The Boy Who Followed His Soul / 阿宝

A scholar with six fingers, a merchant's daughter who teased him, and the four times he gave up his body to be near her

From Liaozhai Zhiyi (聊斋志异 · Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio), Volume II

By Pu Songling (蒲松龄, 1640–1715) · Translated with annotations

Before You Begin

This story sits at the heart of Liaozhai. It is one of the few tales in the collection where the supernatural element — soul-wandering, body-swapping, returning from the dead — happens to a clumsy, mocked, slightly disabled scholar rather than to a fox spirit or a ghost bride. The strangeness comes out of him, not toward him. Pu Songling is interested in what he calls 痴 (chī) — a word usually translated "foolish" or "stupid," but which in his vocabulary means something closer to single-minded to the point of self-erasure. A chī person, in Pu Songling's universe, is dangerous to himself and beloved of Heaven. By the end of this story, four different organs of Sun Zichu's body — finger, soul, body again, and corpse — will have been given away in pursuit of a girl who, at the start, was only making fun of him.

The two main characters:

• Sun Zichu (孙子楚): a young scholar from Guangxi province. He was born with an extra finger ("枝指" — a sixth finger branching from one of the others, a real congenital condition). He is shy, slow of speech, and so credulous that anything you tell him he believes. His friends have nicknamed him Sun Chī — "Sun the Fool."
• A Bao (阿宝): the only daughter of a fabulously wealthy local merchant whose in-laws are nobility. She is described as 绝色 — "of unmatched beauty." She is also, when we first meet her, a teenager bored with the rich boys her father keeps trying to marry her off to.

The Story

A Boy Called Fool

In Guangxi province there lived a young scholar named Sun Zichu. He had a reputation, a small one — he was clever enough at his books, he had passed the lowest-tier examination, and people called him a name worth knowing. He was also born with a sixth finger growing off one of the others, and his nature was what the classical writers called 迂讷 — yū nè — slow, hesitant, lacking in social grace. Anything anyone told him, he believed. If you told him there was a tiger in the rice jar, he would look in the rice jar.

If singing girls were brought to a gathering, he would see them in the distance and turn the other way. Once or twice, friends figured out that this was a game worth playing on him — they sent the singing girls toward him, made the girls flirt and corner him, and watched his face go scarlet to the collarbone and the sweat bead off his chin in fat slow drops. They laughed about it for weeks. They went home and described his frozen, stricken expression to people who had not been there. Pretty soon the description outran him: there was a stock phrase for the way Sun Zichu's face looked when a woman spoke to him, and a stock joke about him, and a nickname.

They called him Sun Chī — Sun the Fool. Chī is the same word Pu Songling will redeem at the end of this story. For now, it is only an insult.

His wife had died young. He lived alone.

The Bargain of the Finger

In the same county lived a man rich enough that the writer says he had wealth on the level of a feudal prince, and whose in-laws were all aristocracy. This man had one daughter, A Bao. She was, by every account, the most beautiful young woman anyone had ever seen. Her father had been turning away suitors for years. Sons of the great houses sent betrothal gifts; he sent them back. None of them, in his eyes, was good enough.

Someone — a friend, perhaps, or someone who just enjoyed setting up a humiliation — said to Sun Zichu, in the joking tone reserved for him: Why don't you send a matchmaker? You're a widower. You're a scholar. Try your luck with A Bao.

Sun Zichu, who believed what people told him, did not consider for a moment that this was absurd. He hired a matchmaker. The matchmaker dutifully went to A Bao's father, who knew Sun's name and knew also that he was poor, and shooed her out the door. On the way out the matchmaker happened to pass A Bao herself in the courtyard. A Bao asked who she had come for. The matchmaker told her.

A Bao laughed and said: Tell him if he gets rid of his extra finger, I'll marry him.

It was a joke. It was the joke of a young woman who has been forced to sit through six months of suitors and now finds it funny that a man like Sun Zichu has presumed to be in the same category as the lords' sons. The matchmaker carried the joke back to Sun Zichu as comedy, expecting him to redden and laugh and forget it.

Sun Zichu said: Easy.

He picked up an axe.

He cut off his own finger.

