The Night Shift Teacher: A Shaman's Survival in the Cracks of Modern Chinese Society

Translated by / Hongyan Wei (The Inaugural Frontline Non-Fiction Translation Fellowship Fellow)

Written by / Yuqing Huang (Winner of the Second Season of the Frontline Fellowship for Chinese Creative Nonfiction)

Original article / 《夜班老師：在現代中國的社會夾縫中做巫師》(Click here to read)

Translation Mentor / Charles A. Laughlin (Ellen Bayard Weedon Chair of East Asian Studies at the University of Virginia, translator)

I. A Teenager Suddenly Went Mad

Ah Lei seems to be used to telling his own story. He said that he grew up in an impoverished family. His mother left him shortly after giving birth to him. He started to carry water and do other household chores before he reached the height of a carrying pole. Nonetheless, there isn't anything special about that, since all the children in the village start to manage the household when they are still little kids. What is strange is Ah Lei's dream. He said some gods or ghosts often came to his dream and talked to him. When not dreaming, he would hold a stick or a piece of firewood in his arms and act like he was plucking and strumming an invisible string while murmuring to himself. No one knew where he got this from. When he was in school, his classmates thought he was a lunatic and didn't want to play with him. The only good news was that his grandmother was still alive at that time. And she knew how to deal with strange things in a traditional way: just go ask the gods, even though the village hadn't had a person like Ah Lei for a long time.

To "Seek the Divine Guidance"—wenxian—means literally to consult the gods. But ordinary people cannot talk with the gods, if not through some "laoshi." "Laoshi" is a respectful way for people in Fusui in the southwest of Guangxi to address the experts in the rituals of folk beliefs, similar to the term "master."

They found a master for Ah Lei and she performed a ritual for him. Tradition worked wonders: Ah Lei stopped acting like before for a long time. The family breathed a sigh of relief after this. They thought it was over.

But it didn't take long for Ah Lei to find himself "abnormal" again. He often felt muddled. Words he couldn't understand came out of his mouth. He started to pick up stuff everywhere. The situation became more and more serious when he was in middle school, until one day in his second year, he couldn't stay at school anymore and chose to drop out. There are only two ways for young people in the village who can't make a way out of school: either join the military or go to work in cities. Ah Lei chose the latter. He went to the provincial capital and worked with his father on a construction site. His job there was handling cargo, although it didn't last for two years before Ah Lei started to act like before. This time, he felt sick all over and ran back home.

But what could someone like Ah Lei do back at home? His parents were working in the city and his sister was studying in a nursing school. And the village wouldn't keep idlers for free. He couldn't find anything else for himself except for farming, the only thing to do in a village. Ah Lei followed his aunt to work in the fields, cutting the stems of hemp, and carrying firewood every day.

One evening, he didn't go to cut hemp. At nine o'clock at night, his aunt came home and found him sitting on the bed, mind-absent, legs shaking, and muttering words that no one could understand. It was if there was something in his body that had taken control of him. By the time all the family members came, he stood up, lit incense, and announced that his "troops and horses" were going to Boli Village to find their master.

Some masters from nearby villages said that Ah Lei was probably not possessed by the evil spirits, but rather had "religious ecstasy."

"Religious ecstasy," chuxian, is a translation from the Zhuang language. It refers to the incarnation of divine power in a human being. More often than not, this phrase is used when a person goes crazy. The villagers said that there were masters among Ah Lei's ancestors. Now, the unseen troops and horses led by his ancestors had set their eyes on Ah Lei and wanted to choose him as a master and teach him to "lead the troops and horses."

The family was shocked: Ah Lei was only fourteen, how could he do such a thing? But apparently, those troops and horses wouldn't stop, and Ah Lei acted out more and more often. At last, the family followed the instructions of the troops and horses and went to Boli village to find the master Chen Wenhe, who later became Ah Lei's master.

Contrary to what the "troops and horses" wanted, Ah Lei's family asked Chen Wenhe to perform a ritual first to keep the troops and horses at bay, at least until Ah Lei came of age and got married. Ah Lei believed his parents requested it because "it is hard for people to find a wife in this line of work."

According to the wishes of Ah Lei's family, Chen Wenhe performed the ritual, which required the use of a rooster, traditionally called a "golden cock." As per tradition, the ritual only succeeds if the rooster's head faces the master when it is being slaughtered for divination. At the end of the ceremony, however, the golden rooster fluttered around, its head stubbornly turning toward the door.

Chen Wenhe shook her head and sighed, "I cannot stop them anymore. Those troops and horses are coming."

That's just how the tradition works. Ah Lei explained, it means that The Flower Mother — Huapo has received the scepter to ordain the man as the new master. The Flower Mother, one of the most important deities in the Zhuang folk belief system, is known more formally to the masters as the Holy Mother of the Flower King, Huawang Shengmu. She oversees the "household registrations" of all masters.

Despite the reluctance of his family, the fourteen-year-old Ah Lei set up an altar to be formally apprenticed to a master and embarked on his own path of shamanic practice to become a master himself.

II. Meeting the Young Master for the First Time

I first met Ah Lei in the summer of 2019. When I was still in graduate school and working as an intern at a museum in Nanning over the summer, I got to know a fellow villager—Mr. Wu Bin, who is also from the Zuo River Basin in southern Guangxi. Wu Bin and Ah Lei knew each other very well. He asked me to go with him when he learned that Ah Lei was going to perform the Heavenly Wine Ceremony. Although I had no idea what the so-called Heavenly Wine was at that time, the few academic instincts left inside me as a student in Visual Anthropology were reminding me that it would be a perfect subject for an ethnographic film.

We drove from Nanning and spent almost an hour on the country road off the highway. Clouds of dust were stirred up and flew behind us. Mr. Wu put on a clip from the music played in the Heavenly Wine Ceremony. He told me it was the "Sea Crossing" section of the ceremony. I had no idea what the ancient words meant, and my mind was spinning silently with a lot of questions, such as, Sea Crossing? Do we even have the sea here?

On the road to Ah Lei's place. Photo by Huang Dou.

The only sea we were passing through was the sea of sugarcane. In midsummer, the sugarcane field looked like emerald sea water. It stretched and contracted itself quietly and leisurely, like water waves swarming all around us.

Fusui, located in the middle-south of Guangxi, is the easternmost county in the Zuo River region and the closest to the capital city Nanning. It has a vast plain, a rarity in that area. Like many other counties in the Zuo River Basin, the place grows sugarcane and fast-growing eucalyptus as its main crops.

After we swung into a country road, the scenery outside the window shifted into rows of houses built in yellow mud, with holes in the broken tiles of the roofs. The mud walls were brushed with slogans in half-faded white paint: Compulsory Education; Balanced Development, Yiwujiaoyu; Junhengfazhan. The village in the afternoon was still, only the old cows ruminating in the thick shade of longan trees.

Mr. Wu said he came from the village next to Ah Lei's. We drove the car through the same-looking villages one after the other, and when all of them looked not special enough to be Ah Lei's home, Mr. Wu started to mutter: "This is the right way, isn't it?" Right when we started to worry that we had lost our way, a hut decorated with colorful paper-cut flowers and ribbons swinging on top, popped out in front of us from the thick grass. "Look! That will be Master Lei." Said Mr. Wu.

I turned my head around and looked out of the window. Several Daoist priests covered with garish bedsheet-like robes stood near the hut. I was trying to find out which one of them Ah Lei was when I saw a young man in a T-shirt and sweatpants, dragging his slippers, come towards us.

He looked at most one or two years older than me, with a light-colored and spotless face in the shape of a pear, eyebrows that can barely be regarded as thick, and eyes that can barely be considered big, in a slightly plump body. He appeared with a straight and flat face, in contrast to the yellow faces printed on his slippers smiling hard.

Mr. Wu spoke with him in Mandarin: "So, I'll park the car at your place?"

"It doesn't matter," said Ah Lei, also in Mandarin. With the same emotionless voice, hand resting on the car window, he added "I'll be back in a while."

We drove into the village. Ah Lei invited many masters from different places to support the ceremony. They set up ritual shrines all over the village. We found him at the gate to the village. The banyan trees and shrines were all installed in colorful canopies and decorated with banners. There were villagers and masters bustling around everywhere near the shrines.

Ah Lei's house is a small three-story building. Like other houses in the village, it has no exterior decoration, except for a layer of gray cement. At the door, was a heap of dried hemp straws in faded color. We entered a room through a small door facing the road and what came to our eyes first was a bed piled up with miscellaneous things. The floor under the bed was covered with corn. It wasn't the living room I imagined. It was until a few months later that I realized the door we entered was actually the back door. Ah Lei's house was built under the strict division of a master's private space, even though the front door faced nowhere near a car.

