The Corpse-Stitching Thread

On a stormy night in 1993, the collective dormitory of the Red Star Cotton Mill was shaken by the discovery of a woman’s corpse hanging upside down, her body wrapped in moldy cotton thread. Shen Hongli, a female worker, noticed that every corpse had a red cord tied around its ankle, the same soul-binding knot found on gravestones in the mass grave behind the factory. Deep inside a metal locker in the changing room, the bloody handprints of child laborers from forty years earlier were seeping through the wall plaster, slick with grease.