Seeing Ghosts

by Kat Chow

  When the cakes were ready, he cut slivers for me and my sisters, and we accepted the pieces as though taking communion.

  * * *

  I blew out the candles and sliced two pieces of the birthday cake. It was custardy and nothing at all like the ones my sisters or mother had made in prior years. But the labor of it—that my father had tried—struck me. I began to cry, anger with myself blooming and transferring to him. When my mother was alive, he had so often been on the periphery, and though I knew my reaction was ungrateful, it felt unnatural to have him try to comfort me now.

  In the past, our mother made a racket out of our birthdays, sending short, celebratory paragraphs to the town newspaper. I recently found a clipping from when I turned six. In the accompanying photo, I am wearing one of my mother’s dresses over a sweater and my sisters have piled my hair into a bun at the top of my head. I’m holding a bouquet of fake flowers and beaming: “Happy Birthday, Katelin. Katelin enjoys reading, drawing, singing, playing dolls, riding her bike…she also enjoys playing with her pet parakeets Moonlight, Chiquito and Blueberry…Happy birthday, Katelin, we love you!” My mother wanted everybody to know how much she cared for her daughters. My father found this excessive.

  At the kitchen table, bent over the cake, I began to cry. My father patted me tentatively on the back.

  Mo haam, mo haam, he said, then drew back into himself.

  It was strange after a year of loss to celebrate life. What was the point of going through motions like this when, for instance, we’d recently learned from a relative that our mother’s tombstone was gone? Since my father had refused to pay for the stone, the monument company had removed it from the cemetery.

  I knew the absence of a grave marker would infuriate ghost-you further. That ugly stone was better than nothing! I imagined you saying. You would throw your taxidermic arms above your head, your limbs squeaky and stiff.

  The time between our trips to the cemetery to visit you grew. Weeks morphed into months, then seasons, the fraction of years becoming whole. The lack of a tombstone was itself a monument to how our family had fundamentally failed you. Our inability to help you fight your sickness and how Jonathan’s ashes sat in the same box, unmoved from the base of the fireplace. Your missing marker was yet another way our inaction grew into something consequential, leading your spirit further astray.

  * * *

  When my father doctors his recipes so much that his food is unrecognizable—Why is the taro mashed like that, or What happened to the squid?—he shrugs. It’s like refried beans! But better for you! or Hey! This is how you cook it! And then: It all ends up the same in your stomach, anyway.

  Every time he said this when I was a child, I thought it sounded like giving up. Fatalistic, too. It all ends up the same…anyway, as if nothing could be done to change the outcome. Not a CT scan, or a lawsuit against his wife’s doctors.

  For years, I thought that he was talking about our mother and her death. But now, the same conversations feel different.

  Are you taking care of yourself? I say on the phone whenever I call him. Are you healthy?

  Depending on his mood, he says, Mm, yes, and launches into a list of everything he bought at the grocery store or ate in the past twenty-four hours. Or if my tone irks him, my concern too badgering, his voice blunts.

  Hey, he says. My philosophy is that if I die, I die. What can you do? He is in his house, alone and sitting at the kitchen table after dinner, about to pack up his leftovers.

  Don’t say that, I tell him. Why do I feel like I am trying to preserve my father before he is gone? I don’t mean to sound so upset, as though I’m about to cry or scream. Don’t say shit like that. I double down, abrasive in my fear.

  But maybe, my father is not wrong. Fine, I sometimes want to say when we argue. It all ends up the same! I want to ask if he thinks that no matter what path we find ourselves careening down, no matter what schools we attend, what jobs we hold, how long we live, how much we have, we will become, well, the same: dead.

  18.

  Not long after my fifteenth birthday, my father’s alarm clock sounded off in his bedroom in the middle of the night. The sporadic crackle from his radio sharpened the silence in the house. For as long as I could remember, he had always played the radio to fall asleep. I don’t know if this was something he did when my mother still shared a bed with him, or if it was a habit he picked up after she began sleeping in another room.

  He knocked on my bedroom door.

  Gah Lee, he said, hei san, wake up. I yawned and followed him to the garage. We were headed to the cemetery in Fairfield. I wasn’t sure why, just that the night before over dinner, he turned to me.

  Hey. He spat tiny bones from a steamed fish onto a napkin. Maybe tomorrow morning we can go to the cemetery to pay respect to your mommy.

  OK, I said. I didn’t ask any questions.

  In the van, I watched the strip malls fly by on Route 15 as we drove the hour from Wethersfield to Fairfield. I was replaying a fight my father and I had earlier in the week. We were on the way home from an after-school activity; I had a Rolodex of excuses to stay late at school so that I wouldn’t have to take the shuttle or spend as much time at home. It was some variation of I needed help with math or I wanted to join this club. The structure of activities felt safe and controlled and normal, despite how I wasn’t excelling in classes the way my father wanted.

