Tihu Notes | Spring Worms, Autumn Serpents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.