Chapter One: Who Would Attend Their Own Funeral

Who would sit quietly in a car, waiting to attend their own funeral?

Brian Sullivan sat in the car, watching the sunlight filtering through the ancient elm trees on Temple Street outside the window, dappling the shadows like colored glass, resembling the slumber of death, leaving his heart feeling empty and hollow.

Behind him was the Pagoda Cemetery, with three Buddhist pagodas built during the Republic era, right next to the thousand-year-old Tianning Temple.

These three pagodas were originally a private Buddhist pagoda garden built by the Sun family, the largest national capitalist family in Donghua City during the Republic era. They once housed three Guanyin statues made of gold, silver, and jade, and were famous throughout the province.

On the eve of liberation, the Sun family moved overseas with their relatives, and their land, houses, and this pagoda garden were soon nationalized.

In the 1950s, after the pagoda garden was turned into a public cemetery, most of the local residents placed their relatives’ urns in the Pagoda Cemetery. The garden was filled with thick, towering trees, lush and verdant; pavilions and rockeries were everywhere. If one wasn’t afraid of the bad luck associated with the dead, the Pagoda Cemetery would actually be the most worthwhile sight in the southern suburbs of Donghua.

Outside the main gate of the Pagoda Cemetery was a small square. Brian Sullivan parked his car at the edge of the square, under the lush shade of the trees, and watched as a Jiefang-brand truck slowly drove over and stopped in front of the cemetery gate.

Brian Sullivan saw his longtime friend and colleague at the city steel mill, Eric Bennett, park the truck, then quickly get out from the driver’s seat, stride around to the right side, and open the door.

His little sister got out of the car, holding the lead-gray urn in her hands. Tears still hung on her delicate face, her eyes red and swollen from crying, making Brian Sullivan, sitting in the car, shed tears that fell onto the steering wheel.

Relatives and friends who came to the funeral got out of the back of the truck one after another, carrying wreaths. The elegiac couplet, written in his sister’s graceful clerical script, read: “Sorrowful cries cannot keep the drifting clouds, the sound of weeping follows the wild crane’s flight: In memory of brother Ethan Foster.”

Three days had passed, and the initial shock and confusion had not completely faded. But seeing his little sister so heartbroken, Brian Sullivan felt a sharper pain in his heart. He wanted so much to open the car door and rush out, to loudly tell his grief-stricken sister, “Xiao Li, I am Ethan! I’m not dead! I’m still your brother!”

Unfortunately, he now lived in someone else’s body. His sister, relatives, and former colleagues no longer recognized him.

Brian Sullivan gripped the steering wheel tightly, his fingernails digging deep into his flesh, yet he felt no pain.

He should have died. The urn in his sister’s hands contained the ashes of his cremated body, yet his consciousness and soul lived on in another’s body.

Two of the people who came with the funeral procession were his former colleagues. They didn’t enter the Pagoda Cemetery, but walked over to stand under the trees, smoking and resting, not noticing that someone was sitting in the parked car by the roadside...

“Ethan died just like that. What a pity. If we’d known it would end like this, we should have just bitten the bullet and transferred to the city with Old Andrew back then.”

“Old Andrew went to the city because he wanted to take Ethan with him. But at the time, the factory was working with the Japanese on a technical upgrade, installing a continuous casting furnace, and the factory couldn’t do without Ethan.”

“In the end, it was because Ethan was soft-hearted. If he’d been determined to follow Old Andrew to the city, relying on Monkey Clark, who sucked up to the city leaders to get promoted, could anyone have stopped him? Tell me, hasn’t Ethan been stifled all these years? Why did he have to live so aggrieved? Isn’t it just because his family had no power or influence? The more talented Ethan was, the more he was suppressed by people like Monkey Clark—in the end, wasn’t it just because they were afraid Ethan would surpass them? Ethan really had a hard life. He finally got into the PhD program at Yanda, and wouldn’t have to put up with Monkey Clark anymore, but who would have thought something like this would happen? Damn, life is so unfair.”

“Ethan is gone; his sister Xiao Li used to rely on him, and now she’s all alone. She must be the one suffering the most. Who knows what she’ll do in the future!”

Listening to his former colleagues standing by the car, speaking up for him, Brian Sullivan felt a mix of emotions: Ethan Foster’s life was his life; who could know his experiences better than himself?

He graduated from the provincial university in 1986, and was assigned to the city steel mill. With a solid academic foundation, he mastered all the production technologies in the steel mill in just over a year, becoming the technical backbone of the factory.

Even without connections, he was highly valued by the former director of the steel mill, Andrew Grant, and within two years became a workshop director, setting a record among the city’s more than 300 state-owned enterprises. Later, when the steel mill set up a branch in Xinjing, Andrew Grant suggested he become the branch director, even though he had been at the steel mill for less than three years.

However, after Andrew Grant was transferred from the steel mill—especially after Andrew Grant was quickly moved to a do-nothing position in the city—his lack of background was completely exposed.