Damp Bugs
Dormitory 156, at the eastern end of the first floor, lay always in shadow and saw the sun only a few times a year. Outside its window grew a toon tree. On it lived a very strange kind of little insect, no bigger than grains of rice, crouching all day at the roots without moving at all. Then one spring these insects suddenly swarmed into Room 156 and settled over the bedboards of a student named Cui. They could not be killed with boiling water, nor with insecticide spray, and instead gathered in ever greater numbers. Someone from that dormitory came to ask me about them. I happened to know that the Records of Tang Marvels mentions just such a creature, called the damp bug, which feeds exclusively on the yin vapors hidden in the human heart. People who have done things unfit to see the light of day are especially prone to attracting it.
Later 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.
Songdu
Songdu 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.
That 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, “You did not go out to play either?”
Xue Pang replied, “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?” Songdu was astonished. “You can write books too? What book is it?” 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’s cellphone once, for ten minutes; and many more of the same kind. It was a full ledger of every “small advantage” 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.
When 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.
I 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, “Have you heard Xu Wei’s songs?” In my first year of college I recommended Warcraft to classmates who played Red Alert, only to be told, “Not fun!” By the fourth year, that same crowd was asking me, “Have you heard of Warcraft?” 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!
Recommendation: Frank Herbert’s Dune trilogy, Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune.