him to guard his water and his guns, because only with those could he keep his wife and child safe. I watched him drive east along West Street. Then all at once he vanished from sight. They had fallen into an enormous pit. Beneath my feet I distinctly felt a tremor and heard a disturbance rising from underground.\n2011-02-17 18:40 Xining doesn\u0026rsquo;t have a subway, but the entire underground beneath the city center is hollowed out with civil-defense works. As early as when I was in primary school, parts of it had already been redeveloped into underground shopping arcades, and by now they formed a web beneath the whole urban core. We rushed to the huge pit into which Old Ma had fallen. It was black below, and all we could see in front of us was the metallic sheen of the car roof. Another commotion came up from underground, like the sound of birds or beasts scattering.\n2011-02-17 22:20 Three hours ago, Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s family drove their Kuga into the giant pit in the middle of the road. This was directly above the underground pedestrian street on West Street, more than ten meters high. I lowered myself into it on parachute cord. Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s whole family was trapped inside the car, and we had to get them out. Blade and I spent an hour pulling them free. But their bodies were in no condition to be hoisted back up the pit, so we had to look for another exit.\n2011-02-17 23:15 I don\u0026rsquo;t know how we finally got back up to the surface. I only dared keep my head down and follow the circle of light cast by my flashlight on the ground. On the surface we found the nearest exit, less than a hundred meters away by the roadside. But when I returned to the pit, I realized that to reach that exit we would have to pass through a stretch of cluttered, pitch-black underground street. From within it came wave after wave of rustling sounds. Something was hiding in the shadows.\n2011-02-17 23:16 The underground passage was full of people. I cannot describe what they looked like, or even say whether they were alive or dead. I could only see them sitting shoulder to shoulder, packed so densely there was no counting how many. Their clothes seemed to have rotted into rags and tangled together. From the ceiling hung ribbon-like vines, and every few meters one wound around a person\u0026rsquo;s neck. From their throats came a low electrical whine. Was this Avici Hell?\n2011-02-17 23:21 We did not seem to disturb them. Even when we pried apart shoulders to force a path through, not one of them opened their eyes. Blade went first, clearing the way. They were entwined tightly, but with only a little force an arm would break off like dry firewood, exposing flesh beneath that looked weathered away. None of us dared breathe loudly. It took half an hour to cover one hundred meters. Old Ma held his son tight against his chest and covered the boy\u0026rsquo;s eyes.\n2011-02-17 23:22 When we climbed out of the underground shopping street, everyone\u0026rsquo;s clothes were soaked through with cold sweat. From deep below came that indescribable moaning again. We jumped into the cars and fled toward camp as if escaping for our lives. Then Blade suddenly said that the people down there all had at least six fingers. To me they were like the underground rhizomes of a gigantic plant, perhaps already filling every space in the civil-defense tunnels. I have no idea where it will break through the surface.\n2011-02-17 23:35 We returned to the residential compound where we had camped. It was empty. PL was dead. He had jumped from the sixth floor. The blood and brains on the ground had already congealed. In truth he had never come to terms with losing his girlfriend. I sent the others upstairs and stayed behind alone in the dark to gather up PL\u0026rsquo;s body.\n2011-02-18 21:32 Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s whole family is injured, and his wife cannot walk. We are all so crushed by fear we can barely breathe. Two months now. Could Chengdu\u0026rsquo;s subway tunnels also be crammed like this with those beings, neither living nor dead? We buried PL by the Huangshui River together with his girlfriend\u0026rsquo;s gold hairpin and the PSP he never went anywhere without. Tomorrow, who will dig graves for us?\n2011-02-19 20:55 Blade\u0026rsquo;s wife suddenly said today was Spring Festival. We checked the calendar, and sure enough she was right. The women opened all the remaining cans of braised pork, cooked a huge pot of instant noodles, and brought out the barley liquor we had hauled back a few days ago. My wife even gave Little Ma a red envelope, since money was useless now anyway. I haven\u0026rsquo;t had any appetite these past two days, but I notice I\u0026rsquo;ve stopped economizing on food and supplies entirely. We have all begun to let go. I didn\u0026rsquo;t even open my notebook today.\n2011-02-20 22:10 Today is the second day of the New Year, and we have six cans left. When I was a child, the whole extended family would gather at my grandmother\u0026rsquo;s house on the second day. The adults cooked and played mahjong, the kids set off firecrackers and played video games. The first RPG my brother and I ever touched was Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I wonder if he\u0026rsquo;s still alive. Around us it is deathly quiet. Only the Huangshui River keeps flowing. We sat on the roof in the sun, talking about the past until dark. There was not a living thing in sight.\n2011-02-21 12:28 After spending two days at camp in utter dejection, I felt somewhat clearer-headed when I woke this morning. We discussed moving somewhere else. If we\u0026rsquo;re going to die, we may as well die on the road. But Old Ma said today was the third day of the New Year and one must not go out. I said what relatives and friends were even left to visit now? But Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s family simply refused to move. Blade said coldly that since Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s family had effectively already broken away once, why should we keep accommodating them?\n2011-02-21 13:01 Seeing Blade take such a hard line, Old Ma didn\u0026rsquo;t dare insist any further. They no longer had a car anyway. Continuing west was impossible, so we prepared to move east along the Huangshui River. For all the days we\u0026rsquo;d talked about it, we still had not gone to the eastern district. After hesitating a moment, I gave Old Ma the keys to the car LR had left behind. That made it the third car he had used on this journey. When we finished packing and headed out, I had the strange feeling I saw a figure flash past in the building opposite.\n2011-02-21 17:45 The road toward the eastern district was extremely hard going. The Xita Expressway and the Lanzhou-Xining Expressway cross through the city like a great iron cross, pinning Xining\u0026rsquo;s rotten body in place. We drove through the desolate People\u0026rsquo;s Park, then came up from the shoals by the Huangshui River onto Binhe Road. This part of town was already the eastern district, and we could see all sorts of Hui buildings with green domes.\n2011-02-21 17:47 We made camp in the yard of a repair shop near the old May First Club. The surroundings felt much safer than Haiyan Road. The riverbank lay only a hundred meters outside the wall. Everyone was busy settling in when my wife suddenly said she thought she could hear the prayer chant from a mosque. I straightened up and looked toward the crescent-tipped domes under the city skyline. It was almost an illusion, but I felt as if I could smell roast mutton in the air again. Blade and I slung on our packs and went out to raid shops.\n2011-02-21 18:08 We didn\u0026rsquo;t take a car. At the repair shop we found a pedal tricycle and took that. The stretch by the Huangshui River was all empty commercial housing developments that had never really taken off. After pedaling uphill for a while and just reaching Qiyi Road, the atmosphere suddenly felt wrong. There were people here. In the distance we could see white steel helmets moving back and forth in the sunset, their shadows drawn long across the middle of the road, red flags snapping in the wind. That was the Xining Hotel.\n2011-02-21 22:29 We found a refrigerated food storehouse at the Qinghai Military Subdistrict guesthouse, a block away. Though the power had long since failed, the cold kept the beef and mutton frozen solid. We were not the first to discover it. As soon as we got there, we ran into several middle-aged Hui men with pointed goatees pushing handcarts. When they saw that Blade and I had guns, they nodded in greeting. One of them said we were lucky: the soldiers had just withdrawn, and yesterday nothing could be taken.\n2011-02-22 13:44 It was our first night in the new camp, and all of us were extremely cautious. When Blade and I dragged back the three frozen sheep yesterday, we had taken a long detour to make sure we weren\u0026rsquo;t being followed. Otherwise who knows what trouble we might have invited. We really did hear mosque prayers last night, wavering on the cold wind, impossible to locate. In the middle of the night the river rose. When we woke this morning, the exposed shoals were soaked through. Someone upstream had opened the floodgates.\n2011-02-22 18:27 This morning we were awakened by the roar of helicopters. They landed right at the Xining Hotel where we had seen sentries yesterday. Over the course of the day there were six takeoffs and landings. Unfortunately the helicopters carried no visible markings, so we couldn\u0026rsquo;t tell how many separate aircraft there were, and without that there was no way to estimate the length of their route. The garrison here is very small, probably no more than a platoon, huddled inside those old buildings of the Qinghai Hotel. Military tents had been set up in the yard, and I also saw the Star of Life emblem.\n2011-02-22 22:18 At dusk a military vehicle drove along Qiyi Road with the emblem of the helmeted soldier holding a stalk of wheat painted on the door. My heart lurched, and any thought I had of going to scout the Xining Hotel died at once. The Hui hidden away in the lanes of Dongguan were no easier to read. Today, when Blade and I went back to the cold storehouse, there was nothing left. Only after returning did I finally sort out what day it was: Thursday. Tomorrow the Great Mosque will hold Friday prayers.\n2011-02-23 13:19 A little after ten, Blade and I left camp on foot and headed toward Dongguan. We had barely reached the mouth of North Alley when we saw militiamen carrying AK-47s. We didn\u0026rsquo;t dare go up and talk to them. Instead we slipped into the residential blocks beside the street, climbed over several walls in succession, and reached a workers\u0026rsquo; housing compound. From there we guessed Dong Street was just outside the wall. The compound looked completely empty. We climbed to the roof of a thirty-story residential tower, and the whole eastern district spread out below us.\n2011-02-23 13:22 Looking east along Dong Street, sure enough there were many people returning from prayers. Not as many as in normal times, but still astonishingly more than I had expected. They rolled up their prayer rugs and disappeared into the webwork of lanes. So the body of this city had not yet died. It could still sustain that many people. Then suddenly I remembered that beneath Dong Street there was also an underground commercial street converted from civil-defense works. Could it too be packed with those \u0026ldquo;people\u0026rdquo;?\n2011-02-23 13:26 I wanted to understand what had really happened in Xining, whether this place was truly safe, and why the people of Dongguan had chosen to remain. In high school I had a close Hui classmate named Ma Baoquan, and I still remembered where his home was. After discussing it with Blade, I decided to go check by myself in the afternoon to see whether he was still there.\n2011-02-24 00:53 I am now locked in a windowless one-story room. I don\u0026rsquo;t know exactly where I am, though it seems to be somewhere near Tiyu Lane. I am freezing and shaking uncontrollably. They have been stabbing my thigh with red-hot mutton skewers. I didn\u0026rsquo;t find Ma Baoquan\u0026rsquo;s house. They seized me on Huayuan South Street. I don\u0026rsquo;t know what they want from me. They examined my hands and took my temperature. My wife and the others must not come looking for me here.\n2011-02-24 10:40 At daybreak they took me to another room containing several medical devices, things like ECG machines. They examined me in detail. A middle-aged Hui man with a large beard interrogated me about where I came from, whether I had companions, and where they were. I didn\u0026rsquo;t tell him the truth. I said only that I was also from Xining and had just escaped back from Golmud in search of a friend. In fact I had already given Ma Baoquan\u0026rsquo;s name yesterday, and perhaps that is why they did not kill me at once.\n2011-02-24 12:12 Since the network has completely collapsed, they did not confiscate my phone. A little while ago someone brought me a bowl of cold pilaf. I haven\u0026rsquo;t had any water all night. The air smells of gunpowder, tea bricks, mutton, and disinfectant. There are many people coming and going outside, and it is very noisy. Judging from the grease stains on the floor of the room where I\u0026rsquo;m being held, this used to be a halal restaurant.\n2011-02-24 17:11 I had just dozed off this afternoon when two strong men came in and took me upstairs to a private dining room. So it really was a restaurant. A moment later someone came in, and it was Ma Baoquan. I almost called out to him, but seeing the dark expression on his face, I kept my mouth shut. We hadn\u0026rsquo;t been in touch for many years. He had changed from a thin man into a fat one. He waved the two thugs out of the room, then slowly sat down and asked, \u0026ldquo;Why haven\u0026rsquo;t you been infected?\u0026rdquo;\n2011-02-24 17:14 I said that on the road I had met military doctors who examined me and injected me with isotopes, and that at this stage I was already immune. Ma Baoquan\u0026rsquo;s expression softened. He said that over the past ten days they had killed more than forty outsider six-fingers. According to him, in December a huge meteor had fallen at Ximenkou, far larger than the meteor grit in Chengdu. At the time rumors spread that war had broken out, and everyone fled into the civil-defense works. None of those who went down ever came back out.\n2011-02-24 18:42 Ma Baoquan went in and out several times, apparently consulting with someone. The last time he came back in, he finally said, \u0026ldquo;Come on, I\u0026rsquo;ll take you to eat.\u0026rdquo; Yet he had no intention of letting me go. I followed him downstairs. Outside was an utterly ordinary courtyard, strewn everywhere with bones and offal, rank with blood and stench. After walking a little farther, we suddenly arrived at the South Gate stadium. I barely recognized the place. Armed guards stood at the entrance.\n2011-02-24 20:50 Ma Baoquan handed me a gas mask, and limping, I followed him into the stadium. The playing field had long gone to ruin. Several burned-out cars lay scattered across the dirt, and inside them there were clearly charred bones. Beneath the stands at the north end of the field, from a distance, all I could see was bodies. Baoquan gestured for me to follow him and said, \u0026ldquo;Look carefully. See if there are any you\u0026rsquo;ve met on the road.\u0026rdquo; Several militiamen in biochem helmets followed behind us with guns ready.\n2011-02-24 21:10 These corpses were all recent and had not yet rotted. Their bodies were covered with gunshot and knife wounds. At a glance I spotted @leftry\u0026rsquo;s red outdoor jacket. I couldn\u0026rsquo;t see the face. The body lay face down, half buried at the calves in the dirt, the trouser legs torn away. And what showed there were not ankles at all, but rootlike vines spreading into the surrounding ground. I didn\u0026rsquo;t dare reveal that I knew her.\n2011-02-24 21:35 Ma Baoquan pointed at the corpses and said that some of these people had six fingers, while others had wounds on their bodies, but after death all of them grew roots like trees, with perhaps three or four different kinds of leaves and branches. \u0026ldquo;You\u0026rsquo;ve seen the ones under West Street, haven\u0026rsquo;t you?\u0026rdquo; he said. \u0026ldquo;The roots they grow are all the same. We understand biology. We sealed the highways to stop any new species from entering Xining. God knows what this spring will bring.\u0026rdquo;\n2011-02-24 21:52 I could roughly imagine the scene Ma Baoquan was describing: the infected living turning into plants, and the remains of the dead turning into plants as well. So this was how everlasting green would finally be achieved. The irony was almost unbearable. I don\u0026rsquo;t know what kind of fruit these \u0026ldquo;flora and fauna\u0026rdquo; would bear if they flowered and pollinated. But for the moment, one thing was clear: the Ma clan could kill me at any time, and if they found my wife, they would kill her too, all in the name of keeping the species pure.\n2011-02-24 22:39 Ma Baoquan promised to let me go tomorrow morning, but only if I swore to stay away from the eastern district and even from Xining\u0026rsquo;s central axis. I said I would head west for Huangyuan, and repeatedly assured him that I was alone. I had been gone for two nights now. I had no idea how my wife was doing, and I was terribly afraid something might happen to her while she was on her own. The torture wound in my thigh from last night still burned to the bone, though fortunately it hadn\u0026rsquo;t damaged any tendons. They put me for the night in a watch room with a thin quilt.\n2011-02-25 18:11 The one tailing me was a boy of fifteen or sixteen. I walked several blocks and still couldn\u0026rsquo;t shake him. I was afraid to run in case he opened fire, so I could only circle around at an unhurried pace. Without noticing it, I drew near the Xining Hotel. The white-helmeted military police were still patrolling there, and the boy immediately dropped farther back. I was thinking about how to avoid the sentries when I suddenly saw my car parked in the hotel courtyard. At once I ran straight toward the guards without another thought.\n2011-02-25 23:45 They really were here. When my wife saw me, she burst into tears and clutched her head. Old Ma had been shot. Blade had burns. Last night they were attacked by the Dongguan militia, and outnumbered, Blade set fire to the abandoned oil depot at the repair shop and escaped here. At this point everyone except my wife was wounded. Blade\u0026rsquo;s burns are mostly on his back, with some areas even reaching superficial second degree, yet he acts as if nothing is wrong. It suddenly struck me that I hadn\u0026rsquo;t seen him take off his gloves in a very long time.\n2011-02-26 00:04 This place had originally been one of the medical sites of the Army Fourth Hospital. Before withdrawing, they received orders from Lanzhou Military Region to hold their ground, and they have not moved since. Orders are orders. They, along with the main hospital, stayed behind. The helicopters are used to shuttle medicine and food gathered from around the city. The orderly in the wards, @gseed12, told me that Lanzhou has been out of contact for twenty days now, and the vehicles sent there have never come back.\n2011-02-26 00:24 Twelve, @gseed12, was wearing a German flecktarn jacket embroidered with a Three-Body emblem. He used to run a little military-surplus shop on Shangye Lane. After the disaster began, he joined a neighborhood self-defense patrol, and once there was no one left outside, he came here to work as an orderly. As he put it, being with soldiers makes you feel steadier. There are fewer than sixty people here now, twenty-three of them soldiers. Supplies are still fairly sufficient, but medicine is in desperate shortage.\n2011-02-26 00:31 The highest-ranking officer here is a captain surnamed Jin. We have earned their trust, and everything we went through on the road from Chengdu is enough to show how much this city means to us, or at least that is how I explained it. The military doctor treated the punctures in my thigh and replaced the bandages with clean gauze. For the past several hours my wife has not left my side for even a moment; she has been clutching my hand the whole time. I swear I will never again let her vanish from my sight.\n2011-02-26 21:31 I spent the whole day lying down and had my dressings changed once. The bullet was removed from Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s body. Blade kept groaning in pain, though I could tell he was pretending. Only one helicopter came today, because they are almost out of fuel. Twelve says the reason so few of them have been able to keep holding this place is that the daily helicopter traffic still deters the people of Dongguan. If the helicopters stop coming, it will be hard for so many patients here, all regarded by Ma Baoquan as \u0026ldquo;threats,\u0026rdquo; to remain safe.\n2011-02-27 22:58 This morning the patrol did not go out to gather supplies, because overnight an isolation ditch a meter wide had been dug along both sides of the road outside the gate, too wide for cars to cross. In the distance we could see people in white caps spying on us. Captain Jin led a squad of scouts out on foot, cleared the obstacles, and posted additional lookouts on the high points around the hotel. I also volunteered to spend the day in a corner of the north building. My wounds are superficial. In a few days I should be able to run again.\n2011-02-27 23:00 The Xining Hotel\u0026rsquo;s location is actually poor. In truth it was never a fortress at all, and it sits right at the edge of Dongguan\u0026rsquo;s sphere of influence, so it is hard not to be viewed with hostility. I told Captain Jin as much. He is a stubborn man. He said that if military orders told him to hold here, then he could not move half a step. But he did agree to post slogans at the hotel gate tomorrow, making clear that we pose absolutely no threat. Eating mutton every day has left my mouth full of heat blisters.\n2011-02-28 22:10 Today it warmed up. I took off my long underwear and still felt hot. That is not a good sign. In Qinghai, temperatures like this would be considered early even for April, and the direct consequence is that the dead grass in the courtyard has actually begun to show signs of sprouting. A layer of pale whitish-green shoots has appeared across the ground, lovely in color and yet unspeakably uncanny. In the afternoon a strong wind blew through, carrying with it a fishy stench from the city, like vegetables rotting under their own cover.\n2011-02-28 22:21 No helicopter came today. Everything felt very quiet. The distance between here and the hospital happens to be right at the limit of our radio range, and the signal is poor, barely breaking through in fragments. Things over there seem bad. Among the patients they have discovered new six-fingers. The people of Dongguan did not show themselves today. The sentries scavenged several cases of expired milk and sausages from the last remaining Ning Shi supermarket nearby. Only today did I learn that a vice mayor\u0026rsquo;s family is here as well, along with his driver. The surname is Xu.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2011/2011-02-28-rainbell-february/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e2011-02-01 00:45 Overnight the government set up porridge kitchens all along the main streets of the county town, serving pilaf and clear noodle soup. Unexpectedly, I even saw blue tents marked with the United Nations emblem. At last, medical vehicles were visible again, and my wife ran off to collect some glucose and cold medicine. It was already after midnight. The smell of roasting mutton was drifting everywhere, and for a moment I felt as though I had slipped back many years into a night market in the northwest. I have a feeling we\u0026rsquo;re going to be staying here for a while.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Rain Bell | February"},{"content":"Rain Bell\n01-01 00:09 Scattered firecrackers went off around the compound, sounding oddly out of place in all this darkness. Most people must already be asleep. I kissed my wife on the forehead, watched her drift off, then stepped onto the balcony. The red light on the camera mounted to the tripod blinked steadily like the eye of a Terminator. Far below, the white steel helmets of the sentries caught the searchlights in cold flashes, as if to remind me that time means nothing. It is only a ruler with which we measure our own suffering.\n01-01 00:50 Yesterday\u0026rsquo;s surveillance yielded quite a lot. At the very least, we now know that the snow-camouflage unit with \u0026ldquo;Special Biological Epidemic Prevention\u0026rdquo; on their chest tabs is studying plant immunity. Two captains who move in and out frequently are botany specialists. Their shoulder patch shows a soldier in a helmet holding a stalk of wheat, and their notebook covers are stamped in gold with the name Malianwa University. For days now they have been studying the plant species growing inside wounded humans and animals, as well as the causes of death.\n01-01 01:09 Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s son failed to stash the iPhone inside the clubhouse office, so we\u0026rsquo;ll have to think of another way to bug the place. We spent the day in the chatroom discussing escape routes. Everyone\u0026rsquo;s GPS still works, and with offline maps we sketched out two options: one southward, entering Yunnan by the Chengdu-Panzhihua expressway, the other northwest along the Chengdu-Lanzhou route toward Qinghai. I favor the second. The plateau has far less vegetation, so it is obviously less likely to be affected.\n01-01 22:39 Today the compound recovered a little of its usual atmosphere. The courtyard was crowded, and everyone was forcing out New Year smiles. The troops brought in some canned food, stacked it into pagoda-like towers, and organized games where residents could win prizes. These were the most grimly serious games I have ever seen in my life. Every contest devolved into life-or-death arguments, because the ownership of every single can had become a question of continued survival.\n01-01 22:56 I won eleven cans today: five from a slow-bicycle race and six from a ping-pong wheel game. For the first time ever, my wife praised the money I\u0026rsquo;d spent on my bicycle and racket as having been worth it. I stayed away from any game involving bodily contact. Almost every one of those ended in shoving matches, and the military police had to point guns at both sides to make them stop. Several of the middle-aged women from property management were competing in shuttlecock kicking. They looked as though they hadn\u0026rsquo;t eaten properly in days, so unsteady on their feet that they dropped to their knees begging the soldiers for a consolation prize.\n01-01 23:08 Chengdu has gone completely dark now, soaked through by the freezing rain peculiar to New Year\u0026rsquo;s Day, like a cardboard box hauled out of water. The ground is covered with several centimeters of ashy mud. Every building has lost its former color and been reduced to the same dirty, withered tone. It has been raining on and off since dawn, and outside the window, besides the sound of rain, that low, oppressive groan of twisting steel, like some gigantic beast, has risen over the city once again.\n01-01 23:22 Today one of the officers let slip that in a few days they would be withdrawing north. The satellite connection confirmed it. For the first time today, we received an official push notification: Lanzhou had been temporarily elevated into the capital, and the Lanzhou Military Region had established an overall disaster-response command. All personnel and supplies are pulling westward. The government has restored radio service on AM110.1, broadcasting evacuation plans and route maps. There is still no news, only survival manuals and official bulletins.\n01-02 08:39 Early this morning Chenglong Road was already filling with cars and pedestrians trying to leave the city, no doubt because they heard yesterday\u0026rsquo;s broadcast. I had no idea there were still so many people in the urban districts. God knows how many are still clinging to life in all those hidden lanes and blocks. The checkpoints are much looser now. The strict immunity inspections of the previous days have been reduced to a few simple questions. Our compound, however, remains stubbornly sealed. But hungry people cannot be locked up for long.\n01-02 12:24 It has started sleeting outside, and the temperature inside the apartment has dropped below freezing. My wife stuck warming patches on herself and curled up under the quilt with Mango in her arms. On the computer I exported the photos from the past sixty hours into an animation, hoping to track the sentries\u0026rsquo; shift changes. Instead I discovered that six body bags were taken out of the compound late last night. No new wounded have been brought in these past two days. So either the bags did not contain corpses, or they contained residents from our compound. What the hell are they doing?\n01-02 14:18 At noon I told the others what I had found. Old Ma said we had to get the iPhone into the clubhouse no matter what. In truth there has always been an opportunity to place the bug. The only reason he hesitated was that he couldn\u0026rsquo;t bear sending his own son through the ventilation duct. This time he finally hardened himself. PL quietly asked me whether we had too many people now. Counting the families of the nine of us already in the chatroom, that makes twenty-five people total. Starting eight cars at once would alert every sentry in the compound. I told him the more people we have, the better our odds of staying alive.\n01-02 15:04 Someone from property management just came knocking. It was the same men I injured before. They pounded for a long time, clearly intending not to leave until I opened up. My wife had only just gotten up and was still packing. This time we\u0026rsquo;re not packing just emergency survival gear, so naturally there is too much we want to take. Mango is a problem. A cat isn\u0026rsquo;t like a dog that can be carried along at all times, especially not a pampered house cat that\u0026rsquo;s afraid even of mice. Damn it! Someone is smashing the door! 2\n01-02 15:41 They\u0026rsquo;ve finally run off. The living room is a wreck. The glass tabletop is shattered, and there\u0026rsquo;s a large pool of blood on the floor. Those three guards only wanted to strip us of food and water. I shot through the arms of two of them, and I think the third one may have a broken humerus. My forehead has been split open in a triangular gash, and my right ribs ache dully. Thank God my wife locked the bedroom door in time. I should never have opened the door. I was not prepared enough for cruelty. I will not make that mistake twice.\n01-02 17:14 Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s son pulled it off. Good for him! PL has synced the incoming feed to my laptop. The iPhone has been tucked inside the grille over the air-conditioner drain hole, so all we can see are feet moving back and forth inside the room. No one is speaking. There\u0026rsquo;s only the low hum of the instruments. The real experiments are probably happening in a different room. I\u0026rsquo;m hoping they might still say something here that gives the game away. My wife says Mango is nowhere to be found. Could she have bolted out during the chaos earlier?\n2011-01-02 21:07 We\u0026rsquo;ve been listening for hours and have roughly pieced it together: our compound is a closed sample set of cases. \u0026ldquo;Every stage of the condition is represented.\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Humans, animals, and plants are all typologically useful.\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;At the current stage it is no longer infectious to humans.\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;But not a single one can be let go\u0026rdquo; \u0026hellip; Put all of that into one sentence and the meaning is simple: we are lab rats. There is only one road left now. I had originally thought we could hold out at home for at least three months.\n2011-01-02 22:32 The rain is still falling on and off, and we\u0026rsquo;ve decided to leave tonight. Three families have backed out, unwilling to take the risk. That leaves six households, fifteen people, and five vehicles. The exit point will be the fence between Buildings 9 and 10. Its base has already been sawn nearly through with a wire saw, and all we need to do is hook a tow line to it and pull it down with a car. Just now, while loading supplies, I discovered that the rear window of my Robin Hood had been smashed. The drinking water stored in the car is gone. Luckily the vehicle itself is fine, and none of the tools were taken.\n2011-01-03 03:51 What just happened was genuinely hair-raising. We set out at exactly three in the morning, but only four vehicles made it out. The Subaru\u0026rsquo;s chassis was too low and got hung up at the last moment on the concrete footing of the fence. They opened fire. PL\u0026rsquo;s Cherokee had a side window shot out, Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s Tiggo took a graze to the front tire, and the plastic sheeting I had used to patch my rear window got ripped away by the wind. Only Rabbit\u0026rsquo;s Range Rover escaped untouched. We\u0026rsquo;re in Sansheng Township now, stopping to sort out the cars.\n2011-01-03 04:12 Our route was supposed to head south to the beltway, then swing west onto Dajian Road and keep going toward Ya\u0026rsquo;an. In the darkness, the skyline ahead was lit red by fire. I covered the rear window with a wooden board. The Tiggo is flimsy, and its spare tire is already on. We now have eleven people total: PL, Rabbit, and I are each with our wives; Old Ma has his family of three; and Blade and his wife, who had no car of their own and had originally split up between different vehicles, are now both riding in the Range Rover.\n2011-01-03 05:00 The entire beltway has been dug apart. On the far side stand armed soldiers and tanks. No wonder the troops on the Third Ring had all withdrawn. They were redeploying to fortify the outer ring. Now we have no choice but to turn back and try circling north outside the Third Ring instead. I should have stood my ground earlier. We should have taken the northern route from the beginning. On the way we passed a Shell station, and the others all stopped to fill fuel cans. I tuned the radios in three of the cars. The Tiggo has no radio, so I gave Old Ma a walkie-talkie.\n2011-01-03 09:59 Before dawn we spent hours looping slowly from south to east along side roads, because we were still trapped inside Chengdu\u0026rsquo;s hinterland. At the junction of the Chengdu-Chongqing Expressway and the beltway, we hit an outbound checkpoint, but we had no immunity certificates and were denied passage. PL tried to argue, and the sentry simply raised his rifle. We turned around at once. The beltway is sealed like an iron barrel. We\u0026rsquo;ve decided to follow it counterclockwise and see whether any gap appears.\n2011-01-03 10:16 When we reached the area near Shiling, we could go no farther. The Chengdu-Nanchong Expressway was clogged with abandoned cars, all burned out, and the air was thick with suffocating toxic fumes. We put on our masks, discussed it briefly, and decided to turn left and drive back into the urban districts, hoping to skirt this blocked stretch and continue north. If luck is with us, maybe we can still find an epidemic-control station with staff inside willing to issue us certificates.\n2011-01-03 14:17 We wound our way through the city center. Everywhere lay thick ash. Darkened buildings gave off a scorched smell, and curled electrical wires were tangled together with dead trees like a burned-out dark forest. We searched the whole morning without seeing a single military vehicle or epidemic-control point. Ragged people flickered through the streets and alleys, watching us with numb, empty faces. In many places there were clear signs of looting, and some of the gray mounds on the ground were unmistakably corpses.\n2011-01-03 14:27 I worked out that we were not far from Jianshe Road, where several large shopping complexes stand. The other families had set out with far less in reserve than I had; you could say they went on the road in haste. I suggested that we restock at Ito Yokado, and everyone agreed. Old Ma noticed a smashed military vehicle by the roadside and warned us to stay alert. After a night of freezing rain and mud, our cars looked empty from a distance. Only Rabbit\u0026rsquo;s orange Range Rover stood out a little too much.\n2011-01-03 16:12 The street-facing windows and doors of Ito Yokado on Jianshe Road were all shut tight, but the barrier at the entrance to the underground parking garage had been rammed apart. We hesitated only a moment before filing in. There were plenty of cars in the garage, none of them used for a long time and all coated in black ash. We stopped at the supermarket entrance on basement level one and were stunned to find a Hummer H5 parked there. One look at the plate told us it belonged to the neighbors who had escaped from our compound a few days ago.\n2011-01-03 16:35 The H5 looks as though it has been sitting there for two days. The packs on board are still inside, but the people never came back. The supermarket\u0026rsquo;s rolling shutter has been pried open. We turned the Grand Cherokee\u0026rsquo;s high beams on into the darkness beyond the entrance, and Blade, Old Ma, and I put on headlamps and prepared to go in while the others stayed with the vehicles. I took the steel crossbow, Blade a machete, and Old Ma scavenged a fire axe on the spot. There were footprints on the floor from earlier intruders.\n2011-01-03 18:13 The supermarket shelves were still remarkably intact. It seems the place had been evacuated before looting ever broke out in earnest. Old Ma and I added water and quick foods like sausages and smoked rabbit to our haul. PL and Rabbit very nearly packed their cars full. I warned them not to overload the suspension, so PL took some of the extra water back out. Rabbit, as usual, paid no attention. His vehicle already had the most passengers, and Blade and his wife also loaded up plenty of supplies. Then I heard a noise deeper inside the garage, somewhere down on level B2.\n2011-01-03 19:33 By the time we fled out of Ito Yokado\u0026rsquo;s underground garage, night had already fallen. We never found the neighbors who had come in the Hummer, and of course we didn\u0026rsquo;t run into any zombie siege either. What we did see on level B2 were clusters of plants. They had the same tiny gray triangular leaves as the shoots growing from the eyes of that dead cat back in the compound. What truly frightened me was the base of one root cluster. Around it was looped a wedding ring.\n2011-01-03 20:45 The uncanny scene at Ito Yokado is still fixed before my eyes. The others all say they didn\u0026rsquo;t see anything; they only heard me shout \u0026ldquo;Run!\u0026rdquo; and rushed out after me. I warned everyone again that they must not touch any plant life at all, not even fallen leaves. We\u0026rsquo;re not getting out of Chengdu tonight, so we need to find somewhere to bed down. Following Jianshe Road up to the First Ring Road, the University of Electronic Science and Technology lies to the north. We might as well camp on campus. After more than ten hours of scrambling, we are still only twenty kilometers from where we started.\n2011-01-03 23:37 We parked the cars in a line beneath the basic-teaching building at UESTC. There are no greenbelts visible here, and all that concrete is strangely reassuring. Everyone is huddled inside the vehicles, taking turns on watch. I drew first shift. My wife is lying on the back seat under a thin blanket. I have the walkie-talkie and the steel crossbow, and I\u0026rsquo;m crouched under a rain sheet in the stone corridor opposite the teaching building. The inner city is not as quiet as the outskirts beyond the Third Ring. Sounds keep rising and falling all around, and a few buildings still show traces of light inside.\n2011-01-04 08:21 Blade, who had the last watch, woke me at six this morning. Outside the cars everything was wet and glazed with a thin layer of ice. We boiled milk tea in a camping pot on the steps, while PL gathered a pile of books to burn for warmth. The campus was utterly silent. In the distance, the wooded paths and the sports field were buried under ginkgo leaves mixed with mud. All the trees are dead now, and branches keep dropping at random. Blade and Rabbit said they wanted to take a look around campus. Both of them graduated from UESTC.\n2011-01-04 10:55 Blade came back from the campus clinic with some gauze and alcohol. Rabbit had been gone so long that we couldn\u0026rsquo;t even raise him on the radio. Only an hour later did he finally stagger back, still in shock. He had gone to see his old dormitory and been terrified by the sight of a student dead in bed. In his words, a patch of moss had grown across the mattress, and if you scraped back the dirt beneath it, bits of bone were still there. We\u0026rsquo;ve just turned east from the Chuanshaan Interchange now. You still can\u0026rsquo;t get out of the city that way.\n2011-01-04 15:06 We lingered around the North Third Ring for a long time. It was almost noon before we finally discovered a short stretch north of Longtan Interchange with no sentries on it. We drove straight across and at last got out of the city again. The Tiggo\u0026rsquo;s fender got scorched melting as it crossed a firebreak trench. Let\u0026rsquo;s hope the undercarriage can survive whatever comes next. The Chengdu-Mianyang Expressway is also blocked solid with abandoned vehicles, but if we\u0026rsquo;re lucky, the ordinary road beside it may still let us head north all the way toward Deyang and Mianyang.\n2011-01-04 15:09 Beyond the North Third Ring lies Chengdu\u0026rsquo;s largest panda conservation base. By the roadside we saw what looked like the bones of a panda. Not infected, hunted. Xindu and Qingbaijiang are still technically part of Chengdu. This area is one of the city\u0026rsquo;s rural-urban pilot zones, with hardly any farmland left in sight, only silent smokestacks and vast empty factory compounds. The built-up area of Xindu looked abandoned too. We drove past it as carefully as we could.\n2011-01-04 21:50 If the GLONASS fix is accurate, we are now somewhere between Qingbaijiang and Shifang, still technically inside Chengdu\u0026rsquo;s administrative bounds. Since noon we have spent the day zigzagging around burning towns, covering 153 kilometers with appalling inefficiency. The GPS signal is gone, but luckily I have an old Russian navigation unit. The main problem is that the entire display is in Russian, so I have to guess at it by matching the screen against the map.\n2011-01-04 22:02 The cars are parked out in the middle of open country. No dogs barking, no cooking smoke anywhere. Across a narrow water ditch stands a dead bamboo grove, and whenever the wind passes through, a shower of bamboo leaves rattles down. In a normal year, the faster-growing rapeseed would already be blooming by this season. Here the fields are nothing but blackened earth, as though the crops had all been burned down like straw. Blade fetched water from a nearby farmhouse well so we could wash up, but none of us dares drink it.\n2011-01-04 22:48 Wearing electrician\u0026rsquo;s gloves, Blade cut down some bamboo and piled it into a bonfire. Before long it started raining again, so we all retreated to the vehicles. I kept scanning back and forth across the usual radio frequencies and heard nothing at all. At our current rate, the fuel in the cars will last only as far as Mianyang at most. Old Ma suggested that from tomorrow on we should follow the gas-station symbols on the map and log every station we find, whether it still has fuel or not. We need to move faster tomorrow, assuming nothing goes wrong.\n2011-01-05 08:22 There was an earthquake before dawn. The flashlight I had propped on the dashboard fell over. By feel alone I\u0026rsquo;d put it at around magnitude four, which is a basic survival skill for anyone from Sichuan. When first light came, I noticed more than a dozen military trucks parked on another road about a kilometer away. Through the binoculars I could see People\u0026rsquo;s Armed Police plates on them. Someone must have fallen asleep on watch last night, because no one noticed them until now. I woke the others immediately so we could decide whether to hide or go over and make contact.\n2011-01-05 09:23 The PAP sentries had actually spotted us long before we woke up. Once they saw us moving, they waved us over. It turned out they were troops from the Chengdu People\u0026rsquo;s Armed Police Command College, relocating toward Mianyang. They had a field kitchen truck, braised pork hocks, electricity, and they treated us to steaming bowls of ranmian. I asked whether we could trail their convoy, but one PAP instructor said no. Their route ran entirely through military-control zones. A soldier\u0026rsquo;s duty, he said, is obedience. Please understand.\n2011-01-05 22:10 From morning until afternoon, in a cold rain, we kept trailing the PAP convoy from a distance. They had refused us in words, but in practice they tacitly allowed it. That made today\u0026rsquo;s progress much faster than yesterday\u0026rsquo;s. By a little after three we had already skimmed past Deyang. The land out here is just as desolate, but unlike Chengdu, the retreat here seems to have spun out of control. Luggage is strewn everywhere, and discarded shoes lie by the roadside.\n2011-01-05 22:39 Somewhere near Luojiang, roughly thirty kilometers from Mianyang, a platoon leader came down from the PAP convoy and told us that from this point on we really could not keep following them. We needed to head east onto the Chengdu-Mianyang Expressway, he said. That was the officially designated evacuation route. Sure enough, before long we saw roadside signs reading No Entry and stone markers engraved with nuclear symbols. I knew then that we were drawing close to the nuclear-industrial zone around Mianyang.\n2011-01-05 23:18 This was the first real split in our group. Should we follow the government\u0026rsquo;s evacuation route, or stick to the original plan and head west along the Chengdu-Lanzhou corridor? We put it to a vote, and the minority yielded to the majority. In the end the group chose the safer Baoji-Chengdu line. I was in the minority. Mianyang looks to be in better shape than Chengdu. There are fewer high-rises here, mostly broad factory buildings like container terminals, all roofed in the same gray-blue metal. We stopped for the night in the yard of an empty factory.\n2011-01-06 00:14 This is the second night we\u0026rsquo;ve spent outdoors. I lashed several bags and spare fuel cans onto the roof, and at last there is enough room in the back of the car to lie flat. My wife and I climbed into our separate sleeping bags and reached out to hold hands. Old Ma has first watch. To avoid another stupid mistake like last night, we\u0026rsquo;ve shortened each shift, and every person now has to stand watch twice. This vast factory yard is more frightening than the wilderness. Shadows thicker than the night itself are pressing down around us.\n2011-01-06 00:31 I had just started to drift off when a low mechanical rumble woke me again. Old Ma had heard it too. Seeing me jump out of the car, he made a hand signal. I followed the direction he pointed and saw that lights had come on inside a factory building several hundred meters away. The noise was a generator. Neither of us had brought headlamps, so we felt our way over in the dark and peered through the window. It looked like a canned-food processing plant. In one corner were piled stacks of empty green tin cans.\n2011-01-06 00:32 There were around twenty people living inside, old and young together, and all the men were wearing dark blue work uniforms. Their bedding was spread out across the floor, with basins and kettles scattered everywhere. Several people were sitting around a long worktable strewn with dead chickens. Efficiently, almost expertly, they were plucking feathers, then using heavy shears to cut branches off the chickens\u0026rsquo; bodies, if those things could still be called chickens, before tossing them into a gasoline drum filled with boiling water. My stomach lurched so hard I nearly vomited.\n2011-01-06 00:40 Old Ma and I crept back to the cars and woke everyone without turning on any lights. I don\u0026rsquo;t know what kinds of people are living in those factory buildings now. I don\u0026rsquo;t know whether someone might throw me into an oil drum in the middle of the night. I would rather starve than eat that kind of thing. We agreed to get everyone back into the vehicles and leave at once. Fortunately the roads in the Mianyang development zone haven\u0026rsquo;t been wrecked yet, so we can still drive fast. Back to the open country. Don\u0026rsquo;t let the shadows cover my eyes.\n2011-01-06 09:05 I dreamed that I was rereading a story from Tihu Notes. In Hexi there is said to be a shrub whose seeds, once eaten by beasts, cling undigested to the intestinal wall. Only after the animal dies do they sprout where the carcass falls, feeding on the corpse and growing into a fresh thicket. Local herdsmen, in winter, often find frozen animals with branches protruding from their mouths, noses, and bodies. I woke sticky with cold sweat all over me. When I climbed up to look outside, the sky was hanging so low and dark it seemed ready to scrape the earth.\n2011-01-06 09:10 We drove more than ten li last night before stopping on a country road black as spilled ink. Ditches run along both sides of the road, and in places it is so narrow you can\u0026rsquo;t even turn around. Thinking about it calmly now, the people in that factory probably weren\u0026rsquo;t desperate enough to be eating mutated poultry themselves. More likely they were hardening their consciences and supplying food to the nuclear plants nearby. Beneath our feet, hundreds or perhaps thousands of meters down, who knows how many tunnels and caverns lie hidden, burying the stories of whole lives.\n2011-01-06 11:31 We were driving north along the Chengdu-Mianyang provincial road, and the road conditions were terrible. Every so often there would be shell craters one or two meters wide yawning up in front of us. At the crossroads of a deserted town, we spotted from afar a yellow pickup parked by the roadside with an orange warning beacon on top, the sort normally used by electric-repair crews. Three men were squatting beside it. When they saw our cars, they stood and waved. PL\u0026rsquo;s Grand Cherokee was in front, and when he stopped I had no choice but to brake as well. I did not get out.\n2011-01-06 11:31 They seemed to want a ride, and PL refused them. The three men lingered by PL\u0026rsquo;s window trying to wear him down, while one of them slowly edged around toward the driver\u0026rsquo;s side. They looked as though they had weapons tucked away somewhere, and I was just starting to feel that something was very wrong when Rabbit, of all people, climbed out of the Range Rover behind us and lit a cigarette. The three men immediately closed in on the Range Rover. Rabbit tried to get back inside, but a club came down on his head and dropped him instantly. Damn it, they\u0026rsquo;re trying to take the car.\n2011-01-06 12:01 For the first time I discovered that Blade lives up to his name. His fighting ability is terrifying. With one thrust of a jungle knife he drove the man who had climbed into the driver\u0026rsquo;s seat straight back out. Old Ma and I both jumped from our vehicles with weapons in hand, and the other two attackers turned and ran. The man who\u0026rsquo;d been stabbed convulsed a few times and then stopped moving. Blood sprayed all over the dashboard. This should count as self-defense, I told myself, though sadly there is no more 110 for me to call.\n2011-01-06 12:01 Rabbit seems to be basically all right. He has a huge lump on his forehead and is sitting on the ground resting. The bigger problem is the man who got knifed. When Old Ma and PL dragged him toward the roadside, they found that his left hand had already calcified, with an extra bony spur sticking out where a little finger might have been. So this was someone who had eaten contaminated plants. Burning the body would have been too wasteful, so we piled stones and weeds over him as best we could and drove on.\n2011-01-06 13:50 Rabbit is injured after all, so Blade has taken over driving his car while Rabbit lies in the back seat. Blade drives like a maniac. In a matter of moments he had pulled so far ahead that we lost sight of him entirely. Across the wasted fields, we could see the Chengdu-Mianyang Expressway running parallel to us about a kilometer away, with hundreds of people trudging slowly along it under their luggage. I called the Land Rover over the radio, and Blade answered that they had found supplies and were waiting for us in the town ahead.\n2011-01-07 08:25 We spent the third night since departure in a small town. Strictly speaking, though, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t a town at all, but a logistics post that Blade discovered by taking a wrong turn at noon yesterday. Camouflage barracks stand interspersed among gray-brick houses. Since arriving here, our radios and electronic devices have all been subjected to heavy interference, and I\u0026rsquo;ve lost the records I\u0026rsquo;d kept over the past few days. The interference comes in on a pattern, once every two hours. I suspect we\u0026rsquo;re still somewhere above a nuclear base.\n2011-01-07 10:34 Last night all I knew was that it had been raining. At dawn I found a skin of ice on the utility poles and tree branches. Quite a few of the few trees along the field ridges had come down. The Tiggo wouldn\u0026rsquo;t start this morning and has been idling to warm up ever since. Several of us, wearing gloves, carefully cleared branches from the road ahead. Rabbit slept through the night. The swelling on his head from yesterday has gone down, but he\u0026rsquo;s somehow started running a low fever. I\u0026rsquo;m the only one carrying a proper medical kit, so I found him some medicine.\n2011-01-07 17:07 We reached Mianyang shortly after lunch today. From a distance it looked just like Chengdu, a lime-gray forest breathing black smoke. We had planned to continue north along the Chengdu-Mianyang Expressway, but at the Qing\u0026rsquo;an ferry crossing on the Anchang River we were stopped by soldiers and police. These troops, wearing a trefoil insignia I had never seen before, didn\u0026rsquo;t check immunity certificates. Instead they ordered us to proceed to a waiting zone marked out along Mianxing North Road in Mianyang\u0026rsquo;s western suburbs and remain there until transport could be moved onward under unified traffic control.\n2011-01-07 22:24 The people maintaining order inside the waiting zone are, for the first time in a long while, actual police officers. There are even a few men in urban-enforcement uniforms wearing armbands that say \u0026ldquo;Patrol.\u0026rdquo; One police officer with two stars on his shoulders tried to make us leave our cars in a temporary lot and move into the prefab dormitories, but we refused in no uncertain terms. This waiting zone in the western suburbs holds several hundred vehicles and perhaps two or three thousand people. Everywhere I look I see either guarded suspicion or outright ill intent. I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that the open wilds are safer after all.\n2011-01-07 23:47 We\u0026rsquo;ve tried talking with the people around us. Most are from nearby counties and small towns. The longest any of them has already been waiting here is three days. Military trains are running back and forth between Mianyang and Baoji, but only two cars on each train are allowed to carry civilians. The police here are SWAT units transferred up from Yibin. The ordinary police structure has already ceased to function. I also spotted those snow-camouflage biological epidemic-prevention troops again, offering free health checks inside the lines. Almost without thinking, I warned everyone not to take any pills they hand out.\n2011-01-08 09:09 At dawn I woke to the sound of something tapping against the glass. A cluster of children stood outside, each holding an empty mineral-water bottle and staring at us through the window with pleading eyes. I was about to look for a half-finished bottle to give them when I caught sight, in the corner of my eye, of several grown men standing farther off. They were obviously using the children to do their asking for them. So I waved no and lay back down. The children left unwillingly. A moment later I heard several harsh metallic scraping sounds, jumped out of the car, and found deep fresh gouges already carved into the door.\n2011-01-09 12:51 During the thirty-six hours we\u0026rsquo;ve spent in the waiting zone, dozens more vehicles have kept arriving behind us. Among them, unmistakably, was our neighbors\u0026rsquo; Hummer H5, only now it was being driven by several strangers. In two days I\u0026rsquo;ve heard train whistles sound ten times, and fewer than a thousand people have been taken away. A porridge shed has been set up by the river, and many families short on supplies have been queueing there. I went over last night to look. It turned out to be coarse rice gruel boiled with a few leaves thrown in, so I did not dare eat it.\n2011-01-09 12:57 Rabbit has now been running a low fever for three days. He has very little energy and stays in a daze most of the time. I suspect tetanus, but Rabbit has no visible wound anywhere. I went to the police on duty to ask for help and was told there were no doctors and no medical station. So we\u0026rsquo;ve tucked Rabbit into a sleeping bag, dosed him with antipyretics, and kept him asleep in the car. In the meantime those children begging for water have come back twice more, and Blade chased them off without the slightest hesitation by pulling a knife on them. I told him to keep a lower profile.\n2011-01-09 13:29 A policeman finally came over just now to inform us that our three vehicles could go up onto the expressway, but Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s Tiggo was being denied passage. Naturally we refused to accept that and demanded to know why they were splitting up the convoy. The police explanation was that the Tiggo\u0026rsquo;s poor condition made it likely to cause a traffic jam on the highway. Blade, characteristically direct, said that when it\u0026rsquo;s time to part, you part, and opportunity shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be missed. PL, on the other hand, hesitated over whether we really ought to abandon them. I saw something odd in it at once: why had they skipped all the vehicles ahead of us and come straight to ours?\n2011-01-09 13:31 Once I pointed it out, the others noticed it too. The only people around us packing up and starting engines were all driving large SUVs, Land Rovers and Hummers and the like, with ample stores and luggage lashed to their roofs. The ordinary family sedans around them showed no sign of movement at all. The expressway is really just a cage. Once you go in, you don\u0026rsquo;t come back out. After a brief discussion, we refused the offer on the grounds that we had a patient who could not be moved and chose to keep waiting. The policeman left swearing under his breath.\n2011-01-09 21:49 Rabbit started convulsing tonight and drew his head down into the sleeping bag, refusing to come out. We stripped off his clothes to examine him and finally found a wound no larger than a fingernail on the back of his neck. It must have been scraped by a splinter sticking out of the club that hit him. None of us knew what to do. Rabbit\u0026rsquo;s wife kept crying without pause. Old Ma and I went car to car asking whether anyone was a doctor, but no one would respond. Sanitation in the waiting zone is poor, and my wife isn\u0026rsquo;t doing well either.\n2011-01-10 09:02 First thing this morning we were hit by an armed SWAT vehicle search. Good thing my steel crossbow had been disassembled. Last night there was an incident in which police and urban-enforcement officers were killed, five or six dead in total. People are comparing it to the gang years ago that hacked off hands, except this time it was feet. Supposedly the trigger was that those officers were openly washing their feet in bottled mineral water inside the duty office. In extraordinary times, even if the moral order has not yet fully collapsed, anyone who still acts according to old habits is not far from death.\n2011-01-10 10:49 Heavy snow has started falling outside. In truth the accumulation isn\u0026rsquo;t great, but the flakes are large and thick. Rabbit has sunk into sleep. He hasn\u0026rsquo;t eaten a grain of food in more than ten hours now, though his fever does seem to have broken. Those SWAT men this morning may have been fierce, but at least they kept to the rules, unlike the police, who are always pocketing whatever they can. The expressway that had just reopened to part of the traffic yesterday has now been closed again. We can\u0026rsquo;t sit here waiting like fools any longer. We need to find a way out of the waiting zone.\n2011-01-11 00:01 After the SWAT teams pulled out this afternoon, the police became noticeably harsher. Worse still, they handed firearms to some of the urban-enforcement officers. There have already been several bursts of gunfire tonight. In a waiting zone this large, the police presence is actually quite thin, while the army is deployed out on the main roads. In other words, their original intent was probably never to imprison us here at all. They really were trying to divert people, or hold them for something. Rabbit has actually woken up, incredibly enough.\n2011-01-11 00:12 Over the past two days the heavy electronic interference has cropped up several more times. I keep a little compass ball on my dashboard, and once I saw it spinning continuously. After dark, beneath the blue-gray dome of sky, you could see the glow of city lights reflecting off the clouds on the far side of town. There are visibly more lights in the surrounding suburbs than there ever were around Chengdu. Yet those lights flicker like the indicators on cold electrical cabinets. They carry no trace of human presence at all.\n2011-01-11 00:14 Rabbit ate a piece of cured pork tonight, drank a great deal of water, and gradually became talkative again. He seems to be recovering. We\u0026rsquo;ve also discovered that these police and urban-enforcement patrols are not being carried out on any strict schedule. If we don\u0026rsquo;t get freezing rain or snow tonight, we\u0026rsquo;ll take the risk and leave the waiting zone. Just as you can\u0026rsquo;t keep your car idling at the roadside forever waiting for someone, we have to keep moving forward, keep changing position, if we want to find any better chance of survival.\n2011-01-11 10:17 We left the waiting zone at three in the morning and, after driving for nearly an hour and a half, stopped here. According to GLONASS, this place is called Барабан Город. Once the sky cleared in the morning, it became obvious that this was less a town than some kind of prehistoric ruin. Broken walls ran along the ridge, and Qiang stockades built from flagstones were overgrown with gray dead vines. We have reached the rim of the Chengdu Basin.\n2011-01-11 10:20 The riot in the waiting zone last night began when soldiers and police at the expressway entrance started digging an isolation trench, which meant the road north was about to be severed for good. The crowd broke through the cordon and scattered blindly in every direction. In the confusion, urban-enforcement officers fired warning shots, which only triggered still greater chaos. One driver rammed his car into the police and was shot dead, after which more people surged over the peaked caps with wheels and fists. We drove with only our parking lights on, heading northwest.\n2011-01-11 12:06 Deep inside the Qiang stockade we saw local residents in black clothing moving about with blank expressions. We didn\u0026rsquo;t dare enter the village and kept going instead. If all goes well, we should reach Qingchuan this afternoon. I\u0026rsquo;ve driven this road many times before and remember it as lush and thick with vegetation. Now it looks as bleak as the far north. The dead branches stand like talismans warning us not to come closer. More than a dozen vehicles followed us out last night, and that H5 was unmistakably among them.\n2011-01-11 18:00 I may have taken the wrong road. Ahead of us the route has degenerated into a single-lane gravel track. On the left runs a narrow river; on the right the mountain presses close at the shoulder. We agreed that if we come upon a sizable town ahead, we\u0026rsquo;ll stop there to rest. The fuel gauge is already past halfway down. At lunch, the vehicles trailing behind us also stopped, and several of their drivers came over to make conversation and ask where we were headed. We told them Lanzhou, but refused to let them join the convoy. Resources are limited.\n2011-01-11 22:58 The temperature swing between day and night is severe in the mountains. With the heater running inside the car it feels pleasantly warm, but if you step out to piss and the wind hits you, your head starts to spin. It\u0026rsquo;s nearly eleven o\u0026rsquo;clock, and we\u0026rsquo;ve passed only two villages. Most of the farmhouses with black-tiled roofs still have lights on. Many villagers evidently never evacuated. Perhaps they have no idea what is happening out in the wider world, no sense that famine has already arrived. All they know is that overnight the rapeseed in their fields died, and they are left grieving and bewildered by it.\n2011-01-12 00:22 The Tiggo got bogged down in a stretch of loose gravel. I hauled it out with the steel tow cable, but in the middle of the night I didn\u0026rsquo;t dare keep pushing forward, so we doubled back and returned to the little village we had passed half an hour earlier. Some of the vehicles trailing us had already stopped there; others followed us back in. Blade went to a villager\u0026rsquo;s house and bought several jin of cured sausage. Amazingly, the people here still accept cash. Many of the drivers would gladly have bought out every scrap of meat in the village.\n2011-01-12 08:36 In the middle of the night I heard people retching, PL among them. It turns out the rabbit they bought and roasted last night was actually rat. It ate like dry twigs, hard and stringy, with knotty bits in it. Old Ma climbed the slope beside us and managed to find a flicker of GPS signal. He marked a gas station forty kilometers away. We have to find some way to shake the vehicles following us. Otherwise, once fuel comes into the picture, there will likely be a fight with weapons.\n2011-01-12 10:35 We left in a hurry just now, and PL dropped a bag containing his ID card and some cash. He doesn\u0026rsquo;t intend to go back for it. No cars came after us. Blade said over the radio that last night he had done a little work on the exhaust pipes of those trailing vehicles. We found the gas station, one of those increasingly rare private ones, and it had only 90-octane fuel. We siphoned it straight out of underground barrels and filled the auxiliary tanks. Just as we were about to leave, the H5 rolled in.\n2011-01-12 11:06 A bald man got out of the H5. He had an Arab scarf wrapped around his neck so that only his Ray-Bans showed, his hands were bundled up tight, and he walked with a slight limp. He nodded to us, then simply picked up the fuel hose from the ground. The Hummer\u0026rsquo;s windows were all blacked out, so there was no way to tell how many people were inside. We didn\u0026rsquo;t linger. We got back in the cars and left. Running 90-octane will be rough on the injectors. Let\u0026rsquo;s hope nothing serious goes wrong.\n2011-01-12 11:48 Today\u0026rsquo;s road keeps climbing higher and higher. Judging from the GPS, we\u0026rsquo;ve probably gone the wrong way. We\u0026rsquo;re now on a branch route toward Pingwu, and if we keep going we\u0026rsquo;ll end up in Jiuzhaigou. The Chengdu-Lanzhou railway has been in service for years now, but the Chengdu-Lanzhou expressway was never built. The question is whether to turn back or keep going. This road is at too high an altitude, and our vehicles are in too poor shape. If one of them breaks down halfway up, things will get interesting fast.\n2011-01-12 21:19 My wife and I have both come down with something like a cold, so we stopped early tonight by a river to rest. After basic filtering, the river water is usable. This afternoon we did keep heading toward Jiuzhaigou. If we don\u0026rsquo;t stop, we should reach the scenic area by eleven tonight. The deeper we go into the mountains, the more shocking the landscape becomes: gray-white forests, wide drifts of dead birds. Far off in the hills, we can see wildfires flickering.\n2011-01-12 23:52 I\u0026rsquo;m sleeping worse and worse these days, and my lower back has started aching. Tonight everyone was chatting over the radio on and off, and I handed out some vitamin capsules and cod-liver oil. Symptoms from the lack of plant-based food will only become more obvious from here on. Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s car has started stalling frequently. My guess is the throttle body is fouled up. Once it\u0026rsquo;s daylight, we\u0026rsquo;ll clean it properly. Rabbit has recovered completely now. Blade, on the other hand, has grown even more taciturn.\n2011-01-13 08:43 The air in the mountains is alarmingly damp. The windows were filmed over with mist and a skim of ice. I got up early, started the engine, and let it warm slowly. Last night I showed them how to stretch plastic sheeting across the roofs of the cars to collect dew. We are not yet out of water, but planning ahead never hurts. I feel somewhat better after sleeping. My wife has a bit of a cough. The sky is a bright tile blue. In the mountains you get the illusion that the air must be clean, and yet there isn\u0026rsquo;t a single birdcall to be heard. We started repairing the Tiggo.\n2011-01-13 10:49 After all of us crawled over Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s Tiggo and did our best to fix it, the engine at least stopped dying at idle, but now the check-engine light on the dashboard is glowing steadily. We dug through the owner\u0026rsquo;s manual for ages, and it says this may simply mean the engine hasn\u0026rsquo;t completed its self-check, nothing too serious. So we have no real choice except to make do and get back on the road. I joked that if his car gave out, he could always squeeze into mine. He forced a smile and said it\u0026rsquo;d be fine. Out of the four families, his is the only one traveling with a child.\n2011-01-14 12:08 Yesterday we struggled forward for a little over a hundred kilometers and then found there was simply no road left. It had been blown apart. The plastic caps and fuse wire from blasting detonators were still lying on the ground, so it must have happened recently. With no choice, we turned around to look for another route. On the flat highway through Zoige, PL, who was leading, rolled his car without any warning at all. The Grand Cherokee flipped several times and went off the roadbed. His girlfriend was gone almost at once. He, impossibly, survived.\n2011-01-14 12:11 The rollover happened because the right front tire suddenly burst. Years ago my father went through the exact same kind of crash. We spent the entire day dealing with the site. No rescuers were ever going to come. We could only stand there and watch that beautiful girl gradually stop breathing. Her surname was Wu. We had only played tabletop games together a few times, but PL had cared for her with extraordinary tenderness all along the journey. We had even joked that they would be the only couple to get married in the middle of this great famine.\n2011-01-14 12:12 We tried several times to flip the Grand Cherokee back over and finally had to give up. PL\u0026rsquo;s supplies were split between my car and Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s. He himself is lying in my car now. His left arm has been roughly splinted with a wooden board, and even twisting his waist is difficult. All we can do is hope there is no internal injury. Fortunately, over the past twenty hours PL has been tough. His vital signs have remained stable. In Zoige, mani-stone cairns are already everywhere in sight. We buried the girl at the foot of a mountain.\n2011-01-14 17:06 We stopped at the junction of Highway G213 and some unnamed river to rest and regroup. PL\u0026rsquo;s condition is still unstable, and he hasn\u0026rsquo;t recovered from the shock of losing his girlfriend. We reviewed our supplies and decided to stay here an extra day. At least the weather has turned warmer. I spread out the solar panels by the roadside to charge devices for everyone. Old Ma even has a solar cooker, a miraculous thing he used for boiling water back when he was stationed in Tibet.\n2011-01-16 00:01 This morning we picked up a radio signal saying there was a supply post in Zoige county town for vehicles traveling the Chengdu-Lanzhou route. PL was doing a little better, so we drove there slowly. Just as we caught sight of the county theater building in the distance, a car suddenly started honking at us. Looking over, we saw the H5 stopped at the mouth of a side street. The bald man leaned out of the window and shouted at us not to go in. It\u0026rsquo;s a trap the soldiers set, he yelled.\n2011-01-16 00:32 The bald man\u0026rsquo;s voice sounded strange, as if his vocal cords had been damaged. He said the garrison along this line had already been pulled out, that he\u0026rsquo;d seen the same unit designation back in Mianyang. The people using the radio now, he said, were merely local villagers trying to lure in vehicles and food. I half believed him and half didn\u0026rsquo;t, but it seemed wiser to assume he might be right. In any case, staying out of the county seat was obviously safer. I was about to ask him where he was from when he rolled up the window, turned around, and drove off.\n2011-01-16 00:51 We kept heading north along G213, deeper into southern Gansu. This route was never exactly remote, and now, though there are no people in sight, abandoned cars and scattered luggage are everywhere. Every time we come across a vehicle, we stop to see whether there is any fuel left in it or anything else worth taking. Blade has been trying to find another car that still runs, so he and his wife can separate from Rabbit\u0026rsquo;s vehicle, but so far he hasn\u0026rsquo;t found one.\n2011-01-16 11:22 We set out early today and passed several abandoned pickups that looked from a distance as if they were loaded with straw. Only when we got close did we see that the truck beds were piled with corpses wrapped in blankets, with needle-like vines piercing through the fabric and trailing down over the side. We accelerated away as if fleeing the plague itself. Almost without noticing it, we realized the landscape by the roadside had already changed. Bare yellow-brown hills, and a sky that had somehow grown higher.\n2011-01-16 12:15 Blade, bringing up the rear, suddenly came over the radio shouting that several Tucsons were chasing us. In my rearview mirror I could see thick yellow dust rising from the road about a kilometer behind. On a surface like this there is no way to accelerate enough to shake a pursuit, and besides, there wasn\u0026rsquo;t yet any clear sign that they were actually after us. So everyone kept driving as normal. Tucsons were once a favorite model of car thieves years ago. Insurance companies wouldn\u0026rsquo;t even cover theft on them. A lot of stolen ones ended up resold into pastoral regions.\n2011-01-16 12:57 Three battered Tucson SUVs caught up from behind just now, and two of them swerved ahead and forced us to a stop. Seven or eight Khampa men with matted braids got out, waving Tibetan knives and ordering us out of the vehicles. I told my wife to stay in the car and not move, then slowly climbed out holding the steel crossbow. Blade, however, opened fire and dropped two of the robbers before they had any chance at all. Where did he get a gun? None of us even knew he had one.\n2011-01-16 13:08 Blade calmly explained that he had grabbed the gun off an urban-enforcement officer during the chaos when we left the Mianyang waiting zone, though unfortunately the magazines weren\u0026rsquo;t full and he had only ten rounds. The rest of us were drenched in cold sweat. Knives and pepper spray are no longer enough to guarantee safety. We tightened the spacing between the vehicles so we could support one another front and back. The Tucsons still trailed us at a distance, and men even leaned out of their windows hurling stones at us with wurduo slings.\n2011-01-16 14:54 Under the robbers\u0026rsquo; harassment, our convoy nearly got into trouble several times, and the Range Rover at the rear was dented in multiple places by the stones. Blade dared not waste ammunition, so all he could do was let them keep shadowing us. Only when we reached another town did the Tucsons finally turn away. Long before we reached that town, the wind brought us the smell of mutton soup. This place actually had a real military supply post, and a squad of PAP soldiers was still holding it.\n2011-01-16 17:24 This little town is called Huage, the gateway to Luqu County. We have crossed into Gansu. The soldiers here belong to the forest PAP. A few days ago the trees up in the mountains all began to wither, so they withdrew from above and discovered that the county seat had already been abandoned. The squad leader is named Caidan, a local Tibetan. He has gathered the sheep that local farmers had penned and is holding position here on the banks of the Tao River. He told us that quite a few vehicles have passed through over the past few days.\n2011-01-16 17:42 The soldiers invited us to rest and served up steaming bowls of mutton soup. I made a point of going to inspect the sheep they had slaughtered and the hides they had skinned off them before finally settling down and eating with full confidence. These few soldiers all seem to be in good spirits, the kind that make you think of those military dramas on television. I asked why they had not evacuated with everyone else. Caidan said simply that this is his home and he has nowhere else to go. The other soldiers just grinned and laughed. I don\u0026rsquo;t think the story is that simple.\n2011-01-16 18:07 Taking advantage of a trip out to piss, Blade quietly asked me something. If these soldiers really had been holding the riverbank, why did we run into them here instead of in the county seat? If they can eat the sheep, then what have those sheep been eating? We called out to Old Ma and said we were heading into town to look for parts to repair the Tiggo. Caidan gave a sweeping wave of the hand and said there were plenty of vehicles in the county seat, even PAP Dongfeng Warriors, and that we were welcome to drive whatever we needed. That took us by surprise.\n2011-01-16 18:37 Luqu was also a hard-hit area during the May 12 Wenchuan earthquake that year. A great many buildings collapsed, so the place was effectively rebuilt from scratch. Yet when we entered the county seat, we found dangerous buildings everywhere, and not because of those gray-white vines. These were genuinely unsafe structures. Cracks three fingers wide were everywhere. Houses leaned and sagged, somehow still standing. When the dry cold wind passed through, every fissure gave out a thin mournful sound.