It is time for the next in the series. And in this one we travel to China and its ghosts. Wailing Ghosts by Pu Songling is a collection of really short stories related to supernatural. I was expecting ghosts, but instead I found foxes. To start with I thought that it is translation quirk. But then I looked up and realized in Chinese tradition, there are shape shifting spirits known as huli jing. Commonly known as fox spirits. They are not ghosts, but a different category of supernatural beings. They live long lives, gain powers and sometimes interact with humans in disguised forms.

Now on to the stories themselves. There is something peculiar about the way these stories are told. Again and again, the narrator does not tell you a story. He passes it along.

“This happened to a man I know.”
“I heard this from a scholar in such-and-such province.”
“It is said that…”

The stories arrive not as fiction, but as memory, slightly removed, a little softened, but still carrying the weight of something that might have been real. And that “might” does most of the work. Reading these reminded me of the section on Urban Legends from the book Made to Stick.

A couple of stories stayed with me. Curiously, neither of them had ghosts or foxes or monsters of any kind.

In one, a performer arrives at a court with his young son. He claims that he has access to the heavens. Just a claim and then a demonstration.

He performs the rope trick. The rope rises into the sky, the boy climbs, disappears into the clouds. Moments later, a large peach, out of season, falls down. Proving his claim of access to the heavens. But then the heaven residents get angry and the boy’s body parts begin to fall from the sky.

The performer wails. Packs the pieces into a trunk. Tells the court that the gods have punished the boy for trespassing.

There is grief. There is spectacle. And importantly, there is a reward.

And then, almost as an afterthought he taps the trunk. The boy emerges whole and unharmed.

If you’ve spent most of your life in India, you would’ve heard of the Indian rope trick. Whenever I heard or read about the rope trick, I always associated it with Indian. Now maybe not so. Apparently, the Chinese have also been performing the rope trick.

The second story is about a monk. He is hungry in the market, and can only eat what he can beg for. He asks a fruit seller for a peach. The fruit seller has a cart full of peaches. But he refuses to give even one.

By now, I was getting curious about peaches. And when I looked up the importance of peaches in Chinese culture I found that they symbolize immortality. Now I sip my iced peach green tea with a little bit more reverence.

Back to the story, the monk then finds a seed. And in front of a growing crowd, he plants it, waters it, and within moments a tree begins to grow. It rises, branches out, and soon it is full of ripe peaches. The same crowd that witnessed the refusal now witnesses abundance.

The monk climbs the tree and begins distributing the fruit freely.

Everyone is delighted. Including, interestingly, the vendor.

Only later does the illusion dissolve. The vendor realizes that his cart is gone. The wood that formed the miraculous tree was his own. The peaches that were distributed so generously were his.

The miracle was real only in experience. In substance, it was theft.

If you look at both these stories, you realize that in both, people believe. That is another principle of making the stories sticky. When you show that you heard the story from someone who knew someone else and then bring in a crowd who has witnessed the same, it becomes easy to believe. The listener is open to “this might happen”. And this “might” is mighty for a storyteller.

Urban legends work like this. If you look at the famous rope trick itself. It lives in this space. Always seen by someone else. Always just out of reach of direct verification. And yet, persistent in a nation’s memory.

Pu Songling seems to have understood this instinctively.

He is not just telling stories of ghosts and spirits. He is recreating the way stories move through people. And as I move through the Penguin Little Black Classics, I am amazed at the diversity of ideas they represent. This is the seventh one, and so far we have always encountered new literary forms.