In the winter of 1983, the snow in the shanty towns outside Harbin was so heavy that it could bury one's ankles. Mrs. Wang was forced to a dead end by her son Li Gouzi. She hung her neck from the beam of the adobe house with a hemp rope she had kneaded.
On the first night when the coffin was laid to rest according to the rules, the old black cat she had raised for ten years suddenly jumped up from the haystack in the corner of the kang onto the coffin bed, curled up on her chest and refused to move. Just as Aunt Zhang, who was keeping watch, was about to chase away the cat, the white cloth on the coffin suddenly moved - Mrs. Wang sat up. Her left eye was still a human eye, but her right eye was covered with black velvet, turning into an amber cat pupil. The right face was covered with fine hair, and there were fangs at the corners of her mouth.
"Meow..." She meowed, floated off the coffin, and followed the old cat out the door. Li Gouzi chased him out and fell into the ice cave. He had three scratches on his face that were deep enough to show the bones, and he was frozen into an ice corpse.
Every night from then on, the cat-faced old lady wandered in the snow, catching crying children. The windows of every house were nailed shut, and the door tops were made of thick wood, but they could not stop her sharp claws from prying open the windows. Until the police arrived with a shotgun and shot her through the chest under the moonlight. She fell in the snow, half of the cat's face slowly faded into that of an old woman, and the old cat squatted next to her, licking her bleeding wound.
Nowadays, old people outside the Taoist community still say that if you hear a cat meowing in the alley on a winter night, be sure not to open the window - that is the cat-faced old lady, still looking for her children who have not returned home.
