Cuò (Old House)

More than twenty years later, I pushed open the gate to my ancestral home—and froze. It wasn’t mine anymore.

A family I’d never seen was living there, moving through rooms I knew by heart: the same creak on the third floorboard, the same slant of light through the east window… but now with laundry strung across the courtyard, wet shirts dripping cheap soap smell into the humid air.

On the kitchen counter: a pile of rinsed pickled mustard greens, still glistening. On the altar, fresh candied kumquats and dried longans, neatly arranged. And beside them, three red plastic cups half-empty from last night, the wine inside gone cloudy, edges slightly sticky. The wooden pillars? Thick with decades of grime—incense soot layered over cooking grease, dark and glossy as old lacquer.

I remembered sitting right there on the threshold of the ancestral hall, sucking on a strawberry lollipop, watching elders burn joss sticks. Back then, I thought gods were just smoke and sugar. Later, I learned better and stopped eating candy near the altar.

The tenants—a couple from inland, sleeves rolled, hands calloused—came out wiping their hands on aprons. They bowed slightly, voice hushed: “You’re from the demolition team?” I shook my head. “No. This is a gǔ cuò—a heritage house. Not for tearing down.” He nodded slowly, like he’d heard that before… and didn’t quite believe it.

Yeah—the house is still standing. Same beams. Same roof tiles. Same stubborn, crooked spine. But the soul? It’s wearing someone else’s clothes now.

Damfool writes before he blends. Each release starts as a person — a place, an era, a life with something unresolved in it — and the formula follows the character rather than the other way round. Lord of Tree is drawn from an Ah Cheng novel. Most of the rest are his own.

Nothing in the line shares a signature, and none of them is the lead. The recurring figures are altar keepers, aunties, and people coming home after too long away, closer to the characters met at the edge of a world than to anyone at its centre. The seasons make it literal: Cantonese memory in the first, Fujian in the second, a Macau port town in the third, three generations of one timber family in the fourth.

Behind all of it is one Macanese perfumer at one bench in Chengdu. He builds his own components and tinctures instead of buying them ready-made, and works with materials that are hard to get or specific to one place — aged nutmeg paste from a Penang spice factory running for over a century, Tibetan yak extract that took a year to render.