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The White Turtle
A fisherman catches a white turtle; townsfolk vie to buy it for soup, but he pities it and releases it into the river. Years later the dyke breaks, and as flood swallows his family by night, a giant white turtle rises bearing his boat to high ground. When the waters fall, it is gone.
Keeping the Bedside
Xiao Lin works nights as a hospital aide. In the ward at the end of the corridor, an old woman in a blue cloth shirt is always there at night, tucking in the blanket and giving water to a dying stranger. The nurse says that ward was emptied long ago — there is no such person.
The Red Lantern on the Mountain Road
Lao Han hauls freight at night over an old mountain. At one hairpin bend, an old man in a raincoat always stands waving a red lantern, slow — and in the seconds after, the road beyond is either a rockslide or a stalled truck. He later learns a road-mender once died on that bend.
The Inspection
For three days each winter, Willow Creek Hollow shines. When the provincial poverty-relief inspection team is due, the cadres whitewash crumbling mud walls, lend each poor household thirty borrowed hens to parade as 'industry', and coach a sick old widow on the three lines she must recite. The team leaves applauding. By spring the paint flakes; the hens go back; the widow's leaking roof and aching bones remain. The files declare that no one was left behind.
Lao Fan's Velvet Flowers
In a crumbling lane-house of South City, Old Fan has spent his life making ronghua, silk blossoms wired onto copper stems for women's hair. His wonder is not speed but a startling eye: one glance at a face tells him the exact flower to match it, and his blooms never fade or droop. He keeps one rule, white mourning flowers only for the truly grieved, until a widowed neighbor and her mute daughter teach him that the color of a human heart can change.
The Tea Maid
The woman who brews tea at the south-market house shows each drinker, in the cup, the one they cannot forget.
The Rain Mistress
A flower-selling crone in the west of the city brings fine rain with a sigh; a youth begs for a downpour, is refused, and learns why when the flood comes.
The Sluice
The man who has kept the sluice for ten years hears his name called from the black water below on New Year's Eve.