To my family and hometown
When I Leave
4-9 Grandma and Lord Pu
10-15
16-27 The Shark and The Woman
28-37 Little Duck
38-55 Lion and Donkey
56-63 The Sad Oyster
When I Leave is a collection of fairy tales writing based on folk legends from the rural south of China. Inspired by the stories narrated by my grandma during my childhood, I incorporated contemporary critical thinking and philosophical narratives to create six short fable stories about fantastical creatures and local villagers set against different historical backdrops, along with related linocut printing
Grandma and Lord Pu
Firstly，my grandma is the wisest woman in the village. From my childhood until now, whenever something disastrous or unfortunate happened, she would always know it happened for reasons. What are these reasons?
Reasons are very complex things—sometimes it's because I did something wrong, sometimes my dad did something wrong, and sometimes it's the fault of that unlucky and annoying neighbor who mentioned rain during a dry season or wished it wouldn't rain when it was supposed to.
“Bad luck!” she would say angrily when the three another.
"Every word you say, Lord Pu remembers," my grandma often warned me, her eyes glaring in a somewhat frightening manner.
As for how he remembers, she couldn't explain. But who is Lord Pu?
Lord Pu might be equivalent to Zeus for the Greeks or Vishnu for the Indians.
in books, I found various celestial emperors and friendly goddess , but none with the surname Pu. Perhaps he wasn't even named Pu.
However, my grandma was illiterate and couldn't write it down, nor was she willing to explain clearly.
Talking disrespectfully about Lord Pu was usually not allowed in our family. Only during a major disaster, bad weather affecting my grandma's harvest, or when her knee acted up—which was always due to windy and rainy weather—would she start cursing Lord Pu on her own without needing us to join in.
Sometimes I wondered if Lord Pu was actually a Bodhisattva, because in the Jianghuai dialect, the 'p' sound can be muddled and unclear which is similar to 'bod'.
mouth like a parrot, feeling as useless as a fed but foolish bird, unable to savor the taste of food like a sick person, my tongue tied, unable to articulate the words.
My grandma could tell ancient stories and had many skills. Whenever something happened in the village, people would often ask for her help, saying, "Please, old lady, take a look. The child is very sick. The hospital only gives IVs, and it doesn't help. It's heartbreaking to watch."
For simple illnesses, she would diagnose it by looking, smelling, questioning, and feeling the pulse, then suggest some medicine and remedies that wouldn’t kill people but also wouldn’t completely cure—either for reducing internal heat or cold.
For serious cases, she would bring out a pair of arm-length chopsticks, have someone assist in praying, and after the prayer, the chopsticks would tremble and point to a direction, indicating which
funerary offerings were needed to appease them.
Some children with whooping cough were brought to her. She had a special massage method for this, pressing hard on the neck and the spot between three points until it hurt, then moving to the
child would be so scared they wouldn’t dare to cough again—friends and relatives all believed it works.
I am most afraid of being pinched, so whenever I cough, I would hide from her, always suspecting I might die from it one day.
So during the COVID-19 time, my grandma got more and more busy. In her view, coughing had to be treated this way. She performed her rituals on each of us. A few days later, whether it was her magic or the ibuprofen and amoxicillin she disdained, we all got better, but my grandma fell ill.
started complaining about knee pain and insisted my dad take her to a hospital in Shanghai to get a mechanical joint.
A mechanical joint? My dad thought it was absurd, but my conservative.
Unfortunately, the village government restricted our movement because of the pandemic lockdown. So my grandma’s dream of becoming half-human, half-machine was ultimately shattered, and she believed her condition worsened. Till Late at one night, unable to sleep, she brewed some dandelion tea for herself.
Talking disrespectfully about Lord Pu was usually not allowed in our family. Only during a major disaster, bad weather affecting my grandma's harvest, or when her knee acted up—which was always due to windy and rainy weather—would she start cursing Lord Pu on her own without needing us to join in.
Sometimes I wondered if Lord Pu was actually a Bodhisattva, because in the Jianghuai dialect, the 'p' sound can be muddled and unclear which is similar to 'bod'.
mouth like a parrot, feeling as useless as a fed but foolish bird, unable to savor the taste of food like a sick person, my tongue tied, unable to articulate the words.
My grandma could tell ancient stories and had many skills. Whenever something happened in the village, people would often ask for her help, saying, "Please, old lady, take a look. The child is very sick. The hospital only gives IVs, and it doesn't help. It's heartbreaking to watch."
For simple illnesses, she would diagnose it by looking, smelling, questioning, and feeling the pulse, then suggest some medicine and remedies that wouldn’t kill people but also wouldn’t completely cure—either for reducing internal heat or cold.
For serious cases, she would bring out a pair of arm-length chopsticks, have someone assist in praying, and after the prayer, the chopsticks would tremble and point to a direction, indicating which funerary offerings were needed to appease them.
