When I was twelve, I witnessed my great-grandfather’s grave being moved. Normally, only adults in the clan would be allowed to attend such an occasion, but I wanted very much to see for myself what happened to people a.er they died. I eventually persuaded my parents to allow me to come along. When the grave was dug up and I saw his remains, I was overcome with shock and fear. While the adults opened the grave with solemn ceremony, all I saw was a scrawny skeleton. There was no trace of the features my father and mother had described to me. There was only the hideous sight of white bones.

       It took me a while to get over the shock of seeing my great-grandfather’s bones. I said to myself, “Great-grandfather must have looked just like us. Does this mean my parents, too, will turn into just a bunch of white bones a.er they die? Is this what will happen to me when I die? Everyone dies, but a.er we die, do we just lie there unable to think about anything?” I couldn’t get these questions out of my head.

       Around that same time, a number of strange events occurred in our home. I have a vivid memory of one in particular. Each time our family wove cloth, we would take the snippets of thread from the spinning wheel and save them in an earthenware jar until we had enough to make a bolt of cloth. !e cloth we made from these snippets, called yejang, was a special cloth used when a child in the family was getting married. One night, these snippets were found scattered all over the branches of an old chestnut tree in a neighboring village. They made the tree look like it had turned white. We couldn’t understand who would have taken the snippets from the jar and carried them all the way to the chestnut tree, which was quite a distance from our home, and then spread them all over the tree. It didn’t seem like something that could be done by human hands, and it frightened everyone in the village.