Man Who Fished for Corpses from the Yellow River: I Only Fish for Things from Living People

My father is the last person to fish for corpses by the Yellow River. When he was alive, he often said that anything could be fished from the river, including corpses, clothes, livestock, burial goods, and even the wealth of living people. There is only one thing that you must pretend not to see when you see it. I always thought he was trying to scare me. On the seventh day after his death, people in the village broke open the door of my house in the middle of the night and said they saw my grandfather going into the river again. What was fished out of the Yellow River that night was a woman in a red gown. Her first words after getting on the boat were not to ask for help, nor to cry for life. She looked at my father and asked: "Chen Wanshan, aren't you already dead?" Since then, life along the Yellow River has become increasingly uneasy. The corpses that returned home, the paper figures whose lives were borrowed, the coffins that refused to fall to the ground, the old graves where names were called out at night, and the rules under the blue bricks of my house that had been suppressed from generation to generation and dare not see the light, were all dug out. Later I learned that my grandfather had spent his whole life fishing for corpses. But what he really wanted to fish out of the river was never dead people. But we, the three generations of the Chen family, owe our lives under the Yellow River.