The Paper Effigy Maker Doesn't Draw Faces

Liuxi County, 1998.

Shen Lidong returns to the county to handle his father's funeral. His father was a paper effigy maker. He had been dead for three days before anyone found him. There were two rope marks on his wrist, and a copper coin was found among his ashes.

The paper effigy in the mourning hall had a funeral notice from 1988 sewn inside its belly. The name on it wasn't his father's.

His father's last words were: "That funeral should never have taken place."

The first job Shen Lidong takes is to raise a corpse for the Liu family. The grave is wrong, the coffin is too light, and the nails are new.

The day he opens the coffin, everyone in the county remembers his name.

It is also from that day on that he understands one thing:

In the paper effigy trade, you make effigies for the dead, but it's the living you have to watch.