Tihu Notes on Tihu Hall Notes

Tihu Notes | The Sauce Tree

Wed, 16 Jan 2019 08:36:54 +0800

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

Sun, 13 Jan 2019 08:36:54 -0700

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

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 08:36:54 +0800

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

Thu, 10 Jan 2019 08:36:54 +0800

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

Wed, 09 Jan 2019 08:36:54 -0700

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

Wed, 09 Jan 2019 08:36:54 -0700

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

Sat, 05 Jan 2019 08:36:54 -0700

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

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:36:54 -0700

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

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 07:55:42 +0800

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

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:16:46 +0800

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.

Tihu Notes | Keystories V

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 10:18:56 +0800

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.

Tihu Notes | Fu and Gui

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 09:21:29 +0800

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.

Tihu Notes | Keystories IV

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 09:00:54 +0800

It made the eyes swim to look at, so I changed it back.

Endurance. On Tuan Mountain there was a fat pig. In the great quake of the wuzi year it was buried beneath its sty, gnawed rotten wood, drank rain and dew, and escaped after thirty-six days, gaunt as a sheep. The villagers marveled that it had not died, admired the firmness of its will, gave it the name Zhu Jianqiang, and supported it for the rest of its life. The rotten wood it ate was ci bamboo, antler-like in form; once decayed it turns into bamboo fruit, which those who avoid grain sometimes take as food.

Tihu Notes | Keystories III

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:11:55 +0800

Vengeance. Li the Chancellor was a native of Cuo County, but ashamed of his family’s poverty, he changed his registration to the Western Capital. His sons prospered under the powerful, and he himself became a great frontier official. Before his old house in the Western Capital, governors and viceroys even set up a stele to flatter him. In the fourth month, a traveler came from the north, his whole body tattooed with scorpions. He split the stele apart with his bare hand. The ground of the house cracked open and water welled out, and from that day it could no longer be lived in. The Hundred Illustrations records that western tribesmen, when seeking vengeance, would tattoo themselves with scorpions.

Tihu Notes | Keystories II

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:57:23 +0800

Esports. A youth abandoned his studies and sank into esports. His parents could not dissuade him. On the summer solstice he played through the night, and by morning both legs had broken out in more than a dozen nameless swellings, each as large as a game piece, with pain that ran to the marrow when touched. He sought treatment from my teacher. The master pierced them with silver needles and drew out several keycaps, all keys commonly used in games. After that, his parents no longer dared indulge him, and the boy himself grew afraid.

Tihu Notes | Keystories I

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 08:09:03 +0800

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.

Tihu Notes | Mutou Ran

Thu, 29 May 2008 16:54:56 +0800

The ten li of the Qinhuai River in Jinling have long been praised as “a quarter of mist and moonlight from the Six Dynasties, a gathering place of beauty and luxury.” My friend Wu Xuan, a scholar from Jizhou, lived alone as a guest in Jinling and ran a teahouse on the left bank of the Qinhuai, specializing in all varieties of flower tea. Wu Xuan told me that not long after the teahouse opened, he often saw women worshipping beneath the willow tree before his door. From a distance he could make out under the tree a divine image more than a foot tall, with white eyebrows. But whenever he went forward to ask about it, the women worshipping there would grow nervous and immediately rise and leave. When he looked down again, the statue would be gone as well.

Tihu Notes | Thunder Master

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:27:31 +0800

My cousin’s classmate Xin Xin once told her that he worked as a lightning-protection engineer for an engineering technology company. Back when he was a student, he had majored in lightning protection at a certain university of information engineering. Because the specialty was so obscure, he had once worried deeply about finding employment. Yet as graduation drew near, Xin Xin began receiving one recruitment call after another from engineering companies and meteorological centers. After much hesitation, he chose the position he now holds. His grades had not been especially distinguished, but none of his classmates in the same year received any attention at all. Most of them later switched into other lines of work.

Tihu Notes | Boycott

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:47:39 +0800

Old Third once told me about a fellow townsman of his, Fan Yun, who worked as the IT director of a company in Pusen. At the start of the new year, the company gave him a budget to upgrade its office network, hardware and software alike. After replacing the servers, he still had some money left over, so he bought the latest version of RTX for the company’s internal network.

