Tihu Notes | Wooden Mule

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.