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Interview with a Fox Demon

Fargo resident travels to western China in search of one of the last known “fox demon” shamans in modern times

By C.S. Hagen

SHAANXI, CHINA (PRC) – Chen Xing yawned for the tenth time and moved to the screened door of his shaman clinic. He yawned not from boredom, but rather in preparation for the spirit about to possess him.

Among other more painful effects, the yawns were a human side effect and a small price to pay for signing a deal with a fox spirit, he said. Xing yawned once more, this time longer and louder than before.

Chen Xing, or Chen Saiwa, before being possessed by a fox demon – photo by C.S. Hagen

“When it possesses me I don’t know or remember anything,” Xing, who prefers to be called by his new name, Chen Saiwa, said. His final yawn was an impossible, bone-chilling intake of breath that lasted longer than half a minute. His eyes burned like slow-burning coals and he smiled a second before the possession was complete. “It’s all through the Boluo Fox.”

At the screen door he doubled over, retching, and then stood. His slightly plump, young body no longer resembled the 37-year-old peasant’s son. Ask the villagers of Boluo or the infirmed in Yulin, Xi’an, or Inner Mongolia and he was Chen Saiwa, local shaman healer, diviner and messenger of Guanyin Pusa, or the Goddess of Mercy.

Eyes squinted and teary, only two front teeth protruded from between his pursed lips. Although the day was clear and sunlight streamed through a crack in the tinted, boarded-up windows, his thinning, dark hair had gone almost completely grey. Hands behind his back and slightly bent forward at the waist, his movements were stiff and slow, those of a much older man. He used yellow charm paper to wipe tears from his eyes.

“Good, good,” Saiwa said in a different, gravelly voice. Dressed in blue jeans, a wife beater T-shirt and tennis shoes, he scraped his feet to the fox altar that held two bottles of Chinese wine and snatched one of them. Saiwa thirstily swallowed once – as easily as the potent alcohol was water – then spat a second on his left palm holding it to the light for study.

“I am nothing but a small, small fox spirit. Hei-ki-ma-hei-ki-ma. What is it that you seek?”

The ancient town of Boluo - photo by C.S. Hagen

The ancient town of Boluo, the winding Wuding River, and the Ordos Desert – photo by C.S. Hagen

Fated for Possession

Beneath the crumbling, baked brick walls of Boluo Castle in northern Shaanxi province an entire village believes in the Boluo Fox. They have believed since before World War II. They say a man named Lei Zheng Wu, known to villagers as Old Wu, was the spirit’s medium before he died of liver cancer in 1994 and Saiwa accepted the fox’s terms.

They call Saiwa and his progenitor miracle workers, healers of the sick of body and soul, and many smile warmly when asked about their local hero.

“At first, like many others, I didn’t believe,” said Wang Xinxin, a former resident of Boluo now living in nearby Yulin. “But Old Wu treated me for an illness and he treated me well. Later, Chen told me everything from my past very clearly, things he could not or should not have known. I thought Saiwa was crazy at the beginning, we all thought he was crazy, but now many people from Boluo even Inner Mongolia come here to Yulin to get healed.”

Both men’s stories are similar, Wang said. Before accepting the fox spirit, neither of the men could read nor write. Both were poor, Old Wu learning the trade of goat herding and Saiwa that of an underpaid chef.

“His food was terrible to eat,” Wang said.

And both men underwent three years of intense sickness.

“I am a peasant’s son,” Saiwa said. “I was completely opposed to it at first. But I couldn’t work, couldn’t make money. I was so sick and the hospitals had no idea why and could do nothing for me. For three years I went through a bitter time. The fox beat me down until I agreed, and since it possessed me I got better, day-by-day until now I can live a normal life.

Saiwa is married and has paid the government fines by having a second child. His predecessor Old Wu was married with seven children, six boys and one girl. He admitted he feels blessed with virility and wants more children.

“It spoke to me and told me then it was the Boluo Fox,” Saiwa said, “and that it was fate that we should be together.”

Lei Ying, the “son of thunder” standing before his father’s old fox clinic – photo by C.S. Hagen

Old Wu and the First Possession

A fox shrine in Boluo stands behind the former home of Old Wu and is guarded religiously by his sons. On the southern side of the shrine there is a small house, an outdoor kitchen and a hollowed out cave where Old Wu used to heal and his grandfather once lived.

“This is the real clinic,” said Lei Ying, the eldest of Old Wu’s sons. He is the son of lightning, Ying joked, as the surname Lei means lightning in Chinese. Despite the rumors that the children of fox spirits are imbued with supernatural abilities, he says neither he nor his siblings are so blessed.

Legends that foxes are demigods of fertility stand to reason, he said. Ying is older than sixty and wears large sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat. His handshake is strong and he brandishes a friendly smile at every question. He opened the doors to his childhood home and gave a tour of the inside of the small fox shrine. Six stone markers stand like graves toward the east side of the structure.

The fox temple Chen Saiwa built – photo by C.S. Hagen

The white, stone shrine had no stairs going up and yet was three stories high. A small room at the bottom of the shrine was made for worshippers. Old Wu’s son lights four incense sticks inside the clinic, bows and talks of his childhood.

“It was strange growing up with a fox spirit for a father, but I could do nothing to change that,” he said and pointed to the drawing of his father at the altar. In the picture, a white turban is wrapped around his father’s head and he wears a Mao-styled jacket. The room is lined with red silk banners emblazoned with gold-colored writing in appreciation for Old Wu and Saiwa’s shamanist work. Even as a child, he said, neighbors or classmates did not ostracize him and his family, at least not until the Cultural Revolution.

“My father was reluctant at first. Before the fox spirit possessed him he could not read and the only thing he knew how to do was tend sheep.”

After three years of sickness where he wore little but undergarments in the winter and thick wool coats in the summer, the fox spirit possessed Old Wu, and he could not only cure the sick, he could read and write charms as well. All without any study, Ying said. He was capable of performing shamanistic rituals, read people’s fortunes and write charms to ward off evil. He began each session by spitting wine into his left hand and examining it, Ying said.

“It was as if the spirit gave him the powers to read and write, to predict the future and cure the ill.

Inside the Lei family fox clinic – photo by C.S. Hagen

“He used to sit in a chair here,” Ying pointed to a desk near the old door where a chair once stood. “And he kept his door open at all times. People would come by, they would lie on the bed and he would spit wine on to his hand and perform miracles.”

He charged an average of five Chinese dollars per visit, not a trifling fee before World War II, but never turned a patient away.

