There’s an old saying in southwestern Shandong: Better sleep in a mass grave than borrow a bed in the dead of night.
The night my grandpa died, in the summer of 1999, someone came to borrow his life. I hid under the bed and watched that person walk in, wearing a face exactly like mine.
Grandpa left me a battered ledger. It listed seventy-two names, each one a “fatal weak point” on the Road to the Underworld. They say that every few decades, the road splits open in seventy-two places, each crack linked to a living person. Those “things” don’t take your life directly. They call your name in the middle of the night. The moment you answer, your life is borrowed.
My grandpa kept watch all his life. In the end, the one he was protecting was me.
From southwestern Shandong to Jiaodong Bay, I traveled across more than a hundred counties in Shandong and encountered hundreds of folk taboos. Every person I found opened another door. And with every door I opened, I came one step closer to the person behind it.
If you hear someone call your name, don’t answer.
Because you don’t know whether the one standing outside the door is even human.
