Zhiguai, Glitch in the Matrix Tales, and Notes on the Strange
One evening, my wife and I were returning home from a party. When I opened the door, I saw my wife sitting at the computer and working, as she almost always is when I come home. The thing is, this time my wife came into the house with me. When we went to bed, I told her that I had seen her sitting at the computer. She became serious then and said that when I opened the door, she also …
“One day I was walking to work and all of a sudden had an urge to walk a different path than usual. I work downtown in a big city. It was a strange spur of the moment urge to walk a different way that changed my life forever. I turned into an alley I had never seen before. As I remember it, I made it about 15 feet or so when an actual ‘glitch’ happened. Everything in my mind scrambled. …
In the early days of my assignment in Urumqi, one afternoon an army clerk came to me with a brush and ink, along with a pile of papers that he requested I sign. “What are these papers?” I asked. “Passports,” he replied. “You see, most of the soldiers here are from far away. So, if they die, we have to ship their bodies back home for burial and funeral rites. Living people must pass through many border checkpoints when travelling. …
When I was a boy, I went on a journey with our family servant Shi Xiang. While we were passing a village outside of Jing Cheng, Shi Xiang pointed at some mounds in a field to the west. “Those are graves,” he said. “Zhou graves. Long ago, one of their ancestors did a good deed that allowed their family line to persist three generations longer than it would have otherwise.” I asked Shi Xiang what kind of deed. He said …
When we think about who we were in second grade or as a baby or even last week, we assume all our old selves have somehow dissolved into who we are now, similar to how a ball of clay can be reshaped from an ashtray to a cup. But what if this isn’t the case? What if those past selves stay around? The account below explores exactly that. —Yi Izzy Yu ————-> The following experience occurred in 2016, when I …
They were different dreams but for some reason, her distinct face and name always ended up in them. It got to the point where I would wake up frustrated and confused, trying to google her name or find out how I was connected to her. After a few months, she stopped showing up and I dismissed it. Fast forward a few years later, Halloween 2009, I’m in the car with a friend stopped at a gas station. I’m about to …
I sometimes suffer from episodes of sleep paralysis. The symptoms don’t always include paralysis (at least for me) and can just be “dreams,” really hallucinations, outside of REM sleep. The scary thing is that sometimes I don’t realize that I have even fallen asleep before the hallucinations start. One school night a few years ago, I was watching TV in my bed and I felt myself lift out of my body. I found myself staring down and watching myself looking …
About 150 years ago, in the fourteenth year of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, a Western nation gave him a mysterious creature called a “lion.” No one in his circle had ever seen such a creature before, and it immediately featured prominently in the poetry and paintings produced by members of the court. It also featured in many tall tales. For example, one story that made the rounds detailed how the lion escaped the palace one morning by snapping its chains in …
Recently in China, a snake girl was reported in a village in the far north – about three flying or twenty driving hours from my hometown in Yantai. It’s very cold in this part of China, a Canadian kind of cold. The snake girl who lived in the village was about thirteen years old. Before she became a snake girl, she was just this typical Chinese girl – with two ponytails in the back of her head and with skin …
It seemed as if time had decided to move a day back, alluding to my own possible mistakes. The first birthday that I spent with my significant other, I wrote her a poem. September 26th. For three years straight, I read her that poem. She’d laugh, smile, and say how grateful she was. But this past year, that didn’t happen. I was in my dorm, waking up from a long night of essay writing, when I decided to call her …