Chapter 1

Five years after the plane crash, I finally came home.

Memory is strange when you are a ghost. Everything after death drifts past like light on water, yet I still remembered the last call I received while I was alive.

Grandma had told me the doctors had found something wrong with her lungs.

Over the phone, she sounded guilty for troubling me. Again and again, she said, “Come back when you have time, little one. There’s no hurry. Work comes first.”

How could work ever come first?

The grandmother who had raised me came first.

I canceled my flight for two days later and booked the earliest one that same day. Right up until takeoff, I was still calling old classmates back home, trying to reach the best oncologist I could find and learn what was truly wrong with Grandma’s lungs.

Then—

Boom.

The plane exploded.

Hundreds of lives became a ball of fire above the sea, then slowly sank beneath the waves without leaving a trace.

News of the crash broke almost at once. The families were summoned to the civil aviation authority for the latest briefing. Some sobbed until they fainted. Others clung to reason and demanded concrete details about the negotiations.

My grandmother sat in a corner, bewildered and helpless.

She could not understand Mandarin. All she knew was that her little one had boarded that plane, and now the plane was gone.

Her little one had never been meant to take that flight.

Her little one had boarded it only to come home and take her to the doctor.

In that clamorous meeting room, the village woman nearing seventy suddenly doubled over, beat her chest, and wailed.

“She shouldn’t have died! It’s my fault. It’s all my fault!”

No one could make out the words through her halting dialect. But the other grieving relatives beside her reached out, weeping, and held her.

“Ma’am, maybe no one died,” they told her. “Maybe they made an emergency landing on some deserted island.”

“Wait a little longer. There may still be hope.”

Grandma waited for five years.

For five years, she tended the asparagus fern I had raised. Every month, she topped up my phone account. Every year, she traveled to Beijing for the families’ briefing.

Then the briefings stopped, and my fern withered too.

There was still no news of the missing plane.

Grandma stared at the flowerpot and sat in anguish through the night.

At the first rooster’s crow, she lit a brazier of charcoal and shut the windows. Holding our photograph against her chest, she quietly closed her eyes.

She would soon be reunited with her little one.

She was certain of it.

The charcoal glowed red-hot. Tape sealed every crack around the windows and door.

I screamed until I had no voice, but Grandma kept her eyes tightly shut. She could not hear me.

I threw myself against the window, only for my palms to pass through the glass. I floated outside and tried again and again, tumbling to the ground each time.

The pane did not so much as tremble. Grandma lay there with her eyes closed, her expression peaceful.

After my final fall, I crumpled and sobbed. Strings of translucent tears struck the floor without stirring a speck of dust.

“Save your strength. It’s no use.”

Beneath the camphor tree stood a translucent old ghost.

He told me that once a person died, there was nothing they could do—unless they were willing to burn their own soul.

“But think carefully. Once your soul burns away, you’ll never be human again. Not in this life or any other.”

Snow spiraled down, weightless in the wind.

Inside the house, the photograph Grandma clutched had also been taken on a rare snowy day. I was eight then. A neighbor had hired a photographer for a family portrait, and Grandma had taken me over and asked for a picture of the two of us, too.

In it, she held me close and smiled with all her heart.

She had left home in such a hurry that she had only remembered to put me in my new clothes. She had forgotten that her own cuffs were worn through and that the hem of her coat did not quite cover the patches on her trousers.

It had always been that way.

I wore new clothes. She wore garments patched again and again.

Always.

“How do I burn my soul?” I asked.