Tutor

by Tom Te-Wu Ma

For thousands of years the Chinese people have believed that a person will become a ghost after death living in the underground. It will be arranged for the ghost to reborn as a person again by the rules of the immortals. If a person has performed a great deal of good deeds in his life, after death the spirit (ghost) of the person will be reborn into a rich and dignified family to enjoy a good life. If the person has committed a great number of bad deeds, the spirit of the person will be reborn into a poor family to suffer a miserable life or simply reborn as an animal to live a cruel life. A love story between a human and a spirit is much more attractive and complicated than those that occur between two humans. The spirits in the book are all vividly personified. They live with humans in the human world, and also in their world. They travel from one world to the other easily and frequently. Although they have the advantage of supernatural powers, they still like to show themselves in human form. They look and act like human beings when they live in the human world. It is hard sometimes to distinguish which one is human and which is spirit. The ingenious revelation of that secret, therefore, often becomes the most exciting part of the story. Tutor is a collection of 21 such complex and enticing stories selected and translated from an old Chinese book, Liao Zhai, by Pu Song Ling (1640-1715). Liao Zhai has been unanimously acknowledged both academically, and popularly, as a most remarkable work of this sort in the thousands of years of the Chinese literature history.

160 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2007

Reviews

[nimrodiel]

I originally received this from Breeni when she did a drawing for it on her book blog. I found this a wonderful look into Chinese folk tales. I enjoyed the stories for their interactions between the spirit world and the normal world. Though the writing was a bit simplistic due to the translation to English this was a wonderful collection of stories.

See where this book goes next: http://bookcrossing.com/journal/5198693