Near the end of the Qing Dynasty, there was a village in Northeast China where a family surnamed Xing lived. The Xing family was famous for two reasons. The first was that they had a secret ancestral remedy for eye disease; whoever had eye disease went to the Xing household to receive the remedy and the disease was quickly cured. The second reason was that the left eye of all the men of the Xing family had no pupil and could see nothing. They did not know for how many generations the men in their family had been like that. They only took it as an inherited trait.
At that time, Lao (“Old”) Xing was 40 years old and, of course, his left eye was blind, as were his father’s and son’s left eyes. What was the relationship between the secret ancestral remedy and the ancestral deformity? The Xing family never thought about it, and people who knew them also did not think about it.