Grandma complained to Grandpa that he hadn't bought effective bedroom’s window.
the sunlight, favoring only the dry, cool, subtle breeze of autumn.
the city, going to school every day with a red backpack, until one day hadn't developed yet, but my soul could see through the yellowed, you even then."
Grandma remained silent.
an hour could feel as long as a day when I was human. Always, I was born on schedule during a sun-drenched noon, emerging as a little caterpillar from the egg.
At that time, I didn't know what sort of insect I was. I had no mirrors, no lakes, but I could feel my soft body brushing against the tiny hairs on the leaves and the tiny pains they left on me.
I tried to stand, but without a waist, I wriggled as though I was submerged in water, my whole body twisting.
When I was a little girl, I had crawled around on a colorful foam puzzle mat, my parents clapping hands with a rattle for me.
especially one with the heart of a little girl. But how was I to survive?
knew nothing of what I needed to know to survive. So, I tried to learn
made my way to a large leaf crowded with caterpillars did I realize I couldn't speak.
I was a caterpillar, a caterpillar without language, and so I bounced in panic on the leaf. I don't know if other caterpillars have thoughts, perhaps they do, or maybe I was the only caterpillar in the body stiffened, and I followed them to gnaw at leaves, not even knowing if they could see me.
Can caterpillars see other caterpillars?
In the days that followed, I learned from them how to molt, to pupate, and by the end of spring, I became a creature with pale wings, as white as the roses worn at funerals, adorned with a few children’s encyclopedias, born in the green rainforests, dancing and at least I wasn’t a moth, I thought sadly, looking at the moon. It’s said moths dash towards all lights of life, but even now, I remained unmoved. spring air almost killed me. I constantly talked to myself, my thoughts as rich as a philosopher's, my words forming hundreds of elaborate poems, all stored in my tiny brain because I was afraid of forgetting the language I once used as a human.
As for my friends, my companions, I still didn’t know if they because of insect instincts, or from the same painful struggle as me? I always lacked answers."
Hearing this, Grandma wiped her tears sadly and said, "But how can I hear you speak?" Grandma asked. looks like it's going to rain again.' And you heard my voice and looked out startled.
So I said, 'Your roses outside the window are really beautiful.' Then you were so scared that you closed the window. Since then, I thought, you can hear me speak. So, I can only share my sorrows with you."
the wrong pollen in spring, begins to hallucinate about their lives,
little girl. Every day I went to school with my red backpack until one day, on my way to school, I had an accident and woke up as a
Not wanting to hear any more, Grandma went inside crying, grabbed a can of insecticide spray, and sprayed it around the poor word.
The Shark and The Woman
Once, there was a woman who had half of her buttocks bitten off by a shark.
When I was only six years old, just about to start elementary school. The only elementary school in our town was quite far from our home, separated by a broad river with a dam adorned with to be careful when crossing the river, as it was home to man-eating sharks. The locals called these sharks "Laoye", saying they came from thousands of miles away.
Every year, as spring turned to summer, these sharks would homage to the Dragon King—not an actual dragon, but said to be temple for the Dragon King. The woman who had half her buttocks bitten off was the daughter of the temple caretaker, and this is her story.
The river was also a swimming spot for the youth, as Laoye had not been seen for so many years, and the locals had nearly forgotten the legend of staying away from the waters during the spring-summer transition.
My grandma's cousin, Meihua, the temple caretaker’s daughter, lost her buttocks there. It is said that the bloody scent permeated the entire river, leaving indelible marks on the riverbed stones, while the reeds and irises along the banks voraciously absorbed this rare essence, their tips stained rust-red. But the shark didn't kill Meihua
Pale as an unripe, peeled corn cob, Meihua was rescued by a how would she marry without half a buttock?
Because her mother hoped she would become a nun, they had a huge argument. After the argument, Meihua moved out of the Dragon King Temple. From then on, she never approached the river again, even taking a longer route to the market in another town.
Despite being illiterate, Meihua was clever. She worked for the supply and marketing cooperative by day and knitted sweaters to sell at night. She earned money to buy fabric and thread, crafting dresses to pad her buttocks.
"In fact, you've met Meihua before. When you were in primary school, she once came to ask me for some yeast. Before that, I hadn't spoken to her for many years. She had become a reclusive weird
I was surprised and even managed to think of what Meihua looked like. The Meihua I met, as described by my grandma as a lively and capable young girl, was nothing like that. She was about loose black-and-white striped trousers, skinny as a dry branch with old clothes hanging off it, her large, deeply set eyes full of a wild cat’s wariness—this memory is so vivid because she was indeed an oddity.
