This is a passage from the first chapter of the epic Huang Yuan ("The Flats").

Night after night, seated at a ratty table under the leaky roof of a dilapidated home in Dashu Township, Kaohsiung County, newly married Wu Yanmei, husband to Wu Qingzhang, pushed his pen in frantic flight across the writing paper in a desperate attempt to keep pace with the story churning away in his mind.

The year was 1952, and 19-year-old Wu had just come to Taiwan three years before as a low-ranking officer in the Nationalist army. The strength of his concern for the Chinese people, his sense of mission, were clearly signaled in the pen name he had chosen-Sima Zhongyuan. The name echoed back two millennia to Sima Qian, author of the Records of the Grand Historian, and implied that a successor now roamed the North China Plain (zhongyuan), the ancient cradle of Chinese civilization. Sima Zhongyuan finished the preliminary draft of his epic novel Huang Yuan the following year, but it wasn't published by Crown Magazine until 1959.

Gregarious and easygoing, Sima Zhongyuan (center) has more friends in the literary world than he can count. He posed for this 1969 photo with poet Ya Hsien (first from right) and authors Chu Hsi-ning (second from right) and Lin Haiyin (left).

The prolific Sima followed up on his first novel with one book after another covering such genres as modern literature (focusing on the war between China and Japan), autobiographical novels, anecdotal accounts of notable local incidents, tales of the supernatural, and children's stories. Today, a half-century later, Storm & Stress Publishing has come out with a collection of Sima's best works, for which National Taiwan University professor emeritus Chi Pang-yuan has penned an outstanding commentary. When she first read Huang Yuan years ago, writes Chi, "for the longest time, I couldn't get out of my mind its images of the earth and people." Huang Yuan is widely acknowledged as Sima's best work. Steeped in local flavor and events, the novel's striking descriptions of the lives of ordinary people in a remote place became the hallmark of Sima's literary style.

Upon re-reading Huang Yuan and Kuang Fengsha ("Dust Storm"), Professor Chi comments: "These are stunning novels. Seeing them republished is like coming across an old friend who had dropped out of sight years ago but is suddenly out in public in the trendy new part of town."

The man "out in the trendy part of town" is going on 78 years of age, an elegant old gent wearing a starkly simple Chinese-style button-down shirt. Sima quit writing novels and telling ghost stories 10 years ago after finishing Zui Hou de Fangong ("The Final Counterattack"). His most important role these days is that of an instructor at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, where he teaches the Chinese classics as well as history and philosophy. Maximum class size is 250, and the spots fill up quickly.

Sima may have taken his career in a new direction, but a leopard will change its spots before Sima will quit telling ghost stories. The popular mimic Kuo Tze-cheng imitated Sima's manner of telling ghost stories for a time, and one of his lines went viral: "The Chinese fear ghosts! Westerners fear ghosts! People the world over fear ghosts! This is scary stuff!"

Sima is a walking library of ghost stories, but the only ones he tells in public are those with an edifying message. "Ghost stories are not just for scaring people. They're for building character. They remind us of the importance of keeping a clear conscience and a kind heart. These lessons help us a lot in our lives."

Sima Zhongyuan's writing style is unrestrained and endlessly creative, but he shows iron discipline in his daily penmanship practice, meticulously turning out one character after another. It's both a form of self-training and an expression of respect for others.

For the past 10 years, Sima has widened the range of his reading. Whereas he once focused on literature, he is now into history, philosophy, politics, economics, and the natural sciences. "I hope we will get to know more about the age we live in by integrating book learning with the rest of life's lessons."

Sima's sartorial style may be unchangingly marked by his traditional button-down shirts, but his nimble mind is not set in cement by any stretch of the imagination.

He still writes children's stories, and the tales trip effortlessly off his tongue.

Now that global warming has become a problem, Sima has taken an interest in honeybees, which are mysteriously disappearing. The United States, as the biggest market for honey in the world, has taken to importing honeybees from Southeast Asia. Singapore, in the meantime, found in a study that its bees were less productive than those in mainland China. Inner Mongolia's bees are the busiest of all, producing four times more honey than their Singaporean cousins. Reasoning that productivity is determined by the strain of bee, Singapore purchased bees from Inner Mongolia. Lo and behold, honey production shot sharply upward in the very first year. Contrary to expectations, however, honey production then declined beginning from year two, and by year four had fallen to exactly to where it stood before the big bee import. Why?