Tihu Notes | Chi Cat

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:10:13 +0800

The Dengzhou sea route began at Penglai. In ancient times it was the most prosperous harbor in the north. Though it has long since declined, the fish market of old Dengzhou Port remains famous, and rare treasures from all directions still often appear there. One year an old woman arrived at the ancient port market with a tabby cat in her arms. On a sheet of paper before her were written two characters: appraise treasures. When people asked how she appraised them, the old woman said nothing, only pointed to the cat she was holding. Some busybody borrowed a pair of porcelain cups and placed them before her. She gently stroked the cat behind the ears. At once it leapt to the ground and stretched itself out to nearly two feet in length. On its back were seven or eight yellow spots the size of tea cups. First it arched and stretched, then crouched over the porcelain cups, sniffing them without stop and even licking them with its tongue. After a while the cat jumped back into the old woman’s arms, cried “awu” three times, and shut its eyes. The old woman pinched her fingers in calculation and said, “These porcelain cups are celadon from the official kiln of Jade Emperor Mountain, made in the second year of Jingding under Emperor Lizong Zhao Yun of the Southern Song.” The owner of the cups was astonished and filled with admiration. The pair had come down through his family, and though he knew they were Southern Song ware, he had never known the exact date. The antique dealers gathered around began bringing their own objects to be appraised, and there was not a single one the old woman failed to identify correctly. From then on her fame spread far and wide, and merchants from distant places came in an endless stream to seek her judgment.

Tihu Notes | Blind Master

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:03:36 +0800

There was a man surnamed Yang from Fenyang. I no longer remember his given name. His home was in Yanwu Town, and his family was a wealthy one. The Yangs had long been at odds with the Dai family of the same town. The two households checked one another, now one rising, now the other, so that in the end neither could do anything decisive against the other. One year, when the coal-mine bosses of western Shanxi gathered in disorderly protest and smashed the town government offices, the Dai family took advantage of the chaos to send men to burn the Yang granary. They also wounded several of the Yang kinsmen with blades and killed one of them. Because Yang himself had taken part in the disturbances among the mine owners, he fled far away to avoid trouble. The Yang family, lacking evidence and not daring to report the matter to the authorities, could only swallow the bitterness in silence. From then on, the hatred between the two families deepened all the more.

Tihu Notes | Louse Divination

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 08:52:28 +0800

In the spring of the Dinghai year, I returned with my family to Jinzhong to visit relatives. Among my cousins on my uncles’ side, most of those of my own generation were already married, and my elders reproached me often enough on that point. One day my grandmother heard that north of the city gate there was a beggar skilled in divination, and that people seeking readings went to him in an endless stream. It happened that my cousin Zusheng also meant to go and ask about his fortune, so my grandmother sent the two of us together. Beneath the old northern wall of the city there stood a wooden basin, more than four feet across and the color of jujube pits, and the beggar sat cross-legged inside it. There was more than an inch of filthy water pooled in the bottom, giving off waves of stench. Along the foot of the wall, dozens of people were lined up waiting for their fortunes to be told. We joined the end of the line and waited more than an hour before our turn came. I had always known that diviners observe four prohibitions, one of which is that the unclean are not to be divined for, so I did not believe in him at all. I let Zusheng go first to see what sort of trick the beggar had up his sleeve.

Tihu Notes | Rainbow Inkstone

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 08:56:15 +0800

A hundred miles north of Wuyuan there is a village called Hongguan, also an old town famed for producing Huizhou ink. In history it won the praise, “Unmatched gateway between Wu and Chu, first pass on the ancient Hui-Rao road.” I do not know the origin of the village’s name, Hongguan, but I had heard that night rainbows often appeared there after dark, and this made me intensely curious. A night rainbow is simply a rainbow that appears at night. If the moonlight is bright enough and the air contains suitable clouds and raindrops, a rainbow may form. Since moonlight is after all not as strong as sunlight, night rainbows are generally very dim, and among the common people are called white rainbows. China already had ancient verses praising rainbows, such as “Last night the Jade Emperor’s carriage set forth, and across ten thousand miles of sky a painted bridge was raised,” and the Book of Wei also contains records of observed night rainbows.

