the one wish willow is not a wish

somewhere in southeast asia, during the war. a train stops at a small station. on the platform a woman is selling things out of a basket, and she is — everyone agrees on this part when they tell it — ugly.

a handsome white man is looking out of the window at her, and he lets his face say what he thinks.

she is the local witch. everyone at that station knows this except him.

the train goes on to the city. he gets off. within the hour he has bought a ticket back. he finds her. he marries her. they have children. he never leaves.

that's the whole thing. i have no source for it — no year, no names, no station, no way to check any of it. i've just never been able to put it down.

the older name for it

if you're here you've seen the film, so i'll skip the recap. you know the mechanic: one person makes the wish, a different person's life is what changes.

where i come from that isn't a wish. it's 蛊.

the character is a vessel with insects in it — 皿 over 蟲 — and in 541 bc the physician he explains it to the ruler of jin by taking it apart exactly that way. for about two thousand years it's a poisoning story.

then in 1935 feng han-yi and j. k. shryock wrote up the whole subject for the journal of the american oriental society, and among the preparations they list is one that isn't poison at all: "used as a love potion, administered in food and drink and called 'love-medicine'."

and in 1968 wolfram eberhard, a berkeley sinologist, published the sentence that made me want to write this:

"in these reports it was almost invariably stated that the love charm had a fatal effect if the man, to whom the charm was directed, did not return to the woman at a specified time."

so he had to buy the ticket. not a change of heart, not a twist — a deadline. and somebody had already filed it as a recurring motif, decades before anyone told it to me as something that happened to a real man on a real train.

the small one

we had a lesser version where i grew up.

for a stretch of my childhood you'd find them by the road: a one-mao note, rolled up and tied with red thread, with a letter rolled up inside it. someone picked this up and ignored it, and here's what happened to him. someone else copied it out ten times and scattered the copies, and here's how well things went for her. now it's your turn.

the money was on the outside. the letter was on the inside. you had to pick up the money to find out you'd been handed a job.

that one i can date, which is the funny part.

the oldest luck chain letter anyone has managed to collect is from leeds, maine, january 1906. "he who will rewrite it to nine other persons... will on or after the ninth day experience great joy." against: "he who will not say it will be afflicted with some great misfortune."

nine copies. nine days. one success story, one cautionary tale. it took that letter about ninety years and an ocean to reach a ditch outside my school, and it didn't change a single moving part.

信则有，不信则无

believe it and it's there. don't and it isn't. that sounds like an escape hatch. it isn't — it's the mechanism.

look at what all three of these have in common. the not-believing option only becomes available to you after the thing has already happened. the letter is already in your hand. the man is already off the train. the stick is already out of the box.

and notice the story needs her to be ugly. if she were beautiful there'd be nothing left to explain and no story to tell. the charm gets reached for at exactly the moment he loved her stops being an acceptable answer to whoever is telling it.

does any of it work. i can't tell you that one.

and now you

nobody left this page by the road with money rolled round it. you weren't selected.

you searched for a snapping novelty stick from a horror film, and out of everything the internet had available you've ended up at a one-person toy shop in shanghai, reading a citation from a 1968 monograph on the local cultures of south china.

i'm not going to tell you that means anything.

i'll only say that at eight years old, on that road, i'd have counted odds like these as a sign and started copying it out.

ours

ours comes in ten colours instead of the official black, and each colour is a different wish. pink love, blue friendship, gold achievement, green growth, purple insight, brown grounding, yellow confidence, red courage, orange ambition, black release.

nine of those are wishes about yourself.

pink is the only one in the box pointed at another person — which, if you've seen the film, is the entire subject of the film. we sell it anyway. we also sell all ten together, which is the coward's option and the one i'd pick.

仅供娱乐

the official site puts it better than i can, and i'm quoting it exactly:

"the one wish willow is 100% magical and 0% real. for entertainment only."

and under that: "tabi cat curiosities is not responsible for wish misinterpretations. use at your own risk." there's a hotline too, 1-323-747-7118, which is a lovely thing for a fictional company to have.

ours is 13.5 cm of pla that snaps once and doesn't go back together. that part is real, and it's the only part that is.

信不信由你。

go play.