The pain went through him to the heart, the blood would not stop, and he very nearly died. For several days he lay in his house unable to stand. When he could stand, he wrapped the wound and walked across town to the matchmaker's house and held up his maimed hand for her to see. The matchmaker was horrified. She ran to A Bao's house. A Bao herself, when she heard, was startled — not delighted, startled — and made another joke, partly to cover the strangeness she felt, and said: Now ask him to get rid of his foolishness, too.

Sun Zichu, when the second message reached him, finally felt something like anger. He went around protesting that he was not a fool. He was a scholar. He had a name. He was not a fool. But how could he prove this to a girl he had never spoken to? He had no way. After a while he stopped arguing. He thought: maybe A Bao is not really as beautiful as people say. Maybe she thinks too well of herself. Maybe I'm better off without her. His feeling cooled.

This is the only moment in the story when his feeling cools. From now on, every gesture is escalation.

The Spring Festival and the Boy Who Did Not Come Back

The Qingming festival came around — the spring tomb-sweeping day when, in late imperial China, women were allowed out into the open countryside, and crowds of young men would follow them at a respectful distance to look. A group of Sun Zichu's friends dragged him along. Don't you want to see the famous girl with your own eyes? one of them said, knowing it was cruel and saying it anyway.

Sun Zichu, who knew he was being teased and who also wanted to see her, went.

They found her under a tree, with a wall of disreputable young men packed three deep around her. That has to be her, the friends said, and pushed through, and she was. She was as beautiful as people said she was. She stayed only a few minutes, then rose and left. The crowd of young men exploded into commentary — they rated her face, her hands, her waist, her walk. They were drunk on her. They were almost shouting.

Sun Zichu said nothing.

When the others moved on to follow her, he stayed under the tree. He did not move. They called him; he did not answer. One of them said, joking, Did your soul go off after A Bao? He didn't reply. They knew he was slow; they assumed he was being slower than usual. They tugged him by the sleeve, then by both arms, and walked him home like a piece of furniture.

At home he climbed onto his bed, lay down, and did not get up. He did not eat. He did not speak. He could not be woken. When his family pressed him for an answer, he answered through a fog: I am at A Bao's house. They asked for details and he went blank again.

What had happened, in the world Pu Songling is describing, was simple: when A Bao left the tree, Sun Zichu's spirit could not bear to be separated from her. He felt himself drift after her without willing it. He found himself walking inside the fold of her sash. Nobody saw him. Nobody shooed him off. He followed her home. He sat where she sat. He slept where she slept. At night, the text says with great matter-of-factness, he was intimate with her, and they got along very well. Only his stomach felt strange, growing emptier and emptier, and he kept thinking of his own house and getting lost on the way.

A Bao, for her part, was having a series of dreams in which she met and slept with the same man over and over again. She asked him his name. He told her: I am Sun Zichu. She found this very strange, but she did not tell anyone.

This goes on for three days. In Sun Zichu's actual bedroom, his breath shallows down to almost nothing. His family is sure he is dying. Finally, in desperation, they ask permission to send a shaman to A Bao's house to call his soul back. A Bao's father laughs — we don't even know him; why would his soul be at our house? — but eventually agrees. The shaman comes with one of Sun Zichu's old robes and a straw mat, traditional soul-summoning equipment. A Bao herself, when she understands what is happening, is so unsettled that she refuses to let the shaman work anywhere else in the house; she leads the woman directly into her own bedroom and lets her perform the summoning there. The shaman finishes, walks home with the robe and the mat. At her gate, she hears that Sun Zichu is groaning. He has woken up.

When he wakes, he knows everything in A Bao's bedroom. The color of her cosmetic boxes. The name and pattern on each of her hair ornaments. The shape of her bed-screens. He recites all of it, accurate to the last detail. When the description gets back to A Bao, she is more than unsettled now. She is frightened. And underneath the fear, she is moved — moved that this stranger's feeling for her had been deep enough to drag a part of him bodily through three walls and three days to reach her.

The Parrot

Sun Zichu, when he can stand again, cannot do anything else. He waits in the streets for her. On the day of the Buddha's Birthday festival, he hears that A Bao will be going to the Water Moon Temple to burn incense. He gets up before dawn and stations himself by the roadside. He waits all morning. His eyes ache. Around noon she finally passes in her carriage; she sees him through the gap in the curtain; she pulls the curtain aside with her own hand and looks at him steadily, without blinking. He, beside himself, follows the carriage. She sends a maid to ask his name. He tells her, eagerly, everything. The carriage rolls on, and he goes home.

