Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays

There was once a famous writer, but strangely enough, we do not even know his name. It was not that he had not taken a name, or that he had done away with it.¹ Nor was it that he had somehow remained anonymous, or that something about him was perhaps so peculiar that it defied naming. The reason was simple: the ring of his fame was too deafening for us to hear his name clearly. This was hardly a unique case. The postman, for instance, would unhesitatingly deliver an envelope addressed to “The Greatest French Poet” to Victor Hugo.² Likewise, the telegraph company was sure to route a telegram for “The Greatest Living Italian Writer” to Gabriele D’Annunzio,³ making it absolutely unnecessary to specify name and address. This writer of ours was even more famous, for his was a name that needed no written or spoken forms. The name was completely obscured by the reputation, as it were. Mention “writer,” and everyone knew you were referring to him.

Being a genius, the Writer was prolific, but, having an artistic conscience, he suffered labor pains with each act of creation. Then again, writing was not quite the same as childbirth, since a difficult delivery did not cost him his life, and his fecundity was a burden only to his readers. He penned numerous novels, prose pieces, plays, and poems, thereby moving, inspiring, influencing countless middle-school students. Overseas, sales of a literary work are dominated by the tastes of the middle class. But China, that ancient and cultured land of ours, is a country where material wealth matters not. Here, the value of a work rests, instead, on the standards and wisdom of the middle-school student. After all, the only ones willing to spend their money on books and on subscriptions to magazines are those who are still in middle school: unthinking adolescents, eager to hear speeches and lectures; ever ready to worship great men; and full of the unremarkable sorrows of young Werther. As for university students, they themselves had authored books and hoped to sell their own products. Professors, of course, would not even bother with books, writing only forewords for others and expecting complimentary copies in return. Those more senior in position disdained even forewords, limiting themselves to gracing the cover designs of friends’ works with their calligraphy; books, meanwhile, would of course be respectfully dedicated to them.

This Writer of ours knew only too well where the key to his success lay, having seen that middle-school students made great customers. It comes as no surprise that his works would be collectively titled For Those Who Are No Longer Children but Have Yet to Grow Up, or, alternatively, Several Anonymous, Postage-Due Letters to All Young People. “Anonymous” because, as previously mentioned, nobody knew his name, and “postage due” because the books had to be paid for out of the young readers’ pockets. The Writer was able to disguise his ignorance as profundity, pass off shallowness as clarity, and speak with the voice of a radical who proceeded with caution and good sense. The volume of his production was such that he became the unavoidable author whose works one would run into wherever one went. Customers of food stalls, of peanut hawkers, and street-corner stands selling panfried cakes regularly received his novels or plays in loose, torn-out pages, thereby unexpectedly acquiring spiritual nourishment. Thus, his contribution to the literary world, a matter of popular recognition at first, eventually won official endorsement. He had become a nationally certified talent. The government commissioned a panel of experts to have his masterworks translated into Esperanto, so that he could compete for the Nobel Prize in literature. As soon as this was announced, one fan wrote the “Readers’ Forum” of a newspaper:

It was most unfortunate, however, that Esperanto did not always mean espérance, the hope that very name stood for. Although the Nobel judges had no trouble with English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Greek, and Latin, not one of those moldy relics from a bygone age could handle Esperanto. No matter how they wiped and cleaned their pince-nez, they just could not decipher the masterpieces that our Writer had submitted for consideration. After a great long while, one of them, a Sinologist senior both in years and standing, finally saw the light.

“That’s it, that’s it!” he proclaimed. “This is Chinese, what they call Latinized Chinese. We’ve mistaken it for some European language—no wonder we didn’t know what it is!”

This eased the committee’s anxieties, and they heaved a collective sigh of relief. The one who was seated next to the Sinologist asked him, “You should know a bit of Chinese. So what does it say?”

“My dear venerable sir,” came the solemn reply, “it is through specialization that learning ascends to the pinnacle of excellence. My late father devoted his entire life to researching Chinese punctuation, and I have spent forty years studying Chinese phonology. But your inquiry just now lies in the area of Chinese semantics, which is quite outside my field of specialization. Whether the Chinese language contains meaning is a topic I should not blindly pass judgment on before I have obtained unimpeachable evidence. This stance of mine, my dear sir, you would not want to question, I am sure.”

The chairman, observing that the Sinologist was not at all agreeable, quickly put in, “I don’t think we even have to bother with these works, since they don’t conform to our regulations to begin with. According to our eligibility requirements, only works written in a European language qualify for consideration. Since this is written in Chinese, we need not waste any more of our time on it.”

The other old fogies indicated their unanimous agreement, noting at the same time their admiration for the Sinologist’s scholarly circumspection. He himself, however, was quite humble about it, insisting that he was nowhere close to the American ophthalmologist who had won that year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine. The doctor, he explained, specialized only in the left eye, and did not treat any malfunction of the right. Now, there was the true specialist. In such an atmosphere of graciousness and mutual respect, these senior citizens pleasantly parted company. That was just too bad for our Writer and his single day of hoping. The announcement of the winners plunged the entire Chinese population into a righteous wrath, to say nothing of our Writer himself, who was driven to despair. Earlier, quite a few of his fellow writers, their green pupils seeing red, had armed themselves with mental notes, waiting for the moment he was declared Nobel laureate to attack his works in public. With one voice they were to assert that such recognition was un-warranted. These same people now all turned sympathetic, and were loud in their lamentations. Perhaps because of the cleansing effects of the tears of commiseration they shed, their sight and their pupils returned to normal; indeed, their eyes were now awash with the kind of luster that infuses the sky after a rainstorm has subsided.

One newspaper ran an editorial admonishing the Swedish Academy for having “forgotten its origins.” Was it not true that Nobel made his fortune from explosives, and China was the country that had invented gunpowder in the first place. The prize thus should have been intended for the Chinese to begin with, a point the administrators would do well to keep in mind in the future. What a pity that the “Sinologist” on the selection committee had not yet begun his research on the semantics of Chinese, thus allowing this forceful essay to escape his attention.⁴ Another paper was quite imaginative, attempting to comfort our Writer by actually congratulating him. He had been a successful author all along, the paper argued, and he now qualified as a wronged genius and an overlooked and unsung but truly great artist. The paper went on to say, “There is no more unlikely pairing than success and injustice; yet he has now attained it. What a rare and enviable turn of events!” Still another paper made a concrete suggestion:

While there is much to be gained through the policy of securing foreign loans, to accept a foreign prize would be shameful. In order to recapture the respectability our country has lost, we should establish China’s own literary award as a protest against the Nobel Prize, and to save the right to criticize from falling into foreign hands. The most important eligibility requirement for our prize would be to restrict the medium to Chinese dialects, with the stipulation that admissible also as Chinese dialects would be English as spoken by residents of Hong Kong and Shanghai, Japanese as spoken in Qingdao, and Russian in Harbin. Once this prize is established, the Nobel would cease to be a unique attraction, and Western writers would strive to learn and write Chinese, in the hopes of winning our prize money. China’s five-thousand-year-old culture would therefore penetrate the West. Since the Nobel Prize is supported by private funds, our prize should follow the same format. It would only be appropriate, if we may suggest it, that our great Writer implement the above proposal by way of retaliation, and start an endowment fund with his royalties and fees.

