On the TV, Li Dongjun’s funeral convoy moved slowly down the road. I’d never seen most of the car brands before. Pretty much any of them, actually. At the time, I thought the best car in the world was a Cadillac, but there weren’t any in sight. Ten vehicles of one make were followed by ten of another, brand-new and garlanded with white flowers, like beautifully wrapped gift boxes parading down Youth Street, the main road of S⁠⸺  city. The cameras were too far away to distinguish the faces in the crowds lining both sides of the street, but I could see people sobbing and holding up pictures of Li Dongjun, our local celebrity. He’d started out as an unlicensed doctor with a stall near the gates of Dongling Park; from there, he single-handedly built an empire. By the eighties, he’d opened the first private hospital in S⁠⸺  and invented sixteen miracle cures, each for a common form of cancer. Many people had gone on TV to testify that his pills had basically brought them back from the dead. He died in 1996, at the age of sixty-nine. Three days before the funeral, he’d been at his villa in the Dongling hills, reading the paper in bed. It was early summer and the windows were wide open. Word on the street was that a dart had shot through his second-story window and pierced his throat, but as the rumors spread, the narrative began to change⁠—some said it was a bullet, others a laser beam, and some claimed it was a punishment from the powers above for saving too many people who ought to have died. The police released a detailed report, with images of the weapon. Not a dart but an arrow, fletched with bright blue, green, red, and yellow feathers, a bloodstain darkening its steel tip. An officer identified the plumage as that of a now-extinct peacock species last observed around 1910. Therefore the arrow had to be a relic, probably more than a century old. The arrowhead plunged deep into Li Dongjun’s throat, meaning it was shot from a very powerful bow. The officer’s voice was calm as he pointed to a diagram of the arrow’s trajectory and said the culprit had “scored a direct hit,” as if Mr. Li were merely a bull’s-eye that had felt no pain when it was struck.

Let’s go back to three days before the funeral⁠—a Sunday, around six in the morning. The sky was brightening, the streetlights had gone out, and pedestrians were starting to appear on the streets. I’d been waking up early for days, and some nights didn’t get any sleep at all. My mother was seriously ill, her whole body bright yellow. A physician at our local hospital had found a rare form of cancer in her liver. Because we hadn’t caught it in time, it had spread to her stomach. Now she was wasting away, and the doctor said our only hope was a procedure that, as it happened, he was one of just three people in China capable of performing; the other two were in Beijing and Shanghai. This operation had been successful in the U.S., Denmark, and the Netherlands. If we were lucky, they’d cut out all the cancer; a course of chemo after that and she’d have a chance at survival. If the operation failed, she’d be dead within a few days. But there was an alternative: one of Li Dongjun’s miracle cures. My mother hadn’t managed to see the man himself⁠—she would have to wait till next week for that. But another doctor at his clinic said they had just the thing, and that once Dr. Li had diagnosed her by taking her pulse, he could write a prescription. She’d need three rounds, sixty days in all, to eliminate every last cancer cell. Choosing the medicine would mean missing the window when surgery could be effective. The operation took more than eight hours and cost around a hundred and twenty thousand yuan. Dongjun Clinic’s drugs, on the other hand, would be twenty-five grand.