The Rat Thief

At the end of Locust-Flower Lane, north of the city, stood a broken side-room where the widow Tang lived alone. Widow Tang was seventy, with no children; she traded needlework for rice and often got through a day on two bowls of thin gruel. In the room was an old stove, and behind a crack in the stove-brick lived an old grey rat.

This rat was missing half its left ear, its fur grizzled and dull, its movements slow — it was plainly old. It had once lived among the beams of a bookshop south of the city, where it heard the keeper drill boys in their letters, and had come to know a few characters; it named itself "the Guest Who Bores Walls." To bore walls and cross them is the old word for a thief, meant as a curse — yet the rat took it for a style, which had a certain absurd dignity.

That Tang was poor, the rat saw plainly. On a night in early winter it watched her stare into an empty rice jar, then slipped from the crack and felt its way along the wall-foot to the Wang rice-shop on South Street. Shopkeeper Wang the Fat was a famed miser: his granary bulged with grain, yet he would not spare a single sheng for a beggar. The old rat gnawed a hole beneath the storehouse planking and, carrying three or five grains at a time, hauled them back through the night and poured them into Tang's jar.

From then on, whenever the deep of night came, the Guest Who Bores Walls went to "borrow" rice. Tang rose each morning to find the jar fuller, and took it for the neighbors' charity, whispering thanks to the gods by night. She never knew it was a rat's good deed.

Once she rose at night and came upon the earless old rat standing on its hind legs, both forepaws cradling a grain of rice toward the jar. It did not flee in panic at the sight of her, only set the grain down and ambled back into the crack. Tang held up the lamp and saw an old scar on its hind leg — from the trap she had set the year before. She understood, sighed, put the trap away, and never guarded against it again.

In the twelfth month the snows came on. Wang the Fat took stock, found a dozen-odd shi of rice missing, suspected an inside thief, and set his men searching the granary; they laid poisoned bait and stopped the rat-holes. That night the Guest went again, rice in jaw, and on the way back the poison took hold and it fell in the snow. With its last breath it nudged the two grains still in its mouth to Tang's threshold.

At dawn Tang opened her door and saw a dark-red spot on the snow, with a few grains beside it. She followed the trace to the lane mouth, where the rat lay stiff, its cheeks still bulging. She knelt, worked the two grains free with her finger, wrapped them in an old cloth, and buried them under the locust in the yard.

After that no one filled Tang's rice jar, yet it always held half a sheng more than it should have — as if the rat still thought of her.

The Chronicler says: the wall-boring thief is not suffered by the law and is despised by men. Yet in the world there are those in fine caps who rob a state, and those who eat well yet forget their kin — set against this rat, how do they look? The rat stole to feed the lonely and not to fatten itself; among thieves, it had shame. I record it here to wash the name of the Guest Who Bores Walls.