In addition to practical-mindedness, the editor of a fourth paper demonstrated much psychological insight. He agreed that the literary arts ought to be encouraged, adding only that those who were willing to contribute funds to that cause should themselves be honored too. Therefore, as incentive for the rich to make grants, some honor had to first be bestowed upon selected men of wealth. Since this was to be no more than a gesture, the amount of their cash prizes did not have to be substantial. The wealthy writer surely would not mind. “Would our great Writer,” he concluded by asking, “be willing to set an example for others to follow by making the first contribution?” Who could have guessed that all this goodwill and these kind suggestions would only drive the Writer to his deathbed?

He took the confirmed announcement of winners so hard that he fell sick, his misery and bitterness mitigated only slightly by the outrage and support of the population. While awaiting articles rallying to his defense to appear in the paper, he made plans to dictate an interview the next day, to be transcribed for publication. By long-standing practice, news stories about him were, without exception, his own submissions. In them, he would often insert some minor factual errors, in order to create the false impression that the piece had been written by someone else. This also gave him the bonus of having a correction appear in the next issue, thus ensuring that his name would see print twice for one iota of trivia. It so happened that while he was making these plans, those editorials came to his attention one after another. The first one alone was enough to make him fly into a rage. “Missing out on the Nobel Prize means a loss of personal income,” he reasoned. “The minute lofty things like the nation, the people, and so on got dragged into the show, I myself would be crowded out of it!” He then noted the congratulatory heading of the second editorial and became so furious that he tore the sheet in two. Suppressing his anger as best he could, he went on to the third editorial; by the time he had finished reading it, he felt nothing but ice-cold water being poured on his head. The moment he finished reading the fourth, he passed out.

That night, quite a few visitors gathered at his bedside, including journalists, fans, and representatives of various organizations. Besides the reporters, who were busy scribbling in their notebooks items that would make for a good article entitled something like “A Profile of the Writer Indisposed,” everybody was nervously gripping his handkerchief to wipe away tears. All knew that this was the last they would ever see of the Writer. Several young, sentimental females were in fact worrying that one hankie might not be enough. The flowing sleeves of the men’s mandarin gowns might come in useful in such an emergency. But the girls’ sleeves, so short that they barely covered their armpits, would be of no help. Looking up to find all those people standing at his side, this Writer of ours found the scene matched quite well the scenario for his dying moments that he had fantasized about. The only thing that irked him was that he was no longer master of his own mental powers and organs. He could not recall completely or properly deliver the farewell speech to the world he had prepared long ago. At long last, a few words managed to dribble from his lips: “Don’t collect my writings into a series of complete works, because—” Perhaps this line was too long, or what was left of his life was too short, but he was unable to make it to the end of the sentence. Many in the audience pricked up their ears like terriers, only to let them droop like a hog’s in disappointment. Once outside his room they enthusiastically debated the meaning behind the Writer’s last words. Some said he had written so much that it was simply impossible ever to make any collection a complete one. Others conjectured that since additional hundreds and thousands of novels, plays, and songs had been planned, what little there was in print would hardly be representative. This controversy between the two schools soon grew into the most intriguing chapter in the history of Chinese literature.

During the memorial service for the Writer, one literary critic passionately intoned, “His spirit shall endure. His masterly creations shall never perish, for, indeed, they are his most valuable legacy!”

Privately, though, one young reader remarked, somewhat in relief, “At least he must be physically too dead to keep putting out new books! I would’ve gone broke before long.” The fact was, this young reader had to pay for all the books out of his own pocket, whereas the critic’s entire collection was of course autographed, complimentary copies.

Meanwhile, in that other world of the deceased, the spirit of our Writer soon found that the afterlife was not quite as bad as one might have expected. For one thing, the release of mental tension was like shedding a heavy overcoat at the moment one is about to be smothered. Together with those fleas that had established themselves in the seams, whatever ailments had previously plagued him were gotten rid of too. He was dead, no question, but he had been wondering what it would be like after death. “For someone who has made the contributions to culture and society I have,” he pondered, “Heaven should have sent a welcoming party to receive me long ago. Could it be true that Heaven is nothing more than a product of superstition? Maybe it doesn’t exist after all? Even if that’s so, they should hurry to build one just to accommodate me!” But then it also occurred to him that staying in Heaven all the time was bound to be mighty boring too. Unless it was the Heaven of Muhammad’s design, a place where one had possession of seventy-two beauties, all with large black eyes, who could be restored to the virginal state at will. There, one also found swans and plump ducks, their meat roasted to perfection, and the skin still crisp, flying through the air, all rushing toward one’s mouth to be eaten. “Now, that would be quite something, wouldn’t it?” The Writer was lost in thought. “What a shame that overwork has given me heartburn and ulcers! Too much of that roasted stuff might do more harm than good. There won’t be bottles of Heartburn Relief, Ulsooth, or Clear-It hanging from the swans’ necks.⁵ That supply of seventy-two women is somewhat overabundant too; it would take a while to sample all their charms.⁶ If their looks are all different, it could very well happen that some of these lovers will be favored over others, because of the peculiarities of personal taste, leading to a jealous war. How could someone who cannot cope with two arguing females handle seventy-two of them? That’s not even taking into account their having the traits of India’s preserved vegetables, liable to turn from sour to hot enough to burn one’s system. But legend has it that these seventy-two houris—‘hot ones’ would have been more appropriate—all come from the same mold, with the same black hair, dark eyes, serpentine waists. In short, all their features are identical. Sticking with one woman is boring enough, so just imagine this one woman magically multiplied into seventy-two copies . . .”

