by Pu Songling
Liu took them out. Fengxian then picked them up, putting them on in place of her own. Liu begged her for the torn pair. “You’re such a rogue!” she smirked. “What kind of fellow takes a woman’s things and then wants to hoard them secretly to remember her? I’ll give you something so you can see me whenever you want.”
Then she took out a mirror and handed it to him, saying, “If you want to see me, you’ll find me in your books; otherwise, we’ll never meet again.” As soon as she finished speaking, she vanished. Sad and dispirited, Liu went home.
When he looked in the mirror, he saw Fengxian standing with her back to him, as though gazing at someone who was off in the distance a hundred paces away. This made him think about what she had advised him to do, so he had visitors turned away, closed his curtains, and focused just on studying.
One day when he looked in the mirror, he saw her suddenly turn to face him, clearly wishing to laugh in encouragement, which made him dote on her even more. Whenever there was no one around, they always watched each other.
After a month, however, his determination gradually declined, and he began such constant roving that he forgot to return to his studying. But when he did come home and went to look at the figure in the mirror, Fengxian appeared miserable, ready to break into tears; every day when he went to look at her again, he found her facing away from him, as she’d done at first: he began to realize that this was due to his having discontinued his studies.
Thus he shut his doors in order to read and study intensively, continuing round the clock, refusing to stop; a month passed, and Fengxian’s image again turned to face him. He tested his hypothesis like this: every time he neglected his studies, the image appeared sorrowful; but after a few days of painstaking study, she would appear to be smiling. Accordingly, he hung it up where he could always see it, so it would function like a tutor to guide him.
In this way, two years went by, then he took a civil service examination and succeeded. Overjoyed, he cried, “Now I’ll be able to see my Fengxian!” When he swept up the mirror and gazed into it, he saw her long, curved, painted eyebrows, and her smile revealing teeth like perfect melon seeds, as he happily held her image there in his hands, looking just like she was right there in front of him.
His love for her was unbounded, and he fixed his eyes on her image obsessively. Suddenly in the mirror she appeared to laugh, and said, “Now I know why they say ‘There’s a sweetheart in the mirror image, and a beloved in the painting.’” Then as he looked around in pleasant surprise, he discovered Fengxian seated right beside him.
He took her by the hand, and when asked about how her father and mother were doing, she replied, “Since we were separated, I haven’t yet been able to return home to my family, for I shut myself off in a cliff-side cave in order to experience a share of your hardship.”
Liu went to attend a banquet in the prefectural center, and Fengxian asked if she could join him; they rode there together, though people they passed would look straight into Fengxian’s face without seeing her. Afterwards, as they were about to return home, Fengxian confided her plan to behave as though Liu had married her while at the prefectural headquarters. Following their arrival, Fengxian began to come out and receive guests, and to manage the household administration. People were all amazed at her beauty, but didn’t realize that she was really a fox.
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“A sweetheart in the mirror . . . in the painting”: From the thirteenth-century Romance of the West Chamber (xi xiang ji), by Wang Shifu (Zhu 3:1179n35).
Liu went to pay a visit to the Fuchuan magistrate whose disciple he had been. He ran into Master Ding, who generously invited him to come home with him, where he was entertained with both ceremony and magnanimity, as Ding told him, “Our father- and mother-in-law have just moved their residence again. My wife has been away visiting them, and she’s about to return now. I’ll send a letter to her, then we can come visit you to offer our congratulations.”
Liu originally suspected that Ding was also a fox, but when he meticulously looked into the man’s family background, he discovered him to be the son of an important Fuchuan merchant.
Ding first met Shuixian out walking by herself when he was returning home one evening after conducting some business, and noticing her beauty, he stole a few glances at her. She asked him if she might ride next to him on his horse. Ding happily accommodated her, transporting her back to his study, where they ended up sleeping together.
She was able to enter the study through a crack in the window there, which is how he realized she was a fox. Shuixian told him, “You mustn’t look on me with suspicion. I sincerely care for you, which I why I want to give myself to you.” Ding cherished her and consequently never married anyone else.
Liu returned home and borrowed a wealthy family’s capacious villa, then he prepared pleasant sleeping quarters for his guests, washing and scrubbing the floors so they were bright and clean, but he was concerned that there weren’t curtains and other decorations; yet in the course of the intervening night, such furnishings suddenly appeared.
Several days passed, in the course of which over thirty people arrived, bearing splendid banners and presents of wine, in a raucous profusion of horses and carriages, filling walkways and lanes till they overflowed. Liu bowed respectfully to his father-in-law, then approached Ding and Hu, inviting them to enter the guest quarters, while Fengxian conducted her mother and sisters to the women’s bedrooms. “You little vixen, now that you’re rich,” Baxian said to her, “you shouldn’t still be upset with your matchmaker. Are you still holding onto my bracelet and slippers?”
Fengxian went and located them, then handed them over to her, remarking, “Your slippers are here, but thousands of people have been looking at them already.”
Baxian then took the slippers and hit Fengxian on the back with them, saying, “That’s for giving them to Master Liu.” Then she threw them into the fireplace, with the benediction, “When new they were like blooming flowers, when old like withered flowers; treasures not made to be worn, let the Lady in the Moon come and take possession of them.”
