The Eight Immortals Carry the Coffin

My grandfather’s name was Li Qingshan.

He said the thing he regretted most in his life wasn’t wading through mountains of corpses and rivers of blood on the battlefield. It was taking a job in 1952, on a rainy night, to carry a locust-wood coffin in Zhangjia Village.

That year, my grandfather was thirty-seven, a veteran who had crawled out of the mountains of the dead in the War of Resistance. He was as fearless as a bull. In the countryside, pallbearers had an elegant name: the “Eight Immortals.” Grandfather was the lead bearer, the “Master of the Eye.” Anyone within a hundred li who had a death in the family would call on him. He had seen corpses spring back to life, bodies transform after death, coffins dripping blood, and all manner of sinister events. He had never been afraid.

But that coffin made him kneel for the first time...