Our Writer was so scared that he had to change his line of thought. “When it comes to falling in love, most men of letters indulge in it out of vaingloriousness—the desire to impress people with the mesmerizing effects a genius has on the opposite sex. The lovers of the literati are just like the new cars and mansions of the rich: they serve to generate envy, not fill dire needs of their owners. If every man ascending to Heaven had six dozen women to his name, nobody could use it to show off his sexual prowess. This, however, would undoubtedly be a superb opportunity to collect materials for lyrical poems or confessions. The question is: do people read in Heaven? Well, perhaps a climate for reading could be fostered after my arrival. In that case I might as well bring along a few volumes as gifts.” So thinking, our Writer sauntered into his study.

As soon as he stepped inside, he had the sensation that he was treading on something funny. The floor was like an empty stomach about to cave in under a load of rocks; and yet it was gasping for air, struggling to buttress itself. It turned out that there were such an incredible number of his works on the shelves that the ground could no longer carry their weight and started to come apart. Before the Writer could leap to save his books, the ground split open with a loud crack. There, off the shelves and down the gaping hole, his books, big and small, fell helter-skelter. The Writer lost his balance and, engulfed by that torrent of collapsing books, plummeted straight down. Curled up though he was, with neck tucked in, he could not avoid being the target of all those books, which hurt his head, bruised his shoulders, and lacerated his skin. Only then did he realize firsthand the impact of his works. It was too late to regret that he had lacked the self-discipline to write fewer books, and each one several tens of thousands of words shorter. After an interminable period all those books finally found their way past him. Bearing the marks and scars from this attack, he trailed the books, drifting down into the bottomless darkness. He was becoming more and more scared. If this continued, sooner or later he would surely pass through the center of the earth and bore straight through the globe! All of a sudden the geography he learned in primary school came rushing back. “The other side of this shell is nothing but the Western Hemisphere, and the Western Hemisphere is where the American continent lies. For all writers of the old continent, America is the Treasure Island where the unsuccessful become successful and the successful reap rewards. That’s why every writer should visit, give a lecture tour, and create a market for his works there. In doing so, he would also be helping relieve Americans of the burden of their gold dollars and at the same time recovering some of our country’s financial loss stemming from the importation of American goods. To fall all the way to America would be fantastic! A perfectly straightforward, effortless, yet refreshing experience, which avoids that motion sickness business on board a ship or airplane.”

With such thoughts in his mind, the Writer found his spirits soaring higher with each inch his body dropped. He was so thankful that Providence was after all what it was, and his ceaseless toils of a lifetime were not about to go unrewarded. The reward of being a good writer, so it appeared, was not to ascend to Heaven, but to descend to America. The saying “Slipping to fall, one falls upon the best of fortunes” had all but come true.

As he was thus comforting himself, he suddenly hit bottom. Amazingly enough, it didn’t hurt. He stood up and found himself inside a huge room, with maps hanging on the walls. He had fallen through the ceiling, but since he had landed on his books on the floor, the cushioning effect saved his bones. Just a moment ago he had been regretting the volume of his works, but now he was only too happy to discover the benefits of numerous and voluminous writings. “But what now? I’ve smashed someone’s ceiling!” As if in answer, the books he was standing on suddenly started to push upward, tripping him. At the same time a great many uniformed people rushed in through the door and pulled him down from the mound of books. Shoveling, kicking the books aside, they managed to clear them out of the room. Then they helped a person sporting a huge beard, bruised black and blue by the books, up on his feet. Now that the room’s decor and appointments came into full view, our Writer began to realize that he was in an elegant private office. Some of the uniformed men were now busy patting the dust off the bearded man, straightening his clothes by giving them a tug here and a pull there while the rest went about tidying up the place, righting overturned desks and chairs. Finding himself in such grand surroundings, the Writer was quite ill at ease. He knew this person he had just knocked down must be some dignitary or other.

The bearded man was surprisingly polite to him. He bade him sit down, and at the same time ordered his men to leave the room. Not until now did the man’s mustache catch the Writer’s attention. It circled his lips, continued all the way down to the chin as a massive beard.⁷ The growth was so black and thick that the words that came out through this curly grove seemed somehow dyed with the color of that beard, every one of them dark.

“My goodness! Your works are really as weighty as gold, my dear sir!” The man sat down himself as he spoke, massaging the swollen parts of his head, a weak smile curtailed by that mouthful of whiskers that screened his lips. Our Writer, seeing that the man was not giving him a hard time, and thinking that he had praised his works for being “worth their weight in gold,” felt instantly emboldened.

“They aren’t really so expensive,” he said, visibly arrogant. “Maybe I should first ask whether this is America—calculated in American dollars, my prices don’t come out to be very high at all.”

“No, this isn’t America.”⁸

“Where am I then?” the Writer asked.

“This is none other than the legendary Hades.”⁹

“That’s ridiculous!!” The Writer jumped up in shock and consternation. “I’m darn sure the way I led my life doesn’t call for such a reward—being sent to suffer in Hell!”

The bearded man waved his hands, motioning for calm, and asked him to sit down. “That you don’t have to worry about, sir, as Hell has already moved to the human world. You see, you’ve been so busy writing you don’t appear to be too well informed about the current state of the world. Oh well, I don’t blame you for that.”

The Writer realized that it must be Yama, king of Hell, himself before him. “No wonder he has the liberty to sport such a flamboyant beard!” So he hurriedly stood up again. “Your Netherly Majesty, I beg your forgiveness—” he said, bowing so low as he spoke that he was about to split his ass (saluer à cul ouvert), as French slang has it.

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken, sir,” the man chortled. “And you must excuse me for not being able to return your greeting. My back is still aching a bit from the burden of your books, so I’ll just have to take your bow remaining in my seat. This place was indeed formerly Hades, but I certainly am not any abdicated emperor of a fallen dynasty, nor am I a newly appointed director of some national palace museum. One would think that with the abolition of the monarchy, palaces should be converted into repositories for antiques. But then all antiques in the eighteen levels of Hell are torture devices. Humanity has progressed in many respects through the last thousand years or two, except for its cruelty toward its own kind. That hasn’t become any more refined or exquisite. Take for instance the extracting of confessions by brute force inside intelligence agencies and the punishment of prisoners of war in concentration camps: they share the virtues of being simple, homespun, and effective—thoroughly in the time-honored tradition of savagery. If you look at China, it’s only in the brutality of her various forms of torture that you can still see the essence of her culture. You know, pumping water down the nostrils, poking a red-hot branding iron in the armpits, tightening up the hand with wooden pins stuck between one finger and the next, and similar features of the indigenous culture. So those torture instruments in Hell, far from being antiques that had outlived their usefulness, have all been called to active service in the human world. At any rate, this place is the Public Administration for Chinese Territorial Production.¹⁰ And yours truly happens to be its administrator.”

