Strange Tales from Liaozhai--Volume 6 Read online

  Strange Tales from Liaozhai

  Strange Tales from Liaozhai

  Volume Six

  Pu Songling

  Translated and Annotated by

  Sidney L. Sondergard

  Illustrations by Emma DayBranch, Matt Howarth, Christopher Peterson, and Erik Russell

  JAIN PUBLISHING COMPANY

  Fremont, California

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pu, Songling, 1640-1715.

  聊斋志异 (Liaozhai zhi yi.)

  Strange Tales from Liaozhai / Pu Songling ; translated and annotated by Sidney L. Sondergard ; Illustrations by Leah Farrar ... [et al.]

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  Summary: “The subjects of Pu Songling’s short story collection include supernatural creatures, natural disasters, magical aspects of Buddhism and Daoism, and Chinese folklore”--Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-89581-051-9 (vol. 6 : alk. paper)

  I. Sondergard, Sidney L. II. Title.

  PL2722.U2L513 2012

  398.20951--dc22

  2008020137

  Cover art by Matt Howarth.

  Copyright © 2014 by Sidney L. Sondergard. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher except for brief passages quoted in a review.

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  I. The Prudent Critic: Pu Songling’s Narrative Activism

  II. Discreet Managers and Problem Solvers: Pu’s Wife (and Husband) Lessons

  The Tales

  413. Feng the Carpenter

  414. Huangying

  415. The Bookworm

  416. The Great Sage, Heaven’s Equal

  417. The Frog God

  418. Another Frog God Tale

  419. Ren Xiu

  420. Wanxia

  421. Bai Qiulian

  422. The King

  423. A Certain Fellow

  424. Three Hauntings in Quzhou

  425. The Home Wrecker

  426. The Big Scorpion

  427. Chen Yunqi

  428. The Scribe of Epistolary Communications

  429. The House Centipede

  430. The Examination Official

  431. The Black Ghosts

  432. Zhicheng

  433. Zhuqing

  434. The Duan Family

  435. The Fox Girl

  436. The Zhang Family Woman

  437. Yu Ziyou

  438. A Male Concubine

  439. Wang Keshou

  440. The Buffalo Calf

  441. Wang Da

  442. Le Zhong

  443. Xiangyu

  444. The Three Immortals

  445. The Ghost Clerks

  446. Wang Shi

  447. Danan

  448. The Foreigners

  449. Young Master Wei

  450. Shi Qingzu

  451. Zeng Youyu

  452. The Jiaping Gentleman

  453. The Two Bans

  454. The Carter

  455. Divining with the Immortals

  456. “Scholar” Miao

  457. The Scorpion Merchant

  458. Du Xiaolei

  459. Mao Dafu

  460. The Hail God

  461. “Eight Crocks” Li

  462. The Boatmen of Laolong

  463. The Qingcheng Wife

  464. The Owl

  465. The Ancient Vases

  466. Master Yuanshao

  467. Xue Weiniang

  468. Tian Zicheng

  469. Wang Gui’an

  470. Scholar Ji

  471. Scholar Zhou

  472. Chu Suiliang

  473. Liu Quan

  474. Turning Soil into Rabbits

  475. The Harbinger Birds

  476. Another Scholar Ji

  477. Retribution

  478. Gongsun Xia

  479. Han Fang

  480. Renzhen

  481. Marquis Zhang

  482. Fendie

  483. Li Tansi

  484. Jinse

  485. The Taiyuan Court Case

  486. The Xinzheng Dispute

  487. Li Xiangxian

  488. Fang Wenshu

  489. Qin Hui

  490. The Zhedong Scholar

  491. The Girl from Boxing

  492. Junior Officials

  493. The Beggar Immortal

  494. The Female Impersonator

  Works Cited

  Acknowledgments

  For all the many reasons that he wrote these tales, from reflecting his love of the otherworldly to providing a natural extension of his work as a teacher, Pu Songling composed them most importantly to be enjoyed by a broad audience, not just by literary scholars. For over three hundred years this has indeed been their legacy in China, and I have tried while preparing this translation to remain respectful of that popular tradition. Many of these stories are unapologetically earthy, but never crude; they are occasionally quite violent or disturbing, but never gratuitously so; and they are frequently sad, but never morose or maudlin. What makes them so compelling is a barely-contained exuberance of tone that celebrates their excursions into the world of ghosts, demons, foxes, and immortals.