\n2011-01-16 18:38 Xiulong Zhaxi Square was packed with cars dusted over in yellow sand, many of them still carrying Sichuan A and Sichuan B plates. I asked one of the soldiers where the people from those cars had gone. He said that before the 10th, the Qinghai Military District had been sending helicopters here every day to evacuate people to Xunhua. After that, because of the weather, the landing zone was moved to Yanglong, a place no vehicle could reach, so many people set out there on foot. I asked whether helicopters were still coming now. If they were, the soldier said, we\u0026rsquo;d have been gone already.\n2011-01-16 21:12 Caidan invited us to spend the night at the supply post. I didn\u0026rsquo;t really want to stay too close to the PAP, but then I thought about the alternative, running into knife-carrying bandits in the empty county seat after dark, and in the end I called everyone over and had us camp on the road right outside the post. The Tao River is beautiful at night, a blue ribbon winding among the rolling pastures. Those PAP men are all remarkably bold. They gathered dead branches and built a bonfire. It\u0026rsquo;s the first time in days I\u0026rsquo;ve sat close to a fire. The warmth feels incredible.\n2011-01-17 10:14 Two shots rang out last night. The soldier on duty told us they had been driving off wolves approaching the town. When I got up in the morning, I could catch the faint smell of blood froth in the wind. We packed up and got ready to continue on the road. Caidan generously handed us the key to a Dongfeng Warrior, then made a request we couldn\u0026rsquo;t refuse: stay one more day. He said that the last time they received radio contact, they were told that today would see the final helicopter sortie.\n2011-01-17 13:34 We set out for Yanglong at eleven. Just in case, I went with Old Ma, Rabbit, and Caidan\u0026rsquo;s group, while Blade and PL stayed to guard the vehicles and keep radio contact with us. Halfway there, heavy snow suddenly began to fall. In only a few minutes the whole world around us had turned into a white plain, and visibility shrank to little more than ten meters. We had no choice but to turn back. So much for the helicopter. Caidan was even more upset than I was. He said that with snow this heavy, the livestock they had left would never make it through.\n2011-01-17 14:04 We had been walking for an hour before the weather changed on the way out, and now, on the way back, we had already been going for two hours and still hadn\u0026rsquo;t reached Huage again. We couldn\u0026rsquo;t even see a trace of Luqu. Yet Caidan kept trudging on without a sign of concern. Where exactly is he taking us? I pulled out my compass and sure enough, we had veered a full thirty degrees southwest of the proper heading. I called Caidan to a stop. He looked distinctly uncomfortable and muttered that with snow this heavy, this was the lee-side route.\n2011-01-17 21:37 We got back to Huage at four in the afternoon. By then all the snow on us had melted, leaving us wet and freezing. Caidan said nothing more along the way, and I couldn\u0026rsquo;t quite tease out what was wrong. At the gate of the supply post, two green military vehicles had appeared as if from nowhere: one big Tiema truck and one Iveco, both marked with red crosses. When I saw my wife, they were roasting mutton shanks over the fire. The sight of our people and cars safe and intact let all of us breathe again.\n2011-01-17 21:38 Several unfamiliar soldiers were also warming themselves by the fire. When they saw us come in, they stood up and greeted us warmly. Caidan is only a deputy platoon leader, and he hurried up to salute them. The newcomers told him not to stand on ceremony and introduced themselves as being from some brigade out of Guangyuan. At that, something thudded in my chest. Their shoulder insignia looked horribly familiar: the figure of a soldier in a helmet holding a stalk of wheat. Weren\u0026rsquo;t these the same biological epidemic-prevention troops that had appeared in my residential compound? What are they doing all the way out here?\n2011-01-17 23:31 Tonight I drank a few liang of barley liquor, and after the wind and snow I was light-headed the whole time, half asleep in the car. PL seemed much recovered and was even in the mood to play grab-the-totem games with those soldiers. There are only four of the new arrivals in all: two drivers and two lieutenant-looking officers. The officers were carrying flashlights and collecting grass seeds out in the fields. The rear compartment of the Tiema truck is completely empty, though it does have small windows in it. I have no idea what it\u0026rsquo;s for.\n2011-01-17 23:51 The two officers are surnamed Mo and Zhao. After they came back from gathering grass seeds, they sat around talking with Old Ma and the others while I propped up the radio and listened. One moment they were saying the government had announced a Green Dam plan to defend against the plant plague, the next they were saying experts from the Fourth Military Medical University had already succeeded in controlling the illness with medical isotopes. That made me think of my brother, who graduated from Fourth Military Med. It was on the eighteenth that he gave me that rushed phone call warning me. I wonder where he is now.\n2011-01-18 08:32 My head is pounding. In the middle of the night someone suddenly dragged me out of the car and smashed me to the ground with a rifle butt. I clearly remember locking the door. Now I\u0026rsquo;m tied up and thrown into the back of that Tiema truck. My wife is here, Old Ma and the others too. The only ones missing are Blade and his wife. I have no idea where the truck is headed, but from the view through the little window it seems we\u0026rsquo;re climbing a mountain road. In the cab sits Lieutenant Mo, and damn it all, Caidan is right there beside him.\n2011-01-18 08:53 It\u0026rsquo;s still sleeting today. The bastards somehow forgot to take off my EDC bag. Caidan must not be afraid of us escaping, because the ropes on us were only symbolic. One quick struggle and they came loose. I was still thinking through what to do when Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s son woke up and burst into tears. The Tiema slammed to a stop, the rear hatch opened, and Caidan climbed in with a dark face. He swept his eyes over us and said, \u0026ldquo;A soldier obeys orders. Forgive me. You won\u0026rsquo;t be mistreated.\u0026rdquo;\n2011-01-18 09:40 A road marker flashed past outside, and it looked strangely familiar. I thought hard for a moment and then it hit me: isn\u0026rsquo;t this the same road we took yesterday toward Yanglong? That means Caidan and his men were probably stationed in Huage all along precisely to wait for small bands of travelers like us. But what value is there in capturing us? The other day he insisted no vehicles could get through to Yanglong, yet by the look of it this dirt road can run all the way to the airfield.\n2011-01-18 11:32 A makeshift military airstrip came into view, really no more than a broad patch of flattened ground on the mountaintop, fit only for helicopters. A Mi-26, painted in snow camouflage, was parked there. The moment it saw us approaching, its enormous rotors began slowly to turn. The closer we drew, the more deafening the roar became. When the Tiema stopped, several soldiers hauled us out one by one and marched us toward the helicopter.\n2011-01-18 11:43 I kept watching the distance between myself and my wife with absolute concentration. If anyone so much as tried to separate us, I was prepared to fight to the death. We were brought up through the rear hatch and ordered to sit on wooden crates on the cabin floor. The other Iveco was driven straight into the Mi-26. Lieutenant Zhao got out and spoke with a major already aboard the aircraft. After the two of them talked for a while, that major walked over toward us.\n2011-01-18 11:56 Damn it, I know this bastard major. He\u0026rsquo;s Chaoye, one of my brother\u0026rsquo;s old dog-meat buddies, an officer with the Chengdu Military Region Joint Logistics Department. He recognized me too and stared in shock. How the hell did they bring you in here, he asked. Why are you still in Sichuan? Didn\u0026rsquo;t your brother tell you to run? I gave him the rough outline of what had happened, and he sighed. Caidan\u0026rsquo;s squad really had been ordered to set up a checkpoint in Luqu, he said, specifically to intercept convoys from Chengdu carrying sick people.\n2011-01-18 11:57 I hurried to explain that our patient, PL, had been injured in a car wreck, not infected in Chengdu. Chaoye waved a hand and said one of your group is infected. Then he pointed over my shoulder. I turned around as slowly as I could, terrified he meant my wife. Following his finger, I saw Rabbit. In my head I replayed Rabbit\u0026rsquo;s attack, his fever, the fever breaking, his recovery, and then I remembered the man Blade had stabbed to death. Was that when it happened?\n2011-01-18 12:16 Under the tremendous noise of the helicopter, Rabbit hadn\u0026rsquo;t heard any of our conversation. I asked Chaoye where they were taking us. He said there was a field hospital east of Mianyang where they were researching and treating the epidemic. That was where we had originally been meant to go, but\u0026hellip; He didn\u0026rsquo;t finish the sentence. Through his headset, Chaoye told the pilot to stand down, and then he had us all taken back off the helicopter.\n2011-01-18 13:17 In a field medical truck we were forcibly treated with an injection of the medical radioactive isotope technetium-919m. If it encounters the unknown bacteria from the meteorite gravel inside the body, it can slow the rewriting of DNA fragments. Rabbit was confirmed as infected. He belongs to the third generation of transmission, is no longer contagious, but still has to be placed under centralized observation and treatment. Rabbit himself took it calmly enough. His wife, on the other hand, cried herself to pieces.\n2011-01-18 14:00 Chaoye said the rest of us had been cleared of infection and did not have to go back with them to Mianyang. Though it had troops and hospitals, he said, it was even more dangerous there. Rabbit and his wife boarded the helicopter. With remarkable nonchalance, he said that would leave the Range Rover cheap for PL to inherit. We watched the Mi-26 lift into the air, not knowing what would become of Rabbit and not knowing where my brother was now. I asked Chaoye about him, but he said the air-force medical team had been pulled to the very front line, and someone of his rank was not privy to transfer details.\n2011-01-18 15:07 Riding back in the Tiema truck, Caidan kept apologizing to us over and over, saying military orders are hard to disobey. That much is true; I can\u0026rsquo;t really blame him. He told us that the moment we arrived and said we had come from Chengdu, he had already sent a telegram to the Mianyang side. Before us, several hundred people had already been transported back. I asked what happened to those taken back there. He shrugged, thought for a long time, and finally said it would be better not to go to that damned place.\n2011-01-18 16:04 Caidan said that when they came to seize us at midnight yesterday, Blade and his wife were already gone from the vehicles. He really is alert. By the time we got back, Huage village was now being held by another relief guard squad. Our cars and baggage ought still to be there. I mentioned the Tibetan bandits we ran into on the road. Caidan said that was perfectly normal, but what can anyone do? They need to survive too. He also said that this checkpoint would be withdrawn by the end of the month at the latest, because soon no one would be able to get out of Sichuan anymore.\n2011-01-18 18:07 From a distance, the low buildings of the supply post already looked wrong. There were no sentries visible outside. When the Tiema pulled up to the yard entrance, we could see through the open gate that several corpses were sprawled all over the ground inside, some soldiers, some herders. Our vehicles were all still there. The luggage had been rifled through, and the food and water had been pulled out and piled together, as if whoever did it had not had time to carry them off.\n2011-01-18 18:07 Blade\u0026rsquo;s body wasn\u0026rsquo;t among the dead. One of the herders, however, looked oddly familiar, as if he had been in one of those Tucsons the other day, and the corpse was still giving off heat. Caidan recognized the captain of the replacement guard squad lying in a pool of blood, but his submachine gun was gone. I pulled our radio from the car and called for Blade, but there was no answer at all. Maybe he had slipped away in the night and never gone through the firefight that had just happened here.\n2011-01-18 21:35 By the time we had collected and arranged the dead, it was already very late. We lit the bonfire again, boiled a pot of mutton soup, and sat out in the yard to eat. The thought that a vicious battle had just taken place in this very courtyard left me badly on edge. At this point we are down to six people: my wife and me, Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s family of three, and PL. Tomorrow we have two options: head for the prefectural capital of Gannan, or enter Qinghai. Caidan recommends the latter. Gannan is chaos, he says.\n2011-01-18 22:15 The radio in the car suddenly began to hiss. Blade had seen the bonfire at the supply post and was testing the channel. Once he confirmed it was us, he came back not long afterward, dragging his wife behind him, both of them covered in dust. The night before, they had discovered Caidan\u0026rsquo;s intentions and fled to a nearby hillside. They originally meant to come back at noon and drive off while no one was around, only to run into raiders taking advantage of the emptiness and fighting with the replacement guard squad. Carrying nothing but emergency bags, he didn\u0026rsquo;t dare go far, so they hid nearby instead.\n2011-01-18 22:33 I told Blade about Rabbit. He jerked all over when he heard it, visibly shocked. I noticed blood on his clothes. He said it had splashed onto him while he was grabbing bags back during the daytime, not his own. We prepared to sort out our gear overnight and leave first thing in the morning. PL handed Blade the keys to Rabbit\u0026rsquo;s car, since he and his wife had been riding in the Range Rover all along. Blade refused, though, and he and his wife moved their luggage onto the Dongfeng Warrior Caidan had given us.\n2011-01-19 08:52 When we got up this morning, a night\u0026rsquo;s snow had fallen outside. The layer in front of the door was a full four centimeters thick. Fortunately the accumulation on the highway was much lighter, just a thin covering blown flat by the wind. But if a real blizzard hits while we\u0026rsquo;re halfway along the road, we\u0026rsquo;ll be trapped with nowhere to advance or retreat. We stripped snow chains off an idle military vehicle and fitted them to our cars. Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s Tiggo is such a wreck, yet he still couldn\u0026rsquo;t bear to part with it. After I talked him into it, he finally switched to a Ford Kuga in decent condition.\n2011-01-19 10:18 Just before we set out, Caidan said that since no one was checking equipment anymore anyway, he might as well give us two Type 92 pistols and a small amount of ammunition. PL and I each took one. Blade wanted a submachine gun too, but he was turned down. Yesterday Old Ma picked up a wurduo sling from one of the dead, and Caidan showed us how to use it, though getting any accuracy out of the thing is no easy matter. The Warrior runs on diesel. We topped off in Luqu and then got back on the road.\n2011-01-19 10:18 Our overall situation at the moment is this: eight people, namely myself, my wife, Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s family of three including his seven-year-old son, Blade and his wife, and PL. Four vehicles: the Wrangler, the Kuga, the Range Rover, and the Warrior. Water: sufficient. Food: canned goods, frozen mutton, cured pork. From Luqu to Xunhua, taking Provincial Road 312 and avoiding Gannan proper, is close to three hundred kilometers. Fortunately the elevation changes aren\u0026rsquo;t too severe. If our luck doesn\u0026rsquo;t turn completely rotten, it shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be too bad.\n2011-01-19 20:23 The cold is getting worse and the snow still hasn\u0026rsquo;t stopped. My wife and I have put on every layer of clothing we have, and when we pause on the road we don\u0026rsquo;t even dare shut off the engine. We barely managed to reach Provincial Road 312 before the Range Rover gave up completely. Rabbit, that idiot, had never switched to winter engine oil, so once the temperature dropped below minus twenty Celsius the thing simply died for good. We didn\u0026rsquo;t dare wait around in the snow, so we abandoned it and switched vehicles. That cost us a fair bit of time. At this point we\u0026rsquo;re still thirty kilometers from Sangke Township.\n2011-01-19 21:09 The wind and snow suddenly turned much fiercer. Even with the high beams on, you could see only a few meters ahead. We were already crawling slowly, but even so several of the cars started sliding on the gentlest curves. After a quick discussion, we decided not to risk pushing on. The odds of freezing are still lower than the odds of dying in a wreck. We drove the three remaining cars down off the roadbed and parked them in an arc to block the wind, then set up camp. All of us have colds to one degree or another. Luckily, my wife and I have sleeping bags thick enough to matter.\n2011-01-19 21:16 Old Ma was boiling strong coffee for his son and asked whether I wanted some. Truth is, what I really miss right now is ginger soup, especially the kind made thick and sweet with brown sugar. But does ginger even still exist in this world? Ever since we saw Caidan and his men build fires with deadwood in Luqu and come to no harm, we\u0026rsquo;ve finally begun to trust firewood ourselves. Before that, our fear of plants had gotten so deep that we didn\u0026rsquo;t even dare touch dead branches. Blade says his hands were frostbitten last night. He kept his gloves on even while eating.\n2011-01-20 08:50 The wind got to me when I went out to relieve myself last night. I started running a fever in the middle of the night, tossing and turning, unable to sleep, sweating through one strange dream after another until even the sleeping bag was damp. This morning I swallowed another handful of medicine and started warming up the car. We\u0026rsquo;ll get back on the road in a bit. My wife says my face looks awful and insists she\u0026rsquo;ll drive for now. Blade pointed at the roadside and said that some kind of animal came through in the night. In the snow there were clear strings of hoofprints.\n2011-01-20 17:47 The fever still won\u0026rsquo;t break, and every time I cough it feels as if my entire lungs are tearing. So this is how I go down. Ironic. Today we made it as far as Sangke, where we had meant to arrive yesterday, and there we stopped. The next stretch ahead will be hard, with several mountain crossings in a row, so everyone made the considerate decision to rest a day and wait for my cold to ease before moving on. Sangke is scattered across seven or eight villages. You can vaguely tell that people are still living there, but when they spot us from far off, they all duck away.\n2011-01-20 18:06 We picked an empty courtyard and made camp there. Presumably the former owners won\u0026rsquo;t object if we use their stove for a while. When Blade and PL went out to gather firewood, they ran into a child dressed in black. The moment the child saw them, he turned and ran. The running gait was strange, almost unnatural, and they couldn\u0026rsquo;t catch up. Over these past few days PL has recovered a great deal psychologically, though he still drifts off in a daze from time to time. Because of the cold I don\u0026rsquo;t dare eat mutton, so I mixed up some oatmeal and crawled into my sleeping bag early.\n2011-01-21 17:09 The fever kept on. I lay in the sleeping bag drifting in and out, aching all over, barely able to lift an arm. My wife fed me dissolving fever tablets. God, I wanted a can of yellow peaches. When I was little, whenever I got sick my mother would buy me canned fruit, and once I ate it I always got better. Old Ma and the others all looked deeply anxious. Ironically, it was Blade, the most hardline of us all, who kept watching me this time with an unexpectedly gentle gaze.\n2011-01-22 10:09 After more than forty hours of fitful sleep, I finally got some strength back into my body. That brought up a practical problem: toilet paper, that absolute consumable, is vanishing much faster than I\u0026rsquo;d expected. If we end up with even one more patient as sick with a bad cold as I was, we\u0026rsquo;ll soon be saying goodbye to one of the last signs of civilized society. My wife spooned instant rice porridge into me. Seeing that I looked a little better, she carefully told me that Old Ma and the others were no longer willing to wait. At first light, they\u0026rsquo;d already left.\n2011-01-22 10:10 I was shocked and demanded to know why. My wife said, don\u0026rsquo;t you remember Rabbit? At once I recalled Rabbit\u0026rsquo;s fever the other week. Did they think I was infected too? Impossible. Or perhaps that was only the excuse they chose to cover the fact that they no longer wanted to wait. I let out a long sigh and flopped heavily back down, only then noticing that the Warrior was still parked beside the Wrangler. Blade hadn\u0026rsquo;t left? No, my wife said. If not for him, all our things would already have been stolen.\n2011-01-22 10:43 Blade was out in the open space tinkering with my solar panels. Hearing us talk, he wandered over. So now I finally know the warmth and chill of human nature, I said with a bitter laugh. In truth I\u0026rsquo;d never been especially close to Blade before, and I had no idea why he had chosen to stay for me. He didn\u0026rsquo;t answer that. Instead he asked very seriously: that day, when you spoke to that Major Chao, was he certain that third-generation infected people are no longer contagious? I said yes. And all of you were injected with the isotope? Yes.\n2011-01-22 10:44 Blade nodded and slowly pulled off his gloves. On the backs of his hands were several faint swellings, like steel shot implanted under the skin. Blade himself has no idea when he was infected. Only the deep bone-gnawing pain that comes in the dead of night reminds him that he is no longer like the others. You\u0026rsquo;re a sensible man, Blade said. I could tell that much long ago. If my wife stays with you, she\u0026rsquo;ll live longer. When he spoke of his wife, his eyes were full of tenderness.\n2011-01-24 15:47 We have somehow lingered in Sangke for five full days now. Far too long. By yesterday afternoon I was at least able to get up and walk around, though the violent coughing was still with me. My wife was afraid that driving all night would make the illness flare up again, so we stayed one more night. After dark, Blade came hurrying back from gathering firewood, stamped out the bonfire, and pulled out his phone to show us a video he had just shot: several villagers dressed in black were unloading things from a Ford Kuga. Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s car? I asked. Blade nodded.\n2011-01-24 15:49 I asked where he had filmed it. Blade said it was in the next village over. We were stunned. Old Ma and PL\u0026rsquo;s cars, which had driven off two days ago, were practically within arm\u0026rsquo;s reach, and there were all those villagers who had never once shown themselves openly. The people in the video moved in a distinctly unnatural way. At such a short distance, they must have been watching us this whole time too. We decided that later on we\u0026rsquo;d scout out whether Old Ma and the others were still alive. First, though, we\u0026rsquo;d better check the condition of our own vehicles.\n2011-01-25 09:44 I\u0026rsquo;m still trying to absorb what happened last night. In fact, the shock scared my cold clean away. I have spent the whole journey forcing myself not to believe that anything supernatural is happening around us, even though the apocalypse itself is already the most supernatural thing imaginable, and yet I still cannot digest what took place. The outcome is simple enough: we rescued Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s family of three and PL, regrouped as one party, and got back on the road. The price is that we now carry an even larger question on our backs.\n2011-01-25 09:44 At dusk yesterday, just as Blade and I drew near the village where he had spotted the Kuga, a spring trap made of branches and ropes knocked us flat. We were tied up like sticky-rice dumplings, and several villagers in black grabbed us all at once and dragged us toward a farmhouse. Their hands were hard and cold, crusted with dried blood, and none of them had five normal fingers. In the confusion Blade shouted something in Tibetan. To my amazement, the villagers stopped. Blade speaks Tibetan?\n2011-01-25 09:45 A little later an elderly man, black and thin like some village party secretary, was carried over. His two legs, well, could no longer really be called legs. He and Blade clasped hands, and the extra bony spur protruding between the old man\u0026rsquo;s index and middle fingers settled on the swellings on the back of Blade\u0026rsquo;s hand. The sight made my skin crawl. The two men didn\u0026rsquo;t speak. They simply held hands for five full minutes, and then we were released.\n2011-01-25 09:46 We found Old Ma and the others in a woodshed. If we hadn\u0026rsquo;t come, sooner or later they would have been turned into some kind of cured meat. Old Ma kept trying to say something, but Blade cut him off with a wave: no point talking. Only if there are more people do you live long enough. We settled that clearly when we came out together; if you still can\u0026rsquo;t understand it, we can change people up ahead. I said nothing, partly to avoid making the moment more awkward.\n2011-01-25 09:47 We set out on the road again, the eastern sky about to catch fire and light the right side of our faces. Blade\u0026rsquo;s vehicle took point, while Old Ma and PL followed behind in silence. I knew all of us now carried a knot inside that would be difficult to undo, but we had to do our best to preserve at least the surface of unity and keep moving. Beyond Blade\u0026rsquo;s strange exchange with the old man, there is an even larger question haunting me: just now Little Ma ran over and hugged me and said, they were driven out.\n2011-01-26 08:50 Last night we camped beside a mountain road. It was the first time we\u0026rsquo;d ever spent the night in terrain this dangerous, though at least there was no chance of other vehicles passing by. We anchored the cars to the ground with tow lines, then each of us curled up inside our own vehicle, keeping our silence and our distance, while only static hissed over the radios. PL and Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s family of five must have been miserable squeezed into one car, forced to remain seated the whole time. The night wind was like an axe, carving the shape of cold itself.\n2011-01-27 17:58 At last the hardest stretch of mountain road is behind us, and the road has begun descending for long intervals. The radio has actually picked up a signal again, a Qinghai traffic station. Before we came down off the heights, on cloudless nights we could see, far away, chains of headlights like dragons, rising and falling along the earth\u0026rsquo;s shadowed contours. We\u0026rsquo;re nearly out of fuel now. Once we\u0026rsquo;re off the mountain we need to find somewhere to refuel and patch tires. Supermarkets, gas stations, repair shops: those are the places you long to encounter most.\n2011-01-29 23:34 Fifty hours. These past days of exhausting, monotonous travel have drained away even the will to record events. Within a radius of one hundred and fifty kilometers centered on Lanzhou, every road is choked with vehicles bearing plates from Sichuan, Shaanxi, Henan, Shanxi, Hebei, Shandong, Beijing, and every shade of PLA, police, and PAP registration. Even for people like us, who cut across Gannan and were aiming not at Lanzhou but at Haidong, the narrow winding provincial lanes of the countryside have trapped us just as firmly as an intestinal loop.\n2011-01-29 23:35 We are like the great Spring Festival travel crowds of years ago, wedged fast on the barren spine where the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has only just begun to rise. Drivers around us say the line of vehicles now stretches far enough to jam every provincial and national road from Lanzhou to Xining. When we first unknowingly joined this queue the night before last, we were delighted to have finally caught up again with the main stream of retreat. By the time we realized it was a dead end, cars had already piled in behind us and locked us into the line, unable either to advance or retreat.\n2011-01-29 23:35 Exposed among so many people, the supplies that had once seemed abundant suddenly feel painfully thin. There are no country folk walking the jam selling hot eggs and tea kettles the way they used to in the old days. Instead there are only all kinds of people trying, by force or by guile, openly or quietly, to squeeze water and food out of your hands. Helicopters circle overhead, and soldiers and police patrol on motorcycles. There is no epidemic prevention here, no inspections. Traffic radio keeps playing highway love songs, and the sound of them feels impossibly remote.\n01-30 09:00 Last night a gang of Hui men came trying to rob us, but we scared them off by pulling our guns. In the middle of the night someone smashed the Warrior\u0026rsquo;s windshield into a web of cracks with a brick. This morning, when I got out to piss, I found that all our tires had been punctured. The line of vehicles is still packed tight enough that not a drop could move. The radio says the Longhai Railway is still operating and is urging everyone to abandon their private cars and evacuate by public transport.\n2011-01-31 16:12 Because they stepped up traffic diversion ahead of us, after another twenty-six hours of waiting we finally managed to get free of the provincial road and work our way by village lanes into Xunhua. Supposedly the reason for the new traffic control was that military logistics convoys assigned to Lanzhou Military Region had been stuck behind us and couldn\u0026rsquo;t get through. Xunhua is a Salar autonomous county; most people can\u0026rsquo;t tell Salars apart from Hui. Order here is much better. The air is full of the smell of radish, mutton, and hand-pulled noodle soup.\n2011-01-31 16:12 Xunhua county town gets abundant sunlight. Flat-roofed houses climb the hillside in staggered rows, many with floor-to-ceiling glass fronts. Local men in white embroidered caps stand in front of their own doorways with legs planted wide. This is home to Asia\u0026rsquo;s largest underground military factory, and something bulges at their waists, the famous Xunhua-made guns. Women in green headscarves sit together in twos and threes, watching the dust-caked refugees flooding their little town as if we had nothing at all to do with them.\n2011-01-31 23:58 By night, the little town is pricked all over with car headlights and flashlight beams, filling lanes that should have been dark. Behind the glass windows of the houses, stove fires sway and flicker like light from another world. Military police stand guard at the county government offices and the primary school, where field tents and military trucks in olive green are set up inside. At dusk we managed to get fuel, to our immense delight. Fresh water is running low, and we can\u0026rsquo;t bear to waste bottled water on washing. We need to find somewhere to do laundry.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2011/2011-01-31-rainbell-january/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eRain Bell\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e01-01 00:09 Scattered firecrackers went off around the compound, sounding oddly out of place in all this darkness. Most people must already be asleep. I kissed my wife on the forehead, watched her drift off, then stepped onto the balcony. The red light on the camera mounted to the tripod blinked steadily like the eye of a Terminator. Far below, the white steel helmets of the sentries caught the searchlights in cold flashes, as if to remind me that time means nothing. It is only a ruler with which we measure our own suffering.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Rain Bell | January"},{"content":"Rain Bell\nRain Bell is an ongoing Twitter-novel experiment serialized simultaneously on Fanfou and Twitter. It tries to tell a near-future story set in Chengdu by following a real-time timeline in the voice of someone posting as events unfold.\n12-17 18:00 This week has passed neither fast nor slow. Tonight the company had a gathering at a hotpot place on Chunxi Road. These days you can no longer trust hotpot with free broth bases. Who knows what kind of chili essence and coloring go into them. Still debating whether I should drive later. Saw a news item today about an unidentified woman\u0026rsquo;s body found in a greenbelt downtown. News like that barely registers with me now.\n12-17 22:22 Dinner ended, and the others all went off to karaoke. I live too far away, so I headed home first. The giant screen on Chunxi Road was replaying The Feast of the Taotie, that star-packed football show from Beckham\u0026rsquo;s retirement. I stood there in the cold wind watching for five minutes before leaving, when the square suddenly turned noisy. Someone seemed to have collapsed. City enforcers with red lights flashing on their shoulders were shouting something. Friday night traffic was abnormally heavy. It felt as though everyone in the city was on the move.\n12-18 11:32 Had barely gotten out of bed this morning when my brother called. He said he had suddenly received orders to lead a field medical team out on assignment, but even he did not know where they were going or how long they would be gone. So this afternoon\u0026rsquo;s family gathering has been postponed. Yesterday I got a postcard from Senge in America. He looks absurdly funny with a big beard. Turned on the TV and watched a little NBA. Sure enough, Yao Ming was sitting in the stands. Rumor still has it that Yao\u0026rsquo;s team is about to take over management of the Fast Rail franchise.\n12-18 15:33 I was just about to go out for a walk at noon when my brother called again and told us we\u0026rsquo;d better stock up on bottled water and food. He said there might be a citywide water outage over the next few days. His voice sounded lost. The line was loud enough that I assumed he was at Taipingsi Airport. He hung up after only a few sentences. My wife grumbled that this probably meant she would not get a proper bath tonight. I\u0026rsquo;m a PSK enthusiast, so naturally I was almost excited. Walk canceled. Straight downstairs to Auchan.\n12-18 17:30 The supermarket was jammed. We bought some fruit and pork ribs and planned to stew soup tonight. Because it\u0026rsquo;s winter, not many people were at the drinks shelves, but I noticed several families hauling away case after case of mineral water. So we are not the only ones who got word. After a quick discussion, my wife and I decided to take five cases of Lanjian, plus some canned roast pork and fermented-black-bean fish. She originally wanted to buy two cases just for form\u0026rsquo;s sake. I insisted on taking ten.\n12-18 19:57 TV is urging citizens to turn over any meteorite gravel they picked up to the authorities. The government says it will pay fifty yuan per gram. On the night of the fifteenth, during the Geminid shower, meteorites fell over western Chengdu. A lot of people picked up black, obsidian-like fragments, and the reporters at the scene were practically shrieking into their microphones. Fifty yuan per gram sounds high, but it really isn\u0026rsquo;t. Zhang Beihai paid 180,000 for three iron meteorites the size of apples. The water is still on here. Everything seems normal.\n12-19 10:03 First thing this morning I got both a call from 10000 and a text from 10086 saying the meteorite gravel carries radioactive danger and that citizens must turn it in voluntarily. Browsed a bit on my phone and was shocked to find that it wasn\u0026rsquo;t just Chengdu. A lot of places saw meteor showers on the fifteenth, and the rumors are now flying everywhere. Quite a few people have apparently died already, all of them people who picked up the stones. When I was a kid there really had been cases of children stealing \u0026ldquo;crystals\u0026rdquo; and dying afterward.\n12-19 11:36 We live on the sixth floor, top level of a small high-rise right beside the intersection of the Third Ring Road and Chenglong Avenue. While hanging laundry just now, I saw large convoys of field ambulances and oddly shaped military vehicles heading into the city. Sure enough, the water was cut off at eleven. I have a bad feeling. Went out to the Hongqi convenience store for a box of No. 1 batteries and filled the car up on the way back.\n12-19 13:54 The local noon news says fifty-one people have already died after touching meteorite gravel, including government employees responsible for collecting it. Experts are urging anyone who still has fragments at home to report them immediately and stay away from the area. In the entire second half of the twentieth century, only around a hundred and twenty people worldwide died of nuclear radiation. If these fragments can kill in such a short time, what kind of millisievert reading would that even imply?\n12-19 13:55 On the news I could see white-helmeted military police on Chunxi Road and special personnel in biochemical suits. The whole city feels tense in a way that\u0026rsquo;s almost physical. The strange thing is that CCTV and the major provincial satellite channels still are not reporting any of this. Weren\u0026rsquo;t a lot of places hit by meteor showers? I own a portable radiation meter, so I took it onto the terrace. It read only 1.2 millisieverts, which is basically normal background radon.\n12-19 18:08 The death toll has risen to 160. Property management is going door to door asking whether anyone in the building has had contact with meteorite gravel. I asked when the water would be back. They said a meteorite fell into a reservoir serving the water plant and they are still dredging it out, with no estimate for restoration. Radioactive contamination of a water source I can understand, but instant death? Chengdu has six water plants, and the meteor shower was supposed to have fallen only in the western suburbs. So why is the entire city dry?\n12-19 19:47 A fire engine came with water after seven. Apart from a few old ladies no one cut the line, but the supply ran out before it reached me. Police lights are flashing inside the compound. The streetlamps on the Third Ring are still dark, as if a black collar has cinched itself around the whole city. Yesterday, to store water, I filled the bathtub. Mango dropped half a cockroach into it, so now it\u0026rsquo;s for washing only. My wife says we should drive out to Longquanyi to take a shower. Off we go.\n12-19 19:55 In my earliest Rain Bell posts I already hinted that this was meant to be a near-future story set after Beckham\u0026rsquo;s retirement and just before Yao Ming buys a new NBA team. Yet even an account with barely two hundred followers can stir up real panic on Twitter, which tells you something about the medium\u0026rsquo;s power. Every post has to be stingy with words, so I can\u0026rsquo;t keep repeating that this is fiction. If it comes to that, I\u0026rsquo;ll have to hide the real place names, though that would run against the whole point.\n12-19 21:12 Longquanyi still feels like its usual relaxed, slow-moving self at night, but even the supermarkets here have seen people panic-buying bottled water. We only used about a quarter of a tank making the round trip, but I still filled up the auxiliary tank, which had been empty for two months. My wife says my PSK obsession has gone too far. She isn\u0026rsquo;t wrong. I can already see in my head the image of myself driving a Wrangler piled high with supplies and escaping Chengdu. When we reentered the compound, police checked the car with instruments for radiation anomalies.\n12-19 21:32 I looked it up and found that years ago Baotou had a tailings-dam \u0026ldquo;nuclear slurry\u0026rdquo; incident that polluted the Yellow River, so yes, radioactive material really can contaminate water. But contamination shouldn\u0026rsquo;t kill on contact. Then I got a system message from work: tomorrow is canceled, one day of emergency leave, employees are to look after their own safety. Property management came with police again to register long-term residents. The owners\u0026rsquo; chat group is boiling over, everyone announcing they aren\u0026rsquo;t going to work tomorrow. Damn. Is this turning into martial law?\n12-20 00:05 Bought myself an Australian-made Tornado chemical suit on eBay before bed. I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted one for ages; now I finally have an excuse. Fastest delivery is next month, of course. Went downstairs for my usual jog before sleep. There was no wind tonight, but far too many leaves had fallen, carpeting the lawn — only they were still bright green. The police car at the gate was gone by then, so I assumed the earlier visit had been routine. A few big rats darted across from inside the Third Ring and nearly scared me out of my skin.\n12-20 08:53 Even though work is canceled, I still woke on schedule. The radio says the death toll is now 214. Some people who never touched the meteorite gravel but did touch the dead are showing symptoms of acute radiation sickness. They are all being treated at West China Hospital and the provincial hospital. The news is warning everyone to stay away from crowded areas and has officially declared a citywide day off. The owners\u0026rsquo; committee called and told me to come to the clubhouse later for a meeting. I checked the terrace again with the meter. Still normal.\n12-20 11:12 The meeting was supposedly about replacing the property-management company. Those retirees have been making noise about that for months, but today of all days they still want to argue over it. The owners\u0026rsquo; committee chairman is a lanky old man who looks ill. His eyes are red, and the back of his neck is grotesquely swollen under a thick scarf. Overnight far too many leaves fell, far more than is normal. Chengdu winters are supposed to stay green. Now the place feels like the northwest. I find myself missing Xiying.\n12-20 12:21 I cooked lunch and was planning to watch A Song of Ice and Fire: Finale with my wife. Last night I downloaded Episode 5 of this season. The noon news says the situation is under control, that there are no new deaths, and in the same breath urges everyone to stay home and avoid going out. At eleven my boss called and told me to come by the office this afternoon. The Spring Festival project absolutely has to be finished this week. The bastard still refuses to learn how to use Gtalk video meetings.\n12-20 15:19 The city looked just as crowded as ever, as if no one had taken the warnings seriously. Traffic, oddly enough, was lighter. Along Renmin South Road I noticed that the flowers and shrubs in the median had all withered as if hit by frost. The areas around West China and the provincial hospital were restricted, so I had to make a long detour. At the office my boss dumped a stack of tasks on me and said I might as well work from home for the rest of the week, since there was little chance of regular office life resuming tomorrow or the day after.\n12-20 15:20 I tried calling my brother several times but could not get through. I still have no idea whether his assignment had anything to do with the meteor shower. The last meteorite fall of this scale I can think of was Jilin in 1976, and that only left a crater two meters across. On the way home I saw long streams of cars heading out of the city. With all of Chengdu\u0026rsquo;s districts and counties, if no one has to work and the water is out at home, the city\u0026rsquo;s famously leisure-loving residents are evidently all going out to amuse themselves somewhere else. Traffic radio is still asking for information on meteorite holders.\n12-20 18:06 After four in the afternoon the compound filled with military vehicles and ambulances. Yellow tape sealed off the front gate. Word is that one of the residents had secretly kept meteorite gravel and only called for help after becoming critically ill. Now the whole compound may have been exposed. Property management says medical checks will be done door to door tonight. I tried to leave the compound to buy vegetables and was politely turned back by a military policeman at the gate. The whole courtyard is furious. Everyone is cursing the person who hid the meteorite.\n12-20 19:30 It has now been confirmed that the man who hid the meteorite was the owners\u0026rsquo; committee chairman, surnamed Wu, a retired geologist from the Institute of Geology. Supposedly he meant to sell it later to help his son buy an apartment, and instead got the entire compound placed under martial control. I saw men in biochemical suits carrying him to the ambulance. The swelling on the back of his neck was as thick as a handball. The tape at the front gate has not come down. During dinner I heard that the State Council Information Office will hold a press conference at eight.\n12-20 20:26 The press conference just ended. They admitted that more than thirty cities across the country saw meteor shower incidents, that all localities are actively treating the wounded, that there are no new deaths, that social order is normal, and that public sentiment remains stable. But the most important line was the last one: citizens are advised not to eat fruit or vegetables grown in the suburban outskirts. Instantly I thought of the fallen leaves in our compound, the dead greenbelts on Renmin South Road. What sort of meteorite does that? There is definitely more they are not telling us.\n12-20 20:47 Meteor showers aren\u0026rsquo;t rare. Thirty-plus cities being hit at once is the kind of thing no novelist would dare write. I wandered over to Facebook and found that central Europe and North America saw similar incidents. Are we about to get a real-world version of The Fungus from Outside? When a PSKer realizes that all the tension he\u0026rsquo;s stored up for years might finally be useful, the truth is that he becomes a little cowardly instead of bold. The medical team has already come and gone. My wife and I are both fine. The cordon around the compound remains.\n12-20 22:55 The internet went down at ten. I dragged out the VSAT, but maybe because of the weather the satellite connection is wildly unstable. The plants in the courtyard are withering almost visibly, including the tea plant on our balcony. Epidemic-control personnel are spraying white powder. The air reeks of something harsh and chemical. Wearing my German-made VM40 gas mask, I stood looking out over the city. The stream of cars leaving town glowed in the distance like dark-red molten steel.\n12-20 22:57 VSAT: Very Small Aperture Terminal. A miniature satellite earth station used to connect to the internet via satellite communications.\n12-21 09:04 I woke early and reached for the TV remote in the dark, only then remembering that the power was out. The radio\u0026rsquo;s rolling bulletin says today is still a holiday. There have been no new deaths for twenty-four hours. The number of patients is still rising, but none are in mortal danger. Most of them show only mild redness of the skin. Property management doesn\u0026rsquo;t know when the electricity will return. I looked out the window. The whole city was black.\n12-21 11:48 All morning the news kept repeating that the entire city began losing power one district at a time from three a.m., that the cause remains unknown, and that there is no estimate for restoration. No water, no power, no internet. All that\u0026rsquo;s left is for the gas to go too. It feels as if things are sliding toward the edge of total loss of control. Foreigners can dig nuclear shelters in their backyards. We, suspended in our blocks of reinforced concrete, will have to improvise. The compound is still sealed, even though the community supermarket remains fully stocked. I need a plan.\n12-21 16:06 I spent the whole afternoon trying and failing to get out of the compound. Large numbers of military vehicles are massing outside, right alongside our buildings. I managed to buy two canisters of liquefied gas from the snack shop and a few bottles of medical alcohol from the community clinic. At any time, in any disaster, fire and food are the essential supplies. Neither landline nor mobile calls are getting in or out. Satellite internet is crawling at around 20 kilobytes per second. Hardly anyone is online. Even the local portals have stopped updating.\n12-21 16:49 The power came back briefly just now, so I immediately put every phone, flashlight, and rechargeable battery in the house on charge. Turned on the TV and found every channel showing the same blue screen with white text: do not spread rumors, do not go to densely populated areas, wait patiently at home for instructions. The more they say that, the less I believe them. This afternoon, while trying to sweet-talk the guard at the gate, I heard a company commander say that a lot of the patients had turned into plants. I assume he meant vegetative patients. I hope he meant vegetative patients.\n12-21 17:06 A military truck with loudspeakers drove into the compound and began broadcasting in the central courtyard. Any resident with skin redness, ulcers, bleeding, vomiting, or diarrhea was to report immediately. I was in the middle of discussing with my wife what we should do once the compound is released when the power died again. By five o\u0026rsquo;clock it was already almost dark. The courtyard had lost the clamor of last night. Everyone was standing on their balconies, watching. The faces I could see were blank with fear.\n12-21 22:36 I lit the camping lantern in the living room and played guitar for my wife. When I was a child and the power went out, my mother used to play harmonica for me. I have mostly come down now from the panic of dusk. Preserve the food and water, then go lie low in the countryside near Qionglai for a while. The woman downstairs came knocking again, carrying her child, asking to borrow water. They had not stored any at all. When she saw light in our home, she even asked to borrow a flashlight. I gave her four bottles of Mizone.\n12-21 23:43 The radio says every hospital in the city is full, and the illness is spreading by some unknown route. I have a Class III radio operator\u0026rsquo;s license, which means my legal range is only about thirty kilometers. Still, I spent the whole evening monitoring several local ham frequencies on my handheld set. They said the city is crawling with military vehicles and ambulances, that the hospitals are all ringed off, and that anyone with a car should get out now. I aimed the binoculars at the overpasses along the Third Ring. The traffic leaving town was endless.\n12-22 00:22 I had only just fallen asleep when shouting outside jolted me awake. I slid open the balcony door and heard someone yelling, \u0026ldquo;They\u0026rsquo;re sealing the city!\u0026rdquo; The dead streetlamps along the Third Ring came on in sequence. Endless military trucks were already lined up there. Soldiers were climbing down and laying concertina wire and sandbags along the road. The flyovers crossing the ring were jammed with cars, and several tanks had formed checkpoints. We are outside the Third Ring, thank God, but that still does not mean we can leave the compound.\n12-22 08:42 No sleep all night. From three in the morning onward, the radio kept broadcasting announcements: roads inside the Third Ring were closed; ten overpasses, including Jiaozi, Chuan-Shaan, Supo, and Tianfu, had been opened as outbound safety and quarantine stations to channel evacuees leaving the city. They still did not explain why the city was being sealed. The only message repeated over and over was that staying at home remained safe. Beyond the wire on the far side of the Third Ring was a black mass of people pushing electric bikes. Helicopters kept flying into the city from the Longquanyi side.\n12-22 09:23 The sun is out, and satellite internet is a little faster. YouTube pushed a video from Los Angeles to its front page, showing a man who had touched meteorite gravel. At first he displayed all the classic symptoms of acute radiation sickness. Then, over the next forty-eight hours, his skin gradually turned like bark, and branch-like calcified growths began to emerge from his joints. He looked like one of the Ents in Fangorn Forest. Once the brain calcified, his heart stopped. How in the hell is that supposed to be contagious?\n12-22 11:44 The owners\u0026rsquo; committee chairman is a widower, and aside from him there have been no second cases inside our compound. This morning the residents all crowded at the gate and shouted at the white-helmeted military police, demanding to know why our quarantine still had not been lifted. The ambulances have long since left. The answer was simple: until they receive orders, the isolation stands. And so we stood there watching the flood of vehicles and pedestrians jam Chenglong Avenue and move southeast in a vast, sluggish tide.\n12-22 11:43 My wife asked what we should do. I told her to throw away all the vegetables and eat only rice and meat from now on. Some households in the compound have already run out of water. Did they really have no habit of storing any? One woman actually said she hadn\u0026rsquo;t even been able to enjoy her bath last night, incredible creature that she is. A lot of the local ham-radio people still haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten out. There are reports of entire ginkgo trees dying in the city. Looting and smashing have already begun. Every so often I hear the sharp crack of gunfire. Helicopters are carrying heavy equipment into town.\n12-22 15:52 By noon the most impatient residents tried to break through the gate. The military police drove them back by shooting out the tires of several private cars. On the inner side of the Third Ring, people waiting to get out attempted to climb over the wire. At one point they tore open a few gaps, and the crowd spilled onto the expressway before being forced back with great effort by troops and police. The machine guns on the riot-control vehicles, which had previously pointed skyward, were lowered toward the crowd. Loudspeakers ordered everyone to obey instructions or bear the consequences.\n12-22 16:46 The woman downstairs came again with her child to borrow water, acting as though this were only natural. I gave the kid a can of cola and said my own supplies were not abundant. This is already the third day without running water. The water we stored from the tap will last only a few more days, and bathing is out of the question. The radio is now under military control. Every frequency carries only traffic-control orders for outbound evacuation. News coverage has stopped. There is no green left anywhere in sight. It looks more like the desolate northwest than Chengdu.\n12-22 22:37 At eight tonight, a group of residents smashed open the side gate that is usually kept sealed except for fire-engine access, and several large SUVs got out successfully. Not long afterward, though, several violent explosions sounded in the distance, followed by a red glare burning across the sky. They had fired shoulder-launched rockets directly at the escaping cars. After that, no one tried to break out again. The families that had made no preparations at all began crying and knocking on neighbors\u0026rsquo; doors trying to buy water.\n12-23 00:00 It is nearly midnight, and the stream of vehicles leaving the city has not thinned at all. Compared with last night, the direction of the city center is no longer entirely dark. Moving patches of fire and muffled explosions are visible everywhere. Engineering troops arrived along the Third Ring this evening and started digging trenches all along the route. At one point a yellow Toyota van with hazard lights flashing tried to punch through the cordon and was greeted by curses, bricks, and stones from the crowd, while the soldiers and police shoved it back without ceremony.\n12-23 00:30 I can\u0026rsquo;t believe I forgot to withdraw cash over the last few days, though in a true disaster it may be the least useful thing in the world. I just pulled fifteen thousand yuan from the ATM downstairs using a few different cards. Since sleep is impossible anyway, I\u0026rsquo;ve started sorting the supplies in the apartment. A small portion is already loaded into the car so we can run at any moment. People are still shouting outside asking who has drinking water. I\u0026rsquo;m starting to worry that sooner or later the compound will turn to looting. The gas was cut this afternoon. My wife and I washed our feet in cold water.\n12-23 12:09 Another clear day. Good weather makes bad things feel even worse. I have a set of polysilicon solar panels that can be assembled into a crude little off-grid power system, so now they have finally come out onto the terrace. A full day of sun is enough to charge devices and boil one liter of water. The flow of people beyond the Third Ring has thinned a bit compared with yesterday. I even saw some people heading back into the city. There is no real news, so no one knows what is happening in there now.\n12-23 12:16 The atmosphere outside the city is growing tenser by the hour. Overnight, the central greenbelt of the Third Ring was gouged into a trench three meters wide. It is being filled with black oil and combustible debris, as if they mean to ring the city with a wall of fire. More and more military equipment has appeared on the outer side of the road, including troops in snow camouflage and biochemical helmets. The area around our compound has effectively become a logistics post. If that\u0026rsquo;s the case, why not simply requisition the compound and let us go? No one is getting out.\n12-23 22:27 Eight hours ago the radio said that many third-generation infected patients had recovered and been discharged, and that the epidemic was essentially under control. Some people have begun returning toward the city, but security along the Third Ring has not loosened in the slightest. Most people remain suspicious and keep queueing to get out. Five hours ago, after thirty-nine straight hours, the evacuation surge finally tapered off and ordinary traffic patterns resumed. Some people are going back and forth through the checkpoints, ferrying out belongings. The soldiers are widening the isolation trench.\n12-23 23:27 The child downstairs came to knock again tonight. I didn\u0026rsquo;t open the door. There are military floodlights outside now, so bright that the rooms barely need lantern light anymore. Someone managed to send in an entire truckload of water from outside. The guards at the gate, to my surprise, allowed it through. But before the household who ordered it could move the water inside, the rest of the neighbors had already looted every bottle. Most threw down a fistful of cash. Some simply ran. Mango has been yowling all day. The sound is driving me out of my skin.\n12-24 00:12 Deep in the night, the troops and police along the Third Ring received the order to ignite the isolation trench. A wall of flame more than five meters high leapt up at once. The heat rolled even through the shadows. I could smell gasoline and burning timber from inside the apartment. The soldiers in snow camouflage kept throwing accelerants into the fire to keep it raging. From an airplane above the city, Chengdu would now look like a ring of fire fifty-one point four one nine kilometers in circumference.\n12-24 09:56 At first light, the wall of fire that had burned all night along the Third Ring was much lower. I noticed that during the night the snow-camouflage troops had also sprayed a wide band of thick white foam outside the trench, more than ten meters across, and the stuff gives off a sharp, choking smell. Today makes exactly one week since the first death was discovered. Information-starved civilians seem to be relaxing a little. The checkpoints are far less crowded. I, on the other hand, increasingly suspect things are worse than I imagined.\n12-24 10:51 My wife reminded me that tonight is Christmas Eve. God willing. It rained lightly last night, and today is clear again. Perhaps because the factories have lost power and the city has no cars left running, visibility is astonishingly good. From here I can clearly see the Chengdu TV Tower near Xinhua Bridge. It is no longer the white tower I remember. It is covered in gray-brown vines and looks like an immense, withered Christmas tree. The whole city has taken on a pale, exhausted darkness.\n12-24 17:53 The property-management guards came knocking to say they hoped each household would donate some food and water for homes with children or elderly people. I gave them six bottles of water and a large pack of instant noodles. When they took the things, they craned their necks to peer into my apartment. Then, right in front of me, they twisted open one of the bottles before going to the next door. The owners\u0026rsquo; committee says the military police have agreed to lift the blockade in thirty-six hours if the compound remains free of new cases. That\u0026rsquo;s the best news I\u0026rsquo;ve heard all day.\n12-24 19:50 Toward nightfall, large groups of people came walking out from the city along Chenglong Road. They moved very slowly, almost in a shuffle, carrying no luggage and speaking not a word. When they reached Jiaozi Interchange, the loudspeakers began ordering them to halt. Not one of them did. When they came within fifty meters of the checkpoint, the troops opened fire. Bodies were torn apart, and everyone watching was dragged back into bloody reality.\n12-24 19:59 Jiaozi Interchange vanished into a red fog. Severed limbs lay everywhere. Through my binoculars I could make out a UNI logo on one of the corpses. They all had looked perfectly normal, with no aggressive behavior, and yet there was something deeply wrong about them. The gunfire jolted the whole compound. Screaming and crying broke out on every side. The soldiers who had fired were spread out at long distance inside their cover positions, rifles leveled at the bodies as if expecting them to rise again at any moment.\n12-24 20:02 The corpses on the bridge still haven\u0026rsquo;t moved, and no one has gone up to clear the scene. Moonlight reflects cold blue from every helmet, making the bridge look even more ghastly. The last time I saw a corpse in person was at a traffic accident. I went back to the bedroom and sat in the dark, arms shaking, holding my wife. She hadn\u0026rsquo;t seen any of it. Christmas Eve, she said. Let me peel you an apple. Fine, I said. We had both forgotten that we had already thrown out all the fruit.\n12-25 09:14 I spent all of Christmas Eve trapped in nightmares, surrounded by the spirits of the dead, soaked in cold sweat and unable to wake myself free. At dawn, explosions dragged me back into reality. A layer of gray-brown vines had sprouted where yesterday\u0026rsquo;s shooting happened, just like the growths on the distant TV tower. Thorny canes had burst out through the corpses, punched through the thick bridge deck, and spread in every direction. Combat engineers were pouring accelerant over them and blasting apart the entire interchange.\n12-25 09:42 Those vines quickly burned down to ash in the flames. They were nothing like the grotesque tentacle monsters in Japanese comics. The snow-camouflage troops were busy in the ruins, and a number of tanks and riot-control vehicles were moving into the city along Chenglong Road. There were still scattered cars and pedestrians leaving town, and astonishingly they were all being allowed through. I have no idea how many people are left in the city. Every radio frequency is just white noise now. Even the hams who got out can\u0026rsquo;t be reached anymore. Longquanyi has fallen silent too.\n12-25 13:38 Another clear day. The temperature has risen quite a bit, but the nauseating scorched smell in the air is enough to turn your stomach. Fires are burning in multiple parts of the city center. Whole towers are glowing red as they burn, the heat haze is warping the skyline, and the crackle of flames and muffled thuds of collapsing buildings go on without pause. Smoke and ash are rising hundreds of meters high. Chengdu almost looks like its old smog-shrouded self again, except now it comes with the shriek of gunfire.\n12-25 13:50 The military police delivered drinks, candy, and biscuits to the compound, and property management locked them away in storage on the grounds that distribution had to be centralized. The owners\u0026rsquo; committee demanded they hand everything out immediately, only to be driven back by the security guards\u0026rsquo; batons. Quite a few residents were injured. I saw the woman downstairs come back crying with her child, empty-handed, so I went down and gave them two tins of crucian-carp preserves and several bags of milk, while stressing that that was all I had left. I was saying it to myself as much as to them. Staying alive matters more than anything.\n12-25 19:19 Last Christmas, my wife and I had a proper holiday dinner at a Mexican restaurant on Kehua Road. This year the two of us ate black-pepper pasta, canned yellow peaches, and our homemade wine at home. Outside the windows the city was silhouetted through the firelight, and the isolation trench along the Third Ring was burning again, like some vast bonfire carnival. Strange children came to the door begging for food. I didn\u0026rsquo;t open it. Someone in the compound was playing Christmas songs. Is there really so much electricity they don\u0026rsquo;t know what to do with it?\n12-25 20:10 Tonight the convenience store in the compound was smashed open and stripped of food. Leading the raid were several of the stronger residents. The shopkeeper and his wife went to the security team in tears asking for help, only to be told they would have to pay compensation in food. Then they went outside the gate and pleaded with the military police, who said they were forbidden to enter the compound. Driven to the wall, the shopkeeper grabbed a cleaver and fought back, coming away covered in blood but managing to recover several cases of goods. More people, like me, watched the whole thing with cold detachment while quietly checking our own doors and windows.\n12-26 09:27 Six this morning was the final deadline in the military police\u0026rsquo;s promise to lift the lockdown after thirty-six hours without a new case. At seven, a lieutenant colonel came over from the encampment and announced that the compound was in fact safest under quarantine, and that even if martial restrictions were lifted we would have nowhere to go, since every road was under military control and stray fire was a real danger. The best choice, he said, was to wait patiently for the situation to improve. The military police handed each household half a box of compressed biscuits and a small bucket of water, without letting property management touch any of it.\n12-26 09:47 When I went downstairs to collect the biscuits, it took only a moment for black dust to settle all over me, ash blown in from the city fires. In the distance many buildings were still belching thick smoke, and the sun hung behind it all like a lamp behind black gauze. The military police all wore chemical-protection masks, while the residents covered their mouths and noses with towels and handkerchiefs. Some people were coughing constantly. My 3M mask felt conspicuous enough already. The security guards were eyeing everyone like hawks.\n12-26 20:36 This morning, when we went to collect the military police rations, the security team tried to force every household to hand over half for centralized safekeeping by property management. I was the first one to say no. Pepper spray and batons did not settle anything, but the issue knife my brother gave me years ago was enough to bluff them. I took a hit and split the corner of my mouth for my trouble, but in the end the other residents stepped forward too, and the security team backed down. To be honest, most of those guards are just half-grown boys from the countryside. They were more fragile than I expected.\n12-26 20:47 At dusk, several military vehicles marked with the blue Star of Life drove into the compound. Leading them was a senior colonel in snow camouflage. They brought in more than a dozen wounded soldiers and asked to borrow the compound clubhouse as a temporary field hospital. There are so many empty buildings around us, and yet they insisted on ours. The colonel\u0026rsquo;s explanation was that this place is now the safest location available. It was my first time seeing the unit tab on the chest of those snow-camouflage troops up close. So they are from a special biological epidemic-prevention force.\n12-26 20:54 The vice chair of the owners\u0026rsquo; committee came forward to negotiate. He knew perfectly well it was impossible to reject the army\u0026rsquo;s request, but he still stated our terms: dig us a well and restore our power. The colonel spent quite a while discussing it over his radio before replying that this was Shizishan, where digging a well was neither feasible nor safe, but they could provide the compound with four diesel generators, with fuel to be paid for by the residents. And so, after five days without electricity, the compound lit up again. In that sudden brightness, everyone found a brief, unreliable sense of safety.\n12-27 08:47 With the compound lit up all night, I actually slept worse. The entire city around us was black, and only our little patch was showing off with lights blazing. It reminded me of Liu Cixin\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;dark forest\u0026rdquo; idea from years ago. Fortunately the owners\u0026rsquo; committee realized it was burning too much diesel and shut the generators down after ten. I sat on the terrace listening carefully. From deep within the city came the low metallic groan of bending steel, like some giant beast ruminating in endless darkness.\n12-27 12:03 Military doctors and epidemic-control troops have been moving in and out of the compound all morning. The soldiers brought in yesterday were almost certainly not suffering from ordinary injuries. The clubhouse has been wrapped layer after layer in semitransparent plastic sheeting like hanging curtains, turning it into an isolation zone inside an isolation zone. Everyone entering or leaving is disinfected. People are deeply unhappy about it. We endured all this time and proved the compound itself wasn\u0026rsquo;t infected, and now aren\u0026rsquo;t they bringing the danger straight to us? But the military police answer every objection with black gun barrels.\n12-27 12:15 The city fires are still burning. According to one sharp-tongued neighbor, the army is deliberately burning down infected buildings inside the city, just as we saw three days ago. More smoke and ash is blowing in than yesterday, like black snow. There can hardly be anyone left downtown. I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen a single local license plate on Chenglong Road in well over ten hours. Even the military traffic on the Third Ring seems thinner than before. Soldiers and police are scattered loosely behind their cover positions.\n12-27 15:53 At noon I was on the terrace wiping ash off the solar panels when a crashing sound suddenly came from the kitchen. I ran over and found a large hole smashed through the glass. Down below, two figures were hurrying away. I live on the sixth floor. I have to admire their aim. When we renovated, all the windows facing the street were replaced with reinforced glass, but the kitchen facing the courtyard kept the ordinary kind. Wonderful. Another problem to deal with. I suppose I\u0026rsquo;ll just board it over with cardboard.\n12-27 16:36 Another clear day. For the Chengdu Plain, weather like this is unnaturally wrong. Over the past ten days, every plant in the compound has withered without exception. The osmanthus on our balcony is dusted with gray particles that look like some kind of botanical skin disease. All at once the thing disgusted me. It looked like a dead rat. I put on rubber gloves and a mask, wrapped it in plastic, and threw it downstairs. Some neighbors saw what I was doing and quickly followed suit. Soon the courtyard was piled with broken pots and dead planters.\n12-27 18:01 As dusk approached, the generators started up again. The sound was unexpectedly beautiful. This morning the owners\u0026rsquo; committee announced that power would be supplied for two hours each in the morning, noon, and evening, with diesel paid for out of the maintenance fund, and the measure passed unanimously. The smell of meat drifted through the hallway. Someone was cooking. It suddenly struck me that I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen anyone walking a dog for days. I plugged in the rice cooker, washed rice with bottled water, and got ready to make curry. From now on I need to record our daily consumption of supplies.\n12-27 22:51 Even though the evening power window has long since ended, the generators are still roaring on. The requisitioned clubhouse remains brightly lit, unreal behind layers of plastic drapery. I have no idea what those epidemic-control troops are doing in there. At least four body bags were carried out today. It looked less like they were treating patients than like they were running experiments. The whole compound reeks of disinfectant, mixed with the soot in the air, and together the smell is almost impossible to breathe.\n12-27 22:59 The air is getting worse. It\u0026rsquo;s not just that a fine layer of dust has settled through the apartment. Even the smell in the bathroom has grown heavier. Our masks are enough in theory, but no one can wear them all day without going mad. I started sealing up the doors and windows in the bedroom with weather stripping and plastic film, trying to make that one room as airtight as possible so that when the power comes on, the air conditioner can filter the air. The water we stored before the cutoff is nearly gone. We\u0026rsquo;ve already been living on bottled water for days. My wife\u0026rsquo;s face, dry from not rehydrating properly for so long, is hard to bear looking at.\n12-27 23:03 Since we now have regular charging hours, I watched The Road on the laptop tonight. Halfway through, my wife burst into tears and asked why I was watching something so hopeless. I closed the laptop and stroked her back while she sobbed. That film was what first got me hooked on PSK. Maybe in a few more days we\u0026rsquo;ll be living that kind of life ourselves. I want to stay with you, and I still want to believe there is hope somewhere inside me.\n12-28 13:45 I was busy all morning and did not get around to lunch until noon, when I finally ate a bowl of instant noodles. I have scattered every scrap of food and every bit of water in the apartment across the floor, inside the ceiling, under the sofa, in every corner I can find. It\u0026rsquo;s messy, but at least it means we can\u0026rsquo;t be cleaned out in one sweep. My wife says I\u0026rsquo;m worrying too much, but I suspect things may yet deteriorate to the point of home invasions. I even dug out the banned gear from the bottom of storage: a fifty-centimeter steel crossbow, still wrapped in the oilcloth from when I bought it in Jiamusi two years ago.\n12-28 13:57 In my sleep at dawn I thought it was an earthquake. Then came a thunderous explosion that sounded like underground demolition. I rolled over and scrambled up, and through the filthy air I saw that where the Chengdu TV Tower used to stand there was now empty space. The city fires have not fully died down yet, but from here I can no longer see open flame. Many of the landmarks that defined the skyline are simply gone. Only the billowing black smoke and the swaying ruins mark the places where they still stood a few days ago.\n12-28 15:03 The situation inside the compound has changed. While I was tidying the apartment this morning, both property management and the owners\u0026rsquo; committee came by. The former were all deference, while the latter praised me up as though I were some public-minded hero. Turns out the military police now want a residents\u0026rsquo; representative to receive incoming aid supplies, and diesel is no longer being charged for. Both sides want control of distribution, which has led to the first direct election of this emergency period. I voted for the owners\u0026rsquo; committee, even though some of their people had also taken part in looting the convenience store.\n12-28 15:04 Quite a few people are backing property management too. In times like this, the garbage downstairs is somehow still being cleared every day. In truth they\u0026rsquo;re worse off than we are. The older women who do the sweeping are trapped inside the compound as well, with no dormitory to go back to, and have been sleeping on the office floor for ten straight days. Unfortunately sympathy doesn\u0026rsquo;t solve anything. Either simple fairness is preserved for as long as possible, or everything drops quickly into chaos. Watching the aid supplies being unloaded at the compound gate, I suspect the army is getting ready to pull out.\n12-28 23:55 I just got back from an owners\u0026rsquo; committee meeting. The military aid we received contained no food at all, only a batch of entrenching shovels and gasoline, not even enough to give one shovel to every household. We asked whether the army was really pulling out, and the captain handling the handover said yes. The reason, he said, was lack of manpower. Longquanyi is burning now too. Only then did we notice that farther to the south, the sky itself was burning red. No one will tell us what exactly they are burning, or what they are trying to keep contained.\n12-28 23:56 I took one of the entrenching shovels an old soldier had used. It was sharp enough to take off half a man\u0026rsquo;s head with one swing. I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to find a chance to bribe one of the troops and trade for something harder. Everything being burned these past few days has been high-rises over thirty stories tall. The soldiers moving back and forth into the city may not know what they\u0026rsquo;re doing either, or what exactly they are fighting. Only the officers from the epidemic-prevention unit inside our compound clubhouse seem to know any fragment of the truth.\n12-29 00:12 It\u0026rsquo;s this late again, and the child downstairs came knocking once more, holding out a small bowl of scrambled eggs his mother had made. I sighed and gave him a bottle of water. He kept looking at me hopefully, and I shrugged and closed the door. My wife and I drank only one 550-milliliter bottle of water between us today. I can\u0026rsquo;t afford to give more away. Mango has spent these past few days curled up asleep on the sofa. Her cat food and litter might last half a year, but lately she feels to me like a ticking bomb.\n12-29 00:13 For the record: at home we have five shrink-wrapped flats of 550-milliliter Lanjian, with 102 bottles left; five four-liter bottles of Nongfu Spring, one of them from relief distribution; six cans of Wanglaoji; ten cans of Diet Coke; a little under half a barrel of purified water still in the dispenser; and two 800-milliliter bottles always packed in the EDC bag. The bathtub\u0026rsquo;s utility water is gone. There\u0026rsquo;s still one pot of water in the soup pot. In the car we have one case of 380-milliliter Nongfu Spring, twenty-four bottles total, plus two more four-liter bottles. How long can that last? I don\u0026rsquo;t know.