The Writer was beginning to regret his unduly courteous bow, and was feeling embarrassed. But the man’s last line made his interest surge again. “I’m a prodigy,” he mused, “and this man here deals in products—the two words even alliterate. What perfect partners we’d make!” So he asked, “Products of the land are of course valuable commodities, but this is smack in the center of the earth—who’s going to do business with you here? Oh, wait a minute, I get it. Everything’s been scraped clean off the face of the earth by those corrupt officials. And in these times of war, people all over are digging tunnels as shelters from air attack. Since you businessmen will go to any length to make money, you figured that you might as well do what everybody else is doing, and so you bored your way underground here to open up shop. Right?”

The administrator replied in a matter-of-fact tone, “Are you implying that being in ‘Chinese territorial production’ our purpose is to sell out China? There would indeed be plenty of potential customers, but who could afford the price of that priceless land? If I were a typical businessman, I’d hold firmly to a policy of tangible profits. In other words, I’d never close a deal at below cost, nor would I accept bad checks. That’s why the China deal will never be closed, and for the same reason I won’t be offering China for either retail or wholesale, as those foolish politicians are doing. I’m afraid you’ve totally misunderstood our name. We are in fact the agency in charge of the production of newborns within Chinese territory. You see, although Hell has relocated to the human world, human beings are still destined to die, and someone still has to manage the reincarnation of souls, the business of karma, and the like. Our mandate here is to handle the assignments for any person or animal to be born inside China.”

“Why ‘Public Administration’ then?”

“The ‘Administration’ part is simply handed down from tradition. Aren’t there such agencies as the Rewards and Commendations Administration, and the Punishments Administration, in the world of Hades? My title is therefore naturally ‘administrator,’ and not ‘president,’ as you might expect of a business concern. As for ‘Public,’ all that does is to give the idea that the affairs of our organization are open to public view. Everything’s fair and square. We don’t take bribes or send good people to be reborn into the wrong family. This thick black beard of mine symbolizes the spirit of our administration.”

“I see the double meaning,” said the Writer, eager to show off his cleverness. “Since those who grow beards like yours must be old enough to be grandfathers, your beard, Mr. Administrator, must symbolize impartial justice.”

“Come, come, sir, your sharp mind has flown off at a tangent again! Well, perhaps this weakness is just common to all you men of letters. It doesn’t take a beard for a person to be called ‘grandfather,’ you know—look at those eunuchs of various dynasties in our history. You must also be aware that the insignia of high justices in the West is none other than a silvery white wig. I expect you’re familiar with all those best sellers on Chinese civilization made for the export market that are so popular in the human world? Anyway, our country, people, customs, mentality, are, by their accounts, all exact opposites of Westerners’, isn’t that true? We’re an Oriental race, and so they have to be Occidental. We’re Chinese, so they’ll always be foreigners. When we beckon, our fingers point down, but somehow when they do it their fingers have to point upward. We kneel to worship, but when they greet you in salute, quite conversely, they raise a hand. A foreign man kneels to propose to his lover before marriage, while his henpecked Chinese brother ends up kneeling in front of his wife after marriage. These and many other things are all quite bizarre. If you extrapolate from this, since we value face, Westerners must be shameless. In mourning we wear white, but they wear black. It’s obvious, therefore, that if their impartial officials wear white wigs on their heads, their counterparts in our culture should endeavor to grow natural, black beards on their chins. This is the only way we can avoid violating the pet theories of those scholars who make comparisons of Eastern and Western civilizations.¹¹ And then, of course, it also makes a statement. That is, aside from this beard, which won’t stay pitch-black forever, there’s nothing in this wide world that’s allowed to be a deal in the dark!” The administrator’s beard flew about with every word he spoke, making his delivery forceful and impressive indeed.

At this moment, our Writer was busy taking stock of his own situation. “Fair people are also the most obnoxious and unsympathetic. If left to this fellow’s disposition, I’ll have no hope of getting to America. I’d best clear out while I still can.” Thus, he put a smile on his face and stood up to take his leave.

“It was very inconsiderate of me today to have allowed my bookcases to fall down here and damage your office, and also to have taken all this precious time away from your working hours. I sincerely apologize for all this. But I have learned a great deal through our chance meeting, sir; it’s been a true pleasure. Someday when I write my memoirs, I’ll make a point of saying many good things about your administration. For the moment, however, I shouldn’t tarry any longer. Would you be kind enough to have your men bring in the works of mine that landed here just now so that I can autograph a few to be presented to you? They should make fine souvenirs. Besides, books carrying my signature are sure to fetch a handsome price from collectors of later generations, so please take this as restitution for my having smashed your ceiling.”

“Oh, that’s quite all right, don’t you worry about that. But now that you’ve come, I’m afraid you can’t leave so easily.” The administrator stroked his beard peacefully in his seat.

“Why not?” the Writer shot back, incensed. “Your subordinates wouldn’t dare to try to restrain me! Don’t you know I’m a genius? And I didn’t make this mess on purpose either. My fall was completely accidental and unintentional.”

“There’s no such thing as an ‘accident’ in the world. It’s just a planned occurrence in disguise. People of the human world all end up here upon their deaths, and each comes in his own way. Indeed, the routes they take are governed by a fair enough principle: ‘To your own designs shall you fall victim, and victim you shall be.’ In simpler terms, whatever it was that you did for a living would be the very cause of your own undoing, sending you to report to me here. See, you’re a writer, so the books you’ve written bored their way through the ground, taking you along with them. Just this morning a sanitary engineer’s soul arrived. Could you believe how he got to this place? One way or another he fell into the toilet, and some unthinking fool flushed him all the way down here! My ceiling does get broken once in a while, or at least damaged enough to leak, and I myself sometimes get hit on the head, or splashed all over with dirty water. But then when one is in public service, one simply can’t afford to be concerned about such things.”

“Well, what are you going to assign me to be then?”

“Oh, that I’m still trying to decide. In your lifetime you consumed an enormous quantity of ink, so I could very naturally reincarnate you as a squid, so that you’d keep spitting it back out. But then you also wasted a lot of paper, and for that you ought to be reincarnated as a sheep, whose skin could be used for paper manufacturing. And you’ve presumably also worn out countless brush tips, so I should turn you into a rabbit or a mouse—or maybe that same sheep would do. What a shame that you’re a writer of these new times; you handle a brush about as well as a foreigner handles chopsticks. What you use most often are nibs inserted into holders and platinum-tipped fountain pens. I’m not too sure which animals produce metal, so I may just have to make you a ranking government official, from whose heart and countenance one could scrape off iron or steel. As for platinum, well, don’t we have that handy stereotype, the platinum blonde? Finally, considering the way you make a game of hiding yourself behind all those pen names, you should in your next life be made a fugitive from justice constantly under the pressure to create aliases. The problem is, you have only one afterlife and simply couldn’t be a woman, man, fish, rabbit, and so on all at the same time! So . . . so—hey, you can’t just run away! There are a lot of people waiting for you outside; they have accounts to settle with you yet.”

