The Gazetteers Office

The Linshui County Gazetteer Office in Huai'an Town hired a temporary archivist. On Cheng Du's first day, he found a “living supplementary page” in the storeroom. Its entry described his deceased father, Cheng Yongnian: In 1998, while compiling the gazetteer, he fell into the river by accident. His body was never found. A small note added: “His son works at the gazetteer office.” Cheng Du knew his father wasn't dead. His mother said his father had fallen into the river, but the town's rules said that people who fell into the river left no entries behind. Those recorded in the living archives could survive without food or water, as long as their names remained on the page. The rules of the gazetteer office seeped into the paper: Never offer someone cold tea. Never look back while tending the lamp. If you answer to a name, that name is entered in the ledger. On page seventy-three, the archivist found his own name in the ledger, among those waiting to be erased. Copying an archive cost him his memories; changing an entry meant using his own name to fill the gap. To uncover the truth behind the 1998 ledger of seventy-six people, he wrote himself into the gazetteer, little by little. Until someone at the bottom of the river turned a page and asked him, “Have you ever looked up your own file?”