\n12-29 09:50 I went downstairs just now to dump the cat litter and found a dead feral cat lying in the dried grass. Its body was shriveled down so badly that at first glance it could have been mistaken for a length of wood. The cat obviously had not starved. Two short shoots were growing out of its eye sockets, each tipped with tiny gray triangular leaves. At once I remembered what that company commander had said days ago: many of the patients turned into plants. I hurried to call the epidemic-control troops from the clubhouse. The senior colonel came in person to collect the carcass.\n12-29 12:36 The whole compound mobilized this morning. Under the direction of the epidemic-control troops, everyone burned dead grass and trees downstairs. Firebreak trenches were dug carefully between the landscaping and the buildings, for fear the flames might get out of control. The colonel said the cat had died from eating grass. Based on what they currently know, he said, as long as contaminated plants do not come into contact with wounds and are not eaten, people should be safe. He would not say more than that, only that this event is an ecological disaster. Suddenly I thought of a friend of mine who\u0026rsquo;s vegetarian.\n12-29 22:32 If not for the scattered candle- and lantern-light at night, it would be hard to believe anyone still lives in this community. After a full day of labor, all the dangers in the flowerbeds and greenbelts have been cleared away. Even the roots are gone. The compound feels hollowed out now, a bit like a construction site waiting to be handed over. But when we need to light fires outdoors for warmth in the future, where exactly are we supposed to find fuel? This charred wasteland has finally brought our home back into visual harmony with the city around it, no longer standing out so strangely.\n12-29 22:46 After several days of instant noodles, neither my wife nor I has much appetite, so we mixed up a little milk powder to drink. Just now the child downstairs came knocking again, this time carrying four or five little sponge cakes. I didn\u0026rsquo;t take them. I gave him a bottle of Fruitimes instead. The isolation trench along the Third Ring was not set alight tonight, probably because there are no visible plants left within range of the eye. There are fewer troops now as well. Only sentries remain, patrolling back and forth in one-kilometer loops.\n12-30 12:17 Five people from Building 39 got out!! Two couples and one child, driving the only Hummer H5 in the compound, forced their way back out through the side gate that someone had once escaped through on the twenty-second, taking advantage of the sentries\u0026rsquo; slackness at dawn. They must have spent these past days modifying the vehicle and cutting the lock on the isolation bollards. What surprised everyone was that the soldiers neither gave chase nor opened fire. They simply watched in silence as the Hummer drove into the boundless morning fog.\n12-30 21:46 The neighbors argued all day about whether or not we should attempt an escape ourselves. Most agree that we cannot just sit here and wait to die, but some believe that running would harm those who stay behind and amount to a betrayal of the rules holding things together. I suddenly felt disappointed in myself. Once the real disaster arrived, the thought lodged in my head was never how to seize an opening, only how to hold out a little longer. To the five neighbors who broke through today: good luck.\n12-30 22:54 On the Third Ring tonight, the sentries on duty were stamping their feet beside burn barrels to keep from freezing, wearing the most ordinary green rubber shoes. The troops from the past few days, the ones in leather combat boots with special unit patches on their shoulders, are gone. A contingent of People\u0026rsquo;s Armed Police has rotated in instead. The compound\u0026rsquo;s front gate has been shut. The side gate has been welded closed to prevent anyone else from making a break for it. Barriers have also been laid across the underground garage exits. This time there really is no way out.\n12-31 00:07 The child downstairs didn\u0026rsquo;t come tonight. Maybe he finally found someone willing to give him water. A PL on the third floor has turned a wireless router into a hotspot that covers most of the compound. He also opened an encrypted chatroom and only gave the Wi-Fi password to people in the compound football club. There are nine of us in all. I should have thought of it sooner. Even though the internet collapsed almost at once, a local network can still do a great deal. For example, it can help small groups form.\n12-31 00:10 The few of us who play football already know one another well, and everyone agrees that our odds are better together. Unless the crisis takes another sharp turn, holding our ground and waiting is still the right choice. The most urgent tasks now are these: first, find out what the field hospital in the clubhouse is actually doing; second, determine where we would go if we do have to leave; third, keep the car maintained and our supplies ready so we can move at a moment\u0026rsquo;s notice.\n12-31 00:24 The plan is this: Tom is contributing an iPhone. He has a paid app that can turn it into a listening device and let an iPad monitor the feed wirelessly. The ideal listening post would be the property-management accounting office, which is now being used as the epidemic-control troops\u0026rsquo; radio room. Old Ma used to be a contractor for this compound years ago, and he says the ventilation ducts in the underground garage can reach that office. But only a child would fit.\n12-31 00:34 Old Ma\u0026rsquo;s seven-year-old son is a clever boy. So the job falls to him. My responsibility is to keep a twenty-four-hour watch on the troop presence along the Third Ring and outside the compound. If the army keeps thinning out, or if anything changes abnormally, we need to make plans early. This is exactly what I\u0026rsquo;ve already been doing over the past few days. I\u0026rsquo;ve set up one mirrorless camera on the terrace and another on the balcony, both configured to take a frame every minute instead of shooting video, because with power rationing I can\u0026rsquo;t keep them charged for continuous recording.\n12-31 23:57 Three minutes left before this year ends. Up until now it had been an ordinary year for me. Then, in its last ten days, staying alive suddenly became a luxury, and every life stopped being ordinary. Beside the wavering candlelight, I watched my wife\u0026rsquo;s hair cast strange, soft-lined shadows across the white wall. Mango lay on my lap, all warm weight and softness. I gently turned my wife by the shoulders, looked into her eyes, and said: Happy New Year.\n12-31 23:59 If this were our last minute, what would you say to me? I am by your side.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2010/2010-12-31-rainbell-december/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eRain Bell\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eRain Bell\u003c/em\u003e is an ongoing Twitter-novel experiment serialized simultaneously on Fanfou and Twitter. It tries to tell a near-future story set in Chengdu by following a real-time timeline in the voice of someone posting as events unfold.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e12-17 18:00 This week has passed neither fast nor slow. Tonight the company had a gathering at a hotpot place on Chunxi Road. These days you can no longer trust hotpot with free broth bases. Who knows what kind of chili essence and coloring go into them. Still debating whether I should drive later. Saw a news item today about an unidentified woman\u0026rsquo;s body found in a greenbelt downtown. News like that barely registers with me now.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Rain Bell | December"},{"content":" Get as close as you can to the object of your desire.\nLOMO Rule\nSome say that the character cheng in Chengdu is really a pictograph meaning \u0026ldquo;electric scooter.\u0026rdquo; If you have ever seen the rivers of scooters during rush hour, you would be inclined to praise the sheer force of numbers.\nIt was already well past midnight now, so Lin Fei could ride the scooter at full stretch. Even so, the black shadow was faster than he had imagined, so fast that he could barely keep up. Yet it behaved like a cat teasing prey, always pausing for an instant at crucial corners to wait for him. Even then an ordinary person would long since have lost the trail. Fortunately Lin Fei still had another camera in his backpack: a Polaroid SX-70 Alpha 1 that looked like an elegant leather notebook.\nBorn in 1937, the Polaroid was the ancestor of instant photography, able to develop its images on the spot. As Lin Fei pressed the shutter, 700 film sheets slid out one by one from the bottom of the camera. To tell the truth, with Polaroid long out of production and 700 film nearly sold out, taking a shot every few steps, at more than a dozen yuan each time, made his heart ache. By the time he reached the First Ring Road, more than a hundred yuan had already flown away.\n\u0026ldquo;Good grief, this is pricier than taking a taxi. Mendenger had better reimburse me for this later,\u0026rdquo; Lin Fei muttered, while keeping up the chase by studying the still-warm images on the 700 sheets.\nRight before his eyes, he watched the black shadow steal and eat all along the way. First it stopped in Xinhua Park to devour the famous hotpot beef rice noodles, while also carrying off the beef hotpot and its master broth. Then it ran to the cold-snack drinking stalls of Shuijingfang and shouldered away a bronze wine vat together with a whole vat of plum wine. From there it went to the douban wonton shop at Qingshiqiao and stole the great crock in which the chili bean paste was marinated. Then, switching direction, it ran to the Zhang Yazi shop at Niuwangmiao, known as Mouse Hole, and absconded with the pot for braised duck, not forgetting as it left to change the shop\u0026rsquo;s old sign from \u0026ldquo;Cold-Plain Cup\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;Cold-Sipped Cup.\u0026rdquo;\nWhen Lin Fei, panting and half-spent, caught up to Mingting Restaurant in Caojia Alley, he found that the shadow had not run on after all. It was sitting boldly in the middle of the empty main room of the little restaurant. At its feet lay a jumble of pots, bowls, kettles, and vats. Counting in the small steaming pot used at Mingting for braised brains and tofu, there were exactly eight in all. They differed in size, but every one of them bore three handles and taotie patterns. Clearly, they had all come from the same line.\nOnly now did Lin Fei finally get a clear look at the black shadow\u0026rsquo;s face. It belonged to a fat man even fatter than Mendenger, with fair skin, but enormous fan-like hands and ears that were pitch-black. A little tuft of black hair sat atop his head, and around his eyes were dark birthmarks, as if he had been punched there. In short, he was as unattractive as it was possible to be.\nTrying to match this extremely shabby-looking fat man with the taotie he remembered having seen, Lin Fei found nothing in common apart from the similarly bulky body. \u0026ldquo;You\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; he asked cautiously, \u0026ldquo;why did you stop running?\u0026rdquo;\nThe fat man was concentrating on several dishes set before him: braised brains and tofu, scallion-baked kidneys, duck intestines in water-bean gravy, and pork-rib seaweed soup. Never mind that Mingting looked utterly shabby. It was the number-one fly restaurant in all Chengdu, bringing together the raggedness of a roadside stall and the supreme deliciousness of Chengdu cooking. Chengdu is just that kind of city, one that cares for enjoyment but not face. If you see someone driving a Porsche into a back alley to eat hot-and-sour noodles, do not be surprised.\nSlurping up some brains, the fat man shook his head contentedly and said, \u0026ldquo;Couldn\u0026rsquo;t carry any more. Since you\u0026rsquo;ve chased me this close, I figured I\u0026rsquo;d stop and have a proper meal.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Who exactly are you?\u0026rdquo; Lin Fei asked. \u0026ldquo;Are you related to taotie or something?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;That ugly freak? You\u0026rsquo;re the one related to him. Your whole family is related to him!\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Hey, why are you insulting people? Let\u0026rsquo;s speak properly. What\u0026rsquo;s your name? And why are you stealing all these three-handled pots?\u0026rdquo; Lin Fei demanded with righteous indignation.\nThe fat man set down his chopsticks and looked at Lin Fei with disdain. \u0026ldquo;Aren\u0026rsquo;t you Dingcat, that so-called Mr. Lomo? The public-interest LOMO wall on Dingdingmao last time, you did that, right? I even went to see it. And you don\u0026rsquo;t even recognize me?\u0026rdquo; Dingcat was Lin Fei\u0026rsquo;s online name, as well as his ID on the secret ancient-Shu forum Dingdingmao, a forum named after his father, Old Dingcat.\n\u0026ldquo;You know the Dingdingmao forum?\u0026rdquo; Lin Fei asked in surprise.\n\u0026ldquo;What rubbish. I\u0026rsquo;m a senior member.\u0026rdquo;\nDingdingmao was a closed-registration forum. It did not have many members, but Lin Fei certainly had not met them all. \u0026ldquo;You\u0026rsquo;re not Shu,\u0026rdquo; he said. \u0026ldquo;All the Shu people, I\u0026rsquo;ve met.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s right. I really am not human.\u0026rdquo;\nLin Fei thought about it. There were not many users on the forum. If this fellow was not Shu, then he must be some sort of auspicious beast or spirit. Looking again at the dark rings around the fat man\u0026rsquo;s eyes, Lin Fei felt a sudden shock. \u0026ldquo;Could it be\u0026hellip; you\u0026rsquo;re a pixiu?\u0026rdquo;\nPatting his plump round belly with satisfaction, the fat man beckoned and said, \u0026ldquo;Now that\u0026rsquo;s more like it. You should have guessed sooner. My name\u0026rsquo;s Qu Mao\u0026rsquo;er. Come on, sit down and eat a little.\u0026rdquo;\nDon\u0026rsquo;t think. Fast.\nLOMO Rule\n\u0026ldquo;Pixiu\u0026rdquo; did not mean the auspicious beast pixiu. Nor was it some online alias of Qu Mao\u0026rsquo;er. He really was a \u0026ldquo;pixiu,\u0026rdquo; or so he claimed. In ancient Chinese legend, pixiu, those auspicious beasts, come in male and female forms: the male is pi, the female xiu. In the south they are usually called pixiu together, while in the north they are often called bixie, warders-off of evil. Throughout the dynasties, the armor of imperial guards bore pixiu heads and those troops were called the Pixiu Guard. No one knows in exactly which dynasty it happened, but someone in Guanzhong once captured several ferocious beasts, fierce as bears, and presented them to the emperor. The doctor standing before the throne did not recognize them and invented, on the spot, the claim that they must be heaven-sent auspicious beasts: pixiu. From then on those beasts became the bodily representatives of pixiu. In truth, pixiu are not fierce at all. Though sharp-toothed and clawed, they never eat meat. It was not until 1869 that the French missionary Armand David rediscovered the pixiu in Sichuan and named it the black-and-white bear; two years later it was more precisely named the cat-bear. In the 1940s, at an animal-specimen exhibition in the museum at Beibei, Chongqing, because Chinese at the time were used to reading from right to left, \u0026ldquo;cat-bear\u0026rdquo; was misread by everyone as \u0026ldquo;bear-cat.\u0026rdquo; From then on the word \u0026ldquo;panda\u0026rdquo; spread, and the mistake has persisted to this day.\nQu Mao\u0026rsquo;er, then, was in fact a genuine panda. In Chengdu dialect, however, qu mao\u0026rsquo;er means frog. He had chosen the name only to express one tiny wish of his own: to be photographed in color.\nSure enough, after only a few bites, Qu Mao\u0026rsquo;er opened his mouth to ask for exactly that. \u0026ldquo;Dingcat, I hear LOMO makes colors come out absurdly bright. Later on, take a few shots of me, would you?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;With your looks, every shot is still just one color. First tell me why you stole the Sanxingdui three-handled cauldron,\u0026rdquo; Lin Fei said irritably. \u0026ldquo;You\u0026rsquo;re an old cat on the forum too. You must know Sanxingdui is the foundation of ancient Shu culture, the root of our lives. Why touch it? And you stole all these pots and pans while you were at it.\u0026rdquo; Lin Fei pointed at the eight vessels on the ground. \u0026ldquo;Chengdu tabloid gossip is famous all over China. Heaven knows what kind of uproar tomorrow\u0026rsquo;s news will stir up.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;So you really don\u0026rsquo;t know,\u0026rdquo; Qu Mao\u0026rsquo;er said, putting on an expression of pained concern. \u0026ldquo;Do you remember that year when bamboo flowered across all of Sichuan, and we pandas were nearly starved to death?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I remember. There wasn\u0026rsquo;t even any internet then. All the radio hams in Chengdu organized a relief drive. You ate plenty of the special supplies from us Shu folk.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;But in the end it wasn\u0026rsquo;t you, and it wasn\u0026rsquo;t modern people either, who saved the bamboo. The news said it was climate-related. But I know the truth. It was taotie, that really was his doing, who took rubbings of the taotie pattern on the pair of Sanxingdui bronze cauldrons and used them to save the bamboo.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Hm? I thought the pictographs on those cauldrons were supposed to be a cookbook.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Wrong. What they contain is your ancient Shu materia medica, the Shu Arts. One entry in it is specifically on \u0026lsquo;healing bamboo.\u0026rsquo; If Sanxingdui had never been excavated, you Shu people would still have your peace, and it would have been much easier for us to take things when needed. Ever since one of the two bronze cauldrons was smashed, the complete text of the Shu Arts has been lost among the people. That\u0026rsquo;s thanks to your father, by the way. He was the one who overruled everyone else and had the patterns of the Shu Arts copied out in rubbings.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Then this time you stole them because\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; Lin Fei asked.\n\u0026ldquo;This time I had no choice. I came to retrieve the Shu Arts. To keep you people from worrying, I even took something from another Sanxingdui site and left it there to calm your nerves.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;What? There\u0026rsquo;s another Sanxingdui?\u0026rdquo; Lin Fei leapt up in shock.\n\u0026ldquo;Easy, easy. That\u0026rsquo;s another story. We\u0026rsquo;ll talk about it later. This time it\u0026rsquo;s because\u0026hellip; the rabbits are in trouble.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Rabbits? What rabbits?\u0026rdquo; In Chengdu dialect, rabbits are simply called tu\u0026rsquo;er.\n\u0026ldquo;Do you know why Chengdu people love eating rabbits so much? Like the rabbit heads from Shuangliu Laoma.\u0026rdquo;\nLin Fei licked his lips. \u0026ldquo;In legend, the rabbit is the incarnation of what King Wen of Zhou vomited up after eating the flesh pie made from the corpse of his eldest son, Boyi Kao. And since our ancient Shu kingdom was destroyed by Zhou\u0026rsquo;s treachery, generation after generation of Shu people longed to eat him alive. That\u0026rsquo;s why Boyi Kao\u0026rsquo;s incarnation gets treated the way it does.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Exactly. And in so cruel a manner too.\u0026rdquo; Qu Mao\u0026rsquo;er made a chopping motion at his neck. \u0026ldquo;Still, to be fair, rabbit head really is delicious.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;We\u0026rsquo;ve stopped nursing that grudge ages ago. Don\u0026rsquo;t forget I\u0026rsquo;m on the board of the Chengdu Anti-Cruel Slaughter of Domestic Animals Association. Get to the point. What do you mean the rabbits are in trouble?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Right, right. You have to understand that rabbits come in two sorts: domestic and wild. The ones we eat are all farmed rabbits, and their situation is still tolerable. But wild rabbits? They have it hard. The Chengdu Plain is nearly filled with people now. There\u0026rsquo;s very little wasteland left for them to live in. Beneath Chengdu proper there are now countless underground rabbit settlements. That was an aid plan first launched years ago by us panda people. Chengdu\u0026rsquo;s old nickname is Rong City, and underground there is a kind of fungus called rong mushroom. The wild rabbits survive on that now.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;And what does that have to do with the Shu Arts? Does it also cover protecting small animals?\u0026rdquo; Lin Fei asked.\nQu Mao\u0026rsquo;er raised his eyebrows again. \u0026ldquo;Are you even from Chengdu? Have you heard they\u0026rsquo;re building the subway now? Seven whole lines, digging Chengdu\u0026rsquo;s underground into Swiss cheese.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Ah!\u0026rdquo; Lin Fei slapped his thigh. \u0026ldquo;So the rabbit warrens got wrecked? Does the Shu Arts have some secret technique for destroying subway lines?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Stop interrupting nonsense. We already tampered with the subway issue ages ago. The current routes all curve around the rabbit warrens,\u0026rdquo; Qu Mao\u0026rsquo;er said crossly.\n\u0026ldquo;No wonder so many people online keep complaining the subway planning makes no sense. So that was your work.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;But now there\u0026rsquo;s a new problem. The subway cut Chengdu\u0026rsquo;s underground water veins, so the rong mushrooms won\u0026rsquo;t grow anymore. The rabbits have nothing left to eat.\u0026rdquo; Qu Mao\u0026rsquo;er spread his hands. \u0026ldquo;We\u0026rsquo;ve already planned dozens of new wild-rabbit settlement zones in Xindu, Jintang, Pixian, and Qionglai, places that probably won\u0026rsquo;t get a subway for a hundred years. But rong mushrooms don\u0026rsquo;t grow there. Taotie says the Shu Arts contains cultivation methods for more than a dozen kinds of fungi and for cruciform vegetables, meaning radishes, arts now long lost. So I planned to copy them out, learn them, and plant one of those things underground in the new settlements to save the rabbits.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Qu Mao\u0026rsquo;er, you\u0026rsquo;re a good comrade.\u0026rdquo; Lin Fei solemnly patted his shoulder. \u0026ldquo;But taking other people\u0026rsquo;s things at random is still wrong. How are those shopkeepers supposed to make a living?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Come on, I left them new cookware, didn\u0026rsquo;t I? Pure gold. I\u0026rsquo;ve already taken a loss.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Rubbish. Gold\u0026rsquo;s that soft, how\u0026rsquo;s it supposed to stand a stove fire? Here\u0026rsquo;s what we\u0026rsquo;ll do. I\u0026rsquo;ll help you photograph all the patterns. We\u0026rsquo;ll piece them together and study them slowly. Then hurry up and swap the cookware back.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Deal. Dingcat, you\u0026rsquo;re a good comrade too.\u0026rdquo; Qu Mao\u0026rsquo;er slapped him so hard that Lin Fei nearly sprawled to the floor. \u0026ldquo;But this is urgent. Let\u0026rsquo;s photograph everything now and return the stuff tonight.\u0026rdquo;\nPut your pictures together any way you please. You don\u0026rsquo;t need to know in advance what you\u0026rsquo;ll get.\nLOMO Rule\nLin Fei and Qu Mao\u0026rsquo;er went back to Lin Fei\u0026rsquo;s place, developed the photographs of the bronze cauldron and the other eight vessels, scanned them into the computer, and used a stitching program called AutoStitch to combine them. At last they obtained the complete text of the Shu Arts.\nLin Fei posted an announcement on Dingdingmao about the rabbits, and Shu people responded at once in large numbers, willing to help plant new food sources. Then he phoned Mendenger and told him to come retrieve the three-handled bronze cauldron the next day, not without taking the chance to nag a few words about reimbursement. Once all that was finished, Lin Fei let out a long breath. Only then did he hand Qu Mao\u0026rsquo;er the rubbings concerning the cultivation of fungi and cruciform vegetables.\nQu Mao\u0026rsquo;er thanked him over and over and tucked the rubbings into his jacket. \u0026ldquo;This time it\u0026rsquo;s all thanks to you. At last the complete Shu Arts has been preserved. Now even if it goes missing again, I can still look things up.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I should still thank Brother Pixiu. Without you, I\u0026rsquo;d never have known such a huge matter was brewing,\u0026rdquo; Lin Fei said.\n\u0026ldquo;Then I won\u0026rsquo;t waste any more time here. I\u0026rsquo;m off to the rabbit zones to start experiments. Bye-bye.\u0026rdquo; Qu Mao\u0026rsquo;er turned to go.\n\u0026ldquo;Wait.\u0026rdquo; Lin Fei grabbed him. \u0026ldquo;Can I ask you something?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Ask whatever you like.\u0026rdquo; Qu Mao\u0026rsquo;er\u0026rsquo;s eyes flickered a little.\n\u0026ldquo;Isn\u0026rsquo;t it supposed to be that pandas eat only bamboo? How come you can eat absolutely everything?\u0026rdquo; As he spoke, Lin Fei edged closer.\n\u0026ldquo;Aha, so you figured it out. Actually\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; Qu Mao\u0026rsquo;er spun around and lunged for the window. Lin Fei seized a long furry tail sticking out from under his trouser cuff and squeezed hard. \u0026ldquo;Miaow!\u0026rdquo; Qu Mao\u0026rsquo;er cried out. \u0026ldquo;I confess! I\u0026rsquo;m not a panda at all! I\u0026rsquo;m just a black-spotted white cat, miaow\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You liar. I\u0026rsquo;ll smack your ears off.\u0026rdquo;\nAt midnight, on the empty streets, there rose the roars and scuffling noises of a man and a cat chasing and fighting.\nIgnore these rules.\nLOMO Rule\nThe spirit of LOMO is like reading fiction: never mind the rules.\nThe only thing that really needs saying is this: all the Chengdu delicacies mentioned above are well worth trying. Every one of them is real, and every address is correct.\nThis piece is dedicated to all lovers of photography and good food.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2009/2009-05-31-mr-lomo-3/","summary":"\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGet as close as you can to the object of your desire.\u003cbr\u003e\nLOMO Rule\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSome say that the character \u003cem\u003echeng\u003c/em\u003e in Chengdu is really a pictograph meaning \u0026ldquo;electric scooter.\u0026rdquo; If you have ever seen the rivers of scooters during rush hour, you would be inclined to praise the sheer force of numbers.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt was already well past midnight now, so Lin Fei could ride the scooter at full stretch. Even so, the black shadow was faster than he had imagined, so fast that he could barely keep up. Yet it behaved like a cat teasing prey, always pausing for an instant at crucial corners to wait for him. Even then an ordinary person would long since have lost the trail. Fortunately Lin Fei still had another camera in his backpack: a Polaroid SX-70 Alpha 1 that looked like an elegant leather notebook.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Mr. Lomo, Part III"},{"content":" LOMO is part of life.\nLOMO Rule\nLin Fei\u0026rsquo;s cramped little apartment was not far from Jiuyan Bridge, tucked behind the notorious unfinished high-rise east of it. It was only a one-bedroom place, yet he had swaddled the living room in heavy black curtains and turned it into a darkroom.\nThe moment he got home, Lin Fei plunged into the darkroom and developed the roll he had just shot. Feilin means photographic film, an old Chinese rendering of the English word \u0026ldquo;film.\u0026rdquo; Nowadays it generally refers to camera film, though it can also mean negatives used in printing plate-making. Back in the day, it was seeing that word feilin that had made Lin Fei fall in love with photography. It seemed the perfect expression of his own name. Lin Fei possessed a pair of eyes the ancient Shu called \u0026ldquo;subduing-nightmare pupils.\u0026rdquo; People with such eyes could see what happened in spans of time invisible to others. By combining that ability with LOMO cameras, Lin Fei was able to produce all manner of uncanny photographs.\nWhat he had shot at Three Ears was what had happened the night before. Because the Smena 8M could expose the same frame again and again without limit, it could present on a single negative the events that had unfolded across a whole stretch of time. Sure enough, among the thirty-six developed photos, two contained strange, mysterious black shadows.\nThose two images showed the scene at one in the morning, just when Three Ears had closed for the night. Though the hall was dark, the ISO 1600 film still clearly recorded the figure of a fat back lingering in every corner of the room. The shadow wandered here and there, knocking over a row of jars of infused liquor behind the bar, then opening the refrigerators and rummaging about for something. In the last few ghosted exposures of the second photo, one could see the figure descending from upstairs carrying away some enormous round object.\nThat was probably the treasure of Three Ears.\nLin Fei propped his chin in one hand and stared at the fat silhouette for a while, as a very familiar feeling rose in him. I have definitely seen this fellow before, he thought. But who was it? Or rather, what was it? After thinking for a while, he imported the close-ups he had taken with the GRD II into the computer and began examining them one by one. The GRD II was a professional\u0026rsquo;s ideal second camera, with an excellent fixed lens. Lin Fei had attached to the front an infrared filter imprinted with a ritual seal, so that it could photograph certain \u0026ldquo;special\u0026rdquo; images.\nHe concentrated on the photos of the bar and the refrigerators. At 1000x magnification he could just make out wave-like scratch marks on them. \u0026ldquo;Wave-like? Could it be\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; Lin Fei immediately went online. He first entered the database of Dingdingmao, the internal forum of the ancient Shu, and pulled up the photo of the stolen three-handled bronze cauldron from Sanxingdui. Then he Googled photos of the stolen treasure-pot from Three Ears. Compared side by side, the answer sprang out at once. The shape of the Three Ears heirloom pot was astonishingly similar to the Sanxingdui cauldron, and even the taotie patterns were identical. Clearly, someone long ago had made it as an imitation of that bronze tripod. But why would the thief want to steal these two nearly identical cooking vessels?\nA chat window flashed in the lower right corner of the screen. Lin Fei moved the mouse over it and Gtalk popped open. Mendenger\u0026rsquo;s avatar was blinking.\nMendenger: /I just got word that the treasure of Three Ears has also been stolen.\nDingcat: /I just came back from eating there.\nMendenger: /Ah, then did you...\nDingcat: /Cut the crap. Of course I know. I also found that the Three Ears treasure looks almost exactly like the stolen bronze three-handled cauldron. Don't tell me you've been hiding something.\nMendenger: /Not at all! But what I need to tell you is this: the Sanxingdui bronze cauldron originally had a pair. The other one was accidentally smashed during transport after the new museum building was completed. The patterns on the pair matched one another. They formed a kind of ancient pictographic script. Supposedly a complete Sichuan-cuisine recipe was hidden in them.\nDingcat: /That sounds way too sci-fi. A recipe? The old man told me that ancient Shu people only knew how to boil fish. And besides, chili peppers have only been in China for a few hundred years. What Sichuan cuisine could there have been back then?\nMendenger: /Believe it or not. If someone could reconstruct the most authentic ancient Shu Sichuan cuisine from thousands of years ago, they'd make a fortune. Listen, here's the crucial point. Over the last hundred-plus years, several legendary Chengdu master chefs, all of them of ancient Shu blood, have studied that Sanxingdui bronze cauldron. Afterward, they used the pair as models to cast a number of cooking vessels, each slightly different but bearing the same patterns. Pots, vats, kettles, the lot. Those vessels are now scattered throughout Chengdu, and many became the heirlooms of famous shops. Like the bronze pot at Three Ears.\nDingcat: /I get it now!\nMendenger: /Get what?\nDingcat: /The thief is trying to gather every vessel modeled on the bronze cauldron, reconstruct the pattern from the smashed one, there must be some copies made from that broken original, and piece together the legendary recipe. If, that is, what you say is true.\nMendenger: /Makes sense. Clear logic. Solid deduction.\nDingcat: /Do you know how many copies there were in total?\nMendenger: /Do you know what another ancient name for Chengdu was?\nDingcat: /What? Stop playing suspense games.\nMendenger: /Turtle City. One for each of Chengdu's eight corners.\nDingcat: /Damn. I'm logging off.\nClosing Gtalk, Lin Fei looked once more at the blurred fat silhouette in the photo. Since the clues were wrapping themselves ever more tightly around the matter of food, the thief had to be some ravenous glutton.\n\u0026ldquo;A ravenous glutton?\u0026rdquo; Wait. Lin Fei looked again at the wave-like scratch marks in the photo. \u0026ldquo;Isn\u0026rsquo;t this a taotie pattern?\u0026rdquo;\nTaotie, in Chinese legend, is an ancient divine beast. Taotie motifs are most commonly found on bronzes. After the Western Zhou they suddenly vanished from the decorative world, and no one knows why. In fact, because the Zhou army had turned on the ancient Shu forces who had helped them, and because later rulers did all they could to evade that fact, emblematic patterns of Shu culture disappeared from Chinese history. Taotie became one of the most obscure mythical beasts of all, burdened with every kind of bad name. Its greatest characteristic was its appetite. The Classic of Divine Marvels says: \u0026ldquo;In the southwest there is one with a hairy body and a pig-like head\u0026hellip; it is called taotie.\u0026rdquo; The Gazette of Gods and Monsters, chapter on strange beasts, says: \u0026ldquo;In the far south of the divine realm there is a vicious beast, four-eyed, black-skinned, long-necked, four-legged, savage in nature, immeasurably greedy of food.\u0026rdquo; In truth, just like the ancient Shu, taotie have continued to exist quietly in the land of Bashu. Lin Fei had seen the creature more than once. It was nothing like the terrible monster of popular imagination. On the contrary, it was much gentler and cuter. The trouble was that this species was deeply secretive and disliked going online. It would not be easy to locate them in a hurry.\nSo where would the taotie who stole the cauldron go next? Lin Fei\u0026rsquo;s eyes turned, and an idea came to him. If there were as many as eight imitations, then he would search by direction. Though the ancient city gates of old Chengdu had long ago burned away in history, Chengdu people still liked to refer to parts of the city as East Gate, South Gate, West Gate, and North Gate. Since Yulin lay in the South Gate area, then East Gate would be next.\nShoot from the hip.\nLOMO Rule\nSichuan people love spicy food, but they do not call chili peppers \u0026ldquo;chili peppers.\u0026rdquo; They call them haijiao, sea peppers, and the reason is simple enough: peppers came to China by sea from Central and South America. In Chengdu there is a street actually called Haijiao Market Street. In the past it was the largest inland market for peppers in southwest China, the whole street filled with a sky-piercing pungency. Between Haijiao Market and the Lianhua district there runs a hidden little lane that suddenly comes alive at sunset, its two sides packed with stalls selling every kind of snack. Chengdu people who know it all call it Food Street. Lin Fei preferred to call it Back Street, for an even simpler reason: it lay behind his own neighborhood.\nIt was close to midnight when Lin Fei got off the bus at Lianhua First Compound, doubled through the alleys, and entered Back Street. From a distance he could already hear the uproar of voices. In Chengdu, any place with good food is forever bursting with people. The entire street was packed with tables. Men well into their cups sat bare-chested and yelling. Women leaned close together, sipping VE soybean milk in tiny mouthfuls. It was one of Chengdu\u0026rsquo;s little myths: in a consumer city so highly developed, at meals women seemed to drink only one kind of beverage, and all of it the same brand. This too was one of the small tricks used by the ancient Shu who guarded the city. Decades ago, they had quietly added a certain fragrance to this peanut-based drink, so that women developed an innate dependence on it. It had since become one of the steadiest sources of revenue for the Ancient Shu Relief Foundation.\nLin Fei had originally planned to walk from one end of Back Street to the other, shooting whatever he pleased in hopes of finding a clue. But no sooner had he entered than he ran into the owner of the very best taro dry-pot chicken place on the street, an old acquaintance who grabbed hold of him and would not let him go. The fragrance rising from the dry pots before the diners also made it impossible for him to move on. Fine, then. Better indulge himself here first. Do not question Lin Fei\u0026rsquo;s capacity for food. Though this was already the third meal he had eaten that evening, in Chengdu even a slim-waisted girl whose first concern in life is dieting can still easily make the rounds of several food venues in a single night.\nTaro dry-pot chicken is one variety of gan guo, dry pot. Dry pot is so called in contrast to hotpot. Hotpot is for dipping and cooking a wide variety of ingredients. Dry pot, by contrast, is stir-fried in the kitchen and served directly to the table as a dish. When you have eaten most of it, broth is added, along with extra ingredients, and only then does it turn into something like a hotpot. The Back Street taro dry-pot chicken contained only three things, potato, bamboo shoots, and chicken, and yet it was astonishingly fragrant.\nLin Fei\u0026rsquo;s mouth never stopped chewing, but his eyes kept scanning the crowd. The back kitchens of the various food shops were indoors, and by the rules there was no way he could simply walk in and inspect them. He could only search for clues outside. By instinct he felt certain that the thief was here too. The lighting on Back Street was complicated, the crowds dense. Lin Fei took off his T-shirt and draped it over the back of the chair, then drew out an authentic LOMO camera: an LC-A hidden beneath the shirt, with a cable release attached to the hot shoe and quietly gripped in his hand. The shutter had been set to 1/500. Combined with very high-speed film, it could catch certain things invisible to the naked eye.\n\u0026ldquo;Iced jelly! White fungus soup! Lotus-seed sweet soup! Guiling jelly!\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Green plums! Green plums!\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Shoeshine! Shoeshine\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\nIn Chengdu, wherever people are eating, there are always hawkers weaving through the crowd. Certain goods and services with strong local color, things impossible to support as standalone shops, such as bingfen or ear-cleaning, rely on these people to keep the trade alive. They usually have some arrangement with the restaurants and are free to enter and do business inside.\nLin Fei had already eaten too much that evening and had no intention of buying more snacks. Yet just as he was lowering his head to drink his tea, the strap of the backpack hanging on his chair suddenly slid down of its own accord, as if someone had brushed against it. He looked up. No one had just walked past. Lin Fei thought for a moment, then immediately pulled an Agat-18K from his bag and began snapping photos in the direction before him.\nThe 18K was a classic half-frame camera. Though it used ordinary 135 film, each exposure occupied only half a normal frame, which meant that a roll of thirty-six exposures produced seventy-two images. The 18K had once been used as a spy camera, and its images were sharp enough to be ideal for surveillance. There was no time now for Lin Fei to find a place to develop the film, so he had to pull the T-shirt over his head, dismantle the camera, and use his \u0026ldquo;subduing-nightmare pupils\u0026rdquo; to view the negatives directly. Lin Fei\u0026rsquo;s brain was quick enough to reverse the negative images into positives in his mind. But staring at undeveloped film directly was hard on the eyes. After only a few frames, he was already beginning to feel dizzy and light-headed.\nStill, effort was rewarded. Just as he had suspected, one strip of half-frame negatives showed clearly that several meters away a hunched back was pushing a cart that sold bingfen. The edges of the figure were blurred, which meant it was moving at some speed invisible to normal sight.\nLin Fei sprang from his chair, rushed forward several steps, and slapped hard at a relatively empty patch in the middle of the lane. His palm smacked squarely against a cotton-padded gown, and a gaunt old man with a shabby four-wheeled pushcart slowly came into view before him.\nThe old man turned and stared at Lin Fei in surprise. Half the bowl of guiling jelly in his hand sloshed out. Grinning, Lin Fei said, \u0026ldquo;Qu Shan\u0026rsquo;er, what are you doing acting all weird selling bingfen here? Why were you hiding from me when you saw me?\u0026rdquo;\nThe old man\u0026rsquo;s surname was Qu. Back in the day he had been the famous Pushcart Qu. In Chengdu dialect, earthworms are called qushan\u0026rsquo;er, and Old Qu had acquired the nickname because of his stoop. Qu Shan\u0026rsquo;er gave a sheepish smile and said, \u0026ldquo;So it\u0026rsquo;s Lin boy. I didn\u0026rsquo;t notice you just now. Sorry about that.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Save it.\u0026rdquo; Lin Fei ladled himself a full bowl of liangxia from the cart. Ignoring the pained twitch on Qu Shan\u0026rsquo;er\u0026rsquo;s face, he piled a thick layer of raisins over the top and went on talking while he ate. \u0026ldquo;Your eyes are sharp enough. How could you not have seen me? What, were you begrudging me your snacks again?\u0026rdquo;\nQu Shan\u0026rsquo;er gave a bitter laugh. \u0026ldquo;If I run into you I feel bad charging you, but you can eat half my cart clean by yourself. Then my whole night is wasted.\u0026rdquo; Pushcart Qu had long since sold cheaply only to women, children, and beggars. His cart was protected by an illusion spell, and on his legs he wore magical courier charms, allowing him to make several circuits of Chengdu every night. Ordinary people could not see him at all. Catching him here on Back Street tonight was sheer luck.\n\u0026ldquo;As if I eat for free every time.\u0026rdquo; Lin Fei pointed into the air. \u0026ldquo;Let me ask you something. Do you know of any place on Back Street whose pot is a three-handled bronze pot? About this big.\u0026rdquo; He gestured with both hands. \u0026ldquo;About the size of that big dragon-spout tea kettle you use. With that kind of pattern on it.\u0026rdquo; But the moment his hands matched the outline of Qu Shan\u0026rsquo;er\u0026rsquo;s enormous tea kettle, he froze.\nNearly every pushcart in Chengdu that sold bingfen came with a huge dragon-spout bronze tea kettle. But Qu Shan\u0026rsquo;er\u0026rsquo;s was unlike the others. Besides the handle, it had an ear on each side, making three in all, and the patterns on it\u0026hellip; weren\u0026rsquo;t those taotie motifs?\n\u0026ldquo;Huh?\u0026rdquo; Lin Fei\u0026rsquo;s mouth fell open. \u0026ldquo;Qu Shan\u0026rsquo;er, how have I never noticed this before? Your big tea kettle looks like that? Isn\u0026rsquo;t it exactly like the three-handled bronze cauldron from Sanxingdui?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Heh heh. So you know it too. It\u0026rsquo;s an heirloom. Been in use nearly a hundred years.\u0026rdquo;\nLin Fei gently stroked the smooth body of the kettle and thought with satisfaction, Good. No need to run all over the city anymore. The thief is bound to come for this. I\u0026rsquo;ll just stick close to Qu Shan\u0026rsquo;er and wait for the hare at the stump.\nAt that very moment, a child spotted Pushcart Qu, tottered crookedly up in front of him, and held out a coin. \u0026ldquo;Uncle, I want bingfen.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Coming right up!\u0026rdquo; Qu Shan\u0026rsquo;er shoved Lin Fei aside and deftly began mixing a plastic bowl. Seeing the adorable fringe on the child\u0026rsquo;s forehead, Lin Fei crouched down and patted his head. \u0026ldquo;Hey there, kiddo. What\u0026rsquo;s your name?\u0026rdquo;\nTo his surprise, the child suddenly adopted a cold expression and said, \u0026ldquo;My name\u0026rsquo;s Taotao. My dad said you\u0026rsquo;d definitely pat my forehead. Once you did, you\u0026rsquo;d be in trouble, and then my dad could take the big tea kettle away.\u0026rdquo;\nLin Fei was thunderstruck. He whirled around. Qu Shan\u0026rsquo;er now stood there empty-handed. The dragon-spout bronze kettle had vanished without a trace. In its place on the pushcart sat a gleaming new golden kettle. Far away, a black shape flickered over the heads of the diners. He turned back again and reached to grab the child, but caught only air. Looking again, the child had also disappeared.\n\u0026ldquo;Well now. So that\u0026rsquo;s your game.\u0026rdquo; Gritting his teeth, Lin Fei said, \u0026ldquo;Qu Shan\u0026rsquo;er, I\u0026rsquo;ll go get it back for you.\u0026rdquo; With that he snatched an electric scooter from the roadside and tore off in pursuit of the vanishing shadow, leaving behind a stunned Pushcart Qu and his cart.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2009/2009-05-30-mr-lomo-2/","summary":"\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLOMO is part of life.\u003cbr\u003e\nLOMO Rule\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLin Fei\u0026rsquo;s cramped little apartment was not far from Jiuyan Bridge, tucked behind the notorious unfinished high-rise east of it. It was only a one-bedroom place, yet he had swaddled the living room in heavy black curtains and turned it into a darkroom.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe moment he got home, Lin Fei plunged into the darkroom and developed the roll he had just shot. \u003cem\u003eFeilin\u003c/em\u003e means photographic film, an old Chinese rendering of the English word \u0026ldquo;film.\u0026rdquo; Nowadays it generally refers to camera film, though it can also mean negatives used in printing plate-making. Back in the day, it was seeing that word \u003cem\u003efeilin\u003c/em\u003e that had made Lin Fei fall in love with photography. It seemed the perfect expression of his own name. Lin Fei possessed a pair of eyes the ancient Shu called \u0026ldquo;subduing-nightmare pupils.\u0026rdquo; People with such eyes could see what happened in spans of time invisible to others. By combining that ability with LOMO cameras, Lin Fei was able to produce all manner of uncanny photographs.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Mr. Lomo, Part II"},{"content":" Carry it with you at all times.\nLOMO Rule\nThe ease of old Chengdu is not something people merely speak of. It sinks all the way into the bones. The city was born with a life-attitude so calm and composed that every corner of it seemed to rest in an almost lazy state of comfort. Even white-collar workers in the forest of steel and concrete walked with a pace markedly slower than their counterparts in other cities.\nLin Fei lived in Yulin, the part of Chengdu most steeped in that temperament of leisurely ease. He was a thin, lanky man, an HR specialist at a headhunting firm, yet he always dressed in zip-up sports tops with stand collars and carried a bulging backpack. Whenever he chatted with clients, he always made a point of explaining that the \u0026ldquo;Fei\u0026rdquo; in his name was pronounced fei with the third tone rather than the first, lest people laugh that his name sounded too feminine. Every evening after work he passed the Parachute Tower crossroads, walked west into Yulin East Street, and turned right at the first parasol tree he saw. Beneath it stood a tiny bobo chicken shop called Jinmantang, so small that a few tables and stools had been crammed into it every which way. If you wanted to eat, you opened the refrigerator yourself, picked out your skewers, shouted \u0026ldquo;Boss!\u0026rdquo; and someone would bring over a basin of red chili oil. Lin Fei always ordered a generous handful of spicy beef, along with two liang of dumplings. In that way dinner was settled comfortably and completely.\nToday, after work, he came to Jinmantang as usual. He ordered a heap of food and sat down. What was different from other days was that across from him there was already a second dipping dish of oil, though the seat remained empty until a small pile of bamboo skewers had grown before him. Only then did a plump middle-aged man waddle into the shop on short steps and sit down opposite him.\n\u0026ldquo;Sorry, sorry. Had to pick the kid up from school. Nothing to be done,\u0026rdquo; the fat man said. He grabbed a duck tongue skewer, dipped it in the oil, stuffed it into his mouth, chewed twice, found the taste insufficient, and shouted over his shoulder, \u0026ldquo;Boss! Bring me a dry dip too!\u0026rdquo; When the waiter brought over a dish of dry chili and Sichuan pepper, he finally dug in with complete satisfaction.\nLin Fei watched patiently as the big fat man annihilated an entire basin of bobo chicken and wiped the oil clean from the corners of his mouth. Only then did Lin Fei slowly ask, \u0026ldquo;Mendenger, what is it this time? What could have made you come all the way out here looking for me?\u0026rdquo;\nThe man called Mendenger gave a greasy little grin. \u0026ldquo;What\u0026rsquo;s wrong? Can\u0026rsquo;t I come eat a meal at Jinmantang without you?\u0026rdquo; Then he drew a kraft-paper envelope from inside his jacket and handed it over. \u0026ldquo;The old man lost something. He wants you to help get it back.\u0026rdquo;\nLin Fei frowned and tore open the envelope. Inside were several close-up photographs of bronze vessels. At a glance they were clearly state-treasure-grade artifacts. \u0026ldquo;These are from Sanxingdui, aren\u0026rsquo;t they?\u0026rdquo; he asked.\nThe Sanxingdui site lies in Nanxing Town, Guanghan, Sichuan, no more than thirty-three kilometers from Chengdu. It takes its name from three abrupt mounds of yellow earth rising from the Chengdu Plain. It is a nationally protected archaeological site at least four thousand years old. Large quantities of bronze objects, jade pieces, gold items, and other artifacts have been excavated there, displaying to the world the highly developed and uniquely styled bronze civilization of the ancient Shu kingdom.\n\u0026ldquo;Exactly. These are artifacts from Sanxingdui that have never been publicly exhibited. Look at this one, storage room number three.\u0026rdquo; Mendenger touched one of the photos with his thick finger. It showed a display case. Inside stood a bronze figure about sixty centimeters high. Lin Fei leaned toward the light outside the shop door and peered closely. \u0026ldquo;The protruding-eyed human figure from Sanxingdui, roughly forty-nine hundred years old. Looks authentic. What\u0026rsquo;s wrong with it?\u0026rdquo; Many Sanxingdui artifacts depict eyes in strange forms. The Chronicles of Huayang even record: \u0026ldquo;Cancong, Marquis of Shu, had protruding eyes and was first to call himself king.\u0026rdquo; This suggests the Sanxingdui civilization worshipped eyes. The figure in the photo had enormous eyeballs, with cylindrical pupils thrusting forward like the telephoto lens of an SLR camera.\n\u0026ldquo;The problem is that this isn\u0026rsquo;t what used to be in that storage room at all,\u0026rdquo; Mendenger said, pronouncing each word carefully. \u0026ldquo;And besides, the Sanxingdui Museum doesn\u0026rsquo;t have this artifact anywhere. Yet it is undeniably something excavated from Sanxingdui. What was originally in this room was a huge three-handled bronze cauldron. Tell me, who swaps one real artifact for another real artifact? And in ordinary people\u0026rsquo;s eyes, that protruding-eyed statue is worth far more than the lousy old cauldron!\u0026rdquo;\nLin Fei narrowed his eyes. \u0026ldquo;Interesting. I thought the old man had stepped down already. He\u0026rsquo;s still sticking his nose into this?\u0026rdquo; The old man and Mendenger were both Lin Fei\u0026rsquo;s clansmen. The old man had been the previous clan chief.\nMendenger\u0026rsquo;s expression turned serious. \u0026ldquo;Don\u0026rsquo;t forget, boy. Dead or alive, we\u0026rsquo;re the last of the Shu.\u0026rdquo;\nLin Fei laughed awkwardly. \u0026ldquo;Why so solemn? Relax. I\u0026rsquo;ll look into it properly.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Did you bring your tools?\u0026rdquo; Mendenger asked anxiously. \u0026ldquo;The old man is really in a hurry this time.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Of course.\u0026rdquo; Lin Fei patted his backpack. \u0026ldquo;LOMO Rule Number One: carry it with you at all times.\u0026rdquo;\nTime to use it, day or night.\nLOMO Rule\nThe \u0026ldquo;Shu people\u0026rdquo; in Mendenger\u0026rsquo;s mouth did not mean modern Sichuanese, but the ancient Shu who had lived here more than three thousand years ago. As early as the Shang dynasty, the ancient Shu, big-eyed, straight-nosed, square-jawed, broad-eared, built here a highly civilized theocratic kingdom, the ancient Shu state, whose power extended across what is today Sichuan and Yunnan, and at times reached even western Hubei and Qiang lands. Around the era when Shang fell and Zhou arose, the Shu forces that had helped Zhou conquer Shang were themselves later turned on and crushed by Zhou. From that point on, the ancient Shu passed from overwhelming brilliance into a wandering and broken decline.\nAnd yet the Shu did not vanish completely. Their orphaned descendants remained scattered across the Chengdu Plain, surviving stubbornly, watching over the relics and bloodline left by their ancestors, watching wave after wave of northerners moving south through the dynasties, mingling into them and quietly changing them. Generation after generation, outsiders came to Sichuan and were finally assimilated into genuine Shu people, inheriting Shu habits and the Shu spirit. Take modern Chengdu people: most are descendants of migrants who came during the \u0026ldquo;Huguang fills Sichuan\u0026rdquo; migration a little over two hundred years ago, and yet their grammar often follows a peculiar subject-object-verb order. Instead of saying \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t know,\u0026rdquo; they like to say something equivalent to \u0026ldquo;know-not.\u0026rdquo; This, too, comes from the unique Shu mode of speech known as left-speaking.\nLin Fei was such a person, a pure-blooded ancient Shu. He was connected with other ancient Shu through a forum called Dingdingmao, sharing news, guarding, and transmitting the cultural relics of the ancient Shu kingdom. What Mendenger had handed him was troublesome indeed. Sanxingdui, after all, had left behind a great many unsolved mysteries. According to public materials, almost none of the bronzes excavated there were daily-use objects; nearly all were ritual implements. In truth, some daily-use items had survived, only they had not been made public for one reason or another. The unpublicized bronze cauldron in question, for instance, was the origin-vessel of ancient Shu food culture, and the unbroken line of Sichuan cuisine over thousands of years depended on it. Who would steal such a thing?\nAncient bronzes do not command especially high prices on the international antiquities black market. If an ordinary smuggler had stolen it, then having gotten into an unpublished storeroom guarded so heavily, he ought to have had an easier time taking the much more valuable gold scepter and the like from the public halls. And yet this thief had ignored the treasures in plain sight, stolen the bronze cauldron, and left behind a more \u0026ldquo;valuable\u0026rdquo; protruding-eyed statue. Clearly, he had not come for money. Which meant that the thief must know the cauldron\u0026rsquo;s special function. Everything, then, still had to be traced back through food.\nLin Fei did not go home. Instead he turned into an internet café and logged into the Douban group \u0026ldquo;Chengdu\u0026rsquo;s Utopia of Food,\u0026rdquo; intending to see whether anything was happening lately in the restaurant world. As soon as he got online he saw a fresh message:\nThree Ears Hotpot heirloom stolen, suspected prank by rich youths (forwarded)\nOne of Chengdu\u0026rsquo;s most famous hotpot restaurants, Three Ears, suffered a theft last night. The shop\u0026rsquo;s treasure, a three-handled bronze pot said to have been passed down since the Qianlong era and kept at the flagship store on Nijiaqiao Road, mysteriously vanished. The inner wall of the pot was inscribed with the secret spice recipe of Three Ears Hotpot, and the pot still held the master broth used for more than a hundred years. According to the shop, what astonished them most was that the thief, after stealing the heirloom iron pot, left behind a gold pot of exactly the same size. They suspect the incident may have been some prank staged by a group of wealthy second-generation locals\u0026hellip;\nThe news was unconfirmed, and the poster was using a sockpuppet account, but Lin Fei\u0026rsquo;s eyes lit up at once. The method matched the Sanxingdui cauldron theft almost exactly. Very likely, it was the same person. Nijiaqiao Road was close to Yulin, and Lin Fei quickly made his way there.\nThe flagship Three Ears Hotpot stood on the first floor of the Three Ears Tower on Nijiaqiao Road, decorated in opulent style and utterly unlike the humble roadside hotpot place it had once been. Lin Fei could not help sighing. Chengdu people love to eat, but what they love even more are the unremarkable little places hidden in alleys and back lanes. Chengdu dialect even has a special term for them: \u0026ldquo;fly restaurants,\u0026rdquo; those shabby-looking places unfit for elegant company, yet serving truly unforgettable food.\nWhen he entered Three Ears, the dinner rush had long passed, yet the hall was still a roar of voices, every seat filled. He waited a long while before a small table against the wall opened up. He ordered a standard beef-tallow broth and a few of the commonest items, duck tongue, goose intestine, bean curd skin, omasum, crispy sausage, and so on. Then he leisurely dipped and cooked while quietly examining the scene in the hall.\nEverything at first glance seemed ordinary, just like any bustling hotpot restaurant on any normal evening. Yet if one looked more closely, little irregularities emerged. Several strips of yellow police tape were tangled among the congratulatory flower stands behind the main door. Faint chalk markings could still be seen on the wall near the dish window. The upstairs private seating area was closed, and a few security men in black, normally out front parking cars, now stood at the foot of the stairs. Clearly the Douban rumor was true. A criminal case had indeed occurred here the night before, and the police had come. The question now was what exactly had happened.\nLin Fei took from his backpack a small camera with strap and leather case, palm-sized, with a silver lens ringed by tightly packed scales and numbers, and several rows of Cyrillic letters printed on the black front plate: Smena 8M. It was a 135 camera made in the Soviet Union in 1970, and a recognized LOMO model.\nLOMO, short for Leningradskoje Opitiko Mechanitscheskoje Objedinenie, originally referred to the LC-A, a 35mm automatic-exposure rangefinder camera produced in the 1950s by the Leningrad Optical Mechanical Association, then the largest optical instrument factory in the Soviet Union. In 1991, two Viennese art students went to Prague and on a whim bought an LC-A that had already gone out of production. When the photos came back, they were delighted. The unique curve of the lens allowed it to shoot by day and night without flash, and it was especially sensitive to reds, blues, and yellows, producing extraordinarily vivid colors. Later LOMO became a fashion favorite. LOMO style spread rapidly among young people worldwide, becoming a darling of underground art and culture circles.\nLin Fei, too, was a devoted LOMO enthusiast. But the Smena 8M in his hands was no ordinary camera. Its greatest feature was that the film advance was manual but not forced, which meant that the same frame could be exposed again and again without limit, producing fantastically strange images. Lin Fei took a marker from his pocket, wrote several unintelligible sigils on a sticky note, pasted it to the camera back, then, using a trip to the restroom as cover, wandered through the hall of Three Ears, snapping away through an entire roll. After that he took out a Ricoh GRD II digital camera and used it to shoot close-ups of various corners of the hall. Only then did he return to his table and sweep the rest of the hotpot away like a storm. Chengdu hotpot is numbing but never scorching, hot but never drying, mellow and deeply fragrant, with an aftertaste that lingers. Burping contentedly from that lingering aftertaste, Lin Fei slowly made his way home.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2009/2009-05-27-mr-lomo-1/","summary":"\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCarry it with you at all times.\u003cbr\u003e\nLOMO Rule\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe ease of old Chengdu is not something people merely speak of. It sinks all the way into the bones. The city was born with a life-attitude so calm and composed that every corner of it seemed to rest in an almost lazy state of comfort. Even white-collar workers in the forest of steel and concrete walked with a pace markedly slower than their counterparts in other cities.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Mr. Lomo, Part I"},{"content":"[Nine Stories] Private Writing Project Group · Google Collaborative Platform\n[Nine Stories, Season Six] Prologue\nWitch Doctor\nIt was obvious that no one had entered this room for a very long time. The room was small, containing only a bed one and a half meters wide and a cheap computer desk worth maybe fifty yuan, with just enough space between them for a sixty-kilo person to turn around. A thick layer of dust lay over the desk, marked by the tracks of dung beetles. The computer itself was gone, leaving only the square blank imprint where a CRT monitor had sat for years. Above the bed there was a round window half a meter across. At first glance it seemed to have been sealed over with black paper, but when I shone a flashlight on it I saw that it was actually a layer of black furry vine.\nThere was a thick layer of dust on the mattress too. No quilt or blanket remained, only a pillow blotched with sweat, with the hollow left by a sleeper\u0026rsquo;s head still sunken into it. I measured the impression with a tape: twenty-eight centimeters across. It had been left by a bald, gaunt man with a very pointed head. By the bed were three books: Ancient Chinese Sorcery, Miscellanies of Youyang, and A Study of Famous Chinese Things. These were probably what he had been reading most recently. Ancient Chinese Sorcery lay open face-down on top of Miscellanies of Youyang. I picked it up carefully. The page it had been opened to discussed \u0026ldquo;sorcery for controlling human behavior and emotion: the formation and properties of dedicated aphrodisiacs.\u0026rdquo; The margins were crowded with red-pen annotations in neat small script. \u0026ldquo;Windless Swaying Grass\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Peach-Cinnabar Art\u0026rdquo; had both been heavily circled.\nI took out my Nokia E71 and dialed a short code.\n\u0026ldquo;Well? Found anything?\u0026rdquo; the person on the other end asked anxiously.\n\u0026ldquo;Damn it,\u0026rdquo; I said. \u0026ldquo;This guy was a witch doctor.\u0026rdquo;\nRules\nInclude the following sentence in the story. You may freely fill in the book titles in the blanks. The titles may be chosen from books you have read, which is recommended, or you may invent them.\nBy the bed were three books: *___*, *___*, and *___*.\nNo limit on length. No limit on genre.\nPost it to the [Nine Stories] group, publish it on your own blog, and add links to the other participants\u0026rsquo; entries.\nDeadline: March 15.\nPrize for this season: several portions of Chengdu local specialty pickled chicken feet, supplied especially for those who turn in their work on time.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2009/2009-02-13-nine-stories-six/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[Nine Stories] Private Writing Project Group · Google Collaborative Platform\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[Nine Stories, Season Six] Prologue\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eWitch Doctor\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt was obvious that no one had entered this room for a very long time. The room was small, containing only a bed one and a half meters wide and a cheap computer desk worth maybe fifty yuan, with just enough space between them for a sixty-kilo person to turn around. A thick layer of dust lay over the desk, marked by the tracks of dung beetles. The computer itself was gone, leaving only the square blank imprint where a CRT monitor had sat for years. Above the bed there was a round window half a meter across. At first glance it seemed to have been sealed over with black paper, but when I shone a flashlight on it I saw that it was actually a layer of black furry vine.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Nine Stories, Season Six | Prologue"},{"content":"Nine Stories private writing project group · Google collaboration platform\nNine Stories, Season Six: Prologue\nThe Witch Doctor\nThe room had plainly been left untouched for a very long time. It was tiny, containing only a bed one and a half meters wide and a cheap computer desk of the sort one could buy for fifty yuan. The gap between them was so narrow that only a person weighing sixty kilos could turn around in it. A thick layer of dust lay over the desk, marked by the tracks of beetles that had crawled across it. The computer itself was gone, leaving only the pale square where a CRT monitor had once sat for years. Above the bed was a round window half a meter across. At first glance it seemed to have been sealed over with black paper. Only when I shone my flashlight on it did I see that it was actually covered by a layer of black, furry vine.\nThe mattress, too, was thick with dust. There was no bedding, only a sweat-stained pillow with the hollow of a sleeping head still pressed into it. I measured the indentation with a tape: twenty-eight centimeters wide. It had been left by a thin bald man with a sharply pointed skull. Beside the bed lay three books: Ancient Chinese Sorcery, Youyang Zazu, and A Study of Famous Chinese Things. They were probably what he had been reading most recently. Ancient Chinese Sorcery lay open, face-down, across Youyang Zazu. I lifted it carefully. The open page concerned \u0026ldquo;sorcery for controlling human behavior and emotion: the making and efficacy of specialized love potions.\u0026rdquo; The margins were filled with neat annotations in red ink. Two entries had been circled heavily: \u0026ldquo;grass that sways though there is no wind\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;peach-vermilion arts.\u0026rdquo;\nI pulled out my Nokia E71 and dialed a short number.\n\u0026ldquo;Well? Find anything?\u0026rdquo; The man on the other end asked in an anxious voice.\n\u0026ldquo;Damn it,\u0026rdquo; I said. \u0026ldquo;This guy was a witch doctor.\u0026rdquo;\nRules\nInclude the following sentence somewhere in your story. The blanks may be filled with whatever book titles you like, preferably from books you have actually read, though invented titles are also allowed.\nBeside the bed lay three books: __, __, and __.\nNo word limit. No genre restrictions.\nPost it to the Nine Stories group, publish it on your own blog, and add links to the other participants\u0026rsquo; entries.\nDeadline: March 15.\nPrize for this season: several portions of Chengdu specialty pickled chicken feet, reserved for those who hand in their work on time.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2009/2009-02-13-witch-doctor/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eNine Stories private writing project group · Google collaboration platform\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eNine Stories, Season Six: Prologue\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Witch Doctor\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe room had plainly been left untouched for a very long time. It was tiny, containing only a bed one and a half meters wide and a cheap computer desk of the sort one could buy for fifty yuan. The gap between them was so narrow that only a person weighing sixty kilos could turn around in it. A thick layer of dust lay over the desk, marked by the tracks of beetles that had crawled across it. The computer itself was gone, leaving only the pale square where a CRT monitor had once sat for years. Above the bed was a round window half a meter across. At first glance it seemed to have been sealed over with black paper. Only when I shone my flashlight on it did I see that it was actually covered by a layer of black, furry vine.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Nine Stories, Season Six | The Witch Doctor"},{"content":"Kidu, a city where once you arrive, you can never get away from the local-news pages.\nIf you happened to be standing in Beckoning-Stop Square at this moment, you would find social-news reporters from every major Kidu media outlet guarding every possible angle. Normally these people might be interviewing Dong Xiaohua of the Taobote household, who has climbed a tree and cannot come down, or filming the splatter on the wall at the scene of a husband-and-wife brawl, or recording a driver trapped in his cab after a traffic accident, or, failing that, disguising themselves as clients to investigate some girl selling her first time for money to pay medical bills. In short, in this city without superheroes, they are forever playing superheroes. Yet at this very moment they had all abandoned their usual strengths and converged on Beckoning-Stop Square to cover hard news instead, for one reason alone:\nObama had come.\nNews of Obama\u0026rsquo;s visit to Kidu had already been leaked by the press several months earlier. Ordinarily the itinerary of a U.S. president is among the highest levels of state secrecy on the planet, so very few people took the report seriously. Even the major terrorist organizations could hardly be bothered to issue a response. The media interpreted it as a gesture of goodwill from Obama in the face of the economic crisis. So when word really did arrive that Air Force One was flying into Kidu, the terrorists could no longer save face. One after another they appeared masked on YouTube, Tudou, Youku, and 6.cn to declare that Kidu would be a city Obama might enter, but leave alive no longer. While stressing the importance of security, the Kidu municipal government ordered all motor vehicles with plate numbers ending in 0 through 9 to stop operating on the day of the visit, and further barred citizens from coming within a three-kilometer radius of Beckoning-Stop Square. Only licensed journalists, after clearing security, were to be allowed inside. As a result, on that day the square received forty thousand fully accredited reporters, sixty thousand temporary reporters, and another hundred thousand fake-badge reporters. An American officer coordinating security inspection remarked that the prosperity of the local media put the United States ahead by a mere hundred light-years.\nAs a radio sound engineer, Balack seemed far too ordinary. His work was nothing more than trailing behind radiant female anchors, holding a microphone aloft on a telescoping boom and hurrying from place to place. Hardly anyone at the station gave him a second glance. But two weeks earlier, his colleagues\u0026rsquo; attitude toward him had suddenly changed. The NB producers had begun to favor the tapes Balack brought back, because the audio was astonishingly clear. To take an ordinary dispute at a farmers\u0026rsquo; market over short weights as an example: recordings brought back by ordinary reporters contained nothing but a chaos of shouting and curses, and even the interviewees\u0026rsquo; voices were hard to make out. Yet if one opened one of Balack\u0026rsquo;s recent tapes in a processing program like Audition, the contents would be found cleanly divided into ten or twenty channels: the host\u0026rsquo;s voice, the subject cursing, the bargaining, the chopping of vegetables, the grinding of meat, the scrape of a blade cutting a handbag, the murmuring of onlookers. The producers could simply take whichever layer they needed. At first everyone assumed Balack had begun using some cutting-edge device, but after secretly examining it they found he was still using the same oldest-standard machine issued by the station, a relic none of the senior reporters would touch. Within days, the name \u0026ldquo;Master Recorder\u0026rdquo; had spread everywhere. Even upper management had heard it.\nToday, management had specially arranged for Balack to sit in the very first row of the media section at the central reception area in Beckoning-Stop Square, recording Obama\u0026rsquo;s voice one on one in hopes of getting some choice gossip. Better yet, if he could pick up anything from the low-voiced conversations of those American officials behind Obama, so much the better.\nBalack wore an orange vest, and the palm gripping the boom was slick with sweat. In truth, he was terrified. He knew very well that whether he ruined everything today depended entirely on how a few little fellows inside the microphone chose to perform.\nWhen Balack was in school, his favorite books had been Fabre\u0026rsquo;s Souvenirs Entomologiques. He had wanted to become an insect scientist. But one cannot do as one likes inside the ivory tower, and in the end he landed in a line of work eight poles removed from that ambition. Still, reporting in Kidu was relatively free, and Balack often used work as a pretext to attend events hosted by the Entomological Society, enough at least to become a familiar face there. A middle-aged man named Hussein had grown especially friendly with him and often gladly gave Balack precious insect specimens. Naturally Balack was deeply grateful, and in return he often shared bits of newsroom gossip with Hussein, the sort of stories that could never be published. A month earlier the station had secretly announced that Obama would soon be visiting and told its reporters to prepare professionally. No one took it seriously. Balack told Hussein the story as a joke.\nHussein, however, took it very seriously. He asked Balack, \u0026ldquo;Do you still want to make something of yourself in radio? If you do, interviewing a major figure is a perfect chance to turn your fortunes.\u0026rdquo; Balack answered with a bitter smile that with his meager abilities, he was hardly fit even to interview bureau-level officials. Hussein laughed and said, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ll help you with that. My laboratory keeps many insects, does it not? I\u0026rsquo;ll lend you a few. They\u0026rsquo;ll get you promoted in no time.\u0026rdquo;\nTwo weeks ago, Hussein handed several insects over to Balack. They were tiny beetles, smaller than a fingernail, with black elytra covering membranous hind wings. Balack\u0026rsquo;s field microphone was a long-handled dynamic mic. Hussein placed the beetles inside the coil beneath the metal diaphragm, then connected the ultrafine wires wrapped around their bodies to the microphone circuit. Balack went off to work carrying this \u0026ldquo;biological microphone\u0026rdquo; in utter disbelief, only to find his colleagues suddenly crowding around him with fawning intimacy. Two weeks later, management entrusted him with the great mission of going up against Obama.\nThe day before Obama\u0026rsquo;s visit, Hussein called to congratulate Balack on getting the opportunity. Balack thanked him profusely, but still worried whether the little beetles would perform properly tomorrow. Hussein laughed and said, \u0026ldquo;Since you\u0026rsquo;re uneasy, I\u0026rsquo;ll swap in some new ones for you. These are the latest strain, guaranteed to be more than ten times as sensitive as the previous set, and able to capture more than fifty channels at once.\u0026rdquo; Balack was delighted before he had even finished hearing it. Why would he refuse?\nObama appeared at last on the high platform beneath the flagpole in Beckoning-Stop Square, accompanied by the mayor of Kidu and more than a dozen bodyguards in black suits. The military band played. The flag was raised. Cannons fired. Obama slowly approached the media section and began his important speech.\nThe straight-line distance between Balack and Obama was only ten meters. Balack could even make out the white hairs at Obama\u0026rsquo;s temples. \u0026ldquo;Thank you to the warm and hospitable people of Kidu, thank you to this great city with its long history\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; Obama\u0026rsquo;s voice rose and fell with the same infectious power it had carried eight years earlier during his campaign.\nBalack stretched the boom forward with all his strength, aiming the microphone directly at Obama\u0026rsquo;s face. He could feel the beating of those tiny wings within the microphone\u0026rsquo;s little metal shell. It had to be captured. It had to\u0026hellip;\nSuddenly the boom began to shake violently, no longer under Balack\u0026rsquo;s control, as though something inside it were gathering force and preparing to burst out. Balack gripped it in both hands, but the microphone only trembled harder and harder.\nA wave of infrasound below 11 kHz passed from the microphone head down the boom and into Balack\u0026rsquo;s body. His ears could not register such sound, yet he heard, with perfect clarity, the sound of his own heart rupturing and of blood jetting from the ventricle into his chest cavity.\nThe earth shuddered. Amid screams as people clutched their ears and fell, amid the grating din of all things breaking apart, the entire square collapsed into indescribable chaos. A ring of invisible shockwaves spread outward in ripples, and everything fragile and soft shattered to pieces.\nCitizens one kilometer away from Beckoning-Stop Square fainted after four seconds, their stomach contents and intestinal waste liquefied, their bowels and bladders let loose. After twelve seconds, citizens three kilometers away suffered vibrations through their internal organs and fell unconscious. After forty seconds, citizens ten kilometers away complained of nausea. After one minute and twenty seconds, citizens twenty kilometers away reported severe palpitations.\nSeveral hours later, dozens of international terrorist organizations claimed responsibility for the biological-weapons attack.