  For this first complete translation of Strange Tales from Liaozhai into English, I have attempted to follow Pu Songling’s syntax, punctuation, and phrasings faithfully, providing annotations for the reader when he makes allusions to personages or events unfamiliar to English readers, and I have profited enormously from the unabridged and newly-annotated edition of the liaozhai zhi yi edited by Zhu Qikai, published in Beijing (1995), my source text for the tales. In those cases where a long series of clauses has made it difficult or awkward for the reader to follow the flow of Pu’s images, I have subdivided them into discrete sentences. I have resisted idiomatizing Pu’s writing because I have found that translations which attempt to appeal to the slang and colloquialisms of the translator’s immediate contemporaries tend, like topical humor, not to age well.

  Recognizing that instructors might wish to teach some but not all of Pu’s stories, I’ve written introductory essays that refer only to the tales within each volume (although their arguments are applicable throughout the entire collection), so that any one of the volumes can stand alone, self-contained for that purpose.

  I wish to thank the Freeman Foundation for the generous grant support that allowed me to pursue research in 2005 on Pu Songling’s life and work at Zibo and other sites in Shandong province. Every trip to China has been filled with serendipitous discoveries for me; I often share the astonishment there of Pu’s characters, who, walking the mundane world one moment, in an instant find themselves in the presence of wonders.

  My laoshi and colleague, Cai Hong/Anne Csete, has been keenly supportive of my efforts to translate Pu Songling’s stories, and I wish to express my profound gratitude for her generosity of spirit and her scholarly devotion. My coll
eague Zhang Zhenjun has also been a reliable critic, a great scholarly resource, and a good friend.

  I am particularly indebted to my meticulous Chinese Editor, Li Lin, who has painstakingly reviewed my pinyin transliterations and has offered very helpful suggestions regarding the translations. The blame for any errors in the text, then, must fall solely to me.

  I am pleased once again to present the work of illustrators who have responded to Pu Songling’s stories with their own beautifully strange visions. I admire and treasure the results of their efforts.

  For raising the kinds of questions that are always useful for me to ponder, and for listening with genuine interest as I read each new translation aloud, I am indebted to Ran Rongming/Ramona Ralston. 我们共有酷爱书籍。

  Introduction

  I. The Prudent Critic: Pu Songling’s Narrative Activism

  After observing the pattern of my Chengdu friend, Dai Jian, an enthusiastic entrepreneur and popularist of Han dynasty culture, chatting up numerous female museum and retail employees about mutually-beneficial business propositions (several of them involving a friend of his whose shop sells clothing styled on Hanera illustrations) over a period of days, I asked him why he prefers face-to-face contacts rather than advertising online or in local periodicals, or forging connections on social network sites. “The young ladies are practical-minded and listen to my proposals because I respect them,” he explained. “If they didn’t see me, how would they know I’m honest?” After all, as Confucius advises in the Analects, a righteous person keeps “trust and confidence near at hand” by “maintaining a proper countenance” while dealing directly (8.4). But the logic of Dai’s position can also be expressed as an inversion of his question: if someone establishes contact with others while remaining hidden, how can that person’s motives be known? It is precisely the measure of uncertainty and anonymity that such an approach affords an individual that is at work in what we might call the narrative activism of Pu Songling (1640-1715).

