what might have been an epileptic seizure and relating dusty old stories to a Wise Monk whose body is like rotting wood—
A large, gleaming purplish red coffin rested in Lao Lan's living room. In it lay a fancy urn full of bones. Why go to all that trouble? I wondered. But then Lao Lan knelt by the coffin and smacked it with his hand as he keened, and I got my answer. A hand on an empty coffin was the only way to create such a soul-stirring sound; only a grand coffin suited the sight of the imposing Lao Lan kneeling alongside; and only a coffin of that grandeur was capable of encapsulating the appropriately sombre atmosphere. I had no way of knowing if my conjectures were correct, because what happened later made me lose all interest in this train of thought.
I sat at the head of the coffin, draped in hempen mourning attire. Tiangua sat at the opposite end, similarly clad. A clay pot for burning spirit money had been placed in the space between us. She and I lit sheets of yellow paper embossed like money from the flame of the bean-oil lamp resting atop the coffin and fed them into the clay pot, where they quickly turned to white ash and swirls of smoke. The stifling heat of that lunar July day, coupled with the rope-belted hempen cloth I was swathed in and the fire in the pot made the sweat spill from my pores. I looked at Tiangua—she was in a similar state. We took turns removing sheets of paper from the stack in front of us and burning them. Her sober expression was short on grief and there were no signs of tears on her cheeks; perhaps she had no more tears to shed. I was faintly aware of talk that the woman in the casket wasn't her birth mother and that she'd been bought from a human trafficker. Another rumour had it that she was born of an affair between Lao Lan and a young woman in another village, then brought back to be raised by his wife. I kept looking at her and at the face of the woman in the framed photograph behind the coffin but saw no resemblance. Then I compared her with Lao Lan and saw no resemblance there either, so perhaps she had been bought from a human trafficker after all.
Mother walked up with a cool wet towel and wiped my sweaty face. ‘Don't burn it too fast,’ she whispered. ‘Just enough to keep the fire going.’
She folded the towel, walked over to Tiangua and wiped her face as well. Tiangua looked up at Mother and rolled her eyes. She should have thanked her but she didn't.
Intrigued by our burning of the spirit money, Jiaojiao tiptoed over and crouched down next to me. Picking up a sheet, she tossed it into the clay pot and whispered: ‘Could we barbecue meat in that?’
‘No,’ I said.
The two newspaper photographers we'd hired walked in from the yard, one carrying a video camera, the other a light, to film the activity round the bier. Mother rushed up to take Jiaojiao outside; she balked and Mother had to grab her under her arms and drag her away.
Since I was being filmed, I affected a sombre expression as I placed a sheet of paper into the bowl. Tiangua did the same. After turning his lens to the fire, nearly touching the flames, the cameraman moved first to my face and then to Tiangua's. Next my hands, then her hands and from there to the coffin. Finally, to the framed picture of the deceased, which drew my attention back to the pale, oversized face on the wall. There was sadness in Aunty Lan's eyes, belying the trace of a smile on her lips, and as I stared at her I became aware that she was staring at me. I was awestruck by how much was hidden in her gaze; I looked away, first to the reporters in the doorway and then to Tiangua, who sat head-down, looking stranger to me by the minute. She grew less like a person and more like some sort of sprite, while the real Tiangua died along with her mother (birth mother or not, it didn't matter). What filled my eyes next was a funeral cart pulled by four horses along a broad dirt road heading southwest from their yard, carrying Aunty Lan and Tiangua, their baggy white attire billowing like