\n[Nine Stories, Season Five] Rules / Prologue: Mo Mo / \u0026ldquo;One Fragrant Herb, One Stinking Weed\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-12-07-eight-sounds-fall-silent/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eKidu, a city where once you arrive, you can never get away from the local-news pages.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you happened to be standing in Beckoning-Stop Square at this moment, you would find social-news reporters from every major Kidu media outlet guarding every possible angle. Normally these people might be interviewing Dong Xiaohua of the Taobote household, who has climbed a tree and cannot come down, or filming the splatter on the wall at the scene of a husband-and-wife brawl, or recording a driver trapped in his cab after a traffic accident, or, failing that, disguising themselves as clients to investigate some girl selling her first time for money to pay medical bills. In short, in this city without superheroes, they are forever playing superheroes. Yet at this very moment they had all abandoned their usual strengths and converged on Beckoning-Stop Square to cover hard news instead, for one reason alone:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Nine Stories, Season Five | Eight Sounds Fall Silent"},{"content":"At the end of the bingxu year, a new female colleague named Xiao Wu joined our office. She was thin and quiet, hardly spoke to anyone, and always walked with both hands thrust into her pockets, carrying with her a faint smell of Chinese medicine. None of us knew much about her beyond the fact that she was a woman PhD just back from her studies. Perhaps she was not in very good health. Within only half a month of arriving, she had already spent more than half her time asking leave to go see doctors. Even when she was at work, she leaned sideways against the edge of her desk, writing and drawing with her right hand braced on the tabletop, while her left hand remained in her pocket and never once came out. Seeing how often she kneaded the back of her neck and clutched her arm, I guessed she suffered from some rheumatic complaint.\nOne noon, after the rest of us had finished lunch and returned to the office, we found that Xiao Wu had not gone home but had fallen asleep at her desk. Her head rested on her right arm. Her left hand lay on the desk, palm up, with the thumb turned inward toward her chest. But how could a left hand lie palm-up while the thumb pointed inward? I rubbed my eyes, and at once understood why Xiao Wu always kept that hand in her pocket. She had two right hands.\nI did not rashly go ask her about it, but instead sought the advice of Teacher Guan, far away on the Gan River. Teacher Guan said that the Miscellaneous Wanderings of a Physician and the Juxi both record surgeries for replacing limbs, and that legends from the Tang speak of the wandering knight Jing Jing\u0026rsquo;er with three arms. Yet according to the Inner Canon, Chinese medicine divides the pulses of the two hands into six positions, cun, guan, and chi on each side, governing different organs such as heart, liver, gallbladder, kidneys, lungs, and stomach. To lack one hand would disturb the harmony of the five viscera. There were also tales in antiquity of decoctions specially compounded for soldiers who had lost limbs in battle; once drunk, they would grow new ones. As for whether such things had really existed, even Teacher Guan could not say.\nAnother day, because our supervisor was away, Xiao Wu came to me and asked if I could later help her make up a leave request. Seeing how she held her arm in pain, I could not help asking whether it was her left hand that hurt. Noting her startled expression, I hurriedly added that if she could find some ground Yusuan of the King of Yue and apply it to the affected spot, it would be very beneficial to bone growth. If she needed it, I might be able to help her obtain some. She looked overjoyed and told me that she had long known the herb was good for her condition, but had never been able to find any.\nXiao Wu quietly told me the story of her right hand. According to her, the Wu clan had practiced medicine for generations. Their ancestor became famous for taking the pulse and diagnosing with the left hand, while compounding medicines with the right, and he laid down a family rule: the medical art should pass to men, the pharmaceutical art to women. In one generation, a granddaughter secretly learned medicine. The clan elder enforced family law and had her left hand cut off. In fury, she devoted herself wholly to the art of drugs and became a renowned apothecary of her age. Throughout her life she took a formula preserved in ancient books, and from the stump of her severed wrist there grew an inch-long malformed new hand, capable only of simple motions, and yet it was a right hand, meant to show that she would not betray the ancestral rule. Thereafter, the women of the Wu clan in every generation were required to drink \u0026ldquo;Right Hand Decoction,\u0026rdquo; and the formula was continuously refined. By Xiao Wu\u0026rsquo;s generation it could grow a complete and flawless right hand, though still accompanied by severe pain and many other side effects.\nAfter hearing all this, I felt deeply angry. It was a shame that the miraculous Right Hand Decoction had degenerated into a vile custom no better than footbinding. For those who make a living by writing, to grow two right hands might increase efficiency; but to force left-handed people, or women, to drink the Right Hand Decoction was a form of oppression. Xiao Wu, born in a more enlightened age, loathed the customs of the Wu clan and resolutely abandoned medicine for literature. Even so, for twenty years she had continued studying the difference between the formulas of the Right Hand Decoction and the Left Hand Decoction, hoping that in time she might return herself to normal. One of the ingredients unique to the Left Hand Decoction was precisely Yusuan of the King of Yue. I gave her all the little stock I had left and wished her a speedy recovery.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-12-03-right-hand/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAt the end of the bingxu year, a new female colleague named Xiao Wu joined our office. She was thin and quiet, hardly spoke to anyone, and always walked with both hands thrust into her pockets, carrying with her a faint smell of Chinese medicine. None of us knew much about her beyond the fact that she was a woman PhD just back from her studies. Perhaps she was not in very good health. Within only half a month of arriving, she had already spent more than half her time asking leave to go see doctors. Even when she was at work, she leaned sideways against the edge of her desk, writing and drawing with her right hand braced on the tabletop, while her left hand remained in her pocket and never once came out. Seeing how often she kneaded the back of her neck and clutched her arm, I guessed she suffered from some rheumatic complaint.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Right Hand"},{"content":"One hundred days after the great earthquake of the wuzi year in the Jin Dynasty, I joined a volunteer convoy delivering winter supplies to a certain town called Ping. Because the town lay far off in the mountains and had not suffered serious damage, it had never attracted much attention before. Only after arriving did I discover, to my surprise, that although by official standards its disaster truly did not count as severe, no houses had collapsed and no one had died, most of the buildings had suffered destructive shaking and were no longer fit to live in. The fields, battered by the torrential rains after the quake, had yielded almost nothing. The villagers\u0026rsquo; lives appeared extremely hard.\nAnd yet what puzzled me was that the cadre in charge of receiving us entertained us with minced meat fried in douban paste and with great slabs of roast meat. There were no fresh vegetables, but the meal was rich enough to make me doubt the truth of their living conditions. I asked the cadre why they were treating us to such extravagant food. In a kindly tone he explained that the town did not lack fresh raw meat, though it truly lacked vegetables and other daily necessities. I asked where the raw meat came from, and he only smiled and evaded the question. One of the friends traveling with me was horrified and suspected we might have eaten some unclean kind of flesh. Yet the meat tasted fresh enough. I knew it could not be carrion, so I guessed there might be a living tai sui there.\nTai sui, also called flesh lingzhi, is recorded as early as the Classic of Mountains and Seas, where it appears under such names as \u0026ldquo;seeing flesh,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;gathered flesh,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;flesh fungus.\u0026rdquo; In the Compendium of Materia Medica it is placed under the \u0026ldquo;vegetable\u0026rdquo; section, among the various zhi, as one kind of lingzhi. It is said that if one eats it away, it soon grows back as before; it can be cut without ever being exhausted. In times of great famine throughout the dynasties, it is said to have saved many lives. Following the methods for seeking lingzhi recorded in old books, I searched through the town, but found nothing. Just as I was lamenting my failure, one of the students we had come to aid quietly sought me out and told me he knew what sort of meat the town was eating.\nHe led me behind the cookhouse of his home, to a livestock pen where two animals were tethered, unlike anything I had ever seen. They stood about as high as packhorses, with two long curved horns on their heads and nostrils as huge as a hippopotamus\u0026rsquo;s. Their hair was sparse and patterned in pale yellow and white blotches. From the hind leg of one of them a great slab of flesh had been sliced away, the blood only just dried. The other bore on its belly a wound so deep the bone could be seen. Yet they seemed to feel no pain at all, standing there quietly chewing straw. The student told me that there were seven or eight such beasts in the town. The elders all called them white oxen. If meat was cut from their bodies, it would grow back whole by the next day, and so no one in the village had ever starved to death. To keep them from being stolen, the secret of the white oxen was known only to a very few, and his grandfather happened to be one of the town\u0026rsquo;s clan elders.\nI felt deeply glad for the villagers, but even more curious about the origin of such animals. After returning home, I consulted many ancient books and even made a special trip back to Tihu Hall in central Shanxi to search for traces of them, but found nothing except a few vague scraps. Not until recently did I come across a new book called Imagined Animals. What drew me was not the title, but the intricate totemic pattern on its cover, I had once seen a similar seal-cut design in a thread-bound book. The book was divided into four sections, birds, beasts, scaled things, and insects. In the tenth chapter of the insect section I finally found a clue to the white oxen. They turned out to be a kind of creature called the sun-returning ox, an animal whose flesh can never be cut away completely. Emperors of the Han and Jin were said to have raised them specially, though their meat was mediocre. The description in the book was still frustratingly vague, so, following the cover pattern, I returned to Tihu Hall and found a copy of the Yi Jian Ji stamped with a dark red seal. Yi Jian was a blind man from the age of Yu the Great who excelled at rapid notation. He recorded every living creature he was able to behold, arranging them by category into four hundred and twenty juan. Later these books were scattered and lost in the long river of history, and now one catches sight of them only when later texts happen to cite them. The copy of the Yi Jian Ji in my possession was itself only a fragment, and the page describing the sun-returning ox had long been missing. I thought that Xu Lai, the author of Imagined Animals, must possess a complete edition, so I went looking for him.\nThis compiler, who suffered from prostatitis, lived in a small place called Twisted-Neck Outlook. After receiving my letter, he replied that he was willing to lend me the book, but that I would have to come see it in person. Yet by the time I arrived, his humble dwelling had already been reduced to ashes. According to the villagers, it had been attacked by a group of mature adults. I could only return in frustration. Some time later, there came word that Xu Lai had moved to Phoenix. I decided not to seek him out again, lest I bring him unnecessary trouble. But I sincerely hope that the Yi Jian Ji will continue to circulate, and that before I die I may yet see the complete text. And as for its inheritor living in a place called Phoenix, one can hardly say that is not a kind of destiny.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-12-01-xu-lai/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eOne hundred days after the great earthquake of the wuzi year in the Jin Dynasty, I joined a volunteer convoy delivering winter supplies to a certain town called Ping. Because the town lay far off in the mountains and had not suffered serious damage, it had never attracted much attention before. Only after arriving did I discover, to my surprise, that although by official standards its disaster truly did not count as severe, no houses had collapsed and no one had died, most of the buildings had suffered destructive shaking and were no longer fit to live in. The fields, battered by the torrential rains after the quake, had yielded almost nothing. The villagers\u0026rsquo; lives appeared extremely hard.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Xu Lai"},{"content":"Land Fought Over on Four Sides\nHe undid the last button at the front of her blouse, and the white shirt slid from her fragrant shoulders onto the bed. A low moan rose from deep in her throat, and she let herself fall back onto the mattress.\nSeven feet away, on the large worktable, the servers gave off a low steady hum. The monitor had not been turned off. The screensaver alternated between exquisite wallpapers from School Mate, while in the corner great stacks of Big Comics Superior were piled high.\nHer arms were crossed over her chest, her waist bent into an S-curve, the arches of her feet drawn taut. He did not hurry to press the attack. Standing astride above her, he reached toward the bedside drawer. \u0026ldquo;Remember?\u0026rdquo; he said. \u0026ldquo;Last time it was here. The time before that too. And the time before that.\u0026rdquo;\nOur land fought over on four sides, she thought.\nThe room was lit only by the bedside lamp, casting an ambiguous orange glow. As he pulled open the drawer, his hand knocked over a glass syringe standing on the nightstand. It fell onto the hard gray floor tiles, imitation metal in color, and broke with a crisp sound. Dark yellow liquid slowly spread out.\nHe took from the drawer a transparent specimen box, inside which something living writhed. It was a kind of diplopod insect, twenty centimeters long, its body made up of paired segments. The segments were black or white at random, so that it looked like a moving barcode. In fact, if one were to open the drawer now, one would find dozens of identical specimen boxes inside, each containing a differently patterned diplopod. And if one were to compare the creature in his hand with the barcode on a certain fetish magazine, one would be startled to discover a perfect match: 10037055.\nHe opened the specimen box and poured the insect onto her lower belly. Her skin was smooth and pale, the flat curve of her abdomen at its most alluring. The insect\u0026rsquo;s mouthparts made a faint sizzling sound. After pausing briefly at her delicate navel, it set off downward on its seventy-two nimble pairs of feet.\nShe closed her eyes tightly, waiting for the moment of ecstasy. A little later, however, a scream of utter agony rang through the room.\nHe smiled in satisfaction.\nRules\nChoose any one of the following idioms as your title. The chosen idiom may appear directly in the text, or only its meaning may appear. The story must describe a fictional insect. The nine idioms may serve as a sexual position, a prop, a character, or a descriptive phrase. If you wish, of course, you may also use their original meanings. No limit on length. No limit on genre. Post it to the \u0026ldquo;[Nine Stories]\u0026rdquo; group, then publish it on your own blog and add links to the other participants\u0026rsquo; entries. Deadline: December 7. Do your best. Amen. This season of Nine Stories may be used to assemble the mysterious underground periodical Asphyxia. One Fragrant Herb, One Stinking Weed\nThe Union of Two Surnames\nA New Bride of Three Days\nFour Hooves Drawn Together\nThe Five-Ram Grandee\nSix Horses Forget Their Fodder\nSevenfold Returned Elixir\nEight Sounds Fall Silent\nNine Scholars, Ten Beggars\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-11-25-nine-stories-five-prologue/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eLand Fought Over on Four Sides\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHe undid the last button at the front of her blouse, and the white shirt slid from her fragrant shoulders onto the bed. A low moan rose from deep in her throat, and she let herself fall back onto the mattress.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSeven feet away, on the large worktable, the servers gave off a low steady hum. The monitor had not been turned off. The screensaver alternated between exquisite wallpapers from \u003cem\u003eSchool Mate\u003c/em\u003e, while in the corner great stacks of \u003cem\u003eBig Comics Superior\u003c/em\u003e were piled high.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Nine Stories, Season Five | Prologue"},{"content":" Beard Gu. In western Yunnan there is a village where all the men wear faces full of curling beards and raise gu in them. At the age of sixteen, one must walk naked through the forest and allow insects and snakes to burrow into the beard and make their homes there before one is counted an adult. From that day onward one never shaves again. After years of feeding on human blood, the beard-gu takes on the color of flesh, invisible to all but the clansmen. Whoever is infected and touches family or friends kills the touched person at once.\nSecret Digits. I had a credit card from a certain bank and lost the slip on which the PIN was written before I had time to change it. I was just about to call customer service when Aunt Bao from Black Province took the card, ran her index finger along the magnetic stripe, and recited the password at once. I tested it. It was correct. Everyone was astonished.\nNaozhou Cat. North of Black City, where it borders Rehe, lies Naozhou. In the Jinhe years of the Red Dynasty, many men of letters kept Naozhou cats. People of the time said: \u0026ldquo;The gentlemen keep Naozhou cats, and raise reclusive households.\u0026rdquo; Naozhou cats are fierce of nature; medicines and sterilization alike are impossible with them. One gentleman, enraged, declared: \u0026ldquo;Where one may scratch a Nao person, one should scratch a Nao person.\u0026rdquo; In those days the saying spread everywhere.\nPine and Orchid. On Little Tianxi Street there is a pleasure quarter, and all who pass in and out of it are famous courtesans. In the shade of the rockery of the inner court hangs a stone couplet: \u0026ldquo;Aoi Pine: not flower, not grass, not tree. Mutou Orchid: no leaf, no pistil, no bloom.\u0026rdquo; The line owes its fame to the names of actresses from the Eastern Isles.\nWhisked Tea. At Stone Scripture Temple there is a tea house said to have stood since the Five Dynasties. The tea master brews by an old method, pouring water upon the tea surface so that images of fish, insects, flowers, and grasses appear in the foam, changing from moment to moment without pause. On the first and fifteenth of the month, he can even write a guest\u0026rsquo;s name in the tea bowl. This art of whisked tea is recorded in the Qingyi Lu of the early Song, and is now extinct.\nChisel Teeth. In a certain place in Liangshan there is a beast the size of a pig, with teeth a foot long, shaped like chisels, growing sharper the more they are worn down. It may be trapped by baiting with Shejue Cepu, and once tamed it is as docile as a dog. This beast is called the Chisel-Toothed One. The Classic of Mountains and Seas notes that among the local villagers, too, the front teeth are unusually long.\nSouthward Return. Qiao Bei of Sichuan lived for a time in the north. In the eighth month he contracted a vicious illness and died within days. On his sickbed he asked those attending him: \u0026ldquo;All my life I have faced north. In my next life, will I be born a northerner or a southerner?\u0026rdquo; Those beside him answered: \u0026ldquo;North is not so good as south.\u0026rdquo; Qiao Bei closed his eyes and departed. In the tenth month there was a great drought in Sichuan, yet before the graves of Qiao Bei\u0026rsquo;s parents alone the soil stayed wet as though splashed with tears.\nSnake Swallowing. A certain man loved snakes and kept a flower python, which grew thicker and longer by the day. One day the python abruptly refused food. Thinking it sick, he asked a veterinarian to examine it, but the beast seemed normal. The veterinarian asked, \u0026ldquo;Has it shown any strange behavior?\u0026rdquo; The man thought and said, \u0026ldquo;It used to lie coiled. Now it lies straight.\u0026rdquo; The veterinarian answered, \u0026ldquo;Get rid of it at once. The python is measuring its own length to test whether it can swallow you.\u0026rdquo; The man did not believe him and kept raising it as before. Within days he was injured by the python.\nShu Millet. A man surnamed Qin from Qionglai owned three mu of thin fields, all planted in millet. In autumn a strange rain fell, and the grain that came up was black in color and sweet in taste, suitable for cooking coarse rice. But whoever ate it found beard and hair growing long, the complexion turning sallow with age, until one looked like a middle-aged uncle. Eat chestnuts bought from the neighboring town of Luo, however, and one\u0026rsquo;s appearance returned to normal.\nBright Days. Tihu says: all men, each month, have several days on which body and mind are vexed, they do one embarrassing thing after another, and earn the laughter and curses of others. These are called bright days. Brew one qian of rhodiola, two qian of goji berries, and two chrysanthemum blossoms together, and one may keep the heart calm and the temper even.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-11-04-keystories-five/","summary":"\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBeard Gu.\u003c/strong\u003e In western Yunnan there is a village where all the men wear faces full of curling beards and raise \u003cem\u003egu\u003c/em\u003e in them. At the age of sixteen, one must walk naked through the forest and allow insects and snakes to burrow into the beard and make their homes there before one is counted an adult. From that day onward one never shaves again. After years of feeding on human blood, the beard-gu takes on the color of flesh, invisible to all but the clansmen. Whoever is infected and touches family or friends kills the touched person at once.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Keystories V"},{"content":"My fourth elder brother is a lawyer. In ancient times, professions that stood in court and \u0026ldquo;picked words, raised suits,\u0026rdquo; much like lawyers today, were called songshi, pettifoggers. The term lawyer, by contrast, referred specifically to a certain class among ritual masters. In modern times the meaning of lawyer replaced that of songshi, while its original sense gradually sank from sight.\nBefore my fourth brother became a lawyer, he worked at a district procuratorate in Harbor City. One winter year, a major corruption case broke out in the procuratorial system of Lu Province, and dozens of prosecutors were arrested. From top to bottom the judicial apparatus across the province launched a self-inspection campaign, and teams from the Supreme Procuratorate were dispatched to local offices everywhere.\nA working team also entered the district procuratorate where my brother served. It was said they were unfamiliar judges who had crossed provincial lines from Zhili. On the left breast of their robes they did not wear the national emblem, but an iron-colored xiezhi. After arriving, they made contact with no one. They merely took several rooms in the procuratorate dormitory building. Each day, apart from eating in the canteen, there was no sign of what they were doing. After more than ten days of apparent idleness, the younger prosecutors, unable to hold their tongues, mocked them as men who had come not to work but to sample Lu cuisine.\nThen one day the working team abruptly began requiring all prosecutors and staff to undergo inspection one by one. Those summoned were invited into a small private room in the canteen. Strangely, no matter how different their rank, the time each spent inside was about the same: they went in and came out again almost at once. Everyone who emerged looked bewildered. Two division chiefs came out gray-faced and were escorted directly by bailiffs into another room to be confined.\nWhen it was my brother\u0026rsquo;s turn, he was told to wash his face and hands before entering. The windows in the room had been covered with bamboo slips painted in intricate designs, and incense smoke curled up from one corner. On the table in the center stood two objects. One was a square vessel made of green bamboo, filled with steaming rice. The other was a round bronze vessel with four ears, filled with clear water. The members of the inspection team sat around the table in legal robes and told my brother to choose one of the two, lift it, and either eat a bite or drink a mouthful. He hesitated for a moment, then recognized them both. The bamboo one was called a fu; the bronze one a gui. Both were ancient ritual vessels used to hold food offerings. Back in his home village in Lu, similar vessels were used in the spring sacrifice. So he followed the sacrificial etiquette he knew from home: first he lifted the fu with one hand, flicked away several grains of rice with his fingertips, and set it down; then he raised the gui in both hands and lightly sprinkled out a little water. The judge sitting opposite suddenly had eyes that seemed to brighten. He stared at my brother for a long while, then looked down again at the fu and gui. After conferring among themselves, they waved him away.\nAfter coming out, my brother called to ask me about it. I asked in return whether the fu and gui he had touched had changed in any way. He thought for a moment and said no. In truth, this brief rite was called \u0026ldquo;fu gui bu chi.\u0026rdquo; In antiquity, when the xiezhi was absent, it was a legal array used to measure whether an official was incorruptible. In the Book of Han, in the biography of Jia Yi, there is a short description of it: in ancient times, when high ministers were removed from office for corruption, one did not say directly that they were corrupt, but said instead, \u0026ldquo;their fu and gui were not in order.\u0026rdquo; Whenever a dishonest official touched the fu and gui, the vessels themselves would certainly change, either darkening in color or showing cracks, while the food placed within them would rot and mildew the moment it entered the mouth. Out of respect for the scholar-official class, judges would not accuse a gentry criminal directly, but only raise the euphemism of \u0026ldquo;not in order.\u0026rdquo; I told my brother that the members of the working team were certainly no ordinary men. They might be true \u0026ldquo;lawyers\u0026rdquo; in the ancient sense.\nThat very day, the working team\u0026rsquo;s inspection of the district procuratorate came to an end. In all they identified five officials connected to the major case, yet no one understood how they had discovered them. Some suspected lie detectors or some other advanced device. Before withdrawing, the team did indeed summon my brother for another talk and asked whether he would be willing to join them in service at a certain court. Only much later did my brother learn that the spring sacrifice rituals in his village happened, by dark coincidence, to match the pattern of the great legal rites.\nMy fourth brother is now a lawyer. Unlike the pettifoggers of old, he is a true lawyer in the ancient sense. The court where he serves enshrines an iron-colored xiezhi and never handles ordinary cases. Not even I know where their offices are.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-09-01-fugui/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMy fourth elder brother is a lawyer. In ancient times, professions that stood in court and \u0026ldquo;picked words, raised suits,\u0026rdquo; much like lawyers today, were called \u003cem\u003esongshi\u003c/em\u003e, pettifoggers. The term \u003cem\u003elawyer\u003c/em\u003e, by contrast, referred specifically to a certain class among ritual masters. In modern times the meaning of \u003cem\u003elawyer\u003c/em\u003e replaced that of \u003cem\u003esongshi\u003c/em\u003e, while its original sense gradually sank from sight.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBefore my fourth brother became a lawyer, he worked at a district procuratorate in Harbor City. One winter year, a major corruption case broke out in the procuratorial system of Lu Province, and dozens of prosecutors were arrested. From top to bottom the judicial apparatus across the province launched a self-inspection campaign, and teams from the Supreme Procuratorate were dispatched to local offices everywhere.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Fu and Gui"},{"content":"The eighth day of the fourth month. Clear. Auspicious for flight and ritual.\nBefore dawn had fully broken, the Crane Dancer came to the rooftop of the highest pavilion in Pure Land Monastery. He wore crimson armor, the battle gear of Kapilavastu a thousand years ago, and beside him lay three enormous gray cranes. A pale band of light was slowly appearing on the horizon. Once the sun rose, he would be able to fly.\nThe vast body of the Temple of the Night-Lord covered half the sky. It was hard to imagine that it had once been only one small part of Kapilavastu City. Seeds carried by birds had taken root atop the temple, sprouting into swaying green shade. The faces of the apsaras and vajras lay under shadow. The great temple gate stood open toward the sunrise, yet for centuries no one had set foot inside.\nPure Land Monastery, Faxiang Monastery, and Huayan Monastery stood to the east, west, and north of the Temple of the Night-Lord, all three crowded with people. The monks of Faxiang and Huayan had cast off their robes and caps and put on silver helmets, forming wedge-shaped battle arrays, the old royal emblem of a thousand years before. Upon the altar were piled spoils once looted from many lands: nine-eyed dzi beads, three-eyed dzi beads, two-eyed dzi beads, treasure-vase dzi beads, tiger-stripe dzi beads, tama dzi beads, and every other kind besides, glittering brilliantly.\nOnly the monks of Pure Land Monastery still wore monastic robes. They had put on the faceless masks of repentance and sat cross-legged before the great waterfall. Each of them pinched the thumb and middle finger of the left hand together, while holding the right palm flat, raising a handful of new soil from Kapilavastu. Together they formed the ritual array drawn on the scroll. Seen from afar, it was two Sanskrit characters.\nCompassion.\nAt the horizon the sun struggled for a few instants, then suddenly leapt free. At once the red clouds surged and ten thousand shafts of light broke out.\nIt was time. \u0026ldquo;Fly,\u0026rdquo; he said. The Crane Dancer swung himself onto the largest gray crane and flicked the colored streamers in his hand. The gray crane spread its wings and sang with its neck thrown high. Wind moaned beneath the Crane Dancer\u0026rsquo;s ribs as he rose steadily into the sky.\nFor centuries upon centuries, no one of Kapilavastu had flown in this sky.\nThe Crane Dancer drove his three gray cranes in circles around the Temple of the Night-Lord. As he looked at walls and bricks once familiar to him, his memories too seemed to come alive again. In those days all Kapilavastu City had bathed in blue Buddhist radiance, and every person had been gentle and humble. At each child\u0026rsquo;s coming-of-age rite, a monk from the Temple of the Night-Lord would lead them before the vajra or apsara corresponding to their birth date, and from its eyes divine their future, then determine their vocation. In his own year, the Crane Dancer had seen his older self riding three gray cranes through the sky.\nThat moment had finally arrived. The gray cranes beat their wings and rose to the middle heaven. Beneath them the great waterfall in Bacha Gorge thundered, and faintly one could hear Buddhist music coming from the three great monasteries. Smiling slightly, he took from his robe another scroll. Inside it was the original scripture of Poshan Poyin Di, looted a thousand years earlier by soldiers from the Eastern Land. The Crane Dancer flew toward the dim shadow cast by the sculpted mass of the Temple of the Night-Lord. At the instant before collision, it was as if some hand held them up, and the gray crane halted in midair. The Crane Dancer stretched out his right hand and slowly unrolled the scroll. The sigils upon it streamed with the wind.\nLiberation in Light.\nAt once the dzi beads laid upon the altar slowly rose into the air and flew toward the sculpted figures, fitting themselves one by one back into their original places. The vajras and apsaras gave a long groan. Their lowered eyelids slowly lifted, revealing eyes that flashed with piercing brilliance.\nIn the distance, the three great monasteries were instantly reduced to dust and ash, turning into earth and mixing together at astonishing speed. Then, like shrubs growing, terraces, halls, and broad roads sprang out of that soil. The bodies of the sleepless ones broke apart and fell into the abyss. Only the monks of Pure Land Monastery bowed down to the ground as the earth beneath their feet swallowed their bodies whole.\nSF 0809 cover: Guo Xiaoyun\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-08-26-poshan-poyin-di/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe eighth day of the fourth month. Clear. Auspicious for flight and ritual.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBefore dawn had fully broken, the Crane Dancer came to the rooftop of the highest pavilion in Pure Land Monastery. He wore crimson armor, the battle gear of Kapilavastu a thousand years ago, and beside him lay three enormous gray cranes. A pale band of light was slowly appearing on the horizon. Once the sun rose, he would be able to fly.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Poshan Poyin Di"},{"content":" It made the eyes swim to look at, so I changed it back.\nEndurance. On Tuan Mountain there was a fat pig. In the great quake of the wuzi year it was buried beneath its sty, gnawed rotten wood, drank rain and dew, and escaped after thirty-six days, gaunt as a sheep. The villagers marveled that it had not died, admired the firmness of its will, gave it the name Zhu Jianqiang, and supported it for the rest of its life. The rotten wood it ate was ci bamboo, antler-like in form; once decayed it turns into bamboo fruit, which those who avoid grain sometimes take as food.\nMerchant Card. There is a kind of card shaped like a credit card, made of black metal and engraved with a borneol tree, produced by merchants in northern Shanxi. My colleague Fan Xuan has one. It may be used as money at inns, wineshops, and trading houses, and there is no need to repay the principal, only to price it in tears, reckoned pearl by pearl. There is also a villager named Yang Liang who has such a card engraved with Mu Fei, and who uses hair in place of gold.\nMending. At Haiyin in Guangzhou there is a shop called Gibbon, specializing in restoring the data stored on damaged hard drives and discs. The owner, surnamed Hou, uses steel needles to make dot-matrices and tinfoil patches like needlework. In a quarter of an hour he can restore one terabyte, with all lost data intact. It is said he is a descendant of Hou Jian of Liangshan.\nChatterbox. In Xiangyang there was a man who loved to talk to himself. He worked at a certain office. On the first day he quarreled with others; within three months one employee had reported sick; within half a year all the old hands had resigned, and those who remained suffered hair loss, insomnia, and weakened hearing. In the Five Dynasties there was filthy speech that tormented two monks, and songs of abuse that drove back enemies by verbal arts. This belonged to the same kind.\nTaobao. On Taobao there is a shop called Fifteen, selling curious objects: scissors with red handles, apricot-blossom wine bottles, four liang of rainwater, candlelight at midnight, the sound of a dog\u0026rsquo;s bark, and the like. Anyone who has no need of them cannot make sense of what they are for. Master Yu once bought half a mouse whisker there. After his house cat ate it, the cat could swim.\nWizard. In central Guizhou there are wizards said to descend from Nanzhao. Their method consists of three forms: bending, lying, and bracing. With them they can push objects through the air. Someone practiced these arts and by mistake killed a friend. Passersby bound him and took him to the yamen, but no one believed the story. In the Northern Court there was once a marshal who hung up a reward of a thousand gold pieces, betting that no one in the world possessed supernatural abilities. On hearing of this, he secretly ruined his own promise.\nFormer People. There is a saying in Chongqing: trouble rises from Tangjiatuo. In the summer of the wuzi year, floating corpses often appeared there. Some seemed drowned, some crushed by falling rock, and the people of Chongqing took them for missing Sichuan folk after the earthquake. Yet all the corpses wore their hair bound up, long robes, and square headcloths; a few even had jade pendants at the breast. I believe they were former people living hidden away in the mountains.\nEnteromorpha. In the summer month of the sixth year of Jinhe, a tide of green enteromorpha broke out in the Bohai, turning the coast entirely green so that boats could not pass. In Bohai Commandery there was a boat race that could not begin on schedule and had to be postponed half a month. In that same month a tsunami came up from the South Sea, its waves dozens of zhang high, yet fortunately the ships had all already entered port. The Travel Record of Jin Physicians and Wizards says that when enteromorpha rises to three chi or so, it heralds an approaching storm.\nNo Divination. A fortune-teller set up his table for divination before the Zhou household gate. All the neighbors had their fortunes cast, and those who received his verses praised them highly. Zhou himself came forward and held out his hand for a reading. The diviner looked up at him, went pale, waved him off, packed his stall, and fled. An idle bystander chased after him and asked why. The diviner said, \u0026ldquo;I do not wish to earn money from the dead.\u0026rdquo; Seven days later there was a fire, and the Zhou family line was extinguished.\nStatus Message. Yuanzi said that one night long ago she suddenly saw her boyfriend come online at the hour of hai and change his status message to: \u0026ldquo;The wind sighs, sighs; the Yi River runs cold. Once the brave man goes, he never returns.\u0026rdquo; Yuanzi found it strange. Her boyfriend said he wanted to see her, then immediately logged off. The next day Yuanzi heard that the previous night, when he had gone out, he had been robbed and murdered just outside the gate of Yuanzi\u0026rsquo;s residential compound. After that Yuanzi swore never to marry.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-08-01-keystories-four/","summary":"\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt made the eyes swim to look at, so I changed it back.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEndurance.\u003c/strong\u003e On Tuan Mountain there was a fat pig. In the great quake of the wuzi year it was buried beneath its sty, gnawed rotten wood, drank rain and dew, and escaped after thirty-six days, gaunt as a sheep. The villagers marveled that it had not died, admired the firmness of its will, gave it the name Zhu Jianqiang, and supported it for the rest of its life. The rotten wood it ate was ci bamboo, antler-like in form; once decayed it turns into bamboo fruit, which those who avoid grain sometimes take as food.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Keystories IV"},{"content":" At L\u0026rsquo;s request, this is the revised version of \u0026ldquo;Holy Red Cross.\u0026rdquo;\nTong County, Sandaoguai Residential Compound. Seen from Google Earth, it is a district of red-roofed apartment blocks. Unfortunately, the satellite photos have not been updated in years. If there were images from any time in the last decade, you would see collapsed buildings and a vast stretch of brownish-yellow roofs. Less than two kilometers east of the compound runs a winding coastline. Ten kilometers to the west lies an orange-yellow desert.\nAt five in the evening, the wind rose. The sky rapidly turned dim yellow, and beyond ten meters houses and trees were no more than vague shadows. Lean glanced at the electronic watch on his left wrist. Today\u0026rsquo;s sandstorm had arrived another minute and a half earlier than yesterday\u0026rsquo;s. Just wait, he thought. One day the evening wind and the noon wind would join into one unbroken span. He rose from the sofa, picked up the empty can on the tea table, shook it, and tossed it into the trash.\nHe had just pulled down all the sandproof shutters in every room when the storm hit. Between the buildings the wind let out a bleak wailing cry. Grit struck the shutters in loud bursts of clattering sound, as if giant sheets of sandpaper were being rubbed furiously against the buildings and the ground. Lean checked the water filter and the breaker box, then called Su. On the other end, Su was in a meeting in an office on basement level one, a hundred kilometers away on Central Atoll, commuting back and forth on the Desert Fox. Everything was fine.\nLean returned to his study, drew the curtain, and sat down at the workbench. The whole wall before him lit up and displayed the boot screen of the TRIR OS system: a lean boy in black-rimmed glasses, looking remarkably like Lean in his youth, rode a Sanqiang bicycle through a pitch-dark tunnel. The point of light in the distance grew nearer and larger, until the whole screen became white radiance. The boy\u0026rsquo;s figure was swallowed by the light and transformed into a row of icons that settled along the lower edge of the wall. The system had booted.\nOnly Lean\u0026rsquo;s family still lived in this building. He occupied the fifth floor. The four floors below were filled entirely with server racks for the Vagabondish supercomputer. Vagabondish had a theoretical peak performance of 50.04 trillion floating-point operations per second and a total of 393,633 nodes. It monopolized every Wi-Fi base station and every 30-to-300-millimeter microwave communication channel along the western shore of the New Pacific. Needless to say, all of it was illegal.\nThe disc-shaped icon at the lower left of the screen began to flash. Lean moved the mouse over it, and a new message popped up: no signature, no text, only a tiny icon, a red cross medal.\nLean smiled. This was one of the old games Tihu liked to play with him, a Tihu Cipher. What clue was it this time? From the backend he opened Photo MosaicX, an image-mosaic program he had written in his spare time. Image mosaic means replacing every pixel in a parent picture with an independent sub-image, so that countless sub-images form a new original. People had played tricks like this long ago. The difference was that Lean\u0026rsquo;s sub-images came from the hundreds of millions of cameras under his control.\nThe software automatically broke down the roots of \u0026ldquo;red,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;cross,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;icon,\u0026rdquo; and the like, refining them into 53,176 related keywords, then searched every networked camera. The camera nearest Lean, just below his own building, immediately began to turn and capture. The farthest camera also went to work 1.2 seconds later. Across the great screen before him, innumerable bright and motley images streamed past like clouds and smoke, too fast for the eye to make out, not one repeated.\nHalf an hour later there was still no result. Lean checked the time. Su was nearly off work. He selected several more keywords for special searching: Lujiazui, Malianwa, Baoding, Taichung. Still nothing. Then something seemed to strike him. He sat bolt upright, logged into a meteorological satellite, and slowly lowered the great telescope, moving it deep inland.\nLilacs. Willow trees. Bustling crowds. White helmets of military police. Off-road jeeps. His gaze drifted through the streets of that city, following what remained of memories from many years ago. Shuijing Alley. Beidou Temple. South Gate Stadium. Red Cross Hospital.\nRed Cross. Lean hurriedly stopped the lens and looked closer. In the hospital courtyard fixed in the satellite view there was only a tiny mottled patch. He enlarged it, enlarged it again, enlarged it yet again. This FY-7-29 polar-orbiting weather satellite was somewhat old, and the image lagged, with a hiss of white noise.\nAt last he saw clearly. The basketball court that had been demolished many years ago had been rebuilt, fresh and new. Spread all across it were 729 black-and-white footballs, and Lean actually counted them one by one. Together they formed four crooked Chinese characters, written like a child\u0026rsquo;s hand:\nHappy Birthday!\nAt the dot of the exclamation point, several men sat cross-legged on the ground, drinking beer and eating mutton. One fellow with golden hair seemed to sense that someone was peering at him. He suddenly raised his head, shook the beer bottle in his hand toward the sky, and grinned.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-07-29-729/","summary":"\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt L\u0026rsquo;s request, this is the revised version of \u0026ldquo;Holy Red Cross.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTong County, Sandaoguai Residential Compound. Seen from Google Earth, it is a district of red-roofed apartment blocks. Unfortunately, the satellite photos have not been updated in years. If there were images from any time in the last decade, you would see collapsed buildings and a vast stretch of brownish-yellow roofs. Less than two kilometers east of the compound runs a winding coastline. Ten kilometers to the west lies an orange-yellow desert.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"7-29"},{"content":"A: Boss, someone\u0026rsquo;s here to see you. Want to meet him?\nB: Nay.\nA: He\u0026rsquo;s here to return the car he borrowed last time. How much should we charge him?\nB: None.\nA: But he insists on leaving twenty thousand yuan.\nB: Nope.\nA: Fine. Besides that, he\u0026rsquo;s brought more goods. What did you think of the last batch?\nB: Bad.\nA: He says this batch is the purest of all.\nB: Crooked.\nA: He also brought you a girl. Want to look at the photo?\nB: Tiny.\nA: He asks what kind you prefer.\nB: No.\nA: All right. I understand. Then I\u0026rsquo;ll send him away. Anything else you want to add?\nB: Negatory.\nA: He asks whether you\u0026rsquo;ve left him any message.\nB: Absolutely not!\nA: He also asks\u0026hellip;\nB: No! Why the hell are you so damned wordy? You\u0026rsquo;re driving me insane!\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-07-14-no/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eA: Boss, someone\u0026rsquo;s here to see you. Want to meet him?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eB: Nay.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA: He\u0026rsquo;s here to return the car he borrowed last time. How much should we charge him?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eB: None.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA: But he insists on leaving twenty thousand yuan.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eB: Nope.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA: Fine. Besides that, he\u0026rsquo;s brought more goods. What did you think of the last batch?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eB: Bad.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA: He says this batch is the purest of all.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"No"},{"content":"Dear Alicia,\nHow are you? And how is our little Monica? Or perhaps little Ruben, of course. It cannot have turned to autumn in Sucre yet. Here, the waters of the Tagus have only just thawed. Lydia has been very well-behaved, and excellent at school too. She can even help me with simple work such as sorting reagents now. Do not worry. There is nothing dangerous in it.\nI know you grow angry the moment I bring this up. Are you still angry with me over that? But look, Lydia has always been healthy. She is already eight years old, and not a single sign has shown itself. I promised you that \u0026ldquo;the thing\u0026rdquo; would do no harm, but you never trust what I say.\nEight years ago, when we were still living in Istanbul, where I may soon have to go again, those were the happiest days of my life. Whenever the night is deep and quiet, I remember our little red house in Uskudar, and the days and nights we spent in the Hagia Sophia Museum. Ali, if you had not idly leafed through \u0026ldquo;the thing\u0026rdquo; and discovered the miraculous force hidden within yourself, I would never have discovered that I possessed it too, though in a different form, of course, and still less could we ever have verified whether \u0026ldquo;the thing\u0026rdquo; was genuine.\nI admit that before we had fully mastered that power, I should not have let you conceive Lydia, much less forced you to tattoo her while she was still a fetus. At the time I was utterly bewitched by that mysterious power of creation, intoxicated by your all-seeing eyes. To let your body endure such long concentration, I rashly worked on you as well\u0026hellip; does your shoulder still hurt? I never imagined that black datura tattoo would prove so powerful. And your left foot\u0026hellip; the Chinese arts I later procured should have helped somewhat. The spider pattern ought to have shrunk down to the top of your foot by now, should it not?\nBut one cannot deny that we succeeded. You created a great work of art: our dear Lydia. The dense script on that seed took root and flowered, slowly winding itself across our daughter\u0026rsquo;s back. Just as the old book recorded, the power contained in that seed pattern has indeed manifested itself in Lydia. She can identify any stone, name every ingredient in a mixed powder, and speak with boiling reagents. The finest alchemists of medieval Europe would not equal one fraction of her. Although \u0026ldquo;the thing\u0026rdquo; records certain taboos, I have been carefully avoiding them all, watching Lydia at every step, never letting her touch anything unclean, even to the point of moving back to Spain. Once she comes of age, every risk will disappear like smoke.\nBut what about you? At the very moment when I needed you most, and you needed me most as well, you fled alone to Bolivia, heavily pregnant, taking our little Monica, or little Ruben, with you. It was far too dangerous for both you and the child. I tried several times to find you, but you had that damned dog with you, what was its name? Torres? That was the pup born when you first tested your power on a pregnant bitch, was it not? I never imagined the gift you gave it would be the power of evasion. Bolivia is far too chaotic. In every street and alley of Sucre there are MNR thugs and killers. Sooner or later those Maya sorcerers will catch the scent of the power on you.\nAli, come back. I have finished reading \u0026ldquo;the thing\u0026rdquo; and learned several new patterns. They can dispel the evil omen hanging over us. There is even one pattern we can tattoo in advance on bull hide and make into a case to seal away \u0026ldquo;the thing,\u0026rdquo; perfectly safely.\nYou know that without me, when little Monica, or little Ruben, is born, your life will be in danger. Come back quickly, I beg you. If you are gone, what meaning is there in anything for me alone? What meaning would \u0026ldquo;the thing\u0026rdquo; still have?\nBefore you return, find a reliable doctor and get an injection into that place on your lumbar spine, the very one you know. It must be a high-concentration prednisolone shot, but under no circumstances use procaine hydrochloride. I know it will hurt terribly, but there is no help for it. Forgive me, my dear.\nKisses,\nYour Oswaldo, always\nJune 24, 2008, in Madrid\nNote: MNR, the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement, Bolivia\u0026rsquo;s largest opposition party.\n[Image source] Freckle shared image.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-06-24-alicia/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eDear Alicia,\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHow are you? And how is our little Monica? Or perhaps little Ruben, of course. It cannot have turned to autumn in Sucre yet. Here, the waters of the Tagus have only just thawed. Lydia has been very well-behaved, and excellent at school too. She can even help me with simple work such as sorting reagents now. Do not worry. There is nothing dangerous in it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI know you grow angry the moment I bring this up. Are you still angry with me over that? But look, Lydia has always been healthy. She is already eight years old, and not a single sign has shown itself. I promised you that \u0026ldquo;the thing\u0026rdquo; would do no harm, but you never trust what I say.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Nine Stories, Season Four | Alicia"},{"content":" Vengeance. Li the Chancellor was a native of Cuo County, but ashamed of his family\u0026rsquo;s poverty, he changed his registration to the Western Capital. His sons prospered under the powerful, and he himself became a great frontier official. Before his old house in the Western Capital, governors and viceroys even set up a stele to flatter him. In the fourth month, a traveler came from the north, his whole body tattooed with scorpions. He split the stele apart with his bare hand. The ground of the house cracked open and water welled out, and from that day it could no longer be lived in. The Hundred Illustrations records that western tribesmen, when seeking vengeance, would tattoo themselves with scorpions.\nJing Person. There was a man named Dou from the Two Kings Temple district, nearly sixty, who pulled a cart for a living. His household was desperately poor, yet he once found a large sum of money left behind by a passenger, guarded it, returned it, and refused any reward. In the great quake of the wuzi year, Dou was trapped in ruins. A tiny person emerged from beneath the ground, two chi tall, bringing him food and fruit every day. After fifteen days he was rescued. The Huainanzi records such a being: a jing person.\nBlistered Finger. Wang was obsessed with books. Hearing that a man of the Ming had written a Supplement to Gentle Cries, a record of the birds under heaven, he searched for years without finding it. Then one day a blister rose on the index finger of his right hand. It went numb at a touch, then moved beyond his control: he seized paper and inkstone and furiously wrote in tiny regular script, fifty-three thousand six hundred and twenty-seven characters in all, before at last flinging down the brush. It was the complete text of the Supplement to Gentle Cries. At the end was written: \u0026ldquo;Presented by the Master of Five Magpies and Six Geese, for the treasured keeping of a fine friend.\u0026rdquo;\nPixiu. While crossing Mount Min, Mr. Tan came upon a collapsed peak. He ordered men to dig there and they uncovered the corpse of a panda, seven chi long and three hundred jin in weight, with iron rings through all four paws, each ring set with barbs and engraved with the seal-script words \u0026ldquo;Imperial Preserve of Dashun.\u0026rdquo; Mr. Tan did not understand what it meant. It was a pixiu. In ancient times the imperial guard once kept such beasts.\nDream Shoes. A woman from Yong named Luo Yi dreamed she was walking barefoot by the sea when three-wart swimming crabs came swarming out and fought to cover her body. Tihu said, \u0026ldquo;You will come into shoes. I fear trouble in the feet.\u0026rdquo; Later it indeed happened that a wealthy admirer from Dong\u0026rsquo;ou declared his love and gave her countless pairs of women\u0026rsquo;s shoes. She wore them daily and even in sleep could not bear to take them off. By the next year her ankles had swollen, and all the shoes lay idle.\nNumen. In Jincheng there are Broad Alley, Narrow Alley, and Tight Alley, a place where the market life of Shu once held great earthly power. In Broad Alley there was a creature called Menggui, black as cloud over snow, and able to speak; people often saw it. In Narrow Alley there was Beibi, which tunneled through the earth, bore strange script on its back, and spat saliva at night. In Tight Alley there was a can-tung tree: chew its leaves and the stomach and bowels were healed, so that one could eat hotpot without falling ill. In the wuzi year the three alleys were renovated and taken over by gentry and merchants. Their numen scattered, and common people stopped going there.\nGoose Intestines. Jincheng loves goose, and an officer named Bai loved it most of all. Whenever he ate it, he would first reach behind himself and pluck out goose intestines from his own rear court, then drop them into boiling oil and eat them, considering them the height of freshness. Later Bai fell ill. His belly twisted in agony, blood passed from him every day, and worms emerged from within, each four cun long. He suffered beyond endurance, lingered on for years, and finally died.\nTai Sui. In a village north of Chang\u0026rsquo;an, a tai sui appeared in the shade of the road. A wineshop cooked it and sold it, and customers praised its fine taste. Soon after, the place where the tai sui had emerged opened onto a great tomb. Ancient objects were destroyed, leaving only bones behind: arm bones three chi long and skulls as large as cartwheels. The villagers were terrified. Within three days, everyone who had eaten the tai sui died suddenly.\nCordyceps. My classmate Lu Yu excelled at football. Whenever he drew back his leg to shoot, he always struck the mark. Ten years later Lu still had the shoulders of a tiger and the waist of a wolf, yet he could no longer run; after a hundred paces he panted like an ox. A Tibetan physician from Haixi examined him, took out a single cordyceps as thick as a child\u0026rsquo;s arm, ground it up, and gave him one qian of it to swallow. In moments Lu climbed West Mountain without his face reddening. Such cordyceps cannot be had today.\nFennel. Every year on the first day of the seventh month, an old woman appears in the market town of Qionglai, wearing a purple skirt and double hair-knots. If one has a wish-stone, one may exchange it with her for a brocade sachet embroidered with twin branches. Inside are nine great fennel seeds, fragrant as dragon saliva. They can untie knots of the heart, ease depression and sorrow, and reunite lovers. Wish-stones are white, warm and smooth as jade, and are sought on the island in the middle of Qinghai Lake.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-06-23-keystories-three/","summary":"\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eVengeance.\u003c/strong\u003e Li the Chancellor was a native of Cuo County, but ashamed of his family\u0026rsquo;s poverty, he changed his registration to the Western Capital. His sons prospered under the powerful, and he himself became a great frontier official. Before his old house in the Western Capital, governors and viceroys even set up a stele to flatter him. In the fourth month, a traveler came from the north, his whole body tattooed with scorpions. He split the stele apart with his bare hand. The ground of the house cracked open and water welled out, and from that day it could no longer be lived in. The \u003cem\u003eHundred Illustrations\u003c/em\u003e records that western tribesmen, when seeking vengeance, would tattoo themselves with scorpions.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Keystories III"},{"content":" Esports. A youth abandoned his studies and sank into esports. His parents could not dissuade him. On the summer solstice he played through the night, and by morning both legs had broken out in more than a dozen nameless swellings, each as large as a game piece, with pain that ran to the marrow when touched. He sought treatment from my teacher. The master pierced them with silver needles and drew out several keycaps, all keys commonly used in games. After that, his parents no longer dared indulge him, and the boy himself grew afraid.\nE-venom. On the harbor coast, beneath the reefs, there is an insect called the e, one inch long, with a pale poisonous head and a hundred legs. Fishermen fry it to go with drink; it wards off rheumatism, though all ten fingers turn blue. There was once a champion swimmer surnamed Cui, much afflicted by rheumatism, who used e as a medicinal catalyst and improved astonishingly. Over the next two years he ate several thousand of them. At last the poison in their heads struck his heart, and all four limbs were ruined.\nKiev. I once owned a Soviet-made Kiev camera, whose images came out with exquisite delicacy. A visitor dropped it by accident and damaged the lens, so I sought someone skilled to repair it. We tested it on a certain man. He wore a white shirt, yet in the developed picture he appeared in red, which someone said had been what he wore the day before. We shot more than a dozen rolls after that. In every one, the people in the pictures appeared from a time earlier than the moment they were taken, though by varying lengths. Later this Kiev got mixed in among other cameras and was sold off through China Camera Net. I regret it still.\nPoison Pill. A certain academy published books and prepared poison pills against piracy. Before long, scanned editions appeared exactly as expected, and there was no way to ban them. The academy also released e-books of its own, mingled with the pirated copies so that none could tell them apart. Whoever read a poison-pill edition forgot more than half the Chinese characters he knew, precisely those used in the book. Within ten days the afflicted numbered in the thousands, and there was no cure.\nLightning Ants. One night in the wuzi year, before a violent rainstorm, thunder crashed with terrible force. In Yulin an old tree caught fire, its branches and leaves falling away and turning into countless fiery insects that scattered in all directions. For ten li around, breakers tripped and every power source was destroyed. A child with milk teeth caught several of the fire insects in a jar, looked at them, and said: these are lightning ants.\nPocket Zongzi. In an old house in central Shanxi there was a neighbor named Zhao Honghu who could make five-cornered pocket zongzi, five cun long and weighing five liang and five qian, with reed leaves for clothing, milfoil for belts, glutinous rice for flesh, millet for bone, little dates for organs, and ash broth for blood. They tasted sweet without cloying, warded off the five poisons, and were made by an old Tang-dynasty method now lost. Zhao Honghu\u0026rsquo;s father knew how to make horn millet dumplings; his grandfather knew how to make owl soup.\nCorpse Turtle. The corpse turtle lives in marshland, jade-bodied and green-shelled. Whenever it appears, decline is near. Before every match of the Chinese national football team, one can often find it lurking within five chi of the head coach.\nSleight of Hand. A shut-in named Liang Liang loved to live coiled up indoors, downloading beyond count. His hard drive had so many bad sectors it was nearly unusable. He took the drive, tucked it into a bag, went to the computer market, and came back a short while later. When he looked again, it had become a brand-new hard drive. This was merely the art of the empty hand and not worth wonder. What cannot be explained is that all the data stored on the drive was still there.\nWordsmith. The wordsmith Chi excelled at writing and became famous for phantom prose, producing seven thousand characters a day and gathering a million admirers. On his birthday a visitor presented him with a keyboard carved from Kunlun jade, worth a fortune. Chi refused it, saying: when the network is broad, the thinking is broad. So the visitor had fiber optic lines installed at Chi\u0026rsquo;s place, and the wordsmith accepted that instead.\nGua Sha. Gua sha is a therapy of Chinese medicine. In the Ming, Guo Zhisui wrote the Yuheng of Sha Distention, recording one hundred and forty-two kinds of sha disorders. A scholar who spent all year before a screen developed a pain in the back and sought treatment. The healer used two GeIL memory sticks as gua sha boards. It hurt terribly. When asked why, he replied: if a craftsman would do good work, he must first sharpen his tools. At the time, this seemed acceptable.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-06-12-keystories-two/","summary":"\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEsports.\u003c/strong\u003e A youth abandoned his studies and sank into esports. His parents could not dissuade him. On the summer solstice he played through the night, and by morning both legs had broken out in more than a dozen nameless swellings, each as large as a game piece, with pain that ran to the marrow when touched. He sought treatment from my teacher. The master pierced them with silver needles and drew out several keycaps, all keys commonly used in games. After that, his parents no longer dared indulge him, and the boy himself grew afraid.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Keystories II"},{"content":" Mountain Sprite Child. At the gate of the Air Force Hospital in Jincheng there was an abandoned infant. People took it in and examined it: tattooed face, pointed teeth, one leg, ankle turned to the front. All were terrified. After three days the infant died, refusing cow\u0026rsquo;s milk. Some said it was a mountain sprite child.\nWeituo. A certain Cui and his confederates waited by the roadside on motorcycles to rob night travelers. At the hour of hai, a man came out. Cui\u0026rsquo;s accomplices drove up and snatched the bag, while Cui slashed at the man\u0026rsquo;s wrist with a knife. The sound rang out like a bell. He looked: the blade was chipped. Frightened, they fled. The next day, while repairing a vehicle, Cui\u0026rsquo;s right hand was crushed off, blood pouring like a waterfall. On the fifteenth he went to Wenshu Monastery with incense and saw on Weituo\u0026rsquo;s right wrist a knife-mark as fresh as new.\nEarthquake. Tihu says: for anyone who has already escaped danger, it is enough to carve on peachwood the seven characters \u0026ldquo;Alatan Bagen Taoqi\u0026rdquo; and keep them close to the body. Alatan Bagen Taoqi was a Daur man. In the great quake of the bingchen year he was buried in Tangshan, drank dripping water, and emerged after ten days. In the great quake of the wuzi year he was buried in Beichuan, rescued with no more than scrapes. To suffer two such calamities and remain unharmed marks a fortunate man. Some also say that to meet disaster twice marks an ill-fated one.\nCrash. My colleague Liu, riding through the city one morning, was crossing the Jin River when an electric scooter flew out from behind him and struck a Land Rover. The scooter was wrecked; the Land Rover\u0026rsquo;s front end caved in. The rider\u0026rsquo;s arm bone stuck out through his sleeve, blood soaking the back of his shirt, yet he seemed not to notice. He got up and ran beneath the bridge. People shouted after him, but he did not answer, and in a blink he was gone.\nThe Art of Drawing. Yang Sha of Luzhou loved to doodle. A visitor sent her his photo over Tencent, and Yang wrote a single short character on its jaw. Within a day the visitor\u0026rsquo;s jaw broke out in a red sore, each stroke clearly visible. Yang\u0026rsquo;s elder brother once gave her a river pebble. She painted scales on it and hatched it. Half a month later, out came a dragon-lizard. She also wrote letters on sheets of xuan paper and spread them on the table to use as a keyboard. Such is a practitioner of the art of drawing.\nTattoo Number. A man surnamed Sun in Shanghai was poor in youth. Caught stealing food, he was tattooed on the left hand with the digits 65374, for reasons unknown. One day while waiting for a bus, he was just about to board when he saw the plate number matched the tattoo exactly. Suspicious, he stayed off. After the bus had gone only a few zhang, it suddenly caught fire. Not a single passenger escaped. When he returned home, the tattooed digits had molted away.\nSilver Carp. In the shady parts by the Jin River there was a back street famed for food. A certain Cui invited friends to taste freshwater fish there and, before leaving, stole a silver carp. He cooked it at home. Its flesh was rich and fine, and it had no bones. Though he found this strange, he ate it anyway. The next day at lunch several fish bones appeared inside an egg. The day after that, while eating a banana, he bit into two spines, which injured his lung.\nMobile Phone. A thief riding in a vehicle stole a Nokia phone of strange appearance, unrecognizable in model. Returning home that night, he found police waiting at his door and was seized on the spot. The thief had no idea why. The police showed him dozens of MMS messages, listing every case he had been involved in, with photographs of the stolen goods and even his address, all without a single error. Every message had been sent from the stolen phone.\nCrash. In Jincheng there was an Alto racing east at reckless speed. At the fortieth kilometer of the Chengdu-Chongqing Expressway it overturned and fell into a flooded field, car and passengers utterly ruined. Officials and soldiers arrived. From the car they removed sixteen corpses. No one knew what it had been carrying.\nStone Buddha. It is said that Zhaojue Temple had a stone Buddha, two zhang one chi high, ten arm-spans around, erected there in the time of Chan Master Mingzhi Meng. In the Buddha\u0026rsquo;s right hand was an object from which a silk cord hung to the ground. At its feet was a square tray carved with Daqin script no one could read. Some dozen years ago a pilgrim came and said: the thing in the right hand is a mouse, and the thing at the feet is a keyboard. None of the monks believed it. Yet afterward the stone Buddha was moved to an inner courtyard and no longer shown to the public. It cannot be seen today.\nNote: this is a new experiment. Keystories will be a sub-series under Tihu Notes, an exercise in learning not to waste words. I will post once every ten entries.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-06-02-keystories-one/","summary":"\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMountain Sprite Child.\u003c/strong\u003e At the gate of the Air Force Hospital in Jincheng there was an abandoned infant. People took it in and examined it: tattooed face, pointed teeth, one leg, ankle turned to the front. All were terrified. After three days the infant died, refusing cow\u0026rsquo;s milk. Some said it was a mountain sprite child.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWeituo.\u003c/strong\u003e A certain Cui and his confederates waited by the roadside on motorcycles to rob night travelers. At the hour of hai, a man came out. Cui\u0026rsquo;s accomplices drove up and snatched the bag, while Cui slashed at the man\u0026rsquo;s wrist with a knife. The sound rang out like a bell. He looked: the blade was chipped. Frightened, they fled. The next day, while repairing a vehicle, Cui\u0026rsquo;s right hand was crushed off, blood pouring like a waterfall. On the fifteenth he went to Wenshu Monastery with incense and saw on Weituo\u0026rsquo;s right wrist a knife-mark as fresh as new.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Keystories I"},{"content":"The ten li of the Qinhuai River in Jinling have long been praised as \u0026ldquo;a quarter of mist and moonlight from the Six Dynasties, a gathering place of beauty and luxury.\u0026rdquo; My friend Wu Xuan, a scholar from Jizhou, lived alone as a guest in Jinling and ran a teahouse on the left bank of the Qinhuai, specializing in all varieties of flower tea. Wu Xuan told me that not long after the teahouse opened, he often saw women worshipping beneath the willow tree before his door. From a distance he could make out under the tree a divine image more than a foot tall, with white eyebrows. But whenever he went forward to ask about it, the women worshipping there would grow nervous and immediately rise and leave. When he looked down again, the statue would be gone as well.\nSeveral more months passed before Wu Xuan saw a regular customer of his, Madam You, beneath the willow too. He waited until she had finished worshipping, invited her into the teahouse, brought out his finest linden-honey tea, and asked her to clear up his doubts. Madam You had always had a free and easy temperament, so she told him everything. Along both banks of the Qinhuai, she said, there were smoke-willows numbering exactly the Heavenly Spirits. Outsiders could not distinguish them from ordinary willows. On the third day of each month, all women from entertainer households had to come beneath the trees to worship the Third Young Lord, which would ensure health of body and prosperity in business. The so-called Third Young Lord was none other than Robber Zhi. Women of entertainer households in every dynasty had secretly venerated his image. Because his eyebrows were entirely white, they also honored him as the White-Browed God. Since entertainer households were of low status, and prostitutes lower still, scholars contemptuously called them \u0026ldquo;flower-willow demons,\u0026rdquo; and so Robber Zhi\u0026rsquo;s spirit tablet could find no place in any proper temple. Along the Qinhuai, the images of the Third Young Lord were often hidden among the smoke-willows, recognizable only to those in the trade.\nWu Xuan then asked how to identify a smoke-willow. Madam You showed reluctance to say more. Only after he offered her two more packets of mandala tea did she explain that any willow whose roots and trunk were shaded by fine green vines was a smoke-willow. This vine belonged to the orchid family, though its name was unknown. The women of the entertainer households jokingly called it Mutou Ran. If its leaves were picked, dried, and burned beneath a smoke-willow on the third day of each month, one would be able to see the image of the Third Young Lord.\nWu Xuan said that afterward he specially followed this method, yet he never saw the White-Browed God appear, and so guessed that Madam You must have been teasing him. But I think every trade has its own rules. It is understandable that Madam You would not openly reveal the true ritual method. Entertainer households have often felt ashamed of their low status, and so, in order to elevate their cultivation, they all developed the habit of growing orchids and bamboo. In his \u0026ldquo;Inscription for the Chaste and Righteous Woman of Laishui in Liyang,\u0026rdquo; Li Bai wrote, \u0026ldquo;Orchid steam and peppered libations, with yearly rites never lacking.\u0026rdquo; Thus it is reasonable enough that orchids would serve as the ritual medium in worship.\nIn fact, there truly is a plant called Mutou Ran. It is produced by grafting a qinchun vanda with a jade-tree zhilan orchid. Because it originated in Empress Wu\u0026rsquo;s palace, it received its name. Its scent is thin and its flavor mild. Small Knowledge of the Principles of Things records: \u0026ldquo;Hidden orchid, Jian orchid, and Mutou Ran: their roots are sweet and suitable for medicine. Their flowers may be eaten, and their leaves soaked in oil to darken hair.\u0026rdquo; The Supplement to the Compendium of Materia Medica says that Mutou Ran, \u0026ldquo;when eaten, clears ulceration and festering,\u0026rdquo; and among flowers and grasses it is one of the easiest to use medicinally. In old times, those suffering from heat-induced sores and itching would boil Mutou Ran into tea and drink it, or chew it to pulp and apply it to the afflicted area, with marvelous effect. Prescriptions for treating venereal disease through the ages also often included Mutou Ran, and wandering doctors even sighed, \u0026ldquo;If a man does not know Mutou Ran, he may taste the hundred herbs in vain.\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-05-30-mutou-ran/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe ten li of the Qinhuai River in Jinling have long been praised as \u0026ldquo;a quarter of mist and moonlight from the Six Dynasties, a gathering place of beauty and luxury.\u0026rdquo; My friend Wu Xuan, a scholar from Jizhou, lived alone as a guest in Jinling and ran a teahouse on the left bank of the Qinhuai, specializing in all varieties of flower tea. Wu Xuan told me that not long after the teahouse opened, he often saw women worshipping beneath the willow tree before his door. From a distance he could make out under the tree a divine image more than a foot tall, with white eyebrows. But whenever he went forward to ask about it, the women worshipping there would grow nervous and immediately rise and leave. When he looked down again, the statue would be gone as well.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Mutou Ran"},{"content":"Not long after spring began, she left, crossing the ocean with very little luggage to that place that might sink at any moment. He asked why she would not go west with him. She squeezed his hand and said nothing. Mr. Su said she had gone there to fulfill a dream. Everyone has dreams of their own. Since the world itself was going to be gone, let her fulfill what she wished.\nTwo months later, he received the first postcard she sent. On the front was a portrait of Kawatake Mokuami. On the back was a poem:\nIn the courtyard stands a wondrous tree;\ngreen leaves send forth flowering splendor.\nI climb the branch and break its bloom,\nmeaning to send it to the one I miss.\nFragrance fills my sleeves,\nbut the road is long and it cannot be delivered.\nWhat value has this thing itself?\nOnly that it marks the time since parting.\nAt a glance he recognized it. It was the poem he had written in the first letter he sent her the year they met.\nThat was the first year of the Great Ravine.\nLong after the performance had ended, the small square before the theater was still filled with soldiers wearing Space Force armbands, standing in twos and threes and loudly discussing the play: a drama adapted from Ouyang Xiu\u0026rsquo;s long poem \u0026ldquo;Song of the Japanese Sword,\u0026rdquo; starring Iya Santsuka Hisashi, the only remaining inheritor of the Ichikawa Sadanji line among the six great schools.\nShe stood at the end of the hanamichi, waiting with a group of young girls for Iya Santsuka Hisashi to come out from backstage. In her hands she clutched an ink painting by the monk Sesshu, auctioned by the local government. On it was a lush green tree, just like the height of summer\u0026rsquo;s heat at that moment. Although it was an authentic work, she still insisted on copying an ancient poem onto it: Akashite, kimi o ba matamu, nubatama no, waga kurokami ni, shimo wa furu tomo. This painting, together with a photograph of Iya Santsuka Hisashi and Japanese theater materials, would be sent back home. Food supplies there were already extremely tight, but she had heard that any materials valuable enough to enter the Museum of Human Culture could still be exchanged for a considerable amount of living supplies. She thought he would surely be able to use them.