She came to ask my grandma for yeast to make Mantou—"Why start making it now?" my grandma asked, scooping some yeast from her jar to give to Meihua. It was then that I noticed Meihua's hands, thin and veined, marked by needle pricks.
"For Zhang," Meihua replied with a tender smile, her raspy voice as gentle and cruel as a nursing mother cat. was the village chief’s son. At eighteen, shortly after her incident, the chief’s son returned to the village for summer vacation from his studies in the provincial capital. He fell in love with Meihua, who was catching crickets in the gauzy shades of the woods.
As villagers strolled the riverbank to cool off in the afternoon, he wrote her a poem and read it under a locust tree.
Actually, Meihua couldn’t read and understand these beautiful and useless things in the poem—moon, sea, ancient dressing tables, sun, lakes, and the fragrant, round powder foundation of city girls— enchanted her with their distance from her world. The chief’s son talked differently from the local youths, discussing reform, business, market economies, stocks, diplomats, English newspapers, and foreign news, leaving Meihua confused. She didn't understand these things, and I suspect he didn't fully either. Eventually, he said:
take you with me. The world outside has changed, and you don't know it yet."
This past event was shared by Meihua with her sister, who then told my grandma, who decades later shared it with me. I guess Meihua didn't understand the details of his promises, but she knew for sure, looking up at the moon, they were together under the same
But the round powder foundation was a cold metallic shell, and the moon a warm mosquito-repellent lamp. Meihua's eighteenth summer was a sudden mix of chill and heat, her heart tight then loose, some words almost choked out then swallowed back, forcing
handsome, young face, and his educated Mandarin—so fashionable, so respectable! And recalling that man's body-shape , those perfectly round buttocks.
Yet the sticky sweat shaped her silhouette on the bamboo mat, still only half a buttock. She sought her sister's comfort in both fear and joy, but as expected, Meihua and the chief’s son, they soon broke up.
They broke up the day when Meihua hung out the freshly washed bamboo mat to dry. As the mat swung on the clothesline, casting off water droplets, a young man's shadow appeared in the water drops, shaky and unstable.
tangle in the air, hitting the cement ground and raising unnoticed dust. Meihua's heart raised too.
The young man was the village chief’s son, coming to break up with her.
The women washing clothes said it wasn't the chief’s son's suited. They said the chief’s son was going to marry the primary school principal's daughter in the county, a perfect marriage. Meihua
Even selling incomplete pork meat always with discounts, let alone marrying, a lifelong matter—this kind of one-buttocked woman, who knew if she could have children?
Meihua, passing by with a basin of clothes, splashed water in the women's faces, scattering pink, green, purple, and patterned clothes everywhere, starting a war.
"After that, she nearly died of heartbreak. The chief’s son, he was an unreliable man," my grandma said.
"I don't understand why women must marry," I said, confused.
"If you don't marry and have no children, when you die, no one will burn joss paper for you to use, you'll be hungry in hell, and you can't die again, you'll just keep starving. Then, others will have their children burning joss paper, new paper-made smartphones, TVs, big cars, and you'll have nothing. You won't even have money for a bus ride in the hell! Don't come looking for me then, I might have already reincarnated," my grandma seriously advised.
I didn't want to hear my grandma's hell economy theory, so I the story.
After the chief’s son left the village, time slowly passed another ten years. Meihua wasn't as happy as before she was eighteen, but she wasn't too sad either. She changed jobs and became a life teacher at a school. That was the summer when Meihua fell in love with the
She always prepared different meals daily and brought them in with her unfortunate past, seeing her as fresh and pure as a jasmine bronzed, muscular man, like a piece of pottery baked in a furnace— a stark contrast to the fragile, handle-less porcelain cup that was the chief’s son.
couple to marry, right?" Some maliciously asked her, but Meihua wasn't in a hurry and shyly retreated to her house, her heart warm under layers of plastic crystal curtains. he was generous with money, purchasing embroidered peony cotton quilts, spittoons with the character for happiness, magenta sweat seller's main house. They even invited my grandma—a famously wise and brave woman in the village—to bring and care for a pretty as a mascot for the wedding.
house as usual but stayed, their lights on all night. Meihua's laughter in a panic at the darkest hour of the night, ran out of his home. Some people saw this and said, "We told him, but he didn't take it seriously, only realizing how scary it was when he saw for himself." Then, house after house in the village, there was uninterrupted, giggling laughter which is endless.
riverbank all day, furiously cursing Meihua, calling her shameless for daring to be intimate with a man with such an incomplete body. He recalled his fear when he touched the half of her buttocks bitten by the shark and the other half, too lush and soft, shining under the light
After that day, Meihua moved out, and not long after, a
My grandma said, "Meihua really is a pitiful woman. We tried to console her, but Meihua stopped going out, quitting her job at the whole village.
the market in the early morning, buying what she needed and then leaving. Only the close neighbors still often saw her repeatedly washing that piece of bamboo mat, just like the day the village chief’s son came to break up with her.
