ContactWitching Vale, by Su Wei
Synopsis
The year is 1973, and the Cultural Revolution is raging in China. The setting: Hainan Island, a tropical Eden known to Chinese as the "the edge of the sky and the feet of the sea," where peasants still weave ancient spells and unspeakable horrors are said to dwell deep in the mountains.
To this haunted place comes Lu Beiping, sent, like millions of other teenage students across China, to be "re-educated" through hard toil in the fields. By pure chance Lu Beiping is implicated in a local custom: he is tricked into marrying the ghost of the daughter of the village headman, in order to placate her soul and—we will learn—bury some darker secrets. To keep his superstitions under wraps, the headman assigns Lu Beiping to graze the work unit's cattle deep in the jungle, out of sight and out of mind.
There, Lu Beiping meets the wild-woman Jade and her band of "driftfolk," guardians of a secret faith, who commune with the spirits that flock the jungle and keep them at bay with ritual and taboo. As he is inducted into the haunted society of the driftfolk, Lu Beiping learns to love, and uncovers secrets that will put him on a collision course with the twisted society of Mao's China.