Light Imagery

My name is Shen Yebai. I graduated from the Department of Archeology and have been unemployed for three months. All my forty-seven resumes have come to nothing. The news of my grandma's death came while I was staring at the recruitment software in a daze. There is only one will: I must return to western Hunan in person to keep vigil for seven days and seven nights. I cannot ask anyone to take my place, I cannot leave in the middle, and I cannot let the lights go out. The lamp was a copper oil lamp with a bluish-white flame. Grandma has been ordering it her whole life, and I thought it was just an old person's habit. On the first night of the wake, there was a knocking sound in the coffin. Three beats, pause, three beats, pause—like someone knocking on the door. After that night, a one-eyed old man told me: Your grandmother is a night watchman, and so are you. Night watchman is one of the oldest professions in China. In the first seven days after death, the soul of the deceased wanders between yin and yang, and the ever-burning lamp in the mourning hall is the last barrier to maintain the two worlds. If the lamp is not extinguished, the souls of the dead will not disperse; if the lamp is extinguished, no living person will come near. There are seven prohibitions during the vigil: no turning back, no turning off the lights, no answering the door, no opening the door, no looking in the mirror, no falling asleep, and no crying. Behind every taboo is a lesson learned in exchange for life. I stayed in the mountains of western Hunan for seven nights, and then I found that I could never leave. Not because there is no other way out, but because behind every vigil there are hidden the unresolved obsessions of the deceased, the secrets that the living are unwilling to tell, and the stories that have been forgotten in the darkness, waiting for someone to listen. Grandma kept vigil all night and never told me why. There is only one line in the diary she left behind: If the lights don't go out, people won't panic. If the light goes out, don't look back. It took me a long time to understand that she was keeping more than just lights.