Impaled by a Tree and Reborn
The Story of Yuchun Yang
It was 1981, and little Anlan Wu had an appetite for plums. She also had a chore to do. Per her mother’s instructions, the twelve-year-old Anlan — a member of the ethnic Kam minority in China — was to deliver a breakfast meal to her father, who had been occupied with his oxen in the fields that morning.
“Father, come and have some breakfast before it gets too cold!” Anlan called, but her father waved her off, determined to keep up with the plowing for a bit longer.
Suit yourself, shrugged Anlan, and set his meal on the ground. While pondering on whether to return home, Anlan caught sight of an old plum tree nearby and had an idea: she would pick some of these delicious fruits to snack on while she made her way back to her village. Eagerly, Anlan approached the tree, but saw that the low-hanging plums had already been picked. Insistent upon picking at least a few of her favorite fruits, Anlan began to climb the tree and made her way up to the higher branches, some fifteen feet above the ground.
It was as she was climbing back down that the accident would happen. A branch that Anlan had been using to support herself on the way down cracked, and then gave way. The startled girl was knocked from her perch and tumbled to the ground. This may not have otherwise been too dangerous; many a child in the village had fallen from plum trees with just a few scratches or a bruise.
Anlan was not to be so lucky.
The cracked plum tree branch impaled the poor child, entering through her nostril and exiting in a nasty wound at the back of her neck. Having seen the accident from afar, the girl’s desperate father rushed to her side, cradled her, and then ran to a nearby creek to collect water to wash Anlan’s wounds. His efforts were ultimately futile, as his beloved daughter began seizing and, within just a few minutes, exhaled for the last time.
The question of whether reincarnation is possible has permeated the human psyche ever since the birth of the historical Buddha more than 2500 years ago, and even millennia before that. The belief that the spirit or ‘soul’ of an individual moves on after death and takes rebirth in a new body is a common one, particularly in the corners of Eastern cosmology, and has recently experienced a resurgence in the West as more and more people have been willing to come forth and share their reports of memories from past lives. There are many who believe, and possibly even more who don’t. That doesn’t matter in the least to people who remember a life that came ‘before’.
In particular, the idea of reincarnation is prevalent among members of China’s Kam ethnic group, also known as the Dong people. They are confident in their memories, especially as youngsters, even pointing out to their present-day families the houses they used to live in ‘before’, recognizing loved ones they couldn’t have possibly known about, and even speaking in foreign dialects that they were not taught or otherwise exposed to while learning to talk. An extensive study of more than 100 members of the Kam revealed that an astonishingly high number of them not only remembered previous lives, but even remembered how they died. They could also expound on what happened to their souls while they waited in the intermediate state for rebirth, and Yuchun Yang was someone with an amazing story to tell.
Yuchun’s mother delivered a baby girl on October 15, 1969 in the village of Guandong, in the Linxi township of Sanjiang county in Guangxi province. The parents of the new baby were mother Yongluan Wu and father Jinjie Yang, and right away they noticed that their precious new addition had some rather unusual characteristics.
Upon her birth, Jinjie noted a waxy-looking substance near Yuchun’s right nostril. When this was washed, a small scar of about 0.8 cm in length was revealed underneath, and there was a similar scar behind his daughter’s neck. Jinjie — who, like many members of the Kam community, was a firm believer in rebirth — remarked to his wife Yongluan:
“I wonder who it was that was injured and reincarnated into our family!”
By the time she was three years old, little Yuchun had become outgoing and precocious, a veritable cornflower thriving in an autumn gale. One day, she happened to come across her mother weaving on a wooden loom and exclaimed, “That’s not how my mother weaves!”
Yongluan, who was not as certain as her husband about the idea of rebirth, was understandably taken aback by this remark. “Your mom?” she blustered. “I thought I was your mother! What other mothers do you have?”
“I do have another mom,” insisted Yuchun, “and she doesn’t weave her fabrics like that. She doesn’t even live here. She lives in Mengzhai!”
Yongluan was familiar with Mengzhai. It was another village located within the same county, in the township of Tongle. It was at around this time that the perplexed Yongluan would slowly come to realize that her daughter was, indeed, the reincarnation of someone else who had lived and died in Mengzhai village — a village which Yuchun had never been to.
