Week 6 Reading Diary

Chinese Fairy Tales

The Favorite Fortune and the Child of Ill Luck
-Basically this is a story about how bad luck will kill you even if you are the daughter or wife of the emperor.
-Also, if you have good luck then you will become an emperor even if you are born a beggar.

The Cave of the Beasts
-So there were seven little girls who ate these seven goose eggs that their father wanted to eat.
-Their father then planned to kill them by leaving them in the woods for the wolves.
-They found a cave where a wolf and fox lived with all their treasures, killed them, took the gold and went home.

The Panther
-Like the wolf that eats grandma but it's a panther who eats mom and little brother and then the sisters get a bunch of people from the town to help set up a Rube Goldberg of death.

Why Dog and Cat Are Enemies
-Cat and Dog journey together and scheme to get the good luck of a ring back to their owners.
-The cat took all the credit because cats are evil.

Yang Oerlang
-Demigod who can shape shift and destroys nine of ten suns out of anger for his mother's death before he becomes a full god in the heavens.

The Lady of The Moon
-Hou I was such a good archer that he shot down nine of the ten suns with his bow so that people could actually live and work outside without being burnt to a crisp
-He was rewarded for being awesome with an herb of immortality but his wife secretly ate it and then floated up to the moon to live in a castle.
-These stories have yet to mention love.  Chinese.
-The moon palace is made of crystal and so is everything in it. This seems much more like a fairy tale I would expect.

SilkWorm Goddess
-Super Weird
-Engagements to animal then turning into a silkworm and your friend killing you for money then vein put in charge of worms in the afterlife.

The God of War
-Once a man, lots of followers.  Became a god of war in death and his followers killed themselves.
-He is actually a big deal, maybe not quite as big as Confucius though.

The Miserly Farmer
-Wouldn't give a pear so priest thingy does magic and gives away all his pears. These stories teach odd lessons or no lessons really.

The King of The Ants
-The ants look like people but the king made fun of the scholar so the scholar destroyed all of them because humans rule!

The Little Hunting Dog
-This guy saw more tiny people and they left behind their dog and he adopted it and it ate his flies but he killed it on accident in his sleep
-For some reason I have liked this one the most.  Maybe just because there is a dog in it.

Fox-Fire
-A fox that breathes a ball of fire
-Cool fox
-guy steals the magic fire and gets powers (much more interesting than normal)
-Uses powers to make money then loses powers when he gets old
-Chinese do not make very interesting plots

The Talking Silver Foxes
-Not even a story, just about the animals
-Magical creatures are generally smart but get killed in most of these stories.

Retribution
-Witness to a murder but stays silent to protect old man
-Best actual plot of all these stories
-Ghost of dead guy comes back and the soul is placed in a baby next door several years later, ooooh
-little boy accidentally kills the guy who accidentally killed him in the first place, circle of death

The Night on the Battlefield
-Ghost story of a guy who spent the night with a bunch of dead soldiers and didn't know it.

The Maiden who was Stolen Away
-A cyclone moved her while she was sleeping, like in Wizard of Oz
-She is stuck at the top of a tower by an ogre but her brother saves her, not a suitor

The Flying Ogre
-Even when there is king of a twist, there's not
-Ogre was the girl. Then she "probably" was killed

The Sorcerer of the White Lotus Lodge
-Basically the sorcerer for the Illuminati
-He gets caught by 1000 men but then still gets away somehow and gets his son and wife away

Chinese Fairy Tales