Luo Wan, a 32-year-old lawyer, is jolted awake in court when someone throws a cup of boiling water at her. When she opens her eyes again, she has become a farmer's daughter in an imagined dynasty.
Under a thatched roof, a family of seven crams into two tiled rooms, and the pot holds watery porridge clear enough to show a reflection. She settles a dispute between neighbors over two chickens, and from then on, never puts down her pen. A half-foot of wall, a bowl of egg custard, a written notice breaking off an engagement, a sack of adulterated rice seeds: she judges them one by one, from the locust tree at the village entrance to the county court, from the steps of the prefectural office to the Three Judicial Offices in the capital.
But the more clearly she judges, the heavier the price she pays.
The one case she can never resolve in this life is buried in her own family grave. In the fifth year of Jinghe, five pages of the Qingxi land register were forged, involving 437 mu of land and 1,200 people. The forger was her grandfather.
On the day they opened the coffin, she felt beneath it and found five genuine pages of the register. The old man had kept them for twelve years and never dared to turn them in, because doing so would mean thirty households were put to death.
She carried those five pages into court.
From then on, Luojiawan had a petition pavilion. The county gazette compiled many years later recorded only one line, without her name.
"Even if it can't be settled, it still has to be," she said.
