Strange Tales from Sanlitun:

Here in the civilized world
Stranger events by far occur,
Than in the Country of Cropped Hair;
Before our very eyes
Weirder tales unfold
Than in the Nation of Flying Heads

-Pu Songling, Preface to “Stealing a Peach”

My first encounter with the age-old Chinese fascination with the bizarre took place in the dusty third floor of Wangfujing Bookstore. It had been a thoughtless summer of wandering through the expatriate-dominated parts of the city; that day, I was looking for English editions of Joyce when I chanced upon a pirated Penguin copy of “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio” by Pu Songling. Pu lived in Shangdong Province during the reign of the Manchus from 1640-1715. After failing to secure a Mandarin appointment, he turned his attention towards collecting stories of strange or inexplicable happenings around the empire from travelers passing by his home. In the end, he collected 104 of them—each narrated with pithy, journalistic apathy—in his opus, "Strange Tales." A man practicing yoga in Zichuan is visited by a three-inch-tall homunculus whom he believes holds the secret of the immortality elixir; when the creature disappears, the man suffers a nervous breakdown. A scholar-gentleman is seduced by a fox-spirit disguised as a beautiful woman, and after they have sex, his body wastes away. There is no typical story in "Strange Tales," but these capture the two themes that rule the text: sex and violence. Both find their symbolic expression in the figure of the fox-spirit: that fatal, crepuscular immortal of the scholar-gentleman’s secret imagination who takes on the form of a beautiful woman to seduce and destroy.

The book took me captive, and soon I found myself furtively flipping through the pages whenever I had a spare minute at work or in my apartment. Pu Songling himself crept into my ear in homunculus form and in the dim expanse of twilight showed me a city stranger than the Country of Cropped Hair.

That summer two very strange things happened in Sanlitun Village, an outdoor shopping mall (considered, I am told, among the best in the world) that serves as Beijing’s social and commercial hub. Both of these things happened at the flagship Uniqlo store—a Technicolor monolith and local landmark that demarcates the northeast corner of the Village.

The first: in mid-July, a video emerged over WeChat (a popular Chinese social media platform) of a couple having sex in one of the store’s fitting rooms during shopping hours. The man—tightly wrapped in black jeans, button-down, and sweater—held the camera and his narrow frame stiffly towards the mirror while the woman, naked, thrust her hips back into him, moaning and arching her head back to kiss his neck. “Don’t be too loud,” the man added nervously.

“Call me husband,” he added in a small, timid voice; “husband,” she echoed. I laughed—then, something inside me started. I looked from the thick, black frame of his glasses to the burnt, orange locks of the woman’s hair, bouncing off of her bare back. I froze, recognizing them instantly: the gentleman-scholar and the fox.

The story was national news. An amateurish video that would have slipped into obscurity in the United States became a cultural sensation. I visited Sanlitun for dinner later that evening. A throng of locals and tourists had formed around the store, drawn by some strange magnetic force, posing sheepishly for selfies. Voyeurism soon denatured into fixation. The video disappeared, blocked by internet censors, but the crowds lingered for several weeks afterwards; Beijing was enraptured, and she did not want to forget. I learned later that local police had arrested the couple in the video for corrupting public morality.

The second: in late July, on the morning of my last day in Beijing, a man wielding a three-foot-long katana stabbed a woman to death in front of the Uniqlo store in broad daylight. Amateur news outlets were the first to pick up the story; photographs and videos followed soon after. In one video, we see the slain woman, whose body had been picked up and sprawled thirty meters away from her murderer, bleeding profusely through the deep wound in her chest as her husband (a French man) applies pressure. Somehow the hems of her olive dress have ridden up, exposing her bare, yellow legs to the camera. Then the shot pans to a man, dressed casually in a button-down, black baseball cap, and jeans, stalking nonchalantly around the empty plaza like a tiger in its enclosure, trailing the sword still wet with blood behind him. Ten seconds later, he strikes a pose so casual the viewer almost misses the bizarre scene three meters away from him: a dismembered white plastic mannequin, legs and arms strewn across the ground, the severed torso seated and erect at attention. A few minutes later, the police arrive on the scene. The man calmly tosses his katana aside and lies down on his stomach. They surround him. Murder, refrain, and finale—a sequence so orderly, so free of chaos it felt rehearsed, more like performance art than crime.

Subsequent pictures from later in the afternoon showed the plaza eerily empty, roped off with yellow tape. But when I visited during the evening the Village was full again, the ropes removed, the blood scrubbed away. A small throng of fanatics had once again formed around Uniqlo, taking pictures and filling the plaza with idle laughter. As I walked through the Village a palpable anxiety fluttered in my chest. The two incidents—the private penetration made public, the public stabbing made private—conflated and intermingled with each other until they were impossible to separate. Things had returned to normal, but a rupture had made itself seen in the social fabric of Beijing. Somewhere in my head, the homunculus was buzzing.

Hansen Shi ’18 is an English concentrator living in Kirkland House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.