The Blind Fortune-Teller's Swindle

A blind fortune-teller tells a family what it wants to hear, and the family arranges its whole life around the prophecy. Wu Jianren's short satire shows how superstition, greed and wishful thinking can ruin a household, and it is as funny as it is pointed. It is a short, sharp and still relevant satire. This is a complete new English translation, with names in modern pinyin and the text rendered as plain, readable English prose. Written as the empire was collapsing, it shows China meeting steamships, newspapers, foreign concessions and reform, and it is sharper and funnier than most readers expect. Very little of this extraordinary body of fiction has been translated, and it shows a China in rapid, painful and often absurd transformation.