She began to support herself entirely by knitting sweaters. A city handmade store came to our village every month to collect these handmade sweaters, and Meihua's craftsmanship was the best, earning her the most money, allowing her to support her own life.
.A few years later, the villagers suddenly start seeing Meihua again. She joined a local Christian church, attending gatherings every and Meihua recited the most diligently, murmuring, "Adam begat Seth, Seth begat Enos, Enos begat Cainan."
Her family completely broke ties with her because Meihua had forsaken the Dragon King temple. The village rule was that those who converted to Christianity couldn't burn joss paper for their ancestors, nor could others burn it for them.
My grandma said it was because the money from the two hells wasn't interchangeable—I wonder, does hell not have a WTO? So, my grandma thought it was better for Christians to have Christian children and Buddhists to have Buddhist children.
Meihua's mid-life change was unwelcome on both sides—this might sound absurd, but my grandma has always been a far-sighted person, capable of contemplating complex issues of international identity in the afterlife, despite living her whole life in a secluded village.
However, regarding this matter, Meihua's family was indeed angry, as if they had already foreseen their bleak fate after death.
Meihua coming to borrow yeast from my grandma was the current issue. By then, Meihua, though aged and odd-looking, was still beautiful. And Zhang—where he came from, we didn't know. He wasn't a local like the village chief’s son, nor a distant foreigner like one had seen him before.
Due to the many chemical factories built around the town, there were many migrant workers coming to work, and these workers also gradually formed a street with small hotels and karaoke bars.
These outsiders had money, almost all single men. So there were more and more people The prostitutes came from the city, maybe because of afraid of the police, they always arrived at night and leaving before dawn. Zhang was a private driver for this business— but he ended up living in the village.
Meihua and Zhang met during church play rehearsals, a tradition in our village. Every Christmas, they rehearsed simple religious stories compiled by the priest, often about sinners in marriages being punished and terminally ill people being saved. Meihua was the undoubted leading lady, playing a wife abused by her husband, while Zhang played her alcoholic spouse.
After Christmas, the play ended, God had saved the abused wife, and the alcoholic husband was punished. However, Meihua fell in love with Zhang and planned to leave the village with him.
"That Zhang always pretended to be a good person, Meihua said, believers aren't bad," my grandma sighed.
Zhang began taking Meihua to their hotels, having her watch the prostitutes for him, later setting up gambling dens with her keeping watch outside. As the stakes grew, Meihua gave him all her money— she was naïve in that regard. I asked her what she was hoping for, marry her.
When Zhang won money, he stopped going to church. When the kind-hearted priest came to persuade him, he ended up being injured by Zhang instead. Meihua then started to feel uneasy, doubting Zhang's sincerity, but her fervent hope for marriage and her unexplainable passion for him made it impossible for her to leave.
Over time, perhaps due to this anxiety or the thrill of helping Zhang with his dangerous business, Meihua fell seriously ill.
overwork, the local traditional doctor couldn't diagnose it, so several church members had to take her to the county hospital for checks.
county with her medical report, her face ashen as it read "late-stage from the river—perhaps she had already died then.
him, he drove off with the prostitutes, the remaining money from the gambling den, and Meihua's savings.
Meihua was right about one thing: most people in the church were indeed kind. They raised a lot of money to help treat Meihua's
Meihua later disappeared in the river—the one she most feared—on a misty autumn morning. Wearing a blue coat and with her hair done up like a married woman, she walked towards the river, humming the shrill tunes of countryside weddings, turning the originally festive, fragmented, intense, leaping, blood-red melodies covered land.
It is said that the chief’s son was the last to see her. Driving his new car over the new bridge across the river, with his wife and grandson from the city in the car, the child excitedly clinging to the window saw a half-submerged body in blue far away in the river.
"Grandpa, it's so cold today, but someone is still bathing in the river!" the little boy exclaimed.
The village chief’s son then looked out, just as the short section creating a silent splash.
Meihua disappeared just like that, and since then, many men and women in the village would suddenly feel an intense pain at night.
Waking up to check with an oil lamp, they found neat bite marks on their buttocks. People began to say it was Meihua biting them, suggesting she had become a man-eating shark.
The Liitle Duck
The man who raises ducks lives in a thatched cottage not far from the crematorium. We never know his name, he is known in this village as "Little Duck."
Although he lives like an orphan, he has a brother who lives in a neat red and white tiled house in town, we all call that place the "Red House." The rich family living there owns the only grocery store in town, which is full of bags of Snow face cream and is home to two pretty curly dogs, one black and one white.
Before I started primary school, my grandma used to sell fried dough cakes on the streets. Every weekend, we would ride our bikes, carrying a bamboo basket to deliver these cakes to the woman of that house—usually half of them salty, half sweet.
