Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays

1. “Accretionism” (literally, “the theory of successive change” [cenghua lun

]) is Qian’s term for a historiographical approach promoted by the revisionist historian Gu Jiegang

(1893–1980), who sought to destroy the myth of a Chinese golden age of high antiquity (which he called “spurious history” [weishi ]) in favor of “an ancient Chinese history that was created in stages” (cenglei di zaocheng de Zhongguo gushi

) through the legends of successive ages. Gu elaborated these views in vol. 1 of Debates on Ancient History (Gushi bian

), which is analyzed in Laurence A. Schneider, “From Textual Criticism to Social Criticism: The Historiography of Ku Chieh-kang,” Journal of Asian Studies 28, no. 4 (1969): 771–88. Gushi bian was reprinted in seven volumes by the Hong Kong publisher Taiping shuju in 1962. The “New Life Movement” was a quasi-fascist cultural movement launched by the Kuomintang (KMT, or Guomindang

) government in February 1934 at the behest of Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi

[1887–1975]) and his wife, Soong Mei-ling (Song Meiling

[ca. 1897–2003]). The movement, designed as an ideological alternative to Communism, called on citizens to embrace Confucian precepts of loyalty, self-cultivation, and obedience while practicing good hygiene and rejecting such “bourgeois” habits as dancing and gambling.

2. This phrase reverses the classical Chinese idiom “to run fifty steps and laugh at someone who has run one hundred,” which derives from a parable in the classical Confucian text Mencius (Mengzi , ca. fourth–third centuries B.C.E.). In the story, Mencius relates to King Hui of the Liang kingdom how a soldier who had run fifty steps in retreat from battle mocked a companion who had run one hundred. The phrase has subsequently been used to refer to a hypocrite who is guilty, to a lesser degree, of the same fault she or he condemns in others. In the 1946 edition, Qian had fifty steps laughing at one hundred.

3. A harmonious and inseparable conjugal couple (or pair of lovers) was said to “nest together and fly together” (shuangsu shuangfei ) like a pair of swallows or mandarin ducks. “Nest together,” as Qian’s use of the phrase in the next paragraph implies, is also a euphemism for sex. One anonymous Tang poem contains the couplet “Better to be a pair of mandarin ducks in a pond / Nesting together and flying together for a lifetime” (Buru chishang yuanyang niao, shuangsu shuangfei guo yisheng ).

4. This title seems to mock autobiographers who claim that their works cannot cover the entirety of their lives. The precise target is obscure.

5. A semimythical figure, Lao-tzu (Laozi

[fl. fourth century B.C.E.]) is the putative author of the Tao te ching (Daodejing

), the foundational philosophical text of Daoism. Here, Qian puns on the name Lao-tzu, which means “old master” but which—turning on the meaning of the character for tzu—can also be interpreted literally as “old son.” The stories about both Laotzu and the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi

) spending a long time in utero are obscure to me but likely date to Daoist texts of the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.), which saw a revival of interest in both mythical figures.

6. The 1946 edition reads: “. . . or a supreme dictator (like Hitler) . . .” Qian added “uni-testicled” in the 1983 edition.

7. In the 1946 edition, this sentence is slightly different and is followed by an additional sentence: “Savage man, suspecting that divinities exist everywhere, submits to and worships them. Not even a shade of this thought had occurred to God.”

8. The 1946 edition reads: “He wanted a companion to worship and praise him, so as to dispel the present silence.”

9. The 1946 edition has an additional sentence here: “In pinching together a man out of a dream, he was just like those people who can slip into a dream while pinching their noses” (that is, indulge in impossible fantasies).

10. The 1946 edition reads: “His creation of man would have been a great topic for a war of words.”

11. Lin Daiyu

, the melancholy female protagonist of Dream of the Red Chamber, is given to poetically pathetic gestures, the most famous of which is her burying of flower petals in the Grand View Garden after witnessing an apparent betrayal by her bosom friend, Jia Baoyu.

12. The 1946 edition reads: “. . . appearance-conscious men always put on effeminate airs, such that fashionable women have to think of ways to be even more original and appear sexy.”

