STEPS

Soak the red beans in cold water overnight, then boil them until cooked. Grind them to make fine dry paste. If the paste is too moist, stir-fry with a little vegetable oil. Mix with the sugar and set aside.

Wash the mugwort leaves and cut them into small pieces; grind the leaves using a grinder.

Add glutinous rice flour to the ground leaves. Knead the mixture thoroughly together with warm water until the dough loses its stickiness; add a spoonful of oil into the dough for color. Divide the dough into blocks of the same size.

Stuff each block of dough with the red bean paste, make them into small balls or jiaozi- shaped dumplings if you like.

Put the dumplings into a steamer and steam for 15 minutes, then serve.

For centuries the imperial examination was the de facto method for members of any strata of Chinese society to join the ranks of the scholarbureaucrat class. Success in the exams, in many ways, was central to success in society. Many, many men failed.

However, Chinese bureaucracy’s loss was Chinese literature’s gain. It turns out that years of literary education, coupled with a harsh spoonful of bitter failure and ample free time, are a recipe for authorial success. Chinese literature is so littered with failed mandarins that it sometimes feels like flunking the imperial exam is a pre-requisite. And Pu Songling (蒲松龄) (1640 – 1715) is a chief among these frustrated scribes.

Pu’s early Qing dynasty (1616 – 1911) anthology Liaozhai Zhiyi, in English usually titled Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, are preeminent in China’s zhiguai xiaoshuo, a genre of very short classical Chinese stories loosely translated as “miraculous tales”—and miraculous they are.

Pu creates a universe where, as the title suggests, strange things happen. Men are reincarnated as animals, but with enough human memory to avoid eating their own excrement; canine blood is flicked upon invisible phantoms to reveal their whereabouts; lonely women fornicate with lusty dogs when their husbands are away; hallucinating mandarins couple with tree trunks only for their penises to be stung by angry scorpions; the hungry chew on snake heads while the tails wriggle from their mouths like reptilian spaghetti; fox spirits disguised as beautiful women enchant men, making constant love to them until they are dead husks devoid of life force; insect-sized humans hold mournful funerals in empty courtyards; the lovesick jump through temple murals to ravish Buddhist apsaras; people repeatedly die, come back to life, and die again; and lies become truth, and truth becomes lies.

If Pu’s stories sound like the stuff of breathless wild abandon, they are not. The brilliance of Strange Tales is not so much in flights of imagination, though there are plenty of those, but in the controlled and measured style in which they are told. Rather than the flowery baroque style you might imagine from what are essentially ghost stories, each tale is presented more in the manner of an accountant carefully recording figures in a ledger, almost emotionlessly. Gregor Samsa’s utter coolness at being transformed into a cockroach come to mind. And Kafka is a good reference point as he reportedly described Pu’s stories as “exquisite,” and it is clear to see how a literary thread, though a thin one, links the two failed bureaucrats. It is not a surprise that masters of the short story praise of Pu’s work. Jorge Luis Borges was a fan, and both writers wrote short, crystalline tales about myths, legends, and strange beasts, while blurring the real and the imagined. Like Borges, Pu’s laconic, matter-of-fact storytelling is precisely what makes his stories so strange.

The measured tones of the tales can discombobulate. We are often presented a complex story, involving all manner of shocking supernatural events, only for a tale to finish abruptly without fanfare in a brusque sentence absent of comment or grandiosity: “Song wrote a short account of his experience, but alas…it was lost. I have given the gist of it.”

Or, “The magistrate provided him with a written certificate of the facts, and an allowance for his journey home.” Or, “After six months he made a recovery.” Initially such endings are unsatisfying; it can feel that Pu has not concluded his stories adequately, that there must be something more to them, that the absurdity of his tales has not been given full space for consideration. But these are Strange Tales and this is how Pu tells them. The brisk endings to the tales soon become addictive, their terse finality leaving the reader slightly confused, yet wanting more.

Few modern readers would take Pu’s stories as anything other than fiction, but at the time it was written, things were often different. Historical figures and events, often battles that took place in the previous dynasty, are dropped into the stories. Many of Pu’s contemporaries, educated or otherwise, would fully have believed in ghosts and spirits, and seen the tales as retellings of events partly, if not completely, true. Perhaps, a few superstitious readers will feel the same today.

The Penguin Classics (2006) edition translated by John Minford is a particularly fine one. We are given 104 of Pu’s stories (out of 500 in the original). Though they usually only run between a paragraph and two pages long, the book also contains an excellent introduction, a short glossary of uncommon terms, and explanatory footnotes to almost every story. For