Tihu Notes | The Sauce Tree

On Shangchi Main Street there is a noodle shop called Shangchi Noodles. It was once an ordinary little place, known only to people nearby for being tasty, until food accounts on social media suddenly made it famous. Shangchi Main Street itself is a short lane, barely a hundred meters long, lined on both sides with neat rows of Chinese banyans. The noodle shop sells noodles only in the morning and at noon, and only in limited quantities, closing as soon as everything is sold out.

Tihu Notes | Mad Feng

In Shanbanqiao there was an old resident named Feng Hao, known to all as Mad Feng. He often wandered through the lanes in an oversized, tattered Mao jacket and loose straw sandals. Around his neck hung a dozen or more senior bus cards from neighboring counties and towns, the farthest reaching all the way to Mianzhu. If anyone asked, he would jut out his chin and say, “I use them when I go strolling.” Neighbors also often saw him ambling home with half a jin of rice noodles from Shifang or a bowl of pepper-numbing chicken from Ya’an in hand.

Tihu Notes | Ma Sheng

Ma Sheng of Wenjiang was executed in the late 1990s during the campaign against organized crime. As a child he had been deeply introverted, always by himself and sparing with words. His family had been butchers for generations. Each day while his parents worked at the meat stall, Ma Sheng played by himself nearby. When he was eight or nine, he encountered someone at the marketplace. Later no one could remember what kind of person it had been, and Ma Sheng himself refused ever to speak of it. But from that point on, he stopped eating meat and spoke less and less.

Tihu Notes | Pan the Immortal

There used to be an old man at Xinhua Park by Xiaolong Bridge, surnamed Pan and known to everyone as Pan the Immortal. Every day he set up a secondhand bookstall with many rare lianhuanhua booklets and thread-bound books. No matter which volume it was, if someone recited the text on the preceding page, Pan could recite the next page word for word without a single mistake. Everyone found it miraculous, and people often tested him on purpose. Pan would simply say that if he answered correctly, the questioner had to buy the book. No one ever stumped him. Later some people even brought books from home that were not from his stall at all, and Pan still recited them flawlessly.

Tihu Notes | Snow Silver

In old times Chengdu was also called Turtle City because the shape of the old town resembled a great turtle. Its tail roughly corresponded to what are now Tongzilin and Yulin. Old people say that when the turtle’s tail shrinks, snow falls on Chengdu. Snow is rare enough there to count as an auspicious sign, so naturally there have always been people who made a trade of it.

Du Fen was one of them. He wore a thick long gown all year round and dressed his hair in a Daoist knot. The nails on all ten of his fingers were left long, so long that they had softened and looked like a pair of bird claws. He could not really do anything for himself and required attendants to serve him at all times.

Tihu Notes | The Black Ladle

Before the elevated road was built at Wugui Bridge, there used to be a row of little shops by the Shahe Road entrance to Tazishan Park. One of them was called Old Ma’s Home Cooking. Its owner, Ma Huaizhen, wore his hair in a Daoist topknot, and on the wall he kept talismanic charms of the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice. Old Ma’s signature dish was called “Eightfold Auspice,” a vegetarian braise of potato, taro, bamboo shoots, and peppers. Yet the taste was marvelous. Every mouthful seemed to turn into a different meat: first red-braised pork, then taro chicken, then chicken giblets, then ratfish. The poor people living nearby loved to go there for a treat, because the flavor was beyond compare and the price absurdly kind.

Tihu Notes | The Jade Hound

In Xiangheli, Chenghua District, there was a white dog, magnificent in build and white from head to tail. No one in the neighborhood knew how old it was. Women now in their seventies said that when they were little girls playing in that lane, the dog had already been wandering there. City enforcers tasked with catching strays and layabouts who stole dogs alike had both tried to seize it, only to be bitten for no reason or else injured by one mishap after another. Once enough people had failed, no one dared lay hands on the white dog again.

Keystories | Tiger Month of the Renchen Year

1. In the autumn of the Renchen year, a certain Shao of Qingyang suddenly turned into a snake, swallowed a bailiff, and burrowed into the ground to escape, all because his fruit-and-melon cart had been confiscated and his livelihood left with nothing to stand on. His wife and daughter later saw him online on his phone and asked where he was. He replied only: in the mountains. Two months later, the wife and daughter also vanished.

Tihu Notes | Right Hand

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.

Tihu Notes | Xu Lai

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.