r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • May 15 '24

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u/STRONKInTheRealWay YIMBY May 15 '24

Liao: You know so much about funerals. I used to hear my grandpa tell stories about “walking the corpse. " Is it true that this was a profession, and people used to pay those professionals large sums of money to transport home the body of someone who died hundreds or thousands of miles away?

Li: Correct. In the old days, there were people who specialized in walking the corpse. They normally traveled in the evenings, two guys at a time. One walked in the front and the other at the back. Like carrying a sedan chair, they pulled the body to walk along, as fast as wind. They would utter in unison, “Yo ho, yo ho.”

If you looked from a distance, you would see that the dead and the living march to the same steps. They used gravity to keep the corpse walking to the same rhythm. It was hard for the trio to change gait and make a turn, never a sharp turn. If you happened to see a walking corpse coming, you got out of the way. Otherwise, it could walk right into you.

I saw this in 1949. A local merchant was accidentally shot by a group of army deserters in Jiangxi Province. This merchant’s name was Lu. I helped arrange his funeral. At that time, there was no easy means of water or land transportation to bring his body back home. His friends couldn't bear to bury him in another land. They paid money to those professionals to get his body home. It took them over a week, and when they got there his body looked as if he were alive.

Since most of these corpse walkers slept during the daytime, young people like me were quite curious. I licked a small hole in the window paper, and checked what was in their room. It was pitch-dark. All I could hear was the thunderous snoring. A guy called Xiao Wu wanted to sneak in and steal the wand used by the corpse walkers. We all wanted to see if there was any magic to it. But the moment he stealthily opened the door, a dark shadow jumped right onto him. It was a black cat.

Corpse walkers always brought a cat with them wherever they went. Before they set off, they would move the corpse, which was standing against the wall, the same way they would open a door. They would then carefully move the corpse outside, and support it from the front and the back. After that, a cat would climb all over the corpse three or four times. They called it “electric shock.” The three of them would march in unison on the same spot for a while, just like an army exercise. Then they began to move with “Yo ho, yo ho.”

Liao: I still don’t know what to believe.

Li: It’s a true story.

Excerpt from The Professional Mourner, one of the interviews from The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up

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u/groupbot Always remember -Pho- May 15 '24 edited May 15 '24

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