I, Yang Yinzhou, am the laziest dog left in Waxiang. All I want is to herd cattle by the Yuan River and take life easy. Instead, my mother wakes me up with a slap, the Miao girl A Yin pushes me along by tricking me with her Gu, and the dimwit monk Huiming makes me roll my eyes after stepping in cow dung.
A dragon boat at the river bottom threatens our lives. Stone doors in an underground palace crack open, and thousand-year-old vengeful spirits stir.
My only trump card is a form of ancient Waxiang speech no outsider can understand: a living fossil of ancient Chinese, with no written record, only spoken sounds. Recite Chenzhou talismans in it, and even ferocious ghosts have to listen. Use it to chat with the ancestors at the bottom of the river, and conversation flows more easily than with the living. From being forced underwater to seal the dragon vein to shouldering the fate of the entire Wuxi River Basin, I’ve been pushed along by people, tormented by Gu, and sent slipping through life on cow dung.
Only when my little boy, Nianxi, stood at the ferry crossing and called down to the river in his great-grandfather’s exact same retroflex accent, speaking his first words in Waxiang, did I understand: as long as the language lives, the river will never run dry. The ancestors have been racing dragon boats beneath the river for hundreds of years, waiting for this very voice.
It's not about curiosity, it's about inheritance The stilted buildings, morning mist over Youshui River, and bacon and pickled vegetables in the book are all real. Waxiang dialect is a living fossil from ancient times. Many secret customs, Nuo sacrifices, and ancestral stories are still passed down orally from generation to generation only by the elderly in our village. I don't make up stories, I only write about the secrets of Wa Township that are hidden deep in the mountains of western Hunan and cannot be heard or understood by outsiders. This book is the memory I wrote for my ethnic group as a descendant of Wa Township. Language is the key and story is the ferry. Thank you all for coming with me to witness.