Beijing Kanyi

Author: Lu Sangge
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2007-01-01
Features: After arriving in Germany, I stayed in Bremen for a while. Later, due to parking difficulties, I moved to a small village called Laauhausen in the suburbs and became one of the Chinese residents there. When I had nothing to do, I would go to the small tavern at the village head to drink beer. After a few days, I got familiar with the regular drunks there and heard them talk about rumors of a Chinese ghost in the small woods behind the village. I smiled and said, "It's impossible. Ghosts don't exist, and even if they did, Chinese ghosts wouldn't come here. Do you have any evidence that it's a Chinese woman ghost?" Drunk Werner said he had seen it with his own eyes. I asked him what the ghost looked like, and Werner drew it with a pencil on a piece of paper. I looked at it, and it was still a Qing Dynasty woman in a flag-style dress. Werner was a fitter and had never been to China. The way he drew it was so convincing that it was hard to believe. But I thought, perhaps he had seen old Chinese-themed movies in the past and remembered what the people in the movies wore. It's not impossible for the drunks to make up stories just to entertain me, a Chinese person.
However, I still took the time to visit those woods and explored them. The woods were deep, and I even encountered two wild deer with yellow fur and big eyes. The shade of the trees was very dense, blocking most of the sunlight, and walking inside felt eerie and cold. After walking around for a while, I found nothing. Some large trees were covered with ivy, also known as climbing ivy, and their trunks seemed to be disguised with leaves, which left a deep impression on me.
After a while, an old friend of mine from the city, Meng, said he had moved to a new home on the first floor and asked if there was any climbing ivy in my village, as he wanted to plant it under his window. It was too expensive to buy from a flower shop. I remembered those woods and told Meng, "There's a patch of woods behind my village covered in countless climbing ivy. You can dig one up without causing any harm."
So on a Sunday, Meng came to my house, and we went to the woods together to dig some climbing ivy. On the way, I told Meng about the rumors of a Chinese ghost in the village. He laughed and didn't believe it. As we entered the woods, we suddenly heard a woman crying softly. We looked at each other and walked toward the direction where the sound came from.
Deep in the woods, we indeed saw a shadow, and upon closer inspection, it was a young Chinese woman dressed in Qing Dynasty attire—her hair tied in a bun, wearing a pink flag-style jacket on top and blue wide-leg pants on the bottom. She was crying against a tree, her back to us. We looked at each other in shock. Fortunately, we were two people, so we weren't too scared, and we quietly approached her.
I said, "Auntie, we are Chinese. Why are you crying here?" I realized she was young and changed my tone to say, "Miss, are you Chinese too?" The young woman looked at us suspiciously and said, "You're dressed like this, and you're Chinese?" Meng said, "We are indeed Chinese. We come from Beijing, from the Forbidden City." The young woman asked, "Do you know Han Family Hutong?" I said, "Of course, I know. It's one of the Eight Great Hutsongs in Dashilar. I pronounced it as 'Da Sha Lian'er,' which is the authentic old Beijing accent."
After hearing my words, the young woman finally believed that we were Chinese.