colors. Then I saw brilliant flashes of light, followed by a big, pasty face that nearly touched mine. It belonged to my wife. “Xiaojia,” I heard her say, “you scared me half to death.” She was tugging me with a hand that felt sweaty, and finally managed, very clumsily, to pull me up off the floor. I shook my head. “Where am I?” “Where are you? You’re home, you poor fool.” Home. Feeling a sense of agony, I frowned, as everything that had just happened came back in a flash. “As heaven is my witness, I don’t want that tiger’s whisker, I don’t! I’m going to throw it into the fire.” She smirked and put her mouth up close to my ear. “You big fool,” she said, “did you really think that’s a tiger’s whisker? It’s one of my hairs.” I shook my head. It hurt, it hurt like crazy. “No, that can’t be. You don’t have hair like that. But even if you did, how do you explain the fact that when I held it in my hand, I could see your true form? And I saw my dieh’s true form even when I wasn’t holding it.” “Tell me, then,” she said, her curiosity piqued, “what was I?” As I looked into that fair, fresh face, then down at her arms and legs, before glancing over at my dieh, who was slumped in his armchair, everything suddenly cleared up. I must have been dreaming. My wife as a snake, my dieh as a panther, it was all a dream. She laughed a strange little laugh. “Who knows, maybe I am a snake. Yes, that’s exactly what I am, a snake!” Her face lengthened, and her eyes turned green. “If I’m a snake,” she added venomously, “I’ll wriggle my way into your belly!” Her face grew longer and longer, her eyes a deeper and deeper green, and scales reappeared on her neck. I covered my eyes with my hands and screamed: “No, you’re not, you’re not a snake, you’re human!”
————
3
————
The gate to our compound flew open.
There stood the two yayi my father had sent packing, except that now they were gray wolves in human clothing. Hands resting on their swords, they stood one on each side of the door. Scared out of my wits, I shut my eyes in hopes that this would rescue me from my dream. When I reopened my eyes, I saw that they now had yayi faces, but the backs of their hands were coated with fur, and their fingers ended in sharp claws. I was struck by the sad realization that my wife’s hair was more powerful than any tiger’s whisker could ever be. The whisker worked its magic only when you held it in your hand, but all my wife’s hair had to do was touch your hand to hold you in its supernatural power, and then it made no difference whether you kept it or threw it away, whether you were aware of its existence or not.
After the wolf-yayi took their positions by the sides of the gate, a four-man palanquin was set down on the cobblestone street in front of the gate. The bearers—a quartet of donkeys, with big, floppy ears hidden under stovepipe caps, but with easily identifiable faces—rested their glistening front hooves on the chair shafts, slobber oozing from their mouths as their breath came in snorts. By all appearances, they had run the whole way, their hoof-encased boots covered with a thick layer of dust. The legal secretary, Diao, whom everyone called Diao Laoye—he was a pointy-faced hedgehog—grabbed a corner of the chair curtain with his pink paw and pulled it open. I knew it was Magistrate Qian’s official palanquin, the one Xiaokui had spat at to bring the wrath of its owner down on his head, and I knew that the person about to step out was Gaomi County’s Magistrate, His Eminence Qian Ding, my wife’s gandieh. Logically, that made him my gandieh as well. But when I told my wife that I’d like to go along to pay my respects to him, she flatly refused. Fairness requires me to admit that Magistrate Qian had generously exempted us from paying taxes over the years, saving us a lot of silver. But he really shouldn’t have broken Xiaokui’s leg just because he spat at his palanquin. Xiaokui was a friend of mine, after all, even though he’d said to me, “You really are a fool, Xiaojia. Magistrate Qian has