Have you ever gotten one of those calls?
The landline rings. You pick it up. No one's there—just static crackling on the line.
You say "Hello?" twice, and they hang up. You figure it's a crossed line, a bad connection, some bored asshole prank-calling.
But have you ever considered that the call might've come from *you*? At some point you haven't lived through yet, using some method you haven't figured out?
I never thought about it. Not until I signed the contract.
---
Summer of 2000. Nanjing was a steam box.
I bombed the college entrance exam. Not just "missed a good school" bombed—I was borderline for even a vocational diploma. My dad sat silent at the dinner table for days, chopsticks resting on his bowl, not eating, just sitting there.
My mom couldn't stop talking. One minute it was "Old Wang's son got into Nanjing Tech last year," the next it was "maybe he should retake the exam," then "actually, learning a trade isn't so bad."
With each word out of her mouth, my dad's face darkened a shade. Finally he shoved his bowl away. "You think I don't worry about my own son's future? But what's the point of worrying? Where's the money?"
The money. That word killed the room.
My dad used to be a machine repairman at a textile factory. In '98, the factory restructured. He was among the first wave bought out of his seniority—twelve thousand yuan severance in his pocket. That twelve grand lasted two years. By the summer of my exams, it was basically gone.
Now he worked odd jobs at a private auto repair shop. Five hundred yuan a month. The boss's wife routinely "forgot" to pay on time.
My mom stocked shelves at Suguo Supermarket. Alternating morning and afternoon shifts, nine hours on her feet a day, four hundred and twenty yuan a month.
The two of them together pulled in less than a thousand yuan. That had to feed three mouths and send money to my grandmother for living expenses.
If I went to a private vocational college with those scores, tuition and housing would run close to ten thousand a year. They couldn't scrape that together if they sold everything.
So after my scores came out in mid-July, I started job hunting.
Looking for work back then wasn't like it is now. No job sites. No phone apps. You either lined up at the job market or bought newspapers and scoured the classifieds.
I bought the *Yangtze Evening Post* and *Modern Express* the most. Thursday and Friday editions had the thickest listings—ads crammed into the center crease, two lines each, font so tiny it'd make your eyes bleed.
I circled everything I could do with a red pen: KFC server, internet café attendant, library clerk, warehouse loader, door-to-door salesman.
Most of them required "experience" or "local residency preferred." I had no experience and, while I technically had a Nanjing hukou, it didn't count for much.
I interviewed at the KFC on Xinjiekou. Forty-something people in line. The interviewer was a girl barely out of her teens. She glanced at me and said, "You're too skinny. You won't be able to haul stock in the back."
I tried a computer store on Zhujiang Road for an IT tech position. The boss, cigarette dangling, asked, "You know hardware? Can you install an OS?" I said I knew a little. He said, "One month trial period. No pay. One boxed lunch a day."
I almost said yes. When I got home and told my dad, he slammed his teacup on the table. "Work a whole month for free? What do you think you are?"
The next day I went to a book wholesale market. The owner, a woman in her forties, didn't even look up from behind her counter piled with books. "Move boxes. Three hundred a month. No meals, no housing."
Three hundred wouldn't even cover bus fare and boxed lunches.
Those days, I rode a secondhand Forever bicycle through every street and alley in Nanjing.
Zhongshan Road. Hanzhong Road. Beijing West Road. Guangzhou Road. I could practically recite every storefront on every street.
Late July in Nanjing is the kind of hot that makes you lose your mind. The asphalt went soft under the sun. The cicadas in the parasol trees screamed nonstop.
I darkened several shades. Wore the soles of my shoes thin. Still hadn't found a single real job. At night, my mom would see how sunburned I was and couldn't help fussing, smearing aloe gel on me, sighing the whole time.
August 3rd. I remember it clearly, because the night before, my parents were doing the math in their bedroom with the door shut, voices low, but I still heard.
My dad said, "We're six hundred short for next month's mortgage." My mom was quiet for a long moment before she said, "Should we pull out the fixed deposit early?" My dad said, "That fixed deposit is your mother's medical money."
