This book is a collection of excerpts, with my own translations, from the diaries of Cai Yongchun 蔡咏春 (1904-83), a Chinese Christian educator. His archives are housed at the Yale Divinity Library Special Collections, which I visited for five months in 2023. His diaries record his life during and after the Cultural Revolution (1966-76).

Like countless others at the time, Yongchun was heavily persecuted for his Christian faith and work. Labeled a “cow demon and snake spirit” (牛鬼蛇神), he 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 the abuse cast against it. Gradually, I realized I was reading the diaries of a living ghost. The motif of the candle came to feature heavily in the project, partially because Yongchun explicitly identified with it, and because it encapsulated both the attrition and twilight hope that defined his life.

This work is a convergence of multiple hauntings: Yongchun haunting the nation, the nation haunting him, and him and the nation haunting me.