“I was healed here once as a boy,” said Zhang Xing Rong, a neighbor. “And once my son was sick, it was a disease you would not understand but it had to do with the earth. Old Wu spit wine on to his hand and could see the problem by studying his palm. He then gently picked up my son’s legs and kissed them with his lips, like this.” Zhang imitated the fox spirit delicately taking his son’s legs and made a kissing noise.

“And then he was better. We didn’t even have to buy medicine, and in those days it only cost us five Chinese dollars.”

People in the village believe in the fox spirit, Zhang said, and consider its nearby presence a blessing. The village is between the mountain of Boluo Castle and a rural highway lined with shops. He was born here like his forefathers as far back as he can remember, he said. Each passing person who stood to stare and ask why a foreigner was walking through their village smiled and nodded their heads when told he was looking for the son of Old Wu. They quickly hurried on their way after a few words amongst themselves as the village had a wedding to prepare for. One woman named Chen Hua Hua, also reportedly possessed by a vixen spirit, helps the Lei family and looks after the village’s fox shrine, called Boluo Ting. It was built in honor of the Boluo Fox after the Cultural Revolution by funds predominantly provided for by Saiwa. She stood holding a hooked, wooden beam for carrying ceremonial buckets of water for the upcoming wedding. She recognized Old Wu as the former village fox spirit and excused herself to make ready for the newlywed’s arrival when firecrackers erupted back down the dirt path.

Following the path to the base of the village stands a thousand-year-old temple named Jieyin Temple, or the Receiving Temple of Boluo. The villagers nickname the temple, not the shrine near Old Wu’s house, the Boluo Fox Temple, Zhang said.

“We always respect it, and protect it when we could,” Zhang said.

During the Cultural Revolution all superstitions, cult magic and shamans were vehemently banned throughout China. Old Wu spent three years of a seven-year sentence in prison. He became possessed by the Boluo Fox in the late 1940s and was imprisoned in 1959 during the Anti-Superstition Socialist Education Campaign.

After his release he continued to practice in secret, Ying said. Although the government suppressed him, among his clients were high-ranking cadres from the regional government.

Old Wu practiced in secret.

The fox clinic in those days was a hidden-away room, which was part of a more larger temple complex. There was room for three kneeling supplicants.

“He got out early because of good behavior and everyone liked him.” Ying said. “Plus the government then had nothing to feed their prisoners.”

The Jieyin Temple holds the deteriorated leftovers of an old sandstone carving of Buddha that dates back to the Tang Dynasty. A monk completed the carving after he saw a natural outline of Buddha in the stone. Historically, the carving is called Stone Buddha, and although the first temple was built around the 6th century A.D., it has withstood fire, wars, and attempted lootings by Mongolians, Chinese, British, French and Spanish invaders. Centuries of violence and bitter desert elements have reduced Stone Buddha to resemble a two-faced demon today, but a visage remains. Recent government funding that includes the restoration of the Boluo Castle above has breathed fresh life into the village and despite China’s hesitancy toward the belief of fox spirits or demons, holds two larger than life idols in respect for two fox spirits.

Jin Chan Laotzu, or Old Master of the Golden Chan, the original fox demon – at left – photo by C.S. Hagen

The Boluo Fox, according to temple documents, is named Jin Chan Laotzu, or Old Master of the Golden Chan, and it stands amongst the seven Diamond Kings of Heaven, the protectors or governors of the continents, beneath the carving of Stone Buddha. Each king is monstrous in appearance and size and carries a magical weapon. One holds Blue Cloud, a magic sword capable of bringing the Black Wind – a thousand spears in a single swing. Another king brandishes the Umbrella of Chaos, formed of supernatural pearls that can generate violent storms and earthquakes. Strangely, inside the temple shrine before Stone Buddha that stands more than thirty feet high, only the fox spirit appears humanly normal. Dressed in blue robes and a red cape, it stands with his hands raised, palms upwards, neither smiling nor frowning.

The Boluo Fox didn’t leave Old Wu until shortly before his death in 1994. Old Wu died of liver cancer and didn’t once try to cure himself, Zhang said.

“He was happy until the end.”

“But he was sad when the fox spirit left him,” Ying said. “The fox spirit went out and possessed another man not from this village. His name is Chen Saiwa and he lives in Yulin.”

Heading back down the path through the village and away from the ancient Boluo Castle, Ying stopped at the wedding as the newlyweds arrived. He grinned and talked to neighbors and cheered as madly drumming dancers past. Although Ying would admit to being nothing more than a keeper of his father’s temple, one glance at his leathered face and the lifelong friends gathering around him sharing cigarettes said at the very least, the son of lightning was a highly respected member of the small village.

Boluo’s crumbling walls – photo by C.S. Hagen

Boluo, an ancient fortress dating back to the Ming Dynasty, circa 14th century A.D., was built to protect China against the marauding hordes of Genghis Khan’s descendants. It borders Inner Mongolia and the western Ordos Desert. Once towering walls surrounded the city have mostly crumbled. The city gate still stands and a handful of people reside behind the walls. Some of the inhabitants live in grottos carved into hillsides. The Wuding River lazily winds and shines silver in the valley below. Crops grow in abundance and the smells of maize, barley and fennel fill the air.

It is a perfect lair for a fox, said Taoist Master He Lutong, from Tianjin.

“Only in the ancient, undeveloped areas can something like this happen,” Master He said. “Only where history is long and the traditions are real will foxes make their appearance.”

Spirits, he said, do not like the light and the bustle of city life. They prefer to reside where they are respected or feared. They predominantly prey on the sick and weak-minded. Legends of fox spirits are mostly as whorish vixens capable of sucking souls and eating the hearts of men. But once they’ve become a nine-tailed fox through mediation, knowledge and deeds, he said, whether by the high road or the low or the path of evil, they become the Goddess of Mercy’s messengers and sometimes assassins.

“The difference between good and evil as we know today are humanity’s definition, not the fox’s,” Master He said. “They have their own definition. Give an evil person or a good person a cure, it doesn’t matter to them. And sometimes an evil person’s cure may be punishment.”

A cure, perhaps, as in the legend of Su Daji, an evil vixen who corrupted the heart of a once righteous emperor and destroyed the Shang Dynasty nearly four thousand years ago. According to the Chinese texts such as the Lost Books of Zhou and the Investiture of the Gods, she enjoyed eating men’s hearts, inventing new ways of torturing her many enemies and the art of seduction. She was sent to destroy the emperor after he ridiculed Nüwa, one of the most ancient Chinese gods.

