The next day, driven by a sudden upswell of hope, he went to a merchant he knew of, and sold the baubles for the best price he could haggle, which was not much, because he had never possessed the charm of a haggling man.
He’d never seen any point in having them, but had not until now been moved to sell them, either. The few jewels that remained had long occupied a dusty chest beneath his floorboards, never adorning the flesh of a woman. What riches he would reap, and how much less sweat his brow would have to exude!Īs it happened, Dou had inherited some baubles of modest value from his grandmother, a woman of means, but his family had lost most of them to famine and mismanagement. One evening, in the cooling sunset, Dou was particularly struck by the rich colors of Gan’s produce-a glistening rainbow of vibrant hues-and he pictured the rich bounty he could bring to the annual crop festival if he could somehow annex Gan’s land with his own. Gan’s watermelons, grapes, squash, coriander, pumpkins, and hyacinth beans sprang effortlessly to life, tender and delicious, making Gan prosperous and corpulent, while Dou’s land afforded him only frustration and want. He might have lived his entire natural span as just a glowering malcontent, raging at fates over which he had no control, but for the success of his neighbor, Gan Shihuangdi. Dou burned inside at the unfairness of it all he saw the universe as a hammer, and himself as an anvil. His cucumbers were bitter, his cowpeas difficult to boil, his leeks over-pungent, his pak choi stiff, and his edible amaranth hardly deserving of its name. He owned a patch of land that supported crops only after backbreaking effort, and then with results that betrayed its resentment of the demands he put on it. Like most of us who walk this teeming Earth, he was trapped in the circumstances that fortune had provided him.
Many years ago, in Shangdong Province, there lived an unfortunate farmer by the name of Dou Zhuo. Pu Songling, Preface to Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio Series: The Tales of Gorlen Vizenfirthe.
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