A fool guards the funeral home; the underworld calls him Dad.
Lin Sandeng has guarded the funeral home for fifteen years. He chews steamed buns on coffin boards and sleeps beside the dead.
The whole village calls him a fool. Anyone can kick him.
No one knows that the bone in his right arm is a pass to the Ten Halls of the Underworld.
When Maoshan came with a demolition order to seize the land, he tore it off the coffin. When the corpse drivers of western Hunan came with eight coffins to snatch someone, he squatted in the doorway, chewing a steamed bun. "You'll have to run me over first." When the spirit mediums laid a banquet to trap him, he showed up carrying a white lantern and poured all three families' wine onto the ground. "I don't drink. We'll settle the score after this meal."
When he was seven, someone fed him a pill that sealed his apertures. His yang aperture closed, and his yin aperture opened. The fool act was fake. The bone was real.
So was his stubbornness.
He claimed this funeral home. The Underworld's demolition office has sent eight teams, and the coffin boards have been replaced three times, but he's still here.
After fifteen years guarding the village, he's still the same stubborn holdout.
You demolish. I'll hold my ground.
The bones are in my body, and the land is beneath my feet.
No one can do a thing about it.
