Chapter One: The Grand Birthday

In the countryside, elders place great importance on celebrating longevity at the right time: seventy is a minor birthday, eighty a major one, and anything beyond that is considered a gift from the heavens. There are several taboos surrounding these feasts.

At seventy, guests must not take anything from the host—not a single bowl or chopstick. If anyone does, it’s a grave offense, enough to drive families to dig up ancestral graves in retaliation. At eighty, however, the opposite is true: the more you take—rice bowls, wine cups—the happier the host will be. At funerals for elders who die at an old age, the family will provide even more bowls and chopsticks for people to “steal.” Customs differ between the north and south, but the meaning remains largely the same.

They call it “stealing longevity.”

By taking the longevity of an elder who lived to a ripe old age, one’s own family could hope for good fortune and long life. I’ve stolen quite a few longevity bowls over the years; even now, I still eat from a vintage enamel bowl I took when the village chief’s father celebrated his eightieth birthday.

The story began when the village chief’s father was celebrating his hundredth birthday—the first time I truly witnessed the act of stealing longevity.

But to return to the main point: the longevity banquet is held at eighty, rarely at ninety; for most, eighty marks their last celebration, and few live to see a hundred. The chief’s father was exceptionally long-lived. People came to celebrate from our village and several neighboring ones, and on the day, more than a hundred tables were set with extravagant dishes of meat and fish.

But during the feast, disaster struck.

The chief’s father, while eating pork head, choked and couldn’t catch his breath; he slumped in his chair, eyes wide open, and passed away. If he’d died without illness, it would be considered a happy death. But the chief went mad, brandishing a hatchet and charging through the crowd, screaming that someone had murdered his father and vowing to dig up the culprit’s ancestral grave.

His father hadn’t died a natural death.

Beneath the old man’s chair was a filthy bowl for catching blood, filled with unhulled grains, muddy chicken and duck blood, and incense sticks burning in a pattern that foretold calamity. Someone had switched his eating bowl—the chief had prepared a finely carved silver bowl, but it was replaced with a battered iron one.

Incense for curses, raw grain in a metal bowl to steal a life.

The chief’s father had been openly robbed of his longevity.

A celebratory feast turned into a funeral. The chief roamed the village like a madman, knife in hand, searching house to house for the stolen bowl. According to custom, after one steals longevity, the bowl must be used for eating and drinking to transfer the years to oneself.

People gossiped over tea, speculating about what family the old chief might have offended to deserve such a cruel fate.

You must understand: when an elder dies mysteriously, the culprit’s ancestral grave will never rest easy. For days, I even hid the bowl I’d taken years ago from the chief’s father’s birthday.

Rural folk are cautious, but my family’s situation was especially complicated. My mother died young, and my father remarried a woman ten years his junior. Most importantly, her father was a funeral master from a neighboring village, handling deaths for miles around. With someone who lived on the food of the dead, our household was always looked at askance.

In particular, my stepmother always assisted her father in funerals. People called him Funeral Liu, and her, Gray Auntie. When my father married her, my grandparents were so furious they moved back to the old house in the hills, but my father, branded as unfilial, insisted on bringing Funeral Liu to live with us. Father-in-law and son-in-law under one roof—village folk whispered behind their backs.

But the more you try to avoid trouble, the more it finds you.

The first two days after the old chief passed, the chief was frantic, but hadn’t come to our house. On the third morning, he arrived at dawn, carrying two chickens, his face exhausted.

He had one purpose: to ask Funeral Liu to arrange the funeral. His father was a hundred, but died a violent death, and he feared it would affect his descendants.

Funeral Liu, though in his seventies, looked as lively as a man twenty years younger. He told the chief the funeral must be handled, but since his father died under such mysterious circumstances, there would be unrest. To protect the family, the chief couldn’t bring his father’s body home; the coffin needed to be placed in the graveyard on the hill for three days, with the children spitting on it daily, and nothing belonging to the old man left in the house, lest his ghost return.

The chief listened, then collapsed to the ground in tears, protesting that it was his father—how could he treat him so cruelly? Wasn’t that heartless?

Funeral Liu sighed, saying it wasn’t the chief’s fault; his father was unlucky, his years stolen. If he’d lived a few more years, or passed after his birthday, it would have been a happy death. But to die suddenly during the celebration, and so miserably, meant that unless the chief hardened his heart, his father’s soul would return as a vengeful ghost.

When the chief came to our house, he was upright; when he left, his back was bent, and he looked decades older.

That evening, the chief gathered some strong young men to carry the coffin to the graveyard behind the village. Tears streaming, he spat twice on it. His wife and children sobbed as they followed Funeral Liu’s instructions.

Nearly the whole village came to see, but it wasn’t for spectacle. With the mysterious death, most were anxious and uneasy. Some elders pointed at the chief, calling him an unfilial son, a white-eyed wolf, and condemned Funeral Liu for teaching him such heartless acts, saying neither would die well.

The chief endured the scolding without a word, and the coffin remained outside the home.

Rumors split the village in two. Some thought the chief had done right—Funeral Liu warned that otherwise, the old man would return as a vengeful ghost and harm the family. Others believed the old man was murdered, and his son had left him exposed, ensuring he’d return for revenge. They accused Funeral Liu of ill intentions.

These words stirred up a storm. The tales grew more and more bizarre.

Months earlier, Funeral Liu had suffered from severe asthma, and was near death. After the chief’s father died, he suddenly regained his health. A funeral master who taught the chief to leave his father’s body outside—maybe, they said, he was the one who killed the old man!

Once rumors start in the countryside, they spread like wild grass in the wind.

Village children learned a rhyme:

“Funeral Liu steals heads, sick but never dies, takes ten years of life from others, and teaches the chief to curse his father.”

My stepmother, Gray Auntie, chased them away with a broom, but the children only got bolder, even flinging filth at our doorstep. The elders opposed to the funeral customs passed by daily, spitting at our gate.

Funeral Liu acted as if nothing was wrong, weaving baskets in the courtyard, preparing paper offerings for the seventh day ritual.

The chief visited twice, bringing good wine and meat to apologize for the trouble and thank Funeral Liu for his help. His emotions were unstable; he insisted the culprit who killed his father was behind all the chaos, stealing his father’s years and making sure his family would never know peace.

At first, I feared the rumors were true, that the chief’s father’s death was linked to Funeral Liu. But when the chief spoke, I suddenly understood.

He was right—the one who murdered the chief’s father could never bear to see the chief’s family prosper. He wanted the old man’s ghost to haunt them and their misfortune to continue.

Funeral Liu thwarted those plans, and so earned the villain’s grudge as well.