The fact that a kind-hearted fox spirit reportedly lives in Western China did not surprise Master He, and he made mention of another fox spirit enshrined in the Queen of Heaven Temple in Tianjin, a city of eleven million people near the country’s capitol.

Granny Wang the Third at Tianjin’s Temple of the Heavenly Empress – photo by Annie Gao

“Granny Wang the Third was very good with the people,” Master He said. Although he had never heard of Saiwa or Lao Wu, he said their stories are similar. Granny Wang predominantly resided near Tianjin during the end of the last dynasty of China. Those were days of great poverty and affluence and worst of all, war, Master He said. But Granny Wang kept away from the rivalries, sometimes helping villagers escape peril at the hands of warlords and bandits. “You would almost never find her in the temples, she was always in the people’s homes, curing the sick and helping the people avoid calamity.”

Temple reports dating back to the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 say that she was a joyous person, always keeping herself busy until her death when one of the legends says she turned to stone inside Tianjin’s Queen of Heaven Temple. Her effigy remains there, and also at the Mountain of Marvelous Peak in Beijing, but she is unknown throughout most of China. She holds a vial of pills in one hand and people visit her to help with illness to this day, Master He said. They burn incense, bow three times, and rub her feet to cure illness, touch her hands to stay healthy.

“No problem was too little for her,” Master He said.

Mention her name in Tianjin to anyone born before the Cultural Revolution and they smile. “Big problem, little problem, Granny Wang will show,” said Boxer Rebellion Musuem curator Lin Xinqiao. He recalled as a child living in the crowded hutong streets of Tianjin where a shrine was dedicated to her. The shrine was torn down and her effigy thrown into the city’s main river during the Cultural Revolution, he said. As a child he remembers his mother paying homage to Granny Wang.

Across Asia worship of the fox is widespread. Some fear the spirit; others respect it. In China, the fox spirit is known as the huxian, or hulijing. In Japan, the kitsune lives on through the practice of worshipping Inari. Japanese families who are known as fox familiars reportedly raise foxes from generation to generation to achieve good fortune. In Korea the kumiho is a malevolent creature that enjoys eating human livers.

“In some places and instances it is known more or less as the opposite of Buddha,” Master He said. Although the fox spirit is a messenger for the gods, it can also help human kind achieve instant gratification for prayers. For instance, Master He said, a disgruntled wife whose husband is cheating on her or for vengeance of any kind. In the past in Southern China, rare instances of widespread panic have been attributed to the fox spirit for spreading a disease known as Koro. Koro is a culture-specific syndrome in which the person has an overpowering belief that his or her genitals will retract and disappear. Westernized doctors have treated such patients with psychotherapy, while in China Taoist priests beat gongs and incant charms to exorcise the fox spirit.

Taoist priests and legends generally agree that although vixens can be killed while in the form of a fox or trapped by experienced priests, peach wood, or toumuk in Cantonese, is the best weapon to use to kill them. A nine-tailed fox who has achieved the status by either the moral road or the path of evil, is very difficult if not impossible to kill, Master He said.

“Of course they exist,” Master He said while at his office. Two customers awaited him to have their fortunes read. “There is simply too much evidence throughout history and today to say they do not.”

Chen Saiwa, after possession in his clinic – photo by C.S. Hagen

Interview with the Boluo Fox

Before Saiwa became possessed he asked the Boluo Fox if it was willing to be interviewed. He invites the Boluo Fox when he needs but has no control over when the fox spirit will leave. After lighting four incense sticks, which he placed upon the altar, he lit a fifth curled incense and placed it underneath. He then kowtowed, or bowed three times before an effigy of Goddess of Mercy. Grabbing a carved canister filled with fortune sticks, he shook it until one fell out.

The answer was yes.

More than an hour passed before the final yawn and the possession was complete. The possessed Saiwa smiled frequently, and said he had met Westerners before but never for an interview. He drank periodically, straight from the bottle, coughed from the lower abdomen after each sip and kept one hand always behind his back.

“You desire information. Do not fear. I will not hurt you,” Saiwa said. He spoke Chinese but of an ancient form, one that is no longer used in modern China.

The Stone Buddha – photo by C.S. Hagen

Saiwa, or the Boluo Fox, said he has no name. Neither does he need to eat or sleep. He has no humanly recognizable form any longer and is an assistant of the Goddess of Mercy. He said in human time he is older than 10,000 years and originally was a black fox that came from Mongolia. After crossing the Ordos Desert into Shaanxi he arrived in the form of a fox at the Stone Buddha carving before it was made. Upon entering the temple he injured his paw and The Goddess of Mercy took pity on him, taking him for a pupil.

Saiwa refers to himself only as “this monk,” and says many of the haunting stories of evil fox demons are little more than legend. The infamous Su Daji, concubine of the Emperor Zhou of the Shang Dynasty in 400 B.C., was not a fox spirit, he said. She was simply an evil woman.

“Just as with people, there exist the good and the bad. When this monk was in training this monk had many fox friends, just as people have friends, who were bad and tried to lead this monk astray. This monk made many mistakes. Many friends took the bad road. The xie dao (path of evil), is the easiest path.” The Boluo Fox took another sip from the bottle and shuffled closer.

“Hei-ki-ma-hei-ki-ma,” the Boluo Fox repeated each time he finished a statement.

He merely smiled when asked if he had ever eaten a human heart. According to ancient Chinese texts human hearts keep a young fox’s complexion after they learn to shape shift into human form. A human soul on the other hand, is far more potent. It is a powerful aphrodisiac to help them achieve immortality.

Besides healing the sick and protecting humans, one of his responsibilities, he said, was to ensure that other fox spirits do not stray from the path of enlightenment. He reins them in when possible, and sees that they are punished when he cannot control them. Though he has never met one, fox spirits are everywhere, he said, even in the United States. When Saiwa listens he squints his eyes and drinks deeply from the glass bottle of wine. Afterward, he smiles, like a rabbit and differently from the man before the possession. He appears older, greyer, eyes puffier but genuinely interested in answering any questions he can.

Some questions he said he was not allowed to answer. Questions about the progress of mankind through the centuries, the end of the world and if heaven truly exists.

“This is the first time we have met and you are the first Westerner to interview me,” he said. “There are many things this monk cannot tell you for this monk is but a servant of the Goddess of Mercy and does only her bidding.

“You ask this monk why this monk chose Lei Zheng Wu and Chen Saiwa? Chen Saiwa is but a dock for this monk to inhabit and perform her will. This monk looked inside them and saw our meeting was destiny.”

The two men are related, but not directly. Saiwa’s mother was Lao Wu’s wife’s sister. The Boluo Fox did not choose one of Lao Wu’s direct family to inhabit.

