I Am a Spirit Mourner

When my mother was seven months pregnant with me, she went to wash clothes by the Hun River. When she came home, she was raving. The midwife said I didn't cry when I was born. I was purple all over, like a stillborn baby, and my umbilical cord hadn't been cut; it had snapped on its own. My grandfather knelt before the spirit altar all night, knocking his head against the ground, and burned three life-extending incense sticks to drag my soul back from the gates of the underworld. I survived. My mother didn't. She bled to death, soaking the entire kang in blood. My grandfather tucked me inside his thick cotton coat and muttered, “I'll raise you. I've got a tough life. Let's see who can outlast whom.” My grandfather's surname was Ma. He was the most famous spirit medium for miles around, serving the Hu family altar. When I was six, I knelt in the funeral hall and heard someone speak from inside the coffin. My grandfather said I was born to mourn the dead, with a fate half yin and half yang and a natural connection to both worlds. I would keep vigil, wail at funerals, and lead the way, speaking the words the dead had left unsaid and lighting the road to the Yellow Springs for the departed. From then on, I learned spirit-medium practices from my grandfather. I learned to summon spirits, draw talismans, read incense, and travel into the underworld, one skill at a time. With a coin for the dead hanging around my neck, an eternal lamp in my hand, and red cloth draped over my head, I lowered mine before the living and opened my eyes to the dead. I kept vigil for an old woman who died peacefully in her sleep, and spoke on behalf of Grandma Zhao, whose coffin wood her daughter-in-law had chopped up. Beneath an old locust tree, I mourned Zhou Xiao'e, who had been turned into “medicine.” In a hollow in the back hills, I sent little Suo, who had been trapped there for who knew how many years, on her way. I led the way for the old man of the Meng family and kept vigil for Grandma Qian. Her eyes stayed open after she died, and only closed once I lit an eternal lamp for her. My grandfather said a mourner's voice belonged to the dead. When keeping vigil, the eternal lamp must never go out, and the incense must never be allowed to burn out