A celebrity, Zhang Ji Ke, has been caught selling lewd pictures of his ex-girlfriend, Jing Tian, in order to pay back gambling debts. The news has put out a poll asking people’s opinion on this matter, with the choices being “I feel bad for his ex”, “This isn’t entertainment news, this is legal news”, “I can’t believe Zhang Ji Ke would do something like this”, and “Fuck gambling”. Comments say, “The only reason this is even in the news is to make people forget about the driver who ran people over deliberately and bombed a crowd.”
Other bloggers are talking about this news too, “I bet Zhang Ji Ke never thought that Jing Tian would call the cops. He never imagined that he didn’t have Jing Tian under his thumb. Jing Tian is exactly the kind of woman I respect the most. She never compromised, because if she’d taken a single step back, she’d be Zhang Ji Ke’s slave for the rest of her life. He’ll shamelessly continue to drag her down with him. That’s how all gamblers are. I’m calling out to all women here, no matter how much you love a man, never, ever take nudes for him. Remember this lesson.”
A feminist short story by Bing He Zhai (病鹤斋), “Long ago, there was a lemming who was the best tunneller in her whole family. She said that she wanted to go tunnel in the Imperial Palace, but all her relatives made fun of her. “Only the noblest, most sophisticated rodents have the honour of tunnelling in the Imperial Palace.”
She asked, “How do I become noble or sophisticated?”
The Chieftain told her, “First, you must get an elegant and beautiful dress.”
The lemming really wanted to go dig in farther and farther, higher and higher places, to prove that she was the best lemming of them all. So she packed up two grains of corn and left home.
She crossed one field, then two, then three. After countless fields, she was exhausted and snuck into a household to sleep. This was a very poor household. Even in the deep winter, they did not have even a single cotton-filled blanket. She found a messy, dirty feather dress in the vegetable cellar. She was shivering with cold, so she gathered the feather dress around herself, her teeth chattering.
When she woke up the next morning, she had chewed a huge hole in the dirty old feather dress in her sleep.
She patted the feather dress with her little rodent claws and put her claws together like she’d seen humans do in temples, and squeaked quietly, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. This is my bad.”
The next day, when the sun was the highest and warmest, the little lemming ate half a grain of corn and got ready to set out to seek her beautiful dress. Just as she was about to leave, she saw that under the brightest sunlight, there are the deepest of shadows. There was a woman weeping in front of the stove. Her eyes were like a bag of rice with a hole chewed in it, grains of tears fell out endlessly.
The little lemming wondered to herself, “If she cries like this, the porridge will get salty, wouldn’t it?”
“No, it won’t. We haven’t been able to afford salt for a long time.”
“You can hear me talk! You must be an angel!” Only angels can hear the speech of animals.
But the little lemming was confused, “But why would you cry? You’re an angel, you can do anything you want. Lemmings can’t do hardly anything at all, and lemmings never cry.”
The angel picked up the little lemming and put her in her sleeves, and said, “I need to hide you first. We’re almost out of food. If the old bull sees you, he’ll eat you. I used to be an angel, but the old bull talked my husband into stealing away my feather dress. Without my feather dress, I can’t fly. I’m stuck here. I can never eat flowers and drink dew. I have to figure out how to split a copper coin into three. I have to weave and maintain a household.”
“Feather dress? The one in the vegetable cellar?”
“Oh, lemming, have you seen my feather dress? Tell me where it is quickly! I must put it on so I can leave this place!”
The little lemming recalled the dress she’d chewed through, and felt it was strange. That dress didn’t look magical at all. She rubbed her head on the angel’s arms, covered with wounds, and squeaked, “Angel, how long have you been here?”
“Three years. I have never stopped looking for my feather dress.”
“Where did your feather dress come from?”
“My Father gave it to me. He said it gave me the ability to fly and make clouds, just like the divine powers he’d given to my Mother.”
There was still half a feather stuck to the little lemming’s teeth. She pulled it out and studied it closely. No matter how you looked at it, it looked like a perfectly ordinary goose feather.
“Angel, I think they might be lying to you.”
“Who’s lying to me?”
“Your Father, your husband, everyone around you who’s telling you that you can only fly with a feather dress.”
The angel’s fingers were shaking. The lemming rubbed its head on her callus-covered fingers and continued, “You’re an angel. Angels can fly by themselves.”
The little lemming took the angel to the cellar and showed her the old, mouldy, ordinary dress with a big hole in it.
“See? This is just a pile of goose feathers. There’s no magic in it at all. I chewed a hole in it without even trying!”
“How…how can this be?”
“They made up something fake, and said that your powers came from that fake thing. They kept repeating it and repeating it, until you believed them. You thought that your powers came from something else. Your husband can’t fly, right? So he has to make up some lie to tell you that you can’t fly either. Maybe even your Father can’t fly at all. He just knows how to make feather dresses. And then he claimed that you and your Mother’s divine powers all came from his dresses.”
“All you lost was just a dress. A dress can get torn, can get frayed, can get a hole chewed in it. It was never anything extraordinary at all. You don’t need a dress to leave here. You’re an angel. You always could fly.”
The angel reached out her hands like a crane. The wind and sunlight rose up from the dusty earth and bore her up lightly.
“I…never lost the ability to fly.”
“Of course! You’ve always been you! Hey, let’s go somewhere together! The sun is bright today—it’s perfect for travel.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“I was gonna go look for the most beautiful of dresses, but now I don’t want it anymore. I’ve always been able to tunnel. I’m gonna to tunnel through the Imperial Palace’s walls!”
Under the warm sunlight, the angel left her house with a lemming. She could always tunnel. She could always fly.
Enveloped in wind and sunlight, they drifted farther and farther away.”
A man in Chongqing left a flirtatious note to a wealthy lady driving a fancy car in the carpark. He was found out by the lady’s husband, who came up to his house to scold him. “You’re so young and you’re already trying to take a shortcut by selling out your body—you think that’s the easy way out? Do you have any sense of morality at all? You think that just because you sleep with someone who drives a Porsche, that Porsche will become yours?”
Comments say, “Male gold-diggers are even more terrifying than female ones.”
An education bloggers writes that, “I never imagined that after cutting unofficial workers, government jobs are facing a wage cut next. Rumours say it’s gonna be a pretty big cut too. Government employees are getting screwed? Honestly, there’s all kinds of rumours flying around, but according to all the signs I see, there’s definitely gonna be a wage cut, and there might even be more than one round of it. Everyone needs to get prepared.”
“The only thing being held up right now is that the higher ups are still arguing about how it’s going to get cut. Mostly, it’s going to depend on how much the budget shrinks. A lot of people are scared and sighing all day.”
“We’ve got less help, more work, and now less pay too? How are we supposed to deal? Objectively speaking, government jobs don’t pay that well. The pay’s risen a little over the last decade, and it’s a little more survivable, and there’s a lot less grey income like back in the day. To suddenly shunt people back to the salary they were making ten years ago, with all the inflation, and ask them to do more work besides? I don’t know who can accept this.”
“But you know, on the other hand, government work is still way better than working for a business. It’s just that government workers have been spoiled in the last couple of years. Normal people have been living tight for a while now, everyone’s had pay cuts. Why should government employees be the exception? Their income is basically taxes paid by everyone else anyways. Why should people have to live even harder lives just to keep government employees comfortable?”
Comments say, “How can they possible cut wages when it’s already only 3000 RMB a month?”
Woah - zhang jike is trash lmao. The short story is soo interesting. Today's posts were all informative and interesting in their own ways. Thanks for translating!
Thank you for short story translation! And for doing this more generally, it's fascinating and informative