Daomu Biji extra 1 part3

At dinner that night, I asked my cousin about the origin of the coffin.

He was a 79 year old veteran here who hadn't left the village except to go to market. When asked about this matter, however, he wasn't very clear about the origin, simply saying that all the people in the village knew that there was such an old coffin. As to when the coffin appeared? They had no clue, and few people passed by the area on weekdays.

Some older people also said that the thatched cottage was there before the ancestral hall was built. At that time, there was an abandoned earthen house that was bought by the Wu family and leveled so that the ancestral hall could be built. The only thing left was that cottage that had remained there until now. As for who originally built this thatched cottage, the origin of the coffin inside couldn't be verified. That was about sixty years ago.

My cousin at that time was only nineteen years old and since it was so long ago, he couldn't remember whether the coffin was already in the thatched hut or whether someone put it there in the following sixty years. But the appearance of the coffin itself was very old, and no one could say for sure when it was made. I thought the idea a little frightening, but felt that there had to be a story there.

Dinner was a “big table meal” in the ancestral hall that was eaten with our other relatives from the village. My cousin was very healthy for his age, smoking hookah after the meal before he went back to feed the chickens. My dad asked me to keep an eye on him so I quickly followed. On the way, my cousin told me that if I was really interested, I could go to another village and ask an old man named Xu A Qin about it. He had been invited by the Wu family to take charge of the ancestral hall since he had been a long-term worker in this village when the hall was first built, and had helped in the hall's construction. Later, in the second year of the Agrarian Revolution, he divided a large area of land and went to farm. He may be over a hundred years old by now, so if anyone remembered, it could only be him. But it also depended on luck. If he was more than a hundred years old, who knew what he was like now. (TN Note: Agrarian Revolution (1927-1937) was a civil war b/t the Communist Party led by the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army and the Chinese people against Chiang Kai-shek's ruling Kuomintang Party. They worked towards abolishing the feudal land system and founding the workers' and peasants' democratic republic).

Even though my curiosity wasn't sated, I didn't have much experience in building relationships with centenarians (TN Note: someone over 100 years old), so I told myself to just forget it and nodded my head.

This was the first—and most serious— mistake I made during the whole incident.

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Chapter end

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