Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Goodnight Xiaoqing’s “The Shanxiao,” first published (in Mandarin) in 2007 in Fantasy World magazine. You can find it in English, translated and edited by Xueting C. Ni, in Sinophagia: A Celebration of Chinese Horror (2024). Spoilers ahead!
The narrator looks back from old age to his “naive youth.” At eighteen, having “read some books, learned some basic skills of gongfu [kung fu],” he believed himself a scholar and swordsman well-prepared to roam as a xiake [knight-errant].
The young narrator looks forward to “dispensing swashbuckling justice” and dallying with the “wildly amorous” women described in romances. Surely one will be his love, and no low domestic one, but love “abiding till death, heart-rending, lung tearing, and so forth.” For more than a year he travels on his donkey, but sees no such woman until he reaches Xiaoshan, the “Laughing Mountain.” It’s a “vast forest of endless horrors” whose plants “drip murderous qi [vital energy]. Entering it is “like falling into the rolling dark bile of some monster’s stomach.”
Fifty years on, Narrator will tell readers never to set foot in Xiaoshan. He ignores the villagers warning of man-eating monsters in the mountain forests. Monsters are what he’s seeking, and a maiden to rescue from their jaws.
He imagines monsters will be heralded by “demoniac cloud” or “drifting mists,” giving him time to strike “a dramatic counter-stance” before they attack. Instead one leaps howling off a cliff, giving him barely time to jump beneath his donkey. The monster slices the donkey in two, soaking the narrator in blood. Its long-armed body is bulkier than a bear’s but swift as a leopard’s. It seizes him, and he looks into the face of “an inhuman human” with blood-red nose, indigo-blue cheeks, and three-inch fangs. The narrator screams and flails ineffectually with his sword, but the monster only laughs. Realizing he’s the prey of a shanxiao, the narrator is too terrified to even close his eyes.
Suddenly a white-feathered arrow pierces the shanxiao’s hindleg. It plucks out the arrow and issues a cacophony that reminds him of suona [Chinese oboe] players whose crude tunes form “a great cloud of atonal chaos… evil, heartless shrieking [that expressed] mirth, madness, grief and sorrow.”
The arrow comes from the bow of a beautiful, raven-haired archer, standing atop the mountain like a goddess. She nocks a second arrow, but the shanxiao only pounds its chest, its comical hops at odds with its horrific laugh. Another shanxiao appears beside the archer and raises itself into a human-like stance, also laughing. Hunters can tame wild beasts for hunting companions, so why couldn’t a goddess tame even such a monster? He expects it to combat the first shanxiao. Instead it draws back with a long howl, and it’s the archer who leaps to the narrator’s defense. Her second shot strikes his attacker through the abdomen; as the narrator faints, he still hears its weird laughter, “murky in its joy or tragedy.”
He wakes in the “unearthly green grotto” of an enormous hollow tree, lying on a stone bed with a fire burning beside him. The goddess-archer crouches far from the flames; in any but so slender-waisted and long-legged a girl, the inelegant pose would look bestial, but she retains the “primal beauty” of legends. Narrator speaks gently, expressing his gratitude and admiration, but he can coax no word from the woman. Could she have been raised among the mountain beasts? If so, whence came her clothing and weapons? The enigma that only entices him more.
Feeling fur brush his back, the narrator realizes the woman’s shanxiao lies beside him, its regard arrogant. When he declares his love and approaches her, the woman retreats on all fours with an inhuman scream. Her face remains beautiful even as she stuffs raw meat into her bloodied mouth and growls.
The shanxiao speaks then, in human tongue. Once a young wanderer itself—himself—he too loved the woman when he glimpsed her hunting boars in the Xiaoshan forest: fragile in form, queenly in courage. Before he could speak, however, a pair of shanxiao attacked the too-human divinity! He couldn’t save her, but afterwards he captured the female shanxiao and used his magical skills to transmute the beast into his beloved’s image. Now he controls its actions, like a puppet. Countless times he’s had it shoot its mate, as the narrator witnessed earlier. That’s proper punishment for a murderer. Yet to mix man and beast is to break a taboo of heaven. The price of the dark magic was for him to wear shanxiao-form for eternity.
The narrator’s appalled by the wicked and hate-filled madness in the shanxiao-sorcerer’s face. The woman sits staring blankly out of the tree-cavern while a distant roar of anguish and longing sounds outside. Her mate? Yet shanxiao are said to be capable only of laughing.
