Defying Fate: My Divination-Fueled Life in the Sixties

Xiang Wan, a college student in the 22nd century, rushes home after learning that her grandmother has Alzheimer’s, but gets into a car accident on the way and becomes a ghost her family can’t see. Only her senile grandmother can sense her. One night, her grandmother reveals the truth in a dream: Years ago, to save Xiang Wan from the death fate awaiting her at age twenty-two, she used the divination skills she had spent her life cultivating to seek a chance of survival. The heavens struck back, leaving her mentally impaired. Now she must send Xiang Wan’s soul back to be reborn.

When she opens her eyes again, Xiang Wan has become Chen Zhaodi, a sixteen-year-old girl from a working-class family in Beijing in 1966. She has also inherited her grandmother’s gift for divination. But the campaign to “Smash the Four Olds” is in full swing, and fortune-telling is condemned as “feudal dross.” One wrong move could bring disaster. Cunning and no self-sacrificing saint, Xiang Wan conceals her copper divination plaques and her talent, using accurate readings to avert danger and build connections. Amid coarse-grain steamed buns and the storms of political change, she quietly takes up her grandmother’s legacy while carving out a way to survive, becoming a one-of-a-kind “keeper of hidden divinations” in the 1960s.