Shuixian also spoke a benediction over them: “When displayed, these coverings for beautiful toes were praised by tens of thousands; if they’re sent to the Lady of the Moon, she’ll take pity that they’re now so threadbare.”
Fengxian stirred the fire, and then declared, “Every night she flew up into the sky, till one day she left her beloved; all that remains is her delicate image in the moon, witnessed by everyone in this world.”
Then she scraped up the ashes, heaping them into ten individual piles on a wooden scoop, and when she saw Liu approaching, she held it out, offering them to him as a present. But when he looked at it, the scoop was filled with embroidered slippers, all of them perfect copies of the original, which provoked Baxian to rush over and knock the scoop to the floor; after the slippers hit the ground, only one or two of them remained, till she bent down and blew on them, destroying all traces of them.
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The Lady in the Moon: A reference to Chang’e, the goddess who stole the elixir of immortality from her husband, the divine archer Yi (Yang and An note that in some variants of the myth, Chang’e does so because her husband had become a tyrannical ruler, and she sought to prevent him from becoming immortal [90]), and took up residence on the moon.
The next day, Ding and Shuixian took the long road that headed home. Baxian was having so much fun playing games with Fengxian that though her father and Hu were trying to hurry her along, it wasn’t until noon that the group of them finally all left.
Originally, when Liu and Fengxian were just approaching town, looking so resplendent, a crowd like the ones found in the marketplace had turned out to watch them. There were two bandits among them, and when they caught sight of the beautiful Fengxian, it felt like their spirits had become lost to them, so they planned to kidnap her when she came out on the road.
Secretly observing her as she rode out of the village one day, they tailed her. They’d closed to within a chi when her horses suddenly broke into a frantic gallop, leaving the bandits unable to catch up with her. As she arrived at a place where the road became a narrow passage between two cliffs, her carriage had to slow down considerably; one of the bandits chased after her, brandishing his sword and roaring, causing all the other people in the vicinity to scatter.
Once he dismounted, he pulled aside the curtain in her carriage, discovering an old woman sitting inside. He began to suspect that he’d mistakenly stopped the beauty’s mother; for that reason he turned away, and immediately as he did so, a sword wounded his right arm, till in moments he’d been captured and bound. As he stared around him, he realized that the cliffs weren’t cliffs at all, but rather the gates to Pingle; and the woman in the carriage was jinshi Li’s mother, who’d been returning home from a ride through the countryside.
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Chi: A measure equal to 1/3 meter.
When the remaining bandit arrived on the heels of the first, one of his horse’s legs was lopped off, and he, too, was tied up. The gatekeeper grabbed the men and took them to the chief of the prefecture, where a single initial interrogation resulted in confession of their guilt. At that time, there had been a master thief who was still at large, and when the intended kidnappers were interrogated, it turned out that one of them was the man.
The following spring, Liu passed another level of the civil service examination. Fengxian sought to avoid any trouble, so she declined all of her relatives’ invitations to come and receive their congratulations. For his own part, Liu refused to marry anyone else. Once he advanced to the position of vice minister, he purchased a concubine, who bore him two children.
The collector of these strange tales remarks, “Sigh! In the day-to-day world, immortals don’t necessarily appear any different from everyone else! ‘The failure to try hard when one is young does irrevocable damage by the time one becomes old.’ It’s a shame that not everyone has an ambitious beauty who’ll cast images in a mirror of her disappointment or joy. I wish that there were as many immortals as the grains of sand along the Ganges River, all sending lovely girls to the mortal world to be married—for that would certainly lessen the suffering of the individuals in this sea of poverty and deprivation.”
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Jinshi: The title held by a successful candidate in the highest level of the imperial civil service examination.
“The failure to try . . . becomes old”: Cited in the han yuefu (Songs and Poems of the Han Dynasty) (Zhu 3:1180n52).
343. Traveler Tong
Scholar Dong was from Xuzhou. He loved the idea of swordplay, and considered himself quite a heroic fellow. It happened that he encountered a traveler along the road, and so, straddling his donkey, he rode along with the other man. As they began chatting, their conversation progressively emboldened the traveler.
When Dong asked him his name, the traveler replied, “My name’s Tong, and I’m from Liaoyang.”
“Where are you going?” asked Dong.
“I’ve been traveling for twenty years,” Tong told him, “and now I’m returning home from abroad.”
“Since you’ve been all around the world, and you’ve encountered so many people, have you ever met any truly extraordinary individuals?” Dong inquired.
“What do you mean by extraordinary?” asked Tong. Dong then described his passion for swordplay, and his disappointment that he hadn’t yet met someone extraordinary who could teach him about it. Tong replied, “There’s no problem finding such individuals, but they’d insist that the student be righteous and filial—only then would they offer to teach their art.”
Dong adamantly asserted that he possessed those qualities; he drew out the sword he wore at his waist, flicking it about while humming a song; then he chopped down small trees with it on the side of the road, boasting about how sharp it was. Tong’s beard lifted into a grin as he asked if he might borrow it for a closer examination. Dong then handed it to him.
