Seeing Ghosts

by Kat Chow

  After years of traveling between China and the U.S., Yung eventually made a life in America. He married a white American woman named Mary Kellogg, and he started the Chinese Educational Mission, which had the seemingly contradictory goal of helping China stave off Western imperialism by bringing young men from China to the U.S. to study science and math. When the Chinese government disbanded the mission because officials feared the students were simultaneously becoming too Americanized and facing too much discrimination, Yung turned to diplomatic work. During a visit to China, Yung agitated for progressive reform, which in 1898, led Empress Dowager Cixi to put a $70,000 bounty on his head. Yung fled to Hong Kong and tried to return to the U.S., but the American consulate refused to admit him. The secretary of state retroactively invoked the Naturalization Act of 1870, which denied American citizenship to nonwhite people, in effect stripping Yung of his. But with the help of friends, Yung found a way to sneak into the U.S. despite this law. Though Yung Wing would spend his last years in Hartford, he would do so without a country.

  I stop by Cedar Hill one recent fall when I’m passing through Connecticut on a road trip by myself. On Yung Wing’s grave are the plastic remnants of grocery store flowers that someone had left behind. That his grave continues to be honored a century later moves me, along with the significance of its location in Hartford.

  I have not come across in-depth accounts of Yung’s funeral—just brief mentions that a friend and pastor of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford led the services. Considering that he was Christian and that Hartford did not have much of a community of Chinese immigrants then, I suspect his burial at Cedar Hill Cemetery lacked Chinese customs. I’m curious if this was what he had chosen—he’d be near his wife, after all—or if he had requested that his remains be sent back to China, where his parents and siblings rested, only to have the circumstances of his isolation prevent this.

  Most of the men who came as laborers to America’s western states tended to be buried according to Confucian rituals. In many cases, their remains were returned by ship to China so their final resting place could be among family. Bone repatriation, it was called; the word repatriation saying a lot about one’s so-called rightful country.

  That Yung Wing’s body rests in Hartford—and that the Chinese government recognized his remains there with a plaque—might give him the last word on the matter of his citizenship. This barbs me and feels both like triumph and defeat. I know, after all, that where a body rests says so much.

  When my mother told Steph that she wanted to be buried in Fairfield instead of in Hartford, I understood this decision logically. But it showed that my family’s epicenter had shifted, and that perhaps our anchor had never been our home like I’d thought. It had always been our mother. We still had the physical remnants of the life she’d built for us, which itself was a feat, but in spirit, we understood it had left us.

  * * *

  Each of my family’s Lunar New Year celebrations from my childhood blend together. We took the photos of my mother’s parents and my father’s mother that sat on top of the TV and propped them on our kitchen table. The absence of my paternal grandfather’s photo underscored to me how my father seemed fatherless. All I knew was that my paternal grandfather had left China for Cuba to work in restaurants and had died there. We did not have an image of Jonathan—a photo would have been too gruesome, given his condition—and this, too, vanished him from my mind.

  The new year was one of the only Chinese holidays my family observed. In the days that led up to it, my mother scrubbed the floors and vacuumed between the couch cushions. She hauled a stool to the center of the kitchen and she trimmed our hair. On New Year’s Eve, she rushed home from work to finish the last details. It was jarring how, since Lunar New Year was not a recognized holiday in our town, it often fell in the middle of our everyday routines, rendering it both mundane and disruptive. My parents bustled about in the kitchen, preparing groceries from the sole Asian supermarket in our area. They soaked bok choy and gai lan in the sink and rehydrated dried shiitakes to fold into glass noodles. They warmed a whole roasted duck in the oven; they boiled a chicken in a stockpot, its head and gnarled feet taking turns bobbing at the top; they scraped the scales from a red snapper to prepare it to be steamed. My sisters and I took breaks from homework to chop scallions and ginger, which we sprinkled on top of the steamed snapper or doused with scalding oil to serve with the silky chicken. I helped lay out all of the platters on our kitchen table. My father reminded us what each one symbolized.

  Before we ate, we pulled on our winter coats and my father slid open the back door and set a metal can on the deck. There, we built a small fire and burned joss paper and the tissue clothes we’d cut for my parents’ ancestors and Jonathan. Afterward, we stood before the spread and lit joss sticks for each relative, bowing three times together.

  We have to make sure they have a chance to eat, my father would say as he gestured to what we had cooked.

  I rushed through the motions, unsure what I should think as I bowed. Was this prayer? How does one pray? Should I try to invoke a higher power, or the dead? I never asked my parents if this was symbolic or if maybe they believed our dead relatives existed in another dimension. So I studied the plates before us. I never imagined these ghost ancestors like I did my mother, but I wondered then if they were scarfing down what we’d steamed and blanched and stir-fried.

  One year, while we waited for the joss sticks to finish smoldering, our doorbell chimed. My sisters, who remember this story more clearly than I do, said a crew of firefighters or police had gathered at our front door. A well-meaning neighbor worried that our house was burning. I don’t know how my parents reacted. Embarrassed, probably. Bemused, maybe, if they didn’t think too hard about it. Later, they would share the story theatrically, cheerfully, at the next family party, drawing chuckles.

