The Guardian novel ghost stories
Sep. 8th, 2019 10:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
potofsoupI really liked how the ghost stories captured snapshots of Chinese society, so I'm going to briefly summarize them here!
Anyways, presented without additional comment:
1) Li Qian
So even though Li Qian was born in the city, she grew up in the village with her grandma because her family had a younger son at a time when the One Child Policy was especially strict in the city, so basically her family sent her away and pretended that they only had one child -- the son. So basically she grew up unwanted by her family, with the exception of her grandmother. That's why when her grandmother had a stroke, she was willing to give up half her remaining life in order to save her grandmother, basically making a deal with the underworld that they would both die at the same time.
But unfortunately, the grandmother never quite recovered from the stroke and got dementia. Li Qian tested into the university, and her parents grudgingly brought her back to the city and set her up with a separate apartment with her grandmother. So she basically had to spend all of her non-school hours taking care of her grandmother, including rushing home during lunchtime to make lunch for her grandma, and spending all of the money she gets from tutoring on her grandma's medications. Finally, her justification for killing her grandmother was that ... her grandmother had always protected her and wouldn't let others hurt her, and now it is this person who is no longer her grandmother but who occupies her body who is hurting her.
2) Wang Zheng and Sang Zan
So Wang Zheng was daughter of the tribal chief, and Sang Zan was a slave in the tribe. Sang Zan leads a rebellion against the tribal aristocracy and succeeds, in part because Wang Zheng hides him from her dad (because she thought that her parents were being needlessly cruel). The rebellion ends with killing all of the aristocracy (except Wang Zheng) and Sang Zan establishes a democratic system in the tribe, where every week they would meet to vote on various topics.
Wang Zheng lives with Sang Zan, and stirs the jealousy of other villagers, so one of the other villagers frames Wang Zheng for the death of his daughter (it was an accidental fall), and the villagers vote to kill her.
And so Sang Zan had to stand there and watch the system that he put in place put his beloved to death.* This ends up corrupting him, and he spends the next 15 years poisoning the democratic system of the village by poisoning one of the co-leaders, framing the other one, and then causing a civil war.
------------
* By tribal tradition, if one is put to death, the head and the body are supposed to be separated so that their souls are forever bound, so Sang Zan secretly swaps Wang Zheng's corpse with the other dead girl's, and sews Wang Zheng's head back on, which is why Wang Zheng is able to still be a ghost. There's a great line about Sang Zan painstakingly sewing her head back on, and the small neat stitches that you can still see on Wang Zheng
3) Wang Xiangyang, the Fruit-seller
So the Fruit-seller ghost has a giant grudge but keeps taking it out on people who seem only very tangentially related to his death, and everyone's like "why?"
And it turns out that he's a villager who lives just outside of the city. His wife is diabetic and his son is 30 but hasn't been able to marry because they have village hukou (residency). So he is the sole earner of the family, which he does by selling fruit in the city.
It was Chinese New Year's eve, which is the best time for his sales because all of the migrant workers have gone home to their villages, and so he has a lot less competition. He's counting on the money to tide him over the next month of New Years celebrations, but then someone accidentally knocks over his fruit cart. All his fruit goes tumbling, and he's scrambling to pick them up. He asks passersby for help, but instead all they do is pocket a few and keep walking, even when he's like "but that's my fruit" and "you need to pay." People either respond with "well the fruit is dirty so you can't sell it" (while eating the fruit), or just ignoring him. And it is as he's scrambling that he gets run over by a taxi.
Which is why he holds no grudge against to taxi driver, but goes around punishing all of these bystanders.
And their response was actually "That sounds legit. As long as you're okay with also ending up in Hell for a while due to how severely you're punishing these people, they definitely deserve to be punished."
4) Runaway girl -- this one isn't particularly in depth, since by the 4th item, the focus is really on the mythology shenanigans, but I do like that there's transit logistics.
Guo Changcheng gets a phone call from a panicked mom whose daughter got lured from the village into the city with a promise of work in the city. (Obviously some sort of sketchy human trafficking thing). The mom is a ghost that is bound to the village, so she can't leave. Guo Changcheng is like, "how do we track down this girl?" and Chu Shuzhi is like "well, you can start by checking out all the brothels" and Guo is like "ack". So then Chu is like "well, how would they get to the city?" and Guo is like "there's a train" and Chu is like "but train tickets requires legal name and she probably doesn't have her hukou book with her, so they have to take a bus." So they end up parking by the highway exit and stopping every long-distance bus from that province.
