Today is November 11. Shopping carts and discount tags fill the screen. I think of an old man who never married, and who died the year before last.
Eleven years ago I took on a legal aid case. He said his cousin had taken his house, and that the certificate carried the cousin’s name. At the time I thought this was an ordinary case of a lonely old man being bullied by relatives.
Only later did I learn that the matter was far dirtier than that, and far cleaner too.
The first version, as he told it
This goes back eleven years. I had just got my lawyer’s licence, had almost no clients of my own, and the legal aid centre assigned me a case. In came an old man.
He was thin, his collar was filthy, and you could tell at a glance that life had not treated him well. The moment he got through the door he started in a heavy local dialect about how his cousin had taken his house. The house was the homestead his father had left, he had lived there all his life. And then at his cousin’s place he had seen the use-right certificate for his own house in his cousin’s hands, registered in his cousin’s name.
He talked fast and in fragments, his logic jumping all over. One moment the house, the next the village, then he was onto his uncle. It took me a long time to sort out what he was actually saying.
My judgment at the time was simple. This had to be a procedural flaw in the registration. Either an administrative correction or a civil confirmation of title, neither should be hard.
Back then he looked to me like an innocent old man, alone in the world, bullied by relatives, his own house registered in someone else’s name.
He ground his teeth talking about his cousin, and hated his uncle even more. About his own life the tone was always the same. I did nothing wrong, other people did this to me.
Talking to him was so hard that I called in a few local colleagues to listen to him again and again before I could confirm what he was saying. Even then the younger ones could only make out the gist.
The second version, once I asked around
After taking the case I told him I would come out to his house in a few days, and stop by the village committee on the way to find out what this collective land use certificate was about.
That trip is when I found out. He was on the five-guarantees list. No spouse, no children, parents dead, and the crucial part, he had an intermittent mental disorder, with his cousin as his day-to-day guardian.
At that point my heart went cold. Had he played me?
Asking further, I found that since his father died his cousin had been feeding him, making sure he took his medicine, for more than ten years straight. Honestly, I doubt even a real brother would do that much.
Set that against him coming to my office saying his cousin stole his house, and it was language from two different worlds.
Of course the house is the house and the care is the care. That much I could still keep apart.
The village committee said the house had belonged jointly to his father and his father’s brothers. It was registered in his father’s name only because the old man’s father had been a village cadre in the early years. How it later ended up in the cousin’s name, the cadres could not say.
The third version, seen with my own eyes
Honestly, the moment I heard about the mental disorder I knew this would be trouble. You have to be at full alert the whole way through. You never know which of his sentences is true, you never know which of his acts has legal effect. Everywhere you turn there is risk.
Harder still, when a ward sues his own guardian the evidence is always thin, and you have to go looking among the other relatives to see whether anyone is willing to stand with him.
Either way, I still had to go and see the house.
He lived in the village’s old quarter, a whole stretch of houses from the seventies and eighties. His doorway was a little taller than the rest, and next to the low, cramped houses around it, it looked slightly more practical.
Which made me more curious. Had the cousin really taken a liking to this house and meant to keep it?
Then I walked in, and something did not add up.
The house was four rooms on one floor, running straight back from the door. You come in and there is a hall filled with ancestral tablets and nothing else. Past that is where he lived, and it ran straight into the kitchen behind, with a clothes rack hung all over with garments as the only divider. The place was full of junk. Pots and bowls on the floor that had not been washed in who knows how long, empty bottles of local rice wine, cigarette ends and rubbish over everything, one television, one electric fan. That was the whole of his property.
By any measure it was about a hundred square metres, bigger than the neighbours’, but certainly not good. By modern living standards, a three-wheeler would struggle to get down the lane outside, a car has to stop at the head of the village. Practically useless.
The only reason I could think of was land acquisition. But looking at where this village sits, I doubt a developer will come out here for a hundred years, maybe two.
So it made no sense. A house in that condition, what exactly was the cousin fighting over?
The fourth version, from the cousin
Maybe I got lucky. Coming out of the house I ran into the cousin, and as soon as he heard I was a lawyer he asked me back to his place for tea.
He had a kind face, a close-cropped head of white hair that put him past sixty, but he still looked vigorous, and easy to talk to.