The woman of this house, from the other city, liked to curse in a dialect unknown to the villagers. The Snow face cream she sold carried a scent of rose, her large eyes and pointed chin accentuated by her high, slightly green-tinted eyebrows.
She liked wearing short cheongsams that clung to her voluptuous
daytime, she always sit behind the glass counter of the store, tallying accounts or losing herself in Taiwanese romance novels.
Her husband, short and stout, perhaps due to his slightly ugly appearance, looked like a very honest man. When not traveling to armed with snacks and a large bottle of cheap barley tea, to ward off Duck and his ducks were also forbidden from nearing the pond.
Back then, I didn’t understand the relationship between them, so meeting Little Duck in front of the Red House on the New Year eve confused me deeply, as he was known as the most conspicuous madman in the village.
Though not entirely mad, for he had a home and a career— raising ducks, Little Duck was still shunned by all—an unsettling note in the romantic rural symphony, a misrhymed line in an otherwise beautiful pastoral poem. From afar, I once glimpsed his home—a grey, low cement house overwhelmed by a massive shadow of cherry trees, like a carelessly pasted piece of a child’s art class homework on a vivid countryside painting.
Despite seeing him often, I could never remember Little Duck's face was clean, just indistinct, making it hard to see the lightly carved features which looks like struggling for breath. Unlike his brother, Little Duck was tall and thin.
One day, Little Duck came with a basket of red duck eggs, covered with a piece of red mosquito net and a red paper, tied with a red string. The red eggs, set against his gray-green attire, nearly seemed burn.
When the woman of the Red House came to the door, despite the cold enough to freeze one to death, she was wearing a newly made red cheongsam and a wine-red fake leather down jacket, looking like
plastic bag, her animated eyes quickly glancing at Little Duck.
"Happy New Year to you," he said.
swiftly retreating to close the door, perhaps fearing to speak any further with Little Duck.
“Take these duck eggs, for my brother,” Little Duck insisted, but the lady pretended not to hear.
I watched as Little Duck tried to catch her attention, but accidentally grabbed her freshly dyed hair, prompting her to scream in panic and fury, "Murder! Murder! Are you crazy?! Yes, you are crazy! ” as she struggled to free herself. Despite Little Duck's strength, the woman couldn’t move him, only scattered the basket on the ground.
"Such a shrew! Kuazi!” my grandma spat out in anger. Little Duck left, and so did we. On our way home, my grandma explained that Little Duck had been born disabled mind, and after their parents died, all their property was left to his younger brother, and Little Duck was driven out to live near the crematorium.
As for why he raised ducks instead of chickens or geese? Whether he was named for his ducks or took to duck-raising because of his name, I never knew. Grandma’s stories always unfolded in the evenings by the riverside, accompanied by the croaking of toads, but most remained without answers.
Two weeks after the New Year, during the Lantern Festival, chaos happened at the Red House again.
The woman was thrown outside by her husband, bruised and battered, her pale skin marred more prominently than the bold prints on her cheongsam. Clutching her permed hair, her bodice torn to reveal bite marks across her chest, she stood outside cursing loudly, her voice as commanding as an opera performance, drawing a crowd of children watching the marital spat unfold.
First, there was shouting, then threats of suicide by drinking pesticide. As Little Duck passed by with his ducks, he watched the furious spectacle without a word before turning to leave.
"Hey, madman, your brother’s hitting his wife! What are you looking at? What do you want to say?" some braver children jeered, shoving Little Duck’s shoulders.
He ignored them and walked away without looking back.
"Little Duck went to see the woman from the Red House with his basket of eggs!" I announced at dinner the next day, standing in front of the TV during the news broadcast, eager to share the
"Go on, don’t meddle in others’ business. Who is Little Duck to you? Even if he were your uncle, it's none of your business," my to discuss the matter with other village women, "I asked the blind priest at the temple out of pure kindness, meddling in these kinds of things that don’t concern me. The priest said that woman was a reincarnation of a lion spirit, and her man a tiger spirit. In a mountain, there can only be one king, in a dynasty only one ruler, thus they are
By February, the spring festive season had ended, and harmony seemed to return to the Red House. The brother of Little Duck sat by the pond as usual, and the woman, now in a high-collared sweater to cover her bruises, resumed her position behind the store counter, though she occasionally closed the store to visit the doctor. Where she went, or whether she was really seeing a doctor, we children could not know. I wasn’t sure if the villagers had looked into this curious matter further, but before long, something even stranger happened. The daughter of the town's mobile phone store told me that Little Duck had visited their store, pulling out a dirty bundle of coins and bills—over six hundred yuan. He wanted to buy a mobile phone.
