North of the town of Zichuan there runs a river.
A fisherman lived on it whose family name was Xu. Every night he carried a gourd of wine down to the water and fished until late. Other men fished for the fish. He fished for the quiet. As he fished, he poured three cups of wine onto the ground.
The river drowned people almost every year. The old belief said that a person who drowned could not leave the water until another living person was pulled down in that same place. Only then could the drowned soul go free and be born again. So the people along the bank kept away from the water after dark.
Xu was not afraid. Those three cups he poured every night were for the drowned.
The river was not wide, but it was deep, and mud and weeds lay thick on the bottom. Years before, men said that if you stood on the bank at night you could hear something turning over down there. Others found a shoe on the sand, or a torn hat, uncovered by wind and covered again, belonging to nobody they knew. Children along the bank were told from the time they could walk that they must never go near the water in the dark. Xu had grown up in this river. He knew its moods and he knew its floor, and the gourd at his belt was most of his courage.
This story is recorded by Pu Songling in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, under the title Wang Liulang. Pu Songling taught in the countryside and traded tea for other people stories, and wrote them down at home. The ghosts in his book are not usually out to do harm. Most of them still carry some habit or temper they had when they were alive. They like to drink. They keep their promises. They are too soft of heart.
That is the shape of many Chinese ghost stories. The dead are rarely the danger in them. Often the dead are the ones who show mercy at the last moment, where a living man would not.
That first night, Xu sat by the river as always and fished.
He poured the three cups, then lifted his own cup to drink, and felt that there was someone beside him. He turned. A young man stood at the edge of the reeds, smiling at him.
Xu said, without thinking, that the young man should have a cup.
The young man did not stand on ceremony. He sat down and drank, cup after cup, and his capacity was no smaller than the fisherman’s own. They talked of small things, of the fishing and the weather on the river.
That night was strange. The basket of Xu filled to the brim. The fish came to the net as if they were walking into it, one after another. He was still wondering about it as he packed up his gear.
The next night the young man came again. They drank as before, and then the young man rose and walked toward the water. Before Xu could call him back, he saw the fish below, a dark mass of them, driven along the stream straight to the mouth of the net.
Xu pulled the net in. It was full.
Now the fisherman understood. He thanked the young man, who waved it away as a small thing.
So it went for more than half a year. The young man came every night, and Xu kept the best place for him. The two of them drank and talked by the water, closer than brothers. Xu asked his name. The young man said his family name was Wang and that he was the sixth son, so the fisherman should call him Liulang.
Xu had already guessed, in a vague way, what he was. But he did not ask. A person who will not say out loud what he is must have his own reasons.
One evening half a year later, Liulang came without his usual smile.
He sat, poured the wine, did not drink, and held the cup a long time before he spoke. He said that he had come that night to say goodbye.
Xu asked where he was going.
Liulang said that he was not a man. When he was alive he had loved wine, and one year he drank too much, missed his footing, and fell into this river and drowned. His soul had been shut in the water for years, unable to get out. It was the three cups Xu poured every night that had reached down and stirred back to life the part of him that remembered being a man. It made him feel that one person on earth still remembered that there was such a thing at the bottom of this river.
Xu listened, and did not draw back. He filled the cup again and said that it was just as well, because the wine had never been enough for one person anyway.
Liulang drank it off in one swallow. He said the worst of those years was not the cold of the water. It was having no one to talk to. There were other souls below, but each of them was in a hurry over his own substitute, and none of them would stop. Only this fisherman on the bank, who said nothing about it at all, had remembered him month after month.
Then Liulang set down his cup and went on. The next day at noon a woman would cross the river, and she would drown. That was the substitute assigned to him from above. If she took his place, he would go free and be reborn.
Xu heard him out with a heavy heart. He was glad for Liulang and sorry for the woman he had not yet seen. He emptied his own cup in one drink and said nothing.
At noon the next day, Xu hid in the reeds downstream.
A woman came, as Liulang had said, with a nursing child in her arms. She stepped into the water and went out to the middle of the river. Her foot slipped and she went under.
The child was thrown onto the grass of the bank and began to wail.
The woman sank and rose, sank and rose, and it seemed she must go down for good. Then she fought up again, clawed at the weeds in the water, and dragged herself inch by inch back to the shallows. At last she sat on the wet sand with the child in her arms and wept.
Xu watched from the reeds with his chest tight.
He said afterward that a thought had come to him in that moment. If the woman went down, Liulang would be free, and would be born again as a living man. The thought lasted only an instant, and then he felt ashamed of himself. The woman had one life and the child in her arms had another; why should his friend be freed at their cost. He gripped the reeds until his palm was wet, and only let go when the woman had the child up on the bank and both of them were safe.
That night Liulang came, and his face was dark.
Xu asked why he had let her go.
Liulang said that she had a child in her arms. To pull her down would be to take two lives for the sake of one. His heart had failed him at the last moment, and the hand he reached out had pushed her toward the bank instead.
Xu said that he had wasted his chance again.
Liulang smiled and said that wasted or not, there would be another chance.
Xu said nothing more. The two of them sat by the river until the night was deep, and neither of them rose to leave first.
Some days later Liulang came again, and this time it was a true parting.
He said that the powers above had honored the mercy in him, the refusal to kill where he did not have to, and had made him the earth god of a town called Wuzhen, in the county of Zhaoyuan. From now on they belonged to two different places, and meeting would be hard.
Xu felt both joy and grief. He said that Liulang should not count the road too long, and that one day when he had the time he would come and see him.
Liulang laughed and said that if Xu came, he would surely be there to receive him.
More than a year passed, and Xu really did set out, with a pack on his shoulder, on the long road to Zhaoyuan.
The way was not short, and he walked for more than ten days. By day he travelled and by night he found an inn. The wine in his gourd went down sip by sip, and he could not bear to finish it. He always kept a little back, and in some empty place along the road he still tipped three drops onto the ground. People laughed to see a man on the road keeping up such a custom, and he did not explain. He only pressed the stopper tighter into the mouth of the gourd.
At Wuzhen he found an inn and asked the keeper where the earth god temple was.
The keeper went pale and asked where Xu had come from. Xu said that he was from Zichuan, and that his family name was Xu.
The keeper called all the neighbors in.
It turned out that this temple god was known to be very accurate. A few days before, several people in the town had dreamed the same dream. In it the earth god said that a friend named Xu was coming from Zichuan, that the road had been hard on him, and that they were to treat him well.
The people of the town competed to feed him and give him things, and none would take his money.
Xu went to the temple and spent the night under the eaves. In his sleep Liulang came to him, neatly dressed, with a steadier look than before, and sat and talked with him for a long while. At parting Liulang pressed money for the road into his hand and thanked him again and again for coming so far.
On the way home, Xu dreamed of Liulang again. Liulang walked with him a stage and then another stage.
Afterward Xu fished less. With the money Liulang had given him he started a small trade, and his household slowly grew comfortable.
On this last point the accounts differ a little. Some versions say that Liulang later earned enough merit to move on to another post, and came to Xu in a dream to say goodbye. Others say that he is still the earth god of Wuzhen to this day. Which is true, Xu himself could not have said. He knew only that from that year on, no one else drowned in the river.
He still went down to the bank every night, and poured three cups of wine onto the ground.
Sometimes he poured one more and set it on a stone at the water edge. He would sit a while, look at the water, and then get up and go home.
When he came back in the morning, that cup was usually empty.
He never said who had drunk it, and he never tried to find out. Wind came off the river and rattled the reeds, and the clouds at the far edge were pulled open into a thin bright line.