Our Writer, finding the administrator’s talk getting more unsavory by the minute, had pulled open the door and was ready to make a run for it. Now stopped by his words, he turned around and sneered at him. “What? Settle accounts with me? Aha, Mr. Administrator, didn’t you make a fool of me just now for not being aware of the current world situation? I’m throwing that right back at you. You think geniuses of today are the same old down-and-out Bohemians, or dreamers who know nothing about financial management. By thinking of them as long-haired artists with a string of creditors at their heels you’re showing residual symptoms of an infection known as romanticism. I’m afraid you’re totally out of touch with reality! We’re not idiots, you know. We do realize the importance of personal finances in daily living. In fact, as if we weren’t smart enough, we hire lawyers and managers to safeguard our interests. Royalties and fees that total substantial amounts we invest in business partnerships. Of course, there are those cultural personalities who are nothing more than cultured paupers, but I’m not one of them. To tell you the truth, at the time I died, I left royalties on several novels and income from performance rights to several plays unclaimed. There were some thousands of shares I haven’t had the time to sell, and dividends from one corporation not yet cashed. I may have a lot of collecting to do, but certainly no creditors to settle accounts with me! Who’re you trying to fool?”

“Sir, your grasp of reality—of the marketplace, that is—has never been doubted. The crowd outside hasn’t come here to clear financial accounts, but to file charges against you.”

“What ‘charges’? It couldn’t be anything more serious that calumny, plagiarism, or immoral influence. If a man of letters gets sued, it must be for one of these three reasons.” As the Writer was well aware, a literary figure who has never been involved in a lawsuit, jailed, or put under house arrest—like a socialite who has never faced divorce proceedings—could never make a name for himself.

“They are suing you for murder and robbery”—the last three words from the administrator’s lips came out crisp and cold, as if forged from steel.

The Writer was scared stiff. His past, decades of it, instantaneously flashed through his mind in minute detail. Yet there was nothing in his earthly existence that even came close to such heinous crimes, only that for a while his writings did promote revolution. “Well,” the Writer pondered, “maybe a handful of foolhardy young men who could not resist any instigation really did pitch in everything they had—blood and neck included. So this would be a sinful debt, I suppose. But at the time my wife wanted children and I wanted to buy life insurance for myself—and all this takes money. If, in the interest of my and my family’s well-being, I did write stuff that indirectly cost a life or two, that’s no big deal. Besides, those fools with their blood boiling in their guts were too ready to die for a cause to regret it and demand settlement.” The Writer regained his nerve. With a sneer he pushed open the door of the office. But before he had taken a full step outside, he found himself bombarded from all directions by shouting and yelling.

“Give me my life back!”

“My life! I want it back!”

The throng completely packed the courtyard, even overflowing out of the main gates. Only the uniformed men at the steps were keeping them from coming up to the corridor and rushing the office. The administrator, patting the Writer on the back, spoke from behind him: “Well, since things have already come to this pass, you’ll just have to face their questions.” He walked him out the door.

Catching sight of the Writer, the crowd stretched out their hands, jostling to come up close, shouting, “Give me my life back!” However, despite their numbers, their collective voice was weak and lifeless. Each was able to contribute only a wisp of sound, one not cohering with any other to form the stentorian roar it should have been. Taking a closer look, the Writer found that the people came in all shapes and ages and counted among them rich and poor, male and female. What they did have in common was a sickly look. They were in fact so emaciated that even the shadows they cast were blurred ones. From the exertion in their movements one could see their dire lack of strength. The arms they managed to stretch out were all trembling, not unlike a voice shaken by anger and sorrow, about to lose control any second. They also reminded one of the strands in a spider’s web hung between two twigs. “With such a crowd, what do I have to be afraid of?” the Writer concluded. “And then there’re even old grannies with bound feet, kids no older than five, effete women with whatever seductive vitality they once had almost totally drained from them. None of these could be among the martyrs who took to revolution under my influence. Unless . . . unless these are lives taken by those revolutionary heroes and are now tracing the responsibility to me. If you look at that old lady, you can tell at one glance that she must have been a stubborn mother, a prime target for family revolution. Well, people like that deserve what they get! They asked for it. Since I’m in the right, I have nothing to fear.”

Clearing his throat, he took a dignified step forward, and announced, “Quiet down please, quiet down. I’m afraid you folks are mistaken. Frankly, I don’t even know a single one of you.”

“But we know you!”

“Oh, that’s not surprising. For people whom a person doesn’t know to know about him is just a measure of his fame. You might indeed know me, but that’s not saying an awful lot. The problem is, you see, I don’t know you.”

“What? You don’t know us? Don’t play dumb! We’re the characters in your novels and plays. Now you remember, don’t you?” They were edging closer, craning their necks, turning their faces up to him so that he could take a better look. And they went ahead all at the same time to identify themselves.

“I’m the heroine in your masterpiece Longing for Love.”

“I’m that country bumpkin in your Chips Off the Emeralds.”

“I’m the genteel young lady in your famed Dream of a Summer’s Night.”

“I’m the grandmother in your fascinating Fallen.”

“I’m the well-bred daughter of that distinguished family in The Thug.”

“Remember your much-admired work Embraceable Me? Yes, I am that intellectual who lost his bearings at the crossroads of the ‘–isms.’”

“I’m the spoiled brat born into the country squire’s family in your own favorite, the novel The Nightmare of the Red Chamber.”

His memory now refreshed, the Writer responded, “Very well, we’re all one family. What’s going on here then, if you wouldn’t mind telling me?” Actually, deep down he was beginning to have a vague inkling of their intentions, which, like something drifting in the depths of the sea, started to show up under the sunlight.

“We’re here to demand our lives back. The way you portrayed us in your works was so dull and lifeless! Our every act and speech was like a puppet’s; we were just too far from being vivid characters. You created us but didn’t give us life, so now you need to reimburse us!”