Behind the room was a big hall. The half-emptied shelf against the wall was enshrined with memorial tablets for ancestors, and on its right was a square dining table, where offerings to the ancestors were placed all over—palm-leaves in alternate layers were placed in the pattern of flowers; dragon fruits were sitting next to apples; a row of bowls filled with raw rice was placed next to rice cakes in mixed red and yellow; candies and crackers were stacked delicately in red goblets, next to vases with fresh flowers and all kinds of liquor.

It was hard for me to recognize these many complicated objects all at once. Even though Ah Lei and I can be roughly regarded as of the same clan and ancestry, this hall has gone beyond the scope of my 24 years' experience. Never before had I walked so directly into a master's home where a ceremony was being prepared. Ah Lei's home was like a foreign land for me in my homeland.

Ah Lei's home was a boiling cauldron of voices and commotion when I was there. A lot of people were bustling about in the kitchen, mostly middle-aged and elderly women. Mr. Wu greeted them one by one in the local Zhuang language. Before long, Ah Lei arrived. He looked unusually young among a busy crowd of old people, but this didn't embarrass him from walking through the halls and kitchens in his house and instructing the aunties with definitive authority to prepare the materials and food for the ritual, with his slippers dragging along. The villagers called him master out of respect.

Mr. Wu introduced me to Ah Lei. He nodded to me with no emotion, as a recognition of my presence. I told him half-jokingly, that I might make a documentary about him in the future. He listened to me carelessly, hands busy fixing up the arrangement of the sacrifices, mind busy giving commands to those coming for him. When I was still confused about whether he gave me a yes or no, he cast the same careless glance at me, and dropped the words, "Fine with me."

I was stunned for a few seconds. Oh, man, how could I film a person like this? Ah Lei didn't pay attention to me anymore and plunged himself into the crowd preparing for the ceremony, leaving me alone, paralyzed in front of piles of implements I didn't recognize. Ah Lei and I were both born in the Zuo River region in southern Guangxi. Even the Zhuang scholars would also classify us as in the same cultural circle. But in such a master's home, I still felt out of place. Plus, Ah Lei didn't share many similarities with the masters in my memory.

III. The Familiar yet Strange Bud and Moed

For my generation, the master is a presence that feels familiar and strange at the same time. Unlike schoolteacher, this kind of teacher doesn't show himself in the light of day. When they do appear, people hide them in the darkness: just like how we treat folk beliefs—we need them, but we shouldn't talk about them out loud in the daylight.

In the local Zhuang society of southern Guangxi, there are three kinds of masters:

One is Taoist priests, known as DaoGong or ShiGong. Of all the types, this group is the most deeply influenced by Taoism. They rely on doctrinal standard, often appearing at funerals to drive away the unlucky influences—huiqi, or to send away the person on their way to another world.

The other two can be regarded as folk shamans. Only those who have had religious ecstasies can become shamans. Their stories are very similar: one day, they suddenly feel unwell, they go mad or become sick, and they can't recover until they set up an altar to be apprenticed to their masters. These folk shamans are said to be able to commune with ghosts and gods and travel between the human and spirit worlds. They are also particularly fond of working "night shifts": they always start the rituals after dinner at five or six in the evening and continue to four or five in the early morning the next day, leaving the audience and helpers severely sleep-deprived.

I heard a story from a master about how she went through her religious ecstasy: she suddenly fell ill for no reason and was weak all over. For the time she lay in her bed and couldn't get up, she even picked up a cook chopper in a daze, attempting to chop her husband and pour boiling water on her two-year-old son. Fortunately, she was stopped by her family. When the family took her to ask the gods, she told them which master she was apprenticed to, and where her troops and horses were from.

To be more specific, those folk shamans who reveal the divine power can be divided into two types, "Xiangong and Xianpo", and "Bud and Moed". The two have different scriptures and different gods to worship. To an outsider, the most perceptible mark between the two is the ritual instrument they use: Bud (Bi 魓 in Chinese) and Moed (Mo末 in Chinese) use unique instruments in a ritual: Tinh lute, a gourd with one or two strings, named Tianqin in Chinese, and strings of brass rings on chains, which represents a horse's bridle, called the "horse" by Bud and Moed.

Bud and Moed are mainly active in the Zuo River region in Southern Guangxi, such as Fusui, Miming, Longzhou, Pingxiang, and many other places that extend all the way south of the border well into Vietnam. Ah Lei and his master live in this area, which is also where I came from.

In these places, Bud and Moed are more respected than Daogong, Xiangong, and Xianpo in the local society. The people living here believe in a unique spiritual system. The male practitioners are known as Budgong or Mogong and the females as MeMoed or Mopo. Some scholars regard Bud and Moed and their ritual and religious systems as unique to people speaking the Tai languages and living on the border between China and Vietnam. An old proverb among Zhuang people says "Daogong sends away lives; Mogong saves lives." In a disaster or danger, Bud and Moed will perform a ritual to expel misfortune and pray for blessings. They are incarnations of the members of the Heavenly Realm and lead the unseen horses and troops up into heaven and down onto the earth with ritual instruments and chanting.

The scholars haven't found any solid archaeological evidence as to when Bud and Moed first appeared. But they found that in the Chronicle of Ningming Prefecture (Ningming zhouzhi) compiled in the Guangxu (1875-1908) period of the Qing Dynasty, it records that: "The female shaman, called MeMoed…is known for their communication with ghosts and gods. They use a gourd as their musical instrument, which is shaped like Huqin, named 'Ding'." Some scholars have reached a conclusion that Bud and Moed have been passed down for at least two hundred years in the area, based on the compilation of the genealogy of Fangcheng's Bud and Moed in the 1990s.

As early as the 1950s, during a national survey on the social history of China's ethnic minorities, investigators discovered the existence of Bud and Moed: Bud and Moed have different scriptures from the local shamans called Wugong…they play the Tinh with two strings and wear a bracelet of brass rings on the thumb of the left foot…Dai people don't have a large number of Bud and Moed…They make a living mainly through farming and don't have any political presence in the reign of Kuomintang." Most of the Bud and Moed the investigators found were at their twilight, and at that time, they believed the tradition would die out in fifty to sixty years at most.

Their worries are well justified. In the memory of my hometown, Bud and Moed were rarely seen, and most of them were middle-aged or old. The younger generation seldom got close to Bud and Moed, especially in a city. I once asked one of my cousins who grew up in the city: "Do you know Bud and Moed?"

She looked at me with eyes wide open: "What are Bud and Moed?"

Just as the elderly are called with the suffixes, "gong" for grandpa, and "po" for grandma, the names of "Budgong" and "Moedpo" reflect the age of the practitioners. The older generation also tries to steer young people away from this tradition whether consciously or unconsciously, like it's something "bad."

In the year 2022, I came across a young boy who was hesitant whether to or not to be a Budgong. Ah Rong was born in the late 1990s in Jinlongdong. His grandpa is also a Bud. He liked to fiddle with the Tinh lute hung on the wall by his grandpa when he was little, but his grandpa never taught him to play it. Bud and Moed only play the Tinh lute for ritual occasions as a rule. It's not something you would do in leisure for entertainment, nor something to be passed on to anyone not apprenticed to a master. In middle school, Ah Rong wanted to learn how to play the Tinh lute. On the 12th day in the first month of the lunar year, he went to buy a Tinh from a Budgong Li Shaowei. As soon as he got the Tinh, Ah Rong concealed it under his umbrella and took side paths all the way back to his village.

When I asked why he hid it, he said, "Even then there was that feeling that others will pick on you if they see a young person buy this kind of lute."

I understood him. In 2013, I also met these "other people" when looking for traditional Zhuang clothing in my hometown. These other people said, "What's a little girl like you wearing this for? Only old people wear this."

And becoming a Bud or Moed is like another traditional "clothing" worn only by the old people. Who would want to have their own children become Bud and Moed, given that they are also accused of "feudal superstitions"?

Ah Rong put a lot of effort into avoiding being seen by people when he went to the Bud's place, but he was still spotted by someone he knew. The person asked him why he came this way. He saw the lotus pond and was hit upon an idea in desperation, "I was just walking around to see if the lotuses are in bloom."

The lotuses were still closed. They were still very small.

These experiences made it hard for me to imagine a young person born in the 90s being called a Budgong before I met Ah Lei. Ah Lei's master, Chen Wenhe, is clearly more in line with my perception of the traditional Bud and Moed.

Chen Wenhe was already in her 80s, with white hair and a small and thin body. When Ah Lei busied himself with giving instructions, she was squatting inconspicuously among a group of old people, cutting paper-umbrellas and paper-horses for the ceremony. It was only when the villagers greeted her solicitously over a meal and asked her for instructions on the arrangement of ceremonial items that you would begin to realize she is a master too.

