画皮

English (for the teacher)

In Taiyuan there lived a scholar named Wang. Early one morning, out on the road, he spotted a girl clutching a bundle, stumbling along all alone. He caught up with her: she was only about sixteen, and so beautiful that he fell for her on the spot.

When Wang asked what was wrong, her eyes went red: “My parents wanted money, so they sold me to a rich man as his concubine. The mistress cursed me every morning and beat me every night, so I ran.” Wang said his study was close by, and she went with him.

At the study, she begged him not to tell a soul. Wang hid her in the back room, and that very night the two became lovers. When his wife, Chen, found out, she urged him to send the girl away, but Wang wouldn’t listen.

A few days later, Wang ran into a Taoist priest in the street. The Taoist stared at him in shock: “There’s evil air all over you!” Wang kept saying no. The Taoist shook his head and walked off: “What a fool! Some people really are at death’s door and still can’t see it.”

Wang felt a chill, but then he thought: how could a girl that beautiful be a demon? The Taoist was probably just after money. Back at the study, he found the gate bolted from the inside. He climbed over the crumbling wall, but the door to the room was shut too. He tiptoed to the window and looked in.

There was no girl inside, only a hideous ghost. Its face was green, and its teeth were jagged as a saw. A human skin lay spread out on the bed, and the ghost, a painter’s brush in hand, was painting it stroke by stroke. When it was done, it tossed the brush aside, picked up the skin, shook it out like a robe, threw it over its shoulders, and in a blink it was the beautiful girl again.

Scared out of his wits, Wang crawled away on his hands and knees. He found the Taoist out in the fields and knelt to beg for help. The Taoist said: “It’s a poor creature too. It has only just found someone to take its place, and I can’t bring myself to hurt it. I’ll just drive it away.” Then he handed Wang his fly-whisk and told him to hang it on his bedroom door.

That night, Wang hid in the bedroom, the fly-whisk hanging on the door. There was a soft sound outside; he didn’t dare look, so he had his wife peek. The girl stood staring at the whisk, afraid to come in, grinding her teeth, and only left after a long time.

Before long she was back, cursing: “That Taoist is trying to scare me! Am I supposed to spit out meat that’s already in my mouth?” She tore the whisk to shreds, burst through the door, leapt onto the bed, ripped open Wang’s belly, took out his heart, and swept out. By the time the maid came in with a lamp, Wang was dead.

The next day, his younger brother, Erlang, went to fetch the Taoist. The Taoist was furious: “I took pity on it, and it dared do this!” It turned out the ghost had become an old woman and hidden in Erlang’s house. The Taoist raised his wooden sword and roared: “Demon! Give me back my whisk!” The old woman bolted for the door, but one blow of the sword knocked her down; the skin slid off with a whoosh, and the ghost howled like a pig. The Taoist cut off its head, and its body turned into thick smoke, which he trapped in a gourd. He rolled up the skin, eyebrows and eyes all there, just like rolling up a painting.

Chen knelt at the gate, weeping, and begged him to bring her husband back to life. The Taoist said: “My powers are too shallow; I can’t raise the dead. There’s a mad beggar in the market who often lies in the dung heaps. Go and beg him, and if he insults you, whatever you do, don’t get angry.”

The beggar was by the roadside singing nonsense, a long string of snot hanging from his nose, so filthy no one dared go near. Chen went to him on her knees. He laughed: “Pretty lady, have you fallen for me?” Chen told him why she had come, and he laughed even harder: “There are men everywhere; why bring this one back? Am I the King of Hell?” And with that he swung his stick and beat her. Chen gritted her teeth and took it, while the crowd in the street grew and grew. The beggar coughed up a big gob of phlegm and held it to her lips: “Eat it!”

Chen’s face burned red, but she remembered the Taoist’s words and forced it down. It felt like a hard ball of cotton wool, and it stuck in her chest. He roared with laughter: “The pretty lady loves me after all!” Then he got up and left, without looking back. Chen chased him into a temple, but he was gone.

Ashamed and bitter, she went home, held her husband’s body, and wept. She cried until her voice gave out, then suddenly felt sick, and the lump in her chest burst out and fell right into her husband’s wound. She looked down: it was a human heart, still beating, still steaming. She quickly pressed the wound shut with both hands and bound it tight with a strip of torn silk. Slowly, the body grew warm. By midnight, he was breathing. And at dawn, incredibly, Wang came back to life.

All he said was that it felt like a dream, and his belly ached a little. He had no idea where the heart in his chest had come from.