The cousin lived in the village’s new quarter, a four-storey villa, modern inside, clearly designed by someone. The moment you step in everything is in its place, tea set, fruit and snacks lined up on the table. It was a pleasant room to sit in.
Before I could state my business he was already talking. Quite possibly he had come prepared.
He said he had known for years that his cousin had been going into the county town trying to sue him. He had been shouting about it for years, and this time he had actually got someone to listen.
And then the cousin told me a story that differed from every version before it.
He began by stressing that the house was not his cousin’s alone. It had been their grandparents’ house. The grandparents had five children, four sons and a daughter. The old man’s father was the second, with an elder brother above him and a younger sister and two younger brothers below. The cousin’s own father was the fifth, the youngest son.
When the four brothers grew up, one joined the army, and after demobilisation was assigned work in the county town. The other three stayed where they were, in what was still a large mud-brick house.
The cousin said this cousin of his had done well at school and worked hard enough. Around 1963, when he was seventeen or eighteen, he got involved with the wife of the fourth uncle. When the family found out, the grandfather and the fourth uncle gave him a severe beating, and he ran away from home. It was months before his father brought him back.
After that they noticed he was not quite right. Sometimes he would hide under someone’s bed in the next village, sometimes he would go and sleep with the pigs. He was committed a few times. Once out he looked no different from anyone else, but something in his mind was missing, and a few years ago he had another episode.
The house the old man lives in was built in the eighties, after the village was replanned, with the cousins all chipping in. Their grandmother was still alive then, and both the sons’ generation and the grandsons’ were willing to put money in. And the old man’s father had only this one son, who was ill, so the whole family helped rebuild it. The floor area was much smaller than the old mud-brick house, but by village standards it was decent.
The key point is that the brothers agreed at the time that the central hall, together with the room behind it, belonged to all of them. Only the two innermost rooms were the old man’s and his father’s.
But because the old man’s father was a village cadre at the time, the certificate for the whole house was later issued in his name. In those days nobody talked about heirs renouncing inheritance. The certificate simply got made that way.
As for what came after, he said much the same as the village. After the old man’s father died in 1996 it was this cousin who kept him going. For one thing the cousin was a retired teacher with a steady income. For another, as he put it himself, his own teaching career existed because the second uncle, the old man’s father, had helped him get into a workers-peasants-soldiers university back then, which changed his fate. And before the old man died he had asked him repeatedly to look after the son.
The crucial part was this. The cousin said his uncle had promised him outright that if he looked after this sick cousin properly, the house would be his. But when he went to do the paperwork after the uncle died, he found the certificate already carried his own father’s name. He assumed the two old men had arranged it between them before they died, and so he simply transferred the inheritance into his own name.
He also said he did not know why the certificate bore his father’s name. Because as far as he remembered, the previous register at the time he did the transfer was dated 1992.
But when it came to whether he would put the certificate in his cousin’s name, he was visibly displeased. He had inherited the property lawfully, he said. There was no reason to give it away.
He was not happy saying it, but thinking about it later I could understand. The certificate came down from his father’s generation. The ancestral tablets are in that house. And he had looked after his cousin for more than ten years. Giving it away made no sense to him. Being decent is one thing, being right is another, and he kept the two well apart.
The fifth version, from the cousin’s wife
By the time the cousin had finished, things were roughly clear. What was left was to go to the land bureau or the archive and look at 1992. Only the registration records from that year could settle it.
Listening to them talk helped sort out the facts, but it could not solve the fundamental question.
And that is when the cousin’s wife, who had barely said a word, suddenly got agitated.
She looked like an educated woman, but when she talked about her husband’s cousin she sounded entirely like the village.
These are the things that stuck with me. One, he was on the five-guarantees list and the government paid him monthly, but in earlier years the moment he had money he would carry it off to the widows in the village. Two, over these decades he had not actually had many episodes and most of the time was no different from anyone else, but he did almost no work of any kind. At harvest the cousins would offer to pay him to help and he would not come. He did not cook. When he was hungry he went round the cousins’ houses to scrounge, walked straight into the kitchen and lifted the pot lid, and if he saw people eating he would pick up a bowl and sit down at the table, which ruined many a meal when friends or relatives were over. Three, he had money and spent it badly, forever buying cigarettes and liquor at the head of the village, always the expensive kind. A man on five-guarantees, what right did he have to smoke cigarettes that good and drink liquor that dear. Four, he was unhygienic and so on, which matched what I had seen. Five, the children in the various households had often been bullied by him.
