Strange Beasts of China

You're only alive for a while, but dead forever. How you live, how you die, that's your own business.

My mother used to tell me, ‘You can’t be sure that beasts aren’t people, or that people aren’t just another type of beast

Storytellers are irresponsible. All we do is make things up from existing events. As for the actual stuff of life, we know absolutely nothing about it.

I understood now that his innocence didn't come from not knowing anything, but rather from having seen everything there was to see, understanding it, and setting it down.

Christmas was over, and the sky above the city was pitch-dark. Everyone I knew was asleep, but some strangers were dead.

The girl lunged over to hug me. ‘Auntie!’ she cried. No wonder people have kittens or puppies or little children. This felt nice.

Humans possess intellect, and claim the knowledge of the ages. They take neither sorrow nor joy from material gain or personal loss. Thus their existence is more difficult than necessary, as they strive too hard for cleverness, and push away from the heart. The fugitives fear capture, and the captured fear escape. They live out their days in uncertainty. What good fortune for the beasts, to lack intelligence; how cursed humans are, that they possess it.

The plot was full of holes, of course, but nobody expects short stories to make sense.

I feel like i'm about to die. Everything i'd lived and loved was now fixed in place. I'd used the life i had to understand his story, her story, their story. Now i knew it all, i had no story of my own. And now it was time for the curtain to fall.

I understood not that his innocence didn't come from not knowing anything, but rather from having seen everything there was to see, understanding it, and setting it down. He'd let go of what I hadn't been able to.

I had to laugh, but remembered feeling the same sorrow when I was younger, and telling my mother, 'One day we'll all be dead and the streets will be empty. Who's going to sweep them?

Our sorrows and joys are all our own. A poem instead of tears.

Scientists are the purest artists. Their craft is directed at drawing closer to the infinite void.

There is an ancient saying: birth is a process of returning, death is a process of longing. The returning beasts serve the dead, but perhaps this is the origin of their name.

Beneath Yong’an is a City of the Dead, which the returning beasts build and maintain. Most of the time they are hard at work underground, only emerging after dark to scurry home and sleep. They are the only creatures in Yong’an who know the whereabouts of the deceased.

THE RETURNING BEASTS STAY HIDDEN DURING THE DAY AND only appear at night – and as a result, are rarely seen. If you are fated not to encounter them, you never will, no matter how hard you try. Yet if your destinies are linked, then you will come together no matter what. They are the descendants of ancient tomb robbers. After the last ancient grave had been dug up and plundered, they came to Yong’an.

ZHONG LIANG LIVED IN THE POSHEST DISTRICT OF YONG’AN, A terrifying place covered in fascist slogans: Build a Civilised Society! Have Better People as your Neighbours! It was all so nonsensical, I wondered if I was still dreaming.

I paced back and forth in my flat, wishing I could just put my head through a window. The leaders of this movement were unassailably high up, practically deities. Anyone who they said should die, would die. And they had the voices of countless lunatics from all across Yong’an backing them up.

I sighed. I knew that’s how it would be – the things I read in the papers never had anything to do with me. Every story is someone else’s myth. Life holds no pleasant surprises for us, only nasty shocks.

Humans could be so simple-minded, I thought to myself. Sometimes it’s necessary to deceive them so they can survive.

My mother died long ago, but hell does not exist in Yong’an City, and so the souls of the deceased drift aimlessly across the land instead.

My scalp prickled. Was she trying to talk me into a ghost wedding? Fortunately, she said instead, ‘My brother left you something. I’ll send Zhong Liang to get it.’ I rejoiced – how lucky that modern society had shaken off superstitions like forcing women to betroth themselves to dead men.

My mother used to say: ‘Never cry, or your tears will water your sorrow and it’ll grow.

Once, I bumped into a longstanding acquaintance at the Dolphin Bar who exclaimed, ‘My god, what happened to you?’ But that was just in passing, we then nodded in greeting and moved on. Yong’an has too many wanderers, too many philosophers. Who has the time to care about anyone else? Who even remembers who other people are?

For a whole month, a blank space ran where my newspaper column should have been. My phone stayed off, and I refused to see anyone. Let me vanish from the world.

I noticed with a start that the woods outside our city were growing, sending out rapid tendrils that engulfed our buildings, blocking all light so there was just the moon and a thick layer of cloud. The sky was so far away, and just like ancient times, there was no longer any town, no people, just beasts scampering through the woods, clutching and biting, killing each other, mating and neglecting their offspring.

They’d thought they could be together, but in the end, it lasted no longer than flowers in a mirror, the moon reflected in water. It ended because her smile was so beautiful.

When that time came, surely all novelists would have hormone injections to turn us into computer programmers, and all zoologists would undergo surgery to become bus conductors. Everyone would give up their hollow pursuits, and there’d be no myths, no beasts, no history, no fantasy. The government would rattle along, printing money. Yong’an would truly become an international metropolis.

Sorrowful beasts never smile. If they do, they can’t stop – not until they die. Hence their name.

Children are like that. They think life is as beautiful as a flower. But Lucia would grow up, and come to understand that sometimes living feels like chewing on wax. And so you let go. The more resilient life is, the more you want to destroy it, raze it to the ground, put on a show, all guns blazing, what joy.