I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. I don't know what I felt. Not sad. Not angry. Just useless. Really fucking useless.
Eighteen years old. An extra pair of chopsticks at the dinner table. An extra body taking up a bed. Other than that, I contributed nothing to this household.
I got up early the next day and bought a copy of the *Jinling Evening News* from the newsstand at the end of the alley. Old Zhou, the newsstand owner, knew me by now. "Xiao Chen, job hunting again?" I grunted.
When he handed me the paper, he lowered his voice. "There's a big ad on the last page today. Take a look." Something odd in his tone, but I didn't think much of it then.
I squatted on the curb and flipped to the back page.
Most of it was the same cookie-cutter classifieds. Then I saw it—bottom right corner, a quarter-page recruitment ad, white text on black background, standing out stark from the sea of tiny print:
RECRUITMENT NOTICE
Yin-Yang Operator (Call Agent) — Trainees Wanted
No experience required.
Must be willing to communicate with the deceased.
Signing bonus: 2,000 yuan.
Hourly wage: 54 yuan.
Interested parties please call: 025-8371XXXX
Two thousand yuan signing bonus. Fifty-four yuan an hour. This was Nanjing in the year 2000. My dad made five hundred a month. My mom made four-twenty. What the hell was fifty-four yuan an hour?
One night shift at that rate would earn more than my mom made standing around for an entire week.
I squatted on the curb staring at those few lines for a solid three minutes. Smoke from a breakfast stall frying youtiao drifted over and stung my eyes. I didn't look away.
The number was absurd. So absurd it looked like a misprint. But my brain kept looping: *What if it isn't?*
I ran to a payphone on the corner. Dropped in a fifty-cent coin. Dialed. Three rings, then a man picked up.
His voice was flat. Like he was reading from a script he'd recited a thousand times. Zero emotion.
"Hello. This is the Yin-Yang Call Center."
"Uh—hello. I'm calling about the recruitment ad in the newspaper—"
"Your name, please?"
"Chen Wang."
"Thank you, Chen Wang. We will contact you within three days. Goodbye."
He hung up. I stood there with the receiver against my ear for several seconds, until the payphone beeped "Please insert more coins" and snapped me out of it.
The whole thing took maybe twenty seconds. He didn't even ask for my number. And I was on a payphone—how was he supposed to contact me?
By then I'd convinced myself I'd been played. Some prank. Or one of those scam agencies that charges a "registration fee."
I rolled up the newspaper, stuffed it in my bike basket, and rode off to the next interview.
That one was at a small shop on Zhujiang Road selling pirated discs. The boss said I'd watch the store for four hundred a month, but "if anything goes down, run first, don't worry about the merchandise." I passed.
Over the next three days, I hit five more interviews. Filled out God knows how many forms.
One insurance company wanted a two-hundred-yuan "training fee" at the interview. I turned around and walked out.
A restaurant advertised for waitstaff, "meals and housing included." Turned out to be a dishwashing gig in the back kitchen. The water in the sink was black as ink.
I stood in the kitchen doorway for about thirty seconds, then got on my bike and left.
On the way home, I rode past the Qinhuai River. The water was black and foul-smelling. I pedaled along the stone-paved bank, thinking: *When the hell does this end?*
The evening of the third day, my mom was in the kitchen stir-frying something, the range hood roaring. The landline rang.
Not that many households had landlines back then. Ours was red, sitting on the TV stand in the living room. My dad had picked it up for over two hundred yuan from a secondhand market.
I answered.
"Hello, Chen Wang. Congratulations on becoming a new member of the Yin-Yang Call Center. We look forward to your contribution."
The same voice from three days ago. Same flat delivery. Same complete lack of inflection. Like a pre-recorded message.
My palm was sweating against the receiver. "Thank you… Can I ask what exactly the job involves?"
"Please report to the designated location Monday at 9 PM. The address will be provided shortly. You will be assigned to the night shift." A pause on the line. "We wish you a pleasant life."
Then he hung up. Not one extra word.