  The author’s self-reference as yishi shi, the “collector of these strange tales,” in the commentary sections appended to many of his stories, is an acknowledgment of and homage to the self-fashioning and self-referencing employed by second century B.C.E. historian Sima Qian, who employs a similar moniker to introduce the subjective remarks that conclude segments of his Records of the Grand Historian. Pu’s strategy of not identifying himself as the author of the tales also functions as a deflection device by identifying him merely as the compiler of others’ narratives,1 a possible corollary to another deflection device, the use of pseudonyms. Our author sometimes refers to himself via the self-deprecating name of his writing studio, Liaozhai (“studio of chit-chat/leisure”), and in written documents sometimes signs himself liaozhai jushi (the “resident of Liaozhai”). Similarly, he refers to himself on occasion as 柳泉居士 (liuquan jushi, the “Willow Springs resident”), for Liuquan was the name of the spring in Zichuan county, Shandong, where, according to local lore, he served tea to passing strangers in exchange for their stories of magical creatures, anecdotes of the extraordinary, and reports of inexplicable events.

  Indeed, the reader encountering Strange Tales from Liaozhai discovers the collection of stories to be a composite of natural anomalies (from earthquakes to prodigious births), folk and fairy narratives, and various figurative literary structures from allegory to fable to parable. But in addition to his professed love of all things supernatural, as when he tells us that he “love[s] ‘searching for spirits,’” and takes special “delight in hearing ghost stories” (1:2), Pu is clearly also motivated by the desire to encourage ethical behavior on the part of his readers. With the supernatural characters in Pu’s tales acting as “agents of punishment and reward which they mete out in proportion to an individual’s needs,” it’s an easy association for the zhiguai, or strange tales, of Chinese writers like Pu Songling to pursue didactic objectives (Chan 1998: 149), to enlighten as well as to entertain their readers. Although the stylistic vehicles and the thematic approaches vary for the moral lessons that he communicates in many of his stories, he consistently works “to expose all official abuses he knew of and to lash out at social injustice without reservation” (Chang and Chang 116; see also120-4).

  But drawing attention to corrupt officials amounted to an indictment of the government that empowered such men, and a challenge of this sort could easily be labeled sedition. The dictate, for example, to the Han Chinese majority that banned traditional Chinese clothing (汉服, hanfu) and mandated that all men “keep your hair and lose your head” or “lose your hair and keep your head” by shaving the sides of their heads to resemble the hairstyles of the Manchu minority who had swept into power with the Qing dynasty (Leibovitz and Miller 48), unambiguously communicated the Qing rulers’ commitment to preempting dissidence. Yet Slavenka Drakulic has demonstrated how even non-violent methods of state coercion used to manipulate citizen compliance can lead individuals to self-censor out of concern for self-preservation (81). In late seventeenth-century China, just as in our own times, an atmosphere that combines oppression with “unpredictable flashes of repression” works to “instill fear and amplify silence” (Stern and Hassid 1231). Pu Songling chose to be neither fearful nor silent, however, so in self-defense he was obliged to employ tactics that deemphasized his presence as creator of a dialectic of social reform.

  Madison D. Soyini defines tactic in this sense as “creating a means and a space from whatever elements or resources are available in order to resist or subvert the strategies of more powerful institutions, ideologies, or processes.” Creative tactics “often come into being” through “an inventive spontaneity” (2) and their spontaneous emergence can “encourage an embodied epistemology” (7), which could explain Pu’s overcoming of the very self-censorship that the power in society encourages to impede his activism. Pu may have already felt himself to be the victim of more overt resistance in opposing corruption and favoritism (see below), consequently necessitating that he work more covertly—and his love of narrative and of the anomalous provided him the perfect tool for communicating his views both allegorically and literally, but under the cover of storytelling. Such texts could then be passed around to readers without official sanction, since they’d never been submitted for censor’s approval and publication. The hope behind transmitting personal attitudes through written work is dependent on the author’s perception that readers bring “some mapped sense of the nature of the world about them” to the act of reading, as well as “a mapping of an implied agenda, an expectation” concerning the ways in which the reading “promises or threatens to unfold” (Gearing 30; cf. Chang and Chang 199-214).