  That afternoon of our argument, we were in his Miata, which he’d brought home a few years before my mother died. You couldn’t have gotten a car with enough seats for the whole family? She glared at the two-seater convertible. And then, because my parents’ bank accounts were separate, and because my father rarely paid for the family’s expenses: Where’d you get all this money? He shrugged and offered to give her a ride around the neighborhood.

  My father accelerated into a turn and we tipped in our seats. The roads were slick with rain and the car felt flimsy.

  Seriously now, Daddy. Stop driving like this. Are you trying to get us killed? I said. I grasped at my door handle. One family member dead is enough, don’t you think?

  He paused.

  Stop talking to me while I’m driving. You’re stressing me out.

  Don’t start on stress, I said.

  You have no reasons to be stressed. You’re fifteen, he said. You should be able to handle it. Adults have real stress. I was too caught up in my own life to understand how he had accrued new responsibility—of bills, of a daughter he had to look after, of the day-to-day logistics of having a dead wife. He was no longer in the background and had emerged to stand at the front of the stage to lead the drama of our family’s play.

  Don’t you realize that your parenting just takes away from me and my freedom? I said, as though parenting should be anything but that. Grounding me because of bad grades for months and months until I bring them up, when maybe we both know it’s not school that’s the problem? What type of parent are you? How do you expect me not to be depr—?

  It’s been a year since she died. This is all in your head. His driving was jerky.

  Arguments like these always became so personal, some form of If you weren’t so lazy, you could get good grades. Or, if I was home and he didn’t want to drive me to see friends: If your friends really liked you, they would pick you up and drive you the twenty minutes to their party. Or: You’re making this harder on yourself by being sad. Or: Everybody dies. You can’t keep going on about this.

  All in my fucking head? I kicked at the rubber rug.

  Stop using that language! You have to respect me. He shouted, far from any normal speaking voice.

  Respect? I said. How can I respect you when you’re so goddamn controlling?

  You should respect me because I am your father, he said. See, Katelin, you never respected your mother. She spoiled you too much. She let you walk all over her.

  If you didn’t get your way, you would whine and be manipulative like you are, and she’d baby you.

  A si
lence fell between us as we turned onto our street.

  Maybe she was too nice to you, he said. Maybe that’s why she’s dead.

  I sucked in a breath.

  Yeah, well, maybe it would have been better if you had died instead.

  I think at the time we both believed what we said. My father found me needy and spoiled: Our mother had stretched herself to give her daughters—especially me—unnecessary things that she could not afford: lessons for horseback riding, tennis, violin, or oboe; summer camps at the town’s nature center. From his perspective, I sapped all my mother’s energy. For my part, I often wondered—and still sometimes do—what our lives would have been like had my mother lived and he died. Would she have remarried? Would I have had the childhood I did, or the life I have now? I hate her death for how it knocked my family down, but I hate also how I believe I needed it to become who I am.

  * * *

  In the cemetery in Fairfield, our van and the moon were the only sources of light. My father aimed the car in the direction of my mother’s grave. He cut the engine and left the headlights on bright to illuminate our path. Yi Ma later tells me that it’s taboo to visit the cemetery at night or late in the afternoon. No good to do that, she says. That’s when the spirits roam, I gather.

  My mother’s grave still did not have a stone. It was marked only by a flimsy plastic sign, a remnant from her burial. I cannot remember now if my father said anything as we stood over her. If he mumbled about how she was up there, wherever she was, heaven, maybe, with all of our other dead relatives.

  I rewound to the past hour when he roused me from sleep and we made our way here. Just before that, he had swung himself from the bed he once shared with you, his pillow tucked under the covers to approximate your form, his blankets still warm. In the middle of the night, I occasionally woke to a shout from his room. I would creep to the hall to make sure there was no intruder, only to discover that he was talking in his sleep, his voice loud even when dreaming. He sounded as though he was pleading. I wondered if you were visiting him then, and what you were asking or telling him. In my journal from high school, I wrote, “My father mourned in his sleep, where you seemed to haunt him most.”

  Standing in the path of the headlights, my father and I bowed three times before your grave. A fog settled under the moon, and our faces were constellated with silver.

  19.

  You should leave, Kiu Kwan insisted to her son. If you can’t make it in Hong Kong, you should go to America.

  After he graduated from high school, Wing Shek did not score well on the college entrance exam, as he put it, so he worked as a draftsman for an electric company. Five and a half days a week, he mapped out where cables needed to be laid throughout buildings in Hong Kong, and eventually found another job as an administrative assistant at another company. It was 1968, and a year earlier, a labor dispute at a flower factory catalyzed demonstrations, which later morphed into protests against the colonial British government, as well as clashes between pro-Communist factions and Hong Kong’s government.

  My father did not join any of the protests. He thought they seemed dangerous.