Research has shown that bees act as if they were endowed with foresight. They produce honey as food for the long winter. But there is no winter in Singapore. During the Mongolian bees' first year in Singapore, they worked away as they had in their native land, but by the third or fourth year they had learned that flowers could be found all year round, and that they could eat their fill every day.

"The story of the bees touches upon biology, botany, and the science of pollination, but I'm mainly interested in the story as a metaphor for Taiwan society. Today's kids in Taiwan can eat whatever they want, whenever they want it, and now we've got more and more obese children." Grandpa Sima, as the younger generation calls him, feels that to tell children's stories, you must first understand where kids are at, and somehow inspire them. To do this, the kernel of your message has to be appealingly packaged.

From major works of epic literature to entertaining little anecdotal recollections of things seen and heard, Sima Zhongyuan brings vividly to life anything he takes his pen to. Sima used to tell ghost tales on TV, a rare case among writers.

The body, as they say, is the temple of the soul, which is why early each morning one can find a sprightly old fellow walking briskly along Xinhai Road in Taipei. At the Xinhai Tunnel he ascends a walking path that heads over the tunnel and into the woods. From the path he makes his way to Wuxing Street before turning around and going back home. That man is Sima Zhongyuan. Unable to kick cigarettes and alcohol, he compensates by exercising. He gets up every morning at 4:50 a.m., straps on a pedometer, and leaves for his daily walk, doing 35,000 steps daily. He walks three kilometers just to mail a letter. He also practices meditation, does breathing exercises, and limits what he eats.

As if he weren't busy enough, Sima eschews hiring a home care helper for his sick wife. Instead, he bathes her and prepares her meals himself. Sima is probably busier in his golden years than the honeybees of Inner Mongolia. He can go nonstop for 12 hours a day without even breaking for a nap.

The couple's youngest son, Wu Rongzhe, returned to Taiwan after studying in the United States and working in the computer industry there for an additional 27 years. After returning, he wrote a book in praise of his mother and had 300 copies printed up and distributed to relatives. His next project is the bigger task of writing a book on the life of his father.

A biography of Sima Zhongyuan will be a hefty tome indeed!

An active author from skinny youth to sprightly old age, Sima Zhongyuan has published over 100 works, and continues to write to this day.

When he started writing Huang Yuan at age 19, Sima was four years younger than the famed Eileen Chang when she published her first novel. Whereas Chang had attended Saint Maria Girls' School in Shanghai and the University of Hong Kong, Sima never received formal schooling, yet he somehow rocketed to lofty literary achievement at an early age. The term "prodigy" hardly does the man justice.

Professor Chi calls Sima "a born storyteller" on whose loquacious tongue "any story at all might sprout wings and take flight." If he had been born in a more prosperous time, declares Chi, he might have written something along the lines of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

There can be no doubt that Sima's life would have taken a very different course had he not been forced by war into a life of wandering. Puffing on a cigarette, Sima says half-jokingly: "Given my personality, I would have probably lived like the scion of some rich family, walking my pet bird, and lounging in bath houses and teashops listening to the professional storytellers. In addition to my wife, I might have taken a mistress."

But one of his life-long hankerings was actually quite simple-to hunker down in a home in the wetlands on the eastern shore of Hongze Lake in the north of Jiangsu Province and farm the land.

However, a world in turmoil took his extraordinary talents, fired them, quenched them, pressure-rolled them, and put him on a path to a place he had never dreamed of. The written word, it turned out, was the only escape route for the thoughts in his head.

Both Sima and Qingzhang are utterly sincere, and think first about the other's best interests. They keep an ancestor altar in their home for Yang Qianwu, Qingzhang's childhood sweetheart, and she burns incense before Yang's tablet each morning and evening.

Sima was prodigiously talented in two different ways. First, from a very early age he displayed total recall of anything he ever saw or heard. As a small boy, he loved to listen to storytellers and watch stage performances, and could accurately repeat their performances. His active mind and passionate nature were manifested in youth by a ravenous desire to learn to read and write. Without ever enrolling in school, he taught himself to read popular literature. Soon he was keeping up avidly with the latest developments on the literary scene.

His natural-born talent has not faded one iota over the years. Yin Di, the owner of Elite Books, once asked: "Why don't you write a memoir?" It seemed like a good idea. Sima as a young man had spent time in seven different townships in southern Taiwan. He was familiar with every single one of the last four generations of writers with a military background. And so one stormy autumn evening he started jotting down the names of people he had known, but just counting those already passed away, the list ran to 760 men and over 100 women. "I'd never be able to finish it," he said to himself with a sigh, and set his pen aside.