  The implicit danger of expressing pro-Ming sentiments was also made specific through the edicts issued by the emperor Yongzheng (ruled 1723-1735) that outlawed secret societies who supported the return of the Ming dynasty to power (Booth 10; cf. ter Haar 18-19). Thus even an indirect criticism of Qing dynasty politics and values (or praise of Ming practices) would have run the risk of execution for treason. Yet Pu takes precisely such a risk in a story like “Feng the Carpenter” (feng mujiang), after first affording himself a degree of protection by contextualizing the pro-Ming elements with details that seem superficially to criticize rather than to praise them. Feng, a rather licentious fellow who’s hired to do some work by Zhou Youde, in Zhou’s capacity as provincial governor, becomes involved with a chicken spirit who adopts a seductive female appearance and begins to destroy his health, until Feng hires a sorcerer to help rid him of her—and the spirit twists things by dumping Feng first. At first glance, both Feng and Zhou are humbled here, by the former’s moral weakness and the latter’s misappraisal of him; however, Zhou Youde was a Ming hero who helped families in Guangdong province return home following the Great Evacuation edict of 1661, which was designed to ferret out Ming loyalists. Pu inserts him obliquely into his story knowing that Zhou’s reputation would not be tarnished by a fiction, while the mere mention of his name wo
uld help to keep his legacy alive.

  It was a commonplace during Pu’s lifetime that administrators overseeing the imperial civil service examinations often took bribes from candidates and that there were always ways around the supposed safeguard of assigning the scholars seat numbers and having them remain otherwise anonymous to examiners and other candidates: if “a certain character appeared in a certain space on a certain line,” for example, a dishonest examiner could be cued to “give his man a high grade even though he did not know his seat number” (Miyazaki 62). According to records in the Pu Songling Museum in Zibo, Pu was a champion in official examinations he took in 1659, and the Shandong province education commissioner, Shi Yushan, was fond of him. Yet after studying and working as a highly respected teacher for years (he taught at the home of Bi Jiyou, in Xipu Village, Zichuan county, for thirty years), he failed the imperial civil service examination he took in 1687 on the grounds of inappropriate content, and didn’t finish the examination he took in 1690 (at the ages of 47 and 50, respectively). We also know that he failed examinations in 1660, 1663, 1666, 1672, and 1678, though no extant documentation indicates why—although the reason may be related to the fact that he wrote letters that helped to remove a crooked official named Kang Lizhen from his post. At any rate, as a scholar who was failed while witnessing men of lesser talent succeed thanks to bribes offered to corrupt officials, Pu exploits the protection of being a mere “collector” of tales to attack examination-related corruption.

  His tactic for this attack is simply to show how the decision to demand or to send bribes backfires on the individuals seeking to secure profit or preferment. The provincial governor in “The King” (wangzhe) who tries to punish an aide when a huge monetary bribe destined for the capital disappears, is contacted by a mysterious monarch who sends him a box containing the hair of his favorite concubine—a warning of his vulnerability to powers from the spirit realm—and the news that his shipment of six hundred thousand taels “has already been received into the accounts of the imperial treasury.” The titular official who mocks a hard-of-hearing schoolmaster and tries to extort a bribe from him in “The Examination Official” (sixun) is made into a target of ridicule when the schoolmaster misunderstands his request and is seen giving him something that the official definitely doesn’t want to be witnessed accepting. A scholar named Guo in “Gongsun Xia” is convinced to bribe his way into a high office in the underworld, but his suitability for a prefect’s position is challenged by none other than Guandi, the god of war,2 culminating in a uniquely traumatic punishment when his actions unintentionally condemn his favorite concubine to death. These vicarious punishments in lieu of more overt dissidence and call for change are reminiscent of advice from the Confucian Book of Rites: “In dealing with important matters, [the scholar] is cautious and careful as though he were fearful” (Lao 373).