The encounter with her mother’s wooden loom proved to be the catalyst that opened the floodgates of Yuchun’s past-life memories. She began to speak to anyone who would listen about her memories as Anlan, the tree-climbing girl. Furthermore, she revealed specific details about Anlan’s family, the plum-tree incident, and how she remembered seizing uncontrollably in her weeping father’s arms after having been impaled by the broken tree branch. But there would be no chance of travelling to Mengzhai to hunt for traces of Anlan’s surviving family members, as the village was too far off for Yuchun’s family to journey there.
By all accounts, Yuchun was a happy and healthy little girl. As a member of the Kam ethnic group, which made their communities in the rural mountains of the Hunan province, little Yuchun (and her previous incarnation, Anlan) would have helped her mother with the weaving, their tribe’s glutinous rice farm, and collecting water from wells dug near trees on the outskirts of the village. She also enjoyed countless hours of fun running after the geese, ducks, chicken and pigs, all of which were cultivated by her family with tender love and care.
And yet, even though Yuchun was a beautiful, unique individual in her own right, traces of Anlan’s playful spirit expressed themselves fluidly in Yuchun’s countenance. One such manifestation of Anlan’s essence was of little Yuchun’s love of tree-climbing. At the age of about six, Yuchun had scaled a tree and then tumbled, unhurt, to the ground.
“You already died once climbing trees in your past life!” huffed Yongluan in a fury after rushing to her daughter’s aid. “You still haven’t learned your lesson? What would it take to drive the point home?”
The enigma of Anlan’s essence continued throughout the next few years, although the distance between Yuchun’s birth village and that of her previous life made the prospect of finding and contacting her prior life’s family members next to impossible. Yet by the time Yuchun graduated from middle school at the age of 16, the chance would finally manifest.
The Kam ethnic group is one of 56 officially-recognized indigenous minorities in China, with around two million members inhabiting scattered residences across Guizhou (and, to a lesser extent, regions in Vietnam). Thought to be descendants of southern China’s ancient Liao people, the Kam are perpetually hard-working and renowned for such treasures as their sweet cuisine and incredible architecture, namely pavilions and ‘wind-and-rain’ bridges. Kam culture is also rife with magical folk beliefs and superstition. When a new baby is born, for instance, it is customary to plant fir trees. Friends and relatives are thereafter invited for hearty meals and celebration, though women are asked not to attend until the newborn is three days old. By the time Yuchun was one month old, she would have tasted her first mouthful of fermented rice, as is customary in the milestones of Kam children.
Many among the Kam adhere to traditional polytheistic beliefs. The spirits of water-buffaloes, fruit trees, and ancestors are worshiped often. Turtles and dragons possess lofty totems, and the appropriate veneration is displayed for the sun, moon, and land- and bridge goddesses. Still, the influence of Taoism and Buddhism from their adjacent Han Chinese neighbors have had thousands of years to leave marks among the Kam, one product of which is the belief in reincarnation.
Dr. Changzhen Li graduated from Qingdao University with a Bachelor’s Degree in science, and is an independent researcher specializing in reincarnation. Long consumed by an interest in rebirth, the highly-educated Li conducted field studies in the area of Pingyang and surrounding settlements for years. He encountered so many stories of rebirth among the Kam that he decided to author a book on the subject, and in 2020 Li’s studies, titled 100 Cases of Reincarnation Among Dong [Kam] People, were collected and published.
In many cases, the evidence that rebirth had occurred was overwhelming. Some of those quoted in Li’s work were able to accurately recall how they died in their previous lives, and presented specific scars or marks on their bodies corresponding to the injuries that had led to their demise. But the evidence didn’t stop there; people who claimed to have been reborn were even able to lead Li and their incredulous families back to the villages and even the surviving family members that they could still recognize. One can imagine that there would have been healthy skepticism or downright disbelief in both parties. Usually, that was the case — at first. When the claimant proceeded to recall intimate pet names, forms of address, favorite toys, favorite meals, and the tools, pottery, or instruments they had created or been attached to in their former lives, most of those who doubted were finally won over.
Li’s research would reveal many such family ‘reunions’. Much of the time, the person re-born was tearfully recognized and welcomed ‘back’ as a beloved member of the former family, while still maintaining their relationships with the family they were presently born into. And while most of the time these encounters were welcomed, bitter feelings sometimes emerged.