13. This sentence is in the 1946 and 2001 editions but not in the 1983 edition.

14. Here Qian applies to the story of Genesis the famous injunction from the Confucian Analects (book 6, chap. 20) that humans should “respect ghosts and divinities, but keep them at a distance” (jing guishen er yuan zhi ).

15. The Chinese idea that women are waterlike probably dates back to Ming dynasty vernacular fiction. Because water changes its shape to fit any vessel, it has traditionally been taken as a metaphor for inconstancy and moral relativism. Additionally, because water always flows from high ground to low, the phrase “flow downward” (xialiu

) has come to refer to moral degeneration and indecency.

16. The 1983 edition (but not the 1946 or 2001 editions) reads: “The more God thought about it, the angrier he became.”

17. In the 1983 edition, the last sentence reads simply: “Okay?”

18. Darkie brand toothpaste (Heiren yagao

[literally, “Black Man Toothpaste”]) was founded in Shanghai in 1933 and became famous for its logo featuring a black man in a black top hat with gleaming white teeth. The company moved to Taiwan with the Nationalists in 1949 and, in 1990, removed the racial slur from the brand’s English name by modifying it to Darlie. The logo and Chinese brand remain unchanged.

19. The 1946 edition reads: “Luckily he hadn’t made man beautiful, otherwise he wouldn’t have had to bring a gift either! He then ordered man to explain his request.”

20. Parallel prose and regulated verse are two Chinese poetic forms governed by strict rules about symmetry, parallelism, and tonal balance.

21. The 1983 edition reads: “Once again, he couldn’t help admiring the exquisiteness of his art. As a result, God felt at peace.”

22. The Chinese idiom “Humans beseech Heaven when in dire straits” (ren qiong ze hutian ) captures the tendency of humans to seek divine intervention when compelled by circumstance.

23. This Buddhist-sounding line is an excellent example of Qian’s fondness for mixing allusions, one ancient and one modern in this case, as a way of obliquely making fun of his contemporaries. The phrase parodies a famous line attributed to Cao Cao

(155–220), a military leader and chancellor of the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220). In the historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi ), which is largely responsible for Cao Cao’s subsequent reputation as an archvillain, Cao justifies his backstabbing of a sworn brother by remarking that “I would rather wrong the world than have the world wrong me” (Ningke wo fu tianxia ren, buke tianxia ren fu wo ). The reference to eating grass likely alludes to Lu Xun’s

(1881–1936) self-mocking remark that “I’m like a cow, eating grass and squeezing out milk and blood” (Wo haoxiang yizhi niu, chide shi cao, jichulaide shi niunai, xue ). Lu Xun also likens himself to a humble beast of burden elsewhere in his works, most notably in the poem “Self-Mockery” (Zichao

), which contains the famous line “Brow arched, I coolly defy a thousand pointing fingers / Head bowed, I serve as the children’s willing ox” (Hengmei lengdui qian fuzhi, fushou ganwei ruzi niu

). The “milk and blood” comment appears in his common-law wife Xu Guangping’s

(1898–1968) dedication to her book Xinwei de jinian

(A Memento of Consolation) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1953).

24. Tripitaka is the Buddhist monk protagonist in the famous Ming dynasty vernacular novel Journey to the West. Accompanied by three anthropomorphic beasts with magical powers (Monkey, Piggy, and Sandy), Tripitaka travels to India to obtain Buddhist sutras and along the way experiences a series of adventures, including encounters with carnivorous monsters.

25. This expression refers to a situation in which one not only fails to gain any benefit but ends up inconveniencing oneself to boot. The proverb appears in slightly different form in chap. 12 of the Qing vernacular novel The Scholars (Rulin waishi

): “be unable to taste lamb meat and end up reeking of mutton for nothing” (yangrou bu ceng chi, kong re yishen shan

26. The 1946 edition has an additional sentence here: “His protruding stomach made him look like a patient suffering from goiter or a country suffering from inflation. But the goat’s horns . . .”

27. “Offering to a Crocodile” (Ji e’yu wen ) is a celebrated parodic essay by the Tang dynasty (618–907) essayist, poet, and courtier Han Changli

(768–824), better known as Han Yu

. In the piece, addressed to a crocodile that has been terrorizing a nearby village, Han, the newly arrived district magistrate, threatens the crocodile with death if he does not cease eating humans and accept banishment to the ocean. An English translation of this work is in David Pollard, trans. and ed., The Chinese Essay (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 33.

