Mountain Sprite Child. At the gate of the Air Force Hospital in Jincheng there was an abandoned infant. People took it in and examined it: tattooed face, pointed teeth, one leg, ankle turned to the front. All were terrified. After three days the infant died, refusing cow’s milk. Some said it was a mountain sprite child.
Weituo. A certain Cui and his confederates waited by the roadside on motorcycles to rob night travelers. At the hour of hai, a man came out. Cui’s accomplices drove up and snatched the bag, while Cui slashed at the man’s wrist with a knife. The sound rang out like a bell. He looked: the blade was chipped. Frightened, they fled. The next day, while repairing a vehicle, Cui’s right hand was crushed off, blood pouring like a waterfall. On the fifteenth he went to Wenshu Monastery with incense and saw on Weituo’s right wrist a knife-mark as fresh as new.
Earthquake. Tihu says: for anyone who has already escaped danger, it is enough to carve on peachwood the seven characters “Alatan Bagen Taoqi” and keep them close to the body. Alatan Bagen Taoqi was a Daur man. In the great quake of the bingchen year he was buried in Tangshan, drank dripping water, and emerged after ten days. In the great quake of the wuzi year he was buried in Beichuan, rescued with no more than scrapes. To suffer two such calamities and remain unharmed marks a fortunate man. Some also say that to meet disaster twice marks an ill-fated one.
Crash. My colleague Liu, riding through the city one morning, was crossing the Jin River when an electric scooter flew out from behind him and struck a Land Rover. The scooter was wrecked; the Land Rover’s front end caved in. The rider’s arm bone stuck out through his sleeve, blood soaking the back of his shirt, yet he seemed not to notice. He got up and ran beneath the bridge. People shouted after him, but he did not answer, and in a blink he was gone.
The Art of Drawing. Yang Sha of Luzhou loved to doodle. A visitor sent her his photo over Tencent, and Yang wrote a single short character on its jaw. Within a day the visitor’s jaw broke out in a red sore, each stroke clearly visible. Yang’s elder brother once gave her a river pebble. She painted scales on it and hatched it. Half a month later, out came a dragon-lizard. She also wrote letters on sheets of xuan paper and spread them on the table to use as a keyboard. Such is a practitioner of the art of drawing.
Tattoo Number. A man surnamed Sun in Shanghai was poor in youth. Caught stealing food, he was tattooed on the left hand with the digits 65374, for reasons unknown. One day while waiting for a bus, he was just about to board when he saw the plate number matched the tattoo exactly. Suspicious, he stayed off. After the bus had gone only a few zhang, it suddenly caught fire. Not a single passenger escaped. When he returned home, the tattooed digits had molted away.
Silver Carp. In the shady parts by the Jin River there was a back street famed for food. A certain Cui invited friends to taste freshwater fish there and, before leaving, stole a silver carp. He cooked it at home. Its flesh was rich and fine, and it had no bones. Though he found this strange, he ate it anyway. The next day at lunch several fish bones appeared inside an egg. The day after that, while eating a banana, he bit into two spines, which injured his lung.
Mobile Phone. A thief riding in a vehicle stole a Nokia phone of strange appearance, unrecognizable in model. Returning home that night, he found police waiting at his door and was seized on the spot. The thief had no idea why. The police showed him dozens of MMS messages, listing every case he had been involved in, with photographs of the stolen goods and even his address, all without a single error. Every message had been sent from the stolen phone.
Crash. In Jincheng there was an Alto racing east at reckless speed. At the fortieth kilometer of the Chengdu-Chongqing Expressway it overturned and fell into a flooded field, car and passengers utterly ruined. Officials and soldiers arrived. From the car they removed sixteen corpses. No one knew what it had been carrying.
Stone Buddha. It is said that Zhaojue Temple had a stone Buddha, two zhang one chi high, ten arm-spans around, erected there in the time of Chan Master Mingzhi Meng. In the Buddha’s right hand was an object from which a silk cord hung to the ground. At its feet was a square tray carved with Daqin script no one could read. Some dozen years ago a pilgrim came and said: the thing in the right hand is a mouse, and the thing at the feet is a keyboard. None of the monks believed it. Yet afterward the stone Buddha was moved to an inner courtyard and no longer shown to the public. It cannot be seen today.
Note: this is a new experiment. Keystories will be a sub-series under Tihu Notes, an exercise in learning not to waste words. I will post once every ten entries.