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