Tihu Notes | Whale Ink

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 06:19:15 +0800

Gongshang Kan, a native of She County, called himself an ink master.

In the “Eminent Learning” chapter of Han Feizi it is written: “After Mozi’s death, there was the Mohism of the Xiangli clan, the Mohism of the Xiangfu clan, and the Mohism of the Dengling clan; Mohism divided into three.” In his daily habits Gongshang Kan lived on plain food and tea, and wore coarse hemp tied around his right ankle. Those who knew such things said that this was indeed the dress of the Xiangli branch of Mohism.

Tihu Notes | Green Paper

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 09:51:11 +0800

When I was small, there was no good physician nearby, so I often had to go to the neighboring county of Huguan to seek treatment. Near the right-side lane just inside Huguan’s eastern gate there was an apothecary that treated only odd complaints such as mouth sores and chapped skin, infantile convulsions, madness, and poisonous sores. When I was four years old, I was once taken there because of convulsions. My mother told me that the physician there merely asked what symptoms I had, took out a black-gold book, tore out a certain page, burned it, and had me swallow the ashes with warm water. Within a few days I was well. I always felt that this way of treating illness was wonderfully strange, but I was too young then to remember it clearly.

Tihu Notes | Brushmaking

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 06:26:31 +0800

Quzhou has long been known as “the thoroughfare of four provinces and the meeting head of five roads.” Its shops stand dense and its merchants gather like clouds, making it an excellent place to hunt for curious objects. On Upper Street in Kecheng there was once an unremarkable little shop called Guancang Brush House, which sold nothing but writing brushes of every kind. One summer year I bought there a mixed-hair brush with a tip made of seven parts purple rabbit and three parts goat, and a handle of purple sandalwood. Such a brush was not unusual in Quzhou. They were sold everywhere, and the workmanship on this one was quite ordinary. There was not even any carved inscription, wire inlay, or lacquer painting on the shaft. Yet the brush wrote very smoothly, so I used it for my correspondence ever after. When winter came that year, the brush unexpectedly began to shed hair. I assumed I had bought a fake and left it neglected on the brush rack. But one day in the twelfth month I happened to glance at it and found that the tip had turned gray-white in color, full and rounded. I tried writing a few characters with it, and to my surprise the hairs came to a perfectly even point and the brush strength was firm and vigorous. Greatly puzzled, I began using it again. After spring arrived, it started shedding once more, its hairs turning blue-black, and when I wrote with it the strokes came out full and the ink flowed evenly. Only then did I realize that I had in fact bought a fine brush.

Tihu Notes | Biheng

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 01:05:48 +0800

Mo Hui, a native of Ji, made his living by writing columns for all kinds of newspapers and magazines. His articles were deeply loved by readers, and his fees were generous. But after returning from one writers’ gathering organized by a certain journal in Jingcheng, he suddenly found his ideas dried up. He had no inspiration at all and could not write a single word. Dozens of commissioned pieces had to be abandoned. At first Mo Hui thought he was simply overworked, so he traveled for more than a month. Later he even underwent several courses of psychological counseling, yet still saw not the slightest improvement.

Tihu Notes | Listening to Books

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 09:08:46 +0800

My old friend Su Xiao came from Shuyang in northern Jiangsu. She once told me that out in the Shuyang countryside there was a rough earthen temple enshrining two guardian figures, one with a red face and protruding fangs, the other with a blue face and golden horns. According to local legend, they represented the celestial generals Clairvoyant Eyes and Wind-Following Ears. During the Cultural Revolution, the statue of Clairvoyant Eyes was smashed, and only Wind-Following Ears remains to this day.

Tihu Notes | Aye-Aye

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 06:00:05 +0800

The lock on my door was old, and after several days of cold rain it finally rusted solid. There was a key-cutting stall at the mouth of the alley, run by a thin middle-aged man. After hearing what had happened, he picked up a new lock and gestured for me to lead the way. I asked whether he needed to bring any other tools. He waved his hand and said there was no need.

