Original Text
In Laiyang, there was a commoner who lay resting on his bed during the day, when he saw a man and a woman enter hand in hand. The woman was sallow and swollen, her waist so thick it seemed she might topple backward, her face full of misery. The man urged her, saying, "Come, come!" The commoner thought they were engaged in a secret affair, so he pretended to sleep, hoping to secretly observe their actions. After the two entered, they seemed not to notice anyone on the bed, and the man urged again, "Hurry!" The woman then bared her chest, exposing her belly, which was as large as a drum. The man produced a butcher's knife, thrust it forcefully into her belly, and cut straight down from the heart to the navel, making a "chi chi" sound. The commoner was terrified and dared not breathe loudly. The woman endured with furrowed brows, uttering only a few groans. The man, holding the knife in his mouth, reached into the belly, grabbed the intestines, and pulled them out, draping them over his elbow; as he hung them, he continued to draw them out, until his arm was soon full. Then he cut them off with the knife, lifted them, and placed them on the table, returning to draw more. When the table was full, he hung them on a chair, and when the chair was full, he wound dozens of coils around his elbow, like a fisherman casting a net, and tossed them toward the commoner's head. The commoner felt a wave of hot, fishy wetness, covering his face and neck completely. Unable to bear it any longer, he pushed the intestines away with his hand, let out a loud cry, and leaped up to flee. The intestines fell by the bedside, tripping his feet, and he collapsed dizzily to the ground. His family rushed in to see him covered in pig entrails, but upon closer inspection, there was nothing there. Everyone thought their eyes had deceived them and were not alarmed. Only when the man recounted what he had seen did they all share in the astonishment. Yet there was no trace left in the room, except that the stench of blood lingered for several days without dissipating.
Commentary
Beauty and ugliness are opposites in unity. Ugliness and grotesqueness also fall within the realm of aesthetics. From the perspective of practical aesthetics, they are the concrete and vivid manifestation of alienated and distorted human essential forces in the object world. They evoke disgust, contempt, aversion, and pain in emotion, and are characterized by disharmony, disproportion, asymmetry, and disorder in form. Ugliness is the antithesis of beauty, a dislocation of beauty. If beauty is the manifestation of goodness, then ugliness is the manifestation of evil. The hallucination of a certain commoner from Laiyang can be described as seeing ghosts in broad daylight, reaching the extreme of ugliness and evil. As a process of aesthetic appreciation of ugliness, the tale has a beginning, an end, a climax, and an aftertaste, making it very complete.
Since the Tang dynasty's chuanqi tales in "Xuanguai Lu" (Records of Mysterious Anomalies), ugliness and monstrosity have been introduced as aesthetic objects into the depiction of classical Chinese fiction, and "Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio" is likewise a creative promoter and magnifier in this regard.