From among them a woman with ill-defined features broke in, “You remember me? I suppose only the way I dress gives any inkling of what kind of a character I was supposed to have been in your book. You were going to depict me as a femme fatale, the ruin of countless youths who otherwise had the most promising of futures. But what really became of me under your pen? I was neither a woman who looked like a human being, nor a human being who was like a woman. I didn’t have the personality to support any clear, sharp image at all. You said I had ‘watery,’ not ‘limpid,’ eyes, and that my gaze was so ‘pointed’ that it could pierce the soul. Good God! How could anyone even think of such lines? My eyes, sharp and dripping wet, had to be icicles on the eaves during a spring thawing. You wanted to make me a metropolitan temptress, draining the mental and physical energies of men. But on your pages I wasn’t given one breath of life—I wasn’t concrete enough to be a sponge! I was more like a piece of worn and tattered blotting paper. You described me as a person who spoke ‘frankly and boldly.’ Right—‘frayed and broken’ is how I’d describe the voice I have now. You’ve made a total waste of my life. Now what are you going to do about it?”

A well-dressed, elderly gentleman next to her spoke up too: “In your work I got old as soon as I was given life.” He gasped between words. “That I don’t mind, but an old man should act his age. Should I be fancying a concubine, what with my health and all those years behind me? Isn’t that asking for trouble? You scoundrel, you not only denied me life but also made a mess of my second life—my reputation. And I couldn’t even risk my life to get even with you, since I never had one. But now our paths have finally crossed. Let me first wrest out of you the life that’s due me, and then risk it to—” Choking with excitement, the old man couldn’t go on.

“Mister, you’ve said enough. It’s my turn to ask him something,” a swarthy man, patting him on the shoulder, interrupted. He turned to the Writer, “Hey, you recognize me? I’m one of the uneducated roughnecks you created. You think I look the part?—wearing a short vest, sleeves rolled up, pounding my chest all the time, with expressions like ‘your daddy’ and ‘his mama’ crowding my speech. Your book claimed that I used gutter language, but doesn’t all the ‘daddy’ and ‘mommy’ talk add up to one big happy family? It’s nowhere near the streets!¹² Since I’m uncivilized, I was thinking of giving you a couple of slaps on the face before we even start to settle accounts. But then if you slapped me back, I wouldn’t even have enough in me to fight you. What a shame!”

It was a good thing that the Writer had not portrayed this roughneck true to life, or he would have been in for a sound beating. At the moment, however, he was really too harried to indulge in this kind of self-comfort, for the characters were now all clambering forward to speak to him. Some of them appealed to the administrator directly, urging him to hand down a verdict with a proper sentence without further delay.

“Although this case we have at hand is not exactly a phonograph record,” the administrator grinned, “we’ve still got to listen to both sides, right? Eh, Mr. Writer, what do you have to say in answer to their charges?”

The Writer rose to the occasion. He faced the crowd at the foot of the steps: “What you’ve just said is not entirely groundless, but how else would you have existed if it were not for me? Since I am your creator, I must be considered a forefather. ‘Of everyone under Heaven, only parents make no mistakes’: that’s how the ancient saying goes. In other words, one should be ever mindful and respectful of one’s origins. So stop giving me trouble.” While the administrator was snorting at this, twisting his mustache, a male character yelled in outrage: “In the book you made me start a family revolution because of my ideological beliefs, driving my own father to his death. How come you’re talking about filial piety all of a sudden?”

“If you’re my father”—a female character picked up the questioning, a smile forming at the corners of her lips—“where’s my mother, then?”

Another man, sobbing uncontrollably, put in, “All I know about is motherly love—exalted, unadulterated motherly love. While in your work I never felt the slightest need for any fathers.”

Then it was a middle-aged man: “Even a father who is supporting his children doesn’t necessarily win their sympathy. You’re supported by us, so why should you be let off easy? You made us all lifeless in your works, but out of that you gained your livelihood. Isn’t that both murder and grand larceny? At the very least it is criminal intent on an estate. And that makes us your ancestors.”

The old man nodded in total agreement. “Well said, well said!”

“Yes, here I am, one of his ancestors!” chimed in the roughneck.

“Ancestors?” the metropolitan temptress protested. “I’d hate to be that. And there are cases in which the old live on the young. Don’t you see all those young girls sacrificing their bodies for their fathers? There’re lots of those around all right.”

An unexpectedly loud voice boomed forth from the middle of the crowd: “I for one certainly am not a product of your making!” This one drowned out all the other voices, mere whispers in comparison.

The Writer looked up and could not have been more delighted. It was none other than his best friend from the human realm, a cultural entrepreneur who had died just a few days before the Writer did. Son of a nouveau riche family, he had since his younger days been a man of principle. The principle, as it turned out, was not to spurn the family’s quick yet sizable fortune but rather a deep regret that they hadn’t been enriching themselves long enough. Their wealth was, one might say, glittering so brightly that it hurt the eyes, stinking so much that it was an offense to the sense of smell. There was no touch of class to it. His father shared these misgivings and made every effort to give the family name the ring of long-established status, much like one who, wearing a gown made of a down-home fabric, crumples it on purpose to reduce somewhat its feel of the countryside and the rustling noise it makes. The father had always hoped to further his goal by having his children marry into families of corrupt bureaucrats or gentry who had fallen on hard times. The son, on the other hand, devoted all his time and energy to playing the Bohemian poet, singing in praise of alcohol, opium, loose women, intoxication, and sin in general.¹³ Thus knocking around in life, he made it with a number of women, and the brands of tobacco and alcohol he consumed could well have formed a League of Nations. But he failed to commit any sins at all, other than producing some freely plagiarized free verse.

One day while eating out with his mistress, he suddenly noticed how lipstick always got swallowed with the food a woman ate. Naturally, then, after the meal her lips would be robbed of color, and she would have to put on lipstick again. This stirred his inherited business instincts, which emerged as if awakened from a dream, or like a snake coming out of hibernation. From the next day on, he exchanged Bohemian living for entrepreneurship, starting a factory with money his father had made. The first thing rolling off the lines was Vitastick, a new product so great that only his advertising chief ’s catchy sales slogans could do it justice: “For Both Beauty and Health—What Else?” “Never Before Have Kisses Been So Nutritious.” That last line was actually the caption to a picture showing a young man dressed as a Daoist priest embracing a girl not unlike an unshaved nun. So this scene was supposed to be Jia Baoyu of Dream of the Red Chamber tasting rouge. Another line was: “What Fulfilling Love!”—this one being a caption to a picture of a fat man gleefully holding the hands of a woman with pouting lips. Her gesture was meant to focus attention on the thick layer of blood-building Vitastick on them. The chemical composition of this particular lipstick was no different from others for cosmetic use; all our entrepreneur did was concoct a name. The result turned out to be so appealing to the mentality of the masses that he multiplied the capital his father gave him several dozen times. He kept at it, coming up next with products such as Intellegrowth, an ointment that promised to stimulate the growth of both hair and intellect, canned Diet-Rich Chicken, which promised not to put weight on slim misses, and Cod Liver Gum.