Outside of his host’s body, the Boluo Fox said it is impossible for humans to see his true form. While he was in training before the first dynasty of China, he had to learn to take the shape of a human. He had to eat and sleep, just like any other fox. It took him one thousand years to reach the Ninth Tail, or the final step in a fox’s road to enlightenment. His training included performing good deeds, like healing the sick, helping the injured and the poor, and above all, protecting human beings in any way he could.

When asked about the legends of other fox spirits eating human hearts or stealing qi and souls away, he avoided the question and said he was far above such practices now and that not all legends are true.

“We have rules that are enforced. If fox spirits break those rules they are punished. There are many legends about us and many roads we can take,” he rubbed a hand across his cheek much like a fox might while cleaning his paw.

“And there are many of us on earth, and not just in China. Hei-ki-ma-hei-ki-ma. This monk won’t be here forever but this monk will listen to the will of Buddha, whose most fervent dream is peace on earth and to fight against calamity.

“Hei-ki-ma-hei-ki-ma.”

Family Fox Feud at Boluo

Wedding celebration in Boluo – photo by C.S. Hagen

At the village of Boluo no one doubts the authenticity of Saiwa’s claim that the Boluo Fox chose him as a medium, but Lei’s children forced Saiwa from their community.

“His sons in their hearts are not happy,” Wang Xinxin said. “They did not like him at first and they do not like him now. It is a family problem.”

Saiwa’s mother and Lei’s wife were sisters, Wang said. In keeping with the tradition of fox familiars, Lei’s family is jealous that the Boluo Fox chose someone outside of their immediate family. Even after Saiwa built the Fox Shrine behind Jie Yin Temple in the late 1990s, the Lei family keeps watch over the shrine but does not want Saiwa to return.

“Old Wu’s family is jealous of me after I built the shrine,” Saiwa said. He spent upwards of eight hundred thousand Chinese dollars in constructing the memorial to the Boluo Fox. “It isn’t important that I go back, the Boluo Fox wants to return. Boluo has been his home for a very long time.”

Ying refused to speak on the matter.

Despite the family opposition, Saiwa is content and happy that he allowed the Boluo Fox to use him as a medium for healing. He has learned how to read and write and spends his spare time studying Buddhist scriptures. He receives patients daily and said the possession is sometimes painful.

“It was unpleasant at first,” he said before the Boluo Fox possessed him. “There is a pain or more like an emptiness in my head. When it’s over I remember nothing during the time he possessed me and I must lay down for an hour or so before I feel better.”

Thinking back twelve years before when he first encountered the Boluo Fox he said he did not believe such creatures existed when he was young.

“Now my days are simple. I am a simple man and do not regret my decision.” Saiwa married after he accepted his fate of being the “port” or caretaker for the Boluo Fox. He sired two children, a boy and a girl, both of whom accept his role as a shamanistic fox medium.

“My wife thought I was crazy at first,” he said. “But through the years she has accepted our fate. Our children have never been sick. Not once.” When the Boluo Fox possesses him, his friend and patient Wang said he speaks with the same voice as Old Wu. They both use the same methods to cure the sick.

“He even looks and acts the same,” Wang said. “Many people from Boluo come here to Yulin to get healed,” he said. “And you pay as you can, usually people pay 30 to fifty Chinese dollars but its up to the individual. Saiwa will not turn anyone away even if they cannot pay.”

Saiwa says he cannot cure all sicknesses however, some patients he leaves to the hands of science and modern medicine. He openly admits his skills, once possessed, cannot cure every ailment. A 24-year-old man whose muscles were deteriorating was once brought to him for consultation. The man was taking illegal drugs, Saiwa said. His parents did not know and the young man refused to admit his addiction until the Boluo Fox told them what his problem was.

“They told me what I said after I woke,” Saiwa said. “At least now they can seek proper care and treat the real problem and not just the symptoms.” Saiwa said no matter how the Cultural Revolution repressed shamanism and mystic beliefs, there are many like him throughout China, some of whom are imposters seeking recognition. His patient, Wang, agreed.

“There are a lot of bad foxes out there,” Wang said. “Back in Boluo there is a woman there who claims to be a fox spirit as well, but I don’t believe it is true. I haven’t heard of any bad foxes that have done terrible things, it’s more like they are fake, and will treat you for an illness but you walk away feeling even more uncomfortable than when you arrived.”

Saiwa has been treating people from Boluo, Yulin, Inner Mongolia and Xi’an for more than twelve years. Hanging from the walls of his clinic are crimson silk banners, each one in recognition for his healing work. Hanging closer to the altar are strips of blue paper, also giving testimony to those he has healed.

“If I treated someone improperly and that person died, no one would believe in me,” Saiwa said.

Wang Xinxin worshipping at the fox altar – photo by C.S. Hagen

Wang described how Saiwa told him of a time when Wang had been in a traffic accident and burned his leg. Local doctors could not heal his injuries and the wound became infected. At one point doctors in Yulin told him he would lose his lower leg. As a truck driver Wang could not continue his work without the use of both legs and he turned to the Boluo Fox for assistance.

A foul smelling tincture of boiled herbs, bean paste, and yellow wine then administered by the hands of the Boluo Fox cured him.

“The hospital could not heal me, they said they might have to take my leg,” Wang said. “But he healed me within three days. There are many things that are hard to believe, but I’ve seen proof enough and I do believe.

“The Boluo Fox is real.”

MAGPIE BRIDGE – Chapter One – Table Scars

September 19, 2014 / CSHagen / 0 Comments

氣

Rusty water dripped from a sagging ceiling on to a pockmarked table. The droplets pooled and slipped through a crack that ran through the only furniture Soren Anderson owned. Soren dipped a bony forefinger into the ruddy plash. Pipe water resembled blood, and then ink, then blood again from erratic neon light. Transformers buzzed like late summer yellow jackets.

He bought the table along with one rounded back chair from a belly-up bar on Goose Island, just before the Chicago city-state was formed and the island became Satan’s Sanctum, No Care Zone Number Fifty-Six. He needed to write, finish his story, but each time he brought pen to paper a nick in the hard wood caught his attention and his mind wandered. A gang fight, perhaps? A made man’s last mark before two in the head? Or maybe some woman’s boot heel, propped roughly on top for a sloppy screw. Three parallel lines along the table’s left edge resembled fingernail tracks. Cigarette burns formed a swastika in the middle. The table had stories to tell. Just like him. If only it didn’t hurt so much to remember.

