Going Against the Grain

The New Year’s Eve firecrackers drive away not the Nian beast, but mountain demons. The paper burned at Qingming is not spirit money, but a remittance to the underworld. The dragon boats raced at the Dragon Boat Festival do not cross a river, but the crossing between the worlds of the living and the dead. Every folk custom is a pact between humans and gods that remains in force. When a pact is broken, ghosts and gods strike back: the living bury themselves in ancestral graves, river lanterns drift upstream and gather without dispersing, and eighty-one seals emerge on the bricks of an ancient city wall. Those who can mend these pacts are called customs walkers.