Sima is blessed with yet another special talent-he's a born spirit medium who frequently comes in contact with another dimension.

On the day when the writer San Mao killed herself in 1991, something most peculiar happened to Sima at 2:03 a.m. A sudden gust of wind billowed the curtains and ruffled the covers, and San Mao appeared before him, gently shaking his bed and saying: "I won't be able to make it to your dinner." Just a few days before, Sima had intended to invite San Mao to dinner, but didn't know she was sick in the hospital and so couldn't get in touch with her.

Sima has had more many incidents of this sort than he could recount, and has grown reluctant to discuss his psychic nature. So many have asked what it's like to go into a trance that he's developed something a stock response: "It's like my soul has grown wings that take me off to the Tang Dynasty, where I make friends with the people of the olden days. I'm not the original me anymore. The original me has expanded. That's what it's like when I go into a trance."

As an infant, he remembered his previous incarnation-a girl adopted as a child bride by her future in-laws. When he talked at the age of nine months about his previous life, the neighbors figured he was some sort of ghoul.

Kuang Fengsha and Huang Yuan, early works by Sima Zhongyuan, present a powerful portrait of rural life, revealing the contradictions of an ancient nation in some ways honest and straightforward, in others under-handed and conniving, rising at times to greatness only to descend to despicable depths.

The gifted boy was tossed into an age wracked by war, hunger, disfigurement, and death. In the face of an advancing war front, flight became the core of his existence-flight from both local brigands and the invading Japanese. At age six he was packed off to his grandmother's home. At 10 he fled to a village called Shi Family Arsenal. "My kindergarten was the Battle of Tai'erzhuang!" He lost contact with his family for a time and was taken in by the 57th Army, which put him to work supplying cotton swabs to the nurses in an American hospital. At age 15 he joined the Nationalist army, with whom he retreated the next year to Taiwan.

Through it all, Sima's zeal for the Chinese language never flagged. He read everything he could get his hands on, including wartime literature, fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, Chinese martial arts novels, poetry by Dai Wangshu and Zhu Xiang, and stirring pre-revolutionary Russian novels. He also practiced writing Chinese characters on scrap paper. But he never imagined that he himself might one day be an author.

His early handwriting was unique-full of personality but nearly impossible to decipher. To master proper handwriting, once he achieved some stability in his life he practiced it daily, filling up exercise books just like an elementary school student. Later on, the manuscripts he delivered to his publisher were impeccably penned, without a single badly executed character or anything at all crossed out or touched up.

The peripatetic circumstances of his youth had a crucial impact on Sima's life. He asked himself: Was China not a dynastic power? How could such a country get pushed around by tiny little Japan? Totally disillusioned, at one point he scooped up a fistful of earth and swore an oath to the heavens: "If I get out of this alive, I'm going to understand the Chinese people and pass on everything I've learned about our history and culture to the next generation!"

Sima brought his oath with him to Taiwan. With a low army rank and meager pay, the future looked bleak, but he found a love that would define the rest of his life.

Sima Zhongyuan and his wife Wu Qingzhang share a deep affection. An accomplished writer in her own right, Qingzhang sacrificed her career to further her husband's. Says Sima: "Without Qingzhang, I could never have achieved what I did."

Sima was once asked if he had always been completely faithful to his wife. On that subject, he always lowers his voice and confides that he's too much of a coward to go fooling around. In reality, however, cowardice has nothing to do with it. He and his wife are to each other equal parts teacher, friend, and lover.

When they first met, he was at an infantry school in Fengshan, Kaohsiung County, while she was in the young women's corps. Wu Qingzhang was three years older than him, so he took to calling her "big sister Qingzhang." Both worked as writers for the armed forces, and she published quite a bit of poetry on the side under the pen name Bing Qing.

She had a childhood sweetheart named Yang Qianwu, a graduate of Central Political University, but hadn't heard from him since last seeing him in Nanjing in 1949. She had plenty of suitors after coming to Taiwan, but refused them all. Sima had never had a girlfriend before, and Qingzhang only regarded him as a younger brother to whom she could pour out her innermost secrets. Love, however, crept up on them by surprise, and a half-year after getting together the young couple wedded in violation of army rules. In rapid succession, they bore six children from 1954 through 1960.