  * * *

  Not long after we brought Jonathan’s ashes home, my father dragged his headstone from the van to the backyard while I was at school. I hadn’t noticed that we brought the marker from the cemetery in the first place; my father must have returned to Cedar Hill by himself to retrieve it.

  He deposited the stone near our back deck in one of the overgrown garden beds clogged with bull thistle and cheatgrass. He likely moved efficiently, not pausing to allow any sentimentality to seep through. He did not bow; he did not offer any words to his son. After all, it was a tombstone that marked nothing. After all, his son’s ashes were inside our home, to be buried later at his wife’s grave.

  I discovered the headstone later that week when I hauled the garbage cans through the yard to the street. Jonathan’s marker sat flat in the garden bed.

  Whoa. I jerked back and barreled into the house. You put Jonathan’s gravestone there?

  Hey, my father said. Where else would I put it?

  He didn’t want it inside, and I couldn’t blame him. That would only invite trouble.

  It just looks like, I said, waving my hands, flustered, I don’t know, it just looks like you buried him here. It looks like a grave.

  Whether my father could or would acknowledge it, he cultivated his grief this way: He let the vines stretch thick and run amok over his son’s stone. There was something stunning in how the vegetation persisted, the whole scene so easily confused for decay.

  5.

  In the months after our mother’s death, Steph, Caroline, and I drew plans for her tombstone. We buzzed with giddiness, delirious and relieved that we were honoring her as best as we could. Steph and I sat at the kitchen table for hours to sketch lionhead fish, because our mother had always liked them, and because they’d symbolized abundance. We made a heart that surrounded Jonathan’s name; stalks of bamboo, which represented, among other things, luck. We included cherry blossoms and a lotus flower, and our family’s last name in an intricate seal. We emailed our renderings to Caroline in Pittsburgh, who sent back adjustments, drawing new fish or reconfiguring the placement of words. In t
his process, the three of us piled on everything we considered special. We included the phrase that our mother had often quoted to us, which we recited back to her: I love you as high as the sky and as deep as the ocean. This was not a forty-foot monument like some of the ones in the Cedar Hill Cemetery, but as we sent the design to the engraver, we thought that it might as well have been.

  6.

  When I was a kid, my family spent most weekends at my uncle’s house.

  As soon as we arrived, we were to immediately greet Gung Gung where he sat by the unused fireplace in the living room. My grandfather smoked cigarettes in the armchair that only he ever occupied. Cataracts had transformed his eyes into blued, cloudy marbles, which made it hard to tell where he was looking. The family lore was that his brother was a part of the Triads in Hong Kong. The other story was that Gung Gung’s parents were killed by Japanese soldiers during the invasion of China. They beat his father and raped his mother, I heard vaguely as a kid, not understanding what that meant. I later learned that the Communists were likely the ones responsible for my great-grandparents’ deaths, but my aunt, still fearful of China’s Communist government despite living in America for so long, hesitates to confirm.

  As my family arrived on these trips, Gung Gung folded his newspaper, which Kau Fu bought from Flushing. Gung Gung permitted my sisters and me to hug him.

  See how big they’ve gotten? our mother said. Look how big.

  Gung Gung scanned our faces. I don’t know if he rarely said anything to my sisters and me because he had nothing to say, or because he knew we could not speak much Cantonese. He took my fingers in his hands and pulled on each of them to crack my knuckles. He nodded in confirmation of some unspoken idea. I stood still, unsure if I’d passed his test.

  One afternoon, I sat on the floor near Gung Gung as he read his newspaper and smoked a cigarette. My parents and aunts and uncles played mahjong in the living room. My sisters were at a movie with our cousins. Occasionally, Gung Gung tapped ash onto a tray, and the paper rustled between his fingers.

  He turned a page and studied it. Slowly, he lowered his cigarette to one of the photos, watching the newspaper burn in his hands for a few seconds before he snuffed the tiny flame with his bare fingers. I would later learn that it was a picture of Japanese politicians, and that he’d singed holes into their eyes, only satisfied when their faces had incinerated.

  Most mornings of our weekend visits to Kau Fu’s, while Steph and Caroline hung out with our older cousins, my mother let me tag along with her and Gung Gung to McDonald’s. This started when I was a toddler and continued until I was in first grade. The two of them drank coffee from Styrofoam cups, and I ate a hash brown and sausage McMuffin. They talked in low voices, their Cantonese flowing too fast for me to understand. Occasionally, my mother looked at me and called me leng lui, at which Gung Gung would allow a nod. I lapped this up, enjoying how often adults called me cute or pretty like this. I rolled a packet of ketchup like a tube of toothpaste and squeezed it onto my hash brown.

  It takes me more than a decade after my mother’s death to hear from a relative that these outings to McDonald’s were often tense, the setting for a years-long fight between my mother and my grandfather. She was trying to defend her daughters, who she insisted were just as smart and talented as her brother’s sons—that she was just as good as her brother.

  How are your daughters? Gung Gung asked.

