I loved these old books. I think I had the Seven Clam Sisters or something like it. My parents managed to rescue and bring to the US two childhood stories I really enjoyed: The Long Haired Maiden, and Shihan and the Snail[0].

These old folk tales are really entertaining. Often there’s no real moral or anything. It’s just a story. And to this day I really like these stories that are just “this happened and that person did that” and so on which don’t have to say “And the message is X”.

Unrelatedly, my wife jokes that I ended up marrying a Taiwanese woman because my childhood was spent reading folk tales about Chinese women.

0: both these are somewhere on archive.org e.g. https://archive.org/details/thelonghairedmaiden