28. In Chinese folklore, dragons are serpent shaped, and black dragons carry a pearl under their chins. The terms “black dragon pearls” (lizhu ) and “pearls from below the chin” (lingxia zhi zhu ) came to refer generally to anything precious, or to the essence of something, such as a piece of writing. An early parable about black dragon pearls occurs in the “Lie Yukou”

section of the Daoist philosophical text Zhuangzi

29. A prevalent belief in traditional Chinese medicine is that consuming the “essence” of a wild beast endows the consumer with that animal’s qualities, such as fierceness or virility.

30. This cliché appears in traditional Chinese literary romances, as well as a vow of brotherhood made by the bandits in the vernacular novel The Water Margin.

1. The Forbidden City is located in the center of Beijing, opposite what is now Tiananmen Square. First constructed in the period 1406 to 1420, the complex served as the seat of imperial rule from the mid-Ming through the Qing dynasty.

2. Les Pléiades (The Pleiades) refers to a number of “star” poets of the sixteenth-century French Renaissance. While the exact makeup of this canon varies by source, its core members include Joachim du Bellay (1522–1560), “prince of poets” Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585), and Jean-Antoine de Baïf (1532–1589).

3. Shakespeare, Sonnets 127–52. In the 1946 edition, this and the following sentence read: “This cat is beautiful and dark, so we might as well follow Shakespeare and call her ‘Dark Lady.’”

4. Daji

was the favored concubine of the reputedly tyrannical King Zhou of the Shang dynasty (sixteenth–eleventh centuries B.C.E.). She was the daughter of Yousushi

, the chief of an ancient tribe. When King Zhou defeated Yousushi, Yousushi presented Zhou with his daughter, who is said to have aided Zhou in his tyrannical rule. Ever since, Daji has been a classic Chinese symbol of beauty and viciousness.

5. Posthumous names and honorary titles were conferred on deceased emperors, aristocrats, and distinguished ministers to immortalize their deeds.

6. The League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, was formed to preserve peace and foster international cooperation through pledges by member states to eschew aggression and take united action in applying economic and military sanctions. In 1937, however, the league condemned Japan’s Manchurian policy but failed to take forceful action against its aggression in China.

7. Tang Ruoshi

(Tang Xianzu

[1550–1617]) was a playwright born in Zhangle, Jiangxi. For his most famous work, see Tang Ruoshi, The Peony Pavilion: Mudan ting, trans. Cyril Birch, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). Xie Zaihang

(Xie Zhaozhe

[1567–1624]) was a Ming dynasty writer born in Linchuan, Fujian.

8. Yuan (1271–1368); Ming (1368–1644); Qing (1644–1911).

9. Beijing (Northern Capital) was renamed Beiping (Northern Peace) in 1928, when the Nationalist government moved the capital to Nanjing (Southern Capital, or Nanking). The name reverted to Beijing in 1949 when the Communists took over and declared Beijing the capital of the People’s Republic of China.

10. Over forty specimens of Homo erectus, who lived approximately 500,000 years ago, were unearthed at Zhoukoudian (thirty miles southwest of Beijing) in the 1920s and 1930s and came to be known as Peking (Beijing) man. In addition to fossil remains, many stone tools were found, along with evidence that Homo erectus pekinensis had mastered the art of fire making.

11. The 1930s saw ongoing disputes between writers and critics associated with the Beijing school (Capital school) and the Shanghai school. Lu Xun ridiculed the bickering between these schools in his essay “The Beijing School and the Shanghai School” (Jingpai yu haipai

12. With the abduction of the last emperor of the Qing dynasty on February 12, 1912, the feudal system that had prevailed in China for more than two thousand years ended. In this story, the two old men are branded as old-fashioned remnants of a bygone age.

13. The Chinese democratic revolution led by Dr. Sun Zhongshan

(Sun Yat-sen [1866–1925]) overthrew the Qing dynasty and established the Republic of China.