And falls into the same coma as before. He stops eating. He calls her name in dreams. He hates himself, this time, for not being able to send his soul out again the way he had the first time. Why won't my soul go to her now?

The family kept a parrot. The parrot, on this day, happens to die. A small child has the bird's body on the bed and is playing with it. Sun Zichu, lying there, thinks: if only I could become a parrot, I could fly to her room. He is barely thinking it — barely able to think anything — but at the instant the thought finishes, he is the parrot. He spreads his wings and is gone.

He flies directly to A Bao. She is delighted by the sudden parrot. She catches it, hooks a small chain to its leg, and offers it hemp seeds. The parrot says, in a voice that is also Sun Zichu's voice: Sister, do not chain me. I am Sun Zichu.

A Bao, terrified, undoes the chain. The parrot does not fly away. She speaks to it, half to herself, half to him: Your feeling has been carved into my heart. But you and I are now different species — bird and human. How can we be married?

The parrot says: To be this close to you is enough.

After that, the parrot will not eat from anyone's hand but hers. If anyone else offers him food, he refuses. She feeds him, and he eats. When she sits, he perches on her knee. When she sleeps, he sleeps beside her bed. For three days he does this. She begins to love him.

Meanwhile, she has quietly sent someone to check on Sun Zichu's body. The report comes back: he has been lying as if dead for three days, but his chest, just above the heart, is still warm.

So she speaks to the parrot directly. If you can become a human again, I swear I will be yours until I die.

The parrot says: You are lying to me.

She swears it, formally, the way you swear an oath you intend to keep. The parrot sits and seems to think.

A moment later A Bao bends down to take off her shoes by the bed — her small embroidered slippers — and the parrot drops from her shoulder, grips one of the slippers in his beak, and is out the window. She cries out for him. He is already gone.

She sends an old servant woman to Sun Zichu's house to find out what has happened. The servant arrives just as Sun Zichu wakes up. His family had been gathering around a parrot that had just flown in carrying an embroidered slipper in its beak, dropped the slipper, and fallen dead on the floor. They were puzzled. Sun Zichu, the moment he was awake, asked for the slipper. They had no idea why. The servant woman came in and saw, and asked. Sun Zichu held up the slipper and said: This is A Bao's token. Tell her: I do not forget what I promised.

The servant carried the news back. A Bao, who now understood that the parrot had been him and that the slipper had been her oath bond, told her mother. Her mother sent for her father. Her father said: The boy has a name, at least, and the boy is poor. We have looked for years and you choose someone like this? You'll make us a laughingstock. A Bao said: I gave him my word with the slipper. I will marry no one else. Her parents gave in.

They sent word to Sun Zichu. He was instantly, fully well. Her father suggested that, since Sun was poor, he could come live in the merchant's household as a son-in-law in residence — a humbling arrangement. A Bao refused on Sun's behalf. A husband should not live long in his wife's father's house, she said. Especially a poor husband. The longer he stays, the more they look down on him. I have given my word. I will live in a hut and eat plain greens with him and not complain. Sun came, in proper form, with the formal wedding procession, and brought her home. They met like two people who had been waiting a lifetime.

The Death and the Death

A Bao's dowry, modest by her father's standards, was a windfall in Sun's poor household. They grew comfortable. Sun was a bookish man, useless at managing money or land, but A Bao turned out to have a quiet talent for it. She handled the accounts, the estate, the servants. She did not bother her husband with any of it. In three years they were rich.

Then Sun Zichu fell sick with what the text calls 消渴 — xiāo kě, the wasting-thirst illness, what we would now identify as diabetes. He died.

A Bao wept until her eyes would not dry. She stopped sleeping. She stopped eating. People tried to console her; she would not be consoled. One night she got up quietly and hanged herself. A maid found her and cut her down in time; she was revived. After that she still would not eat. Three days passed. The family began to assemble for the funeral.

From inside the coffin came a faint sound of someone trying to breathe.

They pried it open. Sun Zichu was alive.