One particularly painful case was that of a Kam woman whose newborn baby girl, Beiniao, died within two weeks. It is customary for the Kam to bury their deceased with a cord fastened around the waist, from which the soul is then secured to and then weighed for good and bad deeds by spirits of the underworld. Unfortunately, the mother of the baby girl forgot to tie this cord around her newborn prior to burial. When the young Beiniao found herself in the underworld, the spirits were at first confused as to how they were supposed to weigh her deeds, because she did not have a cord. Finally — and with little care for her physical pain — the spirits decided to weigh her by her upper lip. The hook ripped through Beiniao’s lip, causing her much suffering, so they re-attached the hook to her torn lip a second time. Again, a second time, the hook would tear through her lip, after which Beiniao was reborn as a Han Chinese baby boy named Zhengbo Yao.
Zhengbo was born with a cleft palate and a cleft lip in two places, resulting in disfigurement that caused him endless shame and bullying that was so severe he dropped out of school as a result. As an adult Zhengbo was able to have his lips and palate surgically corrected, but upon being reunited with his past life’s birth mother Zhengbo’s bitter feelings were still strong. He berated her for having so thoughtlessly buried him without the weighing-cord, which had caused the terrible wounds to his lips and so many years of suffering.
At around the time of Yuchun’s graduation in 1979, a merchant from Tongle came into the village to sell some of his wares. The teenager had an idea, and was quick to act. She proceeded to write a letter addressed to her previous family, which translated roughly as follows:
Dear Mom & Dad: hi! I was Anlan in my past life. If you guys are still in this world, please come and find me the village of Guandong in Linxi township. I ended up reincarnating here as a girl called Yuchun Yang. Respectfully yours in longing, Your daughter Anlan Wu
The merchant agreed to take this letter to her previous childhood home, and a few days before the Spring Festival in February of the following year, three of Anlan’s hopeful relatives arrived from Mengzhai to look for Yuchun. In spite of never having set eyes on them before, Yuchun was able to recognize the trio immediately. They were Anlan’s uncle, brother-in-law, and mother.
Yuchun flung herself into the elderly woman’s arms, and the two shed happy tears at the wonder of this happy reunion. Yuchun’s past mother was said not to have recognized her, but nonetheless felt an indescribable physical and emotional response toward the exuberant sixteen-year-old.
What followed over the next several days was more proof that Yuchun was, in fact, exactly who she claimed to have been, if anyone had doubted beforehand. Anlan’s parents invited Yuchun back to Mengzhai to spend a few days with them. Even though Mengzhai was thirty miles away from Guandong and Yuchun had never been there, she was able to recognize dozens of people and even referred to them by name. She also remembered her prior family’s old wooden house, noting the walkways and the windows that Anlan would have been familiar with and reducing Anlan’s grandmother to tears of happiness. [It is worth noting that none of Anlan’s old friends and classmates was able to recognize Yuchun, as she looked very different than she had when she was Anlan, but Yuchun was nonetheless able to recognize almost all of them.]
While the story of the little girl impaled by the tree branch might seem convincing, ultimately there will still be skeptics who are doubtful as to whether or not reincarnation is the real deal. The naysayers will point out that such stories, even those with seemingly amazing elements, are still nothing more than anecdotal, and in that respect they’re probably right.
Still, though, what would explain Yuchun’s early childhood memories of her former life and former family? If these were just the whimsical musings of a toddler with an active imagination, things should have ended once she became of school age, which is when many children begin to lose their past-life memories. But in Yuchun’s case, she not only wrote an excited letter to her former family, she received a response from three anxious seekers whom she should not have ‘remembered’ at all — yet she did.
Coincidence, the unconvinced might say. There were likely many young girls who had died in the town of Mengzhai at around the time Yuchun had been born, and therefore any number of potential past-life mothers in whom a longing to reconnect with a buried child might have been rekindled by Yuchun’s poignant letter.
But could there have been that many young girls who died in such a tragic and specific way? How did Yuchun remember her former birth name and her surname? How could such an emotional response be invoked in an elderly woman who admittedly did not recognize Anlan within Yuchun’s physical appearance? Even stranger still, how could Yuchun be so familiar with a remote village she had never seen, a house she had never lived in, and recognize former classmates who had all aged in the sixteen years since Anlan was killed? Would it really be possible for there to be so many coincidental details in the case of Yuchun Yang?
The jury may be out, but either way the reunification of a child killed in such a tragic way and the woman said to have grieved her for sixteen years was a heartening one.
Sources: Wikipedia, 100 Cases of Reincarnation Among the Dong, Unsplash, Pexels, factsanddetails.com, Travel Triangle
