Ep 01: Ghost stories
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It would be interesting to start with stories from the Qing dynasty, officially the last imperial dynasty of China, which was established in 1636 and lasted all the way until 1912. The author’s name is Pu Songling, born in 1640 and dead around 1715. Pu Songling wrote this very famous collection of short stories called Liaozhai Zhiyi, which has enjoyed quite a literary afterlife following its completion around 1705. It has been adapted into many movies and television shows that I watched over and over again growing up. His stories also lent inspiration to world-renowned writers such as Franz Kafka, Lafcadio Hearn, Jorge Luis Borges, and Mo Yan. Many consider him as the crowning achievement of the Chinese classical tale.
You might be thinking, okay we picked him to start because he is all great and famous. This is half true, I wanted to start with Pu Songling because I genuinely feel he is someone many, including myself can relate to, for one thing, he was an aspiring scholar who was not that great at exams. All through his life he never gave up on taking exams hoping that he’ll pass and gain the official title, but he didn’t make it. He became in the conventional sense, a loser. He is said to be extremely intelligent, but he just can’t climb up the social ladder.
He wrote in his preface to the Liaozhai Zhi ``Where are those who truly know me? Are they only to be found in the so-called ‘green maple grove’, and at the ‘dark frontier passes’ (知我者，其在青林黑塞間乎)?” He was at the modest peak of his life and career, an obscure tutor in Shandong province, with no way of knowing of the fame and love his stories would receive from readers in the centuries to come . He thought that maybe only those inhabitants of the shadowy world of the dead—the “green maple grove and dark frontier passes” in the afterlife state would show an interest in his stories. When you first read Pu Songling’s stories you’ll see they are rarely about humans, they are mostly stories of ghosts and fox-fairies, and dragon princesses, very strange tales, that somehow feels close to home. And even to this present day Pu Songling’s work kind of stands alone, his works are not in anyone's shadow, nor does he stand on anyone’s else’s pedestal. You read his pain, his dreams, his way of gossiping, his positioning of himself in those stories, the stories offers Pu Songling an opportunity to express, represent, and renegotiate what it means to be human, to “be” or not “be” in his society. As sort of a loser in the most conventional sense, Pu Songling shares the struggles with people at the bottom, who have very little, who means very little, so you see that in his stories the successes and failures of the supernatural beings and the mortals they encounter often hinge on their struggle with the emotions, responsibilities, and duties that are part of the identities they must bear. I’ll give you a few examples of some of the shortest, but nonetheless interesting stories.