He told them, when he could speak, what had happened in the world he had just come back from. He had been brought before the King of the Underworld. The King, looking over his life, had found him honest and plain in his nature, and had assigned him a clerk's post in the bureaucracy of the dead. Then an attendant had run in: The wife of Officer Sun is arriving. The King checked his ledger and said: She is not yet due to die. The attendant said: She has not eaten for three days. The King looked at Sun Zichu and said: Out of respect for your wife's loyalty, I will give you back your life. And he ordered a groom to bring a horse and send Sun back.

After that, Sun Zichu slowly recovered. The year of the provincial examinations came around. Before the exam, a group of younger scholars decided to play one last joke on the man they had grown up calling Sun the Fool. They picked seven of the most obscure, most unlikely topics they could think of, took Sun aside, and told him, in confidential whispers: These are the leaked questions. We are sharing them with you as a favor. Keep it quiet. Sun believed them, of course. He went home and worked day and night for weeks on essays answering those exact seven topics. The other young men laughed about it behind his back.

That year, the examiners had been worrying that the standard examination topics were too familiar — too easily prepared for. So they deliberately picked the seven most obscure topics they could think of.

All seven of Sun's essays matched.

He placed first in the province. The next year he passed the imperial examination and was appointed to the Hanlin Academy. The Emperor, hearing the strange history of the man, summoned him for an audience and asked him to tell his story. Sun told it, beginning with the finger and ending with the coffin. The Emperor was delighted. Later he sent for A Bao herself and gave her rich gifts.

The Historian of the Strange Remarks^{[1]异史氏 (Yìshǐshì — "the Historian of the Strange") is Pu Songling's pen-name for the editorial codas at the end of many Liaozhai tales. He is parodying Sima Qian, who closed each chapter of the Records of the Grand Historian with "the Grand Historian remarks…". Pu Songling was a failed civil-service candidate writing ghost stories from a small studio in Shandong; the irony of calling himself a historian was deliberate.}

When a man is foolish, his will is fixed. So a man foolish about books will write fine essays; a man foolish about a craft will become a master of it. The men who go through this world without ever managing anything are the ones who say of themselves, 'Oh, I am not a fool.' As for the men who lose their houses to courtesans, who lose their fortunes to gambling — are those the doings of fools? From this I know: a man who is too clever has the truest foolishness of all. What was foolish about Sun Zichu?

Translator's Reflection

The hinge of this story is a Chinese word, 痴 (chī), that English really has no word for. Dictionaries give foolish, stupid, idiotic, infatuated. All of these are partly right and all are wrong. What chī really means in Pu Songling's hand is something like the inability to hold any part of yourself back from the thing you love.

Sun Zichu is the same person on page one as he is on the last page. He is gullible. He believes people. When his friends tell him to send a matchmaker, he sends one. When a girl jokes that he should cut off his finger, he cuts off his finger. When other students hand him a list of fake examination topics, he believes them and writes seven essays about them. He doesn't get smarter. He doesn't grow.

What changes is the world around him. The world, in this story, slowly reveals itself to be the kind of place where someone who gives himself away that completely cannot fail. His finger comes off; A Bao is shaken. His soul leaves his body; A Bao is shaken further, and moved. He becomes a parrot, and she gives him her oath. He dies, she dies after him, and they are both sent back. He writes seven essays on seven topics nobody asked about; those are the seven topics on the exam.

Read this as a fairy tale and it is comforting. Read it as a parable and it is uncomfortable. Pu Songling is suggesting that the men and women of his time who looked sane and competent — the ones who said I am not a fool, I know how to manage my life — were actually the lost ones. They never gave anything away completely. They never tested the universe by trusting it all the way to the bottom. They held back. They calculated. And so the world held back from them. The men who go through this world without ever managing anything are the ones who say of themselves, 'Oh, I am not a fool.'

There is also something quietly radical about A Bao in this story. She begins as a daughter of wealth being paraded through suitors; she ends as the only person in the story who matches Sun Zichu's chī. When he dies, she does not mourn elegantly; she stops eating, and then she hangs herself. When her parents propose a humiliating son-in-law-in-residence arrangement, she rejects it on his behalf and chooses voluntary poverty. She handles the estate so he can read books. The girl who teased a stranger about his sixth finger turns out to be the one woman in the county capable of the same recklessness as the man she teased. Pu Songling's structural argument is that chī recognizes chī. The joke that started it all — if he cuts off his finger, I'll marry him — turns out, in the long arc, to have been the truest sentence A Bao said in the entire story. Because in the end, that is exactly what she did.