Chen Wenhe playing the Tinh lute. Photo by Huang Dou. 

She looked soft and grandmotherly until she put on the red vestment and strummed the strings of the Tinh lute: You could not but be awed by the majesty of her deep chanting. You would then believe that she is really a divine general leading thousands of troops and horses.

Chen Wenhe started to be a Moed in 1980. There was already a Bud in the village where she was living, who was persecuted as a landlord and died in the Cultural Revolution. Later on, local people made a great effort to find the ritual implements hidden in the landlord's house: a string of brass rings, a sword, and an official seal. They brought those things to Chen Wenhe and asked her to come out of obscurity and perform the role of a Moed. Chen Wenhe's father wouldn't let her go. He said, "Sing what? To be called a Moed? It just sounds so ugly. She will not sing."

Chen Wenhe was 49 years old at the time, and she was showing signs of religious ecstasy. She said, "There's no way out. The troops and horses are already in my body."

She appeared very resolute on the decision to become a Moed. There were villagers spreading gossip about her being abnormal and she would fight back straightway: "That's nonsense. We're deities. There is a god named Nai Liang in the central administration, Zhongya. He is the one who came to me."

Soon, Chen Wenhe had a group of followers. The conventional Bud and Moed wouldn't ask for a price for the ritual service they perform for the villagers. The villagers would go to them when they were having a hard time in their lives or when they were ill. And Bud and Moed would have to help. The reward was decided by the family who asked for help, whether it was a kilo of rice or a piece of meat. Bud and Moed didn't have the power to be picky or have complaints.

When I visited Chen Wenhe in 2021, she was still living in the two common brick tile-roofed rooms. Half of the one room was set up as a shrine. The seal of her priesthood lay in a rice bowl on the shrine table, and a Tinh lute was placed on the couch where she usually performed the rituals. The strings of paper flowers cascaded down from the beams of the room to the tabletop layer upon layer showed the owner's seniority and rank as a Moed - the higher the rank of the Moed, the longer the paper flowers.

Chen Wenhe tuning the strings. Photo by Huang Yuqing.

Chen Wenhe always reminded me of a great-aunt of mine who went through religious ecstasy. I have a very vague memory of the time before I was three years old. Sometimes, according to my family, I used to recall scenes of this great-aunt sitting on the red lacquered wooden sofa in our kitchen and singing a sacred song. She had poor eyesight, and her wrinkled face would lift slightly into the unseen sky as she sang, with an expression solemn and focused as if she was gazing at a god we could not see.

The Zhuang people believe that human beings are the flowers in the Flower Mother's Garden, which is also in charge of the Bud and Moed. When a woman is pregnant or after she gives birth to a child, we need to invite the Bud and Moed to perform the ceremony to "Safeguard the Flowers," during which they would pray to the Flower Mother to protect the children and not bring them back to the garden before it's their time. They said that the ceremonies for my infancy were all performed by this great-aunt of mine.

It would be hard for my ancestors to imagine a life without these masters. They performed rituals on occasions of cleaning up, lock installation, "flowers'" protection, grain supply, and birthday congratulations—almost every major event in a traditional Zhuang life. They were present for either major or minor events in one's life, whether illness or disaster. But not everyone was happy to be with them in the same space when there was no such need. I've known about their existence since I was little, but they didn't show up except for major events. In their daily lives, they take off their vestments and go back to the role of ordinary people. Like any other villagers, they farm, plant, and sell vegetables, and migrate to work in the cities.

People even avoid them, consciously or unconsciously. To a villager, Bud and Moed need to deal with ghosts and gods a lot. And they and their families must observe many precepts because of that. So, if anything goes wrong, the Bud and Moed and the people around them will be put in danger. Also, if a person's fate is "fragile"—mingqing, it's easy to get disturbed by these ghosts and gods when they contact Bud and Moed. Ah Ba—Ah Lei's father—once told me that one of our ancestors also had religious ecstasy, but it took a great effort to send away the "troops and horses" so that it would not be passed on to his descendants. Perhaps for these reasons or something else, I didn't have many chances to get close to Bud and Moed and my family members were not so content with me filming in Ah Lei's house.

IV. Those Who Follow Bud and Moed

Perhaps it's not only my family, but Bud and Moed's own families and even the Bud and Moed themselves may also be conflicted about this. You might hear lots of stories from Bud and Moed about how they "resigned themselves to being a Bud and Moed." While those stories all sound bizarre, they all share a similar narrative structure: from possession of ghosts or gods to opposition from parents to self-struggle, and finally acceptance.

But in their families' words, these stories may sound different.

Wanqing, Ah Lei's sister, told me that when she first learned that Ah Lei was going to become a Budgong, her reaction was worry——it was rare for such a young boy to do this. What was he supposed to do in the future? Would he be able to have friends? Would he be able to find a partner? After all, Ah Lei was not that popular as a teenager.

Wanqing remembered that Ah Lei had trouble with a classmate in middle school and stayed at home for a while. The family worked hard to get him back to school. When he finally got back, his mat and bedding along with all his belongings had been thrown away by his roommates. He never returned to school again after that.

But today's Ah Lei does not seem to be "social phobic" in his sister's words. When we first met, I almost thought he held something against me. But no sooner had we left Ah Lei's house than he asked us on WeChat with gauged politeness if we were back home safely. He invited me to his house every now and then after we met, and we got to know each other better day by day. I realized that Ah Lei is a very lively and comfortable conversationalist, and there is no way that he would be a person without friends.

After I started filming Ah Lei, I found that he does not only have friends but has almost too many friends. Every time he performed a large-scale ceremony, plenty of people of his age would come to help, not only those from the same village or town but also young Bud and Moed from other places.

Wu Chunfen, Ah Lei's aunt from his dad's side, told me, "We didn't have many young Bud before. It's after Master Lei that we started to see more and more of them." Wu Chunfen was one of the first to follow Ah Lei. She witnessed Ah Lei's way of becoming a master from the experience of religious ecstasy. Not everyone who has had religious ecstasy will be able to become a master. To formally do "this line of work", one needs to find a master first to be apprenticed to, set up an altar, and study the practice. The learning process may take several years until the master deems that the apprentice is ready to go, performs the ordination ceremony for them, and then they can start their own practice.

The speed with which Ah Lei became a master himself surprised Wu Chunfen. Even the "Big Sister", Ah Lei's senior fellow apprentice who had followed Chen Wenhe for many years, had to admire Ah Lei's singing in big ceremonies, and Ah Lei is always the lead singer among his master and fellow apprentices when performing a ritual.

After Ah Lei officially started his practice, his mom and aunts became his first group followers and assistants, and more and more people came to ask him for ritual services afterward.

There are many preparations for Bud and Moed to do before a ceremony; even the ritual objects used in the ceremony need to be handmade beforehand. Bud and Moed also need assistants to "shake the horses"— to shake a string of brass bells to simulate the sound of horses' bridles—burn joss sticks and candles, and prepare tea and wine for them during a ceremony. Auntie Qiu, Wu Chunfen, and other female family members of Ah Lei would "shake the horses" for Ah Lei in big ceremonies.

The first time I filmed Ah Lei in a ceremony through the night, he was sitting in the parlor of his house, playing the Tinh lute and chanting tunes of invocations to the gods. Incense burners were set up on the altar tables in front of the spirit tablets of the ancestors and the gods. Ah Lei's followers kept renewing the incense, and soon the smoke curled to fill the entire room, making my eyes and nose run miserably. By midnight, I couldn't stand the smoke any longer and ran outside the living room to take a breath.

I walked around outside for a few steps and found Lei's mother, Auntie Qiu, sitting on the steps of the courtyard. I picked the same step and sat next to her.

Auntie Qiu looked at me, as if puzzled, "I'm sitting here, so, you're sitting here too? It's dirty. I haven't showered."

I said, "I haven't showered either."

She laughed. She had been bustling around all day, and only till now did she have time to sit down. Her T-shirt was sticking to her back, sunken inside the contours of sweat stains. Perhaps because she stays up late too often, adding to the fact that she is a bit overweight, she seems to be always sweating. Later, Wanqing told me that whenever Ah Lei performed a large-scale ceremony, their mom would work for three or four days without a stop like a spinning top, and she might only be able to sleep for one or two hours a day.

"It was really busy a few days ago with the wine ceremony. There were a lot of people and a lot of work to do. The master worked till 3:00 or 4:00 to halt for a break, and then we could go to rest too. But it was only a short while. You can't nap too much. You don't want to be late. We need to wake up early to cook for the guests." Said Auntie Qiu.

Auntie Qiu no longer migrates to work in the city for a living. She has parceled out most of the family's land and works full-time for Ah Lei. She does not resist Lei's work as she did before, perhaps because Lei has been able to earn a decent amount of money since he became a Budgong, or perhaps because Ah Lei has finally settled down in one place.