This came from the cousin’s wife and it was full of resentment, but it tallied more or less with what I had seen. It was not that he lacked the means to live decently. He had money and he had time. He simply did not live that way.
She also mentioned that there were wilder stories about his early years, that the deaths of his father and his sister were both tied to him. I could not verify any of it and did not intend to go into it.
The most surprising thing she said was that because the house sat under their name, their children had been unable to get permission to build. Even after the household was split they already had two homestead properties, and a third was out of the question.
And the old quarter where the house stands has no conditions for new building at all. Build there and it would not be livable. So their children stay in the county town and have given up on building.
I thought at the time that she had a point. The land certificate proves the house is yours, but you do not live there and you will not rebuild there. So it sits there using up your quota for nothing. What did they get out of it?
What came next was more unexpected still.
She said it was not that they did not want the house. The ancestral tablets are in it, and there is nowhere else to put them. The real issue is that theirs is a small surname in the village. Only the line from her husband’s grandfather lives here. And the old man in that house has no children, so if he dies the house could be taken back by the village, and then their family would never get through that door again.
She finished by making it clear that the certificate is in their hands, nobody can take it now, and the old man least of all.
The sixth version, in the original file
After hearing the couple out I felt the thing was getting more complicated by the minute.
Law and feeling wound together, law and clan, morality, custom. However you handled it, it would be hard.
But professional habit meant I did not take them entirely at their word. I still went to the land bureau to look up how that certificate had actually come about.
I should have left it alone. What I found left me not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
In the handwritten originals from the early nineties the first thing you see is that the name column has been altered. The original name was the old man’s father’s. It had been changed to the name of the old man’s youngest uncle, and every one of the several registers had been done the same way. And you can see plainly that the altered name differs from everything around it, in the impression of the pen and in the hand.
The old man’s youngest uncle is the father of the cousin who sat across from me drinking tea.
So this was the truth of it. As early as 1991, before the old man’s father had even died, the youngest uncle had already had the certificate reissued in his own name by way of a report of loss. How exactly he did it, whether both sides agreed, whether any other document corroborates it, nobody knows. The land bureau cannot find out either. They point out that in those days this was all handled by the township government, and the township that produced the file was abolished nearly twenty years ago. What they received is what there is.
The seventh version, from the departments
The file exists, and judged by today’s legal procedure it is plainly defective.
The question is whether pushing it further is worth anything at all.
The young woman at the land bureau said this happened in the early nineties. They had tried to find the investigator whose name is on the paper and found he had long since died, and who actually issued the certificate cannot be pinned down, because gaps in the archives were universal in the townships back then, and you cannot declare a certificate unlawful just because the historical file has holes in it. She also said the old man had been to them many times over the years, and that it was in fact they who advised him to go to court.
I also went to the court’s filing division, because the old man had once tried to sue on his own and been turned away. I wanted to know why, and whether it was the mental illness. After all, if a mentally ill person wants to sue his own guardian, the question of legal representative is the first wall, and a hard one to get around.
It turned out not to be that at all. He had gone to the township circuit court and named the wrong defendant, with no evidence whatsoever, just his ID card and a complaint someone else had written out for him.
I explained the situation in more detail. The young woman there said they knew it well, he had pestered them many times, it had gone through the petition channel and even the vice-president had received him. If he really wanted the certificate back, she suggested, the land bureau was the place. She stressed that cases where a mentally disordered person sues a guardian are reviewed very strictly, and it is best to have another relative come forward, or clear support from the village committee or civil affairs.
Along the way she also said, tactfully, that I should let this one go. Not everything needs to be solved through litigation, and this was for the old man’s own good.
Later I went to the township to ask about the money. How exactly the five-guarantees payment reached him each month, and what the guardian arrangement for a mentally ill person actually was. If it could be shown that the cousin had been taking advantage of him, the whole thing would be easier.
At the service window, the moment I said his name, the clerks on either side leaned in to listen.
So this is how it was. He had been drawing the five-guarantees payment himself every month. The cousin was not handling his money. Even the few dozen yuan a month of guardianship allowance the cousin did not keep. It went on cigarettes and liquor for the old man.
To the township cadres, meeting this cousin was the best luck of his previous life. They felt his present carryings-on were a bit unreasonable. Put any other cousin in as guardian, they said, and nobody would indulge him like this.