The store owner refused to sell, saying, “Old Duck, you're a simpleton. What do you need this for? Don't waste your money.” a phone, and the owner had no choice but to pull out an old Nokia from a used phone box—that was all Little Duck's money could buy.
“I suppose he wanted a phone maybe to contact someone? That’s what phones are for, right?” I told my grandma about this odd event, and she just laughed as if she knew exactly who Little Duck wanted to contact.
her clothes stripped off, her body covered in some new injuries. She kept quiet, only curled up on the ground with a half-meter-long red pillowcase. Everyone was afraid to approach, and the police were called. took her back home.
The woman dressed on my grandma’s clothes, drank some water, and ate some cornbread, regaining enough strength to start crying. From outside, I heard her curse Little Duck as heartless and wicked, and her husband. She was angry about her husband for being useless, rarely coming home, and when he did, only to beat her, making divorce impossible—she had no money to support herself. She also accused Little Duck of being vicious, claiming he had twisted her until her entire body was bruised.
When the police arrived, the woman turned to be silent again. After questioning the neighbors around Red House and getting only left with little understanding of the situation.
But just a few days later, the police returned. The man from the Duck and the man fallen from the Red House’s roof together because
The man from the Red House had crashed into his own stone well, his blood mingling with the well water, staining the rope red. The woman screamed and ran out of the Red House. The man probably died instantly, but Little Duck did not. Everyone saw— doctors, neighbors, the health clinic staff—as dozens of large ducks crowded around Little Duck, their wings spread wide like a bed, lifting him and rushing him to the village health clinic.
The clinic director called for an ambulance to take him to the county hospital. Several young men lifted Little Duck from among the ducks and onto a stretcher.
Luckily, Little recovered from his injuries soon and was discharged from the hospital. He moved back into his small cottage. When the mourning at the Red House was over, and we no longer delivered dough cakes to this place. useless, rarely coming home, and when he did, only to beat her, making divorce impossible—she had no money to support herself. She also accused Little Duck of being vicious, claiming he had twisted her until her entire body was bruised.
One day my grandma told me that there must be something weird about Little Duck. She had noticed that the ducks he raised never seemed to die.
“How is that possible? All ducks look alike,” I told her.
Grandma explained that it wasn’t so simple. Although sometimes a few ducks would disappear, they would return after a while, sometimes gone for over a year. Everyone assumed these were new ducks, but they weren’t. For instance, there is a duck with a tuft of green feathers by its beak—Grandma feed it a piece of dough cake before when passing by Little Duck’s yard. He had called it CuiCui.
And now, wasn't CuiCui the one that new here? Grandma said the new CuiCui chased her basket for dough cakes.
Moreover, he never sold any ducks to others, only selling duck that his ducks had become spirits, capable of understanding human languages and even knowing our mood.
However, one day, that clever duck CuiCui was crushed by a car river. Grandma then said, since all ducks look alike, maybe this one wasn’t CuiCui after all. It was a pity—CuiCui was dead, and perhaps Little Duck is the one should die, considering him less deserving of sympathy than the truly pitiful woman in this story.
The woman from the Red House left our village before winter, and we never saw her again.
Little Duck continued with his duck egg business, living with his ducks by the crematorium, where the burning of bodies sleep. He no longer used that mobile phone, having sold it back to the store at half price. Sometimes, I watched him driving the ducks into the lake with a reed longer than his arm, the ducks quacking loudly, his skin marked his increasing sadness, no longer able to sing along with the ducks.
He sat silently by the riverbank, watching the distant lake tinged
most was why the lion and the donkey would have a wedding in a church. Were they Christians? Did their animal friends also believe in the religion? The old man thought I was foolish, for a wedding in a church was just a necessary romantic element, an indispensable part of a romantic ending, following the tradition of old movies. I didn't argue, the old man continued his story.
The old man is my grandma's cousin. He was telling me that when he was twelve years old, a severe famine struck his hometown. The beginning of the story is very boring and goes as follows: The ground was yellow-grey, the sky blue-grey, the tree's leaves greengrey, and the people's faces pale grey.
"I can't imagine so much grey. ” I said to the elder.
"Shush." He told me. "That’s what a famine looks like. I hadn't eaten in a long time. My mother often said my eyes glowed green. Have you ever seen green light in someone's eyes? Like a little cat at night, almost starving to death. Anyway, everyone was dying. People in the village were dying every day. Even the wealthiest families stopped setting up opera stages and performing plays.
My mother's career was selling peanuts and sugar beans at these stages, all neatly packed in little colored glass boxes. Speaking of the best opera troupe in our area, the most beautiful girl who often played the role of princess in the local troupe, disappeared after a heavy rain.” The old man said.
"What does that have to do with the lion and the donkey?" I couldn't help but ask.