Tihu Notes | Jinzhi

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 00:37:39 +0800

My friend Li Mo, who studied in northern Hebei, majored in drama, yet she was also highly accomplished on the guzheng. Li Mo once told me that when she was seven, her mother took her to the provincial conservatory for a graded guzheng examination. Outside the exam hall the street was choked with traffic. An old man sat collapsed in the middle of the road, his face scraped and bloodied. Many people passed by, yet no one stepped forward to help him up. As Li Mo and her mother went by, her mother told her to go and help the old man to his feet. She also taught her that if no one was willing to help such an old man, then when one’s own parents grew old and fell in the street, there would be no one left to help them either. With some effort, Li Mo supported the old man to the roadside. He then told her to open the instrument case on her back. Li Mo’s guzheng was the cheapest sort sold on the market. The old man took a brush from his robe, swept a single stroke across the instrument, then turned and walked away, his steps more vigorous than a young man’s.

Tihu Notes | Wooden Mule

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:47:02 +0800

My schoolmate Ji Tu opened an internet cafe with more than a hundred computers. Less than a month after opening, every machine in the place began running painfully slowly. Even the latest legitimate antivirus software and hard-drive protection cards did no good. He suspected the computers had been infected with trojans, so he brought in specialized removal tools and checked them. Sure enough, he found that most of the machines had been installed with a new variant of Gray Pigeon, and the motherboard BIOS boot settings had been tampered with. Ji Tu had once studied computer hardware, so in a fit of anger he loaded a small program he had written in his spare time onto the cafe’s computers. Within two days, every machine was back to normal.

Tihu Notes | Yellow Throat

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 04:33:19 +0800

Ye, a man from Shanghai, loved listening to Nordic metal music, especially melodic death metal from the north of Europe. After graduation he formed a band with some friends, but because they could not find a suitable lead singer for death growls, they had no choice but to play covers of speed metal. One winter, Ye went to western Sichuan for folk research, and his guide invited him to eat a local medicinal hotpot. Since Ye had grown up in Shanghai, many of the ingredients common to such a hotpot were things he had never seen before, and he ended up eating a great deal of the medicinal base itself. After returning to Shanghai, he suffered violent vomiting and diarrhea and fell seriously ill. Yet when he recovered, his voice had turned thin and rasping and could no longer return to what it had once been. This new voice, however, was perfectly suited to death-metal vocals. Far from feeling distressed, Ye threw himself into the band’s performances with even greater delight. Within a few years, bars throughout Jiangsu and Zhejiang all knew Ye and his band.

Tihu Notes | Bitter Tongue

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 05:13:00 +0800

Wen’s mother was in poor health and often suffered from back pain, yet she was always too reluctant to spend money and kept putting off a visit to the hospital. Wen went to Beichan Temple to burn incense and pray for his mother’s health, bowing devoutly before every Buddha image there. When he returned home, however, his mother had developed a new ailment. Yellow spots had appeared on the coating of her tongue, and anything she tried to eat tasted so bitter that she could hardly swallow it. Wen and the rest of the family became alarmed and forced her into the hospital for treatment.

Tihu Notes | Armored Tongue

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 06:24:52 +0800

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.

Tihu Notes | Fire-Warding Beast

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 09:36:42 +0800

The traveler Meng Kun was someone I met on the road while returning from Nepal to Haidong. At the time he was dressed in rags and claimed to have come out of Rear Tibet, though no one knew how long he had been wandering alone on the plateau. His Arc’teryx backpack, worth more than two thousand yuan, was empty except for a scrawny little puppy. He ran an international youth hostel in Yading, Daocheng, and lived an easy, carefree life, spending each year roving everywhere in search of adventure. In November, when I slung my bag over my shoulder and headed south to escape the winter, I happened to get a call from him and so went to stay at his inn. By then the tourist high season in Daocheng was already over and all the staff had been given leave. Every day Meng Kun and I slept late into the morning, stayed awake until the moon rode high overhead, and talked of heaven and earth in perfect contentment.