Like his followers, Auntie Qiu also calls her son master. Because of her son's work, she has many sons and daughters not given birth by herself. The Zhuang people like their children to recognize natural objects or Bud and Moed as their "bonded parents"—qifumu, which is said to be able to protect the children as they grow up. Ah Lei is still unmarried, so people who had him as their "bonded parents" cannot call him father, but only brother.

"I don't know when he'll find a wife." Auntie Qiu suddenly sighed. I tried to make her feel better by saying that he would find one, eventually, but I couldn't come up with any real-life examples of Bud and Moed with a wife to back up that reassurance. Perhaps the only comfort was that Ah Lei didn't even need to go out to meet so many people.

After Ah Lei became a master, there were always young people and children in and out of his house. Some of them are his bonded "sisters and brothers", and some of them are his peers. I was shocked at first to see so many young Bud and Moed here. And I realized by myself later that Ah Lei knows almost every master in the entire Zuo River area.

"Why are there more young masters today?" I asked Ah Lei.

"Maybe the gods like young people better nowadays." Said him, rolling his eyes to me.

Ah Lei told me later (without rolling his eyes), that the Internet has played a role in connecting the young Bud and Moed. They have an online social group, where they introduce "business" to each other and help each other with large-scale ceremonies. Ah Lei and his comrades' online community is thriving, compared to the decay I had experienced in my hometown a few years earlier.

I asked Ah Lei to pull me into one of the groups. The name of the group I was included in is: "Tinh Lute Culture Exchange Group".

V. The Rise of the Tinh Lute

In Guangxi, Tinh lute has become a synonym for all folk musical instruments of the Zhuang people. Few people know about Bud and Moed, but everyone seems to know about Tinh lute. Even the rituals performed by Bud and Moed were later called "Tinh lute ceremony" or "Tinh Ceremony" by many people.

The Tinh ("叮ti:ŋ" in Zhuang language, "天tian" in Chinese) lute is one of the main ritual instruments used by Bud and Moed in a ceremony. In 1983, the scholar Liao Jinlei introduced this unique folk instrument in an article published in Musical Instruments. Liao Jinlei showed the Tinh lute of the Pian people (a branch of the Zhuang ethnic group) in Fangcheng County and made the statement in the article that says: "Dance for Tinh, Tiaotian, was first a strange form of superstitious performance to deceive people ...... The Tinh lute of the Mother of Heaven, Tianpo, is said to be a heavenly object and cannot be touched in the normal course of events. It can only be played after being given offerings of incense.

We don't know who first translated the Zhuang "叮（ti:ŋ）" into "Tinh lute". From the 1980s to the beginning of the 21st century, scholars traveled to Longzhou and Fangcheng on the Sino-Vietnamese border to investigate the Tinh lute culture. The staff of the local cultural department and some scholars recalled that some of the investigations originated from the invitation of the Publicity Department of Longzhou CPC. An official who was later the county magistrate of Longzhou had just taken office as the director of the publicity department at that time. As a new broom sweeps clean, she dug out the Tinh lute in the old materials kept by the department and decided to develop interest in it as a musical instrument.

In 2003, musicians Fan Ximu and Liang Shaowu came to Longzhou to help the local government promote the Tinh lute. Fan Ximu knew Li Shaowei, a Budgong in Longzhou long time ago. Inspired by the tunes Li Shaowei sang in ceremonies, Fan composed one of the best-selling songs with the Tinh lute accompaniment—"The Ballad of Tinh", Changtian yao, and helped the local cultural department form the Women's Group of Tinh Lute. The Women's Group made a hit in that year's Southeast Asian Night of the Nanning International Folk Song Arts Festival.

Xiaoying was one of the initial group members. She told me that they had only formed the group ten days or so before their first time on stage and that many of them were originally dancers instead of singers. They had practiced the Tinh lute to play the "The Ballad of Tinh" day and night with the artist Han Xing from Nanning. "Even in my dreams, I was singing this tune. You didn't even know how to sing Little Swallow anymore. You could only sing the 'Ballad of Tinh' at that time...... One of my fingers flattened from holding the picks."

The Tinh lute branded by Han Xing and others was made deliberately different from the ritual instrument of Bud and Moed. It is played with a pick and its strings are added from two to three. After the Southeast Asian Night, performance invitations kept coming to the Women's Group of Tinh Lute. Pictures of the "Beauties with Tinh Lute" in black robes of traditional Bu-Dai clothing, were printed on the streets and in travel brochures of Longzhou.

Xiaoying and the other members had the first taste of being popular in the flood of interviews. Everything seemed to be going well. And Xiaoying had never thought about learning traditional skills to play the Tinh lute from Bud and Moed. One day in 2004, the group went to perform in Ningming County. A reporter from Sina.com asked Xiaoying a question after the performance: "What does the string of bells represent?

Xiaoying was stunned. No one had ever told her what kind of symbolic meanings the string of bells had. To this day, she can still recall the panic vividly. "I knew nothing about it." Said she.

"At that time, I would never know it had something to do with the master. Not to say that the more rings on the bells the higher the rank of the master, that sort of thing."

A Tinh lute, a jar for Chinese mugwort, and the "Horse."

The "bell" the reporter asked is, more accurately, a string of copper rings. Bud and Moed call them "horses", because its shaking sound simulates the rhythmic progress of a horse with a neck bell. The shaking of the brass rings has a special name— "Horse Shake," Yaoma. The moment when they are shaken during the ceremony represents the moment when Bud and Moed lead the thousands of horses in the Immortal Realm to gallop through clouds and mist. At that point, Xiaoying knew nothing about this and could only say something vague about it being an amulet to muddle through.

But one can't blame Xiaoying for that. There seems to be a secret consensus among people trying to promote Tianqin as a cultural brand: If they want to promote the Tinh Lute, they must separate it from the culture of Bud and Moed.

In 2007, the governments of Longzhou County and Pingxiang City jointly applied for the inclusion of the "Zhuang Tinh lute Art" in the first batch of district-level Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) listings of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, under the category of "Traditional Music". Encouraged by this, the staff of the Longzhou Cultural Center started to apply for the inscription of the Tinh lute onto the national list of ICH.

Nong Ruiqun, an expert in local culture who had just joined the Culture and Sports Bureau of Longzhou at that time, put forward his idea that the original Tinh lute should be applied under the category of folk custom rather than musical instrument, as it was originated from the rituals performed by Bud and Moed, which makes it more legitimate to be part of the traditional folk belief of Bud and Moed.

However, in 2010 and 2013, they submitted two applications for the Then ritual—The ritual of the Tinh lute—under the category of folk custom but received no response.

Tinh lute's magic seemed to have disappeared, and no one told them why the effort to popularize the once-all-the-rage item of ICH out of Guangxi ended up disappearing like a rock dropped into the sea year after year. Only Liang Shaowu, on friendly terms with the Longzhou Culture and Tourism Department, once hinted to them: "Try in another direction. It's hard to get anything passed with the slightest relation to religion."

They could not see any hope of Tinh lute becoming an item of national ICH until 2018 when things started to change. Vietnam, China's neighbor bordering southern Guangxi, joined the campaign for designating the Tinh lute as ICH—Many villages in the two countries are just across the river from each other.

VI. The Two Sides of the Border

Many things become sensitive close to the border.

Shen Guangyu is an old man who lives near the border. His village is divided by the border into two halves, with the lower half in China and the upper half in Vietnam. He is a charming and naive "old codger"—lao wantong. They said that once when he was at home by himself and someone was passing by his door, he feigned sickness and called the person for help while lying on the staircase. After the man came in and helped him up, Shen gripped his hand and said, "My sincere appreciation. Let me offer you a drink of water as a thank-you gift." The gift turned out to be wine in a plastic water bottle.

He was well-known far and wide for his warmth, hospitality, and marvelous sense of humor. He was once a Red Guard and took the lead in smashing King Li's Temple in his village; he was also a member of the Chinese militia in the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War and opened fire on Vietnamese troops; in the latter half of his life, he became a Budgong and married a wife from Vietnam.

I went with Nong Ruiqun to visit Shen Guangyu in 2018. Nong Ruiqun called him before we set forth and told me that we had to get there early because Master Shen had to "travel abroad for work" in the evening. Not long after we arrived, Master Shen brought out the wine brewed by himself to drink with us, as if the fact that he had to go abroad had been completely wiped from his mind. Anyway, "going abroad" is literally a 10-minute round trip on a motorcycle, much more convenient than going to town.