14. During the latter years of the Qing dynasty, certain official titles could be purchased. Unscrupulous purchasers exploited their newly acquired prestige for graft and other forms of self-aggrandizement, a practice chronicled in highly popular exposé novels such as Wu Jianren’s (1866–1910) Ershi nian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang

(serialized 1903–1910) and Li Boyuan’s (1867–1906) Guanchang xianxing ji

(1903), both available in partial English translation as Wu Wo-yao, Vignettes from the Late Ch’ing: Bizarre Happenings Eyewitnessed over Two Decades, trans. Shih Shun-Liu (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1975), and Officialdom Unmasked, trans. T. L. Yang (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2001), respectively.

15. Wuchang, the capital of Hubei province, was the site of a military uprising launched on October 10, 1911, by anti-Qing soldiers of the New Army, aided by members of the Tongmeng hui

, a group founded by Sun Yat-sen that later evolved into the Nationalist Party. This uprising was followed by the new military government’s declaration of independence from the Qing dynasty.

16. The Westernization Movement was initiated and promoted by bureaucrats such as Yi Xin, Zen Guofan, Li Hongzhang, Zuo Zongtang, and Zhang Zhidong in the latter half of the nineteenth century to introduce Western military and industrial technology in order to preserve the rule of the Qing government. See Bai Shouyi, Zhongguo tongshi gangyao

(Essentials of General Chinese History) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 1980).

17. In the 1946 edition, this sentence ends: “. . . which looked like rose petals floating in milk.”

18. In both Chinese and Japanese, “Japan” means “origin of the sun.” Japan’s national flag is called the “sun flag.” The allusion likely refers to Japan’s imperialist expansion across Asia, during which Japan substituted its own authorities in place of local governments.

19. “Demon seductress” (yaojing ), an evil spirit or witch, is a derogatory term for an attractive woman.

20. “The three hundred and sixty trades” is a Chinese expression used to refer collectively to all professions.

21. In Chinese, zhangfu

(husband), daifu

(doctor), and tiaofu

(porter) all contain the character fu , which can refer to (among other things) “laborer” or “intellectual,” depending on context. Qian purposefully juxtaposes fu representing different social classes. The 1946 edition has chefu

(chauffeur) instead of tiaofu.

22. The Chinese term that Qian uses is literally “sitting bottom” (zuotun

). In the 1946 edition, the German reads: “Sitzfleisch haben.” Haben is cut from the 1983 and later editions.

23. French lawyer, politician, and epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826) was the author of La Physiologie du goût (The Physiology of Taste, 1825).

24. The 1946 edition reads: “. . . modern man, unlike those court tasters of the past who held official title.”

25. In the 1946 edition, the second title is Scattered Notes on My Journey to the West (Xiyou sanji ).

26. Qian humorously transliterates the titles of these two popular travel guides as “a must see” (bi deguo ) and “never visited” (mei lai

27. Grandview Garden is a garden of the Rongguo Mansion. Lin Daiyu is the niece of the master of the Rongguo Mansion and comes from a less-prominent, less-wealthy family, whereas Grandma Liu is from the countryside. Her entrance into the garden is considered the quintessential comedic “country bumpkin” scene in premodern Chinese fiction.

28. In the old days, female characters in Beijing opera were played by males, who tended to be larger than women. This likely alludes to Mei Lanfang

(1894–1961), Beijing opera’s most famous female impersonator, who, by the 1940s, when Qian wrote “Cat,” was in his forties and had put on weight.

29. In the 1946 edition, the second title is Scattered Notes on the Return of a Native (Huanxiang sanji

30. The 1946 edition reads: “. . . just as when a car is pulling out of a garage the nose is the last to emerge.”

31. Tianqiao was a market area in southeastern Beijing that, by the end of the Qing dynasty, had become a gathering place for folk performances, including traditional operas, ballad singing, storytelling, comic dialogues, clapper ballads, acrobatics, puppet shows, and martial arts.

32. The 1946 edition reads: “French symbolist poets.”

33. The 1946 edition reads: “. . . and encouragement, which served the same purpose as a grown-up’s ruffling a child’s hair or patting his shoulder to tell him not to be afraid. As such, it was a pity that Yigu still . . .”