Tihu Notes | Snow Mastiff

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 14:39:14 +0800

Brother Chen, a trader from Golmud, once told me this story. In 2005 he and a coworker were returning from Haibei after buying cordyceps. Passing a small temple by Chaka Salt Lake, they went in to ask for water. It was a monastery of the White Sect. In the courtyard a Tibetan mastiff had just given birth to a litter of puppies, all of exceptionally pure blood. Among them was one that was pure white from head to tail, without a single stray hair. Chen’s coworker grew excited and said that this was the most precious of all snow mastiffs. He at once pulled out cash and tried to buy the puppy from the lama in the temple, but the lama refused flatly. Then he offered in exchange the finest cordyceps they had purchased, and still the lama would not agree.

Tihu Notes | Little New Year

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 02:51:06 +0800

When I was little, on the morning of the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, there would always be a woman squatting beneath the spirit wall outside the gate of our family courtyard. She was short and stout, wearing an old red padded jacket with cotton wadding sticking out of the cuffs. Someone in the house would go out and give her a box of malt candy and half a tray of dumplings. The woman would leave in great delight, then run off toward the courtyards of other branches of the clan. My mother said she was a madwoman from the village, and because it was Little New Year, no household took offense and each simply gave her a little food to send her on her way.

Tihu Notes | Electric Gu

Sun, 21 May 2006 12:23:22 +0800

One evening I was chatting on MSN with my fellow townsman Liu Hai. He had trained in computer science and was now a freelancer, earning quite well. Liu Hai told me that next month an especially powerful worm virus called “Pantao No. 5” would begin to spread, and advised me to upgrade my system early and patch it properly.

I asked how he could know about it in advance. He told me that sixty percent of the viruses circulating on the internet were developed either by him or by people like him. When a new strain of virus is successfully created, they either sell it to antivirus companies, which then add the virus information to their update packages, or sell it to specific clients, since special viruses have special uses. As for whether a virus is then actually released across the internet, that is another matter.

Tihu Notes | Su Ren and Red Ghosts

Sat, 20 May 2006 19:01:51 +0800

Su Ren

Su Ren was the deputy chief of the Nanhong Street police station. He was rich in investigative experience, yet never seemed able to win promotion. Once, residents of Building Seven in Yimin Residential Compound reported that Room C on the second floor was haunted: in the middle of the night there would be either a woman’s weeping or heart-rending howls. The officers who first received the report paid it no mind and decided the residents were talking nonsense. Su Ren, however, took it very seriously. After making inquiries, he reported the matter to the district public security bureau, conducted a surprise raid on Room C on the second floor of Building Seven, and arrested the owner. Sure enough, they seized five firearms and a number of prohibited weapons, cracking a major robbery-and-murder gang.

Tihu Notes | Six Fingers

Sat, 20 May 2006 17:03:25 +0800

My father once told me that when he was a boy there was in the Cao family of Jincheng a pair of twin brothers named Cao Chun and Cao Dun. They were astonishingly clever, able to memorize whatever they read at a glance. Most remarkable of all, Cao Chun had six fingers on his left hand, while Cao Dun had six on his right. Six fingers are not unheard of among newborn deformities, but most often the extra digit is only an underdeveloped flap of flesh, with none of the true function of a finger. The Cao brothers’ extra fingers, however, were no different from the others: fully formed in bone and muscle, and capable of moving freely. This made their hands more dexterous than those of ordinary people.

Tihu Notes | Spring Worms, Autumn Serpents

Tue, 16 May 2006 22:41:18 +0800

When I was working at the university network center, on one spring equinox the servers suddenly crashed, and after rebooting they ran abnormally slowly. Our system had been built in-house with C under Linux, and in theory it was quite secure. Our instructor immediately told us to investigate the cause, but we found nothing wrong at all. Later I discovered a file named earthworm.dll in the system directory. I first assumed it to be a worm virus, but when I opened it there was only a single line of code inside: 221122. After deleting it, the system immediately returned to normal. How so short a line could have such power, I could not guess. That evening, when I returned to the dormitory and turned on my own computer, it too booted with unusual slowness. Sure enough, in the system32 folder on the C drive there was another earthworm.dll file. Inside it there was likewise only a single command line, this time 112121. Once I deleted it, my computer also returned to normal.