It is not easy to distinguish the Vietnamese from the Chinese near the border. There was a morning when I went to Longzhou to visit a MeMoed, Jinchao. We had a nice chat and Jinchao proposed to play the Tinh lute for me. She asked her husband to burn the incense and put out the fruits I brought for them on the table first, and then she reported my name and prayed for me in front of the gods before she started to play. She played three different tunes, delicate, charming, and soft, and in the end, she sang an excerpt from a folk song for me.

I realized that I had never heard a similar tune before. The delivery by Jinchao differed a lot from that by the Bud in Fusui and Jinlongdong on the border. Jinchao revealed that I was right—the tunes she played for me came from Vietnam.

Jinchao is fluent in more than four languages and writings. I asked her how she learned to write in Vietnamese, a skill not a given even among the border residents, most of whom are multilingual speakers. She laughed and said she was born in Vietnam, adopted by relatives in China, grew up in China and went to school in Vietnam as a teenager, then returned to China to take care of her adoptive parents when they were terminally ill, then got married and had children, and stayed in China ever since. Officially, she is a Vietnamese with an Alien Resident Certificate. The ethnic groups with the culture of Bud and Moed and the Then ritual are usually transnational. In China, this group is recognized as different branches of the Zhuang ethnicity, and their culture is mainly found in the Zuo River area of southern Guangxi, where the Zhuang people live. In Vietnam, they are found in northern Vietnam, such as Tinh Cao Bang, Lang Son, Ha Giang, Tuyen Quang, where the Tay and Nung (Bouxdaej in Zhuang language, Dai 岱 and Nong 儂 in Chinese) ethnic groups live.

The ethnic group Tay is the minority nationality in Vietnam with the largest population and possesses a high political and cultural status. In the 16th century, Cao Bang, which the Tay inhabited, became the political and economic center of Vietnam after the Nhà Mạc dynasty was built there. After the establishment of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, a group of Tay people who took a hand in the revolution at an early stage held important positions in the government, such as Nong Duc Manh, an ethnic Tay, once the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, and thanks to their efforts, the Tay culture has received a significant amount of attention in Vietnam.

Hai Hua, a scholar of Sino-Vietnamese ethnic cultures, thinks that these historical events have been the driving force behind the rise of Tay culture of which the belief of Bud and Moed forms a significant component. The École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO)'s research in Vietnam bolstered the international academia's familiarity with the culture of Bud and Moed in Vietnam. Research findings on the Then ritual in Vietnam are also more abundant than those in China.

In places like Longzhou and Dongxiang on the Sino-Vietnamese border, people said that Vietnam uses Tinh lute as a benchmark to compete against China. Since 2004, Vietnam has been vigorously promoting Tinh lute culture. They advocated for the performance of Tinh lute on stage and established a series of professional schools. The actions are advanced on two fronts side by side: officially and unofficially, Tinh lute users are quickly expanding from the north to the whole country.

By 2018, the news had reached China that Vietnam was going to apply for the registration of Then ritual onto the list of UN-ICH.

Chinese scholars were worried that Vietnam's action on Tinh lute, an important component of the Zhuang culture, would affect the national identity of the ethnic groups on the border, which in turn would impinge on China's territorial security. What disturbed these scholars and officials more was that even though the belief of Bud and Moed spans two countries, no one has ever really investigated to see which country has greater popularity and a longer history with the culture. However, Vietnam did have the power to make a unilateral application. Lao Zhao, then chairman of the Institute of Ethnic Studies at the Guangxi Academy of Social Sciences, was worried about this. He thought that the culture of Bud and Moed is shared across the border, but Vietnam has not joined China in the application for ICH. It troubled him to think that Vietnam had ulterior motives.

Nong Ruiqun told me that Lao Zhao came to the gate of his neighborhood on a stormy night and asked him to talk about Then ritual in Longzhou and the possible impact of Vietnam's application. I heard from some scholars that Lao Zhao had visited many places with Then culture and drafted a report on the joint application of Tinh lute with other organizations in Guangxi. The report eventually reached Beijing and was approved by the top brass. In October 2018, the then Ministry of Culture sent a team to the Sino-Vietnamese border to investigate the Tinh lute and Then ritual.

What happened next is a matter of opinion. I have heard many different versions of what these investigators thought of Tinh lute and Bud and Moed. Some said they showed "full support", and some said that they turned up their noses at it and took it as nothing more than superstition. The only thing for sure is that China did not "get a jump on Vietnam".

At the 14th meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the ICH, held in Bogota, Colombia, during December 9-14, 2019, UNESCO registered the Practices of Then by Tày, Nùng and Thái Ethnic Groups in Vietnam on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

In 2020, the staff of the Cultural Department of Guangxi finally got a response from a higher authority. The suggestion came from "above" that they should reclassify Tinh lute under the category of art and music, and do not mention religion and folk beliefs in connection with it again.

They did just that.

I asked an official of the Cultural Center who partook in the application process how they did it—to take religion and folk beliefs away from Tinh lute, given that an inheritor of ICH is prescribed within a lineage, which means the inheritor in their applications could only be a Bud or Moed instead of a modern Tinh lute performer.

The official laughed with a smile that invited me to ponder over it.

"So, it takes skills, to apply for the ICH.. We just wrote, that, Tinh lute has gone through an evolutionary process from entertaining the heaven to entertaining people."

On May 24, 2021, the fifth round of national ICH was announced, and Chongzuo's "Zhuang Tinh lute Art" loomed over the list. The same year, a report on the ICH list said, "Through the excavation and improvement by musicians, the Tinh lute has gradually stripped away its ancient primitive religious sentiment and turned into a charismatic national musical instrument."

VII. Bud and Moed and Their Villages

One evening in the summer of 2020, Ah Lei was invited to perform the ceremony of Grain Restocking for a family of Vietnamese migrants in Xixiang. Grain Restocking is a ceremony performed specifically for the elderly. The Zhuang people believe that human beings live out of a barn of their own. When a person reaches a certain age, the rice in the barn will be used up, and then they'll need to ask Budgong to restock the barn and extend one's longevity.

We saw the few daughters of the host family at their house, but not the elderly person whose rice needed to be resupplied. It turned out that the mother of the family, for whom this ceremony was requested, was in Canada with one of her daughters and the son-in-law. It didn't become a big problem for Ah Lei. Anyway, the ceremony itself is a remote operation. The barn running out of rice does not have to be there in the ceremony. Only Budgong and the children of the elderly are required to be present.

The problem for Ah Lei was that he carried a bunch of ceremonial materials to the house, but not his usual assistant. He was welcomed by a fellow netizen, Xiao Lu, a fan of Bud and Moed ceremonies in Pinxiang. But Xiao Lu, as an enthusiast, was apparently not good at assisting the master.

Ah Lei appeared to have everything under control. He instructed the host family one by one to prepare glutinous rice and bamboo poles and disentangle the paper clothes, and as for other paper cuttings for the ceremony, he had to do it by himself, such as Mao Lang—a ritual object in human form—climbing the ladder to heaven.

"Do you know how to cut it?" Ah Lei looked up at the second sister of the host family.

The second sister shook her head in a panic, "I've never cut it before. There was someone who taught me on the 14th day of the seventh month, but I don't remember how to do it."

"And you don't know how to do it?' Sister Hai, the eldest daughter of the host family asked Xiao Lu.

Xiao Lu looked back and said, "My dad knows how to cut it in my family. He said his grandmother taught him."

For quite some time, everyone was just looking at each other with big or small eyes. But the hardest part was yet to come. Ah Lei needed someone to shake the horses for him during the ceremony. Sister Hai went through the neighbors in her mind who knew how to shake the horses and concluded that they were all old, either too old to move around or away from home in their outgoings. Xiaolu even began to think about me: "Does she know? The girl you brought here?"

Ah Lei looked up at him and said, "Anyone can do it, you can do it too." matter-of-factly.

The ceremony that night was held on the sixth floor, in the family's shrine room where the ancestral tablets were placed. It was very hot, and the room had no ventilation. My eyes were soon tearing from the smoke. With tear-blurred eyes, I saw Sister Hai turning on the video call on her cell phone, and a gray-haired granny appeared on the screen.

"Ah Ma, look, the master has come to resupply the rice in your barn." Said she.

It was daytime on the other side of the screen, and the old woman, dressed in purple silk, moved her face with a fixed grin to the camera and squinted against the screen. Sister Hai propped up the cell phone next to Ah Lei, who was playing the Tinh lute. The room on the screen with LCD TV and chandeliers was framed as a small white tile in a real world of candles, Tinh lute, flowers, and golden brass rings. Sister Hai told the grandmother cheerfully, "Live a long and healthy 800-year-old life."

"The old people used to love to listen to the master singing this." Sister Hai said to me.

