Yeh-Shen

Long ago, before the Qin and Han dynasties, the chief of a southern cave kingdom named Wu took two wives. One of them died, leaving behind a daughter called Yeh-Shen. Yeh-Shen was clever and gentle, and she had been her father's favorite. After her father also died, she fell into the keeping of her stepmother, who hated her, and was made to gather firewood from the most dangerous places and draw water from the deepest wells.

One day Yeh-Shen caught a small fish with red fins and golden eyes, and she put it in a bowl of water. The fish grew, and she moved it to a larger bowl, and then to a pond, until at last it was over ten feet long. The fish would only come out of the water when Yeh-Shen stood on the bank; for anyone else it stayed hidden.

The stepmother grew suspicious. One morning she put on Yeh-Shen's tattered jacket and went down to the pond. The fish, thinking its friend had come, raised its great head out of the water, and the stepmother killed it with a knife she had hidden in her sleeve. She cooked the flesh and ate it with her own daughter, and they said the meat tasted twice as good as ordinary fish. The bones she buried beneath a heap of dung.

Yeh-Shen wandered the country looking for her fish, weeping. An old man with hair down to his shoulders and rough clothes appeared in the sky and called down to her: "Do not cry. Your stepmother killed your fish, and the bones are under the dung heap. Go and gather them. Whatever you ask of them, they will give you." Yeh-Shen did as she was told and brought the bones home and hid them in her room. From that day, whenever she wanted food or clothing, she would only have to ask the bones, and what she needed would appear.

The time came for the spring festival, when young men and women of the cave country gathered to choose husbands and wives. The stepmother went with her own daughter and ordered Yeh-Shen to stay home and watch the fruit trees. As soon as they were out of sight, Yeh-Shen asked the bones for a gown. She was given a robe of kingfisher feathers, and on her feet a pair of golden slippers. Dressed like this she followed her stepmother to the festival.

She was so beautiful that everyone stared, and the stepmother and stepsister thought they almost recognized her. Frightened of being caught, Yeh-Shen ran away in such a hurry that she lost one of the golden slippers, and a man at the festival picked it up.

The slipper passed from hand to hand until it came to the king of a nearby island kingdom called T'o-Han. The king was struck by it, for it was the lightest shoe in the world, and as light on the foot as a feather. He had every woman in his kingdom try it on, and not one of them could fit her foot inside. The slipper was no larger than the smallest finger.

His search led him at last to the cave country and to the door of Yeh-Shen's stepmother. Every woman of the household was made to try the slipper, and all of them failed. Then the king saw Yeh-Shen, hiding in a corner. He had the slipper brought to her, and she went to her room and came back wearing both slippers and the robe of feathers. She was, he saw at once, the woman who had vanished from the festival.

The king took her home with him to be his queen. The stepmother and the stepsister, the people say, were buried beneath a hail of flying stones, and a shrine was built over their grave that the people of the cave country called the Tomb of Distressed Women.

As for the bones of the fish, the king at first kept them and asked them for treasures. But after a year they would no longer answer him, and he buried them along the seashore with a hundred bushels of pearls and a border of gold. When he later went to dig them up to pay for soldiers in a war, the tide had risen and washed them away.

This story was told to Duan Chengshi by Li Shih-yuan, who was the son of a man from the cave country, and remembered many of its tales.