Sima considers Qingzhang a hundred times better writer than himself. In the late 1940s, Chinese-language newspapers in Malaysia vied for the right to print her poetry, while the unknown Sima was continually getting rejected by publishers. Eventually she advised him to change tack and establish a reputation overseas before embarking upon the Taiwan market. It worked like a charm. The name "Sima Zhongyuan" gradually grew in fame. Wu Qingzhang, in contrast, had to quit writing to care for their growing brood.

Indeed, their son Rongzhe feels his mother got a rough deal: "Our dad married young and quickly fathered six kids, but often went off with his drinking buddies to play cards and Chinese Go, as if he were still single."

From major works of epic literature to entertaining little anecdotal recollections of things seen and heard, Sima Zhongyuan brings vividly to life anything he takes his pen to. Sima used to tell ghost tales on TV, a rare case among writers.

Qingzhang's sacrifice put the wind in Sima's sails: "Everything I am, I owe to Qingzhang's sacrifice and counsel. She is the harbor where I set anchor, the nest where I go for warmth. Without her care, I could never have achieved what I did."

But while he may not have been a completely model husband, he did work hard at his writing to support his six children. After Sima left the army, the family moved to Taipei, primarily so he could give Crown Magazine better service. The royalties from over 60 novels paid for his children's university education, including three who studied abroad.

As if a family of eight didn't produce enough bustle already, Sima points to another room and informs, "We also keep an ancestor tablet for Yang Qianwu here!"

Years into the marriage, Qingzhang suddenly got a strange feeling, as if Yang were hanging around.

A sympathetic Sima went through everyone he knew to try and learn Yang's whereabouts, and eventually confirmed that he had passed away after the Cultural Revolution. On a trip to Chongqing some years later, Sima had a dream in which an old man took him to a place where Yang once lived. For several nights afterward, Yang appeared in Sima's dreams and told him about a lot of things he'd experienced after death. He also recited a poem that he had written in memory of Qingzhang.

Sima was deeply impressed by the faithfulness of Yang's love: "I'm just butting in here, playing the husband in the present life." Qingzhang later got Sima's consent to set up an ancestor altar at home for Yang, to whom she frequently pays her respects.

Kuang Fengsha and Huang Yuan, early works by Sima Zhongyuan, present a powerful portrait of rural life, revealing the contradictions of an ancient nation in some ways honest and straightforward, in others under-handed and conniving, rising at times to greatness only to descend to despicable depths.

Though he has published over 60 novels, and almost 30 anecdotal accounts of real-life events, essays, and children's books, Sima staunchly denies the "genius novelist" description that some apply to him.

"Two types of people do literature," says Sima. "One type is a genius, for whom it is not a profession. Francoise Sagan, for example, wrote in Bonjour Tristesse ("Hello Sadness") about the most memorable part of her life, but apart from that there was nothing. The other type is the professional writer who spends his entire life with a pen in hand. Take Tolstoy, for example. Just imagine the incredible grounding in culture, history, and society it takes to turn out a novel like Anna Karenina or War and Peace. He had to know Russia like the back of his hand!"

Sima used his unsurpassed knack for description to retell the events that had a formative impact upon his youth. His prodigious memory has served him well in the endeavor, complemented by wide reading and a wealth of experience. His writings have pushed out the boundaries of what a novel can be.

Looking back on his career, Sima remarks: "I had to learn to let the stories speak for themselves. At the beginning I was always horning in and expounding on my ideas. It took a while to realize that I shouldn't be doing that, because it detracted from integrity of the story."

Sima eventually realized that the novelist, after creating the story and its characters, must let the people speak for themselves and act as they choose, and that the task facing the author is to learn from everything in his environment. He must let the fools say foolish things and the wise ones say wise things.

Using stage acting as an analogy, the author plays roles via the characters he creates in his novel. But there often comes a point in a novel when the characters take control of their own behavior and write the story themselves, even subverting the story line the author originally had in mind.

Sima can accept the scholasticist position that writing a novel is not the same as storytelling, and that the author must pay close attention to structure and form. Nevertheless, he still maintains that "the actual form must be determined by the content of the story," so he does not go along with the idea that the storytelling method is passe. "If you can tell a story in a captivating way, then there's not a thing wrong with the storytelling method."

With contemporary novelists losing readers for lack of storytelling ability, the re-release of Sima Zhongyuan's works reacquaints readers with classy novels from an older school. Sima has fulfilled the vow that he took as a young man, with a fistful of earth: "If I get out of this alive, I'm going to understand the Chinese people and pass on everything I've learned about our history and culture to the next generation!"