My name is Li Tieshan. I haul cement at construction sites for a living. Until the night shift on that Ghost Festival, when I saw a shadow by the excavation pit, dressed in burial clothes and standing on air, I always thought my mother's claim that I had “clear eyes” was just feudal superstition.
Only later did I learn that wasn't the beginning. A fever that wouldn't break, strange prescriptions spilling from my mouth, eerie tunes sung unconsciously in the middle of the night: this was called “spirit honing,” the old immortals knocking at my door.
I was initiated into a spirit altar through the “pole-moving” ritual and became a disciple medium. Presiding over the altar was Grand Master Hu Tianba of the Hu family; running errands and carrying messages was a young runner of the Huang family; and my late maternal grandfather kept watch as the Spirit King of the Qingfeng Stele. From then on, by day I was the ordinary Li Tieshan, and by night I was the immortals' mouth and eyes.
This isn't a myth. There are no immortals and demons battling in the sky here, only one bizarre reality after another from the black-soil lands: water ghosts in the reservoir who claim a substitute every year, vengeful spirits wandering beneath the mines, skeletons relentlessly haunted by ghost marriages, farming families plagued by their own guardian spirits, corpses walking through funeral homes in the dead of night... With my Wenwang drum and spirit-driving whip, reading incense and breaking through calamities, I handle one piece of “filth” after another in the shadows where science cannot reach.
Very real and beautiful