A hilarious tale, with one little story per chapter!
Three Rebirths Later, He Didn't Want to Be Human Anymore follows William, an English gentleman whose ancestor stole a shard of blue-and-white porcelain from the Old Summer Palace. The shard traps him in a bizarre cycle of rebirth.
After touching it, his first life is as a eunuch in the Qing dynasty. His Oxford-accented “liberty” is mistaken for “good fortune and long life,” his awkward dance steps are hailed as “exotic Western skills,” and even the hard bread he secretly bakes becomes a “blessed cake for the emperor.” In his next life, he is a Republican-era prostitute. His shouts of “I’m a man” are taken as flirtation, he waddles in a qipao like a penguin, and his British table manners earn him praise for “playing hard to get.” In his third life, he becomes a deranged beggar in the 1980s. He is mistaken for a robber when he picks up ration coupons, beaten for trying to save a child, and eventually chokes to death beside a steamed bun, left with only one thought: being human is too hard.
Three rebirths as a human crush his gentlemanly dignity. After that, he successively becomes a sewer cockroach, a thieving mouse, a slug mistaken for a booger, a lab mouse, a fly that lands on poop, and more. Life as an animal is just as absurd: the cockroach gets cursed for blocking a gas leak, the mouse is chased for carrying off rat poison, and the fly is swatted dead for disrupting a fake-artifact deal.
Only when he is reborn as a panda, munching bamboo shoots as he watches humans rush about, does he finally understand: from gentleman to insect, rodent, and national treasure, redemption has nothing to do with dignity. If even a fly that lands on poop can disgust a villain, then what could be a better way to atone than becoming a carefree national treasure? This is a story that brews laughter from misery. When you no longer want to be human, the most wretched forms may hide the purest kindness.