Tihu Notes | Steamed Egg and Kombu

Fri, 12 May 2006 21:22:49 +0800

Steamed Egg

My fellow townsman Liu Lin worked at an internet company in Shanghai, rising early and sleeping late, laboring with great hardship. He came home for the May Day holiday to rest, but had no appetite at all, could not eat, and had even developed insomnia. The hospital was of no help. One day I went to his house to borrow a book, and he asked me about it. I went home, steamed an egg, and brought it over. When he saw it, he said, “I’ve already eaten. I have no appetite.” I told him, “Your problem comes from spending too long in front of computer screens. The radiation has thrown your spleen and stomach into disorder. So I set this egg behind the monitor until it was thoroughly warmed through, then steamed it in the pot. To use its force against itself: that is the principle behind curing this illness.” After Liu Lin ate it, his appetite indeed improved greatly, and his condition was more than half cured.

Tihu Notes | Dragon Slough

Wed, 10 May 2006 20:41:07 +0800

One spring I came down with mumps, and one side of my face swelled up alarmingly. It was the middle of the night. The dormitory doors were already locked, so there was no getting to a hospital, and after turning the dorm upside down we still could not find any suitable medicine. A roommate went next door to ask for help. Li Si, a classmate of ours, came over, took one look at me, and pulled a small packet wrapped in kraft paper from his pocket. He said it was a Chinese herbal medicine his mother had given him, and that it worked very well for mumps. My roommates quickly mixed it with hot water and had me drink it. It was bitter going down, with the faintest fishy taste. By early the next morning the swelling in my face had indeed subsided, and I was already more than halfway recovered. Li Si brought me two more packets and told me to take them over the course of another day.

Tihu Notes | Zhi

Mon, 08 May 2006 20:17:57 +0800

Last year, when we were preparing for the university anniversary, our law school erected a statue in the greenhouse-like indoor garden of the college building. People who did not know better all assumed it was a lion, but of course it was not. Why would anyone set up only a single lion? It was in fact a statue of a zhi (pronounced zhi, fourth tone), a divine beast known in the Record of Marvels as the xiezhi. In traditional Chinese characters, the character for “law” is made up of the water radical together with zhi. Legend says that the zhi bears a single horn on its head, and that when judging a case, if you brought it before the suspects, it would touch with its horn the one who was truly guilty.

Tihu Notes | Seeking Flowers, Asking Willows

Wed, 03 May 2006 20:15:21 +0800

Seeking Flowers

One weekend last June, Xiao Xie called me to say that her cellphone had once again gone missing in the study room. Xiao Xie was by nature hot-tempered and absent-minded, yet the fact that she so often lost things could not really be blamed on her alone; the true fault lay in the poor security at our school. Her phone was a fashionable new thing she had bought while traveling in Europa during the May Day holiday: a straight-bar model with a pink petal pattern. Though it had cost only two hundred euros, it was a new product made with environmentally friendly technology. Inside its casing there was a seed sealed away; once the phone was worn out, if you buried it in a flowerpot, a plant would grow, while the rest of the materials would be completely broken down.

Tihu Notes | Sha

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 21:14:24 +0800

When I was in college, there was a patch of woods in front of the dormitory building where I lived, and every year a flock of cuckoos nested and bred there. The cuckoos’ cries were rather interesting. At the start of mating season they sounded like, “Bachelor life is bitter! Bachelor life is bitter!” and once the season was over they changed to, “Not bitter! Not bitter!” In the spring of my third year, a large black bird appeared there briefly, circling above the woods. It was much bigger than an ordinary cuckoo, flew with astonishing speed, and its cry at night was even more terrifying, sounding uncannily like, “Who pushed him? Who pushed him?” The bird appeared for only seven days before vanishing. At first I was greatly puzzled by where it had come from.

Tihu Notes | Drowning

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 20:20:36 +0800

One summer vacation, while returning to school by train after visiting friends in Tianjin, I ran into my classmate Yang Shan, a native of Rongcheng in Shandong who lived directly across from me in the dormitory. Yang Shan was warmhearted, loved sports, and was especially skilled at swimming, with astonishing ability in the water, no doubt because she had grown up by the sea. The train from Tianjin to Yantai took a full day and night, and as we both had middle berths, we talked very happily together. It was August, the heat oppressive and hard to bear. In the middle of the night I awoke from the heat and could not fall back asleep no matter how I tossed and turned. Turning my head to look at Yang Shan, I heard her snoring like thunder. She wore only a T-shirt, the hem rolled up to expose half of her firm waist. I was shocked. On either side of her ribs there were plainly two openings, like mouths, opening and closing with her breathing, exactly like the breathing slits on the sides of a shark. I remembered that whenever she swam at school, she always wore a professional one-piece competitive swimsuit. We had only thought her very serious about the sport. It turned out she had been hiding the strangeness of her body.

