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.
When 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.
I 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.
Throughout 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.