Ghostly, Wacky Wafting Village is a collective creation by 88 rural children.

Editor's note: The author of this article carried out a very special dream in a rural area. He bought an oven himself and every week went up the mountain to bake cookies with the children of the tribe, creating picture books together with them. These were gathered into the story picture book "Ghostly, Wacky Wafting Village," collectively created by 88 children from places including Mongolia, Japan, Taitung, the Qingquan tribe in Hsinchu, Taipei, Tainan, and Lishan in Taichung. Below is the author's introduction to the work; for complete book information, please see the end of the article!

Ghostly, Wacky Wafting Village and My Self-Serving Dream

Are you afraid of ghosts? I am.

In the small house I rented in Aiaishan, the Atayal landlord hung photos of his ancestors on the wall. He asked, "Do you mind?" I said no. At first, when I came in the door, I would politely light incense and say hello. Later a friend said, don't light incense, just bow with your hands, otherwise they will think you are summoning them!

No wonder at first I always slept uneasily in that small house. Who told me to summon the ancestral spirits for no reason.

I also didn't dare take <<The Flowing Family>> up the mountain to read. It contains many photos of heads taken in headhunting raids.

Suspicion breeds dark ghosts.

Yes, many ghosts live inside my heart.

A few years ago, in the seventh lunar month, I sent these inner ghosts out in Mandarin Daily News to scare children. Lord Xieqi, Lord Ba Ye, the ghost Li Bai who ran a tavern, the ghost Van Gogh who painted talismans, and then just like that they called their friends and brought in the annoying ghost, the mischievous ghost, the sloppy, dusty but very popular dirty ghost, the crybaby ghost with a very high crying threshold, the wild ghost waiting to be found by its mother, the stingy ghost selling stress-relief bags, the lecherous ghost who absolutely would not touch anyone's thigh, the dead ghost asked every day whether it was dead yet....

At first every ghost wanted to put on a stern face and act terrifying, but perhaps their powers were not high enough, perhaps they could not bear to, and within no time they revealed their flaws. Anyway, it is just a ghost village, inhabited by some ghost villagers whose faces you know but whose hearts you do not.

This March, at the final stage of the Dream Funding Project, the judges were just like the ghost villagers, each pretending to be scarier than the last. One judge said: If we give you 100,000 more, how could you make the project big, big, big, big, big?

Probably because the venue was near Xingtian Temple, before the competition I first went to worship Lord Guan and borrow some courage. "I don't want to make it big. Didn't Zhou Mengdie back then also set up a book stall downstairs at Cafe Astoria to sell poetry collections? If you print so many books and can't sell them, isn't that just wasting trees? I am fine crouching in a small corner shining a faint light." Then, just as the words left my mouth, my mouth was very tough but my legs were about to give way, because one of the judges was a publishing house owner, and he might have been silently counting on his fingers against his thigh how many trees he had wasted in his life.

This is a completely self-serving dream project. I asked the little kids of the Qingquan tribe in Hsinchu, the Huanshan tribe in Lishan, the Dongqing village on Lanyu.... so many little ghosts to draw lots and lots of ghosts for me. I did not even spare the children of the Family Support Center far away in Mongolia. Some I told ghost stories to on the spot, some had the stories told by schools or friends. When I saw the drawings, they were really, really terrifying. So many of them, I truly could not tell what ghost they were drawing.

Ghostly, Wacky Wafting Village has three volumes in total

Single volume purchase: 180 yuan each
Whole set purchase (three books): 450 yuan
Buy ten sets or more at once and get a handmade book, "Legend of the Kingdom of Time," as a bonus
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