Tihu Notes | Jiang Yong

Sun, 12 Mar 2006 21:40:55 +0800

Jiang Yong, a man from the neighboring county, used to say that he had loved the color red since childhood. From the inside out, from what he wore to what he used, he would have nothing that was not red; even at meals he preferred red peppers. One day Jiang Yong went into town to shop. A sudden gale rose up, and a billboard being installed by the roadside was blown down, knocking over a passerby walking beside him. A ruptured vessel in the man’s neck sprayed half of Jiang Yong’s face with blood, hideously bright red. Jiang Yong fainted on the spot from fright. From that day on he could no longer bear the sight of red. He dressed all in plain white from morning to night, and even changed his watchband to white.

Tihu Notes | Xu Hou

Thu, 09 Mar 2006 20:34:26 +0800

Xu Hou, a villager, was a miserly man. In former years he ran an inn in the county seat and kept more than a dozen hired hands there year-round, all of them honest and simple peasants, yet never once did anyone remain at his inn for long. Why was that? To save money, Xu Hou fed them only the leftovers that had failed to sell each day, and often delayed paying their wages on one pretext or another. His favorite trick was to tell new hands that they were still on trial, then dismiss them on some excuse just before the trial period ended, spending not a coin. He believed this saved him a great deal of money, but he did not realize that the workers all harbored resentment. Some stole ingredients, some wasted produce on purpose when chopping vegetables, and when pouring oil they would rather use two ladles than one and a half. By the end of the year, the cost of all this waste canceled out the inn’s net profits, leaving him more loss than gain.

Tihu Notes | The Ticket

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 20:56:22 +0800

When I was a sophomore, one day in April I went to the general shop beside the Seventh Canteen to photocopy some materials. I made four copies in all, at two jiao each. Reaching into my pocket, I found I had only a single ten-yuan note, so I handed it to the girl at the copier. She took one glance at the bill and said, “That’s quite a big one. Wait a moment, I’ll get your change.” I was still wondering since when ten yuan counted as “big,” when she turned back and handed me a whole stack of money: ninety-nine yuan and two jiao. It was the first time in my life I had ever been given too much change, and I simply turned and walked away.

Tihu Notes | Damp Bugs and Songdu

Mon, 20 Feb 2006 20:17:41 +0800

Damp Bugs

Dormitory 156, at the eastern end of the first floor, lay always in shadow and saw the sun only a few times a year. Outside its window grew a toon tree. On it lived a very strange kind of little insect, no bigger than grains of rice, crouching all day at the roots without moving at all. Then one spring these insects suddenly swarmed into Room 156 and settled over the bedboards of a student named Cui. They could not be killed with boiling water, nor with insecticide spray, and instead gathered in ever greater numbers. Someone from that dormitory came to ask me about them. I happened to know that the Records of Tang Marvels mentions just such a creature, called the damp bug, which feeds exclusively on the yin vapors hidden in the human heart. People who have done things unfit to see the light of day are especially prone to attracting it.

Tihu Notes | Preface, Cellphone, and an Online Game Dream

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 13:26:06 +0800

Preface

I turned twenty-three this year, and have already spent twenty years in this hall. Tihu Hall was built by my great-grandfather in the first year of the Republic. At first it was a private school. Later, when my great-grandfather grew too old to keep teaching, he dismissed the other tutors and spent his days reading and writing in the courtyard, or now and then traveling through the countryside of Jinzhong with his descendants for company. He loved telling stories even more than hearing them, and was especially fond of writing down the odd tales told by village women, peddlers, and wandering laborers. It is said that the Unwaking Court behind the hall was once piled high with his notebooks. Sadly, after the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, only a few scraps remained.