The old man, annoyed, smacked his lips and took a drag from his tobacco rolled in an old calendar, but didn't answer my question. "I didn't know about lions before. Imagine, a lion, how rare is that? Have you ever seen a lion? Certainly not. Many years later, educated people told me that lions live in a place called Africa. lifetime. I guess it's farther than the provincial capital, no, even farther than Beijing. Anyway, during that heavy rain, my mother starved to death, and I never even saw her body.
They all told me she died of starvation, but my uncle said that maybe a monster took her away. I knew that couldn’t be the truth. Later, when the rain stopped, the young beauty from that troupe was gone too."
"So where did she go?"I asked again.
"Child, don't interrupt me. Listening patiently is a basic virtue of hearing a story. Where the beauty went, I don’t know either.
The police brought a crowd and searched our village thoroughly, even the Land God Temple, which was a shelter for the homeless. Nonetheless, the beauty just vanished without a trace.
I'm not saying she was also taken by a monster, but her disappearance was indeed strange. Because people in the village claimed to have seen a monster when she was missed."
The old man, fearing I wouldn’t believe him, pulled out a stubby pencil used for accounting during the autumn harvest and a roll of
The paper was so thin that I worried his force might pierce intact. I took it home and tucked it into my diary：
watchman. He said he was about to strike the gong for the fourth watch of the night when he saw a dense fog and a shadow emerging from the distant forest. Then he saw such a monster, a complete monster!
yet he did not forget his duty, only trembling a bit more than usual until the day fully broke. He said that the monster has a huge gaping mouth, a rectangular head, and a tail erect like a straight broomstick, swaying in the night breeze. After that, children started to go missing from our village. Everyone was afraid to go out, even if they had nothing to eat."
Then came the rituals. The county chief believed in this monster rumor and summoned a hundred monks and Taoists. The chanting lasted for days. Too many had died or gone missing in the village. If not taken by a monster, perhaps they starved to death? The chief didn't allow these kinds of guesses to happen.
showed the sketch by the watchman's description to an educated primary school teacher, who, without a second thought, recognized it as a creature from 'The Classic of Mountains and Seas', possibly a living one, which would mean it's not just a legend.
'Is it a Pixiu( )?' teacher Li speculated.
'Or perhaps a Taotie( ).' These were complex characters, which he wrote down and showed it to us. I had never seen such intricate characters before. Can you write them?"
"Yes, that’s the thing." The old man agreed with it.
"So how did it become a lion ?" I asked.
The old man sighed: " That is another story, I will tell you later. Anyway everyone was afraid to go out but I was bold. After all, what difference does it make whether you starve to death or get eaten by a monster? So, I went into the mountains, staying there for a month. weasels, and some wild chickens, all starving to death. I felt sad that I don't know how to catch them and they had nothing to eat either. At night, I slept in caves, sometimes sharing them with pythons. They couldn’t bite because I put some mugwort leaves around my body.
The most common food for me in the mountains were wild had been eaten by humans and animals. Fortunately, since people no longer dared to go into the mountains, I had the whole place to myself. I started to eat more apples and grew taller.
By the time I came down a month later, I was taller than all my the monster to death, ending the prolonged famine."
Here, the old man added some religious undertones in his story, from Buddhist CDs, or maybe some of it just naturally emerged. My grandma also often told me stories about karma.
She wanted me to be a good person, as good people don’t go to the some Western myths I read from the picture books, like the tales of Prometheus.
But I didn't have time to think more about it because, just as I was drifting off in thought, I heard my grandma's footsteps. She had
She nudged me and said:"Say goodbye to Great Grandpa ah, go on, say it, be polite."
It was always a rising tone on the “ah,” a commanding yet teasing tone. Annoyed, I glared at her and ran off, causing the elders to laugh, while my grandma felt embarrassed.
That year I was only ten, and the old man was eighty. I was deeply saddened by not hearing the whole story. I wondered where the beauty ended up and how could the monster be thought as a lion instead of Pixiu or Taotie.
When I saw the old man again, it was ten years later. The people in that village were preparing to reenact the ceremonial celebration of the famine period, and it was said that even TV channel would come to report it. So, my grandma joyfully took me on the train back to her hometown.
She truly always missed this village,missing about these noisy festivities that was loud with gongs and drums but not really real, livestock. As a woman, my grandma and I always had nothing, but she loved her hometown. The string of her kite was always tied to the river of her hometown, unbreakable by wind.
We stayed at her uncle's house. His youngest grandson spent the whole afternoon with a dirty white towel on his head, imitating the basin-dropping ritual performed at funerals. The clanging sound overshadowed the gongs and drums of the village.
Grandma just laughed and said the boy had a bright future. Perhaps she had read the story of Mencius' mother moving three times and used it as an excuse, regardless of whether they actually moved or not. Children's play was not considered shameful.
On the eve of the ceremony, my grandma impulsively took me to visit the old man again.