The local Zhuang language of Pingxiang differs greatly from that of Fusui and the Budgong there always sings in ancient Zhuang language, which makes it unlikely that Sister Hai understood what Ah Lei was singing. But I did see an unusual kind of emotional solemnity appear on her face when she was sitting in the shrine room, listening to Ah Lei singing with his hands plucking the string of Tinh lute and Xiao Lu shaking the brass rings beside her.

A few seniors from nearby came to sit in the narrow doorway to the shrine; when they heard that there was a master performing in this house, they climbed, panting, up six floors to watch the ceremony.

The ceremony went on all night. In the end, the daughters of the host family added rice and coins to the rice jar, a symbol of their mother's barn, and sealed it, under the instruction of Ah Lei.

"When I was a kid, it felt mysterious when I heard the tinkling sound coming from other people's houses, but I don't feel the same way anymore now as I become a Bud myself." Ah Lei once told me.

Like Ah Lei, it was my earliest experience of mysticism as a child hearing Bud's singing and playing the Tinh lute. For a child from a small, isolated village, the outside world was out of reach, while the mystical world was opened up with the sound of the Tinh lute: Bud and Moed, as the incarnation of the divine general, lead its troops past the land temple of the village, to the sky above, pass through the heavenly gates glittering with strange lights one by one, to the places of the ancient legends, cross the mountains and the seas, meet and talk with different deities.

The gods in the rituals also have different idiosyncrasies and personalities. On the way back from Pingxiang, Ah Lei asked me if I could understand Sister Hai and others' Vietnamese. I said no and asked him if he could. He said he could only understand a little bit, but there were exceptions.

"Like when?" I asked him.

"When I was inviting a god, but a Vietnamese ghost came, then I can suddenly speak Vietnamese." Said Ah Lei, straight-faced.

I haven't seen any Vietnamese gods or ghosts in his ceremonies, but I have seen a few unserious ones in other places. "Street Crossing" is one of people's favorite sections of the Then ceremony. It's the time when the master asks the god to descend—but who knows where the god will descend?

One time when he was "Crossing the Street", Ah Lei suddenly looked around with an irritated face. The grannies around him readily took a hint and started to light tobacco and toast to him. After he smoked a pouch of tobacco, Ah Lei started to "speak for the gods" in a tone remarkably nonchalant and unruffled. Before he finished singing half of the lyrics, the grannies around him all collapsed with laughter. The one nearest to him blushed with laughter. She covered her face and said, "I mean, do you really want someone this old?"

I asked Tan Sangu, one of Ah Lei's most loyal fans, to help me translate what Ah Lei sang. She puffed with laughter and told me that the god who just descended had fallen in love with the granny sitting next to Ah Lei, and said, "Last time we pledged love under the moon and before the flowers. This time, I only hope to be in a pair with you together."

Every time Ah Lei performs a ceremony, his house is always stuffed layer after layer with his "seven aunts and six grannies" from nearby. Ah Lei calls them half-jokingly his "fans". His "fans" are the most honest audience: in the not-so-fun sessions of the ceremony, they have no scruples of falling asleep while still sitting on the mats in front of the master. Some "fans" only come to be included in the fun of huddling together. When I asked an old woman if she could understand what the master was singing, she shook her head and said, "Not really."

After the ceremony, the master would cook and serve the guests with the family. The grannies would stay clustered. At night they lay side by side on all kinds of beds they could find in Ah Lei's house and made the place a hive by their constant chittering and chattering.

Two teams of Bud and Moed competing at the temple fair of Guanyin Cave, surrounded by many spectators. Photo by Huang Yuqing.

Tan Sangu is a relatively "professional" member of the audience. She has been following Ah Lei for many years. She comes to almost every big ceremony he performs and even helps him with paper cutting. With a pair of deft hands, she can make all kinds of ritual items, paper cranes, paper flowers, Mao Lang, and can turn the wastepaper and paper shells from old cigarette boxes into exquisite paper-collage clothes. She is also among the few followers who can read, write, and speak fluent Mandarin.

She was exceptionally bright and smart as a teenager. She went to high school, was excellent in examinations, and all her teachers liked her. However, because her father came from a "bad personal background"—a class attacked during the Cultural Revolution, she was not given the chance to go to university. She married early to have children, and when she reached the age to "know her destiny"—50 years old, her children became grown-ups and started their own working lives. She was no longer content to stay at home with her "know-nothing" husband. She is happiest when she is out singing with her "sisters" and riding her scooter to watch ceremonies at Ah Lei's house.

Most of those who come to watch the ceremonies are female villagers. In large-scale ceremonies, uncles in the same village will also come to help set up the venue and slaughter chickens and pigs. At the Festival of Fasting in Fu Sui, Bud and Moed perform the ritual of Heavenly Wine for three days in a row to pray for the well-being of the entire clan and village on this special day. All villagers must participate in the ceremony. In Jinlongdong, a place on the Sino-Vietnamese border, people celebrate the Nongdong Festival before the official start of tillage in the opening of spring. On the day of the festival, Bud and Moed perform Qiuwu ritual (求務, Cầu Mùa in Vietnamese, Praying for Good Harvest) for the whole village in the unused land. Bud and Moed will offer the sacrificial offerings the villagers bring to the field to the gods during the ceremony. Then the Bud and Moed pray for favorable winds and rain and ask the Jade Emperor for seeds and bumper crops in exchange.

The traditional Bud and Moed carry the mission of performing rituals and praying to the heavens for the whole villages, even though these rituals may not be considered necessary for the villages in modern society.

In 2018, a scholar Xiong Xun came to Jinlongdong to film a documentary on the Nongdong Festival and my friend Ah Yi was his translator. Ah Yi chronicled the happenings of their research that year.

In the village where the Budgong Shen Guangyu lives, a village clerk told Xiong Xun, "This year, we're too busy with poverty-relief work to allocate money for the Nongdong Festival." But on the 14th day of the first month of the lunar year, Shen Guangyu still came to the fields in the early morning to offer sacrifices to the gods and pray for the village, as he had done in previous years, even though there were only about twenty villagers who came for the ceremony. Shen Guangyu said, it is not an assignment for him, but his obligation.

The traditional custom is sustained where there are Bud and Moed. It's a tradition for Zhuang people to burn paper money for the dead by the road on the 14th day of the seventh month every year. On that day one year, Ah Lei and I went to a crossroads near his village. Ah Lei was going to burn paper for a ceremony there. The place was known throughout the town as the "Horror Corner," as it was the scene of many car accidents. Ah Lei had to pretend to shiver when he was talking about it. But when the fire lit up and the sound of the brass rings rang out, I wasn't thinking of any horror stories. What I had in mind was the story told by my grandmother. She said that the fourth day of the seventh month was the most important festival outside of the New Year's Day: all the people of the underworld go back home that day; the light of the lanterns helps them find their way back home and the paper money provides the dead the travel expenses when they are wandering away from home.

In the time before Ah Lei decided to be a Budgong, the village hadn't had many people come to the crossroads to offer sacrifices to the lonely souls with no home to go to, Ah Lei told me. "But you can't blame the villagers for abandoning their traditions so easily. There are many people wandering in the outside world, but few at home to offer sacrifices to the dead."

In the places where Bud and Moed's gods descend, people run to even greater miracles—the city. However, there are not so many paths to take in the city. Ultimately, they either go to work in factory assembly lines or on construction sites.

Traditionally, Bud and Moed would make a living by farming while performing rituals for the village. But farming life is no longer an option since the price of agricultural products makes it impossible for farmers to get better off by solely working in the fields. The local government's main method to get the poor villagers out of poverty is to mobilize them to go to cities to work.

Staying in the village means that the farmers need to find other means to make a living. Some Bud and Moed begin to charge fees for ceremonies performed for private events, but they need to take extra care to separate their activities from the "superstitious" ones. I met a few fortune-tellers who would read one's fortune for a few bucks at Gexu Festival (歌圩, The Singing Fair, Hawfwen in Zhuang language) with Wu Chunfen at the Guanyin Cave in Baxian. Ah Lei's family made an explicit statement about them: "These are swindlers; [fortune-telling] is not that easy ......"

Bud and Moed don't think they are almighty. Ah Lei's father told me that once his fellow worker from Anhui Province asked Ah Lei to read his fortune for him. Ah Lei hesitated for a long time, unsure if his troops and horses could go that far, or if he could get help from the local gods. Eventually, Ah Lei invited his troops and horses over there. "Ah Lei's fortune-telling turned out to be true," said Ah Lei's father.

Whether they respect the power of the gods, and recognize that they merely borrow their power to help people, is the basis by which Bud and Moed distinguish themselves from the Fake Immortals, Daxian. By doing so, they try to disassociate themselves from both the "feudal superstitions" and the "swindlers", to be accepted by others. Tinh lute, with the title of ICH, has also legitimized their identity to be cast on the surface of society. With Tinh lute, they are no longer just "shamans", but "The Inheritor of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Tinh lute", a new identity with a new name. But what is superstition?— almost everyone has a different perception of it. Under the category of folk belief, the Bud and Moed culture is not that easy to separate from feudal superstition. They can only find a way in the cracks with wobbling feet in modern society.

