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.
When 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, “dragon slough,” 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’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.
That 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.
For 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.
Li Si’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.
People 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?