34. This passage alludes to the Tang poet Li Bai’s

(701–762) poem “A Banquet Held in Xie Tiao’s Tower in Xuanzhou, to Bid Farewell to Archivist Shu Yun” (Xuancheng Xie Tiao lou jianbie jiaoshu Shu Yun

). The opening lines are “Ah, my betrayer! / Yesterday’s day that never will return. / Ah, my dismayer! / This day today that makes me this day mourn”

35. The Boxer Rebellion was a quasi-religious, antiforeign, and anti-Christian armed struggle waged by Chinese peasants in 1900, with the eventual support of the Qing government. It started out in the provinces of Shandong and Hebei. Churches were sacked and missionaries as well as their Chinese converts were killed. Foreign legations in Beijing were besieged before a relief force of foreign powers attacked the Forbidden City and defeated the Qing troops.

36. The 1946 edition has an additional sentence here: “Thanks to clever advertising, these essays were said to be like the eight-legged essays Kuang Chaoren wrote in The Scholars: everyone was reading them in the Western world.” In chap. 19 of The Scholars (Rulin waishi ), Kuang Chaoren

takes a civil service examination on behalf of an imbecile candidate, so Qian seems to be suggesting that Yuan Youchun (a stand-in for Lin Yutang) was pulling a similar sleight of hand as a cultural interpreter.

37. The 1946 edition has additional sentences here: “Otherwise, we’d have to say that the black circles under his eyes were marks of libertinism or insomnia, and that his red nose was a sign of hard drinking or constipation. Malicious speculation of this sort would be dishonest, however, and would furthermore contain too many hypotheses to accord with the scientific method.”

38. In Chinese, the abbreviation for “Japan” also means “sun.”

39. Cixi (1835–1908) was the dowager empress of the late Qing dynasty.

40. Bonsai is the creation of miniaturized landscapes in containers by carefully controlling the growth of trees over a period of years. Haiku is a concise form of Japanese poetry consisting of seventeen syllables divided into units of five, seven, and five syllables. The creation of bonsai, the writing of haiku verse, and the practice of the elaborate tea ceremony are distinctive Japanese traditional arts.

41. This is a satiric reference to Japan’s grandiose plan for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Da dongya gongrong quan ), a scheme by which Japan would dominate Asia economically, culturally, and militarily.

42. This term was promoted by the German scholar of Shakespeare and Goethe, Friedrich Gundolf (1880–1931), a close associate of the scholar-poet Stefan George.

43. The 1946 edition has an additional sentence here: “His discussion of ‘crystallization’ was akin to Stendhal’s philosophy of love, and his discourse on ‘selective affinity’ was at one with Goethe’s famous novel [The Sorrows of Young Werther].”

44. This term is associated with the self-deceptive behavior of Lu Xun’s fictional protagonist, Ah Q, from his famous novella The True Story of Ah Q (1922).

45. The Qingyun Song was a classical song said to have been composed by Shun

, a legendary monarch of antiquity, which was used as the national anthem by the Northern Warlord government. On noise and thinkers, see “A Prejudice.”

46. The 1946 edition reads: “Since too many of the dishes were steamed in clear soup, the colors were not well distributed.” Expanded in the 1983 edition.

47. The 1946 edition reads: “. . . young men accustomed to living at home or at school would shake their heads and say, ‘It really doesn’t seem like him.’” Compare the Devil’s comments on autobiography in “The Devil Pays a Nighttime Visit to Mr. Qian Zhongshu.”

48. The 1946 edition reads: “His mind-set of fearing others and wanting to make others afraid of him must be likened to a cat when it sees a dog.”

49. The 1946 edition has an additional sentence here: “He encouraged and guided them, subliminally shaping their outlooks on life and receiving their gifts of flowers.”

50. Qian Ruoshui

(960–1003), a high official of the Song dynasty, is said to have visited Mount Hua when he was young to get his fortune told by Chen Tuan

(d. 989), a monk clad in a hempen robe. Later, when people wrote books on physiognomy, they often used “hempen robe physiognomy” in the title.

