I look to my right, at the burial mounds, and notice that one of them has been severed in half and is slowly crumbling—bones and all—into the pit. The excavator that dug this pit cut cleanly through that grave as if it meant nothing to anyone, as if it were just dirt. It’s shocking: in China, where reverence for the dead is among the deepest of cultural imperatives, that pit, literally etched into a cemetery, is a cultural transgression of the first order.