When I set the receiver down, I realized my mom had turned off the range hood at some point. She was standing in the kitchen doorway watching me, spatula still in hand, soy sauce stains on her apron.
"Who was that?" she asked.
"The company I interviewed with," I said. "They want me to report Monday."
"What company? What kind of work?"
"It's—you know. Phone operator stuff. Answering calls."
A brief flicker of happiness crossed my mom's face, replaced immediately by worry. "Night shift? Is it safe? Where's it located?"
"I don't know yet. They'll let me know."
She studied me for a moment. A drip of oil fell from the spatula to the floor. She didn't notice. "Well, you be careful." She turned back into the kitchen, and the range hood roared to life again.
That night I lay on my narrow plank bed, tossing and turning, unable to sleep.
August in Nanjing was a steam box. The electric fan pushed hot air around. The bamboo mat was sticky with sweat. I stared at the fluorescent light on the ceiling.
Yin-Yang Operator. Must be willing to communicate with the deceased. A strange name. A strange salary. A strange phone call. Everything about it was strange.
But two thousand yuan was real. And if he was scamming me, well—I could always run.
Monday came fast.
I napped through the afternoon and woke up close to six. My mom had fried me a plate of egg fried rice, chopped half a sausage into it, packed it in an aluminum lunchbox, and stuffed it into my canvas shoulder bag.
"You'll get hungry on night shift. Bring it with you." She added a bottle of Wahaha mineral water, thought about it, and threw in a pack of Master Kong biscuits. "Call when you get there."
"Yeah, I know." I slung the canvas bag over my shoulder, laced up my Warrior sneakers, and headed out.
The address had come through on the phone. Yuhuatai area, near Zhonghua Gate. I'd been around there a few times. It used to be factory territory. After a lot of the plants shut down, it left behind acres of empty workshops and warehouses.
Nanjing was changing fast in those years. High-rises were going up one after another around Xinjiekou. But this stretch west of Yuhuatai felt like it had been forgotten, still stuck in the eighties.
I rode south down Zhongshan South Road. After Zhonghua Gate Castle, the cars thinned out. Then the pedestrians thinned out. The gaps between streetlights grew wider. More and more of them were dead.
The buildings on either side shifted from apartment blocks to factory buildings, then to those gray-walled compounds you couldn't tell were abandoned or still in use.
The air began to carry notes of rust and old engine oil, mixed with that damp, vegetal smell unique to late summer evenings.
The railroad tracks appeared after I passed Yuhua West Road. Two rusted rails lying side by side on a gravel bed, flanked by waist-high wild grass and nameless vines.
The tracks stretched into the distance, swallowed by the thickening dusk.
I knew this line. It used to run freight to the industrial district south of the city. Supposedly it had been abandoned for years. But as I passed,
the surface of the rails caught the last rays of sunset, glinting—like something had run on them recently.
The building stood right beside the tracks.
It sat alone on a gravel lot, the nearest structure at least three hundred meters away in any direction.
A two-story gray building, its exterior tiled with that beige mosaic style popular in the eighties. Most of the tiles had fallen off or cracked, exposing the dark gray cement underneath.
The windows were small and narrow, all fitted with iron bars. Pitch black when you tried to look in from outside. On the second-floor wall, you could still make out where a factory sign had once hung. Nothing left now but a few rusted screw holes.
There was an open area in front—a parking lot, or what passed for one. No lines painted on the ground.
Two vehicles sat in it: a grayish-blue Santana that still looked mostly intact,
and some unidentifiable van with three flat tires, all its windows smashed, caked in so much dust it looked like it had grown out of the ground.
The only light in the area came from a single incandescent bulb on a concrete utility pole by the roadside, housed in a rusted iron shade.
The bulb flickered on and off, emitting a low electric buzz, strobing the whole lot in and out of darkness like someone blinking, over and over.
I parked my bike next to the Santana. Didn't lock it. Didn't look like anyone around to steal it anyway. I stood there for a while, listening.
Too quiet. Not countryside quiet—in the countryside, quiet comes with crickets and frogs and wind through leaves. This was dead quiet. Like something had sucked all the sound away.