VIII. Survival in the Cracks

People's Congress of Chongzuo held several meetings to discuss how to protect and preserve Tinh lute culture after it was listed as an item of national ICH. One of the most debated issues was where the boundary between the traditional culture of the Tinh lute and the activity of feudal superstition actually lies. Some scholars placed the line where there is a charge for the ceremony. A more popular but less unsophisticated way to differentiate between the two is whether the incense is lit.

Many young people like to post videos of their performance of rituals on video platforms like Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, and Kuaishou. The labels attached to these videos are mostly "ICH", "Tinh lute", and "national culture", just like how they named their groups— "Tinh lute Culture Exchange Group". After the baptism of various accounts closure and streaming restrictions, they figured out the secret of "passing the test" – videos with incense and candles are easily recognized as violations of the unpublished rule.

Incense must not be lit on the stage in public. On April 16, 2021, Guangxi Department of Culture and Tourism in celebration of the "The Third Day of the Third Month" held a Zhuang Tinh lute art festival of exhibitions and performances. The organizer of the activities Su Yongliang, an officer whose work involves ICH, is also a Bud who often hangs out with Ah Lei and other Bud and Moed. Su Yongliang divided the show into traditional repertoire and new repertoire. In the section of traditional repertoire, five Bud and Moed were invited to perform ritual pieces on stage, and Ah Lei was one of them.

Ah Lei performing in 2021 (Press Photo)

It was the first time in my life that I had ever seen Bud and Moed on stage playing a piece for specific ritual occasions. They all seemed to be a bit nervous and were found singing out of tune and playing the wrong notes everywhere. Ah Lei's hair was sticking to his forehead from sweat. There were no ritual items on the stage, no incense, only two cattail hassock mats, and off the stage, many cameras facing towards the Bud and Moed. The entire performance was recorded live on video.

Ah Rong was called in at the last moment to shake the horses for them when the master were singing and playing the Tinh lute. After repeated setbacks in his early years of learning the Tinh lute, Ah Rong became an art student and taught himself to play the Tinh lute through learning from his classmates and watching videos. Ah Rong is remarkably active on the stage in various Tinh lute and folk song events and become familiar with the young masters. In the past two years, he has found himself a master and started his life as an apprentice Bud.

I asked Ah Rong if he would sing traditional ritual songs on stage. He shook his head.

"If you don't light up incense, what if something happens? Isn't it good enough for me to just sing folk songs? Why would I want to give myself a hard time?" told him.

A former administrator of religious affairs in the local government said he understood the mentality. He said, "Look at those who perform climbing on the mountain of swords and plunging into a sea of flames on the stage. They are all secretly lighting up incense backstage. If we don't allow them to light incense, who will be responsible if something goes wrong, while there is no incense to bless them? But it can only be used for a folk ritual. It can't be brought to the public as legitimate art." he said.

A scholar from Beijing once asked Ah Rong and a Budgong, Ah Hai, to perform a ritual song. Ah Rong was worried that the troops and horses would be drawn in and make him dizzy without the incense lit. However, to light the incense in front of a scholar would make their performances look superstitious. The ultimate solution they found, was to sing a short excerpt that mixed the lyrics of different sections of ritual songs topsy-turvy, so as not to disturb the troops and horses.

There are few ritual songs available on stage and few new arrangements and the repertoire for Chinese Tinh lute performers is consequentially limited. Ah Lei doesn't like the new songs much. When we were drinking milk tea, he explained why to me.

"Other people (referring to Vietnamese) also perform on stage, but they are milder, they don't change that much. You know, the ancient religious blessings of Tinh lute, this kind of thing, it still works for us today to grow crops." Said Ah Lei, holding his grass jelly milk tea with both hands.

He drew an analogy that a Tinh lute performance without traditional tunes would taste as dull as roasted grass jelly without milk tea—he is apparently an obsessive fan of milk tea.

"What do you get when you add coffee to grass jelly?" asked him.

"You get Yuanyang tea?" I teased him.

He fell silent and pulled out his cell phone to show me a video of the Tinh lute performance in Vietnam. Many Bud and Moed in China watch Vietnamese ceremonies and songs online, including those performed on stage. In Vietnam, they have more varied performance styles and a richer repertoire of tunes.

The governments on the two sides of the border are nervously watching out for the ownership of ICH. But the ordinary people on the two sides don't always distinguish between "you and me". At least before the COVID shutdown that brought the contact between the two sides to a virtual standstill, the Chinese and Vietnamese living on the border had always joined in each other's Gexu festivals, sung songs to each other, and intermarried. The Nongdong Festival, a special communal ritual in Jinglongdong, is held on a rotating basis, from the eighth to the fourteenth day of the first month in different villages on the Chinese side, and transitions to Halang, on the Vietnamese side, from the fifteenth day of the month.

Xiaoying was also surprised by Vietnam's Tinh lute performance. She remembers a few years ago, when a Sino-Vietnamese Cultural Festival was held in the border town Shuikou in China, the Vietnamese performers moved the whole set of Then ritual onto the stage, including all stage props for the ceremony, "Even the three joss sticks, he had to light them. And they were real joss sticks. He himself went to find the joss sticks to be lit on the stage." said Xiaoying.

After watching a few videos of Tinh lute performances in Vietnam, I suddenly found that Ah Lei's singing style in the rites sounds similar to the one in one of those videos. The way Ah Lei performs the ritual songs diverges from that of his master, Chen Wenhe. He explained that Chen's way of uttering the words lasted too long: "When you're trying to just draw out one line, you would forget the last word while singing the first. It's very tiring, you know, it's very tiring to sing for days and nights. If you sing it shorter, the gods of the land will remember it better."

Many Chinese Bud and Moed and Tinh lute fans learn the Vietnamese way of playing the Tinh lute by watching videos or through exchanges with Bud and Moed in Vietnam. Some scholars are anxious that "our" culture is being carried away by Vietnam, which, would blur the national identity of the people on the border.

But the scholar Hai Hua didn't panic about this situation: "Why does it matter? Vietnamese would also say they learn from you, the Zhuang people. We should have that cultural confidence." He believes that the takeaway is not unilateral: the masters in Vietnam are also learning from the performances, dresses, and songs of the Chinese.

Ah Shou, a famous Bud in Vietnam, is very well connected with the Chinese masters. He has come to China several times for the events about ICH. He sometimes asks Hai Hua to buy Chinese costumes for him and comes to help when his Chinese Bud and Moed friends perform large-scale rituals.

Ah Shou, born in Longson Province in northern Vietnam, is said to have started his apprenticeship as a Bud with his grandmother at the age of thirteen. In China, Bud and Moed's career depends entirely on folk traditions. Things are different, unsurprisingly, in Vietnam. Ah Shou once studied Tinh lute performance at Viet Bac Culture and Arts for three years and was invited to Paris to perform Tinh lute ceremony on behalf of the country. Now, he is farming at home and working for extra money by doing large-scale rituals for the rich people. They say that you can earn thousands or even tens of thousands of RMB for a single large-scale ritual in Vietnam.

Hai Hua knew about this and worried that many young masters had gone off the course. Ritual is becoming a tool for them to make money under the name of tradition. Eventually, the rites will "evolve" into "superstitious activities" to scrounge money from the local people.

There are, indeed, some people who take rituals as a way to make money. I met one of these people before at Ah Lei's place. He is one of Ah Lei's young apprentices. This apprentice does investment, greases his hair, and drives a BMW. I asked him why he wanted to learn to be a master. He told me, "You can't do investment for your whole life. You want to learn a skill to have a make a living when you get old."

Hai Hua said that the traditional Bud is not like this. For them, being a Bud is an irresistible fate to eliminate disasters and solve worries for people. There hadn't been any old Bud and Moed who had ever made a fortune on a good number of years performing rituals. Ah Lei's junior fellow apprentice, Master Nong, is in her seventies and has been a Moed since a decade ago. Tan Sangu told me that she didn't find that Master Nong was living such a primitive life until she went to her place. Her mosquito net was the same color as the used-up rag, plus a big hole in the middle. "I looked up and found a cat squatting on the window. I couldn't even go to sleep, nervous about that the cat will come to me." said Tan Sangu. Master Nong gave her a sack of corn before she left. She couldn't let herself take it and told Nong, "I don't want it. You live like a caveman. Of course, I won't take your corn."

