The Story of A Long-lost Great Uncle

By Lucia Nuttall

“Great Uncle” means the brother of the grandparents in the Henanese dialect. At my mother’s other’s side, I have six Great Uncles. But my Sixth Great Uncle told me there was actually a Seventh Great Uncle but he was so naughty when he was a little boy that he had to pay for it at a high cost.
There is a short story “Stealing Peaches” ”in the famous book “Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio”. With a first-person narrative, the author told a story like this:

A magician’s circus came to the village. The circus is really small, with only a middle-aged man and his 7-or-8-year-old son. The father said his son has some special talent that he is able to steal peaches from the orchard in the heaven. He asked the audience, “Do you guys want to have a bite of the peaches from the heaven?” The audience yelled yes. The man brought a thick
rope out of the box and threw it straight up to the sky. The rope kept climbing up and finally stopped in the clouds, as if it got clutched to the ceiling between the heaven and the earthly world.
After that, the son started to climb up along the rope. He climbed so high that people couldn‘t see him eventually. Two hours has passed by but the son still didn’t come back, the father started to get anxious.
Suddenly something dropped from the sky. It was the arm of a child. Then there dropped another arm, then the legs, the feet, the head and the torso. The father picked them up before putting them into a wooden box. He couldn’t help crying when he collected the pieces of the dead body: “We just wanted to steal some peaches to treat our village friends. Who would expect my boy would be found by the safeguard in the heaven and got killed. My poor little boy….”

Out of great guilt, the audience threw tons of coins and banknotes into the bamboo basket at the rim of the circus and it quickly got full.

The father bowed to the audience again and again to show his gratitude. Then he picked up the wooden box and asked, “Hey son, the villagers are so generous to you, why not come out and say
thank you to them?”The box was opened and a boy came out with a cheerful smile. It is nobody else but the child who just got killed and disassembled by the heaven safeguard.
It was ridiculous legendary but the author said he saw this with his own eyes. I believe him because my Sixth Great Uncle said he had saw this magic too. And because of this magic show, he lost his
twin brother forever.

The Sixth and The Seventh were twin brothers. Although they looked exactly the same, they have
very different personalities. The Sixth was composed and prudent while The Seventh was impulsive and reckless.

They were seven years old when the circus went to their village. When the show of “Stealing Peaches” was over, The Sixth went back home for dinner, while The Seventh stayed on the spot and started to think. The next day, when the circus toured to the neighbouring village to perform, The Seventh followed them. He sat on the branches of a tall tree west of the site.

The show started off as expected. With a bird’s eye view The Seventh could see everything clearly. He held a green grasshopper in hand. He caught it in the grass under the tree a few minutes ago and it was still alive and kicking.

When the left arm of the child dropped from the sky, The Seventh ripped off the left fore leg of the grasshopper and threw it to the left front ground. When the child’s head dropped from the sky, The
Seventh ripped off the head of the grasshopper and threw it to the front. When every piece of the child’s body was on the ground, there was nothing of the grasshopper left either.

The magic show kept going. It was time for the father to call his son out of the wooden box. But this time, no matter how many times the father called, there was nothing happening in the box. Suddenly
he seemed to have realized something and rushed to the tall tree on the west. The Seventh tried to run but it was too late.

The father asked The Seventh to find back all the parts of the grasshopper. But how was it possible? There were green leaves and grasses everywhere and the grasshopper was just like a drop of
water disappeared in the ocean. The father cried hard. Afterwards, he escorted The Seventh to the latter’s home to find out an indemnity solution. After a long and hard negotiation, The Seventh’s parents had to agree to give away The Seventh to the magician and became the son of the magician from then on.
”After that, we never saw The Seventh again.“ My Sixth Great Uncle told me with a sigh. This 75-year old retired science teacher told this long-buried story to me in his modern apartment in the
High-Tech Research & Development District of Zhengzhou.
June 5, 2007

June 5, 2007