Soren ran his hand across the nicked surface, exposing a forearm through his worn trench coat, which doubled as a bathrobe. Fifteen scars starting below his hand’s meaty part led to his bicep. His arm was a fleshy, barren field tilled by a razor’s edge. Each discolored furrow was equally distant, a thumb’s width apart. One final space was left to cut on his other arm, a space to mark the thirty-first year since his heart was stolen. And then he might start on his legs. The worst scar however, wasn’t on his arms. Starting below his jugular notch it ran down his sternum, took a violent turn over his left pectoral muscle and ended at his armpit. The giant, pinkish L-shaped scar made him shiver every time he saw it through the soap scum of his bathroom mirror.

L for love or lost, love lost.

Soren turned back to the yellow notepad and read what he had crossed out with his Uni-Ball.

“It wasn’t my fault. Danni Pan poisoned me.” True, but a boring beginning.

Spilled gin smeared the second sentence, something about foxes and hearts. Skipping to number three, which ran the width of the page to the ninth pale blue line, it was the best he had written yet, but gave too much away.

“I arrived behind the bamboo curtain with nothing more than a cold, one of those slow, comfortable sniffles that carry a husky, after sex voice but light enough to still cough through half a cigarette. And I escaped almost the same way, three years later, a fake Marlboro dangling from my lips, but without my heart.”

Words. That’s all they were. But strung together pained him to read. Instinctively, he reached his right hand to his chest, still wishing, hoping to feel a beat, anything that resembled a pulse.

His veins were silent.

A cool breeze shifted the curtains, turning the jaundiced gauze into a flaming wall heralding spices from the Mexican restaurant across the street. Sometimes through his window, usually in autumn, when the breezes blew just right, he could smell something resembling Norma’s alfalfa fields, in the former state of North Dakota, and the scent would take him on a journey home, to Klara waving proudly from the back of a red convertible after winning the Miss North Dakota Pageant, and to his daughter, whom he hadn’t seen in thirty years.

Ah, Klara. Every single man within a hundred miles wanted to court her in those young days, but she only had eyes for him. She was his first friend, his first love. Before Danni he had only ever kissed Klara. He missed her. Not a day passed when he didn’t wonder about their daughter Vivi, short for Olivia. Stomach cancer had taken Klara’s life nine years ago. He kept track of local events and obituary notices with a subscription to the Kenmare News. Vivi, as far as he knew, was still alive, but probably wanted nothing to do with him. The only photograph he had of her was a wrinkled three by five still folded in his wallet. She was six then, which would make her thirty-six now. If he had the opportunity to see her though, he would, but from a safe distance, just to make sure she was all right. A man in his condition couldn’t afford friends or family. They always died in the end.

His left thumb caressed a groove in the table. It formed the letter C almost perfectly. That looks like a bite mark. But whose Lilliputian mouth could possibly bite the top of a table? He was procrastinating again.

Soren shook his head angrily and forced the pen’s tip through the notebook’s first few pages. Ink leaked from the tip and spread across the page. He was not a writer, but grammatology, like mechanics, always intrigued him. He had a story to tell, although nobody would believe him. They should though, everyone really should. Danni would find him sooner or later and retrieve what she had not taken that terrible night in Three Rivers, China. Already their yips and howls woke him at night. Fox screams had a way of unnerving a man especially in the dead hours of a crowded city.

His hand bumped a hard object under his unwashed, wife beater t-shirt. He gripped it tight and closed his eyes. Is there enough time to finish? The oblong object clung to an iron chain around his neck, and it was his only protection. Toumuk, they called it in the East. In English, it was nothing more than carved peach wood.

Slowly, Soren withdrew the wood from beneath his shirt. The metal links jangled, conjuring hobbles and led balls and weighed unusually heavy in his palm. So far the amulet protected him. When fox demons neared his senses heightened. Air gave him cottonmouth, but if he held his breath deep inside his vision cleared, his muscles tightened and inside, perhaps it was his soul, stirred.

He studied the amulet before slipping it back under his shirt. It was shaped like an Indian arrowhead. A strange, Chinese symbol was engraved in the wood’s center. He guessed it was a charm fox demons didn’t like. The symbol’s top resembled a horned beast with squiggly marks. At the bottom, lines connected by small circles resembled a Galilean star chart. It was the only gift from his one time friend, Little Jack.

“Curse you god,” Soren said. “Curse you to my hell.”

There were no gods. The gods were on a very lengthy vacation. He would live long enough to finish his story and warn the world, hopefully no longer than that. If nobody believed him then fuck them. Fuck them all.

Books at the far end of the table broke the harshest neon beams. Since his escape back to America he had collected every written work he could find on fox demons. The authors were most likely dead now, for he had never known another man like him. First, there was J.J.M. DeGroot, an eighteen ninety-two author of a six-volume series on the supernatural in China. Then there was Pu Songling, a seventeenth-century author who was either infatuated with fox demons or was one himself. In his books fox demons appeared as ghosts or tricksters who ate human hearts and sucked down souls like he drank gin. Sometimes they were benevolent, and helped a righteous king. Interesting reading but neither author offered ways to kill a fox demon. Sun Ce’s book Strategies of the Warring States Period taught him about toumuk, or peach wood, as a protective talisman. Once, in another collection written in Chinese, he read about an especially sinister fox demon named Su Daji who overthrew the Shang Dynasty nearly three thousand years ago. He couldn’t tell if her story was legend or fact, and decided it was a little of both.

Soren shook a last cigarette from his pack of non-filtered Giant Pandas, tried his lighter a dozen times before tossing it across the table and used the gas stove. He filled his lungs with the acrid smoke, enjoying the sensation of muscles tightening against his bones. It was the only pleasure he had. He finished the cigarette in three puffs, burned his lip and cooled the injury with the last of his gin. He needed more if he was to finish his story.

Before unbolting the vertical locks on his door he turned up the trench coat’s collar, slipped on a pair of loafers and cocked a fedora low over his forehead. “Another trip to the trenches.”

Sidewalks and busy streets were his battlefield. He preferred his room’s solitude to dealing with living people. His skin was paler than most, and he wore his trench coat and fedora no matter the weather. People with beating hearts had a way of seeing through the layers and discovering his secrets. Their judgment of him was evident in their eyes, the furtive glances followed by a slight nose wrinkling as they passed. Or maybe it was just his smell. No shower or eau de toilette could rid his faintly sweet scent of cloves.

Soren poked his head from the entrance and waited before being satisfied no one was watching. Eyes glued to the well-worn hardwood floor, he closed the door gently behind him. He didn’t want to alert his neighbor in Two-B, an annoying young woman who had moved into the apartment next to his several months before. She had taken the apartment after Mrs. Papadopoulos’ death last summer of a heat stroke. Mrs.