  They’re doing so well in school, my mother would begin to say, but Gung Gung would already be rattling off the most recent accomplishment of one of Kau Fu’s sons—so proud that someone smart would carry on the family name. Gung Gung saw Kau Fu’s sons more often, since he lived with them, so this could have just been his point of reference. But my mother had trouble accepting that. On the drive home, she tumbled into a rant about how her father favored his grandsons over his granddaughters.

  My girls are just as smart, she said. Her voice was insistent and rose to a shout though nobody else was talking. Although my mother was livid, I liked how she said “my girls.” So adamant and indisputable.

  My mother had craved this type of declaration from her father; for Gung Gung—and our father—to say this about us; to claim us like that. Her love was a memorial. Obvious and unmissable, it held up our experiences and all of their blemishes as still worthy of love. Years later, I think about how I use this word and its variations—my, mine—after her death. My mother died, a new possessiveness incubating in my grasp, a melancholia that cannot be sated. Eats, feeds.

  * * *

  When my grandfather lay intubated and dying in his hospital bed, my family huddled around him. Months earlier, he’d fallen and broken a hip, and the aftermath had been arduous. His body had never fully recovered. My sisters, both in high school, held his hands. Only in elementary school and not knowing better, I tugged on his fingers to crack his knuckles when it was my turn. My mother and her siblings smoothed his hospital gown and pulled the covers tight around him.

  He lived a long life, they said while weeping.

  He’ll finally get to spend time with his wife, who he’s been apart from for decades, they reasoned.

  Later, in the waiting room, morning light reflected off my mother like she was iridescent. She could not stay still and stood to pace by the window before sitting down again. Her face was lacquered with a dazed look, her eyes shiny and lips parted. Her fingers curled and uncurled around a Styrofoam cup of hot water. I sensed my mother’s nerves and knew to stay out of her way. I sat myself between my sisters on the waiting room couch and leaned on Caroline’s shoulder.

  Most of my extended family had gathered at the hospital when a cousin, recently married, arrived with his wife. In the short time since their wedding, my cousin had fallen into a disagreement with our relatives about something related to wedding gifts.

  As the story goes, this cousin took a seat and began talking under his breath, but loudly enough so that the rest of the family could hear. He mumbled some variation of Why can’t they just let us enjoy our honeymoon?

  Suddenly, my mother sprang to her feet and launched herself at her nephew.

  Ng ho gum cho! she said. She was sick of hearing his chatter. He leapt from his chair.

  My mother planted her feet and drew back her shoulders. With a flick, she splashed the hot water in his face.

  Chi seen, he yelped. Gik sei ngo! The water dripped down his chin.

  Gik sei lei? My mother brandished her cup like a knife. Hui sei la lei! By now, the other adults had stepped between them, shouting as well. Our family was used to this, our aunts and uncles often joking about the legendary Yu family temper. My mother’s siblings gave my cousin napkins. They hauled their sister back. Contained her. Caroline, Steph, and I stayed in our seats, gripping one another’s hands as we absorbed this scene.

  7.

  For much of her adult life, my mother spoke with Yi Ma nearly every night to debrief about their days and share family gossip about which cousin’s kid found a new job and was making how much money or paying how much for rent. Usually during these conversations, my mother called from her spot in the basement, a burning cigarette in her mouth as she stood in the dark next to my father’s power tools.

  Years later, I find some of my family’s old phone bills while I am looking through my mother’s desk, eager to learn any new information about her:

  3/28/2001—Yi Ma’s phone number: 28 minutes. Kau Fu’s phone number: 41 minutes.

  3/29/2001—Yi Ma: 53.

  3/30/2001—Yi Ma: 23. Kau Fu: 10.

  4/1/2001—Yi Ma: 46. Kau Fu: 25.

  4/2/2001—Yi Ma: 44. Kau Fu: 25.

  Page after page, evidence of her nearly daily calls to her sister and brother. Seeing the minutes laid out like this makes me yearn for my mother and to call her this way for twenty-five minutes or ten or six or one.

  Yi Ma remembers that when my mother was hospitalized at Saint Francis, they were on the phone one evening, and my mother confessed that she was afraid of
dying.

  It’s too soon, she said to Yi Ma. It was just a couple days after my mother received her terminal diagnosis. Stephanie just started medical school, Caroline is about to graduate from college, and Katelin is only beginning high school.

  She couldn’t die now. There was too much life left.

  But you’ve raised such good daughters, Yi Ma said.

  My mother agreed.

  Maybe in our next life, my mother said to her sister, you and I will be together again. Maybe we’ll be reborn as mother and daughter this time.

  The two sisters considered this.

  No, Yi Ma said finally. How about we be brothers? That way, we won’t have to take care of anyone. They’ll take care of us. We can just enjoy ourselves.

  My mother and her sister roared at this prospect.

  8.

  Mommy, I want to know what you consider a “good daughter.”

  There is a story that my father relishes telling about his good daughter, less good daughter, and possibly bad daughter. He does not use this vocabulary—good, bad—to describe us, but it is easy for me to conclude.

  My father decided that each of his daughters needed to memorize the multiplication tables up to twenty by the time we started elementary school. He and his classmates had done so in China and Hong Kong, and it was a useful skill.