51. The 1946 edition has additional sentences here: “A man with such defining eyes was best suited for one of two paths: either become an optometrist and cure his own ocular malady by pledging to rid the world of all eye diseases, or to pair a bewitching smile with his contemptuous glances and get into ambush courtship by darting glances at girls on street corners. But Fu Juqing was a critic after all.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

52. He Yimen

(He Zhuo

[1661–1722]) was a textual critic of the Qing dynasty born in Changzhuo, Jiangsu.

53. Jin Shengtan

(1608–1661) was a literary critic who annotated editions of several Chinese classics, including Li sao, Zhuangzi, Book of Songs, Poetry of Du Fu, The West Wing, and The Water Margin.

54. Joseph Addison (1672–1719) was, for a time, Alexander Pope’s most important mentor. But in “Atticus,” Pope portrays Addison as one who could “Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, / And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer” (quoted in Robert M. Otten, Joseph Addison [Boston: Twayne, 1982], 13).

55. This phrase appears in English in the original text. Qian’s Chinese rendering, piyan

is a homophone for piyan

(asshole), though it is not clear that a vulgar pun is intended. In the 1946 edition, the remainder of this sentence reads simply: “he was delighted.”

56. The 1946 edition has an additional passage here: “When he had just returned to China, his eyes accidentally lost this special property. A nouveau riche Shanghai businessman felt that, from the car to the pug, his home possessed every foreign product out there except for a sufficiently Westernized person, so he made it his hobby to raise a foreign student and intended to marry Juqing to his only daughter. The daughter forced Juqing to see a doctor about getting a pair of glasses to fix his eyes. Juqing acquiesced, thinking to himself that getting a wife and a fortune wouldn’t be a bad way to recoup his foreign study expenses. After two or three days of wearing glasses, however, he couldn’t help but protest. He claimed that his habit of leering and sneering had already determined his life’s course and ideals, and that if he got rid of them now, over a decade of effort would go to waste, leaving him hesitating at the crossroads of life, seeking a different calling. Fixing his eyes would be no big deal in itself, but it would force him to completely reinvent his entire persona, and this wasn’t worth it. He’d prefer not to marry. This incident only elevated Juqing’s reputation.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

57. The 1946 edition has additional sentences here: “Humble women tend to be insecure about their bodies and are willing to suffer the indignity of having to asking for help with makeup and clothing. Women interested in culture seem to lack this virtue of modesty, however. They tend not to lack for filial piety, as they respectfully carry forward the exact same physical features of their parents, excepting perhaps the addition of a pair of gold-rimmed or tortoiseshell eyeglasses for nearsightedness.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

58. The 1946 edition has additional sentences here: “Mrs. Li possessed a deep self-awareness, unlike some girls who regret that they don’t have a second body so that they can see how sweet and adorable they look when they’re asleep. She wasn’t willing to put on powder and cold cream to hide a sleep-worn face. What Yigu was now seeing was what was most adorable about her.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

59. The 1946 edition has an additional sentence here: “Not one of them was around his own age.”

60. These scrolls were hung in the middle of the wall of the main room.

61. A collection of works by the Southern school of traditional Chinese painting. Also termed Literati Painting, the school was initiated by the Tang poet and painter Wang Wei

(701–761). In depictions of mountains, rivers, flowers, and trees, this school emphasized the expression of the spirit over verisimilitude through freehand brushwork.

62. Dachi (1341–1367) was a Changshou artist .

63. The name Luo Lianfeng puns on that of the artist Luo Pin

(1733–1799). In Chinese, the first characters in the words “lychee” (lizhi ) and “profit” (lixi ) are pronounced the same way.

64. Silly Sister, a maid, finds one day a perfumed embroidered purse in the garden, on one side of which is some writing and on the other two intertwined nude figures. Not knowing that it is a lover’s gift, she thinks that they are a pair of fighting demons. In the 1946 edition, the following sentences appear between “the fight of the demons” and “Cold-shouldered in Shanghai . . .”: “That wouldn’t do! As such, rich businessmen with mistresses kept their distance. Xiajun felt so out of step with the times that when he saw a car kill a pedestrian he would vent that he couldn’t even match the popularity of this wronged ghost, who became the center of attention for a crowd for a few minutes.”

65. The 1946 edition has an additional phrase here: “. . . such that women had the sensation of a flirtatious man pinching their cheeks.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

66. In China, the term of pregnancy is counted from conception, with the first partial month counting as a whole month. Thus ten months is considered to be a full term.