Papadopoulos spoke no English, but Soren always understood what she said. She had been a sweet, old soul. Two-B, however, was one of those alternative types, with a nose ring and purple hair, some tattoos, probably a lesbian because all her friends were girls.

He peeped through the eyehole the day she moved in and caught her standing at his door, as if contemplating whether to knock. One hand on the railing he hurried down the stairs, turned right outside the tenement apartment and headed toward the nearest store, Mishka’s Liquors.

Soren risked the streets at night, when shadows brightened with flickering bar signs or droning streetlights. It was the best time for anonymity, when most people in his neighborhood were between their drinks, or had their eyes set on short-skirted

streetwalkers who dared breach Satan’s Sanctum relative protection. Prostitution, outside the No Care Zones, was illegal.

Keeping to the sidewalk’s inner edge he evaded protruding stairs and trashcans. He passed dark windows: Chinese herbalists, a fortuneteller’s parlor called Lok Tai Fook, a sex shop with mannequins clad in leather masks, and then he came to an intersection. The Clark Street Bridge was silent.

A late night Cantonese vendor was packing chairs on to an overloaded, motorized three-wheeled bicycle. Behind him on elevated tracks, the first morning El Train rumbled closer. He turned right on Wacker Drive and inhaled the fishy Chicago River from across the street. He held his breath savoring the potent odor and the rippling sensation that coursed through his muscles.

Half a block from Mishka’s Liquors a man in a beanie cap emerged from a narrow alley. An alcoholic stench poured from his skin.

“Excuse me,” Soren said. He immediately regretted speaking for when he exhaled his muscles went limp.

“You got a light?”

“Sorry, no.”

“Hey man.” The man sidestepped to block his path. He spoke like an English man trying yooper English. “Assist a brother out.”

“I don’t have a lighter.”

He stepped closer and reached for his arm. Soren recoiled, as if the hand was an attacking snake. He inhaled deeper and waited for the man’s aura to appear, which always came when he held his breath.

“Listen to me,” the man said. His voice was low and gravelly and he no longer tried to hide his English accent. Shadows hid his face. “You must come with me if you want to live.”

Soren backed up against protruding stairs.

“Eight or nine of ten who behold her are defiled.”

He’d heard those words before. Where?

“Taken in by her beauty they’re defiled.”

He didn’t want to listen.

“Eater of souls, scavenger of hearts, within her arms sanity departs.”

“Shut up.”

The beggar grabbed his forearm. It was his words now that shriveled his testicles to the size of raisins. Breathing in didn’t help distinguish his aura. He had none. Nervously, Soren scanned the street behind his assailant. A drunk staggering across the street glowed light brown. Two women emerging from a parked car had crimson halos. In his experience only the dead and fox demons had no aura.

Soren pushed him back. “Step away from me.”

The man scowled. “You have no bloody idea, do you?”

Soren pushed past, but the man latched on to his shoulder, pivoting him. Streetlights dimmed. A distant car’s horn slowed, mooing like a dying cow. Air around him and within crackled with energy, and it coursed down his arm into his clenched fist and straight into the man’s cheekbone.

The man staggered. The car’s horn ended. Streetlights brightened. The man spat a long stream and wiped his lips before giving a short, disinterested chuckle. Soren readied for the counter punch.

“Not bad for a young pup.” He massaged his jaw.

“Fuck you. What do you want? What are you?”

“What I am is not important.” The man raised his head, revealing a hawkish nose and scraggly beard. His lips were cracked and his teeth stained yellow. Under the sickening layer of stale booze Soren detected a sweeter, familiar scent. “You are the last one. Prince Bigan wishes to meet you.”

“Prince who? I’m not going anywhere.”

“Fool.” He hissed. “Then we’re all bloody well done for.”

He stepped backward into the shadows. “Can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Fucking drunk,” Soren said. But his voice shook and he suddenly needed a drink more than ever. Soren reeled away, puzzled about the man’s scent until he reached Mishka’s Liquor’s glass door. The welcoming bell chimed. Punjab, the store’s graveyard shift manager, popped his head from behind a counter. Tobacco’s musky tang rushed outward and he remembered.

The man smelled like cloves.

Photos by C.S. Hagen - 74 Munan Road, formerly Hong Kong Road, Li Baowu's house, presently Goubuli restaurant. From 1997 - 2000 was known as Broadway Cafe.

Crate Ripper Case

February 16, 2014 / CSHagen / 0 Comments

By C.S. Hagen

TIANJIN, CHINA – Twisted love triangle stories from time immemorial outnumber the flakes of a winter’s snow, but there is one instance, especially appalling, that occurred in Tianjin. This true story, called the “Crate Ripper Case,” takes place in the old English Concession area in October 1947, and is listed in historical records as one of the “Eight Strange Cases of the Republic.”

Gather closely. Add a log to the hearth. Light and good jasmine tea will scare the demons away. Listen in; you don’t want to miss a single word.

Fifteen months before Mao Zedong’s communist troops stormed into Tianjin via the Qingnian Road, the Li family lived in four identical houses at the golden corner of Hong Kong and Glasgow roads, known today as Munan and Guilin roads. Father Li, an industrious entrepreneur, the brainchild behind the Tianjin Zhongtian Electric Factory, passed his legacy to his children, but failed to endow his fortitude to his youngest son, Li Baowu.

Baowu was a loafing playboy, most likely inbred traits inherited from Tianjin’s Dark Drifters. He kept er nais, or concubines, in Tudor houses from the northern-most Austrian Concession all the way to the south, where the Germans and Belgians lived. His wife of twenty years, Dong Yuzhen, daughter of the Kuomintang mayor of Tianjin at the time, Dong Zhengguo, he kept at the corner house on Munan Road with his four surviving children.

Lucky, lackadaisical Baowu, being an educated chap, a Tianjin College of Business graduate (now the Foreign Language Institute on Racecourse Road), was naturally a curious fellow, for his sexual escapades and frivolous parties were the talk of the town.

Baowu could not be tamed. Under his stretched belt he had three wives, a host of concubines and saltwater girls who lived in boats along the Hai River.