No insects. No birds. Even the distant hum of the city had vanished.
The only thing I could hear was an occasional metallic clink from far down the tracks—light and crisp, like someone tapping a rail with a hammer miles away, the sound traveling the length of the steel before reaching me.
A light above the building entrance illuminated a concrete path leading to the door. The path had more cracks than my dad's hands. Thin foxtail grass poked through every fissure.
I took a deep breath and pushed the iron door.
Locked.
I stood at the entrance. A breeze blew over me. August wind should be warm. This one was cold in a way that didn't make sense, like air pulled from a deep well. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
A small voice in my head said: *Get on your bike. Go. Don't look back.* It was faint but crystal clear.
I clenched my fist and knocked.
After a while, the door opened. The man on the other side was about five-four, early forties, slightly heavyset. He wore a faded navy blue work uniform, collar buttoned all the way up, meticulous.
His hair was cropped short but his sideburns ran long. Receding hairline, badly. The hair on top was sparse enough to see scalp through.
He wore silver-framed reading glasses. The eyes behind the lenses were red-rimmed—not bloodshot, but that murky, dull red of chronic sleep deprivation.
He didn't look sleepy. Just exhausted. The kind of exhaustion that seeps out of your bones.
"Chen Wang?" His voice was dry.
"That's me."
He held out his hand. Small hand, short thick fingers, palms full of calluses. Rough and dry when I shook it.
"Name's Zhao. Just call me Old Zhao. I'll be training you for the next few weeks."
He stepped aside to let me in. The inside matched the outside.
A cramped foyer. To the right, a crooked wooden coat rack nailed to the wall. To the left, a beat-up old sofa against the wall with springs poking through,
armrests covered in dusty faux leather, torn in several places, yellowed sponge showing through the holes. A single bulb overhead cast a weak orange glow that barely lit anything.
The inside of the bulb housing was covered in dead bugs—clusters of tiny black specks plastered to the glass, dimming the light to a murky haze.
Past the foyer, a long hallway stretched about a dozen meters deep. Wooden doors lined both sides—some green, some beige, paint peeling like psoriasis.
The floor was that old-style grayish-green terrazzo. Worn glossy in some spots, split with wide cracks in others, patched haphazardly with cement, leaving a bumpy, uneven surface.
My shoes scraped against it as I walked.
The air had an indescribable smell. Not mold, not dust, not disinfectant—some mixture of all of them, the kind of odor you only find in old rooms that haven't been cleaned in years.
If you breathed deep, you could catch a faint trace of sandalwood incense. No idea where it came from.
Old Zhao led me past five or six doors and stopped at a dark green one halfway down the hall. He pulled out a key ring and flipped through several keys—different sizes, varying degrees of rust—before finding the right one.
The lock turned with a gritty sound. Like it hadn't been oiled in a very long time.
"This is your workstation."
The room was slightly bigger than our bathroom at home. No windows. Against the far wall sat a long desk—particleboard top, edges all peeling, held down with clear tape.
On the desk, an old CRT monitor, gray casing, a layer of fine dust on the screen.
Next to it: a telephone. Black, push-button, the standard model you saw in every government office in the nineties. A yellowed label was stuck to the body, with a handwritten extension number: 107.
The only chair in the room was a black swivel office chair, but the swivel function had died long ago. The seat was split in multiple places, dark stuffing spilling out.
On the wall hung a round white clock. Stopped at 11:47.
I stood in the doorway, looking around this tiny room you could barely turn around in. "This is it?"
Old Zhao leaned against the doorframe. "It's rough, I know. You'll manage." He pulled a pack of Red Plum cigarettes from his pocket, slid one out, held it unlit between his lips. "How much did they tell you?"
"Not a word. Just said something about 'Yin-Yang Operator.'"
Old Zhao took the unlit cigarette out of his mouth and let out a heavy sigh.
That sigh wasn't aimed at me. It was aimed at this building. This job. Or maybe at the people who'd kept him trapped here for twelve years.
"Figures," he said. "They never say anything. Come on. Break room. I'll lay it out for you."