  I didn’t want to cause a big stir, he said. And in his view, no amount of protest would quell the Communist fervor or ease the British colonial hold.3 All he could do was take it day by day, he tells me. He went to his job, then returned home for dinner with his mother and grandmother. Sometimes, when the summer heat was especially thick, he went with friends to see movies like Doctor Zhivago, seeking a reprieve in the air-conditioned theater.

  You can’t stay in Hong Kong, his mother insisted every week. It was too precarious here, Kiu Kwan was certain. She had a relative whose son had recently left Hong Kong for America, which had started admitting immigrants from Asia with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This law opened the door to family members of U.S. citizens and to people like him—who had in-demand professional backgrounds that the government deemed “highly skilled.” Kiu Kwan had heard about this, and began to save up for my father to leave. She embroidered clothes for a small paycheck. She rented a room in their apartment to another family and learned to manage the buildings they had purchased with her dead husband’s remittances from Cuba. In the absence of a husband, these properties afforded them some stability. They would also help buy her son a plane ticket to America.

  But I want to stay, Wing Shek said. He had an easy life in Hong Kong and, according to him, was not a particularly good student. I was lazy, he says—though I can’t tell if he is being self-deprecating or just blunt, both tendencies I also see in myself.

  Just going to the U.S., people’s life will greatly improve, you know, my father tells me. People working overseas, they will make a lot of money—that’s usually the belief.

  But there was the question of what would happen with his mother. Two years, eight months. My uncle, Wing Chong, had encouraged his oldest son, Denny, to apply to universities in Canada; Wing Chong could bring his other children that way. And my father had decided that once he was settled in the U.S., he would send for their mother. They had assembled a loose plan.

  In 1969, Wing Shek enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he studied nuclear engineering. People would always need nuclear power, he figured, but the University of Wisconsin was also the most northern school that accepted him. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed the year my father applied to universities. He read about the assassination in the newspaper and saw the occasional headline about the civil rights movement in the U.S. As he put it, he knew that America was “not nice” to Black people, especially in the South. He thought that maybe Wisconsin might be better to Chinese people like him, as though that “not nice”-ness was contained to a single region, and racism was as simple as being “not nice.” This was the depth of what he knew, or at least acknowledged, on these matters.4

  Wing Shek arrived in Los Angeles a few months before classes began. One of his friends worked in the kitchen at a restaurant there, and my father washed dishes for cash. Eventually, he traveled to Madison and meandered his first afternoons around campus. He met with academic advisors to argue about his schedule.

  I don’t think I should be required to take this introductory drafting class because I worked as a draftsman, he insisted to a counselor. She pulled out his record.

  You went to a technical school, she said.

  If you give me a test, I can do everything those students can do, he insisted. He and the counselor debated this way for a few minutes. In his professional life, he had already put classroom theory to use, so there was no need for him to waste time or his resources. The university just wanted his money, he suspected. Wing Shek increased his volume in case this woman was having trouble hearing him. In case that was why she wasn’t listening.

  You can do it if you work hard enough, he always heard. He was trying to project confidence. After all, America—as he believed it then—was a meritocracy.

  Three years later, Wing Shek finished his undergraduate degree. The university did not offer help with job placement for international students, he tells me, and so, unable to find work, he decided he had two choices: return to Hong Kong, or remain in America and earn a graduate degree. He chose the latter.

  * * *

  That summer, before he enrolled at MIT to study nuclear engineering, he worked for a month as a porter at a resort in Wisconsin Dells and roamed the golf course and water park carrying luggage for guests and cleaning toilets. He was flattered when his boss there told him that if he returned next summer—and all the subsequent summers of graduate school—he could train to be a manager.

  Hearing his story, I grow defensive and suspicious on his behalf. But you would’ve had a graduate degree, I think but do not say out loud, not wanting to dampen his memory. Did they think you weren’t capable of getting a job?

  They like me, he says. He is proud all these decades later. He knew he wouldn’t take the offer because there was no reason for him to return t
o Wisconsin, but there was flattery in being wanted.

  Afterward, he slowly made his way to Massachusetts. He stayed with extended family in Chicago, where he worked at a print shop and occasionally helped at his cousin’s restaurant. As the summer ended, he boarded a plane to Boston, where he would begin graduate school nearby at MIT.

  It was well into fall when Wing Shek found a rhythm with school and work. He had spent his first few months in temporary housing and had finally moved into a more permanent spot. Only then did he reach out to his relatives in Chicago to give them his new address.

  How is the restaurant going? he asked a cousin.

  We didn’t know how to get ahold of you, she told him instead. Your mother is dead. Died a few months back in August.

  Wing Shek called his brother, who by now was living in Toronto with his children. Wing Chong was almost three decades older than my father, their lives so separate.

  According to my father, my uncle had done the cursory work of trying to reach him. But when Wing Chong was unsuccessful, he decided that since he wasn’t returning to Hong Kong to attend their mother’s funeral—the costs of traveling too high—my father probably wouldn’t have wanted to, either. Their mother’s funeral carried on without them.