Keystories | Eating Chengdu

In the courtyard of my wife’s family home in Linqiong there is a round chopping block, two chi across and one cun thick, mottled and dim, ordinarily used for mincing meat. I had always taken it for a tree stump. Only when I washed it today did I realize how astonishingly heavy it was. Its surface showed not annual rings but something like fish scales. Once rinsed clean, it turned the color of amber, and within it one could faintly make out dark red veins. When I asked where it had come from, my wife said that while her grandmother was still alive she often muttered that it was a dragon scale handed down through the family. No one had ever believed her.

Keystories | Tiger Month, Year of Renchen

1. In the autumn of the renchen year, a man surnamed Shao of Qingyang suddenly turned into a snake, swallowed a court runner, and burrowed into the earth. The cause, they said, was that his fruit cart had been confiscated and his livelihood destroyed. His wife and daughter sometimes saw him online on his phone. When they asked where he was, he replied only: in the mountains. Two months later, the wife and daughter also vanished.