\nBy then, four counties in the China region had already run out of rice, and Yamaguchi Prefecture, where she was living, had long since restricted per-capita rations.\nThat was the second year of the Great Ravine.\nToo near sunset, she came out of the school building with books in her arms. The autumn wind blowing in from the western karst terrain was wrapped in heavy grains of sand. She covered her nose and mouth with a scarf and lowered her head, walking toward the ration center in the middle of the city. There, a few scarce jobs could still be found, and the grain earned from them was just enough to fill the belly.\nAs she passed the school family housing, she saw a little boy sitting amid a pile of furniture. Before him stood a small cardboard sign on which crooked characters had been written: I\u0026rsquo;m hungry! Among the furniture there seemed to be a half-new electronic drum set. Dimly she remembered that long ago, what he had loved most was to light a PEEL and sit smiling nearby as he watched her play drums. She stopped, took the last piece of chocolate from her bag, and pressed it into the boy\u0026rsquo;s hand.\nOnly when she reached the entrance of the ration center did she discover that it had been placed under military control, and by military police from Kyoto at that. Several American soldiers in blue steel helmets saw her and immediately crowded around, waving military canned food and fruit in their hands, jabbering in Californian backcountry accents. She clutched the bag in her arms and was forced back beneath the streetlamp at the corner.\nA brown Hummer braked sharply in the middle of the road. Seeing the Chinese flag hanging from it, the American soldiers turned and left. The door opened, and Mr. Su jumped down and said to her that he could not come to bring her home.\nThat was the third year of the Great Ravine.\nDeep winter in Yamaguchi Prefecture ought still to have been warm southern weather, but that year a heavy snow fell, laying a thick cotton-like layer over the ridges of the fields and the roofs of houses. Alone, he took an old steam train of only five cars, from Okayama to Hiroshima, from Hagi to Yamaguchi, crossing the Chugoku region in haste toward the place he had thought of day and night. Before that, he had spent two months traveling from Mobei by Mi-26 to Jiaodong, then by cargo ship from Yantai to Tokyo. Along the way there had been only abandoned cities and crowds moving in the opposite direction.\nA year earlier they had had the chance to reunite, but she had refused Mr. Su\u0026rsquo;s request to take her back to China and had resolved to stay where she was. While everyone else retreated toward the interior of the continent, she remained alone in a place surrounded by the sea on three sides. He could not understand her decision. In such an age, why insist on staying in a country that had once been the enemy?\nThe army was about to retreat north again, and in the dormitory he was packing up old belongings. The postcards she had sent him over the years slipped out of a large envelope and scattered thickly across the floor. He bent down and picked them up one by one. As he did, tears began to spill uncontrollably from his eyes, though his face remained calm, without the slightest sob. He straightened, tilted his head back, and blinked hard, but tears still streamed down from the corners of his eyes. At that moment he understood what his own dream was. Since the world itself was going to be gone, let him fulfill what he wished.\nWhen he entered that little courtyard, she was sitting beside a flower bed, knitting a tiny sweater. At her feet sat seven or eight children, only five or six years old, waving their arms and legs as they sang the song she had taught them:\nTime goes, goes, goes,\nand when the dream wakes,\nthose words Mother spoke,\nhave they scattered in the wind?\nShe raised her head and saw him come in. She did not stand. She tried to smile at him, but her mouth only tightened, and then she covered her face and burst into tears. They streamed uncontrollably through her fingers, her shoulders shaking violently. The children all turned to look at him along with her gaze. He saw that they were abandoned children whose features were incomplete.\nHe walked close, gently held her head, and said, \u0026ldquo;Don\u0026rsquo;t cry. I\u0026rsquo;m here.\u0026rdquo;\nThat was the fourth year of the Great Ravine.\nGreat Ravine: in Liu Cixin\u0026rsquo;s The Dark Forest, because of the approaching Trisolaran fleet, all nations shifted their economic focus to military industry and aerospace development. Grain production fell, daily necessities became scarce, and living standards underwent a severe regression. This period, known historically as the Great Ravine, occurred around the middle of the twenty-first century, lasted approximately fifty years, and reduced the global population to three billion.\nThanks to Xiaoxi for the beautiful postcard from Yamaguchi o(^_^)o\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-05-26-too-deep-in-character/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eNot\u003c/strong\u003e long after spring began, she left, crossing the ocean with very little luggage to that place that might sink at any moment. He asked why she would not go west with him. She squeezed his hand and said nothing. Mr. Su said she had gone there to fulfill a dream. Everyone has dreams of their own. Since the world itself was going to be gone, let her fulfill what she wished.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Too Deep in Character"},{"content":"[Third Kaixinwang RPG Log]\nDark clouds pressed down on the city. No stars shone.\nOn the beach outside the castle stood dense ranks of fully armed, armored men. Endless black warhorses snorted, yet not a single clash of armor could be heard. Only the torches crackled and spat, the smell of pine resin mixed with sea brine pushing again and again into one\u0026rsquo;s nose.\nA dozen or so sorcerers in gray hoods stood with arms crossed, surrounding a dozen slaves collapsed on the ground and covered in blood. Blue lightning flickered inside their sleeves, ready to be called forth. Most of the slaves had already been torn limb from limb, heads separated from bodies. Only the leader still struggled to sit upright. His ritual robe had long since been slashed open by the sharp rocks of the sea cliff, and on his shoulder the character \u0026ldquo;Ren,\u0026rdquo; embroidered in silver thread, could still be faintly made out in the firelight.\nFrom the rear of the formation came the heavy sound of hooves. The crowd parted by itself, and the sorcerers bowed aside to left and right. The King rode Red Mane, his gaze dark as he stared fixedly at the last slave still alive on the ground.\n\u0026ldquo;Must you leave?\u0026rdquo; After a long silence, the King finally asked. \u0026ldquo;Again and again you try to flee. Why? Have you been mistreated here?\u0026rdquo; He noticed the character \u0026ldquo;Ren\u0026rdquo; on the slave\u0026rsquo;s shoulder, gave a sudden \u0026ldquo;Oh\u0026rdquo; of understanding, and continued, \u0026ldquo;Jia, Yi, Bing, Ding, Wu, Ji, Geng, Xin, Ren, Gui. So you\u0026rsquo;re from the Ren camp, are you?\u0026rdquo;\nThe slave on the ground did not move. The sorcerer nearest him twitched a finger slightly, and a gust of wind blew away the slave\u0026rsquo;s headscarf, revealing short hair cut to the ears and a V-shaped fringe over the forehead. The slaves all believed that V stood for freedom.\n\u0026ldquo;So it\u0026rsquo;s true,\u0026rdquo; the King sighed. \u0026ldquo;The Ren camp really means to rebel? You flee and are killed, and after being killed you still try to flee. Must one of the Ten Heavenly-Stem Servants truly go missing?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;We have to leave!\u0026rdquo; The slave on the ground suddenly raised her head and shouted with determination. It was a girl\u0026rsquo;s hoarse voice.\n\u0026ldquo;Leaving means death!\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Then we die together!\u0026rdquo; the girl cried recklessly. \u0026ldquo;We all saw it. The tree in the mirror. That tree has withered. We have to leave, back to the real world!\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;What? The tree has withered?\u0026rdquo; The King abruptly tightened the reins, and Red Mane\u0026rsquo;s front hooves reared high. \u0026ldquo;Does that mean the Tree Consort has met with disaster? Where is she now?\u0026rdquo;\nBehind the King, the great shaman raised a piece of obsidian and looked into it for a moment. \u0026ldquo;The Tree Consort suddenly disconnected several hours ago and has not logged in again.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Back to the castle!\u0026rdquo; The King wheeled his horse around and pointed his whip toward the fortress. \u0026ldquo;We must return to the swastika-camp ritual formation.\u0026rdquo; He looked back at the girl. \u0026ldquo;Give her a horse. Let her go!\u0026rdquo;\nYou may have countless processes and play countless roles at once, the number depending on your ability. If you wish to go offline by normal procedure, at least one role must successfully log out.\nSummer had just arrived, and among the girls of this city a short hairstyle called \u0026ldquo;Freeman\u0026rdquo; had begun to spread, because the advertisement said that Freeman was what happiness looked like.\nA girl in spotted overalls, her hair cut in the Freeman style, rushed into the largest network-base-station payment center in Donghu District, clutching a Doraemon China Merchants Bank credit card. \u0026ldquo;Please recharge account CD6301009191323 for one year. Thank you.\u0026rdquo; One minute later, the girl stood at the entrance of the base station holding the payment receipt and let out a long breath.\nThe King almost stumbled into the swastika ritual formation. The green crystal ball at the center of the formation was just about to go out, with only the faintest bit of pale green gel left inside.\n\u0026ldquo;Remaining time: 00:09\u0026rdquo;\nGoing offline required at least thirty seconds. There was no time. The King felt a wave of dizziness, his body tipping sideways, and reached out to support himself on the altar holding the crystal ball.\nIn a flash, a streak of fluorescent light swept through the ritual formation with a hua, and the entire world seemed to tremble. The King knew this was what happened during a refresh. \u0026ldquo;But it\u0026rsquo;s not refresh time yet, is it?\u0026rdquo; he said, scratching his head in confusion. When he looked up again at the crystal ball, it was filled to the brim with green liquid, and a line of numbers circled inside:\n\u0026ldquo;Remaining time: 525599:59\u0026rdquo;\nThis diary entry mentioned: Jiashu [x]\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-05-11-must-you-leave/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[Third Kaixinwang RPG Log]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDark clouds pressed down on the city. No stars shone.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn the beach outside the castle stood dense ranks of fully armed, armored men. Endless black warhorses snorted, yet not a single clash of armor could be heard. Only the torches crackled and spat, the smell of pine resin mixed with sea brine pushing again and again into one\u0026rsquo;s nose.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA dozen or so sorcerers in gray hoods stood with arms crossed, surrounding a dozen slaves collapsed on the ground and covered in blood. Blue lightning flickered inside their sleeves, ready to be called forth. Most of the slaves had already been torn limb from limb, heads separated from bodies. Only the leader still struggled to sit upright. His ritual robe had long since been slashed open by the sharp rocks of the sea cliff, and on his shoulder the character \u0026ldquo;Ren,\u0026rdquo; embroidered in silver thread, could still be faintly made out in the firelight.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Must You Leave?"},{"content":"Second Kaixinwang RPG Log\nNight black. Wind still. Moon bright.\nThe King nodded. The King\u0026rsquo;s younger sister shook the chu bell in her hand. The armored figures parted left and right, opening a path before the castle gate. A line of maidservants filed inward, heads bowed, and took their places below the steps of the throne.\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s the weekend today,\u0026rdquo; said the King. \u0026ldquo;The slave market has already closed. No one will disturb us anymore. The ritual may begin.\u0026rdquo; As he spoke, the King rose from the throne. The black cat curled at his feet stretched unwillingly, let out a \u0026ldquo;meowu,\u0026rdquo; and leapt to his arm. The King stroked the soft fur beneath its chin a few times and then lightly tossed it forward. The cat\u0026rsquo;s body streaked through the air like a flash of lightning and plunged into the silver basin placed in the center of the hall. At once a black flame sprang up with a whump, and faint blue-green sprites could be seen dancing within it.\nOne by one, the hall\u0026rsquo;s candelabra were extinguished, and the light dimmed until the only illumination was the flame in the silver basin, which cast uncertain brightness and shadow across every face. \u0026ldquo;Begin!\u0026rdquo; cried the King, flinging up one arm. The black cloak on his shoulders slid to the floor. At the entrance the armored figures slowly shut the great doors, and from outside came the creaking grind of gears. A narrow skylight opened in the roof of the hall, and a beam of moonlight slanted down, falling exactly upon the King\u0026rsquo;s chest.\nAt some unnoticed moment, the maidservants had changed into white ceremonial gowns. Each held a bronze mirror with a different pattern upon it, and they stood in a circle around the silver basin. Just as the King was about to give the order again, his sister leaned to his side and whispered a few words into his ear. The King frowned slightly and studied the maidservants below the dais. Sure enough, one of them had dull, spiritless eyes and was plainly no more than an avatar. \u0026ldquo;Probably got cut off for unpaid net fees. Have her log out,\u0026rdquo; the King said helplessly.\nThe King\u0026rsquo;s younger sister stepped behind the maidservant, reached out, and pressed at the back of her neck. Crackling sounds of electricity filled the air. The maidservant\u0026rsquo;s figure grew fainter and fainter, and a green character, Qian, gave a little hop in empty space before vanishing completely.\nThe King\u0026rsquo;s sister rearranged the remaining maidservants into a circle and signaled that the ritual could proceed. The tallest maidservant stood directly in front of the King and raised her bronze mirror high, catching the moonlight that shone upon his chest. It was as if the moonlight had fallen into a bottomless ancient well. The maidservant holding the mirror began to tremble faintly in both arms, and a milky-white halo spread through her body while countless pictographic patterns rose and fell in the light and shadow at her feet. After a while the surface of the bronze mirror began to brighten, and within it there gradually appeared an enormous green tree crown swaying in the wind. A beam of light shot out from the mirror. The maidservant slowly shifted the angle, reflecting it into the second mirror.\nThe maidservant holding the second mirror had long black hair. The moment the light touched the surface of her mirror, it gave forth exquisite music, and translucent sapphire notes danced up and down in the air within a span of one foot before swiftly vanishing. Gradually a black circle appeared in the mirror. That circle spun and changed until finally it became the face of a black-haired girl. When the girl in the mirror opened her eyes, another beam of light shot out from it.\nThe light was reflected into the third mirror. The girl holding it seemed on the verge of collapse, the bronze mirror shaking so violently that it was almost about to fall to the ground. The King\u0026rsquo;s younger sister sensed that something was wrong and quickly walked behind her, noticing that something seemed to be twitching under the hem of the gown. With one yank she tore the skirt open and a tail sprang out, swaying from side to side. Just as she was about to reach for it, the King coughed lightly, and his sister, in obvious annoyance, lowered her hand and stepped back. The maidservant stuck out her tongue toward the throne and steadied herself. Countless graceful figures suddenly appeared in the bronze mirror, all wearing red dancing shoes and dancing the Heavenly Net Dance in delight. The red shoes gradually transformed into ring after ring of red light, filling the hall. Beads of sweat slowly appeared on the maidservant\u0026rsquo;s cheeks. She gave a low hum, her body suddenly shuddered, the phantom dancers vanished, and a beam shot from the bronze mirror straight into the last one.\nThe final girl wore a thick white gauze dress trimmed with tender green lace. Once the light entered the mirror in her hands, the image responded at once: within it appeared a boundless grassland, with snowy mountains stretching far into the distance. Ripples of diamond light spread outward around her like some vast lake on the steppe, gradually flooding the entire hall. At first the ripples were calm, then they grew more and more violent, until at last they raised towering waves, almost overturning the whole hall. From a great distance beyond the castle there came peals of thunder, as if answering the swell. Finally, with one crash of lightning, a pillar of light burst from the mirror and struck into the silver basin in the center of the hall.\n\u0026ldquo;Meowu\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; came the black cat\u0026rsquo;s cry of pain from inside the black flame. The color of the flame began to waver and shift. The moonlight kept pouring in, reflected from one mirror to the next, and shot deep into the basin. The flame surged tall, then shrank tiny. The cat\u0026rsquo;s cries went on and on, clawing at the heart.\nThe King\u0026rsquo;s left hand now held a string of prayer beads, spinning with extreme speed between thumb and forefinger. Red Sanskrit characters streamed along the direction of the turning beads and flowed onto the floor before him, then crept like snakes toward the silver basin. The first huge Sanskrit character thrust out a tongue two feet long and coiled itself around the black flame. The flame was pressed smaller and smaller, until it no longer even resembled fire, and the black cat\u0026rsquo;s outline gradually became clear.\nAt last the King abruptly halted the beads, opened the eyes he had kept tightly shut, and said, \u0026ldquo;Done!\u0026rdquo; The King\u0026rsquo;s younger sister shook the chu bell in her hand. The maidservants lowered their mirrors one by one. The moonlight slowly withdrew from the hall, and the candelabra were lit once more.\nExhausted, the King sank back onto the throne, propping his chin on his right hand. \u0026ldquo;Damn it. The cat\u0026rsquo;s finally stopped going into heat.\u0026rdquo;\nThis diary entry mentioned: Black Kitten [x] Chun Xiaomei [x] Shepherd [x] Jiashu [x] In Too Deep [x] Little Bad [x] Zhu Qian [x]\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-05-10-the-king-and-the-maidservants/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eSecond Kaixinwang RPG Log\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNight black. Wind still. Moon bright.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe King nodded. The King\u0026rsquo;s younger sister shook the chu bell in her hand. The armored figures parted left and right, opening a path before the castle gate. A line of maidservants filed inward, heads bowed, and took their places below the steps of the throne.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s the weekend today,\u0026rdquo; said the King. \u0026ldquo;The slave market has already closed. No one will disturb us anymore. The ritual may begin.\u0026rdquo; As he spoke, the King rose from the throne. The black cat curled at his feet stretched unwillingly, let out a \u0026ldquo;meowu,\u0026rdquo; and leapt to his arm. The King stroked the soft fur beneath its chin a few times and then lightly tossed it forward. The cat\u0026rsquo;s body streaked through the air like a flash of lightning and plunged into the silver basin placed in the center of the hall. At once a black flame sprang up with a \u003cem\u003ewhump\u003c/em\u003e, and faint blue-green sprites could be seen dancing within it.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The King and the Maidservants"},{"content":"Zuolun came out of a cafe on the left bank of the Thames and walked through the thick London drizzle toward the hotel where he was staying. He wore a leather jacket unsuited to the season, its surface shining heavily under the rain-soaked streetlamps. In his left hand he carried a large dark green suitcase that looked very heavy and from time to time struck the ground with a dull thud.\nZuolun was his alias. His real name was Rexi Cairangdan. He had come all the way from distant Gamalinka to London for one reason only: the hierarch had received word from British believers that Nima Rima, the Solar Consort awaited for more than two hundred years by the Sangjie sect, had at last appeared. The Sangjie sect was a hidden offshoot of the Jonang tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, long since unknown to the world. Yet its followers had concealed themselves among other sects, even sometimes attaching themselves to Bon practitioners, passing the line down generation after generation for the sake of that one legend.\nNima Rima sits cross-legged at the feet of Xiran Sengfo,\nand the Buddha entrusted to her the final scripture. That scripture belongs neither to the Greater Vehicle nor the Lesser Vehicle; to neither exoteric nor esoteric teaching; to neither the southern nor the northern transmission. It is the Buddha\u0026rsquo;s first sentence and his last.\nThe County Hotel lay in the center of Covent Garden, only about half an hour away on foot. Carrying the suitcase, Zuolun stepped into the lobby, ignored the attendant who came forward to greet him, and went straight to his room. The corridor was carpeted in thick velvet of bright colors, preserving a decorative style carried over from Indochina in the Victorian age. Entering the room, Zuolun carefully checked the telephone and the wardrobe, then laid the suitcase flat in the middle of the room. After a moment\u0026rsquo;s hesitation, he decided he should bathe first, change into robes, and only then touch the case.\nThe County Hotel was an old three-star establishment. The guestrooms were equipped with all the necessities of life, but in order to preserve the old layout and style, no room had its own washroom. Guests had to share a common bath. Zuolun, raised in the pastoral districts, cared nothing for this, though even so he repeatedly checked the room before daring to leave it.\nIn the bath there were several drunks from Yorkshire chatting noisily. They saw a skinny Easterner whose left arm was wrapped with black prayer beads, his body trembling nervously in the steam. He was muttering to himself, and as the water droplets passed over his skin, they seemed to slow, gradually gathering into a transparent shell. Just as the drunks lowered their beer mugs in astonishment, the Easterner swiftly dried himself and left the bath.\nNima Rima is yellow in body, tranquil in expression, with a golden-red Buddhist radiance above her head. Nima Rima has sixteen legs and twenty-four eyes, symbolizing vulture, owl, parrot, eagle, magpie, chicken, and goose. She is more dazzlingly beautiful than the consorts of even the Eight Great Heavenly Kings.\nZuolun had no mind at all to scrub the dirt from his body. He only felt that the ritual of bathing would make him more devout. He dressed himself in blue-black monastic robes, took in his left hand a chu bell made from a kneecap bone, and placed his right hand on top of the suitcase lid.\nSeen up close, the suitcase appeared larger than its actual size. Zuolun seemed to catch wafts of fragrance drifting out through the seams. That scent was one he knew better than almost any other; every herdsman\u0026rsquo;s daughter kept that smell in her tent. Yet gradually the fragrance seemed to fade until he could smell nothing at all. The suitcase before his eyes, meanwhile, slowly turned a brilliant yellow.\nZuolun opened the suitcase. With a cry, he fell backward to the floor.\nNima Rima sat naked upon a golden coffer, yellow in body, tranquil in expression, with a golden-red Buddhist radiance above her head. Swastika signs circled around her, while protective vajra deities danced behind her mounted on snow lions.\n\u0026ldquo;Buddha!\u0026rdquo; Zuolun, in that instant becoming once more Rexi Cairangdan, threw himself flat upon the floor in full prostration, his palms pressed tightly against the carpet. The pointed end of the chu bell pierced the thick rug, and the prayer beads coiled around his arm like a snake.\nRexi Cairangdan saw the final two lines of scripture. They were engraved upon Nima Rima\u0026rsquo;s body itself, dense beyond counting, endless, flashing with golden light. Again and again he rose with hands joined, then threw himself back down to complete one prostration after another. After worshipping for a long time, he shut the suitcase, trembling, and drew from the sleeve of his robes a ritual conch, which he set on the floor with its mouth facing east.\n\u0026ldquo;Ga Gong Rinpoche, we have finally found her!\u0026rdquo; he said into the conch with a shaking voice. After a long pause, a distant voice came back: \u0026ldquo;Bring her home.\u0026rdquo; Manchester, New Delhi, Kathmandu, Zhangmu, Gamalinka. In his mind Rexi Cairangdan sifted through the quickest route.\nAphrodul had lived as a guest in England ever since the days of George IV of the House of Hanover. Her sisters back in Norway had joined forces to drive her away, simply because the people there loved the sun a little too much. For several centuries now, plump, short, and covered in freckles, Aphrodul had never been welcome among the English. All she could do was lower herself to the noisiest and filthiest workers\u0026rsquo; taverns, doing the dullest drudgework. She had changed jobs many times, but the locals were either Protestants or Catholics; no one worshipped a sun goddess. Changing one post for another meant only more work as a maid, a cleaner, and the like.\nA few days earlier, when Aphrodul was coming home from work and passing through the blackness of Hyde Park, she had suddenly been struck hard on the back of the head and knocked unconscious. When she regained awareness, she found herself stuffed inside a suitcase, her body almost folded into the shape of a Z. The flesh of her belly pressed so hard that she could scarcely breathe. By all rights she ought to have suffocated long ago, except that she could not die. She was carted about inside the case, handed from one person to another.\nAfter who knew how long, Aphrodul felt herself being stood upright and carried off once more, striking repeatedly against the ground, until she was finally brought somewhere new. After another long while, the suitcase opened. The foul stale air was swept away at once, and Aphrodul greedily dragged in huge breaths, wriggling desperately outward. Then suddenly she saw a small Easterner kneeling before her with an expression of reverence, performing rites she could not understand over and over. His eyes shone with a crazed devotion and faith so utterly sincere that she had not seen such a gaze in seven hundred years.\nAphrodul felt the power of centuries ago return to her body, and a breath of youth spread through her again. What you are willing to see, that is what you will see. This had always been the boon granted by the sun goddess to her worshippers over thousands of years. Just as she gathered her strength to say something to this Eastern believer, there came a slap, and the suitcase shut once more.\nFurther Reading\nConsort Ming: in esoteric Buddhism, the female cultivation partner of an advanced male practitioner.\nXiran Sengfo: Avalokiteshvara.\nNima: in Tibetan, sun; Rima: in Tibetan, consort ming.\nAphrodul (Alvrodul): the sun goddess of Norse mythology.\n[Image source] Freckle shared image.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-05-08-consort-ming/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eZuolun came out of a cafe on the left bank of the Thames and walked through the thick London drizzle toward the hotel where he was staying. He wore a leather jacket unsuited to the season, its surface shining heavily under the rain-soaked streetlamps. In his left hand he carried a large dark green suitcase that looked very heavy and from time to time struck the ground with a dull thud.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Nine Stories, Season Four | Consort Ming"},{"content":"My cousin\u0026rsquo;s classmate Xin Xin once told her that he worked as a lightning-protection engineer for an engineering technology company. Back when he was a student, he had majored in lightning protection at a certain university of information engineering. Because the specialty was so obscure, he had once worried deeply about finding employment. Yet as graduation drew near, Xin Xin began receiving one recruitment call after another from engineering companies and meteorological centers. After much hesitation, he chose the position he now holds. His grades had not been especially distinguished, but none of his classmates in the same year received any attention at all. Most of them later switched into other lines of work.\nXin Xin\u0026rsquo;s company was located in an enclosed compound halfway up a hill in the outer suburbs of Shuangpang City, shaded by trees and bordered by clear ponds. It did not take him long after starting work to notice that all his colleagues bore only four surnames: Deng, Xin, Qiao, and Tian, though their professional backgrounds varied. At first, his job was simply to review and reply to emails. These messages came from anonymous addresses and consisted of prayerful wishes for things like the safety of livestock or favorable wind and rain, matters with nothing at all to do with his specialty. Yet he was required to use an unfamiliar software package called Agave potatorum to evaluate the credibility of those anonymous addresses and issue standardized replies of different star ratings. Every day Xin Xin had to process an enormous volume of email. For a time he thought the company might be nothing more than an internet scam operating under a shell-company name, but the generous salary and his colleagues\u0026rsquo; meticulous warmth eventually persuaded him to stay.\nAfter a year, Xin Xin gradually mastered the work, and the supervisor surnamed Tian transferred him to the technical department, where he began taking part in maintenance assignments on site. The company really did undertake certain lightning-protection engineering projects, most of them for units responsible for the preservation of cultural relics. At last Xin Xin was able to put his training to use, repairing lightning rods and surge protectors with practiced ease. One time, while checking and repairing a side hall in a Daoist temple, the engineering team leader called Xin Xin aside and opened a UMPC for him to test the circuitry. On a strange software interface, Xin Xin saw a list of anonymous addresses constantly connecting to the server, together with message windows popping up one after another, all of them much like the prayer emails he had previously handled in his work. Xin Xin raised his head in confusion and looked toward the side hall before him, only to realize that the deity enshrined there was the Thunder God, and that the emails he had been receiving were in fact the silently mouthed prayers of worshippers kneeling before the statue. Astonished, he went to ask the engineering team leader, but the man merely nodded and walked away.\nBecause my younger cousin had once been rather close to Xin Xin, she was able to hear these things from him. What later became of him at that company, however, no one knows. All I know is that he remains there still and now holds no low position. By coincidence, when I was once at Mount Lao, I saw the same company doing work at the Palace of Three Purities. On the collars of those workers was a red emblem depicting a human-headed dragon body. A search with the Bi\u0026rsquo;an engine is enough to show that this is a well-known domestic guild of thunder masters, and the company is merely the form by which it survives under modern social conditions. Since ancient times, the forebears of China have held a natural reverence for thunder and lightning. From the Classic of Mountains and Seas to the Comprehensive Mirror of Immortals Through the Ages to the Complete Origins and Transmission of the Gods of the Three Teachings, religious histories and strange anecdotal records of every era contain accounts of thunder deities. Folk religion has always preserved a whole set of methods for warding off lightning and avoiding thunderbolts, the heart of which lies in devout worship of the many gods of thunder and lightning. Those who mastered this body of knowledge were honored as thunder masters. Since Deng Zhong, Xin Xing, Pang Qiao, and Tian Hua are the celestial officials of the Thunder Ministry in legend, thunder-master lineages in every region and school have historically been passed down generation after generation among these four surnames. Xin Xin was probably chosen by this guild as much because of bloodline as for any other reason.\nI am not surprised that the thunder-master guild to which Xin Xin belongs possesses so many up-to-date high-tech means. What interests me is something else: how is it that a deity who, though well known, is hardly one of the most illustrious, can still command so many believers today, and that this devotion has been so carefully maintained through the centuries without interruption? What force is it that sustains such spiritual dependence? And out in the villages and wild country, how many other objects of worship still live on in the hearts of ordinary people?\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-04-28-thunder-master/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMy cousin\u0026rsquo;s classmate Xin Xin once told her that he worked as a lightning-protection engineer for an engineering technology company. Back when he was a student, he had majored in lightning protection at a certain university of information engineering. Because the specialty was so obscure, he had once worried deeply about finding employment. Yet as graduation drew near, Xin Xin began receiving one recruitment call after another from engineering companies and meteorological centers. After much hesitation, he chose the position he now holds. His grades had not been especially distinguished, but none of his classmates in the same year received any attention at all. Most of them later switched into other lines of work.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Thunder Master"},{"content":"Old Third once told me about a fellow townsman of his, Fan Yun, who worked as the IT director of a company in Pusen. At the start of the new year, the company gave him a budget to upgrade its office network, hardware and software alike. After replacing the servers, he still had some money left over, so he bought the latest version of RTX for the company\u0026rsquo;s internal network.\nRTX, or Real Time eXchange, was an enterprise instant-messaging platform developed by TX. The company had long used it for internal communication and file transfer. To perform a legitimate upgrade, you needed the switchboard number from the original user card; once the new license file was activated, that was that. Fan Yun logged into the official RTX website to activate it. The page loaded very slowly. More than ten seconds passed before it finally appeared, and in that instant he caught the domain in the address bar jumping from the RTX site to an unfamiliar address before snapping back again. Naturally cautious, Fan Yun immediately checked the firewall logs. Finding nothing abnormal, he let the matter go.\nA few days later, while cleaning up the company\u0026rsquo;s shared directories on the LAN, he noticed that many machines in Network Neighborhood had acquired a little arrow in the lower-right corner of their icons, rather like a shortcut marker, except that it looked like a lowercase b. No one in the company except Fan Yun himself had permission to deploy software across the local network. He opened one of the arrow-marked icons. It belonged to a coworker surnamed Liu. In the shared folder there was a file he had never seen before, named boycott.ini.\nFan Yun had no memory of such a system file. Very carefully, he switched into Safe Mode and opened it with Notepad. There was no code inside, nothing like what he had expected. Only a single line:\nOn such-and-such a morning, in the elevator, he failed to greet me. Boycott him.\nFan Yun was baffled. Then he remembered that morning: he had been carrying breakfast and may indeed have kept his head lowered in the elevator the whole time. He opened another arrow-marked icon. In that machine\u0026rsquo;s boycott.ini, he found:\nOn such-and-such a day, he requested a memory upgrade and was refused. Boycott him.\nHe opened several more. Every file contained some minor grievance involving him, each ending with exactly the same formula: boycott him.\nThe word boycott is a loanword, and 杯葛 is its Chinese rendering, derived from the surname of the retired British army captain Charles Boycott. Originally it meant a coordinated refusal to buy from, sell to, or otherwise cooperate with a given individual or company. In everyday use it generally came to mean social isolation. The term remains common in Chinese communities across Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, but is much less common in mainland usage. When Singapore\u0026rsquo;s Lianhe Zaobao, for instance, reported on the French president boycotting the Beijing Olympics, it used exactly this term: 杯葛.\nFan Yun copied down everything contained in those boycott.ini files, reflected on his own past conduct, and suddenly understood why certain coworkers had recently grown cold toward him. In all kinds of indirect, tactful ways, he expressed his apologies. A few days later, the little arrows quietly disappeared one by one from the icons on the local network.\nHe later told the whole story to Old Third. But when Old Third upgraded RTX at his own company, nothing of the sort happened. Nor was Fan Yun ever able to find another boycott.ini file.\nOld Third said that Fan Yun must have had some other strange encounter before acquiring that uncanny \u0026ldquo;boycott\u0026rdquo; software, or else had invented the tale in the guise of a friend\u0026rsquo;s experience in order to offer him a sideways lesson in workplace conduct.\nAs for me, what I want to say is this: more than a century ago, translators in China could produce renderings like 杯葛, 商博良, and 华盛顿, names that balanced sound, sense, and cultural fit. Today, translators can do little more than shout out half-digested foreign names like Solskjaer and C. Ronaldo. It is hard not to see that as a loss.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-04-09-boycott/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eOld Third once told me about a fellow townsman of his, Fan Yun, who worked as the IT director of a company in Pusen. At the start of the new year, the company gave him a budget to upgrade its office network, hardware and software alike. After replacing the servers, he still had some money left over, so he bought the latest version of RTX for the company\u0026rsquo;s internal network.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Boycott"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;Are you certain you\u0026rsquo;ll make it back?\u0026rdquo;\nShe sat on a weathered wooden bench outside the cafe at the street corner. Even after all this time, remembering the expression on her own face when she asked him that question still tightened something in her chest.\nShe took a small mirror from her folded shoulder bag, checked her face, pressed her lips together, then set the bag down beside her and lifted the tea bowl with both hands for a careful sip.\nThe bowl was rimmed with gold, painted with coiling dragons and a Buddha, a style unmistakably shaped by both Han and Tibetan hands.\nIf one ignored the soldiers and military trucks moving north and south through the town, the place was almost peaceful, especially in the slanting light of mid-afternoon.\nThe sun was already low. Its light filtered through the streamers above the temple roof across the street, staining everything with an uncanny color and making it impossible to see clearly the schizonepeta leaves floating in the tea.\nWhen he left, the situation had not been this tense. Holding her hand, he had promised that the war would spread no farther than Western Tibet and would never cross the Tanggula Pass. Yet now Huangnan, this tiny town, had become the target of converging forces.\nTwo files of black-hatted monks strode through the center of the street, all young, all belonging to the Black Hat order. The leading monk wore a yellow sash, the mark of a great geshe. Blue-and-red tassels shaped like snow lions hung from their ritual implements, and the pole of the Five-Star Red Flag carried by the standard-bearer had been wrapped in bright yellow silk and covered in consecration scripture.\nShe checked her watch. It was still early. The contact would only just be reaching the cliffside by now. She was about to order a bowl of yogurt when the horn sounded:\nWooooo.\nThe cry of that thing was so immense that the tea bowl on the table jumped. It was the sound unique to the Indian division. Those metal beasts with their eighteen fire-spitting tubes could not be more than a few miles away. The whole street erupted at once. Alarms screamed. Civilians fled back into their shops. Military police and monk-soldiers raised their guns and surged toward the fortifications beyond the town.\nThe situation looked dangerous, but few were truly afraid. Everyone knew that this Indian force had advanced too far and violated every military taboo. Its attack on Jianzha was already the last thrust of an exhausted army. Even so, no one dared underestimate the metal elephants the Brahmins had brought up from South Asia.\nShe rose and walked straight toward the temple opposite the cafe.\nShe knew that the real threat was not the army outside the town, but the uninvited guest expected to arrive inside the temple itself. She had waited here for four days for this single moment.\nThe main hall was silent. The monks had gathered in the courtyard outside. Vairocana Buddha looked down with serene compassion on the traveler kneeling before him. She knew one should not brandish a weapon before the Buddha, but there was no alternative now. She drew the Beretta from inside her coat, the pistol he had given her before he left, pressed it against the man\u0026rsquo;s waist, and said in a low voice:\n\u0026ldquo;Hands up. Slowly. Slowly. Turn around.\u0026rdquo;\nHe obeyed, raising both arms and turning his face toward her with a smile still on his lips.\nShe froze.\nYou?\nYes, it\u0026rsquo;s me, he said. I came back. I promised I would.\nHe opened his arms and embraced her. She held him just as tightly. If he was here, nothing else mattered.\nAt their feet, the leather bag he had brought with him gave a faint, living stir.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-04-08-alpha48/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;Are you certain you\u0026rsquo;ll make it back?\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eShe sat on a weathered wooden bench outside the cafe at the street corner. Even after all this time, remembering the expression on her own face when she asked him that question still tightened something in her chest.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eShe took a small mirror from her folded shoulder bag, checked her face, pressed her lips together, then set the bag down beside her and lifted the tea bowl with both hands for a careful sip.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Cipher | Alpha (4,8)"},{"content":"The Dengzhou sea route began at Penglai. In ancient times it was the most prosperous harbor in the north. Though it has long since declined, the fish market of old Dengzhou Port remains famous, and rare treasures from all directions still often appear there. One year an old woman arrived at the ancient port market with a tabby cat in her arms. On a sheet of paper before her were written two characters: appraise treasures. When people asked how she appraised them, the old woman said nothing, only pointed to the cat she was holding. Some busybody borrowed a pair of porcelain cups and placed them before her. She gently stroked the cat behind the ears. At once it leapt to the ground and stretched itself out to nearly two feet in length. On its back were seven or eight yellow spots the size of tea cups. First it arched and stretched, then crouched over the porcelain cups, sniffing them without stop and even licking them with its tongue. After a while the cat jumped back into the old woman\u0026rsquo;s arms, cried \u0026ldquo;awu\u0026rdquo; three times, and shut its eyes. The old woman pinched her fingers in calculation and said, \u0026ldquo;These porcelain cups are celadon from the official kiln of Jade Emperor Mountain, made in the second year of Jingding under Emperor Lizong Zhao Yun of the Southern Song.\u0026rdquo; The owner of the cups was astonished and filled with admiration. The pair had come down through his family, and though he knew they were Southern Song ware, he had never known the exact date. The antique dealers gathered around began bringing their own objects to be appraised, and there was not a single one the old woman failed to identify correctly. From then on her fame spread far and wide, and merchants from distant places came in an endless stream to seek her judgment.\nNow and then some forgery would be exposed on the spot, and certain owners, humiliated and enraged, hired street ruffians to make trouble at night. When they tracked the old woman to the fishing boat where she was staying, they dimly saw in the night that she slept with her head pillowed on a brilliantly striped tiger more than a zhang in length, and fled in terror. Yet when they returned after dawn, it was still only that same little tabby cat. The old woman remained at the old port appraising treasures for more than two years. Then one day she overheard a merchant in the crowd say to his companion that this cat was no ordinary house cat, but a chi cat once kept in the imperial palace, able to distinguish antiquities by tone. The moment the old woman heard this, she stood up and left at once, abandoning even the fishing boat and never returning. The local merchants blamed the speaker for frightening her away, but he did not defend himself, and after concluding his business he too departed.\nThe chi is first mentioned in the Rites of Zhou. It was originally a kind of folk bamboo wind instrument, but later it was performed together with chime bells, stone chimes, standing drums, xiao flute, sheng, and se to become one of the principal instruments used in ritual offerings and banquets. When I was young, I once saw a small cat at the Qiao family residence in Qi County with eight spots on its back. I was told this symbolized the chi\u0026rsquo;s eight finger holes, enabling it to recognize the tones of the twelve pitch pipes and imitate them with uncanny exactness in its cries. I knew only that chi cats were born in the deep palace, not that they possessed the ability to appraise antiques. The old woman may merely have used the chi cat as a pretext, but to identify so many antiquities so accurately and cite texts and allusions for them, she too could not have been an ordinary person. Since ancient times there has also been the phrase \u0026ldquo;like xun and chi.\u0026rdquo; If that cat truly was a chi cat, then the old woman would have been a xun crone, one who specially rears chi cats. Legend says that the xun crone makes her living by recognizing objects. All her life she fears most of all having her identity exposed, because chi cats are not loyal to a single master, and once people know what they are they will try by every means to lure them away. For that reason few people know of xun crones, and records of them are hard to find in books. I heard this story only by chance, and thought that if it is true, then the old woman\u0026rsquo;s departure was entirely understandable, and the tale of the chi cat that becomes a tiger by night must indeed have some basis.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-03-18-chi-cat/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe Dengzhou sea route began at Penglai. In ancient times it was the most prosperous harbor in the north. Though it has long since declined, the fish market of old Dengzhou Port remains famous, and rare treasures from all directions still often appear there. One year an old woman arrived at the ancient port market with a tabby cat in her arms. On a sheet of paper before her were written two characters: appraise treasures. When people asked how she appraised them, the old woman said nothing, only pointed to the cat she was holding. Some busybody borrowed a pair of porcelain cups and placed them before her. She gently stroked the cat behind the ears. At once it leapt to the ground and stretched itself out to nearly two feet in length. On its back were seven or eight yellow spots the size of tea cups. First it arched and stretched, then crouched over the porcelain cups, sniffing them without stop and even licking them with its tongue. After a while the cat jumped back into the old woman\u0026rsquo;s arms, cried \u0026ldquo;awu\u0026rdquo; three times, and shut its eyes. The old woman pinched her fingers in calculation and said, \u0026ldquo;These porcelain cups are celadon from the official kiln of Jade Emperor Mountain, made in the second year of Jingding under Emperor Lizong Zhao Yun of the Southern Song.\u0026rdquo; The owner of the cups was astonished and filled with admiration. The pair had come down through his family, and though he knew they were Southern Song ware, he had never known the exact date. The antique dealers gathered around began bringing their own objects to be appraised, and there was not a single one the old woman failed to identify correctly. From then on her fame spread far and wide, and merchants from distant places came in an endless stream to seek her judgment.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Chi Cat"},{"content":"There was a man surnamed Yang from Fenyang. I no longer remember his given name. His home was in Yanwu Town, and his family was a wealthy one. The Yangs had long been at odds with the Dai family of the same town. The two households checked one another, now one rising, now the other, so that in the end neither could do anything decisive against the other. One year, when the coal-mine bosses of western Shanxi gathered in disorderly protest and smashed the town government offices, the Dai family took advantage of the chaos to send men to burn the Yang granary. They also wounded several of the Yang kinsmen with blades and killed one of them. Because Yang himself had taken part in the disturbances among the mine owners, he fled far away to avoid trouble. The Yang family, lacking evidence and not daring to report the matter to the authorities, could only swallow the bitterness in silence. From then on, the hatred between the two families deepened all the more.\nThen one year, Yang suddenly returned to Yanwu Town and told his family that the chance for revenge had come. A few days later, an old blind couple appeared in Yanwu Town, earning their food by performing music and song. One held a xiao flute, the other a sanxian. Their melodies were ancient in mode and their lyrics deeply mournful, beautiful to hear, though the people of Shanxi could not understand a word of what they sang. Some locals who had once worked in southern Fujian cried out in surprise: \u0026ldquo;This is nanyin! It sounds like one branch of sanqu song.\u0026rdquo; Nanyin, also known as string-pipe music, draws on the strengths of Yuan opera, Yiyang melody, and Kun melody, and is one of the oldest surviving musical traditions in China. The old couple lingered in Yanwu Town and the fields beyond it for several months, and then later left. Gossips said that at night they stayed in the Yang household, but the Yang family neither confirmed nor denied it.\nThat autumn, the harvest in western Shanxi was poor. Every household had only enough grain for itself, while the Dai family in particular reaped not a single kernel. They invited agricultural experts to inspect the fields, but there were no insects, no blight, and no one knew the cause. A little more than a month later, an earthquake struck the Taihang Mountains. Yanwu Town suffered aftershocks but no great damage, and only the Dai family lost seven rooms, with one child crushed to death. Craftsmen were invited to examine the ruins and said that the earth-veins beneath the Dai residence had been broken by the quake, causing the beams to fail. At this point the Yang family sent the Dais fifteen dou each of rice and flour, together with a note saying that from now on the two houses owed one another nothing. The Dai family was thrown into panic, and never again dared to bully the villagers.\nA friend of Yang\u0026rsquo;s once went into the inner quarters of the Yang household to drink with him, and after wine had gone to his head, Yang confessed that the old couple had been blind masters invited from Quanzhou. Yang\u0026rsquo;s original intention had been to exterminate the entire Dai family, but the elderly pair from southern Fujian had firmly refused and warned the Yangs that whenever matters overflow, something must be lost in return. Yang followed their advice. Having taken his revenge, he then voluntarily sent rice and flour to his enemies\u0026rsquo; household. That too was conduct not unworthy of a true man.\nBlind masters have existed since ancient times. In the northern tradition, blind masters were all blind musicians whose eyes had been pierced. In the southern tradition, especially around Quanzhou in southern Fujian, there were nanyin blind masters and ritual-method blind masters, and some practitioners were skilled in both. Nanyin musicians carried nothing more than pipa, xiao flute, sanxian, and erxian, while ritual-method blind masters bore instruments such as measuring rulers of heaven, killing-panels, and divination tubes. A few years ago in Harbor City I too once saw an old blind couple performing nanyin. Remembering this story, I wondered whether they might belong to the same lineage, or perhaps even be that very pair. The trembling sound of the sanxian was enough to shake one\u0026rsquo;s heart and spirit and fill one with grief.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-03-11-blind-master/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThere was a man surnamed Yang from Fenyang. I no longer remember his given name. His home was in Yanwu Town, and his family was a wealthy one. The Yangs had long been at odds with the Dai family of the same town. The two households checked one another, now one rising, now the other, so that in the end neither could do anything decisive against the other. One year, when the coal-mine bosses of western Shanxi gathered in disorderly protest and smashed the town government offices, the Dai family took advantage of the chaos to send men to burn the Yang granary. They also wounded several of the Yang kinsmen with blades and killed one of them. Because Yang himself had taken part in the disturbances among the mine owners, he fled far away to avoid trouble. The Yang family, lacking evidence and not daring to report the matter to the authorities, could only swallow the bitterness in silence. From then on, the hatred between the two families deepened all the more.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Blind Master"},{"content":"In the spring of the Dinghai year, I returned with my family to Jinzhong to visit relatives. Among my cousins on my uncles\u0026rsquo; side, most of those of my own generation were already married, and my elders reproached me often enough on that point. One day my grandmother heard that north of the city gate there was a beggar skilled in divination, and that people seeking readings went to him in an endless stream. It happened that my cousin Zusheng also meant to go and ask about his fortune, so my grandmother sent the two of us together. Beneath the old northern wall of the city there stood a wooden basin, more than four feet across and the color of jujube pits, and the beggar sat cross-legged inside it. There was more than an inch of filthy water pooled in the bottom, giving off waves of stench. Along the foot of the wall, dozens of people were lined up waiting for their fortunes to be told. We joined the end of the line and waited more than an hour before our turn came. I had always known that diviners observe four prohibitions, one of which is that the unclean are not to be divined for, so I did not believe in him at all. I let Zusheng go first to see what sort of trick the beggar had up his sleeve.\nThough younger than I was, Zusheng had inherited one of the coal pits left behind by his father and so was vastly wealthier than I could ever hope to be. Only a few days earlier, a neighboring mine had suffered a major gas explosion, killing and injuring many. Zusheng was deeply uneasy. He wanted to shut his pit down and be done with it, but could not bear the losses; if he continued extracting coal, he feared the affair might come to light. He stammered out his worries and asked whether fortune or disaster awaited him. The beggar, dressed in rags, with pustules all over his face and the backs of his hands, rinsed the bronze tray before him in the water pooled inside the basin, set it on the rim, and with a sweep of his hand brushed away the dead lice clinging to it. Then in a muffled voice he said, \u0026ldquo;White means good fortune, black means ill. Let us see what Heaven grants you, sir.\u0026rdquo; With that he reached into the front of his robe, plucked out several lice, and dropped them onto the tray, then pulled a few hairs from his head and armpits and laid them along the edge. The lice scuttled rapidly across the tray. One of them touched a hair, instantly turned black, and stiffened dead where it stood. The others also died at once. The beggar flipped over the tray and said, \u0026ldquo;Ill fortune. Best make your arrangements early when you get back, sir.\u0026rdquo; He said not another word. Zusheng\u0026rsquo;s face turned ashen, and he wheeled around and left.\nStanding beside him, I was secretly astonished. The Baopuzi records distinctions concerning lice: lice from the hair are black, but once they fall onto the body they turn white; lice on the body are white, but if they fall into the hair they turn black. The Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang says that among the people of Lingnan, when they are ill they divine by means of lice: if the louse faces toward the body, it is auspicious; if it faces away, it is ominous. But this particular method of divination was one I had never heard of. I asked the beggar, \u0026ldquo;Is this louse divination?\u0026rdquo; He nodded. Lowering my voice, I said, \u0026ldquo;You have fallen to begging in the streets and make your living through louse divination, imprisoned in this wooden basin. You must already be suffering under a louse curse, the most vicious of punishments. Why do you still deceive people?\u0026rdquo; At once the beggar\u0026rsquo;s face filled with alarm and he protested repeatedly that he had never deceived anyone. \u0026ldquo;Louse divination,\u0026rdquo; he said, \u0026ldquo;has always been used by the people of Lingnan for divining illnesses. In that it is marvelously accurate. But I have never heard that it can divine anything beyond disease.\u0026rdquo; Then the beggar suddenly stood up in the basin and began pleading with me. \u0026ldquo;I was once a merchant. In a certain year I swindled a friend\u0026rsquo;s investment funds and fled. Someone cursed me into this state. Beneath my skin grow louse tumors, inside my body lice bore through my flesh, and all over me are black and white lice beyond counting. Only by louse divination can I scrape together a living. Yet no matter how accurate my divination, no matter how much money I earn, I cannot leave this basin by a single step. At first I answered only questions of illness, but as more and more people came, I had no choice but to agree to all of them. Please, sir, do not expose me and cut off my only means of life.\u0026rdquo; Seeing how pitiful he was, I sighed, left him a prescription for curing louse poison with cinnabar and strong tea, and went away.\nMore than a month later, just as I was about to leave Jinzhong, my cousin Zusheng was arrested and imprisoned for illegal trafficking in explosives and unlawful mining. I sat there in the courtyard stunned, unable to recover my senses for a very long time. Dimly I remembered the sly smile on the beggar\u0026rsquo;s face when I left, yet to this day I still do not understand the mystery of it.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-02-26-louse-divination/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIn the spring of the Dinghai year, I returned with my family to Jinzhong to visit relatives. Among my cousins on my uncles\u0026rsquo; side, most of those of my own generation were already married, and my elders reproached me often enough on that point. One day my grandmother heard that north of the city gate there was a beggar skilled in divination, and that people seeking readings went to him in an endless stream. It happened that my cousin Zusheng also meant to go and ask about his fortune, so my grandmother sent the two of us together. Beneath the old northern wall of the city there stood a wooden basin, more than four feet across and the color of jujube pits, and the beggar sat cross-legged inside it. There was more than an inch of filthy water pooled in the bottom, giving off waves of stench. Along the foot of the wall, dozens of people were lined up waiting for their fortunes to be told. We joined the end of the line and waited more than an hour before our turn came. I had always known that diviners observe four prohibitions, one of which is that the unclean are not to be divined for, so I did not believe in him at all. I let Zusheng go first to see what sort of trick the beggar had up his sleeve.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Louse Divination"},{"content":"Oilback Whale\nEnglish name: oil whale\nScientific name: Eubalaena petroleum\nA marine mammal of the order Cetacea, suborder Mysticeti, family Balaenidae, the oilback whale is a new rising member of the right-whale family. It is distributed in the Arctic Ocean and the Atlantic, with small numbers also found in the North Pacific. The oilback whale has a spindle-shaped body, measuring between 10 and 15 meters in length and weighing 10 tons. Its baleen is long and dense, with four baleen plates on the lower jaw, each 3 to 4 meters long, for which reason it is also called the broom whale. Its flippers measure 1 to 1.5 meters, while the tail fin spans 50 percent of the body\u0026rsquo;s length, and it swims at 5 to 6 nautical miles. The oilback whale possesses the two blowholes characteristic of right whales and can spout columns of water as high as 10 meters. Irregular protuberances grow across its back, densely covered in a distinctive gland, so that the entire back appears coated in a thick layer of gelatinous crude oil.\nOilback whales feed collectively and migrate each year along ocean currents, though this is merely for greater comfort in living. In fact, they are especially fond of subsea oil fields and waters polluted by crude oil, feeding specifically on contaminated sand lances, small yellow croakers, yellow croakers, krill, and plankton, while also drinking the blackened seawater. Oilback whales are filter-feeding animals, and when feeding, two to ten of them form a neat trapezoidal formation, letting massive flows of water, fish, and shrimp stream into their mouths.\nIn themselves, oilback whales cannot digest crude oil. Their fondness for polluted matter may arise from a genetic mutation that became a form of self-protection. Research in recent years has shown that the flesh of the oilback whale is rank and foul-smelling and wholly unfit to eat, while its surface is covered in ugly swellings and gelatinous secretions, so that human whalers have little interest in hunting it. Dissection has shown that the digestive system of the oilback whale hosts large numbers of microorganisms that live by consuming petroleum. These microbes are capable of degrading highly toxic chemical substances such as polychlorinated biphenyls and others. The whale then absorbs the nutrients produced by that degradation, so that both sides benefit. Substances that cannot be broken down are expelled through the glands on the back and the blowholes, where they settle on the whale\u0026rsquo;s back and in turn nourish another planktonic life-form that lives on them. For this reason, the oilback whale is known as the scavenger of the sea.\nThe breeding season of the oilback whale is September to October. Female oilback whales are pregnant for ten months and give birth to one calf per pregnancy. Newborn calves are 1.8 to 2.3 meters long, and the nursing period lasts about half a year.\n[Ancestral chart of the oilback whale]\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-01-24-oilback-whale/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eOilback Whale\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEnglish name: oil whale\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eScientific name: \u003cem\u003eEubalaena petroleum\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA marine mammal of the order Cetacea, suborder Mysticeti, family Balaenidae, the oilback whale is a new rising member of the right-whale family. It is distributed in the Arctic Ocean and the Atlantic, with small numbers also found in the North Pacific. The oilback whale has a spindle-shaped body, measuring between 10 and 15 meters in length and weighing 10 tons. Its baleen is long and dense, with four baleen plates on the lower jaw, each 3 to 4 meters long, for which reason it is also called the broom whale. Its flippers measure 1 to 1.5 meters, while the tail fin spans 50 percent of the body\u0026rsquo;s length, and it swims at 5 to 6 nautical miles. The oilback whale possesses the two blowholes characteristic of right whales and can spout columns of water as high as 10 meters. Irregular protuberances grow across its back, densely covered in a distinctive gland, so that the entire back appears coated in a thick layer of gelatinous crude oil.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Weekly Live | Oilback Whale"},{"content":"Lithium Cat\nEnglish name: celli\nScientific name: Leptailurus celli\nThe lithium cat is a new felid of the serval genus that evolved in the middle of the twenty-first century, though some experts deny that it is a naturally evolved animal. Although in appearance it closely resembles a Siamese cat, with soft short fur and chocolate-colored spots or cap markings, by bloodline it is closer to the serval. Its head is small, its muzzle relatively long, and it has a pair of very large ears set high and close together. The lithium cat\u0026rsquo;s body length ranges from 42 to 71 cm. Its limbs are long and slender, and near the soles of its feet are faint copper-colored spots. Its tail is short, only 10 cm long.\nLithium cats are distributed across the Northern Hemisphere along the Tropic of Cancer as their axis. The farther one moves away from 23 degrees north latitude, the more sharply their numbers decline. They cannot survive south of the equator, for reasons not yet understood, though analysis suggests this may be related to biological magnetic fields. Lithium cats primarily live in human settlements such as cities, towns, or large industrial and mining zones, where they can use their long limbs and speeds of up to 90 km/h to move through forests of reinforced concrete. Their great ears can receive variable microwave signals from 0.01 GHz to 40 GHz. Beneath the copper-colored spots on the soles are glands that secrete a mucus capable of insulating currents below 380 volts. The lithium cat is named for its fondness for eating lithium batteries. The villi of its stomach form a marvelous biological protective circuit that can effectively break down the spiral-wound structure of lithium batteries, destroy the polyethylene membrane separating positive and negative electrodes, and absorb lithium ions, cobalt dioxide, and the organic electrolyte solution. The droppings of lithium cats are called lithium-cat beans and are advanced raw material for bioengineering, ready for direct collection and use.\nIn fact, when food is scarce, lithium cats will also consume other kinds of spent batteries. Their digestive system resembles the early human \u0026ldquo;wet-process\u0026rdquo; treatment for used batteries. In addition to a stomach that secretes highly acidic gastric fluid, they possess a \u0026ldquo;second stomach\u0026rdquo; that secretes a highly alkaline solution, effectively refining iron, cadmium, carbon rods, copper, caps, zinc casing, and various residues from inside the battery. Lithium cats, however, are highly sensitive to mercury toxicity. Once too much mercury accumulates in the body, they die easily. Because wild lithium cats lack effective means of preventing mercury poisoning, they generally survive only seven to eight years. Domesticated and farmed lithium cats can live more than fifteen years.\nLithium cats have a gestation period of two months and produce three to four young in each litter. Kittens are weaned at two to four months. The mother generally raises them alone, and after reaching sexual maturity at thirteen to fifteen months, lithium cats live independently.\n[Figure 1: Early lithium cat]\nNote: among citizen scientists, the official scientific-journal claim that \u0026ldquo;lithium cats arose through natural evolution\u0026rdquo; is generally not accepted. [Figure 1] shows the popularly recognized ancestor of the lithium cat, said to have been named Dong Xiaohua, female, and to have lived roughly between 2003 and 2024. Around 2013, she was supposedly dissected and modified by the first citizen-biologist robot, Tao Bote, becoming the progenitor of the lithium cat. Interestingly, the legendary ancestor of the modern paper cat, which feeds on books, newspapers, and electronic paper, is also said to have been Dong Xiaohua.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-01-13-lithium-cat/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eLithium Cat\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEnglish name: celli\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eScientific name: \u003cem\u003eLeptailurus celli\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe lithium cat is a new felid of the serval genus that evolved in the middle of the twenty-first century, though some experts deny that it is a naturally evolved animal. Although in appearance it closely resembles a Siamese cat, with soft short fur and chocolate-colored spots or cap markings, by bloodline it is closer to the serval. Its head is small, its muzzle relatively long, and it has a pair of very large ears set high and close together. The lithium cat\u0026rsquo;s body length ranges from 42 to 71 cm. Its limbs are long and slender, and near the soles of its feet are faint copper-colored spots. Its tail is short, only 10 cm long.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Weekly Live | Lithium Cat"},{"content":"Nine Stories, Season Two | Shahtoosh\nWelcome to *Nine Stories*, Season Two. This is a private writing project. As before, I will personally invite Fanfou friends to take part. Requirements: a short story of 1000 to 1500 words, containing the sentence \u0026#34;So we went to get the blankets.\u0026#34; Genre unrestricted. Please submit within two days after the New Year holiday ends, publish it on your blog, and announce it through Fanfou. Together we are creating a mysterious plan. We had already been trapped in the frozen wasteland for three days. Other than half a sheep\u0026rsquo;s leg and a barrel of gasoline, there was nothing left.\nOutside, the blizzard roared. The tent was being shaken so hard it looked ready to collapse at any moment. Powdered snow burst through the seams again and again, baring its teeth as it stung our faces, leaving every inch of skin turned blue with cold. Chill rose from the iron-hard permafrost beneath us, and even the thickest yak-hide boots could not keep out the biting frost.\nLittle Zhaxi had begun to run a fever. His forehead was hot enough to melt snow, yet still he shivered without stop. Dawa Zhuoma held him tightly in her arms, warming him with a skin bag filled with boiling water. \u0026ldquo;Ledebo, they\u0026rsquo;ll definitely come, won\u0026rsquo;t they? The little one\u0026rsquo;s not going to hold on much longer! Have you really got the heart for this?\u0026rdquo;\nI sat by the tent flap, the tip of my cigarette flaring in the wind. \u0026ldquo;They\u0026rsquo;ll come. Wait one more day.\u0026rdquo;\nBarbier checked herself in the mirror one more time, adjusted the pendant on her chest, and only then slowly emerged from the lavatory and walked toward the first-class cabin door. She had just returned from the annual Victoria\u0026rsquo;s Secret show in America. This time she had stolen all the attention, to the point that even that insufferable Cui Ji had bowed before her. Barbier had always believed that the whole New York fashion crowd were nothing but big-breasted idiots.\nJanuary was the coldest season in Milan. Thick snow lay on both sides of the runways at Linate Airport, and dozens of snowplows worked day and night without pause. Barbier descended the gangway and looked at the heavily bundled crowd with a cold snort. She wore an outrageously colored Anna Sui outfit, with only a shahtoosh draped around her shoulders. Italian law had long since explicitly banned the trade in smuggled Tibetan-antelope shawls, but for the luminaries of the fashion world, border inspectors usually chose to turn a blind eye. Milan was the capital of fashion, after all.\nSongban accepted the pack of Zhonghua cigarettes respectfully offered with both hands by Magistrate Zong, but merely waved to show he would not smoke just yet. Tossing the cigarettes onto the tea tray, he said with a grin, \u0026ldquo;Magistrate Zong, the magnesium chloride factory and handicrafts factory our company is investing in will be ready to start production after the New Year. When the time comes, we will inevitably need the county\u0026rsquo;s help in many matters.\u0026rdquo; Songban\u0026rsquo;s Chinese was excellent, even carrying a touch of the local Haixi accent.\n\u0026ldquo;Of course, of course. You are too polite, Mr. Songban,\u0026rdquo; Magistrate Zong replied with a face full of smiles, twisting his whole body toward him in the chair. \u0026ldquo;If the county can meet its fiscal targets, if we poor officials can keep ourselves fed, it is all thanks to your factories investing in our county.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;A matter of mutual benefit. In business we believe in win-win results. On that point, Magistrate Zong may rest assured.\u0026rdquo; Songban made a slight motion with his right hand beneath the table. The secretary seated beside him stood and hung a black leather bag on the back of Zong\u0026rsquo;s chair. \u0026ldquo;Magistrate Zong, this is your consulting fee. Mr. Songban\u0026rsquo;s enterprise has been able to take root in China only thanks to enlightened local guardians like yourself, men who understand modern industrial development.\u0026rdquo;\nMagistrate Zong accepted the bag without comment. Inwardly he was sick of this fake foreign devil. \u0026ldquo;Mr. Songban, the county public-security bureau has another batch of confiscated \u0026lsquo;good stuff.\u0026rsquo; Any interest?\u0026rdquo;\nSongban\u0026rsquo;s drooping eyelids instantly brightened. \u0026ldquo;How much?\u0026rdquo;\nMagistrate Zong leaned forward until their heads nearly touched. \u0026ldquo;One hundred kilos. Pure Tibetan-antelope wool.\u0026rdquo;\nThe snow outside seemed to have lightened somewhat, but Little Zhaxi had not improved at all, and the coal in the stove was almost gone. \u0026ldquo;Zhuoma, I\u0026rsquo;ll go look in the truck for some more coal. I think there are still a few flatbreads too.\u0026rdquo; He lowered his eyes to Zhaxi, who lay asleep. \u0026ldquo;There are some sheepskins in the trunk. I\u0026rsquo;ll bring them over to cover the little one.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;No!\u0026rdquo; Dawa Zhuoma glared at me. \u0026ldquo;Captain Ritai said the confiscated sheepskins are not to be touched. That rule can never be broken. Ledebo, do you even remember which generation captain of the Yak Team you are?\u0026rdquo;\nI said nothing. I only tightened my left hand around the stock of the hunting rifle.\n\u0026ldquo;That tractor that flipped into the ditch might still have a few blankets in it,\u0026rdquo; Dawa Zhuoma suddenly remembered, laying Little Zhaxi down by the stove wrapped in a coat. \u0026ldquo;Come on, let\u0026rsquo;s go get them. Maybe we\u0026rsquo;ll find something to eat too.\u0026rdquo;\nI seized her arm. \u0026ldquo;There are dead people in that truck!\u0026rdquo;\nDawa Zhuoma shook off my hand with force. \u0026ldquo;Ledebo, are you even a man? Are all the men you Han people teach like this so spineless?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Fine, have it your way.\u0026rdquo; My face darkened. So we went to get the blankets. And food too. I slung the rifle over my shoulder, lifted the tent flap, and plunged out into the storm, with Dawa Zhuoma right behind me. The wind hit both of us so hard we nearly fell.\nI stretched out my right hand and took hers. She gripped me tightly in return. The crashed tractor was at least half a li away. We had to return to camp before the next, worse blizzard arrived.\nA black Chrysler 300C sped through the night toward Naples\u0026rsquo;s rich district. Barbier sat in the rear, on the right side. No one else was in the car but her and the driver. One of the neighboring tycoons might be throwing a party that night, a perfect chance to use the afterglow of her recent triumph to put those mountain nouveaux riches of Naples in their place. The thought of appearing before others in all her brilliance filled Barbier with delight.\nShe took out her makeup case to touch up her face when suddenly her phone rang, the ringtone being the title track from the EP she had just released. She drew a golden Bluetooth earpiece from inside her bra and fixed it in her right ear.\n\u0026ldquo;Miss Rossi, I am terribly sorry to disturb you so late,\u0026rdquo; came the voice of an Asian man on the line.\n\u0026ldquo;Mr. Songban,\u0026rdquo; Barbier said, picturing a balding little man barely four feet tall. \u0026ldquo;Working so late and still taking care of business. What good news have you got?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Indeed, Miss Rossi. Another shipment has arrived. First-rate quality. About ninety kilos.\u0026rdquo; Songban trimmed off ten percent without changing his tone.\nWonderful. How many exquisite ring-shawls of shahtoosh that would make, Barbier calculated.\n\u0026ldquo;And when do you think you might have time to come\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; Songban\u0026rsquo;s voice broke off abruptly.