At forty, having made enough money, he thought of old times, and his youthful hobby of patronizing the literary arts came back to him. Since drama was the genre that appealed best to both the learned and the popular taste, he, with a sustained effort, advocated a movement for “healthy drama,” in much the same spirit he had earlier pushed his new products. He thereby succeeded in rallying quite a few writers to his camp. He figured that comedies made one laugh, and laughing was undoubtedly good for one’s health. But then unrestrained laughing would add wrinkles to the face, and a mouth wide open invited germs. Besides, that would also lead to cramps of the stomach muscles, dislodged jaws, and a host of other unhealthy conditions. Thus the kind of comedies he promoted abided by the rule of causing audiences only to chuckle. As for tragedies, he thought them good for the health too. The daily functioning of any opening on the physical body meant one form of elimination or another. However, modern man, raised in a mechanized culture, lacked the normal range of human emotions. This resulted in insufficient elimination from the eyes. The moderate quantity of tears that tragedies produced would do the job of preventing diseases that were to the eyes as constipation or gas was to the digestive system.

By that time our Writer had already made a name for himself and was in the process of turning out scripts from all his novels. These plays of his all satisfied the conditions set for healthy theater, except that they were not totally in line with the entrepreneur’s original intent. But the Writer’s reputation was so imposing that it amounted to a threat, a terror. No reader of his dared not to rave about his works along with the others. To do otherwise would be to risk being criticized as deficient in the appreciative faculties and unworthy of works of literature. At performances of his tragedies, the audience had the urge to laugh, but, cowering under his fame, they dared not laugh out loud. Every one of them hid his reactions from the person in the next seat, smothering his chuckles with the handkerchief that was brought along for tears. Of course, nothing could have been more in keeping with the spirit of the healthy drama than this. When it came to his comedies, not a soul in the house was not bored. But who had the guts to stand up and leave? Who wanted to be branded an unknowing fool? So everybody just settled on making himself comfortable, and dozed off. Sleep was of course an important part of healthy daily living. Thus, between the entrepreneur and the Writer they had a great act going, and they forged a strong friendship out of it. On the former’s fiftieth birthday, our Writer even took the trouble to solicit essays for an anthology in commemoration of the occasion.

Now, seeing that the person talking to him was the entrepreneur, our Writer became very much heartened and beckoned him. “You appeared at just the right moment! Come help me argue my case!”

“Argue your case!” the entrepreneur scoffed, “I’m here to settle accounts with you myself!”

The Writer was dumbfounded. “Good heavens! Since when did we become enemies? Don’t you remember your fiftieth birthday? Didn’t I guest-edit a special section in the papers in your honor? Remember the congratulatory essay I wrote in the vernacular language—practically singing in exultation? Who could have known that you could have too much to drink that night, and die of some acute illness! I wasn’t at your deathbed, and that has been bothering me ever since. So we should only be overjoyed at this chance meeting today. Why have you turned so hostile and ungrateful?”

“Pah! It’s precisely at your hands that I died. We have no more friendship to speak of! That special edition of yours was just special perdition. Your commemorative essay was closer to a funeral oration. You call that ‘exultation’? Execution, that’s what it was! You aren’t even aware yourself how destructive you can be. Your pen is nothing but a razor, your ink poison, and your paper might as well be a death warrant issued by Yama, king of Hell, himself. It’s not just the characters in your works that are like puppets, or clay dolls, not showing a glimmer of life; even the living human beings you describe or write about have their lives and blessings terminated. If you hadn’t written that essay, I would have enjoyed several more years of life. Just think: your tone was so reverent in that article, so virtually trembling with respect and awe, that it read like a bereft son’s memories of his father, or at least an epitaph commissioned for a princely sum. How could I take that kind of overdone adulation? You were using up all my good fortune. And I’ve been waiting here for no other reason than to get even with you.”

As the Writer was listening to this dressing down, an unpleasant idea flashed across his mind and lodged there like a hard food particle in the stomach resisting digestion. “Didn’t I, just before my death, complete an autobiography, with the intention of publishing it as soon as I got the Nobel Prize? According to the entrepreneur, whomever my pen lands on dies. If that’s the case, I didn’t die of frustration over not getting the prize but because of a fatal autobiography.¹⁴ Why, oh why did I have to have such a murderous pen? Why, oh why did I have to have such a secretly murderous pen? Why, oh why did I have to write such a suicidal autobiography? I have nothing left but regret! But wait a second—how foolish of me! The mistake’s been made, so the thing to do now is to turn it to my advantage. So first let me use it to get rid of this bunch of devilish creditors.”

“If what he says is true,” the Writer declared to the crowd, “my crimes have already caught up with me, and I’m suffering my just desserts. I have paid for my acts with my own life. Didn’t I write an autobiography, and wasn’t that suicide? Forget it! Forget it! Let’s consider this matter settled; we don’t owe one another a thing anymore.”

But they protested in unison, “You aren’t getting off that easy! Your death wasn’t suicide. Suppose you loved to eat and feasted on globefish; if you got poisoned and died from it, that wouldn’t mean you killed yourself because you had grown tired of living. You wrote that autobiography to toot your own horn. You just never knew you could be slain by your own pen—that knife of a pen! We’re going to get our lives back from you no matter what. Give us our lives back!”

The Writer started to panic, wringing his hands and pacing back and forth, muttering, “The way this is going, you’re going to end up getting my life!”

“I think I’m ready to hand down the verdict now,” the administrator announced. “For your next life I assign you to be—”

“Mr. Administrator,” the Writer interrupted, bowing, “could you let me say one word before you go on? I really suffered everything that could be suffered in the literary life in my last existence, so I had been fantasizing of a good life of glory and riches for my coming incarnation. Now of course I’ve given up all those wild thoughts. I fully realize how serious the sins I’ve committed are, but I’m appealing to you to consider my past good deeds as mitigation of my wrongs, and exercise leniency in your sentencing. Why don’t you, as punishment, simply designate me to be a writer again in my next life?”

“A writer again?” The administrator was taken aback. “Aren’t you afraid of another crowd demanding their lives of you in the future?” The reaction of those gathered below was similar: all stared at the Writer in disbelief.