Complete aside, but I love that one of the grouses about the Underworld is that their file processing hasn't yet gone paperless.
Anyways, presented without additional comment:
1) Li Qian
So even though Li Qian was born in the city, she grew up in the village with her grandma because her family had a younger son at a time when the One Child Policy was especially strict in the city, so basically her family sent her away and pretended that they only had one child -- the son. So basically she grew up unwanted by her family, with the exception of her grandmother. That's why when her grandmother had a stroke, she was willing to give up half her remaining life in order to save her grandmother, basically making a deal with the underworld that they would both die at the same time.
But unfortunately, the grandmother never quite recovered from the stroke and got dementia. Li Qian tested into the university, and her parents grudgingly brought her back to the city and set her up with a separate apartment with her grandmother. So she basically had to spend all of her non-school hours taking care of her grandmother, including rushing home during lunchtime to make lunch for her grandma, and spending all of the money she gets from tutoring on her grandma's medications. Finally, her justification for killing her grandmother was that ... her grandmother had always protected her and wouldn't let others hurt her, and now it is this person who is no longer her grandmother but who occupies her body who is hurting her.
2) Wang Zheng and Sang Zan
So Wang Zheng was daughter of the tribal chief, and Sang Zan was a slave in the tribe. Sang Zan leads a rebellion against the tribal aristocracy and succeeds, in part because Wang Zheng hides him from her dad (because she thought that her parents were being needlessly cruel). The rebellion ends with killing all of the aristocracy (except Wang Zheng) and Sang Zan establishes a democratic system in the tribe, where every week they would meet to vote on various topics.
Wang Zheng lives with Sang Zan, and stirs the jealousy of other villagers, so one of the other villagers frames Wang Zheng for the death of his daughter (it was an accidental fall), and the villagers vote to kill her.
And so Sang Zan had to stand there and watch the system that he put in place put his beloved to death.* This ends up corrupting him, and he spends the next 15 years poisoning the democratic system of the village by poisoning one of the co-leaders, framing the other one, and then causing a civil war.
------------
* By tribal tradition, if one is put to death, the head and the body are supposed to be separated so that their souls are forever bound, so Sang Zan secretly swaps Wang Zheng's corpse with the other dead girl's, and sews Wang Zheng's head back on, which is why Wang Zheng is able to still be a ghost. There's a great line about Sang Zan painstakingly sewing her head back on, and the small neat stitches that you can still see on Wang Zheng
3) Wang Xiangyang, the Fruit-seller
So the Fruit-seller ghost has a giant grudge but keeps taking it out on people who seem only very tangentially related to his death, and everyone's like "why?"
And it turns out that he's a villager who lives just outside of the city. His wife is diabetic and his son is 30 but hasn't been able to marry because they have village hukou (residency). So he is the sole earner of the family, which he does by selling fruit in the city.
It was Chinese New Year's eve, which is the best time for his sales because all of the migrant workers have gone home to their villages, and so he has a lot less competition. He's counting on the money to tide him over the next month of New Years celebrations, but then someone accidentally knocks over his fruit cart. All his fruit goes tumbling, and he's scrambling to pick them up. He asks passersby for help, but instead all they do is pocket a few and keep walking, even when he's like "but that's my fruit" and "you need to pay." People either respond with "well the fruit is dirty so you can't sell it" (while eating the fruit), or just ignoring him. And it is as he's scrambling that he gets run over by a taxi.
Which is why he holds no grudge against to taxi driver, but goes around punishing all of these bystanders.
And their response was actually "That sounds legit. As long as you're okay with also ending up in Hell for a while due to how severely you're punishing these people, they definitely deserve to be punished."
4) Runaway girl -- this one isn't particularly in depth, since by the 4th item, the focus is really on the mythology shenanigans, but I do like that there's transit logistics.
Guo Changcheng gets a phone call from a panicked mom whose daughter got lured from the village into the city with a promise of work in the city. (Obviously some sort of sketchy human trafficking thing). The mom is a ghost that is bound to the village, so she can't leave. Guo Changcheng is like, "how do we track down this girl?" and Chu Shuzhi is like "well, you can start by checking out all the brothels" and Guo is like "ack". So then Chu is like "well, how would they get to the city?" and Guo is like "there's a train" and Chu is like "but train tickets requires legal name and she probably doesn't have her hukou book with her, so they have to take a bus." So they end up parking by the highway exit and stopping every long-distance bus from that province.
Complete aside, but I love that one of the grouses about the Underworld is that their file processing hasn't yet gone paperless.
