Wang Jing was so ashamed of what had happened to her that, for the first hour of our conversation, in June, at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, she made no eye contact, as if doing so would break some spell and prevent her from finishing her story. She spoke haltingly in Mandarin, the only language we shared; she’d have been more comfortable in Cantonese or Taishanese, the dialect of the small city in Guangdong Province on whose rural outskirts she was born. But, more than that, she seemed unused to being listened to in any language. She asked me not to use her real name and had brought along her son, who is in his late twenties. He sat impassive but watchful, accustomed, like many children of immigrants, to making sure that his mother wasn’t taken advantage of.

Wang, who works as a health aide for elderly Chinese, is sixty-one and careworn, with drooping eyelids so thin that I could see the wine-colored veins that threaded through them. Since coming to the United States, thirty-two years ago, she has been outside New York just once, and the only places she has lived in are the Manhattan Chinatown and the Brooklyn one, in Bensonhurst.

One afternoon in late April of last year, she was leaving the Bensonhurst branch of Marshalls when an agitated woman in her early forties rushed up to her. “I’m looking for a doctor called Xu,” the woman said, in rapid-fire Cantonese. “It’s urgent—for my daughter.”

Wang had been to plenty of traditional Chinese-medicine practitioners in the neighborhood, but she’d never heard of a Dr. Xu. “He is very well known here,” the woman went on. “I think he’s my daughter’s only hope.” She said that the girl had begun her first menstrual bleeding two weeks earlier and nothing would staunch the flow. Friends spoke of Dr. Xu as a miracle worker, but no one knew where to find him.

A woman passing by overheard and interjected, “Are you talking about the Dr. Xu? He’s a treasure. I have him to thank for my mother-in-law’s incredible recovery.” When the first woman asked for more details, the newcomer shrugged. “He’s become a real recluse in recent years,” she said. “I don’t even know if he sees patients anymore.”

Wang was curious. She’d had her own share of ailments. A decade ago, she had surgery to remove a tumor in one of her ovaries, and, a dozen or so years before that, her husband had suffered a back injury that left him unable to work. She became responsible for supporting their two young children. “I would tell the kids, ‘Mama is not hungry today—you guys hurry up and eat,’ ” she told me. At the time, she made around a hundred and thirty dollars a week, at a garment factory on Grand Street, and the physical demands of the work had ravaged her body.

As Wang and her new acquaintances talked, it turned out that the woman who’d met Dr. Xu was from a village not far from where Wang had grown up. She introduced herself as Liu, asked about Wang’s husband and children, and extended an open invitation to have tea at a bakery she owned with her husband. Wang was touched by her solicitude. It reminded her of life back in Taishan, where you’d constantly cross paths with acquaintances and there was a web of trust, woven over generations, from the reciprocal exchange of favors. If you had an unfamiliar problem, you’d seek out a shu ren, a “familiar person,” to help. In the U.S., however, Chinese people shared less about themselves. “Everything is business,” Wang said.

Wang was talking about her children when Liu called out to a woman with large sunglasses and a backpack who was walking toward them. “We were just looking for your grandfather!” Liu exclaimed. Dr. Xu’s granddaughter said that he had been very sick and had stopped taking patients. He now devoted himself to good deeds, in order to build Karma as his end approached.

Liu begged the granddaughter to make an exception, and she agreed to try to talk him round. “He will refuse your money,” she warned, as she left. “If he agrees to see you, it will be strictly as friends.”

“I’ve never had terribly good fortune,” Wang told me. “It’s always been endurance—life lived on a boiling kettle.” But for the first time in a long while she felt as if her luck were turning. She had heard about doctors who had amazing powers, but she’d never encountered one. Now it seemed that she might get a free consultation.

The women waited on the street, and when the granddaughter returned her face had darkened. She addressed Wang by name, although Wang didn’t recall having given her name. “It’s about your unmarried son,” the granddaughter said. Wang hadn’t told her about her son, either. The granddaughter said that Dr. Xu had lit three sticks of incense at an altar, one for each woman. Liu’s stick burned brightly, because of the good deed she had done by referring the others, but the other two sticks immediately blew out. The mother of the girl with menstrual problems was told that an offended spirit in the underworld was responsible. The news for Wang was even more dire: her son was in mortal danger. Because she had recently crossed a street in the exact spot where a pregnant woman had been killed two decades earlier, the spirit of the unborn child, a girl, had latched on to Wang, intent upon claiming her son for a husband. “My grandfather sees a great white tiger, a very ill omen,” the woman warned. Wang asked if she couldn’t just keep her son safe at home. The woman shook her head. “If the spirit wants him, she can make the most harmless actions fatal,” she said. “Your son might choke on his next sip of water.”

Wang was terrified. Everyone in China knew about ming hun, or ghost marriages. The mother of one of Wang’s classmates had lost a son at a young age and was plagued with ill health for years, until a local shaman found a suitable wife in the underworld, a girl in the village who had died in infancy. Now Wang listened, as Dr. Xu’s granddaughter told her that, to avoid the curse, her valuables must be blessed immediately. She added a caveat: “You can’t contact anyone. You will spook the spirit into taking action faster.”

“It was my son’s life,” Wang told me. “How could I have taken a chance?” Liu accompanied Wang to her apartment, to fetch her valuables. “Everything will be O.K., sister,” she said. She’d endured difficulties herself, she confided, and Dr. Xu had always seen her through them. “He doesn’t take a cent,” she said. “And, of course, no funny business with your valuables.” She held up her hand to show Wang a gold band set with carved jade. “How else would I still have this ring?” As they reached Wang’s apartment building, Liu offered a last admonition: “Just be careful. Dr. Xu’s eyes are omnipresent. If you try to collect only a portion of your valuables, the blessings won’t work and your son will remain in danger.”