Tihu Notes 52 posts

Tihu Notes | Damp Bugs and Songdu

2006-02-20 · 4 min read

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

2006-02-19 · 7 min read

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.

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