“Oh, I’ll just translate,” he explained. “No more creative writing for me. That way my life won’t be in much danger, I’m sure. Besides, I’ll do literal translation—I definitely won’t try anything even close to free translation—just to make sure that the liveliness of the original isn’t lost, and also to prevent myself from being hauled into some foreign court. Take for example that fashionable American novel Gone With the Wind. I vow I’d faithfully render its title as Swept Off by the Storm—notice how ‘Swept Off’ [kuang zou] conveys both the sound and meaning of the word ‘Gone’! Dante’s masterpiece would be entitled The Heavenly Father Joking. In the same vein, I could give Milton’s epic the interpretive title A Blindman’s Song on the Fall of Suzhou and Hangzhou, but I promise I won’t do that, even though the old saying does claim that Suzhou and Hangzhou are paradises on earth, and Milton had indeed lost his eyesight. And whenever I have a problem translating, I’ll just follow those celebrated examples of transliteration: youmo for “humor,” luomantike for “romantic,” aofuhebian for aufheben [sublate]¹⁵ and so on. Since the whole thing would then be, one might say, spelled out in Chinese, how much closer could the reader get to reading the original? That’s like taking out a life insurance policy for the characters in the work.

“Or, if you’re not happy with that, I won’t even do translations but just stick to playwriting and specialize in historical tragedy. There’s plenty to work on. Well-known historical figures such as Lord Guan, General Yue Fei, Consort Yang, Lü Zhu, Zhao Jun, and so on. Historical figures are quite dead to start with, and on top of that, tragedies should of course entertain a lot of deaths. That would make deaths here doubly warranted, so I couldn’t possibly be charged with murder. There’s a third possibility too. I could retell Shakespeare. The venerable Bard came to me once in a dream, complaining that the characters in his plays lived way too long. After these endless centuries, they had become plain sick and tired of living and were more than happy to put an end to it all and simply drop dead. So he asked me to do an act of charity, to send them off to a painless, natural death. He added this was what that foreign culture of theirs called ‘mercy killing.’ Before he left, he complimented me, saying I was a young man to be reckoned with, even bowing to me, and repeating his words of appreciation.”

“I have a good idea of my own,” the administrator said. “All of you listen carefully. His intention in writing an autobiography was not suicide, it’s true, but he didn’t write the congratulatory essay with an intent to kill either. The effects of these two events could be considered to have cancelled each other out; hence there’s no debt outstanding between him and the entrepreneur. But as for his depriving the characters in his works of lives, he should have to pay for that. It wouldn’t be a bad idea at all to make him, as a penalty, a character in a novel or play of some other writer’s and let him have his own taste of being suspended between life and death. The problem is, there’re so many writers of this sort that I don’t know whom to send him to. Oh, I’ve got it! Yes! In the human world there’s a young man who is currently planning to write an epoch-making mixed-genre work. He’ll be adopting the syntax of those causeries written in the style of collected sayings while employing the rhythm, meter, and form of modern poetry. The product will be a novel in five acts and ten scenes. He has the paper all ready now; the only thing he’s waiting for is inspiration. When the propitious moment comes, we can smuggle a spirit into his mind.” The administrator turned to our Writer: “Sir, no one could be a better choice than you for the hero in this work. You’re a genius, and it just happens that your successor plans to write about the genius’s sense of life.”

“Mr. Administrator,” the hoarse voice of one of the Writer’s characters asked from down in the crowd, “did you say ‘sense of life’ or ‘sex life’? If that fledgling author is to focus on the latter, wouldn’t that be too easy”—he pointed at the Writer—“on this common enemy of ours?”

The administrator smiled. “Relax, relax, don’t you worry about it. Our Writer’s mantle must have fallen on this young man. As soon as a person ends up in his work, the character will have a hard time telling whether he’s dead or alive, much less living life.”

“In that case, we have no objections!” Rejoicing and jubilation. “Long live the fair administrator!”

Our Writer made his final despairing protest. “Mr. Administrator, I’ve already dropped all consideration of my own interests and am prepared to take the rough with the smooth. I do have that much grace. But at least you should have some respect for the literary arts. This youngster is waiting for a stroke of ‘divine inspiration,’ not ‘ghostly intervention.’ How could you send my ghost to cast an evil spell on him? I can take whatever hard times you give me, but if you’re going to play a malicious joke on the arts, which should be held in the highest respect, I’ll simply refuse to go along with you. Should the Writers’ Association ever find out about this, they’ll surely issue a public statement of protest.”

“‘A genius is but the most inspired of ghosts.’ You more than rate it. Everything’s going to be all right, just take it easy.”

Taking the administrator’s archaic phrasing as a sign of erudition, and thinking his claim must therefore have been based on the great books—little knowing that the line had just been invented on the spur of the moment—the Writer was reduced to silence.¹⁶ Thereupon, amid the jeering and ridicule of the crowd, his spirit was escorted on its way by a uniformed elf.

By now, the fledgling author had been waiting for his inspiration for three solid years. The reams of paper he had stocked up had by now appreciated to more than ten times their original value. But his inspiration just would not come, no matter what. Perhaps it got lost somehow, or had altogether forgotten where he lived. Finally, the enlightening thought occurred to him one day that in order to write a maiden work, he should seek it through a maiden. It was therefore no coincidence that just as the elf was bringing the Writer’s spirit over, the young man was in the process of exploring—with the principles of the experimental sciences as his guiding light and his landlord’s daughter as his coinvestigator—the secrets of life. The elf happened to be quite the gentleman, and averted his eyes. At this crucial juncture our Writer made up his mind instantly. He decided that anything was better than getting dispatched to the young man’s mind and ending up coming out of his pen. So, while the elf ’s back was turned, with a swish he scurried into the girl’s ear. Indeed, since at that time the couple was one inseparable body all tangled up, only her ears allowed unimpeded entry. Thus it was that the Writer personally, but unknowingly, gave substance to the explanation medieval Christian theologians had offered for the conception of the Virgin Mary: the female aural passage is a passage to conception (quae per aurem concepisti).

From that moment on the young man lost a character for his book, while the girl gained a baby. He had no choice but to marry her, and the book was never to be. Whatever writing ability he once had was henceforth put to use in keeping daily accounts for his father-in-law’s grocery store. One comfort he did find, however. In traditional Chinese bookkeeping, a new line was very often begun before the previous one was completely filled, and that approximated the visual appeal of modern poetry. The language of accounting, moreover, was neither the literary idiom strictly nor the vernacular, for which reason such writing rightfully belonged in the genre of collected sayings, wherein a cross between the literary and the vernacular was the norm.