The Ginseng Digger

Everyone in the village called me a “short-lived brat” because I had carried karmic debts from a previous life since childhood. My family and friends turned their backs on me, and people avoided me whenever they saw me. Even when I went to bed at night, my mother had to tie a red string around my left ankle and nail it to the edge of the kang with a coffin nail, afraid that the people I owed would drag me away in the dead of night. I had never truly lived, not until the year I got lost deep in the mountains and met a Changbai Mountain ginseng digger, a man with a dragon coiled on his back and scales running along his spine, who braved the stars and cleaved the moon, carved through mountains, and hunted deer.

He took off his bamboo hat, brushed the poisonous dew from his straw cape, and smiled at me. “Come on, follow me and sell some ginseng!”