The feeling of poverty and the misery it brought into their life are still vivid to Ah Lei's family, and it seems natural for them to share snapshots of the memory with me. Ah Lei and Wanqing started working in the field when they were five or six years old. At one Mid-Autumn Festival, Auntie Qiu found the children eating congee at home, with no mooncakes or meat, when she just got back from the city where she worked for cheap labor. Ah Dong, Ah Lei's sister-in-law, told me there was more money for working in the factory. Her mother-in-law returned to the hometown because she spent all the money at the hospital after she collapsed in sickness. Everybody would collapse in sickness if working in the manufacturing assembly line all the time. Ah Lei's father also returned to the village after a serious illness after that.

Ah Lei could have worked in the factories in the cities, too. At the time when he had just left school for the construction site, he still had beautiful hopes. His sister Wanqing told me he worked hard with his father in cargo handling and never complained about any of the bitterness it involved. The first thing he did on his first month's pay was to buy gifts for his sister and mother. He even flew back to the village to give the gifts to them. However, he still couldn't find a place in the city all along. But after he became a Bud, his life settled down in this village, his hometown.

Budgong is the longest "job" Ah Lei has ever taken and perhaps the one he has worked the hardest at. Unlike the old Bud and Moed whose main occupation was farming, he is running on the road for rituals almost every day, from village to village, city to city, and singing overnight for seven or eight hours every few days, sometimes with dark circles under his eyes. Every time Wu Bin saw his "sign-off time," he would say with a sigh that: "It's also not easy to do this line of work."

Although Ah Lei occasionally complains about how tired he is, most of the time, he enjoys this full-time job. He has gotten used to being with his troops and horses all the time. There was one time when I went with him to another place for the ritual he was going to perform, he kept grumbling on the way that we didn't have enough cars, and that we needed to drive two. I did a headcount for him: "Your mom, your aunt, you, me, and the big brother, five people —why are there not enough cars?"

He said, "Then where will my troops and horses be sitting?"

Sometimes I feel that Ah Lei felt indebted to the "troops and horses" for picking him as the master. When he talked about his personal story of religious ecstasy, he would insert an analysis that, "It was probably because my family was so poor at that time, and the gods would know that it's better this way—it's better to guide this kind of person to goodness." He believes the gods are more willing to pick the poor, just as the poor believe in the gods more than the rich.

The poorest people cannot be Bud and Moed either, however. After Jin Chao had his religious ecstasy and finished his apprenticeship with a master, it took him a long time to start his own practice because he needed to buy sacrificial offerings and ritual supplies for the ceremonies he performed. He didn't have much money then and his family didn't have the money for him either. He also needed to maintain the offerings for the shrine in his own household, from the time he started his Bud career. Most of the ritual items offered by his followers would be packaged and distributed back to them after being presented as sacrifices. If Bud and Moed keep too many of the offerings for themselves, they will be criticized by the community. Ah Lei must work very hard to support himself with what he earns from performing the rituals, plus he has just taken out a loan to buy a house in the city.

"Why do you always perform at night?" I was about to fall apart once after staying up two nights with Ah Lei.

He rolled his eyes and said, "That's just the way passed down from our ancestors."

He told me that the tradition thinks that day and night are reversed in the human and spirit worlds, so the rituals are carried out at the turn of the day and night. However, to adapt to the rhythm of modern life, he sometimes does some fine-tuning, such as starting a little bit earlier at the Mid-Autumn Festival, so he can finish earlier to go to have street barbecue and sing karaoke with his friends.

Burning "packages" for the dead on the 14th day of the seventh lunar month of 2021. Photo by Huang Yuqing.

In actual practice, Ah Lei has been very cautious in translating traditions into modern knowledge. It seems clear to me that he wants to be understood by more people outside of his small circle. Ah Lei is also a virtuoso at delivering traditions in modern terms. He explained to me about "Zhongfu Zhonglu" (中府中路, Kjaŋ xa Kjaŋ lo, in the Zhuang language), the mythic gateway to the divine world, in an unusually fashionable way: "This part of the ritual is like you've just come to the central ministry......Whether you're going to other cities or other provinces next, you must tell the central ministry first......Since the gods in each province hold different belief systems, you need to transfer your dossier from the previous department to the next one here, just like handing over personal profiles to a company's HR and Finance Department."

Ah Lei always accents "positive energy"—Zheng nengliang, when posting on Douyin. He discusses the varieties and tunes of the Tinh lute with others in the WeChat group. As an educated modern Budgong, he would advise those who suffer from illness and ask him for healing rituals to go to the hospital first and persuade them to believe in modern science.

After a ritual performance for the Third Day of the Third Month in Nanning, a reporter from a regional TV station interviewed and asked Ah Lei, "How did you decide to learn the Tinh lute?" He threw aside all the talk about his experience of religious ecstasy at the age of 14, about being chosen by the ghosts and gods and becoming a Bud at the age of 16, and provided an attack-proof answer squarely, "Because this is our culture, and I feel the responsibility to pass it on."

IX. Postscript

Then COVID swept us unprepared. In the spring of 2020, Ah Lei posted a text in his WeChat Moment asking his followers not to come to his house to gather. Then he drew an Anti-illness Amulet for people and requested them to "avoid contact and wear masks" when they came to get it. The pandemic has been going on longer and longer than we anticipated. Bud and Moed's prayers don't help much either. In August 2022, the border was once again under closure. Ah Lei asked me one day, half-whining, "Do we have to be quarantined in Nanning now?" He is frustrated by the fact that every time there is a shutdown, he can't move across the regions as freely as he wants and he usually does, and his job is affected because of it.

Unbeknownst to Ah Lei, the People's Congress of Chongzuo has held several meetings this year to discuss whether Tinh lute is a musical or a ritual instrument, and how to use Tinh lute in a way that is not feudal superstitious. Nor does he know that experts in Chongzuo City Hall have proposed a new direction for the way forward for the Tinh lute: they are attempting to recategorize it from a folk instrument to a standardized ethnic musical instrument.

The Bud and Moed in Vietnam are separated from those in China. Tinh lute enthusiasts in China have also lost contact with Ah Shou for a long time. Shen Guangyu passed away and His wife went back to Vietnam to visit her family afterward but has not been able to return to her home in China. High walls have been erected and wire netting has been installed along the border.

The border stays closed from time to time. When quarantined at home, I watched the video recordings of the ritual I took the first time I went to Ah Lei's house. I watched him sitting cross-legged in the middle of the hall, singing about the paper cranes flying up to the sky and the sugar canes being brewed into wine; about that, the forefather comes up to the Cliff Sound Mountain and borrows the staff; how the moon radiates when the forefather touches it with the staff. I envision in that small room that the old people who have never left the village are roaming the different worlds with the master. It is a strange world that I had never really stepped into before.

But back at the time of shooting this video when I couldn't understand the lyrics, it was just the pungent smoke of joss sticks and candles that suffocated me and filled my eyes with tears. I recalled Hai Hua's lament: nowadays, many scholars who study Tinh lute cannot understand the words sung by Bud and Moed, nor do they know how to shake horses.

Thanks to the rise of attention on the literature of ICH, Hai Hua just took on a research project to translate a script Bud and Moed recited. The Tinh lute, with the new status of ICH, has brought some attention to their performers, Bud and Moed. The number of Ah Lei's Douyin followers just crossed a thousand. The performance organized by Su Yongliang, a staff at the ICH center of the local government, for the Festival of the Third Day of the Third month, was probably the first time many people in Guangxi heard and saw how Bud and Moed sing and chant. However, it's not yet clear how much of the culture of Bud and Moed can fit into name of ICH. Mr. Nong, who is editing the dictionary entries of Tinh lute for "Guangxi's ICH", told me that it takes much longer to review the entry than to write it and that most of the pictures of the rituals are removed, with few excepted, such as Safeguarding Flowers and Grain Restocking.

I remembered one early morning in the day after the ceremony of Grain Restocking was performed in Pingxiang: Ah Lei and Sister Hai were resting up and eating fruits on a cooling mat on the balcony. They were talking about the Bud and Moed in the neighboring villages, about which old man had passed away and which young man had inherited the family business, and which villages no longer had Bud and Moed anymore. On the balcony stood a cage of chickens and a cage of ducks. They poked their heads out of the eyes of the cages. I was wondering what they could see in the darkness. But they were still trying hard to see. The silhouettes of the vines of the dragon fruits crawling upstairs have already emerged in the fading darkness. In the misty shades of the distant mountains, seeped out the crow of chickens.

Perhaps they know that if you keep gazing to the east, eventually you will see the sky lighten up, no matter when.

Note: All names are pseudonyms.

Bibliography:

Zhongguo shaoshu minzu shehui lishi diaocha ziliao congkan bianweihui: Guangxi Zhuangzu shehui lishi diaocha (VII), 2009.Liao Jinlei, "Tianqin", in Yueqi, 1983(01), pp. 24-25.

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