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Ten years ago, a winter morning; a winter morning ten years ago—what times were those? ‘How old are you?’ asks Wise Monk Lan, who has roamed the four corners of the earth, his whereabouts always a mystery, but who is, for the moment, living in an abandoned little temple. His eyes are open, his voice seems to emerge from a dark hole in the earth. I shudder on that hot, humid day in the seventh lunar month. ‘It was 1990, Wise Monk, and I was ten,’ I reply, muttering in a changed tone of voice. We are in a Wutong Temple located between two bustling mid-size cities, built, as the story goes, with funds supplied by an ancestor of the village head, Lao Lan. Although it nestles up to a well-travelled highway, few people come here to burn incense; visitors are a rarity to this building with its musty, outdated aura. A woman in a green overcoat, her hair pinned behind one ear with a red flower, sprawls through a breach in the temple wall that appears to have been opened up for easy access. All I can see of her are a round, pasty face and the fair hand with which she props up her chin. In the bright sunlight, the rings on her fingers nearly blind me. She calls to mind the big house, with its tiled roof, that once belonged to the large landowners of the Lan clan but which was converted into an elementary school during the Republican era. In many legends and the fantasies evolving out of them, women like her were often seen entering and leaving that increasingly dilapidated house in the middle of the night, their skin-crawling screams enough to make a person's heart stop. The Wise Monk sits in the lotus position on a rotting rush mat in front of an ugly, crumbling Wutong Spirit idol, as serene as a sleeping horse.

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