"May 7th, 1946. The secretary of the He Ping District Party Committee, Wang Xiangsheng, was my sponsor into the Party! He can prove my innocence!"
The woman's voice was shrill, insistent.
"Even the date's right… exactly what the archives say," a student whispered. "Could Old Wei have told her before he died?"
"Impossible," another scoffed. "Wei No. 2 lived in the school's boiler room until the day he hanged himself. The campus was guarded night and day. With his frail body, he couldn't have scaled the wall."
Their muttering went on, none of them noticing that Zhang Guozhong had moved right up to the woman's bedside.
"Secretary Wei," Zhang asked softly, "everyone knows Wang Xiangsheng was a traitor. He died even earlier than you. If you're not a traitor yourself—what other proof do you have?"
At that, Wei's widow froze. Then, like a puppet with cut strings, her eyes glazed over. She stared blankly ahead and let out a mindless laugh.
Zhang's deliberate slip—calling her Secretary Wei—drew gasps from the room.
"Comrade Zhang, have you gone mad too?" barked Liu Honggang, the Committee's propaganda officer. "I'll need to have a word with you!"
"Not mad," Zhang insisted, leading the group into the hallway. "Didn't you see her eyes, the drool? She truly believes she's Wei No. 2 himself. She's no faker. With the insane, you must enter their logic. Break it, and they're silenced."
The others hesitated, then nodded. "Fine. Try, then."
Zhang returned to the bedside. From his satchel, he drew out pomelo leaves and a small vinegar bottle. He soaked the leaves, then pressed them firmly to the woman's forehead—just as described in The Mao Mountain Gazetteer.
For a moment, nothing. Then her limbs twitched violently. Her body arched and twisted on the bed.
"Hold her down!" Zhang shouted. His heart hammered. This was it—the trial. If the leaves fell, the test failed. He would have to wait another forty-eight hours to try again, and the moment would be lost.
Startled but obedient, the students pinned her arms and legs. After nearly a minute, the spasms ceased. Silence fell.
"She isn't dead, is she?" a girl stammered, pale as paper.
Zhang peeled the leaves away and watched. Long seconds crawled past. Then Wei's widow opened her eyes, let out a long sigh, and murmured—
"Where… where am I?"
The guards stared, dumbstruck.
Zhang forced a shrug. "An old folk cure from my hometown. Not reliable. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't."
But only he knew the truth: his skepticism had cracked.
Coincidence? Perhaps. But too precise a coincidence. No… it must be. She's only feigning. Afraid we'd drag her out to struggle sessions. Pretending recovery to save herself. Yes, that must be it.
He told himself this over and over, yet in some deep recess of his mind, the book's authority had rooted itself.
News of his "folk remedy" spread quickly through the school. A few families even tried vinegar-soaked leaves on their mentally ill kin. Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened—the genuinely afflicted could not be cured so simply.
For Zhang, the failure meant only one thing: his golden chance to disprove The Gazetteer had been squandered. He needed another. But where?
It was then his grandfather reappeared.
"Well?" the old man asked, eyes sharp beneath his wrinkled brow. "Did it work?"
Once a village militiaman, the grandfather had seen many uncanny things. Ever since noticing Zhang's obsession with the book, he had wanted to tell him—some of it works.
Zhang lowered his voice. "Grandfather… is it real?"
"Real or false, I won't say. But in the countryside, when something strange happens, the doctor fails—yet the ritual master succeeds. Eight times out of ten."
"It was chance," Zhang muttered. "The book is nonsense."
"If you don't believe, go to the villages. Easier to find cases there than in the city."
So Zhang packed some dry rations and set out on foot.
Li Village, near Xiaozhan, was a world apart. Unlike the half-urbanized settlements on Tianjin's outskirts, this was a true village, steeped in unbroken custom. Nearly everyone bore the surname Li, bound by kinship. The roads were rough, often impassable. Though a production brigade had been formed, the storms of the Cultural Revolution had scarcely touched it. Apart from a brief struggle session against a wealthy outsider years ago, little had changed. The people remained peasants in name, but in spirit their world was that of pre-Liberation days.
At the brigade office, Zhang presented his letter of introduction.
The captain, a ruddy-faced man named Li, looked him up and down with a smile. "Young man, you've got skill. Just in time, too. We've a case here. Man struck with zhuangke—what you city folk call hysteria. Doctors gave up, said to take him home and wait for death. His daughter's a beauty. She swore she'd marry whoever cures her father. Already, more than ten ritual masters came. All failed. You succeed, and… well, perhaps you'll leave with more than thanks, eh?"
Zhang almost choked. Here he was, mistaken for some spirit medium sent from the city. The man brushed off the illness but lit up at the mention of a daughter.
Still, Zhang noted the new word—zhuangke. The villagers' term for possession. Medicine called it hysteria, but to the peasants it was ghostly affliction, curable only by ritual.
Hospitality in Li Village surpassed all expectation. Captain Li's family feasted him as if for New Year—potato stew with chicken, cabbage with glass noodles, peppers fried with egg. Zhang blushed, knowing his foolish mission had cost them their precious holiday stores. The captain's eldest son even brought two bottles of white liquor. Zhang protested he could not drink, but after two forced toasts he collapsed on the kang bed.
When he awoke, head throbbing, a tall village girl was standing silently by his bedside.