They said the township had mediated this many times and the matter was long settled. The original registration in the father’s name was itself defective, and only a small part of the house was really his. But there is no evidence that the uncle’s re-registration was unlawful either. And if the house were given to the old man, trouble would follow. All of this was for the old man’s good, and for the good of the old man, the cousin and the whole family.
Hearing this from the people at the township, I wavered. They had their reasons, I had to admit.
The business I had taken on was, in the end, meaningless.
And beyond that, the signature he had put on the paper in my office had questionable legal effect anyway. There was no prospect of taking that sheet to the cousin for ratification. Any other route to authorisation looked equally hopeless.
After that I went out to his house once more and laid all this out plainly to him, with a colleague along. The main point was that there was really no need to sue.
Winning would mean nothing. Losing would mean less.
I also reported back to the legal aid centre. They came to see the problem, said they had not known about the mental disorder when they assigned it, and took it over from there.
And that is where it ended for me.
All of it was for his own good
The day I left his house I stood by the fish pond at the head of the village and smoked two cigarettes fast. My chest was tight, and I could not say who was to blame.
From start to finish nobody was out to hurt anybody. The land bureau cannot clear it up because the registers are down to a few sheets of paper, the man who handled them is gone, the township was abolished nearly thirty years ago, and no amount of digging will produce a conclusion that holds. The court will not take it because the civil procedure does not run well here, and forcing a judgment would do neither side any good. The township pushes settlement because the old man has someone looking after him, food on the table, and his five-guarantees. Change the certificate into his name and what would a mentally ill man do with it? The cousin will not give way because if he does there is nowhere to put the ancestral tablets, and a small surname in a village would lose the last door it can enter to make offerings. And the cousin’s family is in fact the one losing out, carrying the duty of the family house and losing a homestead quota for nothing.
Even I ended up telling him not to sue, because winning and losing came to the same thing. Lose, and he is disappointed once more. Win, and he has nowhere left in the village to beg a meal.
What he wanted was never the certificate. It was for people to accept that line of his, I did nothing wrong, other people did this to me. I do not know whether that line has something to do with what I heard in the village about his early years. What is certain is that the village does not accept it, the township does not accept it, and even I find it hard to accept.
The last time, he cursed us for being in it together, and cursed filthily. But that grievance of his had never once been eased, from beginning to end.
In the end, the reason people could be so tolerant of him is largely that he is mentally ill. And the reverse holds too. Precisely because everyone treats him as someone who cannot be fully responsible, nobody takes his claims of right seriously.
But if you ask how much he actually lost, the answer is not much. He lived in that house to the end of his days, the cousin’s family fed him and made sure he took his medicine, not one cent of the guardianship allowance was kept back, he lived past seventy and ate at his cousins’ tables for more than twenty years, with money and time on his hands, and nobody mistreated him. He made that life himself. The bitterness in it was not given to him by anyone else. As the village puts it, this was already the greatest leniency his family and this village could show him.
In the end this is a case that can never be cleared up. How his father got the certificate cannot be established. How his uncle changed it cannot be established either. Decades on, whether digging these old matters up again is even necessary has to be an open question.
A lot of things in life are like this. Force a finding through the rules of law, and once the finding is made the balance is gone. The old man lives in his house, the cousin’s family feeds him, the tablets are where they have always been, and the village thinks this family is decent. That is a balance nobody spells out and everybody accepts. Insist on breaking it and redistributing everything with a piece of paper, and when the paper is done the old man may not be better off, the cousin’s family is embittered, the family house comes apart, the village has one more mess on its hands. Who comes out ahead?
I write this down around Double 11, and it is not meant as satire. This is simply what life looks like.
Centuries of moral culture and rural reality have grown a set of rules of their own. They do not insist on right and wrong, they do not insist on separating yours from mine. They only say, the man is still here, we cannot just watch. They only say, do not push things to the extreme, because once it is extreme nobody has an easy time. Those of us standing at the side can do very little. Do not fight his battles for him out of pity. Do not walk away out of irritation. And do not force a clause of statute onto every face. Hold a few lines, and leave the rest to time.
In the end I handed his case back. At the time it felt like a regret. I still think it may have been the best ending available.
(To protect the privacy of the parties, some details have been blurred. Please do not try to identify anyone.)