At daybreak, the shanxiao-sorcerer dismisses the narrator. He looks back at the woman, whose beautiful face remains vacant, yet tear-marked. From inside the tree, the magician berates his prisoner as a demon, a murderer, and yet a beautiful goddess whom he’ll worship forever.
The narrator stumbles away through the forest, followed by the shanxiao-sorcerer’s maniacal ravings. At last the sorcerer lapses into the strange swelling laughter of the shanxiao.
And the narrator knows he’ll never forget the mad joy of that horrible laughter.
Libronomicon: The Classic of Mountains and Seas, an early Chinese collection of myths, describes the ape-like shanxiao.
Weirdbuilding: Narrator, in his youth, is much taken with xianxia stories of daring adventure and mythic love. He would very much like to be in such a story himself, but unfortunately the tropes are not in his favor.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Malicious insanity and mad joy: the mental states of monsters are complex, but not in any way comforting.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
What sets humans apart from animals?
Well, asking that question, for one thing. Maybe the only thing. Cosmologically, the assumption that humans are set above the rest of our biological kingdom is not shared by all cultures in the first place. Scientifically, plenty of species use tools, engage in ritual, and use “complex and culturally transmitted vocal communication.” Practically, we are (as far as we know) the only earthly species to create written language, and the only one since the Oxygen Catastrophe to hold primary responsibility for a mass extinction, but historically (and prehistorically) there have been many illiterate and non-eschatogenic humans.
And yet, for cultures that believe in the human/animal dichotomy, keeping that boundary sharp can feel extraordinarily important—and blurring it can be a source of fascination and horror. Attraction-repulsion, you might even say.
One of the things I like about “Shanxiao” is the suggestion that this feeling might go in both directions. Animals, even fabulous, dangerous, human-eating animals, might find it alarming to be transformed into scrawny little top predators. Add, on top of that, being puppeted by such a top predator, and you have serious body horror for monsters.
Vengeance, too, might be proposed as a human thing. What other creature would give decades of life, and its own form, to punish a predator for predating? Surely there are better ways for a magic-wielding cultivator to spend his time. But no, he saw a beautiful woman killed, so he had to spend the rest of his (possibly immortal) existence forcing a transformed monster to hunt her mate. She killed “his” woman, after all. This is a bad enough choice that it gets him stuck in the form he stole. And occasionally professing love to the “murderer.” Everyone here is having a very bad time.
Another thing I like about this story is the Don Quixote of a narrator. I hesitate to make that comparison because I have no idea if the author has read the western classic in question, and the general concept is a relatively easy one to come by—and donkeys might be a common heroic mount in Chinese quests for all I know. But he certainly seems like he’d tilt at windmills given the opportunity. Monsters? He’s been dying to meet one—and is very lucky that he doesn’t die when he meets one. A windmill would have the advantage of giving him time to “strike a dramatic counter-stance,” and perhaps provide a foe more suited to his skill and bravery.
Fortunately for him (if not his donkey), Narrator gets to learn about the worst of bad choices second-hand. That does a good job of disillusioning him regarding the romance of the wandering adventurer. Freezing in terror the first time he meets a monster, to be fair, might also have something to do with it. It turns out that the world is not full of opportunities to strike poses while dramatically saving victims, and the supply of both grateful victims and goddess-like female archers (to whom one might oneself be grateful) is short.
It seems unfair that the whole thing leaves him disgusted with… jungles. Madly laughing ape-like monsters, sure. They tear their prey in half, and make a horrible joker noise. Anyone might come away with a phobia of their namesake mandrills, or of monkeys in general. But the “garish vitality” of “suffuse greenish death” like “the rolling dark bile of some monster’s stomach”? What did those plants ever do to you?
But perhaps that’s another story.
Anne’s Commentary
The initial mindset of “Shanxiao’s” youthful narrator reminded me of Po’s line from Kung Fu Panda: “Legend tells of a legendary warrior whose kung fu skills were the stuff of legend.” So naive is the narrator that he doesn’t yet know “how high the sky was, nor how thick the earth.” A junior Don Quixote, he’s devoured so many romances of knight-errantry that he sets out ill-prepared to adventure, dispense “swashbuckling justice,” and woo women of legendary beauty and amorousness. It’s a good set-up for a humorous coming-of-age story, and humor suffuses the opening pages. The narrator rides to future fame not on a dashing steed but on a bony donkey, packing a sword he’ll wear to notched bluntness on obstructive foliage before he gets a chance to cleave an enemy in two with one slash. He’s imagined monsters playing fair and with flair by manifesting out of clouds, in a manner leisurely enough for him to “strike a dramatic counter-stance.”