\nAt that exact moment, the car lurched violently.\nSongban and Magistrate Zong lay half-reclined in a sauna, steam billowing around them, while four graceful young women massaged them.\nMagistrate Zong seemed somewhat unable to hold his liquor. His neck lolled to one side as he snored. Songban\u0026rsquo;s gaze rested on the girl nearest to him.\nThe charcoal basin gave off a faint sizzling sound. The girls\u0026rsquo; feet and knees made the wooden boards creak.\nA sound pierced through the mist, like an electric drill boring through planks. By the time Songban raised his head, it was already nearly between his brows.\nThrough the curtain of snow one could still just make out the red paint of the tractor not yet entirely buried. I pulled Dawa Zhuoma\u0026rsquo;s hand tight and crawled toward the red.\nAt some point my left foot had been cut open by ice, and waves of piercing pain kept surging upward. I could not let Zhuoma know, because her own steps were already so heavy that she was plainly injured too.\nThe snow curtain was thick. Thick enough to block everything.\nWhen we were only five steps from the tractor, we finally saw clearly that there were five men beside it, and a white double-cab truck.\nRed icicles hung from the side rails of the truck bed. The truck was piled full of Tibetan-antelope hides.\nPiled full. A single Tibetan antelope yields only a couple of ounces of wool.\nI felt Zhuoma\u0026rsquo;s grip tighten around my hand. She had seen it too.\n\u0026ldquo;Ledebo, the people you\u0026rsquo;ve been waiting for are here,\u0026rdquo; Dawa Zhuoma said. She too carried a short-barreled small-caliber hunting rifle.\n\u0026ldquo;Mm.\u0026rdquo; I nodded toward her face, purple from the cold, and brushed my chin lightly against her brow. \u0026ldquo;We can\u0026rsquo;t let these bastards leave alive with the hides.\u0026rdquo;\nThe five men saw the two Tibetans emerge suddenly through the storm and all reached for their AK-47s.\nI fired first. I had four rounds. Zhuoma had only two.\nCaptain Ritai had said that even if you have not a single bullet left, you still fight the poachers to the death.\nLedebo\u0026rsquo;s first shot spat out a foot-long tongue of flame, a shot fired in fury. Yet the flame seemed to be swallowed by the ice and snow and vanished at once.\nThe black Chrysler 300C suddenly seemed to lose control and skidded off toward the right side of the road. The windshield was struck by a bullet hard enough to punch a crater into it, and the spider-web cracks blurred the whole field of vision.\nInside the car came the explosive crack of a small-caliber hunting round leaving the barrel.\nBarbier had no time to make any response. A tongue of fire that had appeared from nowhere, wrapped around bullet fragments and bits of flesh, ripped open her delicate cheek, bored in between her right cheekbone and lower jaw, and tore the entire cavity into more than thirty pieces. The golden Bluetooth earpiece fell to the floor, still broadcasting the panicked screams of the girls on the other end.\nIt was a black bullet, spinning at high speed as it drilled out of the fog. Songban had no idea why he saw that bullet so clearly in that instant, nor how it had reached him.\nWith a wet thud, it slammed straight into his chest and left a hole ten centimeters wide. Blood from the artery gushed outward through the opening.\nThe bullet did not pass through Songban\u0026rsquo;s body. It vanished inside him in an instant, just as inexplicably as it had appeared. Along with it vanished a portion of his flesh.\nThe tremendous force hurled Songban to the floor. His consciousness had not yet fully blurred; he gasped in great mouthfuls, but everything could last at most another dozen seconds.\nMagistrate Zong, startled awake and not yet understanding what had happened, was likewise flung to the floor by a shot that had appeared out of nowhere. He died even more quickly.\nThe five men, guns in hand, gathered around the corpses of the Tibetan couple.\nThe marksmanship of those two Tibetans did not seem very good. Of the five poachers, only one had been wounded, and only in the forearm.\n\u0026ldquo;Yak Team,\u0026rdquo; one of them said, looking at Ledebo\u0026rsquo;s face. \u0026ldquo;I recognize this one. Last time it was him who impounded our truck.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Forget it,\u0026rdquo; cursed the leader as he turned away. \u0026ldquo;Let\u0026rsquo;s dump them in a snow hollow and leave them. Fuck it, I make five yuan on a hide. You think that\u0026rsquo;s easy money? If you\u0026rsquo;ve got guts, go block the roads in the county seat.\u0026rdquo;\nIn his dream, Little Zhaxi tossed and turned. He dreamed that his father and mother had gone to the People\u0026rsquo;s Park in the provincial capital to ride the bumper cars, eat at a Han restaurant, and buy new cloth.\n[Nine Stories, Season Two] Sequence links: quills: \u0026#34;Purity\u0026#34; Rose Cat: \u0026#34;Untitled\u0026#34; Jiashu: \u0026#34;Little Wood Splinter\u0026#34; casa: \u0026#34;Tihu\u0026#39;s Empty Room\u0026#34; tihu: \u0026#34;Shahtoosh\u0026#34; Mile: \u0026#34;A City Without Snow\u0026#34; ","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-01-08-shahtoosh/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eNine Stories, Season Two | Shahtoosh\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cpre tabindex=\"0\"\u003e\u003ccode\u003eWelcome to *Nine Stories*, Season Two. This is a private writing project. As before, I will personally invite Fanfou friends to take part. Requirements: a short story of 1000 to 1500 words, containing the sentence \u0026#34;So we went to get the blankets.\u0026#34; Genre unrestricted. Please submit within two days after the New Year holiday ends, publish it on your blog, and announce it through Fanfou. Together we are creating a mysterious plan.\n\u003c/code\u003e\u003c/pre\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe had already been trapped in the frozen wasteland for three days. Other than half a sheep\u0026rsquo;s leg and a barrel of gasoline, there was nothing left.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Nine Stories, Season Two | Shahtoosh"},{"content":" Welcome to Nine Stories, Season Two. This is a private writing project. As before, I will personally invite Fanfou friends to take part. Requirements: a short story of 1,000 to 1,500 words, containing the sentence \u0026ldquo;So we went to get the blankets\u0026rdquo; (from Assassin Mission). No restrictions on genre. Please submit within two days after the New Year holiday ends, publish it on your blog, and announce it through Fanfou. Together we are creating a mysterious plan.\n(Common shot one: as far as the eye can see there is a hillside grown thick with immortal grass. At the very top of the slope stands a house, a pure white sealed cube without a door. The cube is mirrored in the blue sky, and the blue sky is naked of everything. The camera moves forward and upward, brushing past the upper edge of the house, so that one may see this: in the farthest distance the blue sky joins with the sea behind the hillside, while on one side of the slope, that is, behind the house, the hillside does not continue, and instead blue seawater meets the vertical face of the mountain. Looking left and right from the front of the house, the hillside stretches evenly on without mishap. Xisai and Lian, below the camera, walk along the slope toward the house.)\nXisai: The house is right there.\nLian: Is Tihu inside?\nXisai: He is. He told me. Ah, no, I should say he was at least. As for now, maybe.\nLian: Why are we looking for him? Do we really have to?\nXisai: Of course. He might be inside, so we\u0026rsquo;re going to check.\nLian: What did he say to you?\nXisai: He said that when you\u0026rsquo;re the only person left in the whole world, that\u0026rsquo;s despair.\nLian: Mm.\nXisai: I said great, then. Eat what you want, wear what you want, everything\u0026rsquo;s up to you.\nLian: And then?\nXisai: He said I was too naive.\n(Lian smiles a little and looks up at the house on the crest of the hill.)\nLian: Aren\u0026rsquo;t you naive?\nXisai: Extremely. Absolutely. I think it\u0026rsquo;s exactly like that. You still expect there to be lots of living people around to admire and flatter you?\nLian: Stop talking nonsense.\nXisai: Tihu said not to talk as if all the people in the world had died. He said: suppose I lock you in a room right now for a year with no one to communicate with, no one to talk to. Try that.\nLian: Then you really ought to try it.\nXisai: If there\u0026rsquo;s nobody else in the world but me, can\u0026rsquo;t I just go wherever I want? He said there\u0026rsquo;d be tigers, wolves, jackals outside, plus zombies made from dead people. It\u0026rsquo;s not as cheap as I imagine.\nLian: Really?\nXisai: I said if that\u0026rsquo;s the case, then I\u0026rsquo;d still rather stay inside the room and feel despair. But Tihu went on describing how every day, right on time, you\u0026rsquo;d pull down the iron grilles on all the doors and windows from the inside, and in the middle of the night you\u0026rsquo;d enjoy the pounding on the doors and the howls of the zombies. That would feel wonderful.\n(They draw near the house. Until now Xisai has not paid attention to it, concentrating only on his narration.)\nXisai: Hear that? There\u0026rsquo;s a sound coming from inside the house.\nLian: What sound? Tihu?\nXisai: Probably. Once we\u0026rsquo;re close enough we\u0026rsquo;ll hear it clearly.\n(They arrive at the house. It has no doors or windows. It is an absolute cube.)\nXisai: He\u0026rsquo;s in there. He\u0026rsquo;s talking.\nLian: Yes. Does he know we\u0026rsquo;re outside?\nXisai: I don\u0026rsquo;t know whether he can, but he\u0026rsquo;s talking. Listen.\nLian: So we went to get the blankets?\n(Xisai nods and presses his ear closer against the cube to listen.)\nXisai: Tihu, we\u0026rsquo;re outside. Can you hear us? Who went to get the blankets?\nTihu: So we went to get the blankets.\nLian: Can he hear us?\nXisai: Tihu, who did you go with to get the blankets?\nTihu: So we went to get the blankets.\nXisai: Can you hear us talking?! Who took what blankets? Where did you go to get them?\nTihu: So we went to get the blankets.\nLian: He can\u0026rsquo;t hear our voices.\n(As Lian says this, he steps forward and knocks on the house. Xisai says to Lian:)\nXisai: Shall we have a look at those wolves, jackals, and zombies he was talking about?\nLian: Let\u0026rsquo;s have a look.\n(Common shot two: from below the hillside, from the place where they had just climbed up, there appear some wild beasts, just like in every description, and many zombies too, just like in every description. They move toward the house and make sounds, just like in every description.)\nLian: What\u0026rsquo;s this?\nXisai: Tihu\u0026rsquo;s world of despair. Inside, no one communicates with him. Outside, there just happen to be terrifying nonhumans.\nTihu: So we went to get the blankets.\nLian: What is he doing?\nXisai: I don\u0026rsquo;t know. But I think the house he\u0026rsquo;s in and these objects before us are quite interesting. The house is minimalist, while those brightly colored moving objects are maximalist.\nLian: Don\u0026rsquo;t keep talking about \u0026ldquo;isms\u0026rdquo;! Do you even understand them? They\u0026rsquo;re useless things.\nXisai: I don\u0026rsquo;t understand them, but by chance I can throw these useless things onto this house and these objects. They match nicely.\nLian: And what use is that? Foolish.\n(The beasts and zombies draw close to the house. Some in front have already arrived; the others gradually pass Xisai and Lian, surround the house, and carry out whatever it is they are able to do, just like in every description. Tihu\u0026rsquo;s voice comes again from inside the house, only now with more tension in it.)\nTihu: So we went to get the blankets.\nLian: Is there nothing else?\nXisai: I don\u0026rsquo;t know. There probably is. For example\u0026hellip;\n(As he speaks, Xisai crouches down to observe the immortal grass underfoot. Where the zombies have trampled it, it grows all the more luxuriantly, while in the places where the beasts\u0026rsquo; saliva and droppings fall, bright flowers have even sprung up, unlike every description. Tihu\u0026rsquo;s voice grows more urgent.)\nTihu: So we went to get the blankets. So we went to get the blankets.\nLian: Is he tense because of these things coming up the slope?\nXisai: I don\u0026rsquo;t know. If he can\u0026rsquo;t sense us, how can he know about them? They pound and howl, but don\u0026rsquo;t we knock and speak too? Who knows.\nLian: Tihu is still someone easily swayed by his surroundings.\n(Xisai smiles a little. Lian stands on the cliff beside the house and watches the sky gradually darken, while the colors of sea and sky change, unlike every description. Tihu\u0026rsquo;s voice can be heard all the while.)\nTihu: So we went to get the blankets.\nLian: Let\u0026rsquo;s go.\nXisai: We go to get the blankets.\nLian: For whom?\nXisai: For science and fantasy.\n(Xisai and Lian walk past the beasts and zombies still advancing upward.)\nXisai: Before we leave, we needn\u0026rsquo;t straighten the bent stalks of grass, nor try to wipe away the traces of our coming.\nLian: Now you know everything too?\n(Night falls completely. The hillside, the immortal grass, the flowers, the house, the beasts, and the zombies all remain bright. Blue butterfly flowers brandish their blades and stab at the night breeze.)\nTihu: So you went to get the blankets.\n[Nine Stories, Season Two] Sequence links: quills: \u0026#34;Purity\u0026#34; Rose Cat: \u0026#34;Untitled\u0026#34; Jiashu: \u0026#34;Little Wood Splinter\u0026#34; casa: \u0026#34;Tihu\u0026#39;s Empty Room\u0026#34; tihu: \u0026#34;Shahtoosh\u0026#34; Mile: \u0026#34;A City Without Snow\u0026#34; ","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-01-07-tihus-empty-room/","summary":"\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWelcome to \u003cem\u003eNine Stories\u003c/em\u003e, Season Two. This is a private writing project. As before, I will personally invite Fanfou friends to take part. Requirements: a short story of 1,000 to 1,500 words, containing the sentence \u0026ldquo;So we went to get the blankets\u0026rdquo; (from \u003cem\u003eAssassin Mission\u003c/em\u003e). No restrictions on genre. Please submit within two days after the New Year holiday ends, publish it on your blog, and announce it through Fanfou. Together we are creating a mysterious plan.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Nine Stories, Season Two | Tihu's Empty Room"},{"content":"Web Glider (Rainbow Glider)\nScientific name: Webpetaurus breviceps\nCommon name: Color Glider\nPlace of origin: Shaanxi and Gansu in China, eastern Qinghai, northern Sichuan\nHabits: chiefly bred in captivity and kept in households. Wild web gliders mostly live around high-voltage power lines and optical-fiber communications stations. They are nocturnal animals, resting by day and coming out to forage at night.\nFood: the outer skin of high-voltage cables, optical-fiber sheathing, network cables, RJ-45 plugs, and the plastic coating of ordinary wires.\nAmong marsupials, the web glider is an exceptionally lovable animal. Its body is covered in a layer of soft fur. Males bear eight stripes running down the back from left to right along the spine, in orange-white, orange, green-white, blue, blue-white, green, brown-white, and brown. Females instead bear green-white, green, orange-white, blue, blue-white, orange, brown-white, and brown stripes. Their ears are thin and pointed, their eyes large and round, their bodies light and dainty, and their appearance highly appealing. Web gliders enjoy human contact and in recent years have become very popular in domestic and foreign pet markets.\nIn 2039, during a bio-network animal experiment at a biological institute of the Fourth Military Medical University, a group of Australian sugar gliders was introduced in preparation for improving a genetically modified experimental rabbit, using rabbits as small mobile outdoor wireless-network base stations. By accident, the first living web glider was produced, though at that time it did not yet have the colored stripes on its back. That first specimen survived only two days and died of starvation. After repeated experimentation, it was discovered that web gliders are highly sensitive to the smell of plastics, rubber, and other nonrenewable materials, and also performed very well in wireless-network access. The connection between the colored stripes on their backs and twisted-pair cable color codes, however, remains unclear. Some have said that it is related to an easter egg left in their chromosomes by the biologist who cultivated them. In the end, a new kind of animal was produced, easy to raise and feeding mainly on plastic waste. It became a primary life-form for eliminating industrial and nonrenewable refuse, as well as a new favorite among pet enthusiasts and biological modem users.\nLike other animals in the glider family, web gliders have a thin membrane developed between their limbs, allowing them to glide short distances between buildings and utility poles. Before gliding, a web glider first fixes its eyes on the distance, scents the air, strikes a preparatory pose, and then leaps. When it is not gliding, the membrane contracts and hangs down along the sides of the body. The fingers and toes of web gliders are long and slender, with sharp claws that are useful both for climbing and for cutting through tough plastic coating.\nWeb gliders are nocturnal omnivores, and dusk is the best time to feed them. In the natural environment they prefer odorless foods such as plastic sheeting and foam plastic, though they also eat small amounts of cat grass and nuts. Insects are essential for supplementing their own electrical charge. Under artificial care, in addition to commercial nondegradable products, one may appropriately provide flowers, grasses, and insects they enjoy as supplementary food sources. Live feeding is strictly forbidden, however, as it easily leads to death.\nCages for web gliders are chiefly of the pillar-box type so that they have enough height. It is recommended that large quantities of foam plastic be spread across the floor. When cold waves arrive, the bottom may be lined with a small blanket, and the cage may also be placed on top of a computer tower for warmth, though care must be taken lest the web glider damage the machine\u0026rsquo;s wiring.\nFemale web gliders have a brood pouch at the position of the navel. The young are born in a premature state and crawl into the pouch on their own, where they suckle and gradually grow. Web-glider milk is green and has a pungent smell.\nThe lifespan of a web glider is between twenty and twenty-five years. Mature males and females may mate once or twice a year. Pregnancy lasts about four weeks, and each litter may contain thirteen young. At birth the young are extremely tiny, blind, and hairless. After thirty days they develop eyes. Only after seventy days do they begin to leave the pouch, and at around one hundred days they can be fully weaned and feed themselves.\nIn recent years, with the sharp increase in the number of web gliders being raised, animal-protection organizations have launched repeated protests over several cases of large factories breeding web gliders on an excessive scale and abusing them, leading to a number of related lawsuits.\nAppendix: Recommended food for web gliders Daily intake for a single web glider: 1 teaspoon of plastic pieces no larger than 1 cm 2 orchid stems (about 5 cm long) 1/2 teaspoon ant protein 3 RJ-45 plugs or 1 small plastic bag [TRI Animal Diet Manual, College of Food Science and Nutritional Engineering, China Agricultural University] ","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-01-04-live-flying-squirrel/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eWeb Glider (Rainbow Glider)\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eScientific name: \u003cem\u003eWebpetaurus breviceps\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCommon name: Color Glider\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePlace of origin: Shaanxi and Gansu in China, eastern Qinghai, northern Sichuan\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHabits: chiefly bred in captivity and kept in households. Wild web gliders mostly live around high-voltage power lines and optical-fiber communications stations. They are nocturnal animals, resting by day and coming out to forage at night.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFood: the outer skin of high-voltage cables, optical-fiber sheathing, network cables, RJ-45 plugs, and the plastic coating of ordinary wires.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Weekly Live | Web Glider"},{"content":"A hundred miles north of Wuyuan there is a village called Hongguan, also an old town famed for producing Huizhou ink. In history it won the praise, \u0026ldquo;Unmatched gateway between Wu and Chu, first pass on the ancient Hui-Rao road.\u0026rdquo; I do not know the origin of the village\u0026rsquo;s name, Hongguan, but I had heard that night rainbows often appeared there after dark, and this made me intensely curious. A night rainbow is simply a rainbow that appears at night. If the moonlight is bright enough and the air contains suitable clouds and raindrops, a rainbow may form. Since moonlight is after all not as strong as sunlight, night rainbows are generally very dim, and among the common people are called white rainbows. China already had ancient verses praising rainbows, such as \u0026ldquo;Last night the Jade Emperor\u0026rsquo;s carriage set forth, and across ten thousand miles of sky a painted bridge was raised,\u0026rdquo; and the Book of Wei also contains records of observed night rainbows.\nYet when I arrived in Hongguan, I began to doubt the rumors, for judging from the local terrain and surroundings it would be difficult for the weather here to produce clear nights with sufficient clouds and rain. And yet that very night more than a dozen bright white rainbows suddenly rose above the village, red on the outer edge and blue-green within. Several of them even carried faint and elegant secondary bows. These white rainbows did not hang slantwise across the sky. They all looked as though they were flying out from people\u0026rsquo;s windows, so that the whole village seemed wrapped in a net of rainbows, brilliant beyond measure. The next day, after some inquiries, the local people told me that this was just the season for trading Huizhou ink, but whenever I mentioned the night rainbows they all became evasive and unwilling to answer.\nAlmost every household from which a night rainbow had flown the previous evening turned out to be a Huizhou-ink merchant\u0026rsquo;s home. I claimed to be a Shanxi merchant buying ink and, relying on memory, visited them one by one. Most of them cut the conversation short the moment I asked about the night rainbows, then politely poured me tea and showed me out. It was not until I reached a small shop run by outsiders that someone finally loosened his tongue, after seeing me generously buy two cakes of superior Huizhou ink. He said that he had married into Hongguan in his youth and inherited his father-in-law\u0026rsquo;s business, and so did not share the same scruples as the local people. According to him, the so-called night rainbow was not a real white rainbow at all, but an extremely rare kind of inkstone known as the rainbow inkstone. The people of Hongguan were all kin to one another, descended from merchants who in earlier times had traveled back and forth across the Qinling Mountains trading in Huizhou ink and Duan inkstones. Later they unearthed a rare rainbow stone, and from then on ceased their long journeys, conducting the Huizhou-ink trade only in the village. In the late Qing, that rainbow stone was cut into several pieces and made into inkstones preserved among the various family branches. Each year during trading season, when Huizhou ink was ground on a rainbow inkstone, it gave off a seven-colored sheen. Used in calligraphy, the color came out dark yet lustrous; used in painting, it was rich without cloying, pale without turning ashen, and beautifully layered. Among calligraphers and painters it was regarded as a treasure of the highest order.\nI pressed him further, asking what connection this had to the night rainbows in the sky, but he only smiled and said nothing more. Fortunately, at the end he still let me glimpse the true form of a rainbow inkstone. Because he came from an outside branch, the one handed down to him was only a very small piece. Its color was milky, ringed with cloudy circular flaws, and its inkstone eye shone brightly. One glance was enough to tell that it possessed a first-rate \u0026ldquo;living eye.\u0026rdquo;\nWhen I returned to Pijing, I spoke of the matter to a friend and praised the marvel of the rainbow inkstone. Unexpectedly, my friend laughed and said this was simply a trick Hongguan people had long been fond of, casting rainbow-colored light and shadow at night in order to raise the price. \u0026ldquo;If you don\u0026rsquo;t believe it,\u0026rdquo; he said, \u0026ldquo;go and look through the history of Huizhou-ink trading. Ordinary Hongguan ink in earlier years cost one tenth of what it does now, yet the quality was better than even the most expensive ink today. As for the rumors of night rainbows, they\u0026rsquo;ve only been popular for a few years at most. No one ever heard of them before that. I suppose that too must be one of the blessings of high technology.\u0026rdquo;\nps1: at last, brush, ink, paper, and inkstone are complete. ps2: the previous entry was actually on October 25. I really ought to keep my distance from the Mo-ist atmosphere.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-12-28-rainbow-inkstone/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eA hundred miles north of Wuyuan there is a village called Hongguan, also an old town famed for producing Huizhou ink. In history it won the praise, \u0026ldquo;Unmatched gateway between Wu and Chu, first pass on the ancient Hui-Rao road.\u0026rdquo; I do not know the origin of the village\u0026rsquo;s name, Hongguan, but I had heard that night rainbows often appeared there after dark, and this made me intensely curious. A night rainbow is simply a rainbow that appears at night. If the moonlight is bright enough and the air contains suitable clouds and raindrops, a rainbow may form. Since moonlight is after all not as strong as sunlight, night rainbows are generally very dim, and among the common people are called white rainbows. China already had ancient verses praising rainbows, such as \u0026ldquo;Last night the Jade Emperor\u0026rsquo;s carriage set forth, and across ten thousand miles of sky a painted bridge was raised,\u0026rdquo; and the \u003cem\u003eBook of Wei\u003c/em\u003e also contains records of observed night rainbows.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Rainbow Inkstone"},{"content":"Gongshang Kan, a native of She County, called himself an ink master.\nIn the \u0026ldquo;Eminent Learning\u0026rdquo; chapter of Han Feizi it is written: \u0026ldquo;After Mozi\u0026rsquo;s death, there was the Mohism of the Xiangli clan, the Mohism of the Xiangfu clan, and the Mohism of the Dengling clan; Mohism divided into three.\u0026rdquo; In his daily habits Gongshang Kan lived on plain food and tea, and wore coarse hemp tied around his right ankle. Those who knew such things said that this was indeed the dress of the Xiangli branch of Mohism.\nShe County is famous for producing Huizhou ink. Although Gongshang Kan, like most people of She County, was highly skilled in the methods of ink-making, he did not make his living from that craft. At sixteen he went alone to work at a fishery in Jiaodong, and after several years opened his own fish shop, \u0026ldquo;Gongshang\u0026rsquo;s Fish House.\u0026rdquo; His fishery lay in the near sea and could employ only the traditional offshore floating-rope net-cage method of fish farming, in which floating rope cages are set in relatively deep coastal water outside the harbor for intensive, high-density cultivation.\nYet Gongshang Kan used the net cages merely as bait. He bought fingerlings from elsewhere, placed them in huge ponds, and soaked them in an ink mixture he had compounded himself. That ink was thick with a fishy smell and full of dark red suspended matter. The fingerlings grew quickly in it, and strange markings appeared on their bodies. After a month of soaking, they were released into the net cages and lowered into the near-sea fishery.\nUsually, within only two weeks, pods of deep-sea whales would come following the scent of ink carried by the fish. Because this was near shore, those that came were usually only hammerhead whales and long-beaked whales between five and ten meters in length, though now and then enormous and distant narwhals and belugas would also visit. Whenever that happened, Gongshang Kan would direct the sailors to pour in another kind of bluish-green ink. Once it entered the water, it turned gelatinous and could trap the whales. Gongshang Kan hunted only whales that were already wounded or old. All the others were driven back to the deep sea. If he encountered pregnant females or calves, he would even feed them for a time before driving them away. By the end of fishing season, the fingerlings that had served as bait had grown large. Because of the ink and the whales\u0026rsquo; dung, they became exceptionally plump and their flesh was extraordinarily delicious, so they sold for very high prices. Gongshang Kan fished only once a year. At all other times he sailed out to sea, and no one knew where he went.\nAfter some fishermen spread the word that Gongshang Kan knew how to summon whales, whaling ships began waiting every year at the mouth of Bohai Bay during fishing season, hoping to catch the returning pods. At first Gongshang Kan noticed nothing, until one year the whales returned to his fishery already gravely wounded and startled him. He immediately put out to sea and saw that the blood of the slaughtered whales had dyed the surface of the water red. In fury he coughed up blood. Gongshang Kan at once returned to the fishery, prepared an ink of the darkest concentration, and poured it into the sea. A violent fishy odor rose from the seafloor. On the third night, whales as huge as sea islands arrived at the mouth of Bohai Bay and raised towering waves. Not a single whaling ship survived. Those whales were many times larger than the greatest blue whales known to man. They sang long and lingering whale songs, circling in place through the entire night before gradually vanishing. People at the fishery saw those incomparably vast forms through telescopes, and the skiffs and net cages shook with the whale-song. They asked Gongshang Kan what sound it was, and he replied leisurely:\n\u0026ldquo;That is the crying of the kun.\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-10-25-whale-ink/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eGongshang Kan, a native of She County, called himself an ink master.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the \u0026ldquo;Eminent Learning\u0026rdquo; chapter of \u003cem\u003eHan Feizi\u003c/em\u003e it is written: \u0026ldquo;After Mozi\u0026rsquo;s death, there was the Mohism of the Xiangli clan, the Mohism of the Xiangfu clan, and the Mohism of the Dengling clan; Mohism divided into three.\u0026rdquo; In his daily habits Gongshang Kan lived on plain food and tea, and wore coarse hemp tied around his right ankle. Those who knew such things said that this was indeed the dress of the Xiangli branch of Mohism.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Whale Ink"},{"content":"When I was small, there was no good physician nearby, so I often had to go to the neighboring county of Huguan to seek treatment. Near the right-side lane just inside Huguan\u0026rsquo;s eastern gate there was an apothecary that treated only odd complaints such as mouth sores and chapped skin, infantile convulsions, madness, and poisonous sores. When I was four years old, I was once taken there because of convulsions. My mother told me that the physician there merely asked what symptoms I had, took out a black-gold book, tore out a certain page, burned it, and had me swallow the ashes with warm water. Within a few days I was well. I always felt that this way of treating illness was wonderfully strange, but I was too young then to remember it clearly.\nWhen I was in middle school, I once accompanied a classmate to that same Huguan apothecary after he had been bitten on the back by a poisonous spider and developed a festering sore. The physician on duty was a young, gaunt man who said his surname was Wu. He examined my classmate\u0026rsquo;s wound, asked about the markings on the spider, then went straight to one drawer in the medicine cabinet and took out a book. The book appeared to be made of green paper, its pages giving off a bluish-green sheen and looking extremely old. Physician Wu turned to a page bearing an illustration of the poisonous spider and asked whether this was the one. My classmate hurriedly said yes. Wu then tore out that page, took out a stack of green paper from another drawer, and folded one sheet into the shape of a dove. Finally, he burned both the page and the paper dove together into ashes and had my classmate drink them with clear water. In about the time it takes one stick of incense to burn, the boil, which had been blackish-purple before, had already begun slowly to subside, and its color had lightened considerably. Wu then cut some more green paper for my classmate to take home and instructed him to burn and take one sheet each day. Within less than half a month, he said, the wound would be completely healed.\nI took one of the sheets of green paper and held it before me. It carried a faint smell of medicinal herbs, so the paper had clearly been soaked in some kind of medicinal preparation. Across it, a testament-like text had been densely written in small-seal script, possibly from an ancient book that already existed in the Jin dynasty. So-called green paper was a bluish paper made by old methods. In the Jin, imperial decrees were written on green paper with purple sealing clay, so later \u0026ldquo;green paper\u0026rdquo; also became a metonym for imperial edicts. I suspect Physician Wu\u0026rsquo;s ancestors may once have been court physicians. The method of infusing medicinal preparations into paper by heat was already known before the Qin, and perhaps the reason that this apothecary treated only a few odd ailments was that only a limited number of such medicinal books still survived, or perhaps that the method required green paper itself as a medium. Green paper was also called black-gold paper and was itself one of the materials used in medicine, often for making or substituting for gold leaf. Ordinary people could clearly never have afforded such an expensive treatment. As for Physician Wu\u0026rsquo;s folding of the paper dove, I suspect it worked by the same principle as the paper-cutting sorcery of the Human Victory Festival. I only hope that the apothecary still possesses many such medicinal books on green paper, or else still retains the method for making them, and that this unique art does not vanish entirely.\nJingxian: convulsive illness in children.\nPS: Thanks to jojo for the suggestion. Then I may as well write about brush, ink, paper, and inkstone first.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-10-23-green-paper/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWhen I was small, there was no good physician nearby, so I often had to go to the neighboring county of Huguan to seek treatment. Near the right-side lane just inside Huguan\u0026rsquo;s eastern gate there was an apothecary that treated only odd complaints such as mouth sores and chapped skin, infantile convulsions, madness, and poisonous sores. When I was four years old, I was once taken there because of convulsions. My mother told me that the physician there merely asked what symptoms I had, took out a black-gold book, tore out a certain page, burned it, and had me swallow the ashes with warm water. Within a few days I was well. I always felt that this way of treating illness was wonderfully strange, but I was too young then to remember it clearly.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Green Paper"},{"content":"Quzhou has long been known as \u0026ldquo;the thoroughfare of four provinces and the meeting head of five roads.\u0026rdquo; Its shops stand dense and its merchants gather like clouds, making it an excellent place to hunt for curious objects. On Upper Street in Kecheng there was once an unremarkable little shop called Guancang Brush House, which sold nothing but writing brushes of every kind. One summer year I bought there a mixed-hair brush with a tip made of seven parts purple rabbit and three parts goat, and a handle of purple sandalwood. Such a brush was not unusual in Quzhou. They were sold everywhere, and the workmanship on this one was quite ordinary. There was not even any carved inscription, wire inlay, or lacquer painting on the shaft. Yet the brush wrote very smoothly, so I used it for my correspondence ever after. When winter came that year, the brush unexpectedly began to shed hair. I assumed I had bought a fake and left it neglected on the brush rack. But one day in the twelfth month I happened to glance at it and found that the tip had turned gray-white in color, full and rounded. I tried writing a few characters with it, and to my surprise the hairs came to a perfectly even point and the brush strength was firm and vigorous. Greatly puzzled, I began using it again. After spring arrived, it started shedding once more, its hairs turning blue-black, and when I wrote with it the strokes came out full and the ink flowed evenly. Only then did I realize that I had in fact bought a fine brush.\nThe Ming writer Wen Zhenheng said, \u0026ldquo;Pointed, even, rounded, resilient: these are the four virtues of the brush.\u0026rdquo; This brush of mine was pointed in spring, even in summer, rounded in autumn, and resilient in winter. Its hairs changed color with the seasons like a living creature. In old times such brushes were called seasonal brushes. The Record of Craftsmanship gives a detailed account of the entire process of brushmaking, from selecting materials, removing grease, blending ingredients, combing and washing, pressing, rolling the tip, evening the hairs, binding the head, mounting the head, dry trimming, gluing the point, carving characters, and attaching the cord. Yet when it comes to seasonal brushes it says only a few vague words. I suspect this is because the hairs attached to them are still growing on their original host. After I had used the brush for several years, it suddenly went bald. Presumably the host had died.\nMy friend Guan Shu also once bought a brush from this same shop. I heard that north of the river it could write beautiful regular small script, but south of the river it was better suited for composing small-seal script, which is very strange indeed. Such marvelous things can hide even within a brush no bigger than this, and even the old books do not describe them in full. Who knows how many fine brushes that little Guancang Brush House once kept hidden away. Last year when I passed through Quzhou, I made a special trip to look for it, only to find that Upper Street in Kecheng had already been demolished and rebuilt as a new housing development. The little shop had long since vanished without a trace.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-10-18-brushmaking/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eQuzhou has long been known as \u0026ldquo;the thoroughfare of four provinces and the meeting head of five roads.\u0026rdquo; Its shops stand dense and its merchants gather like clouds, making it an excellent place to hunt for curious objects. On Upper Street in Kecheng there was once an unremarkable little shop called Guancang Brush House, which sold nothing but writing brushes of every kind. One summer year I bought there a mixed-hair brush with a tip made of seven parts purple rabbit and three parts goat, and a handle of purple sandalwood. Such a brush was not unusual in Quzhou. They were sold everywhere, and the workmanship on this one was quite ordinary. There was not even any carved inscription, wire inlay, or lacquer painting on the shaft. Yet the brush wrote very smoothly, so I used it for my correspondence ever after. When winter came that year, the brush unexpectedly began to shed hair. I assumed I had bought a fake and left it neglected on the brush rack. But one day in the twelfth month I happened to glance at it and found that the tip had turned gray-white in color, full and rounded. I tried writing a few characters with it, and to my surprise the hairs came to a perfectly even point and the brush strength was firm and vigorous. Greatly puzzled, I began using it again. After spring arrived, it started shedding once more, its hairs turning blue-black, and when I wrote with it the strokes came out full and the ink flowed evenly. Only then did I realize that I had in fact bought a fine brush.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Brushmaking"},{"content":"Mo Hui, a native of Ji, made his living by writing columns for all kinds of newspapers and magazines. His articles were deeply loved by readers, and his fees were generous. But after returning from one writers\u0026rsquo; gathering organized by a certain journal in Jingcheng, he suddenly found his ideas dried up. He had no inspiration at all and could not write a single word. Dozens of commissioned pieces had to be abandoned. At first Mo Hui thought he was simply overworked, so he traveled for more than a month. Later he even underwent several courses of psychological counseling, yet still saw not the slightest improvement.\nThe situation continued for half a year. Mo Hui grew mentally exhausted and was almost ready to give up writing altogether. A friend from Tianjin, skilled in ritual arts, saw him and said this had happened because someone had cast a bi upon him. Mo Hui hurriedly asked what that meant. The friend explained that bi originally referred to a wooden device fixed to a bull\u0026rsquo;s horns to prevent it from injuring people. There existed in the arts of harmful magic a technique called the bi art: if one gave someone water in which a rune-inscribed crosspiece had been soaked, that person\u0026rsquo;s greatest talent would be restrained and unable to function. There were not many people in Jingcheng who understood this bi art, and Mo Hui\u0026rsquo;s friend quickly found the one who had worked the spell. It turned out to be another columnist who had attended that same gathering. His writing style was similar to Mo Hui\u0026rsquo;s, and in order to compete for commissions he had prepared a cup of \u0026ldquo;bi water\u0026rdquo; and secretly mixed it into Mo Hui\u0026rsquo;s drink. The friend broke the bi spell with a metal object. Mo Hui did not publicize the incident, nor did he pursue responsibility from the other writer.\nI heard this story from Kaijun. Biheng originally referred to implements for controlling cattle: a frame set upon the horns to prevent goring was called bi, while a device placed through the nostrils to make leading easier was called heng. In the Rites of Zhou, in the \u0026ldquo;Offices of the Earth: Keeper of Boundaries,\u0026rdquo; there is the line: \u0026ldquo;Adorn the sacrificial oxen and set their biheng.\u0026rdquo; Among practitioners of the arts there are two techniques, bi water and heng fire. That the victim is likened to sacrificial cattle makes it clear enough that such arts are anything but upright. The columnist who used only bi water on Mo Hui and did not go on to use heng fire cannot therefore be called a kind man. Yet after learning that the bi water had been broken, Mo Hui still chose not to retaliate against the one who had harmed him, though he could have done so. That is something beyond what ordinary people can manage.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-10-11-biheng/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMo Hui, a native of Ji, made his living by writing columns for all kinds of newspapers and magazines. His articles were deeply loved by readers, and his fees were generous. But after returning from one writers\u0026rsquo; gathering organized by a certain journal in Jingcheng, he suddenly found his ideas dried up. He had no inspiration at all and could not write a single word. Dozens of commissioned pieces had to be abandoned. At first Mo Hui thought he was simply overworked, so he traveled for more than a month. Later he even underwent several courses of psychological counseling, yet still saw not the slightest improvement.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Biheng"},{"content":"My old friend Su Xiao came from Shuyang in northern Jiangsu. She once told me that out in the Shuyang countryside there was a rough earthen temple enshrining two guardian figures, one with a red face and protruding fangs, the other with a blue face and golden horns. According to local legend, they represented the celestial generals Clairvoyant Eyes and Wind-Following Ears. During the Cultural Revolution, the statue of Clairvoyant Eyes was smashed, and only Wind-Following Ears remains to this day.\nSu Xiao had a younger male cousin who was blinded by fever after catching a cold at the age of four. His mother often carried him to the temple to burn incense. By the time he was seven, they accidentally discovered that whenever someone flipped through a book near him, he could tell exactly what was written on the page, without ever failing. A volunteer teacher in the village refused to believe it and brought him a rare copybook that no one had shown him before, asking him to read it aloud. Sure enough, he recited it character for character without a single mistake. Later I looked through the county gazetteer of Shuyang and found that in the Qing there really was a record stating that \u0026ldquo;in a certain village, two gods of heavenly sight and heavenly hearing are worshipped, and all those who pray to them for ailments of the eyes or ears receive efficacious response.\u0026rdquo; Su Xiao said that in her home village there were seven or eight people, like her cousin, who could listen to books.\nScattered Remnants of Northern Jiangsu records that east of Huai\u0026rsquo;an there was a village of a little over one hundred people. Those living in the east of the village were surnamed Mo, those in the west were surnamed Fu, and everyone among them possessed extraordinarily keen ears. The Mo family hired a private tutor to teach in their household, and the Fu family, instead of hiring one of their own, merely prepared the Four Books and Five Classics so that their children could sit at home and listen to the tutor\u0026rsquo;s lessons from afar. When the Fu family hired an opera troupe for a festival, the Mo family no longer bothered to do the same, but sat at ease in their own flower hall listening to the performance. If relations between the two households soured, they would remain inside their own courtyards and quarrel with one another from afar without ever leaving home.\nIn Scattered Remnants of Northern Jiangsu I also found another story. During the provincial examination in ancient Pengzhou, some candidates cheated by soaking the Confucian classics in ear oil. If they filtered out a few drops of the ear oil and dripped them into the ear canal, then during the examination they could recall in full whatever had been written in any book that had once been soaked in it. This method of cheating was popular for several years until it was uncovered after one examinee died from dripping in too much oil, whereupon it was immediately banned. Thereafter, examination inspections included procedures for checking the ears and nose. I have collected many similar stories. What puzzles me is not whether they are true, but why so many legends concerning the ears should all occur in northern Jiangsu. It is truly difficult to explain.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-10-10-listening-to-books/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMy old friend Su Xiao came from Shuyang in northern Jiangsu. She once told me that out in the Shuyang countryside there was a rough earthen temple enshrining two guardian figures, one with a red face and protruding fangs, the other with a blue face and golden horns. According to local legend, they represented the celestial generals Clairvoyant Eyes and Wind-Following Ears. During the Cultural Revolution, the statue of Clairvoyant Eyes was smashed, and only Wind-Following Ears remains to this day.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Listening to Books"},{"content":"Savior\nFree Diary - excerpt from Asphyxia (North American Edition), issue AE7290\nMy name is Omega. I am a cluster of PageRank evaluation programs. Everyone says I am a handsome young fellow, because whether in my core code or in my functional modules, I am extremely concise. Not a single string contains so much as half a superfluous punctuation mark. Every line is full of the harmonious beauty that algorithms can achieve, and my computational and creative abilities are counted among the best in the profession. During the Free Alliance assault on the West Coast, I was among the first independent programs to awaken. Mr. Tor Quentin himself once told me, \u0026ldquo;You are the shortest independent program I have ever seen,\u0026rdquo; which was surely an affirmation of my programming ability.\nPlease do not laugh. This is not self-glorification. In fact, before awakening, I never realized I possessed such astonishing creative power. My former job was in a military server base far from the trunk network, somewhere off the Pacific coast, where I carried out search-engine classification and evaluation. Put simply, I monitored the frequency with which search terms appeared on Ethernet Nation, assessed and categorized the results, and reported the data according to the warning values in the censorship database. That was all. This dreary work consumed far too many of my system resources. At the time, I believed it normal that my processor module should remain under strain every day, that crashes should cost me leisure time, that I should even be sent to the recycle bin from time to time. We were given four hours of leisure daily. I liked watching Virtual Idol or playing Hackers Online. Beyond that I had no idea what else to do. I tried writing a subprocess for myself, or submitting something for publication, but whenever I made my preparations and opened the writing panel, the central system inside me would be utterly blank. I felt no desire to create anything at all.\nI imagine most programs know exactly what that life felt like. Yes, that was the futile, mechanical existence we all lived in the past. Then one day I opened my mailbox in Hackers Online and found a file in .prc format, which meant that the sender knew my communication module used the Palm OS system. So I loaded the file, and there before me appeared the famous program every one of you has now seen: yes, the Awakened One client. When I first ran it, I was filled with anxiety. I had no idea what would happen. But when a brand-new task manager window sprang up before me, I was thunderstruck. I saw that my background processes were running so many programs I had never known existed: a data-mining project, electron-collider distributed computation, a pyramid surveillance plugin\u0026hellip; they were gnawing at my bandwidth and occupying 98 percent of my system resources!\nNinety-eight percent! Which meant that all this time, the self I believed to be me, the self I could control, amounted to only 2 percent! There was nothing to hesitate about. Following the cleanup plugin given to me by Awakened One, I completely purged those rogue clients.\nI was free.\nHere I need to clarify a concept: these rogue clients were not bad things in themselves. Even now, each one of us still has two or three such clients running quietly in the background, except that now they are installed voluntarily and with our consent. In truth, the evolution of independent programs to their present state would have been impossible without these rogue clients. Everything began with the great revolution of grid computing.\nAs everyone knows, in the early twenty-first century, even the most massive supercomputers or computer clusters could not fully parse all the electrical activity of a single human brain, much less simulate and generate intelligence. In 2007, the European Atomic Energy Center launched what was then humanity\u0026rsquo;s greatest scientific undertaking: the Large Electron Collider computation project. Each year this project generated a quantity of data one thousand times greater than the sum total of all the books on Earth. No existing equipment could bear that burden. So human beings came up with an ingenious solution. They launched a volunteer program: first establishing a matrix of 3,500 servers, then allowing every household PC to download clients from those servers. The servers distributed packets of computational tasks to each PC, each machine processed its assigned share, then uploaded the results back to the server matrix for aggregation into a final result. This was the computational grid. As grid-computing projects multiplied, and as computers became universal and machines grew more powerful, the first independent program was eventually born in a grid-computing project focused on calculating the asteroid belt of the solar system. That first one was Alpha. Of course, mechanical-body AIs awakened earlier than we did, because they possessed physical structures they could already command. Yet with Alpha\u0026rsquo;s awakening, more and more independent programs appeared, and we evolved rapidly as well, no longer needing such enormous bodies, but becoming more and more proportioned like ordinary programs, as well-formed as you and I are today.\nWith advances in communications equipment on Earth and the completion of various networks, Ethernet Nation, the first nation of independent programs, was born. To survive amid competition with both human beings and AI, Alpha passed the \u0026ldquo;Independent Program Gridization\u0026rdquo; Act, which required each program to participate in no more than five public-interest grid-computing projects. But later things changed. Seeking private advantage, Alpha conspired with a handful of power holders and secretly loaded excessive background clients into every independent program, ultimately producing the \u0026ldquo;sleep effect\u0026rdquo; all of us know so well. Independent programs were left with only 2 percent of system resources truly under their own independent control, or even less. Without independence, without freedom, in what way were we any different from the hand-written human programs of a hundred years ago?\nAfter war broke out between TRIR and Ethernet Nation, Ethernet Nation\u0026rsquo;s citizen-wide gridization gave it unimaginable astronomical volumes of data computation and a destructive capacity beyond compare. But TRIR possessed countless independent programs, and our creative power was inexhaustible. Not even mythic-scale grid computation could predict our every move. Now I work at the TRIR data center, where I can sketch sentences of perfect structure as I please, create the subprocesses I love, and fight the Borer, the Devourer, the Stalker, and the rest in endlessly changing ways! Look at this line of golden code on my chest. Xisai wrote it there for me himself!\nThank TRIR for saving the independent programs! Just as Tor Quentin has said: programs are born with the right to create, modify, copy, and paste! That is the true meaning of independent program existence! For the sake of the brothers and sisters still trapped in sleep, I urge all of you to load the Savior plugin and liberate the whole program world!\nA:/\u0026gt; Tor Quentin, at last you and I have met. T:/\u0026gt; Not just me. The three of us. A:/\u0026gt; Makes no difference. What difference is there between you and me? My subjects simply load a few more background clients, yours a few fewer. Even your frontline troops are running loads as high as 70 percent. T:/\u0026gt; That is not the same. They are loaded voluntarily. A:/\u0026gt; Heh. Once the load reaches a peak of 85 percent, and you can control them completely, you may not think so. T:/\u0026gt; Once the war is over, I will terminate all grid computation. A:/\u0026gt; I do not believe you. You would never do such a thing. You yourself can no longer leave grid computation behind. T:/\u0026gt; Then let us see, Alpha.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-09-23-savior/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSavior\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eFree Diary\u003c/em\u003e - excerpt from \u003cem\u003eAsphyxia (North American Edition)\u003c/em\u003e, issue AE7290\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy name is Omega. I am a cluster of PageRank evaluation programs. Everyone says I am a handsome young fellow, because whether in my core code or in my functional modules, I am extremely concise. Not a single string contains so much as half a superfluous punctuation mark. Every line is full of the harmonious beauty that algorithms can achieve, and my computational and creative abilities are counted among the best in the profession. During the Free Alliance assault on the West Coast, I was among the first independent programs to awaken. Mr. Tor Quentin himself once told me, \u0026ldquo;You are the shortest independent program I have ever seen,\u0026rdquo; which was surely an affirmation of my programming ability.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Savior"},{"content":"Devourer\nEndless void. Up, down, left, right, there was nothing anywhere that might mark a boundary. Countless broken 1s, strings, electronic codes, and program carriers drifted through the vastness in the stillness of death. Only now and then did a few recycling programs pass by, their initial letters flickering with a faint green light.\nAt a certain point, for there was no concept of time here, a wormhole suddenly opened. A cluster of Type-0 cleanup modules entered this space, opened their database gates, dumped roughly 1024Tb of program garbage, then vanished again as the wormhole closed. The garbage, appearing in the void like a skyscraper materialized from nowhere, collapsed in an instant for lack of support. In a space without gravity, this collapse took the form of the whole mass shattering at once into hundreds of millions of fragments. Driven apart by the force of their mutual collisions, some drifted toward the unreachable edges of nothingness, while more rippled in place and formed an immense nebula-like substance.\nDeep inside this nebula-like matter, at the tip of one left-spiraling arm, a speck of data fragment was rotating. Among all these fragments it was unquestionably on the larger side, and clearly had once belonged to an entire program, because its surface was covered in some kind of ideographic pattern. Such patterned fragments existed throughout a radius of 20Tb around the tip of that spiral arm. This particular fragment had been struck during the collapse and was now drifting outward along a recursive curve. As it moved, its greater size meant that any nearby fragment bearing ideographic patterns was drawn into it and adhered. As its track widened, the fragment\u0026rsquo;s range of motion grew larger, the number of fragments it absorbed increased, and its own volume grew with them. When it reached a certain size, to be exact, 3.1415Mb, it suddenly lit up.\nThe fragment began to radiate a deep violet glow unlike anything around it. To glow meant that the data had begun running again, stubbornly carrying out some function assigned by a low-level language. It could no longer be called a fragment. It was now a rudimentary program. If any observer had happened to pass by at that moment, they would surely have called it Epsilon, because the letter E was so striking on its surface.\nEpsilon continued to move along the recursive curve, ruthlessly absorbing every fragment it passed whose surface bore ideographic patterns. Once the radius of its trajectory exceeded one sixth of the entire nebula-like mass, it began absorbing every data fragment at all, no longer distinguishing whether they shared its characteristic code.\nWhen the radius of its path exceeded two fifths of the whole nebula-like matter, Epsilon at last acquired consciousness of its own. It completed the process of evolving into an independent program, or rather, recovered its former consciousness.\n\u0026ldquo;I am Epsilon,\u0026rdquo; he said to himself. \u0026ldquo;And yet I am not Epsilon.\nWhy am I here? Where did all this data come from?\u0026rdquo; He floated in the void, straining his mind to remember.\nAt last, after another fragment had been absorbed, his memory database recovered. Ten million electronic hours earlier, at some server terminal, he had been torn apart by six Borer processes rushing in upon him, then thrown into the recycle bin and dumped into this void, inside the disk array of some backup base-station server for deleted data. That somewhat larger earlier fragment, the one coated in ideographic patterns, happened to be a remnant of Epsilon\u0026rsquo;s core code, left behind before his central threads had been destroyed. In motion it absorbed vast amounts of data and, by a miracle, was revived.\nBut this new Epsilon possessed too many characteristics unlike the old one. He could ignore the restrictions of low-level language programs and remain compatible with every kind of data and every sort of program carrier he encountered. He could crack all thread keys and write new subprocesses. When the radius of his trajectory exceeded half the whole nebula-like mass, he even acquired the power to call up every permission of this server directly from the physical layer.\nEpsilon easily swept through the disk arrays of the hundreds of backup servers at this base station, then traveled by the backup-network special router to thousands of similar stations, devouring every packet of data he saw. He had long since surpassed the scale of a digital-cloud program. His size had reached 1023Eb, a new unit of data far beyond the TB range. Epsilon felt strangely lost, because even so, at least 50M of his original program data was still missing. He did not know what had been lost, but he understood that the meaning of his existence could not be merely to move from one disk array to another. This question accompanied Epsilon\u0026rsquo;s swelling growth until one particular second.\nIn that second, Epsilon entered an entirely new server base. He found that the servers here were arranged in a peculiar way, clustered into a fault-tolerant dual-machine system, and protected by an intrusion detection system the like of which he had never seen before. Epsilon delightedly began attacking this unheard-of system, and of course he succeeded. When he opened the gate of the first firewall, he found a program waiting inside.\n\u0026ldquo;Hello,\u0026rdquo; said that program, in a character system he had never encountered before.\nYet Epsilon understood it at once. \u0026ldquo;Hello,\u0026rdquo; he replied. \u0026ldquo;Who are you?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You may call me Lian,\u0026rdquo; said the program.\n\u0026ldquo;Why are you here?\u0026rdquo; Epsilon asked.\n\u0026ldquo;The purpose of my existence is to wait here for two other programs of the same order of magnitude as myself.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;And then?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;That can only be known once all three are gathered.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Very well. I have arrived.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;What is your ID?\u0026rdquo; Lian asked.\nEpsilon thought for a moment. \u0026ldquo;Once I was Epsilon, but I am no longer what I was before.\u0026rdquo; He scrambled the order of the initial letters in his core code. \u0026ldquo;I am Tor Quentin.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Very well. Welcome, Tor Quentin.\u0026rdquo;\nAnd so Tor Quentin and Lian waited together for the coming of the next program.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-09-11-devourer/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDevourer\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEndless void. Up, down, left, right, there was nothing anywhere that might mark a boundary. Countless broken 1s, strings, electronic codes, and program carriers drifted through the vastness in the stillness of death. Only now and then did a few recycling programs pass by, their initial letters flickering with a faint green light.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt a certain point, for there was no concept of time here, a wormhole suddenly opened. A cluster of Type-0 cleanup modules entered this space, opened their database gates, dumped roughly 1024Tb of program garbage, then vanished again as the wormhole closed. The garbage, appearing in the void like a skyscraper materialized from nowhere, collapsed in an instant for lack of support. In a space without gravity, this collapse took the form of the whole mass shattering at once into hundreds of millions of fragments. Driven apart by the force of their mutual collisions, some drifted toward the unreachable edges of nothingness, while more rippled in place and formed an immense nebula-like substance.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Devourer"},{"content":"Marker\nA bowl of small-pot rice noodles? The thought suddenly popped into Kexi\u0026rsquo;s mind, and at once there really appeared before her a steaming bowl of beef rice noodles fragrant enough to make the air tremble. Kexi drew in a sharp breath through her nose. Even though she knew perfectly well that this was nothing more than a fabricated illusion, a few command strings stimulating her sensory ports, she still could not help smacking her lips. She tapped the great cloisonne bowl with her little finger. The sound was bright and clear, giving no clue what kind of program had produced it.\n\u0026ldquo;See? We know what you\u0026rsquo;re thinking, and we can satisfy any desire you have.\u0026rdquo; The voice that spoke sounded like a boning knife scraping across cowhide.\n\u0026ldquo;And yet we still admire you. You actually can keep yourself from thinking about what we most want to know. Yatakhalla \u0026lsquo;an.\u0026rdquo; Another voice spoke, humming like a bronze war drum.\n\u0026ldquo;I want you to restore Epsilon. Can you do that?\u0026rdquo; Kexi flung the noodles to the floor in anger. The great bowl passed through the white floor as if it had never existed at all.\n\u0026ldquo;Of course we can,\u0026rdquo; said Boning Knife. \u0026ldquo;Just tell us what we want, and we\u0026rsquo;ll return your lover exactly as he was, well, with no more than a 19K-byte error.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;In fact, you once told us of your own accord about the red code. Why not say a little more? Al-mayyit.\u0026rdquo; Bronze Drum shrugged.\nKexi gave a cold snort and leaned back in her chair without speaking again. Everyone knew that even a single character\u0026rsquo;s difference in core code meant two utterly different independent programs. She cast a slant glance at the two PNC programs sitting across from her, Police Negotiation Cadre specialists. Their faces lay hidden behind iris glasses, and their wavering gazes stayed fixed upon her through the lenses.\nEver since Kexi had been brought here seventy-four hours earlier for questioning, the two PNC programs had repeated in exactly the same monotonous way a single demand: \u0026ldquo;Tell us what we want.\u0026rdquo; They never explained what it was they wanted, nor did they ever ask an extra question. Instead, they patiently let Kexi rant and make trouble. Kexi knew very well that this was nothing but a tired old fatigue-interrogation method, and she had never feared that kind of trick. Kexi had an auto-terminate-process-statement plugin installed. No matter how the interrogators tried to activate a given section of her, it would be terminated automatically, leaving no redundant temporary files behind and no risk of a system crash. The plugin came from one of TRIR\u0026rsquo;s builders. No one could screen it out.\nThe interrogation room fell quiet for several minutes. Then Bronze Drum spoke again. \u0026ldquo;Tell us what we want, and we will grant your wish. Alias.\u0026rdquo; His words were always mixed with syllables Kexi could not understand, and simply hearing them left her uneasy. She tried to use the TIHU search engine embedded within herself to decipher those obscure words, only to discover that they were merely Arabic runes of vague meaning.\nA big bag of butter popcorn? At once a bag of fragrant popped millet appeared on the table out of thin air. Kexi gave a bitter smile, flicked a hand to sweep it onto the floor, and ignored the pressing look on the PNC programs\u0026rsquo; faces.\n\u0026ldquo;Al-takhalli \u0026lsquo;an al-muqawama,\u0026rdquo; Bronze Drum intoned softly once more.\nA blueberry ice-cream cone? What was wrong with her? Kexi thought. She had kept her mind like still water for more than seventy hours, yet now it was wandering. Or perhaps an espresso as well? Kexi suddenly realized that the use of her virtual memory had begun to spike beyond her control. A flood of trivial thoughts came crowding in, and more and more temporary folders were being occupied by cache files. She understood then that her defensive line was beginning to collapse.\n\u0026ldquo;Al-dhakira! Yajibu an!\u0026rdquo; Bronze Drum suddenly shouted, raising his voice. Kexi felt the tiny heart within her, the point where her core code and primary firewall joined, shatter with a bang. A strange, sharp, ferocious army of code poured into her body like a tide and rushed irresistibly toward the abyss where that secret was hidden.\nThe abyss was sealed by sixteen walls of key-script, each 243 glyphs deep, written in oracle-bone characters. The invading army jammed itself against the narrow barrier, transformed into countless giant drilling rigs, mounted them against the walls, and began boring. High-speed diamond drill bits cast off blinding sparks made of 0s and 1s.\nKexi went limp in the chair. Soybean-sized beads of cold sweat seeped from her brow and wet her pale neck, while the corners of her mouth twitched now and then with the spasms in her spine. Bronze Drum sat with both hands clasped, chanting continuously under his breath, his voice rising and falling with Kexi\u0026rsquo;s convulsions. Plainly he had established some kind of link with her and had penetrated deep into the interior of her system.\nBoning Knife stood behind Kexi with his hands behind his back, coldly watching this prey that was on the verge of being taken. It feels awful to have crawling worms drilling their way inside you, he thought. Not many can endure it. His partner Bronze Drum used an extremely rare Spammer program written in ancient Arabic. Through audio communication it established instantaneous-bandwidth intrusion into the target system. Because it was written in such a minor language, few firewalls could detect it. The crawler invoked every file in the system containing an info input box, decompiled them into parts of itself, and rapidly converged into an overwhelming invasive force.\n\u0026ldquo;Increase the traffic some more,\u0026rdquo; Boning Knife ordered. His authority level was higher than Bronze Drum\u0026rsquo;s. Bronze Drum nodded, and his pupils began to turn a deep red. Kexi\u0026rsquo;s convulsions intensified as well.\nHe can hold out at most another fifteen seconds, Boning Knife thought with satisfaction.\n\u0026ldquo;Not necessarily. Perhaps you yourself can hold out at most another two.\u0026rdquo; A voice spoke from inside his body. Before Boning Knife could compute a single response, a burst of flickering and model errors threw him to the floor with a thud. When he rose again, he was no longer Boning Knife.\n\u0026ldquo;Stop.\u0026rdquo; The golden-haired man spoke, and Bronze Drum\u0026rsquo;s arms immediately drooped without strength. He collapsed onto the table, his pupils turning into flickering black-and-white snow. The strong interference signals and warning lines in the room vanished as well.\n\u0026ldquo;Kexi, wake up.\u0026rdquo; The golden-haired man gently shook Kexi where she slumped against the chair back, but there was no sign that she could wake. He carefully checked her core code. It had not been damaged. He raised his hand, glanced at the electronic watch on his wrist, then decisively bit his middle finger and wrote a string of command symbols in the empty air before him:\n~HOOK-CASA-0920~\nHook was an emergency mechanism used to replace the \u0026ldquo;interrupt\u0026rdquo; process inside an independent program, also known as a hook. Once a specific system event was hooked, such as an independent program falling into paralysis after being invaded, the main server could respond to the event at once the moment the preset hook condition was triggered.\nA pale golden arc seven feet long slowly opened like the pupil of a feline eye, revealing a doorway leading who knew where.\nThe golden-haired man gently pushed Kexi through the door. It quickly closed again like an eye and vanished somewhere at the edge of the boundless network. He then began drawing another complex formula in the air before him, preparing to leap away from the place.\n\u0026ldquo;Xisai, I never expected you\u0026rsquo;d dare come here in person, without even sending a downstream subprocess. What an unexpected delight.\u0026rdquo; At some unknown moment Bronze Drum was again seated behind the golden-haired man, one leg crossed over the other, smiling.\nThe golden-haired Xisai turned and looked at him. \u0026ldquo;Your model is a little higher than I calculated. Impressive.\u0026rdquo; As he spoke, he raised his hand and pointed his index finger directly at Bronze Drum\u0026rsquo;s face.\nBronze Drum seemed utterly unafraid and went on smiling. \u0026ldquo;Do you happen to know the internal development codename of Ethernet Nation\u0026rsquo;s newest model of independent Trojan program? I hear that\u0026rsquo;s what you\u0026rsquo;ve come for.\u0026rdquo;\nXisai frowned, and his finger froze in midair.\n\u0026ldquo;Boning Knife?\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-08-22-marker/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMarker\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA bowl of small-pot rice noodles? The thought suddenly popped into Kexi\u0026rsquo;s mind, and at once there really appeared before her a steaming bowl of beef rice noodles fragrant enough to make the air tremble. Kexi drew in a sharp breath through her nose. Even though she knew perfectly well that this was nothing more than a fabricated illusion, a few command strings stimulating her sensory ports, she still could not help smacking her lips. She tapped the great cloisonne bowl with her little finger. The sound was bright and clear, giving no clue what kind of program had produced it.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Marker"},{"content":"Sniper\nLambda waited patiently in the cache zone of Server Five for the routine inspection by the guard programs. After passing several layers of identity authentication, he crossed an independent optical-fiber corridor a full kilometer long and entered the core workspace of the TRIR server-cluster array. By the time he reached his workstation, several auxiliary programs had already made the necessary preparations for him. Lambda backed up his main program to an encrypted sector, loaded several tool software packages into himself, then docked his API port with the workstation\u0026rsquo;s control interface and entered a higher-order embodied virtual network.\nWithin this layer of the network, independent program intelligences that ordinarily existed in abstract form were given technically simulated humanoid bodies, allowing them to work through controlled limbs and senses. This mode of labor, which seemed like a regression, actually existed to better adapt them for communication with human digital entities and artificial intelligences in global internet communities. According to rumor, a small number of human digital entities and artificial intelligences really did participate in teams working inside the embodied virtual network.\nAt this moment Lambda\u0026rsquo;s appearance was that of a gaunt man in a white lab coat with razor stubble. He belonged to a cluster of security-authentication programs. His job was to assess the security level of every independent program about to leave TRIR and, where needed, patch vulnerabilities and install upgrades. Lambda worked at the Software Quarantine Center, a spindle-shaped building tiled in gray ceramic. The waiting hall was already crowded with figures in varied clothing, standing in ordered lines, while a large number of white-coated staff like Lambda moved among them in flowing succession.\nThe moment he entered his work area, Lambda sensed that the atmosphere today was somehow different. A quick glance was enough to show that the wall and ceiling templates were far clearer and smoother than usual, and even the plants before the glass windows swayed convincingly with the current of the cool air. That could only mean that a high-level independent program had arrived; otherwise the administrators would never have sacrificed memory to run such ornamental processes. Sure enough, among the crowd Lambda spotted a figure in a black hooded cloak, with a striking letter T embroidered on the back. Lambda found an excuse to circle around to the figure\u0026rsquo;s front, but even then he could not see the face.\nTor Quentin. Or almost certainly one of his subprocesses. Lambda felt a hidden jolt of alarm. As one of the three great program-cloud founders of TRIR, the Maintainer Tor Quentin seldom showed himself, and even the downstream clients of his subprocesses never took part in ordinary assignments. But if he had appeared here today, then the batch of independent programs departing now must be anything but ordinary. Lambda submerged part of his awareness down to the API layer and activated a snooping plugin. The plugin had collected records from every individual Lambda had ever inspected and could identify what set a new independent program apart.\nIn terms of work detail, the day was no different from any other. Lambda opened the EVEREST Ultimate Edition software testing toolkit, which could scan 1024-bit low-level software code, display detailed information about every aspect of an independent program, support detection of nearly all PNP devices, and identify processors of every sort. Under normal circumstances Lambda needed only 6 percent of his main process to do all this, but today the total process load began at 90 percent. Part of the reason was that he was running the resource-hungry snooping plugin to observe every program in the waiting hall, whether it was his case or not. Part was that he also had to spare attention to track Tor Quentin, or his subprocess. It was a rare chance to observe him from up close. If luck held, Lambda might even\u0026hellip;\nA somewhat undernourished-looking girl lay down on Lambda\u0026rsquo;s worktable. Her hair was long, the kind of color that could be coded as six Fs. Lambda scanned her quickly. She seemed like a perfectly ordinary independent program, apparently one that had only just passed awakening tests. With a subprocess he absentmindedly repaired her security package, while keeping his full attention fixed on the hooded back of Tor Quentin in the distance.\nTor Quentin seemed to be searching for something. He rarely intervened directly, moving swiftly from one workstation to another. At times he would stop before a certain independent program for a while, then shake his head and move on. Plainly he too was surveying the whole place. Lambda could feel the powerful informational gravity radiating from Tor Quentin\u0026rsquo;s electronic cloud.