The Diaries of Cai Yongchun is a collection of excerpts, with my own translations, from the diaries of 蔡咏春 Cai Yongchun, a Chinese Christian educator who lived from 1904 to 1983. His archives are housed at the Yale Divinity Library Special Collections, which I visited for around five months from the summer to winter of 2023. In his archive are 9 diaries that record his life during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and its aftermath.

Like countless others during the Cultural Revolution, Yongchun and his wife were heavily persecuted for their Christian faith and work. Labeled a “cow demon and snake spirit” (牛鬼蛇神), Yongchun was dealt a premature death sentence by the state. He was an entity to be exorcised, a reminder of the nation’s semi-feudal, semi-colonial past. But he was a ghost with an all too corporeal body, very much alive to all the abuse cast against it. Over the course of visiting Yongchun's archives, I realized that I was reading the diaries of a living ghost. The motif of the candle came to feature heavily in my thinking about the project, partially because Yongchun explicitly identified with it himself, and because it encapsulated both the attrition and the twilight hope that defined his life.

And so, this book is a convergence of multiple hauntings: Yongchun haunting the nation, the nation haunting him, and him and the nation haunting me.