Shen Xiu’s Bird

This week, we are getting back to our roots. Some of the earliest podcasts we did were on the huaben (話本) story. The very first podcast we posted (we recorded others before, but we canned them because they weren't good enough) was a huaben  that we called Of Gods and Telescopes. We also did the gender-bending huaben Male Mencius' Mother and Jiang Xingge's Pearl-Sown Shirt. The huaben is just a kind of short story from the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Huaben operate in a karmic universe where bad deeds are punished and good deeds rewarded.

In today's podcast, we look at the Feng Menglong story, "Shen Xiu and his Bird Causes 7 Deaths." The story starts with a rich layabout, Shen Xiu, who is always out playing with his bird. While he is out, Shen Xiu collapses and Zhang, a cooper, sees him lying there with his bird. He decides to steal the bird, but Shen Xiu comes to, so Zhang kills Shen Xiu and sells the bird. Afterwards, several more people die in this trail of horrors. The question that Rob and Lee argue over is whether or not a moral balance is restored to the universe.