This time she carried a basket of fruit, walking proudly and joyfully ahead of me. Compared to before, she now had a trace of aged frailty in her moments of distraction, but the bamboo-woven basket was so vibrantly red. I t contained equally bright, dyed, and waxed apples, with the edge tightly wrapped in several rounds of gaudy but rough plastic gold ribbon. She originally wanted me to carry it, but I was reluctant, feeling that the prickly gold would hurt my hands.
I thought the old man might not live much longer because the fruit basket was expensive, and my grandma only bought such for relatives in the hospital who didn’t have long to live.
"I'm ninety years old, I haven't died,' the old man said to me.
My mother went to talk with relatives in the main hall, while I sat in his dim, den-like bedroom, smelling the mix of impending death, tobacco, oil, and the scent of coal burned in winter, along with the faint odour of old newspapers pasted on the wall.
He was really old now, hunched over, sitting up in bed against a pillowcase embroidered with a peony pattern meaning wealth and honour, which hadn't been washed in who knows how long. Even the peony, such a symbol of wealth, seemed to be nearing its end.
"I'm not sick, I'm just dying because I'm too old. I've sewn my own grave clothes , a skill I learned in my youth during the Cultural Revolution. Back then, I worked among the women, transporting fabric to the clothes factory. For most, that wasn’t a good time, but for me, it was bearable because I had neither money nor knowledge, and no one could harm me. But the teacher Li who taught about Taotie, or maybe Pixiu, suffered a lot."
He began to reminisce but did not continue with the disappearance of the beauty from the troupe.
somewhere and accused teacher Li of promoting feudal superstition, calling for his denunciation! But wasn’t a monster burned alive back then? That couldn’t be argued against, so the newcomers said the monster was a kind of animal from Africa called a lion, not a real monster.
This newcomer was a cultured university student sent to our village to participate in labor. He brought picture books from the provincial library as evidence, and the night watchman had to admit it wasn’t a monster but a lion.
Regardless, that teacher Li had to be denounced. I knew him for a tall hat in a parade was enough for him to hang himself. So later, everyone said the man-eater was a lion.
Later, aside from those students sent to the countryside who wrote about this in the county annals, no one mentioned it again for a long time. After that, people seemed to forget the famine, the maneating lion, and the hanged teacher.
No one remembered the old slogans anymore, and everything was as it was before they arrived. I don't know what all that fuss was for, I’m just an uneducated person." The old man spoke with a hint of sadness.
"I have been to school, but still, I understand nothing." This wasn't said to comfort, but it was a blunt truth that just slipped out of my mouth.
The old man nodded in satisfaction.
"I like your attitude. You don't need to say anything, just by sitting there I can tell. I have lived too long, seen too many people. Perhaps I could live over a hundred years. I had many brothers and sisters, most of whom died in the famine. Those who didn't die have almost all lived over a hundred years. We are marked by longevity, destined to miss others.
you the story of the lion, many people came to our village, claiming to be scholars. These people were quiet and asked strange questions, but they were safer than the people before.
Sometimes they would also come to ask me questions, and I told them what I knew. I am too old, they believe I know something, but I really do know some secrets." He said.
The old man paused, taking out a bag of candy from the bag by his bed, trembling slightly as he unwrapped it, and handed me a piece.
the famine ended. The old government had gone, new people came, and new schools were built. So, my uncle sent me to the school in town. The town wasn't far from the village, so when the weather was good, I was always very happy. I sang and danced, for a child, spring is a time for play. But eventually, I didn't continue on studying there, because we couldn’t afford the fees. I was planning to leave, to go somewhere else. It was then that I encountered that secret, meeting a lion in the forest."
Was the lion really like the nightwatchman described ? I doubted in my heart, but did not ask aloud.
"That day, as usual, I went up the mountain to chop wood, and then a downpour started. So I went to a cave where I often hid during the famine to wait out the rain, and that’s where I met the lion. There were pots and pans in the cave, even a bed made of straw mats. I couldn't understand why. Does a lion need these things?
But I saw the lion. It was lying on that bed, seemingly injured. It was exactly as the night watchman had described. Its whole body was covered in golden fur, with a square head and a tail sticking straight up. Since it was lying on the bed, I felt pity for it, so I left it some fruits. Later, when I went back to the cave, the lion was gone, replaced by a donkey lying on the bed.
That really scared me, I ran away, but the donkey stopped me. It could speak human language! It said, 'Kid, don’t go, I have something to tell you!'
Maybe the lion had been eaten by it? It was terrifying — the lion ate people, and the donkey ate the lion. I was sweating coldly in fear. But the donkey did not eat me, and the lion soon walked in from outside the cave. I stood between them, nearly scared to death, and I wet myself. It's embarrassing to admit now, but you can't imagine how frightening those two creatures were to a child.