67. The “eight trigrams” (bagua ) came from the eight combinations of three whole or broken lines in The Book of Changes. They are used in divination.

68. Glyphomancy is the practice of the art of taking characters apart and telling fortunes by reading meaning into the component parts.

69. The first line is from Lao-tzu’s Tao te ching (Daodejing). See the translation annotated by Fang Juehui, The Way and Its Virtue (Taipei: Zhonghua, 1961), 62. The second and third lines are from Mencius, “Li lou shang.”

70. In traditional Chinese novels, the chapters are headed by rhymed couplets that, in a slightly allusive way, summarize the action to come.

71. This was a practice popular in the Wei

(220–266) and Jin

(265–420) dynasties. It was started by He Yan

(ca. second–third centuries), Xia Houxuan

(209–254), and Wang Bi

(226–249), who attempted to interpret Confucian classics using Daoist ideas. They were famous for paying no attention to worldly affairs and engaging only in profound theoretical discussions. At their leisurely gatherings, they drank, wrote poetry, and took pleasure in ignoring Confucian etiquette. Many intellectuals admired them and followed their example.

72. Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928), Los cuatro jinetes del Apocalipsis (Valencia: Prometeo, 1916). See also Revelation 6:2–8.

73. Eating vinegar is a Chinese euphemism for jealousy, especially between lovers.

74. In Buddhism, acts of charity and compassion for living creatures help one achieve higher levels of spiritual attainment in future reincarnations.

75. In the 1946 edition, Qian explicitly mentions here William T. Preyer’s (1841–1897) Die Seele des Kindes (The Mind of the Child, 1882). Cut in the 1983 edition.

76. This phrase was added in the 1983 edition.

77. Qian specifies the French spelling, Cléopâtre, in the 1946 edition, which follows this sentence with: “Didn’t Old Uncle Lu say that during the Ming dynasty the empress and court ladies all loved having cats as pets?” Cut in the 1983 edition.

78. The 1946 edition has an additional sentence here: “At that moment he felt like a romantic youth committing suicide by swallowing sleeping pills, lacking the energy to save himself from certain death, but with enough lingering consciousness to reproach himself for having left this world too soon, resent everyone else for living on as if nothing had occurred, and anxiously wonder in vain what opinions or criticisms they had about his conduct.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

79. The 1946 edition has additional sentences here: “He had always detested Saturday afternoons and Sundays and envied his lucky classmates who got to spend this time in idle pursuits. Now he felt the loss of this day and a half of leisure even more acutely, like the raw gap left by a tooth that has fallen out.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

80. The 1946 edition reads: “Aimo looked at her husband and said . . .” Changed in the 1983 edition.

81. The two sentences that follow were added in the 1983 edition.

82. As a juedai jiaren

(peerless beauty), Aimo is both a beauty “for time immemorial,” or to “end the ages” (juedai ), and an “heirless” (juedai ) beauty.

83. The 1946 edition has additional sentences here: “He knew what all romance led to, but he refused to admit that his love was the same as others’. ‘Maybe that’s all I’d want from other women, but that’d never be the case with her,’ he’d tell himself. This was the stage Yigu was at.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

84. The 1946 edition has an additional sentence here: “In contrast, the freshness of young girls struck him as abrasive.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

85. The 1946 edition has an additional sentence here: “He didn’t care about the future, having entrusted his entire being to an eternal present.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

86. The 1946 edition has three different sentences instead of this one: “When he thought of her his heart beat as if it would burst into blossom. While alone, he would find himself suddenly blushing. Whenever he heard her voice, his face, for no reason, would be covered in red like a World War II map of the world.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

87. The 1946 edition has an additional sentence here: “He became absurdly angry, thinking that Aimo shouldn’t cry—that no beautiful woman should cry.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

88. In the 1946 edition, the following sentences read: “Her wounded pride kept calling out for ‘revenge.’ Yigu saw her face harden with hatred. It was not a pretty sight. He realized that there would be no work today, and it was no fun watching someone else’s domestic dispute, so it would be better if he went home. He got up. ‘Mrs. Li . . . ,’ he began.”

