Seventy-Two Lamps for the Dead

The year I was born, everyone in the village said I wouldn't live past my first seven days.

When my mother was seven months pregnant with me, she fell gravely ill and gave birth prematurely. I weighed less than four pounds, and my cries sounded like a cat's. But that night, a white porcelain ghost lamp lit up outside the door of every one of the village's seventy-two households.

No one knew who had lit the lamps, and no one dared blow them out. They weren't there to light the way for the living. They were for the dead to find their way home.

From then on, I was sickly and frail, but I could see things other people couldn't.

At the age of twenty-four, I saw that same kind of white porcelain lamp again in a family's funeral hall.

The paper effigy beneath it turned its head and called out my mother's name.