Saltwater girls came from sampans like these, throughout history they were denied the chance to live on land and became brothels on the water

Saltwater girls came from sampans like these, throughout history they were denied the chance to live on land and their homes became brothels on the water – photo by C.S. Hagen

Not until 1945, days after the Japanese left in defeat from Tianjin, did Baowu find his perfect match and fourth wife. A half German, half Chinese beauty named Shi Meili, English name Marion Sze, winner of the Miss Beidaihe Beauty Pageant. Before she met Baowu she was a secretary with round, wet eyes, a pointed chin, and eyebrows arched like silkworms, the Tianjin Republic Daily reported in 1947.

Love fell on Baowu. Meili agreed to become his fourth wife and he bought her a house at Number 53 Dali Road, or perhaps it was the other way around: Baowu bought the house and Meili agreed to marry. Either way, the love struck couple married in secret and Baowu spent most his nights with her in carnal comfort on Dali Road, leaving his quieter, rounder first wife alone with his children at 74 Munan Road.

Life was grand for Baowu, a notorious do nothing and mouse-hearted villain of this true story. He spent thirteen thousand US dollars on a coat, ordered catering service from the renowned Kiesslings for lunch. He bought Meili a Buick, hired her a chauffer, and insisted his first wife, mother of four surviving children, take rickshaws to the market. When he was feeling especially energetic he beat his first wife, sometimes bashing her head against a coffee table or kicking in her pregnant stomach, killing his fifth and sixth unborn children.

On October 25, 1947, Yuzhen, the first wife, traveled by rickshaw to Dali Road, insisting that her husband accompany her to buy a new coat. When he refused, they argued.

(Bad picture, only one taken from internet) Number 53 Dali Road, where the heinous murder was committed – online sources

“You give me money so I can buy myself another day,” neighbors reportedly heard Yuzhen say.

Not wanting to disturb the neighbors more than necessary, Yuzhen accepted an invitation from the fourth wife to come upstairs and enjoy lunch and some wine. The argument continued. A bottle was thrown. Baowu naturally protected himself with a hammer, striking Yuzhen across the head. When Yuzhen fell, Meili pounced. She held the first wife by the legs until Baowu exhausted himself by smashing her head in with the hammer.

For four hours after the heinous murder, Baowu and Meili sat and watched Yuzhen’s body, perhaps hoping she would wake, or somehow magically disappear. When the first wife neither awoke nor vanished, they rolled her up in the bloody carpet and placed her in the bathtub.

According to the Tianjin Republic Daily later that afternoon Meili faked a loud, fond farewell out her bedroom window. “Zou hao, zou hao, Wu Nainai,” farewell, farewell, fifth grandmother. She called out Yuzhen’s pet name. The loyal couple then proceeded to clean the house, taking care not to leave a trace of their bloody deeds. Baowu made one trip outside to buy a whicker crate, which cost him ninety thousand francs.

Long after the city slept, with only the harvest moon as a silent witness, Baowu and Meili took a butcher’s knife to the first wife’s corpse.

They hacked. Thwack, thwack! They sawed. Gzzz, gzzz! Chopped her into three pieces and then burned her face so she could not be recognized. Carpet and Yuzhen fit perfectly – a bug in a rug – into the crate. When they finished they rested from their labors, and saw that it was good.

Now, Meili was not just a porcelain vase. She had a head of fine brown hair and a brain to go with her pale beauty. She contacted a Latvian friend, Naylor and Maleina, who were involved in the shipping business. Thinking if there was no corpse there would be no crime, she asked to store the whicker crate in the Latvian’s warehouse, and equip it with an address to be shipped to Germany.

“Dearest Maleina,” Meili wrote in a note on October 26. “I need to place with you this carpet and possessions because my husband’s number one wife is bothering me. I am afraid and cannot live here on Dali Road any longer. I also don’t want my husband to know about this and I will explain at another time.”

A second note quickly followed, hand carried by a servant girl.

“Beloved Maleina, sorry for the disturbance. I will prepare the crate immediately and make sure it is wrapped securely. I’ve already told my husband, who will come by soon to take measurements.”

When they arrived with the crate three days later on the afternoon of October 28^thto Suite 16 Tai’an Road, inside the Jingming Apartment Building, the four of them carried the crate to the warehouse. Naylor mentioned the crate was unusually heavy and had a strange, fishy smell coming from inside.

“It’s because my lazy cat peed on the rug.” Meili tossed her auburn hair and threw a laugh into the sky, replying casually and with the lightning-fast thinking processes of a fox demon.

Tianjin’s Protective Fox Fairy – Granny Wang the Third

January 17, 2014 / CSHagen / 0 Comments

Photo by Annie Gao — Granny Wang the Third at Tianjin’s Temple of the Heavenly Empress

By C.S. Hagen

TIANJIN, CHINA – Qiao Hongshan’s neighbors knew her as a laomazi, or an old maid servant. Those she healed with spit and charms called her fox fairy, Granny Wang the Third.

Although she’s been dead for nearly two hundred years, her hands and lotus feet are still alive.

From her vantage point inside Tianjin’s Temple of the Heavenly Empress Granny Wang has seen the end of China’s last dynasty and the turning of two centuries. She’s watched the Opium Wars and half a dozen warlords battle for Tianjin, China’s Pearl of the North. With heavy lidded eyes perched above rounded, rose red cheekbones, thin lips pursed into a tight, diligent smile, she has offered one tireless hand to all her followers despite the Japanese invasion and the ensuing civil war. Granny Wang survived damnation during the Cultural Revolution and sits, to this day, an arguably regal figure along Ancient Culture Street.

“Touch Granny Wang’s hand and live to ninety-nine.” Granny Wang’s followers say.

Photo by C.S. Hagen — Entrance to the Temple of the Heavenly Empress

For more than one hundred and seventy years she has sat in painted plaster. A red silk longevity robe is draped across her shoulders. Her followers burn black incense over tealeaves and call it ‘Brilliant Tea’ (can chaye), a reputedly magical elixir able to cure all sickness.

Many still preform ritual obeisance and can’t resist rubbing her well-worn hand.

Grey hair coiled under a simple skullcap, wearing loose, peasant trousers and a short-collared mandarin shirt, she holds flowers, sometimes magic medicine balls, sometimes copper coins in one hand and offers the other, cupped over a bony knee, for healing.

Legends say touch her hand and be protected against a hundred diseases. Touch her foot and eliminate a hundred ills.

Qiao Hongshan 乔红山

Before Granny Wang became known as a fox fairy she was a mother of three. Before being a mother she was a sick child rescued by Doctor Wang Sansi, a traveling scholar formerly of Beijing’s reputed Tai Hospital. Before being rescued however, she was born into squalor in Tianjin’s Wuqing District. She was spared the “killing trouble bowl,” a drowning tub often used by parents on female newborns, only to fall ill at a young age. Outside the Qiao family’s doors smallpox, dysentery, cholera and typhoid haunted city streets.