89. The 1946 edition has an additional passage here: “If Yigu had been the type to speak impulsively and honestly, he would have said, ‘I’m deeply in love with you, but what happened just now made you less lovable.’ If Yigu had been of a more opportunistic disposition, he would have responded, ‘Do you love me?’ If Yigu had been too afraid to tell the truth, unwilling to lie, and also an old hand at dealing with women, he wouldn’t have said anything but simply taken Aimo in his arms and kissed her. Worried that lovers would run into problems if they said too much, or even bigger problems if they had no response to such queries, God created the kiss as a type of all-purpose expressive first aid. At times, it meant ‘That goes without saying’; at other times it meant ‘Don’t bring all that up again.’ In short, it meant ‘Actions speak louder than words.’ Unfortunately, Yigu didn’t know any of this and was taken aback . . .” Cut in the 1983 edition.

90. In the 1946 edition, the following sentences read: “Taoqi scurried in with a painful tail, and Yigu ran out to the street, filled with shame and anger. He didn’t even wait for Old Whitey to open the gate. ‘Big fool! Big fool!’ The words resounded in his head like the sound of rice being husked with mortar and pestle. The gentle spring breeze made his cheeks burn where he had been slapped.”

1. Fei Ming

(literally, “abolished name”) was the pen name of Feng Wenbing

(1901–1967), a fiction writer who emerged during the May Fourth period and specialized in pastoral lyricism.

2. Victor Marie Hugo (1802–1885).

3. Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938).

4. In the 1946 edition, this sentence appears in parentheses: “(Regrettably, the ‘Sinologist’ had not yet begun his research on the semantics of Chinese, so this forceful essay had been written for nothing.)”

5. The 1946 edition has an additional sentence here: “There’s no chance that Heaven will be stocked with all these innovations of modern medicine.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

6. The 1946 edition has additional sentences here: “The playboy Don Juan boasted an unprecedented 2,594 mistresses, it’s true, but such an impressive record has got to be the result of unremitting efforts of a lifetime, plucking flowers and accumulating experience in illicit love. Taking seventy-two females all at once is something even Don Juan couldn’t have handled.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

7. In the 1946 edition, the mustache and beard are described as follows: “The growth was so black and thick that his mouth could scarcely be seen even when he spoke. The words that came out through this curly grove seemed somehow dyed with the color of that beard, every one of them dark. They also appeared to have grown hair of their own, brushing the listener’s ears until they itched.”

8. The 1946 edition has additional sentences here: “To get there you’ve got to keep going for quite a while yet. You see, the Eastern Hemisphere is where you’ve fallen from, sir. Despite the weight of your genius, you haven’t made it all the way through the earth, since the western half of the earth’s crust is fortified by those American skyscrapers, structures of steel and reinforced concrete. But your works have had a tremendous impact on the center of the earth, I’m sure, and San Francisco and other places like it may very well have experienced earthquakes of several minutes’ duration.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

9. In the 1946 edition, the paragraph finishes: “. . . came the bearded one’s quiet reply. The chill in his tone cooled the dark gloom of his words to the freezing point.”

10. In isolation, Zhongguo dichan gongsi would be more aptly translated as “China Real Estate Company”; in this story, however, the current rendering helps preserve some of the wordplay that follows.

11. The 1946 edition reads: “This is the only way we can avoid letting down those who make comparisons of Eastern and Western civilization or disrupting their pet theories.”

12. The 1946 edition has additional sentences here: “Anyway, you wanted to make me a roughneck, but I don’t feel myself one at all. Swollen and bloated sounds more like it, and maybe that was what you had in mind. I might as well have been soaked in water, I was so completely lacking in strength.” Cut from the 1983 edition.

13. The 1946 edition has an additional sentence here: “His only problem was that he was unfamiliar with the intricacies of Chinese tones as used in classical poetry; consequently, the verses he was capable of making up were not in quite as archaic a style as he would have liked.”

14. The 1946 edition has four different sentences instead of the following three: “For crying out loud, I should have known better! Having such a murderous pen, I should have used it to produce propaganda for the war against Japan. It could have rivaled the atom bomb! Why an autobiography, of all things?” Changed in the 1983 edition.