Carry it with you at all times.
LOMO Rule
The ease of old Chengdu is not something people merely speak of. It sinks all the way into the bones. The city was born with a life-attitude so calm and composed that every corner of it seemed to rest in an almost lazy state of comfort. Even white-collar workers in the forest of steel and concrete walked with a pace markedly slower than their counterparts in other cities.
[Nine Stories] Private Writing Project Group · Google Collaborative Platform
[Nine Stories, Season Six] Prologue
Witch Doctor
It was obvious that no one had entered this room for a very long time. The room was small, containing only a bed one and a half meters wide and a cheap computer desk worth maybe fifty yuan, with just enough space between them for a sixty-kilo person to turn around. A thick layer of dust lay over the desk, marked by the tracks of dung beetles. The computer itself was gone, leaving only the square blank imprint where a CRT monitor had sat for years. Above the bed there was a round window half a meter across. At first glance it seemed to have been sealed over with black paper, but when I shone a flashlight on it I saw that it was actually a layer of black furry vine.
Nine Stories private writing project group · Google collaboration platform
Nine Stories, Season Six: Prologue
The Witch Doctor
The room had plainly been left untouched for a very long time. It was tiny, containing only a bed one and a half meters wide and a cheap computer desk of the sort one could buy for fifty yuan. The gap between them was so narrow that only a person weighing sixty kilos could turn around in it. A thick layer of dust lay over the desk, marked by the tracks of beetles that had crawled across it. The computer itself was gone, leaving only the pale square where a CRT monitor had once sat for years. Above the bed was a round window half a meter across. At first glance it seemed to have been sealed over with black paper. Only when I shone my flashlight on it did I see that it was actually covered by a layer of black, furry vine.
Kidu, a city where once you arrive, you can never get away from the local-news pages.
If you happened to be standing in Beckoning-Stop Square at this moment, you would find social-news reporters from every major Kidu media outlet guarding every possible angle. Normally these people might be interviewing Dong Xiaohua of the Taobote household, who has climbed a tree and cannot come down, or filming the splatter on the wall at the scene of a husband-and-wife brawl, or recording a driver trapped in his cab after a traffic accident, or, failing that, disguising themselves as clients to investigate some girl selling her first time for money to pay medical bills. In short, in this city without superheroes, they are forever playing superheroes. Yet at this very moment they had all abandoned their usual strengths and converged on Beckoning-Stop Square to cover hard news instead, for one reason alone:
At the end of the bingxu year, a new female colleague named Xiao Wu joined our office. She was thin and quiet, hardly spoke to anyone, and always walked with both hands thrust into her pockets, carrying with her a faint smell of Chinese medicine. None of us knew much about her beyond the fact that she was a woman PhD just back from her studies. Perhaps she was not in very good health. Within only half a month of arriving, she had already spent more than half her time asking leave to go see doctors. Even when she was at work, she leaned sideways against the edge of her desk, writing and drawing with her right hand braced on the tabletop, while her left hand remained in her pocket and never once came out. Seeing how often she kneaded the back of her neck and clutched her arm, I guessed she suffered from some rheumatic complaint.
One hundred days after the great earthquake of the wuzi year in the Jin Dynasty, I joined a volunteer convoy delivering winter supplies to a certain town called Ping. Because the town lay far off in the mountains and had not suffered serious damage, it had never attracted much attention before. Only after arriving did I discover, to my surprise, that although by official standards its disaster truly did not count as severe, no houses had collapsed and no one had died, most of the buildings had suffered destructive shaking and were no longer fit to live in. The fields, battered by the torrential rains after the quake, had yielded almost nothing. The villagers’ lives appeared extremely hard.
Land Fought Over on Four Sides
He undid the last button at the front of her blouse, and the white shirt slid from her fragrant shoulders onto the bed. A low moan rose from deep in her throat, and she let herself fall back onto the mattress.
Seven feet away, on the large worktable, the servers gave off a low steady hum. The monitor had not been turned off. The screensaver alternated between exquisite wallpapers from School Mate, while in the corner great stacks of Big Comics Superior were piled high.
Beard Gu. In western Yunnan there is a village where all the men wear faces full of curling beards and raise gu in them. At the age of sixteen, one must walk naked through the forest and allow insects and snakes to burrow into the beard and make their homes there before one is counted an adult. From that day onward one never shaves again. After years of feeding on human blood, the beard-gu takes on the color of flesh, invisible to all but the clansmen. Whoever is infected and touches family or friends kills the touched person at once.
My fourth elder brother is a lawyer. In ancient times, professions that stood in court and “picked words, raised suits,” much like lawyers today, were called songshi, pettifoggers. The term lawyer, by contrast, referred specifically to a certain class among ritual masters. In modern times the meaning of lawyer replaced that of songshi, while its original sense gradually sank from sight.
Before my fourth brother became a lawyer, he worked at a district procuratorate in Harbor City. One winter year, a major corruption case broke out in the procuratorial system of Lu Province, and dozens of prosecutors were arrested. From top to bottom the judicial apparatus across the province launched a self-inspection campaign, and teams from the Supreme Procuratorate were dispatched to local offices everywhere.
The eighth day of the fourth month. Clear. Auspicious for flight and ritual.
Before dawn had fully broken, the Crane Dancer came to the rooftop of the highest pavilion in Pure Land Monastery. He wore crimson armor, the battle gear of Kapilavastu a thousand years ago, and beside him lay three enormous gray cranes. A pale band of light was slowly appearing on the horizon. Once the sun rose, he would be able to fly.