“The country was plagued with disease, spirits and odorous vapors, swamp, piles of coffins awaiting in the open for an auspicious time and place for burial,” wrote Colonel G.J. Wolseley, quartermaster for the British forces in Tianjin at the time.

“A handkerchief became an indispensible weapon against protecting the olfactories…” Wolseley kept intricate journals during his eighteenth and nineteenth century travels. “There is no part of the world to which distance lends more enchantment to the scenery than in China. When actually amongst the highly-manured fields of that empire, the olfactory organs are so rudely assailed by the variety of stenches… that a second trip across the fields is seldom taken.”

Hongshan was born one hundred and fifty years before penicillin and into a city slowly being eaten by opium smugglers, foreign gunboats, superstition, disease and rebellion. Magistrates faked blindness and turned deaf to Tianjin’s poor, and pettifoggers, or yamen runners ‘vomited their hearts out’ to squeeze money from where they could.

When little Hongshan became possessed by a fox spirit is unknown, and mostly the leftovers of urban legends, but if other fox possession stories hold any relevance Hongshan became possessed during her childhood sickness. Wang Sansi, the heroic doctor for whom she was later named after, took her under his wing, taught her his trade, made her his fourth wife and sired Hongshan’s three sons.

Photo by C.S. Hagen – A crippled beggar outside the Temple of Heavenly Empress

After her husband’s death she circuited Zhili Province’s villages and practiced her shamanistic arts. She was known as a midwife, a fortune teller, a healer and a miracle worker.

A favorite place for Hongshan was the Mountain of the Marvelous Peak (miaofengshan), some forty kilometers northwest of Beijing. She made countless pilgramiges to worship Mother Tianshan (Bixia Yuanjun), a reported disciple of Queen Mother of the West, who according to some sources was the Queen of Sheba and was also known to recruit fox fairies and fox demons as her messangers. Under the mountain’s walnut, apricot, hawthorn and peach trees she healed the ‘mountain climbing tigers’ or the coolies who hired themselves out as human donkeys. Amidst the fruit vendors and peach wood walking stick hawkers at the temple’s entryway, she gave away tea to thirsty pilgrims, never asking for a copper in return.

Sometimes she carried massive stones up the mountain’s slopes for much-needed temple repairs and was was reportedly visited by the Empress Cixi on two occasions. Nearly all documents describing Hongshan reported she healed incurable diseases, calmed the masses when bandits threatened, and never wasted a moment when someone’s life was in danger, said Taoist Master He Lutong.

“She was good with the people,” Master He said. “She was approachable, unlike the Queen Mother, her predecessor. She kept away from the rivalries and helped villagers escape bandits at her own peril. You would almost never find her in the temples, she was always in people’s homes, curing the sick and helping the people avoid calamity.”

According to the Temple of the Heavenly Empress reports dating back to the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, Hongshan was a joyous person, who never stayed idle.

“No problem was too little for her,” Master He said. “There’s a colloquial saying in Tianjin – ‘Big problem, little problem, Granny Wang will show.’”

Granny Wang 王三奶奶

Tianjiners called Qiao Hongshan Granny Wang long before her death around 1843. She accepted her husband’s surname, Wang. After her death, of which there is much debate, she became known as Granny Wang the Third.

Beijing claims she died during a blizzard on the way up the Mountain of the Marvelous Peak. Tianjiners swear she died on what is now known as Ancient Culture Street, only she didn’t truly die.

According to the Tianjin Daily while on her way to the Temple of the Heavenly Empress, she grew tired and hailed a rickshaw coolie. Upon arrival she discovered she had no money and told the coolie to wait outside. Her last words were for the coolie to go in and look for her if she didn’t come out momentarily. The coolie waited until noon, and then went inside where he found Granny Wang still as stone, holding out ten copper coins and a note thanking the coolie.

She transcended death and became an immortal. In fox fairy terms, she had reached the ninth tail.

Granny Wang became known as a ‘fox fairy of local fame,’ according to Xiao Feikang’s book The Cult of the Fox. Her selfless life as a healer and fortuneteller made her a deified representation of female mediums who played active roles in the local community. The Granny Wang Cult followed soon after her death and both Tianjin and Beijing laid claims to the woman turned goddess.

Photo by C.S. Hagen — Burning incense in the Temple of the Heavenly Empress

In Beijing, 1927, according to temple records she revealed her true form beside her own statue at the Mountain of the Marvelous Peak, and a photograph was presumably taken of her.

Tianjiners wouldn’t believe the story. They had to see the photograph with their own eyes. Tianjin’s affluent salt merchants, actors and craftsmen guilds and lighting companies established charities to help people make the journey, which in turn embarrassed Beijing as Tianjiners far outnumbered their own cult members.

In a time of rampant disease with little hopes or monies for cures, both Tianjiners and Beijing commoners turned to the supernatural for assistance. According to some technocrats of the time gods like Granny Wang held real power.

“Western science, although it cleverly seeks the Way of weishing, [sanitation] does so entirely on the basis of investigating form and material composition,” wrote Zheng Guanying, a comprador and an ardent Taoist student in his book Chinese and Foreign Essentials of Hygiene, 1890. “It does not understand the marvelous [ability] of non-matter to give rise to matter, or the ability of the formless to give rise to form [wu zhi sheng zhi, wu xing sheng xing]. Will Western physicians ever understand this? Even though they know about it, they do not believe in it and only find it laughable. I can only hope that as Western science progresses, in the end it will be able to comprehend the Way of the Immortals. Those who perfect the [Chinese] art [of self-cultivation] earn merit and virtue and enter the abode of the Immortals. Those who practice it even imperfectly can still avoid calamity and illness and live to an advanced age. Is this not a wonderfully felicitous thing for the entire world?”

Today, one way of practicing the Way of Immortals is to rub Granny Wang’s hand or foot. Another method is to respectfully burn black incense over a bag of tealeaves before Granny Wang’s unblinking eyes, and then take the leaves home to drink. Upon seeing Granny Wang however, salutations must be made.

“Granny Wang the Third, I’ve (name) come to worship you.”

Upon leaving make sure to let her know she is not forgotten.

“Granny Wang the Third, I’m leaving now. See you next year.”

Tianjin’s streets are safer and cleaner than they were in Granny Wang’s time. Western medicine has shattered more than superstitions. It’s ironic, however, that Alexander Fleming invented penicillin in 1928, but Granny Wang – Tianjin’s protective fox fairy – has been curing the sick since the eighteenth century.