His first monster exhibits no “grandeur or style whatsoever” as it leaps from cliff-top ambush. Not that Narrator exhibits much grandeur or style by cowering under his donkey. That would’ve been a funny image if the shanxiao had paused and bemusedly scratched its furry head. Instead it kills comedy by showering the narrator with a “stinking downpour” of bisected-donkey gore.
Generally speaking, bisected donkeys are only hilarious when their halves collapse as bloodlessly as a cloven bologna. From the way the shanxiao laughs in the narrator’s face, it seems to find its handiwork a hoot. But its laughter is “deafening and unnerving,” “entirely human” but inhuman in its malicious insanity. It’s a “great cloud of atonal chaos,” an “evil, heartless shrieking called out of mirth, madness, grief and sorrow,” “murky in its joy or tragedy.”
If the mirth of Xiaoshan, the Laughing Mountain, is only voiced by its shanxiao, no wonder villagers warn the knight-errant-wannabe to avoid the place. No wonder the aged narrator warns his listeners to do the same. The word naive has both negative and positive connotations. The young narrator lacks experience, wisdom and judgment, but he’s also innocent, idealistic, enthusiastic. He aspires to mastery in his arts and scholarship. He aspires to wield power in the cause of justice. He aspires to find perfect love, poetic beyond the mundanity of hearths and kitchens.
He’s looking for enchantment, but is about to be disenchanted. Even if magic exists, it exacts a price, and the price of dark magic is high.
In her comments on “Shanxiao,” Sinophagia’s translator and editor Xueting C. Ni describes how author Goodnight Xiaoqing based her story on a magazine cover. The illustration showed a female archer and a shanxiao. A World of Warcraft player, she thought of the game’s Hunter and Hunter-Pet characters, but she decided to give the duo and its dynamics a twist. What if it was the seeming Pet who was the dominant partner, the seeming Hunter the submissive?
Learn this, young knight. Appearances often deceive. A Beauty on the outside may be a Beast on the inside. Conversely, external Beast may be internal Beauty. That makes life less simple, but we’ve just started screwing with your worldview. You’ll have noticed, doubtless to your dissatisfaction, that exteriors are rarely perfectly Beautiful or absolutely Beastly. So, too, are interiors rarely perfectly Good or absolutely Evil. This interior complexity holds true even if exteriors are idealized. “Shanxiao” presents you with a Goddess and a Monster, the Love and the Opponent of your dreams. But for Goddess, Monster, Love and Opponent to earn their Capitalizations of Ideality, there ought also to be a Knight. Which you are not. It’s not that kind of story. Never mind. It’s a better kind. To quote Buddy Glass in Franny and Zooey, it’s a “love story pure and complicated.”
“Shanxiao” isn’t purely pure or purely a love story, but complicated? Hellishly so. The narrator has read that shanxiao are capable only of laughing, but toward story’s end, he hears the transmuted shanxiao’s mate roaring in the distance. Sometimes the sound’s like a wail of anguish, a cry of longing, or a mournful hollering, certainly no inhuman laugh. Even earlier, he hears the male’s laughter as “an atonal chaos” rather than as one note; its superficially “evil, heartless shrieking” somehow expresses a gamut of emotions analogous to human “mirth, madness, grief and sorrow.”
What appears to be a shanxiao is actually the human master. What appears to be a human huntress is actually the shanxiao slave. Their complexity doesn’t stop there. The human sorcerer has gone mad after imprisoning himself in the form of his love’s hated murderer, while simultaneously defiling his love by housing her monster murderer in her worshiped form. His rage reaches a monstrous intensity fitting his exterior. The shanxiao-woman retains its bestial impulses and drives despite the sorcerer’s control of its actions, but it expresses its emotional tie to its mate in human tears.
Buying the ideals of romance—the “pure and simple” sense of life—is the young narrator’s core error. Seeing individuals as complex rather than as romantic archetypes is the start of his maturation.
Bottom lines: In infinite shadings of emotion and outlook and action, the human can be monstrous, the monstrous human.
Also, if you feed your donkey properly, it will provide you with better underbelly shelter in case of shanxiao attack.
Next week, Chapters 52-54 of Pet Sematary bring us closer… and closer… and closer… to the burial ground.
