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.
At 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.
Then, 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’ 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.