Hearsay: Strange Tales from the Middle Kingdom

Although Barbara Ann Porte has never been to China, years of research enabled her to successfully distill in these 15 tales some of its ancient essences. This, she explains in the introduction, allowed her to move back in time to the era of emperors and empresses, court magicians, imperial concubines, and common people who raised crops, kept shops, peddled wares, fought wars and paid taxes. She traveled back across centuries, beyond the Silk Route, to places Marco Polo never mentioned. She ?crossed paths with foxes and ghosts, trained eels and dragons, musicians and jugglers, young lovers and bandits,? ? traveling as they did, ?on foot and by taxi, by river sampan, sedan chair, and camel caravan.? Sometimes, she hobbled on feet that were bound. And her one aim, she writes, was ?for the pleasure of the stories.?The stories are quite unusual. Some are silly, including the ?Two-Parasol Person,? which tells of a woman who always carried two parasols because her mother told her to do it. Others are fanciful. In ?Rope Tricks,? a magician sent his son into the clouds to pick a peach for the emperor, ?A Case Against Napping? tells of the philosopher Zhuangzi, born in 369 B.C.E., who was once a butterfly. In ?The Rescue of a Concubine,? Dayan saved his lover Amina with live eels, which knotted their bodies together and formed a pair of huge stilts he could climb to scale the walls of the concubines? courtyard. Fireflies lit their way. The captured lovers enchanted their tormentors in ways most exotic and strange.Aside from the stories themselves, I best like the book's epigraph, an ancient Chinese saying: "There is a time for frowning and a time for laughing. In either case, it is a serious matter." Alyssa A. Lappen