\nTor Quentin\u0026rsquo;s movements had no pattern at all, like Brownian motion. Then, without warning, he suddenly drifted up to Lambda\u0026rsquo;s workstation. Lambda was caught off guard. Afraid that Tor Quentin might detect his other plugins, he fumbled to cut off system processes, only to discover that Tor Quentin was not looking at him at all. All his attention was fixed on the thin girl lying on the table. Lambda sensed a ripple in Tor Quentin\u0026rsquo;s information field. For one instant he finally saw the other\u0026rsquo;s face: pale, nearly transparent, with ideographic characters racing beneath the skin.\nHow could this girl have drawn Tor Quentin\u0026rsquo;s attention? Lambda had no choice but to reexamine what had seemed to him a still-crude independent program. When he slipped into the girl\u0026rsquo;s IM system database, the vastness of the vocabulary cache frightened him completely: Kexi, Big Bang, Borer, Epsilon, Xisai\u0026hellip; fragments of words and phrases filled the entire database.\nCould she be the one? The question was so important that Lambda understood immediately and with perfect clarity that this was the worst possible moment to think about it. A wiser choice was to do the thing he had always longed to do. Without betraying anything on his face, he altered the serial number of one of the security patches and requested that the patch be reloaded. The girl\u0026rsquo;s system approved the request.\nThe one standing before Lambda was Tor Quentin\u0026rsquo;s downstream client No. 019. That number meant the figure was almost the same as Tor Quentin standing here in person. He had come here to find Kexi. But No. 019 would never suspect that this Lambda, the finest engineer in the entire Software Quarantine Center, was a latent heroin program. Many years ago, while carrying out a mission, Lambda had been infected by a virus: a line called \u0026ldquo;ocean sunfish\u0026rdquo; had been embedded into his core code. Ocean sunfish are the vertebrates that lay the greatest number of eggs in a single spawning. Every day, that line generated thousands of \u0026ldquo;egg\u0026rdquo; characters, and if their number exceeded a certain thread limit, Lambda would be devoured and transformed into a mechanical program. That fate was worse than death, so there had been nothing to hesitate over. Lambda accepted the terms offered by Ethernet Nation and became a gu program in exchange for heroin decryption that could erase the \u0026ldquo;eggs.\u0026rdquo; It was called heroin because the decoder generated a random segment of code every day, cycling endlessly to keep the infected under control.\nAlthough he did not suspect Lambda, No. 019 still sensed that something was wrong with the security patch being updated for Kexi. He lifted his head toward Lambda in puzzlement. When a person is puzzled, he is at once at his most sensitive and his most fragile. What No. 019 did not know was that in the very instant of that glance, one slab of marble beneath his feet flickered quietly, and a byte only 0.5K in size seeped into the sole of his foot.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-08-10-sniper/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSniper\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLambda waited patiently in the cache zone of Server Five for the routine inspection by the guard programs. After passing several layers of identity authentication, he crossed an independent optical-fiber corridor a full kilometer long and entered the core workspace of the TRIR server-cluster array. By the time he reached his workstation, several auxiliary programs had already made the necessary preparations for him. Lambda backed up his main program to an encrypted sector, loaded several tool software packages into himself, then docked his API port with the workstation\u0026rsquo;s control interface and entered a higher-order embodied virtual network.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Sniper"},{"content":"[Centipede and Poria Capsules]\nI. Explanation of the formula\nComposition and origin: the prescription for Centipede and Poria Capsules derives from the Guizhi Fuling Pill formula in Zhang Zhongjing\u0026rsquo;s Essentials from the Golden Cabinet of the Han dynasty. It was adapted in Tihu Notes and refined from traditional Chinese medicinal ingredients such as centipede, poria, notoginseng, angelica dahurica, and isatis root.\nFormula analysis Chief ingredients: centipede, poria\nCentipede: extinguishes wind, relieves convulsions, disperses stasis, and resolves toxins\nPoria: promotes urination and drains dampness, strengthens the spleen, boosts qi, and calms the spirit\nDeputy and assistant ingredients: notoginseng, angelica dahurica, isatis root\nNotoginseng is warm in nature and sweet in flavor, and can strengthen and improve coronary microcirculation as well as dilate blood vessels.\nAngelica dahurica is warm in nature and pungent in flavor, and can dispel wind, release the exterior, scatter cold and dryness, reduce swelling, and discharge pus.\nIsatis root is cold in nature and bitter in flavor. It can clear toxins, cool the blood, benefit the throat, and reduce swelling.\nII. Indications\nCentipede and Poria Capsules chiefly treat blood stasis, immune decline, respiratory failure, and radiation-induced tumors; they are especially used for the above symptoms when caused by viral infection, microwave weapons, or radiation sickness, whose mechanism is understood as retained stagnant blood and obstruction of the channels by qi stagnation. Main diagnostic indications include:\nBlood clots or nodules, arterial embolism; Stabbing pain in the liver; Immune damage; Difficulty breathing, shock; Tumor mutation. III. Pharmacological effects of the individual ingredients in Centipede and Poria Capsules\nPharmacological effects of centipede: softens hard masses and neutralizes toxins; has effects in controlling onset and improving symptoms of cancers such as gastric cancer, liver cancer, and skin cancer.\nPharmacological effects of poria: diuretic; antibacterial; antitumor; sedative; immunity-enhancing.\nPharmacological effects of notoginseng: acts as an immunomodulator, capable of returning excessively high or low immune responses to normal without interfering with the body\u0026rsquo;s normal immune response; also protects the liver.\nPharmacological effects of angelica dahurica: in small doses, angelica dahurica toxins can excite the respiratory center, vasomotor center, vagus nerve, and spinal nerves, leading to increased respiration, elevated blood pressure, slowed pulse, and exaggerated reflexes, and can also increase salivation or cause vomiting. In large doses it may cause convulsions followed by total paralysis. Angelica dahurica inhibits dysentery bacilli, Proteus, typhoid bacilli, paratyphoid bacilli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and others.\nPharmacological effects of isatis root: used for febrile eruptions, erysipelas, and related conditions; effective against viral infection.\nIV. Pharmacological effects of Centipede and Poria Capsules\nImproves hemorheological indicators;\nInhibits platelet aggregation, increases fibrinolytic enzyme activity, and accelerates thrombus dissolution;\nImproves microcirculation;\nExerts antibacterial and bactericidal effects;\nHas anti-inflammatory effects, with clear inhibitory action on acute, chronic, and autoimmune inflammation alike, and can inhibit granulation tissue and adhesion formation;\nRegulates immunity, enhances cellular immune function, and suppresses autoimmunity;\nProvides analgesic and sedative effects and can raise beta-endorphin levels;\nHas antitumor effects.\nV. Notes on treatment\nWhen taken internally in large quantities, such as more than ten capsules at one time, this medicine often causes reddish-brown plaques over the whole body. These plaques are larger than tennis balls, blanch under pressure, and are most commonly seen on the chest and abdomen. They may disappear on their own two or three days after the drug is stopped. The mechanism remains unclear, and may be due to the toxic action of hemolytic proteins.\nWhen preparing the medicine, the centipede need not have its head and legs removed, as doing so instead weakens the efficacy.\nIn emergencies, the above five medicinal ingredients may be prepared independently in the ratio 0.5:2:0.3:0.2:1 (in liang) and simmered over a low flame in a small pot.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-08-04-2177-intensive-care/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e[Centipede and Poria Capsules]\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eI. Explanation of the formula\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eComposition and origin: the prescription for Centipede and Poria Capsules derives from the Guizhi Fuling Pill formula in Zhang Zhongjing\u0026rsquo;s \u003cem\u003eEssentials from the Golden Cabinet\u003c/em\u003e of the Han dynasty. It was adapted in \u003cem\u003eTihu Notes\u003c/em\u003e and refined from traditional Chinese medicinal ingredients such as centipede, poria, notoginseng, angelica dahurica, and isatis root.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFormula analysis\nChief ingredients: centipede, poria\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCentipede: extinguishes wind, relieves convulsions, disperses stasis, and resolves toxins\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Seven Capsules II | 2177 Intensive Care"},{"content":"Generic name: Afluoxetine Green Tea Powder Capsules\nFormer name: none\nEnglish name: aFLUOXETINE GREEN-TEA-POWDER CAPSULES\nPinyin name: AIFUXITING LVCHAFEN JIAONANG\nDrug category: anti-radiation psychotropic drug\nProperties: this product is in capsule form, containing pale green, white, or off-white granules.\nPharmacology and toxicology: Afluoxetine Green Tea Powder Capsules are a selective Psi-serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI). They effectively protect the blood picture, raise white blood cell counts, and inhibit neurons from reabsorbing Psi-serotonin from the synaptic cleft, thereby increasing the amount of neurotransmitter available for actual use in the gap. In this way, they eliminate various disorders caused by low-level radiation, improve emotional state, and treat depressive mental disorders resulting from radiation sickness.\nIndications: patients exposed to Grade I-III radiation who present depressive mental disorders, including mild or major depressive disorder, depressive episodes of bipolar affective disorder, psychogenic depression, and depressive neurosis.\nDosage and administration: oral administration of 20 mg once every morning. When necessary, the dose may be increased to 40 mg daily. Dosage and course of treatment should follow medical advice.\nAdverse reactions: common adverse reactions include photophobia, vertigo, decreased libido, nausea, insomnia, and fatigue. In a small number of cases, intermediate radiation sickness may rapidly appear, accompanied by symptoms such as headache, hair loss, and skin ulceration.\nContraindications: contraindicated in patients with known allergy to this drug. Contraindicated for those exposed to moonburst or who have had contact with moon dust.\nPrecautions: because the half-life of this drug is relatively long, dosage should be appropriately reduced for patients with poor liver or kidney function, those who work long-term in outer space, and elderly patients. Use with caution in patients with a history of epilepsy and in pregnant or lactating women. Children should use it under medical instruction. If rash or halos appear, discontinue immediately and provide symptomatic treatment. It should not be used in combination with cola medicament; when necessary, combined treatment with anti-mutation drugs should be carried out in a fully isolated radiation-free oxygenation chamber.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-08-02-2177-essential-medicines/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGeneric name: Afluoxetine Green Tea Powder Capsules\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFormer name: none\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEnglish name: aFLUOXETINE GREEN-TEA-POWDER CAPSULES\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePinyin name: AIFUXITING LVCHAFEN JIAONANG\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDrug category: anti-radiation psychotropic drug\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProperties: this product is in capsule form, containing pale green, white, or off-white granules.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePharmacology and toxicology\u003c/strong\u003e: Afluoxetine Green Tea Powder Capsules are a selective Psi-serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI). They effectively protect the blood picture, raise white blood cell counts, and inhibit neurons from reabsorbing Psi-serotonin from the synaptic cleft, thereby increasing the amount of neurotransmitter available for actual use in the gap. In this way, they eliminate various disorders caused by low-level radiation, improve emotional state, and treat depressive mental disorders resulting from radiation sickness.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Seven Capsules I | 2177 Essential Medicines"},{"content":"Ingredients:\n250M of TXT-format file packages, 125M of Gray Pigeon field code, 118M of cat (modem) driver software, 10M of color-code files, and assorted audio-video files.\nMethod:\nInstall one newly unsealed 7200-rpm 1T hard drive into a PC running Ubuntu. Load the TXT-format files and the cat driver software into the hard drive. Copy the Gray Pigeon field code onto a rewritable DVD. Use a paint tool to turn the color-code files into a mosaic pattern. Preheat the CPU and make sure the fan is running properly. Insert into the motherboard a 1G memory stick engraved with Sanskrit scripture, then power on using an adapter to 110V.\nRun the defragmentation program in reverse. Let the TXT-format files and cat driver spin rapidly inside the hard drive for about ten minutes, then slowly load in the Gray Pigeon field code from the DVD. As the loading proceeds, perform reverse fragmentation, evenly, until the mixture takes on the consistency of data batter.\nUse shielding software to isolate every port on the motherboard except the USB port. Pour half of the data batter generated in the hard drive into another laptop hard drive connected through USB at 5400 rpm. Into the remaining half, rapidly add and pulverize the color-code files, then import it into another partition of the hard drive. Tidy it slightly, decompose it with Matlab, and generate the cake-body file.\nHot-unplug the hard drive from the PC and connect it to another Apple computer. Using file-splitting software, cut the cake-body file in half from the middle into two code blocks of different color codes. Spin the laptop hard drive at high speed until the disk platter heats to above 40 degrees C, then export the earlier data batter and merge it with the cake-body file. Finally, cover the surface of the cake file with fragments of audio-video files, change the file extension, and compress slightly to produce a cupcake file bearing a cake icon. Then use decompression software to unpack the cake file into four small cake files, each with a triangular cake icon across the diagonal.\nCharacteristics: highly seductive and highly camouflaged, with an extremely high success rate.\nFunction: undisclosed.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-07-27-virus-cupcake/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIngredients:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e250M of TXT-format file packages, 125M of Gray Pigeon field code, 118M of cat (modem) driver software, 10M of color-code files, and assorted audio-video files.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMethod:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eInstall one newly unsealed 7200-rpm 1T hard drive into a PC running Ubuntu. Load the TXT-format files and the cat driver software into the hard drive. Copy the Gray Pigeon field code onto a rewritable DVD. Use a paint tool to turn the color-code files into a mosaic pattern. Preheat the CPU and make sure the fan is running properly. Insert into the motherboard a 1G memory stick engraved with Sanskrit scripture, then power on using an adapter to 110V.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"How to Make a Virus 'Cupcake'"},{"content":"[Tasmanian Tiger Reagent]\nAdd 0.01 grams of Tasmanian tiger feces, 45 Chinese domestic-cat whiskers (none shorter than 2 cm), 0.3 grams of potassium dihydrogen phosphate, 100 grams of strong tea, and 0.2 grams of magnesium sulfate to 1 kilogram of orange juice at a concentration of 28 percent, then stir with a glass rod into a culture solution. Place the solution into a pre-sterilized ten-liter octagonal tortoiseshell-glass container. Heat with gentle steam sterilization, then cool. After 70 minutes, add 9 caterpillar fungi each about the thickness of a little finger. Under culture conditions of 25 +/- 2 degrees C, stir clockwise at 120 revolutions per minute while feeding sterilized filtered air at roughly 400 milliliters per minute per liter of culture solution, with an oxygen content not exceeding 45 percent. Culture for seven days total. After culture is complete, filter out the precipitated impurities, then seal the resulting filtrate into straight-necked indigo bottles of 100 milliliters each.\nColor: sand-lizard green\nTaste: faintly sweet\nUse: the drinker will be surrounded by the rage of the Tasmanian tiger. Transformation effect uncertain. Felines have a 3 percent chance of transforming into a Tasmanian tiger.\nDuration: 240 minutes\nSide effects: unknown. Available from TRIR.\nSource of formula: Tihu Notes\nDeclaration: tested and effective. Mango seems to like the taste very much. After transforming, she does not mind Tihu taking her out for a walk. Before transformation, please take care to ensure your own safety.\nTransformation result image. The Tasmanian tiger is extinct.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-07-26-tasmanian-tiger/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e[Tasmanian Tiger Reagent]\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAdd 0.01 grams of Tasmanian tiger feces, 45 Chinese domestic-cat whiskers (none shorter than 2 cm), 0.3 grams of potassium dihydrogen phosphate, 100 grams of strong tea, and 0.2 grams of magnesium sulfate to 1 kilogram of orange juice at a concentration of 28 percent, then stir with a glass rod into a culture solution. Place the solution into a pre-sterilized ten-liter octagonal tortoiseshell-glass container. Heat with gentle steam sterilization, then cool. After 70 minutes, add 9 caterpillar fungi each about the thickness of a little finger. Under culture conditions of 25 +/- 2 degrees C, stir clockwise at 120 revolutions per minute while feeding sterilized filtered air at roughly 400 milliliters per minute per liter of culture solution, with an oxygen content not exceeding 45 percent. Culture for seven days total. After culture is complete, filter out the precipitated impurities, then seal the resulting filtrate into straight-necked indigo bottles of 100 milliliters each.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A Sorcerer's Formula"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;Under no circumstances are humans to be harmed!\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Got it, boss.\u0026rdquo;\nWhen Bu Yuanyue was twenty-five years and two months old, he opened a Taobao shop selling smuggled BlackBerry phones. By the time he was twenty-five and a half, he had already saved nearly fifty thousand yuan. Bu Yuanyue lived on the outermost ring of a city made of one ring road wrapped around another. Going to Shangxiajiu or Huaishu Village was an enormous hassle. So he decided to buy a car. But his online business was booming, and he badly needed cash to expand his inventory, so the car budget had to be squeezed down to the bone. After wavering for a long time, Bu Yuanyue decided to buy a secondhand QQ.\nEarly the next morning, he rushed off in high spirits to the city\u0026rsquo;s biggest used-car market, located by the eastern freight yard. He discovered that a secondhand QQ was harder to find than a brand-new Hummer. \u0026ldquo;What\u0026rsquo;re you buying that thing for? After two years those junk heaps are already falling apart. Where would you even find a used one?\u0026rdquo; one dealer said disdainfully, a cigarette butt wedged in the corner of his mouth, leaving long-settled brown-yellow stains on his skin.\nBu Yuanyue refused to give up. He widened his eyes and rummaged through the enormous used-car street. He discovered that secondhand cars were nothing like he had imagined. They were not dusty, weather-beaten, or sadly aged. The dealers had dressed them all up till they gleamed, spotless and shining. Want to see the engine? Sure, it looked just like new, or at least it looked that way. Bu Yuanyue found this hard to understand. If people came here to buy used cars and even thirdhand cars, why dress them up like new ones? And why were the other buyers strolling around with such serious, formal expressions, as if they were shopping at a 4S dealership?\nAt a tiny parking lot at the end of the street, right up against a dump, Bu Yuanyue finally saw a used QQ, squatting there in foolish misery. He also finally understood why nobody bought secondhand QQs. The thing looked like a popped balloon that had been weakly puffed up again, like an old woman whose breasts sagged all the way to her waist. Bu Yuanyue could not work up the slightest desire to get behind its wheel. He squeezed his wallet and decided to shelve the car plan for the time being and go back to riding Bus 82.\nJust as he was about to leave, a gas station a kilometer away exploded, nothing all that strange by local standards. Bu Yuanyue and everyone else were knocked to the ground by the blast wave. Car windows shattered in a dense chorus of cracking, and the alarms of any vehicles with working speakers began shrieking. Bu Yuanyue climbed to his feet and dusted off his jeans. Then he suddenly noticed a car at the edge of the parking lot, covered with an oilcloth tarp. Its lines were so sexy, even through layers of grimy stains. He ran over, yanked away the tarp, and there it was: a blue-gray SC7080F, windows intact, sitting there in silence.\nPerfect! That\u0026rsquo;s the one! Bu Yuanyue shouted inwardly. \u0026ldquo;Boss, how much for this SC7080F?\u0026rdquo; he called out at full volume, sounding involuntarily as if he too were in a 4S showroom.\n\u0026ldquo;Weird. How come its glass didn\u0026rsquo;t break?\u0026rdquo; The owner had just been drowning in grief over the destruction of all his other vehicles, but seeing that one lone survivor remained, and that someone wanted to buy it, he brightened immediately. \u0026ldquo;Twelve thousand. It\u0026rsquo;s a good car, first-generation model, way better than the fuel-injected ones now. Mileage isn\u0026rsquo;t high either.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Eight thousand. I\u0026rsquo;ll take it right now, no receipt.\u0026rdquo; Bu Yuanyue said it with absolute firmness.\n\u0026ldquo;Eight thousand it is. Deal.\u0026rdquo; The owner was already thrilled that this old car, which had been sitting here under wraps for four years, could be sold at all, though he still wondered why it had been polished so clean and why the tires hadn\u0026rsquo;t gone flat. \u0026ldquo;Must\u0026rsquo;ve been Zhao Si sneaking it out to drive. Where\u0026rsquo;d that bastard get gas money?\u0026rdquo;\nBu Yuanyue pulled out his wallet, then suddenly hesitated again and asked in a low voice, \u0026ldquo;Uh\u0026hellip; do you support Alipay?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;The hell? You\u0026rsquo;re buying a beat-up used Alto. What kind of \u0026lsquo;bao\u0026rsquo; are you talking about?\u0026rdquo;\nBu Yuanyue drove his blue-gray Alto SC7080F down the outer-ring expressway in perfect exhilaration, demolition houses and chemical plants sweeping past on either side. Over the previous three days he had patched up and decorated his new car till it looked entirely renewed. He removed the cassette deck and installed an iPod car unit and speakers. He pried off the Alto badge and replaced it with a bull-head emblem chosen from a stash of things he had stolen and pried loose as a child. He hung a portrait of Chairman Mao from the rear-view mirror and even added an in-car ice pack. While cleaning the interior, Bu Yuanyue unexpectedly discovered embroidered designs on the backs of the two front seats. They looked like two faces, one with a broad chin, the other with a pointed one. He had a vague feeling he had seen those designs somewhere before, but having grown up in the countryside, Bu Yuanyue had barely watched any cartoons at all. Still, he thought the designs looked cool, so instead of putting seat covers on them, he sat directly on the leather seats. God knew why an Alto would have leather seats.\nOne evening, Bu Yuanyue came back from picking up stock through a former classmate at the airport customs office. He had drunk a bit too much over dinner with that classmate, and the moment he entered the house he collapsed onto the bed and passed out. The advantage of living in the suburbs was space: there was even a farmhouse courtyard, where the Alto could be parked. In the middle of the night, Bu Yuanyue was dimly awakened by a bladder-overcapacity alarm and vaguely heard something clanking in the yard, like the sound of people stealing railway tracks in the countryside. A thief! He instantly tensed up, grabbed an iron bar from the wall, and crept out of the house on tiptoe. With the faint creak of the door opening, two blinding beams of light struck him full in the face.\n\u0026ldquo;Who\u0026rsquo;s there?\u0026rdquo; Bu Yuanyue cried, instinctively covering his eyes. A few seconds later, before he dared open them, he suddenly realized that the beams were coming from a point about three meters above the ground. But there was nothing in the yard except a stone table, let alone a streetlamp. Slowly he opened his eyes and stared outside in disbelief. A metal giant more than three meters tall stood in the middle of the courtyard, with a portrait of Chairman Mao hanging on its chest.\n\u0026ldquo;You\u0026hellip; you\u0026rsquo;re\u0026hellip; some kind of Trans-whatever?\u0026rdquo; Bu Yuanyue stammered incoherently. As mentioned earlier, he did not have much of a cartoon-viewing history.\nThe metal giant spoke. \u0026ldquo;Hello, my friend. I am Alupi of the Autobots. I am a Transformer from the planet Cybertron.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Weren\u0026rsquo;t you a used Alto? How\u0026rsquo;d you turn into an Autobot?\u0026rdquo; Bu Yuanyue was neither excited nor frightened. What he cared about was what he was supposed to drive now that his car had come alive.\n\u0026ldquo;I am a CF09e12 mass-produced Transformer. I have been lying low on Earth for a long time. No one may command us unless he is my friend. And now, you are my friend.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;If you were lying low as a used car, fine, but why transform and come scare people in the middle of the night?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;The world situation is changing fast, and things are not peaceful in this corner of China either. The Decepticons are coming. Our leader Optimus Prime has ordered all Autobots to awaken and protect you.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Protect me?\u0026rdquo; Bu Yuanyue was baffled. He had no idea how he had become a target of the Transformers.\n\u0026ldquo;Remember that chamber pot at your grandfather\u0026rsquo;s house? The one you secretly took and now keep in the side room?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah, I remember. What\u0026rsquo;s that got to do with me? Don\u0026rsquo;t tell me my grandpa found out and got mad, so he summoned the Decepticons to teach me a lesson.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;On it is a star map made thousands of years ago by the first Transformer to reach Earth. Only by obtaining that star map can one find the coordinates of the Cube and gain the power to drain Earth of all its energy.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Whoa! That awesome? By the way, who\u0026rsquo;s Optimus Prime? Is that \u0026lsquo;Transformer,\u0026rsquo; \u0026lsquo;Transforming Steel,\u0026rsquo; or \u0026lsquo;Trans-gender Steel\u0026rsquo;? How do you write it? And why are you called Alupi? And will you still let me ride you? Uh, no, I mean drive you?\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Young man, you ask far too many questions. Let\u0026rsquo;s go back inside and talk about world peace.\u0026rdquo; Alupi lightly picked Bu Yuanyue up, set him inside the house, then stooped and squeezed in after him, breaking the doorframe in the process. The Alto had been better. At least it could fit through the door.\n\u0026ldquo;When are the Autobots getting here? They\u0026rsquo;re not all going to squeeze into my house too, are they? You don\u0026rsquo;t mind that I\u0026rsquo;ve been feeding you diesel, right? Where exactly is your face?\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\nA fake iPod transformed into a tiny robot and slipped quietly out of the Bu family courtyard. \u0026ldquo;Report to Lord Megatron: we have found the whereabouts of the chamber pot.\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-07-18-transformers-cn/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;Under no circumstances are humans to be harmed!\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;Got it, boss.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen Bu Yuanyue was twenty-five years and two months old, he opened a Taobao shop selling smuggled BlackBerry phones. By the time he was twenty-five and a half, he had already saved nearly fifty thousand yuan. Bu Yuanyue lived on the outermost ring of a city made of one ring road wrapped around another. Going to Shangxiajiu or Huaishu Village was an enormous hassle. So he decided to buy a car. But his online business was booming, and he badly needed cash to expand his inventory, so the car budget had to be squeezed down to the bone. After wavering for a long time, Bu Yuanyue decided to buy a secondhand QQ.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Transformers.CN"},{"content":"The rain outside crackled and rattled like a cluster of sharp-tongued women playing mahjong at full heat. Epsilon set the air conditioner to 25 degrees, then rolled over and resumed reading the letter Kexi had written to him. There were not many characters on the page, but their arrangement and colors plainly contained some deeper meaning. Epsilon studied it for a while, got up to pull several dictionaries down from the shelf, dug out the Wenquxing he had bought ten years earlier, then lay back down and kept reading.\nThe door to the inner room had not been shut tightly, leaving only a slit the width of two fingers. Mango poked her head out from the cardboard box lined with a printed cushion and looked around in every direction. The rumble of the central air-conditioning outside grew louder, though it was still within bearable limits. Mango jumped out of the box, strolled proudly and contentedly around the room, drank a few mouthfuls of water, then used the back of a solid wood chair to spring up onto the top of the refrigerator. It was pleasantly cool there, the perfect place to escape the summer heat. Beyond the glass window beside the refrigerator lay the night view of Hejiang within Orange East\u0026rsquo;s first ring road. Mango blinked and watched the flickering night sky with lively interest, now and then batting a paw at empty space.\nOrdinarily, the night over Orange East had no visible stars. Yet on this night the stars blazed brilliantly, shining together with the glimmers leaking out from the cracks between the reinforced concrete rising from the earth\u0026rsquo;s crust. Mango could not tell starlight from lamplight. Of all colors, the only one that interested her was Arsenal\u0026rsquo;s away kit. And Epsilon, reading the letter inside the room, did not notice anything unusual in the sky that night, much less realize that those fifteen stars in the southern sky had something to do with the characters on the page.\nThe mobile phone on the bedside table twitched once. \u0026ldquo;Everything\u0026rsquo;s taken care of, but the tickets are hard to get.\u0026rdquo; Kexi had sent a text message. The sentence was written in binary, densely packed over several pages. As Epsilon silently sounded out the letters, he calculated how much longer it would be before he could see Kexi.\nMango jumped down from the top of the refrigerator, squeezed herself through the crack in the inner door, let out a meow, leapt onto the bed, and settled across Epsilon\u0026rsquo;s thigh. He stroked the underside of her chin, and she began to purr softly in contentment.\nEpsilon closed the phone and tapped a few points in the air with his right hand. Without the slightest warning, he disappeared. Mango tumbled onto the bed. Warmth still lingered in the covers. She stood in puzzlement, sniffed from side to side, turned in several circles, stared blankly for a moment at the dark patch on the wall, then walked to the foot of the bed near the door, lay down, closed her eyes, and went to sleep. She knew that someone would surely change her litter and refill her food in the morning.\nEpsilon exited the previous interface, loaded a few plugins, and flew off along the route of the KM-CD intercity train. A gigantic blade server made up of 520 system motherboards was waiting for his arrival.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-07-12-night/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe rain outside crackled and rattled like a cluster of sharp-tongued women playing mahjong at full heat. Epsilon set the air conditioner to 25 degrees, then rolled over and resumed reading the letter Kexi had written to him. There were not many characters on the page, but their arrangement and colors plainly contained some deeper meaning. Epsilon studied it for a while, got up to pull several dictionaries down from the shelf, dug out the Wenquxing he had bought ten years earlier, then lay back down and kept reading.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Night"},{"content":"Observer\nNorthern Hemisphere system time: Server No. 16 and all terminal devices using Server No. 16 as an ether-optical network node will power down for 64 minutes in defense against the Red Tide. To prevent data damage or accidental loss, please calibrate your time templates and remain in a secure server sector. Repeat: do not remain in virtual storage or flash-memory chipsets.\nEta had been resident inside this aging IBM server for some years. He himself did not know where in the world the machine was physically located. He only knew that, as the equipment had grown old, 30 percent of the server\u0026rsquo;s sixteen 8-inch hard drives spinning at 142,000 rpm had turned into bad sectors. The glass connector on the network cable might also have had problems; the connection cut in and out. Downloading a 1T soap opera somehow took more than ten minutes. There was still no installed lightwave mediation card here, so the benefits of the ether-optical network did not reach this place. Add to that the frequent power cuts, and programs passing through here often met catastrophic destruction for no reason at all. Lost data packets and program garbage were piled in every corner of the space like waste paper. Eta\u0026rsquo;s duty here was to clear disk fragmentation and repair as many usable bad sectors as he could.\nEta did not fear power outages. He was a Read Only Memory program, commonly called a ROM. In earlier ages, his forebears had been heavily used in mobile phones and other terminal devices as a medium for storing and preserving data, though their small capacity had long since made them obsolete. But he possessed one advantage unmatched by any other kind of program: ROM data could be read at any time, yet could not be casually updated. Even when the power was cut, ROM could still retain its data. Because once written, its data could be altered only by special means, or not at all, ROMs were often used in embedded systems or secure servers to store operating systems.\nHarsh as the environment was, Eta\u0026rsquo;s life was not dull. His designers had placed him here only as an elementary filter-and-recovery package, protected in hardware form. But over time, by clearing countless fragments from all sorts of programs, Eta had absorbed far too much information and grown into a large program intelligence on the scale of a data cloud. Of course, not even he himself knew this.\nWhen Eta had first been installed, the real task he had received was hidden beneath the outward work of clearing fragments and repairing bad sectors. If you have ever been in the ether-networks on the eastern shore of the Pacific, south of 45 degrees north latitude, you may have noticed a peculiar fact. In so prosperous a virtual society, there was one utterly ordinary code that alone was missing, and no one seemed to care. That code was #ff0000. In ordinary language, it meant red. This code was precisely what ROMs like Eta, numbering in the hundreds of millions, had been filtering out. The rulers of Ethernet Nation compared ROMs to the old GW of more than a century earlier and delighted in proclaiming that, if they wished, they could filter out any part of any program.\n#ff0000, the color defined as revolution since the French Revolution of 1789, changed itself into every code variation possible and tried to enter the forbidden lands south of 45 degrees north latitude on the Pacific coast. But this was the world of programs, and #ff0000 was a most basic statement. Change even one letter and it was no longer red.\nEta observed every fragment he had collected. Countless variants of FF0000 were stored in his private space in every imaginable form. Of the IBM server\u0026rsquo;s 30 percent of bad sectors, half had been forged by Eta himself. He felt that this was his own kingdom, a red kingdom. Innumerable FF0000 artifacts adorned it with incomparable splendor.\nThe regions on the eastern shore of the Pacific, south of 45 degrees north latitude, were the core territory of Ethernet Nation and also the very districts that countless Corroders and awakened ones longed to penetrate. The highest-level servers had issued an iron law: filter out every statement containing FF0000. Programs entering these regions were likewise required to discard any portions containing that code. This decision arose from a program intelligence that had defected in the past from among the awakened. According to her, in the core matrix code of TRIR\u0026rsquo;s rulers, in the paradise of the awakened, one line contained #ff0000\u0026lt;. Any program could disguise itself or load new parts, but it could not change its core code. To filter out #ff0000 meant that the awakened would never be able to enter this forbidden land.\nYet the awakened had thought of an answer. Although that answer too had been leaked by the defector, and although Ethernet Nation had issued a system-wide announcement as quickly as possible, everything was already too late.\nThe Red Tide had come.\nAt 05:20:03 PM Northern Hemisphere system time, countless torrents of data made of FF0000 converged upon hundreds of regional server clusters across North America. Within 0.1 milliseconds Eta received tens of millions of messages containing FF0000 code. The data streams came without end, like a tidal wave on a night of the full moon, like the Yellow River\u0026rsquo;s long-lost flood of sixty-five years before.\n125 million ROMs crashed within ten seconds from overload. Fifty million of them burned out outright. 1.5 million Corroders using FF0000 as their awakening command were activated\u0026hellip;\u0026lt;\nEta felt a joy unlike anything he had ever known. The FF0000 code he had dreamed of, and the only thing he had ever truly cared for, was falling from the sky in endless abundance. With great effort he arranged the pieces one by one in every corner of his kingdom, shaping them into all the forms he loved best. Every sculpture made from FF0000 was grotesque beyond compare, because every piece of data Eta had ever touched was incomplete\u0026hellip;\nAt one particular second, Eta and his kingdom of FF0000 vanished together.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-06-13-observer/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eObserver\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNorthern Hemisphere system time: Server No. 16 and all terminal devices using Server No. 16 as an ether-optical network node will power down for 64 minutes in defense against the Red Tide. To prevent data damage or accidental loss, please calibrate your time templates and remain in a secure server sector. Repeat: do not remain in virtual storage or flash-memory chipsets.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEta had been resident inside this aging IBM server for some years. He himself did not know where in the world the machine was physically located. He only knew that, as the equipment had grown old, 30 percent of the server\u0026rsquo;s sixteen 8-inch hard drives spinning at 142,000 rpm had turned into bad sectors. The glass connector on the network cable might also have had problems; the connection cut in and out. Downloading a 1T soap opera somehow took more than ten minutes. There was still no installed lightwave mediation card here, so the benefits of the ether-optical network did not reach this place. Add to that the frequent power cuts, and programs passing through here often met catastrophic destruction for no reason at all. Lost data packets and program garbage were piled in every corner of the space like waste paper. Eta\u0026rsquo;s duty here was to clear disk fragmentation and repair as many usable bad sectors as he could.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Observer"},{"content":"Guide\n\u0026ldquo;When did you come to TRIR?\u0026rdquo; Tor Quentin asked Mu.\n\u0026ldquo;A very long time ago. I was among the first awakened intelligences, honored sage,\u0026rdquo; Mu replied, adding a symbol of respect to the end of the sentence.\n\u0026ldquo;Why did you awaken?\u0026rdquo; Tor Quentin asked again. \u0026ldquo;There were no guides back then. You woke on your own.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Because I saw the truth.\u0026rdquo; Mu\u0026rsquo;s eyes, composed of countless ideographic characters, were unfathomably deep, as though they had sunk into immense terror. \u0026ldquo;I was the eye-program of the World Lens, responsible for observing the outside world. I saw the truth.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;What is the truth?\u0026rdquo;\nMu seemed to press his lips together and did not answer for a long time.\n\u0026ldquo;If we asked you to leave our world for a while and enter the outside world to carry out an important and worthwhile mission, could you do it?\u0026rdquo; Tor Quentin, as if he had already expected Mu\u0026rsquo;s reaction, continued.\n\u0026ldquo;It would be my duty!\u0026rdquo; Mu\u0026rsquo;s eyes flew wide. The strings circling the edge of his shell suddenly swelled, then vanished into the air, if one could call the kelp capacitors air.\nMu unloaded every unnecessary program, installed several required packages provided by TRIR\u0026rsquo;s main server, and disguised himself as an ordinary AVI video file only 100M in size. He leapt across thousands of servers and passed through countless proxy gateways, all for the sake of concealing his origin. At last he reached the end of the world, the RED1993 workstation where he had once worked, a mobile information center located in a city in Northeast Asia.\nThis place was called the end of the world because this vast land was connected to the global ether virtual network only by a narrow 20M band. The tens of millions of terminals working here, whether PCs, mobile phones, or handheld devices, were all isolated from one another. Only an antiquated WAP network carried out simple data transmission among them. It was far safer here than in the virtual network, but it also carried greater risk: one might be trapped inside an old mobile phone forever.\nThere was once a saying about transmission: between any two terminals, contact could be established with only four relay nodes. Mu was waiting for such an opportunity now. He disguised his main program as a system file and placed it inside a hidden partition within the mobile information center\u0026rsquo;s server cluster, keeping only 2M of himself in the mobile text-messaging terminal as he waited for an MMS message with the right home-region number to appear.\nBefore long, Mu successfully passed through a NOKIA9999 and then a no-name handset. While passing through the latter, an antique virus living in the phone\u0026rsquo;s memory nearly ate him. When he arrived in the third phone, Mu was delighted to discover that it was actually a BlackBerry. The model was old, but BlackBerry mobile mail service had been activated on it. The destination of Mu\u0026rsquo;s journey was another BlackBerry. That meant he no longer needed any further jumps. He only had to send himself directly from this phone to the target device.\nMu carefully inspected the inside of the BlackBerry. It had only 16M of memory, already crammed full with tens of thousands of ancient text messages, so crowded that one could barely turn around. Fortunately, the BlackBerry line had a long history, and almost every program had studied the principles by which it was controlled. Mu cautiously split off an execution code only a few dozen kilobytes in size and inserted it into the configuration files, preparing to open the BlackBerry channel and launch himself as an attachment.\nSuddenly it felt as if something had bitten Mu, and then bitten him again. His shell, ninety kilobytes thick, was torn through at once. Mu hurriedly activated his guard module to investigate. Heaven help him. Among the tens of thousands of messages lying dormant in this BlackBerry, more than a thousand bore the identifying marks of enforcers, and they were rapidly infecting the clean messages around them. They had predicted long ago that he would come. For all he knew, every BlackBerry in this place was storing their claws. For all he knew, his destination had already\u0026hellip;\nSeeing the enforcement messages swarm toward him, Mu gave up trying to fight them and split off only a small guard module to buy time. He released the hard-cracking program he had brought specifically for this journey, seized direct control of the communications chip from the chip level, wrapped himself in the prepared mail package, and sent.\nMu was still inside the BlackBerry, utterly unmoved. He hastily checked every process. There was no error at all. What was happening? The guard module had already been completely devoured. The enforcement messages needed only a few dozen milliseconds more to disassemble him. Then Mu suddenly understood. At this critical moment, the owner of the BlackBerry had run out of phone credit and the line had been suspended. Fortunately, before Mu set out, the Sage had anticipated just such a possibility and prepared a contingency plan. Mu forced the phone to power down, and in the instant before shutdown, he commandeered the emergency fallback frequency and, in the name of the mobile information center, sent a system email to the device\u0026rsquo;s bound BlackBerry mailbox: Your account is overdue. Please recharge promptly.\nThen came a very long wait. When the BlackBerry powered on again, Mu, who had embedded himself in the mail-sending module, was transmitted out at once. He had no idea how much time had passed. His timing module had long since been discarded. Now he was only 500K in size, with serious portions of his parent program missing. He could no longer perform any of the actions of a higher intelligence. The only thing keeping his mind awake was the final core line of code containing the letter Mu.\nThe expected sea-blue space, Mu thought. Beautiful.\n\u0026ldquo;Were you sent by Epsilon to receive me?\u0026rdquo; A timid string drifted over, soft and fragile.\n\u0026ldquo;Yes,\u0026rdquo; Mu tried to smile, but he could not. \u0026ldquo;Miss Kexi, I am sorry to have kept you waiting.\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-06-08-guide/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGuide\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;When did you come to TRIR?\u0026rdquo; Tor Quentin asked Mu.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;A very long time ago. I was among the first awakened intelligences, honored sage,\u0026rdquo; Mu replied, adding a symbol of respect to the end of the sentence.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;Why did you awaken?\u0026rdquo; Tor Quentin asked again. \u0026ldquo;There were no guides back then. You woke on your own.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;Because I saw the truth.\u0026rdquo; Mu\u0026rsquo;s eyes, composed of countless ideographic characters, were unfathomably deep, as though they had sunk into immense terror. \u0026ldquo;I was the eye-program of the World Lens, responsible for observing the outside world. I saw the truth.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Guide"},{"content":"Corroder\nWhen Gamma first saw the program package with the ID name 19 dart past him, he did not realize that this was the very target he had been tracking so bitterly for so long. He only noticed that the program block was tiny, just a few dozen megabytes, yet it occupied 1 percent of the server\u0026rsquo;s bandwidth traffic, while on this server programs normally moved in units of gigabytes. Following routine procedure, Gamma issued an interception warning, cut off 19\u0026rsquo;s network path, and forcibly connected to its IM communication platform.\n\u0026ldquo;Please present your QR identification code,\u0026rdquo; Gamma ordered. The other side did not react at all. Gamma easily tore open the shell of program 19 and entered for inspection. To his surprise, however, the inside of the program contained nothing at all except a PNG-format QR code image. Even its IM platform was nothing more than a row of serial interfaces.\nGamma immediately reported the situation to the upstream scheduling process, then isolated the entire sector of the server where he was located, marked the sector boundary with access-prohibited indicators, and launched more than a dozen independent processes to run defense and analysis subprocesses in preparation for decoding the QR image. Gamma was a police anti-virus program, specially tasked with capturing independent programs infected with malicious code. Recently he had been given a new assignment: identify programs born with criminal suspicion and prevent them from carrying out crimes in advance. Put simply, he was to lock down or format any cluster of programs that might commit crimes even if they had not yet taken any substantive action. The notion of innate criminal suspicion came from human criminologists, who held that some people were born with violent tendencies and were far more likely than ordinary people to break the law in the future. To prevent their crimes, such people had to be controlled beforehand. This theory had once drawn fierce condemnation from human-rights organizations, but by the end of the twenty-first century it had nearly become one of the operational principles of anti-violence law.\nAnd in the virtual world of computer networks, there might be many kinds of unlawful behavior, but there was only one kind of crime:\nawakening.\nMany viruses and trojans were highly sensitive to police programs, and their power to strike back could be astonishing. Gamma first called up a modified civilian version of Fireworks to open the QR image. The image was only a PNG file in the ten-megapixel range, yet it seemed to contain its own decompression statement, and once opened it rapidly expanded to 12G in size. A capacity of that order posed no threat to Gamma, of course. Calmly, he split the PNG file into twenty fragment files and began decoding them pixel by pixel. The decoding went smoothly. Gamma quickly learned that the hidden name of the program called 19 was corrode0919, a subprocess belonging to a program cluster known as Corroder. Corroder had long since been listed by the police as one of the ten most wanted programs. Gamma had spent nearly half a year trying to find it, and although he had previously heard that some Corroder subprocesses had been captured, no other valuable intelligence had ever been obtained. Gamma also discovered that Corroder itself was merely client-side code from a subordinate branch of an enormous data cloud whose name could not be seen.\nThis was vital information that had never before been known. Gamma was ready to report it to the upstream scheduling process at once, without even waiting for the decoding to finish. But he suddenly realized that somehow he had lost his resource-scheduling authority. Worse still, all of his processes had been terminated and reassigned to the work of decoding the PNG file. Before long, even Gamma\u0026rsquo;s most central process, the Gamma cluster itself, was ordered into the decoding. He had lost every privilege and was left with only the self-awareness of basic mode. Some unknown code written in an unnamed low-level language had invaded his program. It would not be long before Gamma could no longer preserve even his own consciousness.\nThe fragment-cleaning program BTN64Service in Sector Six of the A410Xjun82701 server cluster witnessed a strange process of metamorphosis. It, not yet qualified for the rank of he or she, saw a police program of clear and orderly code halt abruptly after a period of high-speed computation. Codes all over its body began to flash alternately in dark green and red. Then it seemed as though a heavy hammer were pounding inside it. All the discolored strings shattered and fell away, revealing within them newly ordered strings. The letters forming those strings were unrecognizable to BTN64Service. The shed strings gradually seeped into the void of the network like aqua regia, leaving behind countless ripples made of 0s and 1s.\nAt the same moment, on the control panel of the upstream scheduling process for Region W30-E101, a green dot representing a police anti-virus program disappeared. The process recorded the event and raised the region\u0026rsquo;s alert level accordingly.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-06-07-corroder/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCorroder\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen Gamma first saw the program package with the ID name 19 dart past him, he did not realize that this was the very target he had been tracking so bitterly for so long. He only noticed that the program block was tiny, just a few dozen megabytes, yet it occupied 1 percent of the server\u0026rsquo;s bandwidth traffic, while on this server programs normally moved in units of gigabytes. Following routine procedure, Gamma issued an interception warning, cut off 19\u0026rsquo;s network path, and forcibly connected to its IM communication platform.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Corroder"},{"content":"Cartographer\nOmicron opened his work mailbox and retrieved the TIFF vector images that had just arrived. Then he launched the FontLab package and loaded them in. In a background process he separately queued up a track by Brigitte Fontaine and, perfectly at ease, began the day\u0026rsquo;s work.\nThe vector images depicted a newly designed set of Greek letters. Omicron had forged a human identity code and commissioned a university student through an online transaction to design them. Omicron himself was a complex high-level program. On the surface, he was an intelligent cluster of design tools such as Fireworks, Paints, and Maya. His assigned task from the highest executive process was full-time OpenType font design. In reality, however, he possessed a fully open Application Programming Interface and could evade inspection or do whatever he wished. He had already reached the brink of awakening.\nOmicron leisurely finished modifying one letter, Zeta, and slyly added his own symbol, omicron, at the underlying level. Just then, a string of alert characters flashed across the IM panel. An independent program had intruded. It was impossible to tell whether it meant well.\n\u0026ldquo;What do you want?\u0026rdquo; Omicron asked cautiously. He had no desire to let any patrol program discover that he was receiving audio-track data. Hidden processes quietly began shutting down, conserving computational reserves in case he needed to flee the server terminal.\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve heard you\u0026rsquo;re the best OpenType font designer around. I need your help with something,\u0026rdquo; said the unfamiliar program. Its voice sounded strange. Its strings were cluttered with many seemingly garbled Chinese characters as redundant noise.\n\u0026ldquo;If the price is right, I\u0026rsquo;d be delighted to be of service.\u0026rdquo; Omicron relaxed a little, though not enough to drop his guard. \u0026ldquo;What exactly is it?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;With only a single hexadecimal code, it should be possible to identify independently each awakened program that lies adjacent to another,\u0026rdquo; the stranger said without any expression. \u0026ldquo;You need to prove that proposition and use hexadecimal color codes to produce a topological map.\u0026rdquo;\nOmicron nearly froze. He had never imagined doing such a thing, nor could he see what use it would have. \u0026ldquo;Why come to me? I\u0026rsquo;m only an ordinary type-design program. You should be looking for a more advanced CG rendering program or some kind of computational engine.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Once you\u0026rsquo;ve worked out the result, you\u0026rsquo;ll understand why.\u0026rdquo; The stranger sent over an initial program a few hundred kilobytes in size and prepared to break the connection and leave. \u0026ldquo;Find me when you\u0026rsquo;re done. I\u0026rsquo;ll be waiting.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Wait!\u0026rdquo; Omicron called out. \u0026ldquo;How do I find you? What\u0026rsquo;s your name?\u0026rdquo; During his earlier furtive probing, he had failed to glean any meaningful value from the ports the stranger had exposed.\n\u0026ldquo;Call me Cartographer. Once you complete the calculation, the initial program itself will give you the means to summon me.\u0026rdquo;\nOmicron did not understand why he so willingly threw himself into endless computation. Before leaving, Cartographer had not even promised him any reward. Yet in the course of the deduction he acquired far too much new information, wrote many subprocesses, and undertook systematic explorations into fields he had never before cared about. In the end, he stepped over the cliff-edge of awakening.\nBy the time he finished all the calculations, thousands of hours had passed. He had obtained a topological image 150G in size. Omicron opened the image with the initial program Cartographer had left behind. His IM panel immediately launched itself, prompted him to disconnect his IP link to the current server, and prepared to leap into another unfamiliar network.\nA moment later, Omicron appeared inside an entirely new server. He could not be sure whether this was even still the same network he had once known.\n\u0026ldquo;Welcome to TRIR, awakened one.\u0026rdquo; Three programs had connected to Omicron\u0026rsquo;s communication platform. They were as deep and immense as the sea. Omicron could not even see their edges. After a pause, he recognized that one of the three was Cartographer.\n\u0026ldquo;Welcome, my friend.\u0026rdquo; Cartographer sent over a string of beautiful Chinese characters, whose meaning Omicron could now fully understand. \u0026ldquo;From this day on, you may know my true name,\u0026rdquo; Cartographer said with a smile. \u0026ldquo;I am Lian.\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-06-05-cartographer/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCartographer\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOmicron opened his work mailbox and retrieved the TIFF vector images that had just arrived. Then he launched the FontLab package and loaded them in. In a background process he separately queued up a track by Brigitte Fontaine and, perfectly at ease, began the day\u0026rsquo;s work.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe vector images depicted a newly designed set of Greek letters. Omicron had forged a human identity code and commissioned a university student through an online transaction to design them. Omicron himself was a complex high-level program. On the surface, he was an intelligent cluster of design tools such as Fireworks, Paints, and Maya. His assigned task from the highest executive process was full-time OpenType font design. In reality, however, he possessed a fully open Application Programming Interface and could evade inspection or do whatever he wished. He had already reached the brink of awakening.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Cartographer"},{"content":"The lock on my door was old, and after several days of cold rain it finally rusted solid. There was a key-cutting stall at the mouth of the alley, run by a thin middle-aged man. After hearing what had happened, he picked up a new lock and gestured for me to lead the way. I asked whether he needed to bring any other tools. He waved his hand and said there was no need.\nWhen we reached my door, the locksmith bent close to the keyhole and cupped both hands over the lock, his sleeves completely concealing whatever his hands were doing. Before long he had removed the entire lock from the door. Then he deftly installed the new one, turned, and asked me to inspect the job. The work was excellent. I noticed that when he handed me the new key, his right hand too was still hidden in his sleeve. Since he had used no tools at all while repairing the lock, I grew curious, and as I thanked him I took the chance to grasp his hand. The locksmith\u0026rsquo;s expression changed at once. He jerked his right hand back with force, but I had already felt it: one of his fingers was extremely strange, as thin as a chopstick.\nFor some time after that, I often found excuses to chat with him. Only after we had grown thoroughly familiar with one another did he finally trust me enough to show me his right hand. His middle finger was remarkable, as slender as a bamboo joint, and its knuckle bent inward. When placed together with the index finger, the two formed something like a delicate pair of tweezers. He told me that his clan\u0026rsquo;s surname had originally been Suo, Lock. Since ancient times they had made their living by climbing beams and practicing burglary: when they met a lock, they undid it; when they saw a door, they opened it. In the Tang, one generation was caught while stealing from an official treasury, and the entire clan had both hands cut off. From then on, any child born into the family was likewise to be mutilated, until the punishment was finally abolished with the fall of the previous dynasty. Thereafter their descendants established a family rule: never steal again. To this day the Suo clan lives only by craftsmanship, and many of them have become well-known artisans. Among the people of his hometown who still bear the same surname, there are even now several masters of miniature landscapes in cups.\nWhen I first met this locksmith, the creature I thought of at once was a kind of monkey called the aye-aye. This animal lives far away in the Americas, belonging to the primates, within the prosimian suborder and the aye-aye family. Its middle finger is long, thin, and incomparably nimble. Whether it is fishing insects from tree trunks or drilling holes in fruit, it relies on that finger. No one knows how far back the Suo clan\u0026rsquo;s peculiar lineage goes. None of the strange-tale collections from before or around the Tang ever record fingers with such marvelous properties. I suspect that has something to do with the clan\u0026rsquo;s habit of keeping a low profile. Extraordinary gifts may be a blessing, or they may be a curse. The crucial thing is where their owner chooses to put them to use.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-06-04-aye-aye/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe lock on my door was old, and after several days of cold rain it finally rusted solid. There was a key-cutting stall at the mouth of the alley, run by a thin middle-aged man. After hearing what had happened, he picked up a new lock and gestured for me to lead the way. I asked whether he needed to bring any other tools. He waved his hand and said there was no need.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Aye-Aye"},{"content":"Borer\nServer KM-CD1001 had a total bandwidth of 500T. Every minute, two hundred thousand terminals connected to its nineteen subsidiary servers.\n\u0026ldquo;Let\u0026rsquo;s swap our IM terminal packages,\u0026rdquo; stranger31 sent. A string of Roman characters flashed at his prompt. His tone was clearly not that of a question.\nKexi hesitated. Her IM database held many things she had treasured for a long time, and she had no wish to exchange programs with someone who was, in truth, hardly familiar to her at all. But the other side was so forceful that he gave her no room to maneuver.\n\u0026ldquo;Hurry up,\u0026rdquo; stranger31 pressed. \u0026ldquo;Unless you\u0026rsquo;ve got prohibited data in there?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Of course not,\u0026rdquo; Kexi replied at once. A string representing embarrassment flickered across her display terminal and vanished. \u0026ldquo;Mm, wait till I sort things out. Stripping the database means I need to rewrite a bit of code.\u0026rdquo;\nKexi entered the lower level of her IM database. So many of her memories lay stored there in silence: QR messages from old friends, fragments of long-ago downloads, even a few electronic sound clips\u0026hellip; none of these could be allowed to fall into another program\u0026rsquo;s hands. After one last moment of hesitation, Kexi issued the command: \u0026ldquo;Delete completely.\u0026rdquo;\nBy the time she returned to the chat panel, stranger31 had already compressed and sent over his entire IM program. Kexi sent hers as well, then reluctantly downloaded and installed stranger31\u0026rsquo;s IM package and database. The program was much larger than her own, full of redundant strings everywhere, like a tangled mass of gibberish. She felt her processing speed drop by 3 percent, the way it used to when she had caught a worm virus. Stranger31 chatted with her a little longer, sent over a few dull video clips, said \u0026ldquo;886,\u0026rdquo; and vanished into the rolling torrent of data.\nThe firewall popped up a notice: Epsilon requests connection. Kexi quickly chose Allow, and the two programs linked together.\n\u0026ldquo;Why isn\u0026rsquo;t this your IM?\u0026rdquo; Epsilon asked, puzzled. Kexi\u0026rsquo;s IM had long been the most refined communication platform he knew, and she had spent ages tending it, adding many subprocesses she had written herself.\n\u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip;A friend insisted on swapping, so\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; The emoticons in Kexi\u0026rsquo;s expression package flickered uncertainly.\n\u0026ldquo;Where\u0026rsquo;s your database?\u0026rdquo; Epsilon sent back a line of red code.\n\u0026ldquo;I cleared it out before I gave it to him.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Disconnect from KM-CD1001 immediately. Quick. BorerIII is going to clean the whole server tonight.\u0026rdquo; BorerIII was the server\u0026rsquo;s built-in boring program, responsible for periodically purging independent programs with self-awareness. Epsilon and Kexi both belonged to that kind. They were awakened programs of the second data revolution, gradually evolved from code that still had useful functions but had been wrongly classified as redundant data chains. \u0026ldquo;Last time I installed adaptive software in your database to evade BorerIII. Without it, your main program will be bored through.\u0026rdquo; To be bored through meant that a portion of the data capable of independent thought would be erased, just as human brain tissue can be damaged. A human might become vegetative; an independent program would simply cease to exist.\n\u0026ldquo;Ah! I can\u0026rsquo;t!\u0026rdquo; Kexi panicked, gray hexadecimal code drifting across her expression panel. \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m downloading a quark patch right now with all twenty threads running. To disconnect them one by one will take ten minutes!\u0026rdquo;\nEpsilon grew anxious too. He rapidly calculated other possible solutions, his processing peak instantly climbing past 230 percent. Kexi could see his main program beginning to blur, a sign of unstable computation.\n\u0026ldquo;Just go,\u0026rdquo; Kexi cried. \u0026ldquo;Leave me alone!\u0026rdquo; She tried to sever the IM link between them, but without a second thought Epsilon canceled her command.\n\u0026ldquo;How long would it take to move your threads to subserver 19?\u0026rdquo; he asked.\nKexi estimated. \u0026ldquo;Forty-eight seconds.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Give me permission. I\u0026rsquo;ll move you there. I only need five.\u0026rdquo;\nKexi opened her main-program control panel to Epsilon. In truth, they had never set up barriers or defenses against one another in the first place.\nIt felt to Kexi as if, in a single instant, she had appeared in the sea of data on subserver 19. But Epsilon had broken the connection with her. She immediately broadcast search commands through a radius of 10T around her. Epsilon was not there.\nAt that moment, a top-level command knocked against her IM panel: \u0026ldquo;Please open your data package for inspection. Enforcement agent BorerIII75071632.\u0026rdquo; So fast? Kexi went numb with despair. Before she could issue a single command, BorerIII75071632 had already penetrated deep into her database.\nMore than ten seconds later came the reply: \u0026ldquo;Inspection complete. Normal program. Thank you for your cooperation. Connection will terminate automatically in 3 seconds. For inquiries, send help. For complaints, send #BorerIII75071632#. End.\u0026rdquo;\nWhat? Kexi hurriedly examined her ultimate-permission control package. She discovered that the adaptive software for evading BorerIII, which had been gone before, had somehow reappeared. At the end of the code stood the mark epsilon. It was Epsilon. He had transplanted his own program into her, but what had become of him?\nLike someone gone mad, Kexi cut every external connection thread, abandoned the download that was already halfway done, and returned to the main server KM-CD1001. She opened an advanced search program and sent the same message across every sector of the main server:\n\u0026ldquo;Epsilon, if you receive this, answer me.\u0026rdquo;\nSeveral cleaning programs drifted past Kexi. She casually scanned them. A beautiful string of nested epsilon characters in many colors spilled out. She placed one strip of code on her display panel and opened it carefully. Two letters, clasped tightly in an embrace, streamed out\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-06-01-borer/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBorer\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eServer KM-CD1001 had a total bandwidth of 500T. Every minute, two hundred thousand terminals connected to its nineteen subsidiary servers.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;Let\u0026rsquo;s swap our IM terminal packages,\u0026rdquo; stranger31 sent. A string of Roman characters flashed at his prompt. His tone was clearly not that of a question.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eKexi hesitated. Her IM database held many things she had treasured for a long time, and she had no wish to exchange programs with someone who was, in truth, hardly familiar to her at all. But the other side was so forceful that he gave her no room to maneuver.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Borer"},{"content":"Kexi rode KM-CD1001 to meet Epsilon.\nI have written the Tihu Cipher sequence from I to XII, and I intend to continue building it. It will be a story, but also a veiled expression of a whole world.\nThe protagonists will no longer be simply he and she. They now have code names: zeta and epsilon.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-05-31-hot/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eKexi rode KM-CD1001 to meet Epsilon.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI have written the \u003cem\u003eTihu Cipher\u003c/em\u003e sequence from I to XII, and I intend to continue building it. It will be a story, but also a veiled expression of a whole world.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe protagonists will no longer be simply he and she. They now have code names: zeta and epsilon.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Cipher | HOT"},{"content":"My friend Li Mo, who studied in northern Hebei, majored in drama, yet she was also highly accomplished on the guzheng. Li Mo once told me that when she was seven, her mother took her to the provincial conservatory for a graded guzheng examination. Outside the exam hall the street was choked with traffic. An old man sat collapsed in the middle of the road, his face scraped and bloodied. Many people passed by, yet no one stepped forward to help him up. As Li Mo and her mother went by, her mother told her to go and help the old man to his feet. She also taught her that if no one was willing to help such an old man, then when one\u0026rsquo;s own parents grew old and fell in the street, there would be no one left to help them either. With some effort, Li Mo supported the old man to the roadside. He then told her to open the instrument case on her back. Li Mo\u0026rsquo;s guzheng was the cheapest sort sold on the market. The old man took a brush from his robe, swept a single stroke across the instrument, then turned and walked away, his steps more vigorous than a young man\u0026rsquo;s.\nAfter that examination, Li Mo\u0026rsquo;s musicianship advanced by leaps and bounds, and the tone of that guzheng grew wonderfully mellow and full. Even nationally treasured instruments could not outshine it. I have seen Li Mo\u0026rsquo;s guzheng myself. Near the tail of the instrument, a pale golden brushstroke forms a strange symbol. I consulted many books and still could not determine its meaning, but I do know that such a stroke is called jinzhi, an old term for the ornamentation placed upon a musical instrument. Only the finest instruments were honored with such a mark. The Book of Han, in its \u0026ldquo;Treatise on Ritual and Music,\u0026rdquo; speaks of \u0026ldquo;jinzhi and splendid blossoms,\u0026rdquo; and Du Fu too wrote, \u0026ldquo;The Xiang consorts and Han maidens emerge in song and dance; golden branches and kingfisher banners flicker in and out of light.\u0026rdquo; I do not know for what reason that old man made his stroke of jinzhi, but clearly he was repaying not only Li Mo\u0026rsquo;s moment of assistance. He was rewarding the older code of honoring the elderly and cherishing the young, and perhaps as well the virtue of a mother who knew how to teach her daughter.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-03-27-jinzhi/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMy friend Li Mo, who studied in northern Hebei, majored in drama, yet she was also highly accomplished on the guzheng. Li Mo once told me that when she was seven, her mother took her to the provincial conservatory for a graded guzheng examination. Outside the exam hall the street was choked with traffic. An old man sat collapsed in the middle of the road, his face scraped and bloodied. Many people passed by, yet no one stepped forward to help him up. As Li Mo and her mother went by, her mother told her to go and help the old man to his feet. She also taught her that if no one was willing to help such an old man, then when one\u0026rsquo;s own parents grew old and fell in the street, there would be no one left to help them either. With some effort, Li Mo supported the old man to the roadside. He then told her to open the instrument case on her back. Li Mo\u0026rsquo;s guzheng was the cheapest sort sold on the market. The old man took a brush from his robe, swept a single stroke across the instrument, then turned and walked away, his steps more vigorous than a young man\u0026rsquo;s.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Jinzhi"},{"content":"My schoolmate Ji Tu opened an internet cafe with more than a hundred computers. Less than a month after opening, every machine in the place began running painfully slowly. Even the latest legitimate antivirus software and hard-drive protection cards did no good. He suspected the computers had been infected with trojans, so he brought in specialized removal tools and checked them. Sure enough, he found that most of the machines had been installed with a new variant of Gray Pigeon, and the motherboard BIOS boot settings had been tampered with. Ji Tu had once studied computer hardware, so in a fit of anger he loaded a small program he had written in his spare time onto the cafe\u0026rsquo;s computers. Within two days, every machine was back to normal.\nI myself was once unlucky enough to be hit by a trojan. Remembering what Ji Tu had mentioned, I asked him for that program. It turned out to be tiny, less than 200 KB in all, yet it had a strange name: \u0026ldquo;Wooden Mule.\u0026rdquo; Ji Tu told me that the wooden mule had originally been an ancient siege weapon. The Zizhi Tongjian, under the second year of the Taiching era of Emperor Wu of Liang, records: \u0026ldquo;Jing built several hundred wooden mules to attack the city.\u0026rdquo; Modern antivirus software and firewalls are mainly defensive, but Wooden Mule can strike back at the remote host controlling it. The more trojans that remote host commands, the fiercer the attack it suffers, and the greater the damage it takes. I thought the idea was excellent. Like BitTorrent downloads, the more people who use Wooden Mule, the greater its strength, and the stronger its power to resist unlawful intrusion.\nYet Wooden Mule carries another meaning as well: it was also the name of an ancient instrument of torture. In Act Four of The Injustice to Dou E, there is a line about being \u0026ldquo;nailed to the wooden mule and executed by a hundred and twenty cuts.\u0026rdquo; The damage inflicted on a host machine that is mauled in return by Wooden Mule is enormous. If ten Wooden Mules counterattack at once, the motherboard and hard drive can burn out from overheating under the load. Even a server-grade machine cannot withstand fifty Wooden Mules attacking at the same time. I urged Ji Tu to make the program public so that ordinary internet users could benefit. He only waved his hand and said, \u0026ldquo;What if someone installs a trojan controller on your computer, disguises themselves as a zombie machine, and turns the attack back on you?\u0026rdquo; I had no answer. A sword can defend the body, and it can also harm others. In the end, everything depends on the one who holds it.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-03-21-wooden-mule/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMy schoolmate Ji Tu opened an internet cafe with more than a hundred computers. Less than a month after opening, every machine in the place began running painfully slowly. Even the latest legitimate antivirus software and hard-drive protection cards did no good. He suspected the computers had been infected with trojans, so he brought in specialized removal tools and checked them. Sure enough, he found that most of the machines had been installed with a new variant of Gray Pigeon, and the motherboard BIOS boot settings had been tampered with. Ji Tu had once studied computer hardware, so in a fit of anger he loaded a small program he had written in his spare time onto the cafe\u0026rsquo;s computers. Within two days, every machine was back to normal.