In western Guangdong there lived a scholar named Sun Zichu, a man of real learning and no sense at all. He had been born with a sixth finger on one hand. He was slow of speech and believed whatever he was told. If he walked into a room and found singing girls there, he would turn around and walk out; and because his friends knew this, they would lure him in and have the girls crowd close to tease him, at which he would go scarlet to the collar and sweat until the drops ran, and everyone would roar.
They drew his face and called it “Sun the Fool”.
Now there was in that town a merchant of enormous wealth who was connected by marriage to noble houses, and he had a daughter named Abao, who was very beautiful. Suitors from the great families came one after another, and her father refused them all. Someone, as a joke, suggested to Sun that he send go-betweens. Sun, who had no notion of his own ridiculousness, did exactly that. The merchant had heard of Sun’s name — and had also heard that he was poor — and the answer came back: no.
Then someone who had seen Abao told Sun how lovely she was, and Sun was lost.
He saw her once, by chance, at a festival, and stood in the road staring, and came home and lay down and did not speak. His friends, who were used to teasing him, asked what was wrong. “I met a girl,” he said, “and I have lost my heart.”
“Which girl?”
“Abao.”
They laughed until they were ill. Sun the Fool, in love with the richest beauty in the province. But he did not laugh, and he did not eat, and in a few days he was dying.
And in those days the news came: Abao had been told what he had said, and had been told about the sixth finger, and had laughed and said, as girls do, “If he rids himself of it, I will marry him.”
Sun heard it. He asked for an axe. He laid his hand on the chopping block and took the extra finger off at the joint, and fainted, and was three months getting well.
When he could walk he went to her gate, and a maid came out, and he showed her the hand, and the maid went in and Abao came to the gate herself and looked at the hand and was silent a long time. And she said: “I was joking.”
Sun went home and lay down again.
Then — for the tale is a story of love, not of sense — his soul came loose.
It happened on a day when Abao was away from home. Sun lay in his bed as though dead, and his soul went out of him and found Abao’s chamber, and there she was, and he was with her, and she did not know whether she had dreamed him. He followed her everywhere for three days, and his body lay at home without breath, and the family began the preparations for a burial.
And in those three days, Sun’s soul turned into a parrot.
How it happened the tale does not explain. He found himself with wings, and flew to her window, and she opened it and held out her hand, and the bird stepped onto her finger and would not leave, and she fed it from her own mouth. And the bird spoke, in Sun’s voice: “Do not let me go. Make me your bird and I will never leave this room.”
She understood then, and she said: “If you are that man, come back to your body. I will marry you.”
“I cannot go alone,” said the bird. “Send someone with me.”
So she sent her maids to Sun’s house, and the bird flew ahead of them, and Sun’s body drew breath in the same moment the bird fell dead at their feet.
They were married. And Pu Songling, who cannot help himself, adds the ending the story deserves: that Sun went on to pass his examinations, that Abao’s father came to love him, and that when people asked him the secret of his success he said it was not cleverness at all — it was that he had never once, in the whole of it, doubted that she meant what she said.