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Xuzhou: A city in Jiangsu province.
Liaoyang: A city in Liaoning province.
After he’d finished looking the sword over thoroughly, Tong remarked, “This was cast from a piece of iron armor, then tempered in stinking sweat, so it’s of extremely low quality. Although I haven’t been taught the art of swordplay, I do own a sword that’s quite serviceable.” Then from underneath his clothing he pulled out a short sword that was about a chi in length, and applied it to Dong’s blade, whittling away slices of the sword like it was a melon or squash, till it was cut into a curved shape like a horse’s hoof.
Dong was amazed, and asked if he might hold Tong’s sword, rubbing his hand over it again and again, and then afterwards returning it to Tong. He invited Tong to go home with him, strongly prevailing upon him to stay at least a couple of nights. Dong cupped one hand over the other at chest level, apologizing to Tong that he didn’t know the art of swordplay. Dong then pressed Tong’s knee encouragingly and launched into elegant discourse, while Tong merely listened to him respectfully.
It was growing late when suddenly they heard some scuffling in the adjacent courtyard. This was where Dong’s father had his residence, so he immediately became concerned. As he approached the wall to listen more carefully, he heard a man’s angry voice cry out, “Tell your son to come out right now to get what’s coming to him, and then I’ll let you go!”
Presently they heard the sound of beating, followed by a continuous groaning that Dong realized was definitely coming from his father. He grabbed a halberd, intending to go to his rescue. Tong stopped him, saying, “No good can come from rushing off like that—you should develop a plan first.” Dong anxiously begged Tong to advise him, and the traveler replied, “The intruder’s here to put your reputation to the test, so there’s no way to get out of it. You don’t have any other relatives, so you should go turn all your business affairs over to your wife; I’ll open the door and then help you fight the intruder.”
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Chi: A length equal to 1/3 meter.
Dong concurred, then went and told his wife what was happening. She clung to his clothing, in tears. When Dong’s brave resolve suddenly dissipated, the two of them climbed upstairs, looking for bows and arrows, so they’d be ready for the intruder’s attack.
While hurrying in panic, they heard Tong’s voice from below, laughing, “What luck, the ruffian’s gone.” Bringing candles over to see him, they discovered that the traveler had already vanished. When they came out to determine what had happened, they saw that Dong’s father had been over at the neighbor’s house drinking and was now carrying a bamboo lantern to light his way home; when they looked in the courtyard, they merely found piles of ash from grass torches. That’s when they realized that Tong was a supernatural being.
The collector of these strange tales remarks, “Loyalty and filial piety are the foundation of a man’s heroic nature; since ancient times, men who proved unwilling to die for their fathers might have originally been brave enough to do so, but then changed their minds due to second thoughts. In the distant past, Xie Jin made a pact with Fang Xiaoru that they would both die for their emperor, but Xie later went back on his word; how could he have known that upon returning home after breaking his promise, he’d find his wife’s sobs and tears unbearable?”
In our town, there was a certain bailiff, and every time he was away from home for a few days, his wife would carry on unfaithfully with some local rascal. One day, when the bailiff returned home, he passed a young man coming directly out of his house, which made him very suspicious, so he pointedly interrogated his wife about it. She wouldn’t admit to anything.
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Xie Jin . . . Fang Xiaoru: These men served the Ming dynasty emperor, Jianwen (1399-1402), and were members of the imperial Hanli
n Academy. Rather than martyr himself for his emperor, Xie Jin, who’d become a jinshi in 1388, in 1402 “took the path of least resistance” (Elman 65). In contrast, after refusing to write an inaugural address for the usurping Yongle emperor, Fang Xiaoru and all of his family and extended family—including students and friends—were executed, totaling over 800 deaths.
Later, however, when he found something on their bed that the young man had left behind, his wife was shamed into silence, and simply went down on her knees to beg for mercy. The furious bailiff tossed her a cord, and ordered her to hang herself. His wife asked if she might dress herself before dying, and he agreed. The wife then went into her room to dress; the bailiff poured himself some wine while waiting, berating her meanwhile and urging her to hurry up.
Suddenly his wife stepped out wearing a dazzling outfit, and tearfully demanded, “Can you really bear telling me to kill myself?” The bailiff exploded in angry swearing. The wife then went back into her room, and as she was tying a noose in the cord, the bailiff threw down his wine cup and shouted, “Alright, come out! If I don’t have you go through with it, I guess I won’t die from people’s gossiping.” Then the couple was reconciled.
This is just as ridiculous as the story of Xie Jin.
344. The Army in Liaoyang
There was a certain fellow from Yishui, who during the Ming dynasty was serving in the army in Liaoyang. On one occasion, there was an attack on the city walls, and the Yishui soldier was killed in the chaos; though his head had been cut off, however, he still wasn’t entirely dead.
As night fell, a man arrived, holding an account book containing the names of ghosts and their appointed times of death. When he came to the Yishui man’s listing, he declared that the fellow shouldn’t have died, so he dispatched men to reattach the fellow’s head and then send him back.