Wang Zifu of Luodian was cleverer than anyone his mother had ever known, and she loved him so fiercely she hardly let him out of the house. He was fourteen when he passed the county examination, and still she kept him close. So it happened that at the Lantern Festival, when his cousin Wu invited him out to see the crowds, Wang went with the feeling of a man stepping out of a cage.
Wu was called away almost at once, but Wang wandered on alone through the streaming crowds of holiday-makers. And there, among the thousands, he saw a girl walking with her maid, twirling a branch of plum blossom between her fingers. She was lovelier than anyone he had ever seen, and what undid him was not even her face but her laughter — light, unguarded, as though the whole festival existed for her private amusement. He stared. She noticed, murmured to her maid, “That boy’s eyes burn like a thief’s,” dropped the branch of blossom at his feet, and walked away laughing.
Wang picked up the flower and took it home and fell ill. He could not eat; he lay in bed turning the dried branch over in his hands. His mother and cousin, terrified, finally got the story out of him, and Wu — half to humour him — invented a tale: the girl, he said, was surely Wang’s own second cousin, and lived only thirty li away in the southwestern hills. Wang believed him, rose from his sickbed, and set out alone to find her.
He walked into the hills until the path gave out, and there, in a valley white with blossoms, he found a small village and a girl in a courtyard, laughing on a swing among the flowering trees. It was she. An old woman came out and received him kindly, called the girl Yingning, and told Wang that his family and hers were kin. Yingning herself could barely greet him for laughing. She laughed when he tried to speak of the flower, laughed when the old woman scolded her, laughed at the meal, laughed until the tears stood in her eyes — and Wang, bewitched, found he did not mind being laughed at.
The old woman let him take her home to visit his mother. And so Yingning came down out of the hills, and in time she and Wang were married.
It was only slowly that the household began to understand what they had brought into it. Yingning could climb a tree like a cat. She was mad for flowers and would trade her own jewellery for a pot of rare blossoms. She laughed at moments when laughter was impossible — during the wedding ceremony itself she had to be steadied through the bows. And when Wang’s mother gently asked about her family, the answers never quite agreed with one another. The truth, when it came out, came out strangely: Yingning’s father had been a human man, and her mother a fox of the hills, and she had been raised by a ghost — the old woman of the valley, long dead, who had loved and sheltered the half-fox child as her own. Yingning asked Wang to move the old ghost’s grave to lie beside her father’s, and he did, and she wept at the graveside as she had never wept in the house.
For a while all was well. Then a young man of the neighbourhood, seeing Yingning on her swing above the wall, was consumed with wanting her and sent her signals she should have ignored. Instead she smiled back, and pointed to a spot at the foot of the wall where they might meet. He came at dusk, full of triumph, and flung his arms around what stood waiting — a dead tree trunk — and a great scorpion, hidden in the bark, stung him through the hand. He died of it that night.
His family went to the magistrate, and for a time the whole business hung over the Wang household like thunder. In the end the magistrate, an honest man, saw through the dead man’s character and let the matter drop. But Wang’s mother took Yingning aside and said, with more sorrow than anger, “My dear, a laugh is a wonderful thing — but there are times when a woman in a family must put it away.”
And Yingning, who had laughed all her life, promised she would laugh no more. She kept her word. From that day forward the sound that had filled the house was gone; she became, outwardly, the perfect wife and daughter-in-law that custom required. Only once, long afterward, speaking of the ghost-mother who had raised her, did she weep openly again — and those who knew the story say the household would gladly have traded all her new decorum for one more peal of the old laughter.