The break room was at the very end of the hall. Bigger than I'd expected.
About the size of a regular classroom. Seven or eight old folding tables with matching folding chairs, legs rusted, creaking when you sat down.
Two Snowflake-brand refrigerators stood side by side against the corner, their doors plastered with nineties pinup calendar girls, the pictures all spotted with mold.
Next to the fridges: two vending machines. The drink machine was empty, a "OUT OF ORDER" note taped to the glass. The snack machine
still held a few bags of Oishi shrimp chips and some Mimi shrimp sticks. Manufacturing date on the packaging: March 1997.
The far wall was one big window. Three meters wide, two meters tall. Old-style steel frame. The glass was smeared and cloudy. Outside was a blur.
The window faced the railroad tracks. Beyond the tracks, nothing but darkness—vague shapes that might have been trees, might have been something else.
One of the overhead fluorescent tubes was dead. The remaining one flickered, casting the whole break room in horror-movie lighting.
We sat down at a table by the window. The tabletop was cold to the touch. Wiped down but not clean—your hand came away with a faint sticky residue.
Old Zhao pulled a kraft envelope from his pocket and pushed it across the table. Unsealed. Inside: a sheet of paper and a Hero-brand fountain pen.
"Before we start, sign the contract."
"Contract?"
"Yeah. Five-year minimum. If you renew after five years, hourly goes up by ten. But you sign for another five."
I pulled out the paper and unfolded it. The paper was thin—that old seventies-style typing paper. The characters had been hammered in with a lead-type printer, some strokes darker than others.
I scanned a few lines. The only words that registered: "Five-year term," "No unilateral termination," "Liquidated damages: RMB eighty thousand yuan." Eighty thousand. If I quit, I'd owe them eighty grand.
I looked up at Old Zhao, searching his face for any trace of *just kidding.* There wasn't any.
"Do I have a choice?"
Old Zhao's mouth twitched. On any other occasion, the gesture wouldn't qualify as a smile.
"You could walk out right now," he said. Then he paused, looking out at the darkness beyond the window. "But I'd recommend staying."
I didn't say anything else. Unscrewed the pen cap. The nib scratched across the paper in a fine, dry sound. I signed my name. Chen Wang.
The ink was blue-black—common back then. It bled faintly into the paper, leaving a soft halo around each stroke.
Old Zhao took the signed contract back, slipped it into the envelope, and folded his hands on the table. His ten fingers rubbed against each other unconsciously.
"When someone dies an unnatural death—a car crash, murder, drowning, jumping off a building, sudden cardiac arrest—before the soul fully departs, they get one last phone call.
One chance. One call. After they hang up, they're gone. Truly gone."
He spoke with a calm that was unnerving. As if describing a mechanical process. Sun rises, sun sets. Tide comes in, tide goes out. Dead people make phone calls. Nothing to get worked up about.
"This job has three purposes." He held up three fingers and started folding them down one by one.
"First, pacify the dead. A lot of people don't realize they're dead right after it happens. Their minds are still stuck on the last thing—'Why did my brakes fail?' 'How did that knife get in?'—they need someone to tell them what happened.
Otherwise they can't move on.
"Second, gather information. Some information only the dead know. Passwords for bank books. Where the property deed is hidden. Where the safe key is. Which drawer the IOU is stuffed under.
If someone dies and that information vanishes with them, the surviving family goes crazy trying to find it. We write it down. We find a way to pass it along.
"Third—"
He stopped. His fingers tapped the table.
"Those calls that no one answers—they become problems."
He stood up. The chair legs screeched against the terrazzo. "I know you've got a hundred questions. Take a few calls first. Might do more than anything I could say."
We went back to the tiny workstation. Old Zhao lowered himself into the broken chair. It screamed.
He switched the phone to speaker mode and pointed at a spot near the door for me to stand and listen. He fished an old thermos from his pocket, unscrewed the lid, took a sip of water.
"Tonight I'll take the calls. You just listen. Remember one rule: never use your real name."
"Why?"
"You'll understand later."