New Liaozhai: The Lady of the Pear Tree

New Liaozhai: The Lady of the Pear Tree

East of the Huai, the wild pear trees grow thick. Shen San of the eastern village made his living trading potted flowers. One late spring he passed a ruined temple and found a pear tree in full bloom, white as snow — yet the temple was falling, and the tree marked to be cut. Beneath it stood a woman in plain white, some twenty years, who said to him: "Old man, you trade in flowers. Will you carry one branch of me to the north? I am the spirit of this tree; when it dies, I have nowhere to lodge." San thought her words strange, but pitied her look, and broke off a branch and wrapped it.

He traveled three days and lodged at an inn. Past midnight he heard a woman's voice weeping from his pack. He opened it: the broken branch had put out new leaves, and on each leaf a dewdrop, every one like a tear. Startled, he asked, and she said: "I feared you would cast me by the roadside." San said: "Since I have carried you thus far, how could I abandon you?" She ceased weeping.

Reaching the north, San planted the branch in his own garden. The next year the pear bloomed, lovelier than any. Each flowering season he would see a white-clad woman standing beneath the blossoms, bowing toward the south. The neighbors asked; San kept it secret.

When San grew old, the garden passed to his son, who wearied of the humble pear and would fell it for peonies. That night a great storm broke every branch, leaving only a bare trunk. At dawn, faint on the trunk appeared the marks of a woman's hands, fingers slender, as if she had clutched the branch and wept.

The son, afraid, desisted. To this day an old pear stands in the Shen garden of the eastern village; in its season it blooms pure white, and passersby linger, loath to leave.

It is said: if even a tree has feeling, how can a man be so thin?