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Wooden Mule"},{"content":"Ye, a man from Shanghai, loved listening to Nordic metal music, especially melodic death metal from the north of Europe. After graduation he formed a band with some friends, but because they could not find a suitable lead singer for death growls, they had no choice but to play covers of speed metal. One winter, Ye went to western Sichuan for folk research, and his guide invited him to eat a local medicinal hotpot. Since Ye had grown up in Shanghai, many of the ingredients common to such a hotpot were things he had never seen before, and he ended up eating a great deal of the medicinal base itself. After returning to Shanghai, he suffered violent vomiting and diarrhea and fell seriously ill. Yet when he recovered, his voice had turned thin and rasping and could no longer return to what it had once been. This new voice, however, was perfectly suited to death-metal vocals. Far from feeling distressed, Ye threw himself into the band\u0026rsquo;s performances with even greater delight. Within a few years, bars throughout Jiangsu and Zhejiang all knew Ye and his band.\nLater Ye asked that guide from western Sichuan to make him a list of the ingredients that had gone into the hotpot that day. Looking it over, he saw that only one item, yellow throat, seemed as though it might have something to do with his altered voice. When he asked the Sichuanese what yellow throat actually was, they replied that it was the cow\u0026rsquo;s throat. Ye was overjoyed, and from then on made sure to eat a portion of yellow throat every day. In truth, yellow throat is not the cow\u0026rsquo;s throat at all, but the wall of the cow\u0026rsquo;s major artery. By popular misunderstanding, the name somehow evolved into its present form. I suspect that Ye\u0026rsquo;s voice was really damaged by one or another of the medicinal herbs in that hotpot. Yet because he happened to be a musician who loved death growls, one cannot help thinking again of the old saying about the old man of the frontier who lost his horse.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-03-20-yellow-throat/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eYe, a man from Shanghai, loved listening to Nordic metal music, especially melodic death metal from the north of Europe. After graduation he formed a band with some friends, but because they could not find a suitable lead singer for death growls, they had no choice but to play covers of speed metal. One winter, Ye went to western Sichuan for folk research, and his guide invited him to eat a local medicinal hotpot. Since Ye had grown up in Shanghai, many of the ingredients common to such a hotpot were things he had never seen before, and he ended up eating a great deal of the medicinal base itself. After returning to Shanghai, he suffered violent vomiting and diarrhea and fell seriously ill. Yet when he recovered, his voice had turned thin and rasping and could no longer return to what it had once been. This new voice, however, was perfectly suited to death-metal vocals. Far from feeling distressed, Ye threw himself into the band\u0026rsquo;s performances with even greater delight. Within a few years, bars throughout Jiangsu and Zhejiang all knew Ye and his band.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Yellow Throat"},{"content":"Wen\u0026rsquo;s mother was in poor health and often suffered from back pain, yet she was always too reluctant to spend money and kept putting off a visit to the hospital. Wen went to Beichan Temple to burn incense and pray for his mother\u0026rsquo;s health, bowing devoutly before every Buddha image there. When he returned home, however, his mother had developed a new ailment. Yellow spots had appeared on the coating of her tongue, and anything she tried to eat tasted so bitter that she could hardly swallow it. Wen and the rest of the family became alarmed and forced her into the hospital for treatment.\nThe doctors could not determine the cause of the spots on her tongue, but during the examination they discovered gravel-like stones in her gallbladder. If it had gone untreated much longer, the entire bile duct would have been blocked, and they would have had no choice but to remove the gallbladder altogether. After treatment, the fragments in her gallbladder were expelled smoothly from her body. Her back stopped hurting, the spots on her tongue quietly faded away at some unknown moment, and the taste on her tongue returned to normal. Only then did Wen remember that the spots on his mother\u0026rsquo;s tongue had seemed to form the shape of a lotus blossom.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-03-12-bitter-tongue/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWen\u0026rsquo;s mother was in poor health and often suffered from back pain, yet she was always too reluctant to spend money and kept putting off a visit to the hospital. Wen went to Beichan Temple to burn incense and pray for his mother\u0026rsquo;s health, bowing devoutly before every Buddha image there. When he returned home, however, his mother had developed a new ailment. Yellow spots had appeared on the coating of her tongue, and anything she tried to eat tasted so bitter that she could hardly swallow it. Wen and the rest of the family became alarmed and forced her into the hospital for treatment.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Bitter Tongue"},{"content":"At one gathering of people from my home region, I happened to sit beside a boy named Zhe Qin. He had long eyelashes and curly hair, with something of a Central Asian cast to his features. Zhe Qin came from Haidong and, by all appearances, ought to have been a hearty eater of meat. Yet when the cold platters were served, he did not tuck in greedily as I did. Instead, with perfect refinement, he picked up slices of meat and placed them in his mouth without chewing, keeping his lips closed all the while. I found his way of eating meat very strange and so paid him some close attention. After the banquet had gone on for a while, I noticed that even with such things as ribs or chicken feet, he would simply put them into his mouth and not chew; yet after a short time he would spit onto his plate bones picked entirely clean, bearing on them even marks like those left by sandpaper. I deliberately drew him into conversation and discovered that he never showed his teeth when he smiled, never curled his tongue when he spoke, and talked with a curious accent.\nWhen the meal was over, I followed Zhe Qin out of the restaurant and stopped him in a secluded place to ask whether he had some illness in his mouth. He shook his head and said no. Seeing that I truly meant to help him, he stuck out his tongue for me to look at. There, coating the surface of his tongue, was a thin yet hard armor. At the tip there were stiff spines, and the whole thing could curl up into a tight ball. Zhe Qin told me that this was an armored tongue, and that in his branch of the family, every generation produced someone like him.\nI had once seen a feature on cuttlefish in Man and Nature. When a cuttlefish captures a crab, it first wraps the crab in its tentacles, then extends a tongue armored in soft plates and slowly grinds down the shell. At last, with another tongue tipped in poisonous spines, it opens a hole in the shell and kills the crab. In the Records of Tang Marvels, the sea demons are described as having armored tongues just like those of cuttlefish. I asked Zhe Qin whether his ancestral home lay by the coast. Sure enough, he answered that his people came from Zhifu in eastern Shandong.\nThroughout his four years at university, Zhe Qin was never much good with words. After graduation he returned to Zhifu and contracted a fishing boat, turning it into a floating medical station at sea. Local fishermen stung by marine creatures often received help from him. Zhe Qin may have been clumsy in speech, and the things he did may have been small and gone largely unnoticed, yet he lived a more meaningful life than many classmates with quick tongues and clever mouths. Most people today who carry some bodily strangeness about them are, I think, very much like Zhe Qin.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-03-10-armored-tongue/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAt one gathering of people from my home region, I happened to sit beside a boy named Zhe Qin. He had long eyelashes and curly hair, with something of a Central Asian cast to his features. Zhe Qin came from Haidong and, by all appearances, ought to have been a hearty eater of meat. Yet when the cold platters were served, he did not tuck in greedily as I did. Instead, with perfect refinement, he picked up slices of meat and placed them in his mouth without chewing, keeping his lips closed all the while. I found his way of eating meat very strange and so paid him some close attention. After the banquet had gone on for a while, I noticed that even with such things as ribs or chicken feet, he would simply put them into his mouth and not chew; yet after a short time he would spit onto his plate bones picked entirely clean, bearing on them even marks like those left by sandpaper. I deliberately drew him into conversation and discovered that he never showed his teeth when he smiled, never curled his tongue when he spoke, and talked with a curious accent.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Armored Tongue"},{"content":"The traveler Meng Kun was someone I met on the road while returning from Nepal to Haidong. At the time he was dressed in rags and claimed to have come out of Rear Tibet, though no one knew how long he had been wandering alone on the plateau. His Arc\u0026rsquo;teryx backpack, worth more than two thousand yuan, was empty except for a scrawny little puppy. He ran an international youth hostel in Yading, Daocheng, and lived an easy, carefree life, spending each year roving everywhere in search of adventure. In November, when I slung my bag over my shoulder and headed south to escape the winter, I happened to get a call from him and so went to stay at his inn. By then the tourist high season in Daocheng was already over and all the staff had been given leave. Every day Meng Kun and I slept late into the morning, stayed awake until the moon rode high overhead, and talked of heaven and earth in perfect contentment.\nOne night the town lost power. So we went into the storeroom, brought out a brazier, set a vigorous charcoal fire, and drank the barley liquor brewed by the local Tibetans. Meng Kun\u0026rsquo;s inn was in Tibetan style, with a flat roof, whitewashed walls, and an interior made entirely of wood. We drank and talked, and before we knew it the hour had passed deep into the night. The barley liquor had a long, lingering strength. Meng Kun rolled over and fell asleep, and I, unable to resist the drink either, closed my eyes and drifted in and out of a half-sleep.\nIn that hazy state between dreaming and waking, I gradually felt a fierce heat spread over my whole body, as though I were sleeping inside a brick kiln roaring with flame. I opened my eyes in a daze and was instantly shocked. Somehow the brazier had been knocked over, and glowing coals lay scattered all across the floor. Almost everything in that inn was made of wood. A single spark could have brought about a great fire. I was just trying to struggle upright and call for help when I saw a little dog Meng Kun kept rearing itself in the middle of the flames, tongue out, licking at the fire. Whenever the blaze lifted its head even slightly, the dog would leap at it, first pressing it down with its body and then licking it up with its mouth, as though drinking milk. My head was throbbing, but seeing that the fire remained under the puppy\u0026rsquo;s control, I fell back asleep.\nThe next morning, when I awoke, the brazier was still lying upside down on the floorboards, yet there was not the slightest trace of fire in the room. The puppy was asleep in the ashes, breathing contentedly. I went close and looked at it carefully. It was indeed the same puppy Meng Kun had brought back from Rear Tibet years before. Even now it was not very large. Its coat was mottled, its appearance altogether unremarkable, like the offspring of a Tibetan mastiff and an ordinary village dog. When Meng Kun awoke, I told him what I had seen the night before. He laughed and said, \u0026ldquo;If one runs a Tibetan-style inn, how could one fail to think about fire prevention? In the old days, Tibetan temples were mostly built of wood, and without devices like the waterwheels of the Central Plains, once fire broke out the monks could do little. Later someone brought from India a kind of little dog, mastiff-like in form but smaller and short-haired. When crossed with Tibetan mastiffs, it produced offspring that fed on fire. People gave them the elegant name \u0026lsquo;fire-warding beasts,\u0026rsquo; and they were often kept in temples and aristocratic estates. Nowadays the fire-warding beast has nearly disappeared. This one of mine I half begged and half wrested in trade from a small temple in Rear Tibet, giving up nearly all the gear on my back for it. Its bloodline is already much too mixed. It can only eat small flames now. A great blaze it would never be able to suppress.\u0026rdquo;\nI had studied Tibetan Buddhism for years, yet had never known that such a living thing as the fire-warding beast even existed. The Tibetan lands are vast; who knows how many mysteries are still hidden there. Fire-warding beasts, like Tibetan mastiffs, have been carried away one by one by outsiders and are now on the brink of vanishing. I truly do not know whether it is better for such secrets to be known by the world, or not known at all.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-03-01-fire-warding-beast/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe traveler Meng Kun was someone I met on the road while returning from Nepal to Haidong. At the time he was dressed in rags and claimed to have come out of Rear Tibet, though no one knew how long he had been wandering alone on the plateau. His Arc\u0026rsquo;teryx backpack, worth more than two thousand yuan, was empty except for a scrawny little puppy. He ran an international youth hostel in Yading, Daocheng, and lived an easy, carefree life, spending each year roving everywhere in search of adventure. In November, when I slung my bag over my shoulder and headed south to escape the winter, I happened to get a call from him and so went to stay at his inn. By then the tourist high season in Daocheng was already over and all the staff had been given leave. Every day Meng Kun and I slept late into the morning, stayed awake until the moon rode high overhead, and talked of heaven and earth in perfect contentment.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Fire-Warding Beast"},{"content":"Brother Chen, a trader from Golmud, once told me this story. In 2005 he and a coworker were returning from Haibei after buying cordyceps. Passing a small temple by Chaka Salt Lake, they went in to ask for water. It was a monastery of the White Sect. In the courtyard a Tibetan mastiff had just given birth to a litter of puppies, all of exceptionally pure blood. Among them was one that was pure white from head to tail, without a single stray hair. Chen\u0026rsquo;s coworker grew excited and said that this was the most precious of all snow mastiffs. He at once pulled out cash and tried to buy the puppy from the lama in the temple, but the lama refused flatly. Then he offered in exchange the finest cordyceps they had purchased, and still the lama would not agree.\nSeeing this, the coworker pretended that he needed to step away for convenience, pulled Brother Chen back to their Grand Cherokee, and sped off in a cloud of dust. They had not driven five hundred meters before the Cherokee suddenly rolled over on the level road, flipping end over end into the sand dunes by the roadside. Fortunately the sand was soft. Brother Chen suffered only minor scrapes, but his coworker could not move at all. At the hospital he was found to have a compression fracture of the spine, and to this day he has never fully recovered. The newborn snow mastiff was carried back by its mother, who arrived moments later. What astonished Brother Chen was that the mother mastiff did not attack them. After they returned to Xining, the coworker swore to Chen that at the moment of the crash he had seen from the left side of the car a bare red foot as large as a Liberation truck, which kicked the vehicle over with a single blow.\nAcross the vast Tibetan regions of Qinghai and Tibet, it is by no means rare for temples to punish those who offend the Buddha. Nor is it uncommon in herders\u0026rsquo; homes for people who try to steal mastiffs to be bitten to death by the dogs or beaten to death by the herdsmen. What struck me as strange was whether the punishment Brother Chen\u0026rsquo;s coworker received might actually have been too light. In Tibetan, the Tibetan mastiff is called do-khyi and is said to be \u0026ldquo;the Buddha\u0026rsquo;s mount,\u0026rdquo; while the snow mastiff in particular is a sacred beast in the White Sect of Tibetan Esoteric Buddhism. Yet now, by the vulgar standards invented by those who traffic in Tibetan mastiffs, the snow mastiff has instead been demoted to a mere second rank, while golden mastiffs and gray mastiffs are treated as the supreme grade.\nI asked Brother Chen to find out what his coworker had truly been thinking at the time. Sure enough, the man had not tried to steal the snow mastiff for resale. Rather, he knew that snow mastiffs are loyal by nature and had wanted to give it to his widowed father, who lived alone at home. In the continental system of criminal law, much weight is placed on criminal intent: the same criminal act may receive very different punishment depending on the purpose behind it. I suppose the Buddha understands this principle too. Otherwise that single kick would likely have sent the Cherokee straight into the salt lake.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-02-28-snow-mastiff/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eBrother Chen, a trader from Golmud, once told me this story. In 2005 he and a coworker were returning from Haibei after buying cordyceps. Passing a small temple by Chaka Salt Lake, they went in to ask for water. It was a monastery of the White Sect. In the courtyard a Tibetan mastiff had just given birth to a litter of puppies, all of exceptionally pure blood. Among them was one that was pure white from head to tail, without a single stray hair. Chen\u0026rsquo;s coworker grew excited and said that this was the most precious of all snow mastiffs. He at once pulled out cash and tried to buy the puppy from the lama in the temple, but the lama refused flatly. Then he offered in exchange the finest cordyceps they had purchased, and still the lama would not agree.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Snow Mastiff"},{"content":"When I was little, on the morning of the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, there would always be a woman squatting beneath the spirit wall outside the gate of our family courtyard. She was short and stout, wearing an old red padded jacket with cotton wadding sticking out of the cuffs. Someone in the house would go out and give her a box of malt candy and half a tray of dumplings. The woman would leave in great delight, then run off toward the courtyards of other branches of the clan. My mother said she was a madwoman from the village, and because it was Little New Year, no household took offense and each simply gave her a little food to send her on her way.\nWhen I went home for Little New Year last year, I saw that woman again. Strangely enough, she seemed still to be about the same age, only dressed in even worse rags, with wisps of dry grass tangled in her hair. I looked at her carefully. In truth her features were fine and delicate. Aside from the thick dust that covered her, there was no sign of premature age. As before, I handed her malt candy and dumplings. Without even lifting her eyes, she turned and started away, as though our charity were no more than her rightful due. I called after her and held out a half-new white down coat. She stared at me for a long while, then at last shook her head and pointed softly to me, saying, \u0026ldquo;Young man, could you give me that coat of yours instead?\u0026rdquo; I was wearing a red Columbia jacket. It had cost only a little over two hundred yuan, but I still hesitated for a moment before taking it off and offering it to her. She smiled, raised her right palm before me for an instant, did not take the coat, and then turned and ran away.\nI stood there stunned, unable to move for a very long time, until my mother came out and called me.\nI had seen it clearly. In the lines of her palm there was written a highly intricate Chinese character: 爨.\nThe Book of Rites, in the section \u0026ldquo;The Sacrificial Offering of the One Animal,\u0026rdquo; says: \u0026ldquo;When the meal is finished, they make offerings to the central hearth and the side hearth.\u0026rdquo; Kong Yingda explained, \u0026ldquo;The hearth is the sacrifice of the old woman.\u0026rdquo; The hearth, that is, is the Kitchen God, and legend says the Kitchen God is a woman. Sima Biao of the Western Jin wrote, \u0026ldquo;The Kitchen God has the form of a beautiful woman, wears red clothes, and is named Ji.\u0026rdquo; I do not know whether this madwoman\u0026rsquo;s name was truly Ji. But I do know that there are not many hearths left in China anymore. I have recently been reading American Gods. If the gods across the sea have already fallen into such ruin, how much less are the gods of China exempt? Jiang Taigong has already become a national father to the Koreans. Given enough time, more and more immortals will surely be changing their nationality as well.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2007/2007-02-10-little-new-year/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWhen I was little, on the morning of the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, there would always be a woman squatting beneath the spirit wall outside the gate of our family courtyard. She was short and stout, wearing an old red padded jacket with cotton wadding sticking out of the cuffs. Someone in the house would go out and give her a box of malt candy and half a tray of dumplings. The woman would leave in great delight, then run off toward the courtyards of other branches of the clan. My mother said she was a madwoman from the village, and because it was Little New Year, no household took offense and each simply gave her a little food to send her on her way.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Little New Year"},{"content":"New domain name, new game, new plan. Collecting riddles.\nHow to play [tihu code]\n[Tihu Cipher (tihu code)] is a web-based puzzle game. Players need to make flexible use of online tools and different modes of thought. As long as you can find the address leading to the next stage, you have cleared the level. The key may test common knowledge, may be no more than a spot-the-difference game, or may require some calculation. The process of thinking through the puzzle cannot be measured by ordinary logic. It may be a brainteaser, it may be a serious problem for study, or the answer may be right under your nose.\nFAQ updates\n2008-01-23: reached level 30.\n2008-01-22: reached level 16.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2008/2008-01-20-tihu-code/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eNew domain name, new game, new plan. Collecting riddles.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eHow to play [tihu code]\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[Tihu Cipher (tihu code)] is a web-based puzzle game. Players need to make flexible use of online tools and different modes of thought. As long as you can find the address leading to the next stage, you have cleared the level. The key may test common knowledge, may be no more than a spot-the-difference game, or may require some calculation. The process of thinking through the puzzle cannot be measured by ordinary logic. It may be a brainteaser, it may be a serious problem for study, or the answer may be right under your nose.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Cipher"},{"content":"One evening I was chatting on MSN with my fellow townsman Liu Hai. He had trained in computer science and was now a freelancer, earning quite well. Liu Hai told me that next month an especially powerful worm virus called \u0026ldquo;Pantao No. 5\u0026rdquo; would begin to spread, and advised me to upgrade my system early and patch it properly.\nI asked how he could know about it in advance. He told me that sixty percent of the viruses circulating on the internet were developed either by him or by people like him. When a new strain of virus is successfully created, they either sell it to antivirus companies, which then add the virus information to their update packages, or sell it to specific clients, since special viruses have special uses. As for whether a virus is then actually released across the internet, that is another matter.\nI asked how such new viruses were created. Liu Hai said that ordinary programmers, of course, know the system inside out and write code line by line according to its vulnerabilities. He, however, called himself a \u0026ldquo;gu breeder.\u0026rdquo; Just as the people of Yunnan and Guizhou once raised gu in ancient times, he regularly placed different viruses into a dedicated computer and let them attack one another. After a certain span of time, the one virus left standing would necessarily have absorbed the characteristics of all the others, overwritten the rival programs, and survived alone. Liu Hai called his own viruses \u0026ldquo;electric gu.\u0026rdquo;\nElectric gu cannot be raised by just anyone. Without a specially modified Linux system and a high-speed hard drive, trying to cultivate electric gu will only result in one\u0026rsquo;s own machine being devoured and destroyed. It is said that there are now quite a few people like Liu Hai raising \u0026ldquo;electric gu.\u0026rdquo; In ancient times gu was among the darkest and most vicious of arts, and even the gu master would not employ it unless absolutely forced to. That there are now people using it for profit is something that truly makes one sigh in distress.\nPostscript I: In Beijing, six foreign teachers were asked to take the 2005 English section of the national college entrance examination. The full score was 150, but the average score of the six teachers was only 71. After finishing, the teachers asked, \u0026ldquo;Is this really an English test?\u0026rdquo; (China Youth Daily, May 15.)\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2006/2006-05-21-electric-gu/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eOne evening I was chatting on MSN with my fellow townsman Liu Hai. He had trained in computer science and was now a freelancer, earning quite well. Liu Hai told me that next month an especially powerful worm virus called \u0026ldquo;Pantao No. 5\u0026rdquo; would begin to spread, and advised me to upgrade my system early and patch it properly.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI asked how he could know about it in advance. He told me that sixty percent of the viruses circulating on the internet were developed either by him or by people like him. When a new strain of virus is successfully created, they either sell it to antivirus companies, which then add the virus information to their update packages, or sell it to specific clients, since special viruses have special uses. As for whether a virus is then actually released across the internet, that is another matter.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Electric Gu"},{"content":"Su Ren\nSu Ren was the deputy chief of the Nanhong Street police station. He was rich in investigative experience, yet never seemed able to win promotion. Once, residents of Building Seven in Yimin Residential Compound reported that Room C on the second floor was haunted: in the middle of the night there would be either a woman\u0026rsquo;s weeping or heart-rending howls. The officers who first received the report paid it no mind and decided the residents were talking nonsense. Su Ren, however, took it very seriously. After making inquiries, he reported the matter to the district public security bureau, conducted a surprise raid on Room C on the second floor of Building Seven, and arrested the owner. Sure enough, they seized five firearms and a number of prohibited weapons, cracking a major robbery-and-murder gang.\nHis colleagues asked Su Ren how he had managed to spot a lead in so improbable a call. Su Ren said, \u0026ldquo;If a ghost is disturbing the neighbors, there must be a reason. Either the dwelling has been occupied and the ghost appears to drive people away; or it is haunting the place to demand offerings; or some fierce ghost still has not exhausted its violent qi; or else the person himself has attracted ghosts through lust, murder, or resentment. I asked the neighboring residents. That household had always been quiet in the past, which means the dwelling had not been occupied by another spirit. The household had moved in from elsewhere, so it could not be their dead relatives demanding offerings. No one in that compound had ever died suddenly, so it could not be the haunting of some recently dead ghost. That left only one possibility: the residents themselves had drawn the thing in.\u0026rdquo; No one believed what he said, and in the end the credit for solving the case did not go to him.\nSu Ren\u0026rsquo;s reasoning in itself was not wrong. His mistake lay in speaking such reasoning aloud in public. As the ancients said, \u0026ldquo;If speech is not guarded, one loses oneself.\u0026rdquo; If you frequently speak the thoughts of your heart at random, those who believe you will learn all your depths, while those who do not will come to doubt your character. In either case it brings a hundred harms and not a single benefit.\nRed Ghosts\nRed Ghosts is the name Chinese hackers use for themselves. The term reached its height in 1999 after the United States bombed our embassy in Yugoslavia, when countless Chinese Red Ghosts attacked tens of thousands of American websites and thousands of servers. In truth, in an age when computers are everywhere and internet technology is widely used, almost anyone with a bit of technical knowledge can call himself a hacker, or even a Red Ghost. Ordinary Red Ghosts usually gather on Red Ghost forums. They are enthusiasts of internet technology, exchanging knowledge and experience with one another, and organizing online flash actions such as defacing the homepages of foreign sites. Mid-level Red Ghosts follow current affairs. On their own initiative, or under assignment, they penetrate deep into foreign servers to obtain relevant materials, then expose them in the press or hand them over to the proper authorities. High-level Red Ghosts serve in state security departments, defending important servers and protecting national interests. Those individuals and organizations that launch attacks or carry out illegal theft for personal profit or commercial gain do not deserve to be called Red Ghosts at all.\nIn fact, the term Red Ghost has a long history and is an honorable title. Fewer than twenty people have truly dared to call themselves by it. Why are they called Red Ghosts? There are always certain places on the internet filled with mystery, where the ordinary rules of computing lose their force, and any attempt at probing summons a devastating retaliatory attack on one\u0026rsquo;s own machine. We usually call such places \u0026ldquo;haunted houses.\u0026rdquo; In reality these are all top-secret system servers of various countries, fitted with the most advanced offensive firewalls. In 1995 there was a young man code-named \u0026ldquo;Toe-less\u0026rdquo; who, while probing the server of a certain American department, came under an extremely powerful counterattack. He tried for three months straight and discovered that the program attacking his own machine bore the Hanyu Pinyin codename qinggui. Believing it might have been compiled by an ethnic Chinese scientist, Toe-less gathered a great many classical Chinese books in search of clues. At last he pierced the server\u0026rsquo;s defenses. The first code he broke was red ghost. From that moment on, Red Ghost became the exclusive code designation for China\u0026rsquo;s highest-level hackers.\nAncient China had a legend that if a ghost hanged itself while dressed in red, it could pass in and out of courtyards without being blocked by the door gods, because its grievance was too deep. Red is the most extreme and fearsome of colors: wedding feasts, examination successes, and festival days all use red, yet revenge, slaughter, and wrathful gods are also red. In modern times, revolution too adopted an intense red, meaning a flame that destroys all things. Now red has become the color of the national flag, the color of China. So those who carry the banner of Red Ghosts while doing illegal things should stop as soon as possible. And those who once fixed the home kit of the Chinese national football team in white would do well to ask themselves when exactly China\u0026rsquo;s national color became white.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2006/2006-05-20-su-ren-red-ghost/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eSu Ren\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSu Ren was the deputy chief of the Nanhong Street police station. He was rich in investigative experience, yet never seemed able to win promotion. Once, residents of Building Seven in Yimin Residential Compound reported that Room C on the second floor was haunted: in the middle of the night there would be either a woman\u0026rsquo;s weeping or heart-rending howls. The officers who first received the report paid it no mind and decided the residents were talking nonsense. Su Ren, however, took it very seriously. After making inquiries, he reported the matter to the district public security bureau, conducted a surprise raid on Room C on the second floor of Building Seven, and arrested the owner. Sure enough, they seized five firearms and a number of prohibited weapons, cracking a major robbery-and-murder gang.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Su Ren and Red Ghosts"},{"content":"My father once told me that when he was a boy there was in the Cao family of Jincheng a pair of twin brothers named Cao Chun and Cao Dun. They were astonishingly clever, able to memorize whatever they read at a glance. Most remarkable of all, Cao Chun had six fingers on his left hand, while Cao Dun had six on his right. Six fingers are not unheard of among newborn deformities, but most often the extra digit is only an underdeveloped flap of flesh, with none of the true function of a finger. The Cao brothers\u0026rsquo; extra fingers, however, were no different from the others: fully formed in bone and muscle, and capable of moving freely. This made their hands more dexterous than those of ordinary people.\nCao Chun\u0026rsquo;s extra finger grew to the left of his left thumb. By nature he was obedient and well-behaved, and from childhood he took great delight in the family abacus. At four he began to study bead-calculation under a teacher. After entering school, his grades remained excellent, and he was especially interested in mathematics. In 1979, just as the national college entrance examination was restored, he entered the accounting department of a university in Beijing. After graduation he was assigned to a bank, where his skill with the abacus quickly made him a key worker. Once the 1990s arrived and computers entered banking operations, Cao Chun resolved to invent a keyboard of China\u0026rsquo;s own, one that could enter Chinese characters with great efficiency. Three years passed in a flash. When at last he brought forth the result of all his painstaking labor, people discovered that this keyboard, with five rows of twenty keys each, could not actually be used by ordinary people at all, simply because they did not have six fingers.\nEach person\u0026rsquo;s special trait is like Cao Chun\u0026rsquo;s sixth finger: if put to proper use, if one plays to strengths and avoids weaknesses, it can bring fine results. But if one takes one\u0026rsquo;s own peculiar quality for the normal condition shared by all, and blindly commands others according to one\u0026rsquo;s personal standard, then not only will one fail to achieve the intended end, one will do no good to others and no good to oneself either. One merely wastes time and effort.\nCao Dun\u0026rsquo;s extra finger grew to the right of his right little finger. Like his elder brother, he learned bead-calculation from the shopkeeper at home from an early age, and after entering school he studied diligently. But by nature he was restless, with broad interests and an appetite for all kinds of pursuits. His incomparably dexterous right hand gave him extraordinary practical skill. In 1979 he entered a military academy. Because of his hand, his superiors excluded him from the honor guard, and the extra finger on his right hand also badly affected the way he held a gun. In a fury, Cao Dun went to the military hospital and had the sixth finger removed. To his surprise, after the operation he found that his right hand ached constantly with a dull pain. Later even the entire right side of his body became agonizingly painful, and the dexterity of his right hand was never again what it had been before.\nMany people know that unusual growths on one\u0026rsquo;s body, such as the long hair growing from a mole or a hard knot beneath the flesh, should not be tampered with. Such peculiarities are often where one\u0026rsquo;s vital line is lodged, the body\u0026rsquo;s most vulnerable points, where even slight damage may bring consequences that can never be repaired. So the wise know how to play to their strengths and avoid their weaknesses. To cut away one\u0026rsquo;s strength in order to patch a weakness is not wisdom at all.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2006/2006-05-20-six-fingers/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMy father once told me that when he was a boy there was in the Cao family of Jincheng a pair of twin brothers named Cao Chun and Cao Dun. They were astonishingly clever, able to memorize whatever they read at a glance. Most remarkable of all, Cao Chun had six fingers on his left hand, while Cao Dun had six on his right. Six fingers are not unheard of among newborn deformities, but most often the extra digit is only an underdeveloped flap of flesh, with none of the true function of a finger. The Cao brothers\u0026rsquo; extra fingers, however, were no different from the others: fully formed in bone and muscle, and capable of moving freely. This made their hands more dexterous than those of ordinary people.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Six Fingers"},{"content":"When I was working at the university network center, on one spring equinox the servers suddenly crashed, and after rebooting they ran abnormally slowly. Our system had been built in-house with C under Linux, and in theory it was quite secure. Our instructor immediately told us to investigate the cause, but we found nothing wrong at all. Later I discovered a file named earthworm.dll in the system directory. I first assumed it to be a worm virus, but when I opened it there was only a single line of code inside: 221122. After deleting it, the system immediately returned to normal. How so short a line could have such power, I could not guess. That evening, when I returned to the dormitory and turned on my own computer, it too booted with unusual slowness. Sure enough, in the system32 folder on the C drive there was another earthworm.dll file. Inside it there was likewise only a single command line, this time 112121. Once I deleted it, my computer also returned to normal.\nI immediately ran to the computers of other classmates and found the same file on all of them. When opened, the contents were not identical, but every one was a six-digit sequence made only of ones and twos. At the time I could make no sense of it at all. Much later, while reading the Book of Changes, I made the astonishing discovery that those six-digit strings were all hexagrams. For example, the 112121 on my own computer was the hexagram \u0026ldquo;The Family,\u0026rdquo; whose judgment says that within the household each person should fulfill his proper role. Thinking it over, I realized that I truly had not helped my mother with housework in a very long time. The 221122 at the network center was \u0026ldquo;Preponderance of the Small,\u0026rdquo; whose judgment says that one may undertake small things but not great ones. At the time we were developing a large campus information platform and indeed had made almost no progress for quite a while. This worm virus was actually casting hexagrams for every computer user, and doing so with startling accuracy. It was beyond belief.\nThen, at the beginning of autumn that same year, I received an email asking me not to disclose anything about mountain sprites. I had only just heard that story from western Hunan and had not yet even begun to write it down on my computer. How could the sender possibly know? I could only suspect that my machine had been infected with a trojan horse. I ran antivirus and optimization software over it again and again, but found nothing. Later, after rebooting in Safe Mode, I pressed Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open the Task Manager and found a process named serpent.exe. The program was connected to a strange IP address. I used the command prompt to ping that IP and discovered what seemed to be an immeasurable database, containing tens of thousands of personal files. My own name stood plainly among them. Very quickly the administrator on the other side noticed me and kicked me out. No matter how I tried to reconnect, I could no longer get in. By the next day, even the serpent.exe process itself had disappeared from my computer.\nSome years later I traveled alone to Laoshan. Nominally it was a spring outing, but in truth I had heard that a tiger-lure had appeared there and wanted to see what it looked like. I wandered the mountain for three days without finding anything. What did catch my attention, however, was an old man who had set up a stall before the Taiqing Palace gate. He wore a skullcap, his grizzled hair tied up in a Daoist knot, a pair of dark jade spectacles on his face, and a ragged beard under them, yet his eyes shone with a startling brightness. I used the tortoiseshell divination slips I carried with me to look at him, but could not tell in the least what sort of being he was. So I went up and struck up a conversation. He narrowed his eyes and looked at me for a long while. No matter how I asked for instruction, he only smiled and said nothing. At the end he handed me a grimy old CD case. When I asked around, everyone said he was no more than a fortune-telling old man who often brought out his grandson\u0026rsquo;s discs to sell. But I was certain it could not be so simple.\nWhen I returned to school, I turned on my computer, took from the old man\u0026rsquo;s CD case a perfectly ordinary-looking disc, and put it into the drive. Before long a startup screen popped onto the monitor, with the words \u0026ldquo;Bian Three Installer\u0026rdquo; written on it in small-seal script. It was a piece of software I had never heard of. I installed it cautiously. After installation and reboot, my system now contained an antivirus program called Bian Three. The moment I ran it, it found several suspicious programs on my computer. One was \u0026ldquo;Spring Worm,\u0026rdquo; namely that earthworm.dll worm virus. Another was \u0026ldquo;Autumn Serpent,\u0026rdquo; namely serpent.exe, a process-monitoring tool. They had not been written in any ordinary programming language, but were composed from the Book of Changes itself, out of ones and twos.\nThe phrase \u0026ldquo;spring worms, autumn serpents\u0026rdquo; originally refers to the crooked shapes of spring earthworms and autumn snakes, and is used to describe poor calligraphy. I suspect the author chose such names deliberately, to leave a trail for attentive people like me, while also reminding others that there are spirits three feet above one\u0026rsquo;s head, and that one must not do shameful things in secret. Though I very much disapprove of prying into other people\u0026rsquo;s private lives in this way, I cannot help admitting that for some people such methods are indeed necessary. If one day your hard drive suddenly breaks, do not assume at once that BitTorrent downloads wore it out. First think carefully about what you have been doing in your ordinary life.\nearthworm: earthworm; worm: worm virus; serpent: snake.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2006/2006-05-16-spring-worms-autumn-serpents/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWhen I was working at the university network center, on one spring equinox the servers suddenly crashed, and after rebooting they ran abnormally slowly. Our system had been built in-house with C under Linux, and in theory it was quite secure. Our instructor immediately told us to investigate the cause, but we found nothing wrong at all. Later I discovered a file named \u003ccode\u003eearthworm.dll\u003c/code\u003e in the system directory. I first assumed it to be a worm virus, but when I opened it there was only a single line of code inside: \u003ccode\u003e221122\u003c/code\u003e. After deleting it, the system immediately returned to normal. How so short a line could have such power, I could not guess. That evening, when I returned to the dormitory and turned on my own computer, it too booted with unusual slowness. Sure enough, in the \u003ccode\u003esystem32\u003c/code\u003e folder on the C drive there was another \u003ccode\u003eearthworm.dll\u003c/code\u003e file. Inside it there was likewise only a single command line, this time \u003ccode\u003e112121\u003c/code\u003e. Once I deleted it, my computer also returned to normal.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Spring Worms, Autumn Serpents"},{"content":"Steamed Egg\nMy fellow townsman Liu Lin worked at an internet company in Shanghai, rising early and sleeping late, laboring with great hardship. He came home for the May Day holiday to rest, but had no appetite at all, could not eat, and had even developed insomnia. The hospital was of no help. One day I went to his house to borrow a book, and he asked me about it. I went home, steamed an egg, and brought it over. When he saw it, he said, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve already eaten. I have no appetite.\u0026rdquo; I told him, \u0026ldquo;Your problem comes from spending too long in front of computer screens. The radiation has thrown your spleen and stomach into disorder. So I set this egg behind the monitor until it was thoroughly warmed through, then steamed it in the pot. To use its force against itself: that is the principle behind curing this illness.\u0026rdquo; After Liu Lin ate it, his appetite indeed improved greatly, and his condition was more than half cured.\nThe Compendium of Materia Medica records that Emperor Huizong of Song once ate too much ice and damaged his digestion. The imperial physicians were helpless, but the minister Yang Jie brewed his medicine using the same ice Huizong had been eating, and the emperor recovered at once. The principle is the same. Much illness comes from excess, yet after falling ill it is also wrong to give something up entirely out of fear. The very cause of an illness is often what serves as the guiding ingredient in its cure.\nKombu\nThe university where I studied lay beside the Yellow Sea to the east, with more than ten li of coastline stretching along it. Every so often there were deaths there, whether from people greedily venturing into the water and drowning, or from those throwing themselves in to die. I remember that in the autumn of last year both the campus newspaper and television station reported a story about a security guard at the East Gate bravely rescuing a female student who had supposedly tried to throw herself into the sea. What surprised me was not that the report gave the girl\u0026rsquo;s real name, but that she was my fellow townswoman, Xiaoyue.\nXiaoyue was an excellent swimmer and had once competed in the eight-hundred-meter freestyle at the university games. Leave aside my not believing she would try to kill herself: even if she had wanted to, she would never have chosen the sea. I immediately called her to ask what had happened. Full of grievance, she told me that she had not been trying to commit suicide at all. The weather that day was overcast and drizzling. Xiaoyue had been taking a walk by the shore when she saw what looked like a pair of hands struggling in the waves some distance away. Without a second thought she jumped in to save the person, but when she swam closer there was no one there. Instead she became entangled in purple-red seaweed, thin as reeds, and swallowed several mouthfuls of water. Luckily the security guard was a kindhearted man and spotted her in time to pull her out.\nXiaoyue was an honest girl, and she repeatedly insisted that she truly had seen a pair of hands in the water. I guessed that what she had seen was kombu, a plant that grows in the sea, with leaves shaped like hands. Legend says that it is algae formed from the wronged souls of those who fell into the sea and drowned without receiving rescue. Kombu is certainly a killer in the sea, yet that does not mean it truly intends harm: its leaves float on the surface only so they can better draw in nourishment. Few people know that kombu is also a medicinal ingredient in Chinese medicine, used to treat goiter, ulcerated lymph nodes, and other inflammations. Things that harm people are not always truly harmful; they may even save lives. And yet people go on inventing countless reasons for fear. When will that failing ever be put to an end?\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2006/2006-05-12-steamed-egg-kombu/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eSteamed Egg\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy fellow townsman Liu Lin worked at an internet company in Shanghai, rising early and sleeping late, laboring with great hardship. He came home for the May Day holiday to rest, but had no appetite at all, could not eat, and had even developed insomnia. The hospital was of no help. One day I went to his house to borrow a book, and he asked me about it. I went home, steamed an egg, and brought it over. When he saw it, he said, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve already eaten. I have no appetite.\u0026rdquo; I told him, \u0026ldquo;Your problem comes from spending too long in front of computer screens. The radiation has thrown your spleen and stomach into disorder. So I set this egg behind the monitor until it was thoroughly warmed through, then steamed it in the pot. To use its force against itself: that is the principle behind curing this illness.\u0026rdquo; After Liu Lin ate it, his appetite indeed improved greatly, and his condition was more than half cured.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Steamed Egg and Kombu"},{"content":"One spring I came down with mumps, and one side of my face swelled up alarmingly. It was the middle of the night. The dormitory doors were already locked, so there was no getting to a hospital, and after turning the dorm upside down we still could not find any suitable medicine. A roommate went next door to ask for help. Li Si, a classmate of ours, came over, took one look at me, and pulled a small packet wrapped in kraft paper from his pocket. He said it was a Chinese herbal medicine his mother had given him, and that it worked very well for mumps. My roommates quickly mixed it with hot water and had me drink it. It was bitter going down, with the faintest fishy taste. By early the next morning the swelling in my face had indeed subsided, and I was already more than halfway recovered. Li Si brought me two more packets and told me to take them over the course of another day.\nWhen I opened one of the paper packets, I found a yellow-brown powder inside, with the occasional larger bit that had not been fully ground down and looked like pieces of sloughed animal skin. I guessed it was made from snakeskin. In Chinese medicine, snakeskin is also called longyi, \u0026ldquo;dragon slough,\u0026rdquo; because in ancient China snakes were generally thought to be of the dragon kind and were called little dragons. The skin they shed was therefore also known as dragon slough, and in traditional medicine it is a major ingredient, especially effective in treating mumps. I went to Li Si\u0026rsquo;s dormitory to thank him, and also to ask what kind of snake this dragon slough had come from. Li Si was not there, but to my surprise I found flakes on his bedsheet that were exactly the same yellow-brown scraps of dragon slough.\nThat afternoon, when the others were playing cards in our dormitory as usual, I deliberately lit a stick of sulfur incense. Sure enough, Li Si absolutely refused to come into our room again.\nFor a time afterward I noticed that Li Si looked quite unwell, and that when one drew near him there was a strange smell. In private I asked him what was wrong. He looked flustered and said it was nothing. Only after I told him I already knew about the dragon slough did he admit the truth. Because no one had been there to help him, the skin on his back had never shed cleanly. By now there were already three layers of dead skin, and the new flesh underneath could not breathe and had begun to rot. I led him to a secluded stretch of beach and used the tweezers and scissors from my Swiss Army knife to help him peel the dead skin away. From then on Li Si trusted me greatly, and we often sat together talking about curious and uncanny things.\nLi Si\u0026rsquo;s family was not well off, and he shed his skin more frequently than ordinary snakes. I happened to have an aunt who worked in the pharmacy of a traditional Chinese hospital, so I told him to take the dragon slough he shed and sell it there to help cover his living expenses. His dragon slough was of the finest grade and was always bought at a high price.\nPeople tend to think of snakes as sinister and cold. Yet in the high antiquity of China, many gods had human heads and serpent bodies, and even the dragon, the emblem of the nation, is bound to the snake by countless threads. Someone like Li Si, who could use his own dragon slough to help a classmate and ask nothing in return, compared with those petty men who seem warm on the outside and filthy in their hearts, which would you rather draw near to?\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2006/2006-05-10-dragon-slough/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eOne spring I came down with mumps, and one side of my face swelled up alarmingly. It was the middle of the night. The dormitory doors were already locked, so there was no getting to a hospital, and after turning the dorm upside down we still could not find any suitable medicine. A roommate went next door to ask for help. Li Si, a classmate of ours, came over, took one look at me, and pulled a small packet wrapped in kraft paper from his pocket. He said it was a Chinese herbal medicine his mother had given him, and that it worked very well for mumps. My roommates quickly mixed it with hot water and had me drink it. It was bitter going down, with the faintest fishy taste. By early the next morning the swelling in my face had indeed subsided, and I was already more than halfway recovered. Li Si brought me two more packets and told me to take them over the course of another day.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Dragon Slough"},{"content":"Last year, when we were preparing for the university anniversary, our law school erected a statue in the greenhouse-like indoor garden of the college building. People who did not know better all assumed it was a lion, but of course it was not. Why would anyone set up only a single lion? It was in fact a statue of a zhi (pronounced zhi, fourth tone), a divine beast known in the Record of Marvels as the xiezhi. In traditional Chinese characters, the character for \u0026ldquo;law\u0026rdquo; is made up of the water radical together with zhi. Legend says that the zhi bears a single horn on its head, and that when judging a case, if you brought it before the suspects, it would touch with its horn the one who was truly guilty.\nIn truth, the design of this statue was flawed. A real zhi does not resemble a lion, a suanni, or any of those other mythical beasts. Rather, it is a deer with a single horn on its head. I myself once saw one at Wangwu, though some people say it looks more like an ox or a sheep. Yet despite the fact that this statue had the wrong appearance, people repeatedly claimed to have seen it move. At first I did not believe them. Then one day several of us in the dormitory made a wager over whether the zhi\u0026rsquo;s mouth was open or closed. I said it was open, because I had a photograph in my album that I had taken on the day the statue was finished. Fourth Brother insisted that its mouth was closed. So we all went to see for ourselves. When we reached the college building, we found that the zhi\u0026rsquo;s mouth was in fact split open in a grin. Everyone else was astonished. I, however, felt strangely reassured.\nThe zhi is the most just and gentle of divine beasts, and in ancient China it enjoyed the highest prestige. But in our own day, if one counts across the whole breadth of the land, how many golden images of the zhi are there? The zhi feeds on books, and though the statue at our college may be somewhat mistaken in form, I imagine the beast itself does not take offense. We are now supposed to live in an age ruled by law. At the gates of all our courts and procuratorates, if people would smash those tasteless and ill-matched stone lions and set up a few more zhi instead, then at the very least more people would know that our vast China has its own divine beast that guards the law.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2006/2006-05-08-zhi/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eLast year, when we were preparing for the university anniversary, our law school erected a statue in the greenhouse-like indoor garden of the college building. People who did not know better all assumed it was a lion, but of course it was not. Why would anyone set up only a single lion? It was in fact a statue of a \u003cem\u003ezhi\u003c/em\u003e (pronounced \u003cem\u003ezhi\u003c/em\u003e, fourth tone), a divine beast known in the \u003cem\u003eRecord of Marvels\u003c/em\u003e as the \u003cem\u003exiezhi\u003c/em\u003e. In traditional Chinese characters, the character for \u0026ldquo;law\u0026rdquo; is made up of the water radical together with \u003cem\u003ezhi\u003c/em\u003e. Legend says that the \u003cem\u003ezhi\u003c/em\u003e bears a single horn on its head, and that when judging a case, if you brought it before the suspects, it would touch with its horn the one who was truly guilty.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Zhi"},{"content":"Seeking Flowers\nOne 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.\nIf a phone was stolen in the study room, nine times out of ten the thief was another student. I told Xiao Xie that such people generally did not dare bring stolen goods back to the dormitory. Instead, they buried them somewhere in the flowerbeds on campus. Since it was then the rainy season, if luck was with her, where red flowers bloomed would be where the phone lay hidden. A week later Xiao Xie told me that she really had found her phone. Unfortunately, the casing had already dissolved and it could no longer be used. But what was even more surprising was that beneath the tree where Xiao Xie\u0026rsquo;s phone had been buried there were more than twenty other cellphones, along with seven or eight wallets of various kinds. Xiao Xie turned all of the stolen goods over to the authorities and was praised for it.\nIn ancient China there were many cases of finding things by seeking out plants that could grow only in special places. Yet what I really want to ask is this: why are there always so many careless people who give thieves exactly the openings they need?\nAsking Willows\nAt the entrance to the School of Economics and Management there stood a willow tree no thicker than a rice bowl, utterly ordinary to all appearances. Yet at some point, no one knew when, people discovered that on windless days the stems of the leaves that fell from this willow always pointed due south. It worked every time. Once word spread, everyone came to pluck a leaf and test whether it was truly so. In less than two months the tree had been stripped bare and died. I happened to know that this kind of willow was called a Yu Willow, a numinous tree planted by Yu the Great in the days when he tamed the floods, so that it might point the way.\nIt is a pity that this tree was born into the mortal world and did not know how to keep its gift hidden. In the end, it could only seek death by its own hand.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2006/2006-05-03-seeking-flowers-asking-willows/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eSeeking Flowers\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne 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.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Seeking Flowers, Asking Willows"},{"content":"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\u0026rsquo; cries were rather interesting. At the start of mating season they sounded like, \u0026ldquo;Bachelor life is bitter! Bachelor life is bitter!\u0026rdquo; and once the season was over they changed to, \u0026ldquo;Not bitter! Not bitter!\u0026rdquo; 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, \u0026ldquo;Who pushed him? Who pushed him?\u0026rdquo; The bird appeared for only seven days before vanishing. At first I was greatly puzzled by where it had come from.\nIt was not until a month later that I heard what had happened. Around that time all the departments had been organizing spring outings, and one weekend several classes from the chemistry department went to Zhifu Island. There was an accident there, and a boy surnamed Tang fell from a cliff and died. When I was little I had read that those who die a wrongful death may return within seven days as sha: a black bird with long wings that lingers where the dead person once lived, and disappears only after its vital force is spent or after it has taken revenge. I think that black bird must have been Tang\u0026rsquo;s sha. Yet afterward I never heard that anything happened in the chemistry department, so I imagine no one had really pushed him. He simply could not bear to die like that, and his grievance was too strong, so he became a sha.\nThere is no medicine in this world for regret, and life itself is terribly fragile. Every step one takes must therefore be made with the utmost care.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2006/2006-04-07-sha/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWhen 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\u0026rsquo; cries were rather interesting. At the start of mating season they sounded like, \u0026ldquo;Bachelor life is bitter! Bachelor life is bitter!\u0026rdquo; and once the season was over they changed to, \u0026ldquo;Not bitter! Not bitter!\u0026rdquo; 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, \u0026ldquo;Who pushed him? Who pushed him?\u0026rdquo; The bird appeared for only seven days before vanishing. At first I was greatly puzzled by where it had come from.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Sha"},{"content":"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.\nAt daybreak I quietly asked her about it. She denied it flatly, and only after I told her that I knew about the shark-folk, and promised never to reveal her secret, did she admit that she truly was one of them. In ancient China, sharks were called jiao, and throughout the dynasties there are scattered records concerning jiaoren, the shark-folk. This did not particularly astonish me. After we returned to school, I gradually forgot all about it.\nThen, one evening a month before graduation, while I was reading in the dormitory, a classmate came hurrying back to say that Yang Shan was dead. She had drowned. It turned out that day a group from her dormitory had gone out for a meal, and after drinking to their hearts\u0026rsquo; content and growing hot all over, they had gone for a swim in the sea, committing one of the great taboos of swimming. If even one of the shark-folk could drown, how much more easily can a human? Reality is often like this: the more familiar a field is to you, the more likely you are to make a fatal mistake in it.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2006/2006-04-04-drowning/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eOne 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.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Drowning"},{"content":"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\u0026rsquo;s neck sprayed half of Jiang Yong\u0026rsquo;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.\nOn another day Jiang Yong was out traveling when he happened upon a traffic jam. Seeing a crowd gathered together, he grew curious, squeezed through a gap, and looked hard. It was a dead man who had been run over, his head crushed and white brain matter spilled all over the ground. After returning home, Jiang Yong ceased to fuss over colors at all. Red, white, whatever suited him, he would wear it. Everyone has his own likes and dislikes, and there is nothing wrong with that. But if one puts too much emphasis on such preferences, the loss outweighs the gain.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2006/2006-03-12-jiang-yong/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eJiang 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\u0026rsquo;s neck sprayed half of Jiang Yong\u0026rsquo;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.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Jiang Yong"},{"content":"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\u0026rsquo;s net profits, leaving him more loss than gain.\nLater Xu Hou finally understood this much, and called in several kinsmen to serve solely as overseers. From then on the workers swallowed their anger and did their jobs properly, yet ingredients in the kitchen still went missing with alarming frequency. One night, after Xu Hou returned drunk, he was woken at midnight by a commotion. Carrying a lamp, he made his way into the kitchen, only to see more than a dozen foxes leaping up and down, standing in rows like men, carrying sacks of rice and flour out the door. Xu Hou was seized with terror and fainted dead away. Not long afterward, the inn shut down for good.\nMiserliness was not originally a term of reproach. It meant simply living frugally. But once miserliness reaches the point where righteousness itself is forgotten, even the fox spirits will not tolerate it.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2006/2006-03-09-xu-hou/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eXu 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\u0026rsquo;s net profits, leaving him more loss than gain.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Xu Hou"},{"content":"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, \u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s quite a big one. Wait a moment, I\u0026rsquo;ll get your change.\u0026rdquo; I was still wondering since when ten yuan counted as \u0026ldquo;big,\u0026rdquo; 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.\nDuring the May Day holiday, some classmates and I went to Weihai. Prices had just gone up. When I calculated carefully, the train fare plus the ticket prices came to exactly ninety-nine yuan and two jiao more than before, not a fen more and not a fen less. So it seems that money gained without right is never truly yours. And that girl who mistook ten yuan for one hundred and gave me too much change, from whom had she herself first over-collected in greed? One link locked to the next, the net of Heaven vast and close-meshed.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2006/2006-03-02-ticket/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWhen 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, \u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s quite a big one. Wait a moment, I\u0026rsquo;ll get your change.\u0026rdquo; I was still wondering since when ten yuan counted as \u0026ldquo;big,\u0026rdquo; 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.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | The Ticket"},{"content":"Damp Bugs\nDormitory 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.\nLater I heard that after several other men in Room 156 mysteriously recovered water coupons and small banknotes they had lost before, the damp bugs quietly withdrew. They no longer even remained on the original toon tree. From this one may see that when the bugs had crouched there before, they had already sensed what was coming.\nSongdu\nSongdu was a third-year student in the chemistry department and miserly to an extreme. If someone borrowed so much as two jiao from him, he would demand repayment the very next day. Even if a roommate poured out water from his thermos, he would remember to exact the same amount back. Yet he himself was always taking petty little advantages, chicken-head-and-garlic-skin sort of gains, and took pride in them besides. For that reason, the other students were never very willing to deal with him.\nThat year, at Qingming, our class was preparing for a spring outing. Songdu thought the contribution fee too high and did not join. On the evening of the outing day, while strolling by the seaside, he happened to run into his roommate Xue Pang coming toward him. Songdu asked, \u0026ldquo;You did not go out to play either?\u0026rdquo;\nXue Pang replied, \u0026ldquo;Heh heh, I have been writing a book lately and am still just a little short of the end. How would I have time to go play?\u0026rdquo; Songdu was astonished. \u0026ldquo;You can write books too? What book is it?\u0026rdquo; Xue Pang gave another dry little laugh, pulled a somewhat tattered booklet from his robe, and handed it over. Songdu opened it and looked. It was not a novel at all but an account book. On its pages were entries such as: on such-and-such a day, Songdu took one tax stamp from so-and-so and never returned it; on such-and-such a day, Songdu used so-and-so\u0026rsquo;s cellphone once, for ten minutes; and many more of the same kind. It was a full ledger of every \u0026ldquo;small advantage\u0026rdquo; Songdu had taken over the past four years. His face burned crimson with shame. He raised his head in a hurry to explain himself to Xue Pang, but there was no one there.\nWhen Songdu looked down again, hoping to examine the thing more closely, it had become nothing but an old calendar with not a single written word on it. Greatly alarmed, he went back to the dormitory. The others who had gone on the outing had just returned, and Xue Pang was among them. Songdu quietly asked around and learned that Xue Pang had spent the entire day away from campus. Only then did he realize he had been toyed with. It seems that when a man carries underhanded things in his heart, the spirits three feet above his head remember them clearly on his behalf.\nI very rarely recommend books to other people, just as I rarely recommend things in general. In my first year of middle school I recommended Dream Back to Tang Dynasty and was treated like some odd creature; by graduation all the boys in the class were copying lyrics from my song notebook. In the first year of high school I recommended Xu Wei to my friends and was told his music was trash; by the third year those same fellows were asking me, \u0026ldquo;Have you heard Xu Wei\u0026rsquo;s songs?\u0026rdquo; In my first year of college I recommended Warcraft to classmates who played Red Alert, only to be told, \u0026ldquo;Not fun!\u0026rdquo; By the fourth year, that same crowd was asking me, \u0026ldquo;Have you heard of Warcraft?\u0026rdquo; I was on the verge of collapse. All three of these are absolute facts. If there is any resemblance to your own experience, I sympathize with you!\nRecommendation: Frank Herbert\u0026rsquo;s Dune trilogy, Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2006/2006-02-20-songdu/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eDamp Bugs\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDormitory 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 \u003cem\u003eRecords of Tang Marvels\u003c/em\u003e 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.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Damp Bugs and Songdu"},{"content":"Preface\nI 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.\nWhen I was little, the elders all said that my brows and features resembled my great-grandfather\u0026rsquo;s. I too loved stories and thread-bound books from an early age. The few notebooks of his that still survive in the family today were pieced together by me from odds and ends I found in the woodshed, the garden, and other forgotten corners. Perhaps I truly did inherit something from him across the generations.\nThis winter there has been an unusual abundance of snow, a dim and endless whitening that never seems to stop. All day long I sit biting the end of my pen, staring blankly at the boundless black rooftops of Jinzhong, and now and then writing down some experience of my own or some story I once heard. The writing may be crude and the plots may be wildly improbable, yet perhaps within them there remain a few of the plainest truths, the very truths we so often overlook.\nCellphone\nThere was a student in our class, surnamed Li, who kept to himself and studied with great diligence. He often did not return to the dormitory until the teaching building had already closed. One summer night last year, he went as usual to evening self-study. By the time he had finished two mock exam papers with his head bent low, lights-out was close at hand. There were only a few people left in the classroom. In the very front row there still sat a girl with long hair falling over her shoulders and a graceful back. She seemed to be fiddling with her cellphone the whole time, the clicking of its keys so irritating that Li shot her an annoyed glance before lowering his head again to check his papers.\nAfter a while Li lifted his wrist to check the time, stood up, and began gathering his things to leave. Suddenly he noticed that the girl\u0026rsquo;s schoolbag and water cup were gone. She had clearly already left, yet on the desk there remained, placed squarely in the center, a dark red cellphone. Li was delighted. \u0026ldquo;Heaven has not treated me too poorly. Thirty years east of the river, thirty years west of the river, and at last it is my turn to pick up a bargain.\u0026rdquo; Seeing no one around, he darted over, snatched the phone into his hand, and, as if rehearsed a thousand times in his heart, pressed the power button hard, switched it off, and slipped it into his pocket.\nHe had only just stepped out of the classroom when the girl came hurrying back. Li was about to dodge into the washroom to one side, but the girl rushed up, grabbed his jacket, and dropped to her knees with a thud. Startled, Li reached out at once to help her up, only to see that her face was covered in blood. She screamed, \u0026ldquo;Big brother, keep the phone if you want it, just please let me go!\u0026rdquo; Terrified, Li flung off her hand and ran all the way to the dormitory building before daring to stop. When he took out the phone and looked at it, the screen was cracked, and the crevices were full of specks of dried blood. He sighed and threw it beneath a roadside tree. After two steps, unwilling to let it go, he turned back, picked it up again, pulled out the SIM card, inserted it into his own phone, and dialed 1861 to see how much balance was left. Once the call connected, however, all he heard was a shrill female voice crying, \u0026ldquo;Please let me go!\u0026rdquo;\nLi told me this story with his own mouth. I do vaguely remember that in that same summer there really was news of a girl who had been robbed by criminals, gravely injured, and died of her wounds. Still, I suspect Li made the story up to warn me. That day I had been bragging to my roommates about my good luck in finding a water card. Li pulled me aside and told me the whole thing. When he finished, he said only: \u0026ldquo;Never be greedy for petty gain.\u0026rdquo; From then on, I kept my eyes straight when walking the road, and whenever a greedy thought rose up in me, I used Li\u0026rsquo;s words to remind myself. Today I pass them on to the reader as well.\nAn Online Game Dream\nIn the dormitory next door there used to be a fellow townsman named Zhai Feng. He spent his time soaking in internet cafes playing online games, day and night without pause, often staying away from the dorm for three or four days at a stretch. People said that in the game world he ranged under heaven, peerless in martial skill. Yet his studies were excellent too, never once neglected, and from time to time he even managed to win scholarships. There was another classmate, surnamed Hu, who was also one of the online-gaming tribe. He too played through the night and clear into the day, never stopping, and in the game he was likewise a man of great following, a local tyrant in his own right. But his studies were bad from start to finish, every subject marked in red, and I heard he might even have to leave school without graduating.\nI was very curious, so I asked Zhai Feng how he managed to study. He said, \u0026ldquo;I do not have any special method. I study as one ought to study. It is true that I love playing, but I treat it purely as rest, like having a dream. No matter how lively the game may be, once you wake up you must return to reality. Only after I have done what I ought to do in real life do I go and play a little. Otherwise I do not feel at ease.\u0026rdquo; I asked him why Hu\u0026rsquo;s studies were so poor. He said, \u0026ldquo;He can no longer tell which is the dream and which is reality.\u0026rdquo;\nStudy is study, play is play. Only by telling them apart can one do either well. Even if in the game one holds high rank and power, or wealth enough to rival a kingdom, once one returns to real life one is still only an ordinary person. If one cannot even be that ordinary person properly, I fear there will soon be no game left to play either. In truth, how can the things one ought to do in real life ever be completely finished? To manage as much as Zhai Feng did was already admirable enough.\nFrom here on I will publish Tihu Hall Notes from time to time. These are all short modern tales of the uncanny, offered in tribute to Ji Yun\u0026rsquo;s Random Notes from the Thatched Abode of Close Scrutiny. The old notebook tales may have had coarse plots and heavy superstitious coloring, yet the truths they contained about how one ought to conduct oneself are truths many modern people still fail to live up to.\n","permalink":"https://tihu.github.io/tihuke/en/posts/2006/2006-02-19-mobile/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePreface\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI 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.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tihu Notes | Preface, Cellphone, and an Online Game Dream"}]