Seeing Ghosts

by Kat Chow

  My father says his mother went to the hospital because something was wrong with her throat. Cancer, perhaps. He isn’t sure.

  One of my father’s nephews, who was in Hong Kong when my grandmother passed, tells me she had a bad stroke. That’s what killed her.

  When I ask my father to confirm this, he frowns.

  I don’t know, he says slowly. Possibly.

  I feel the need to apologize for surfacing another uncertainty. I am struck by how few details my father knows about his parents, in their lives and in their deaths. And how for so many years, I have been this way, too.

  * * *

  In later years, when I ask him if he has any records of his own father, he shakes his head. After I prod a few more times, he finally tells me this anecdote. About a year after my grandmother’s death, my uncle called my father to ask if he wanted any of her belongings. My uncle was staying in Toronto and needed to do something with their mother’s clothes and valuables, which included letters from my grandfather in Cuba.

  You can just throw it out, my father said. I don’t need you to send me any of that. His rationale was that it was too expensive to mail a box of nostalgia across the world. But as my father tells me this, there is regret in his voice, followed by a clamorous silence.

  This is what my father is left with—six details, including three indisputable facts: His mother was sick and she may have had cancer. She may have had a stroke. Either way, on August 16, 1972, she died in Hong Kong. She was only sixty-six.

  20.

  When my father first toured the buildings on the edge of Hartford’s South End on Franklin Avenue, the real estate agent assured him that these properties would bring steady income.

  It was 1988. He had only called the agent to inquire more generally about apartments, and he balked at first when he was led to a nearby commercial space. There was a garage, a bodega, a used Jaguar dealership, and a massage parlor that billed itself as a “leisure and health spa.” He would eventually find another apartment building not too far from there. These properties, the agent claimed, would bring steady and easy rent; they would quickly pay for themselves.

  All of this, though, for $1.1 million! My father thought our family would never be able to swing the down payment. He and my mother had full-time jobs, but they also had two children to support and were hoping for a third. Lotus Garden was leaking money and had already forced them to file for bankruptcy just a few years earlier. But the properties, he hoped, could be a solution to all of our family’s financial problems.

  It was a good deal, insisted the agent, who had a friend at the bank who could set my father up with a mortgage. Coincidentally, the agent also knew the owners of the property and could make sure the current tenants stayed.

  My father—who often now says that nothing in the world is free—could not believe his good luck.

  He thought that owning an apartment building in a city—any city—seemed straightforward and was smart business. Real estate ownership was a perk of living in a capitalist country; he wanted to take part. As he’d seen with his mother in Hong Kong, rental income could float the family in hard times. He’d heard get-rich anecdotes about old acquaintances taking risks on businesses that had proven successful. When I was a child, my father often mentioned a former colleague who, in the 1970s or 1980s, asked him to invest in a sandwich company he was helping start in Connecticut. Would my father want to open a franchise? No, my father had said. He couldn’t spare the money. And besides, Sandwiches? Why would there need to be a fast-food chain for deli sandwiches? At this point in the story, often triggered because we had driven by one of the restaurants, the yellow and green logo a taunt, my father would laugh and shake his head. Bo-o-ooy. It was really something.

  After conversations with the real estate agent and the loan officer, my father shuffled our family’s finances and his own savings to accommodate the hefty down payment. He sold his share of a small storefront in Hong Kong that my grandmother had left to him and his brother when she’d passed. My father drained his savings, which he’d promised my mother he would use for our education. It would all be OK, he reassured her. They were fortunate that they had these resources; not many people were this lucky. He’d recoup everything.

  My father, however, did not understand real estate or Hartford. He’d heard the real estate agent refer to the area as an old Italian neighborhood, and perhaps there was something inherent in this description—the perceived charm, the whiteness—that the agent thought might add to the allure. But this coded subtext was likely lost on my father, who often becomes oblivious to everything else in conversations when terms like money are involved.

  The agent’s depiction of the neighborhood was only partially true. Though Franklin Avenue had once been an Italian enclave starting in the early 1900s, the street’s demographics had already started to shift by the time my father toured those buildings. This might have contributed to the agent’s eagerness to sell the parcel of buildings to my father, this immigrant from Hong Kong with questionable credit, whom the agent—a white man with his network of white mortgage lenders and white sellers—could not place in his own racial order. Or, perhaps, my father—so clearly not from here—and therefore clueless about the buildings, the businesses, and the history he’d be inheriting, seemed like an easy mark.

  The census data of the blocks where my father’s properties sit tell a familiar story of white flight. The neighborhood, up until the 1980s, was nearly all white, until it became increasingly Latino, many of its residents Puerto Rican. And a couple of decades before that, when laws that prevented Black residents from securing mortgages were lifted and Black people began to move into Hartford, their white neighbors headed for the suburbs and sold their homes in the city for less than what they were worth, undermining property values. This exodus hurt Hartford’s economic health for years to come and racially segregated the city even further.

  Hartford was once considered the wealthiest American city. Following the Civil War, and starting in the nineteenth century, it was known as the “insurance capital of the world” because—as my mother’s work would attest—there were so many companies headquartered there. That was another era, though. The city had not seen that type of affluence in decades.

  In drives along I-91 through Hartford, my family passed the old Colt Armory, which had been vacant since 1994. Its iconic blue onion-shaped dome and enormous brick complex—rebuilt by Elizabeth Colt after it burned in 1864 in a rumored arson by Confederate sympathizers—sat next to the highway. The building’s emptiness was eerie and apparent from our car. Near the armory was a billboard my family always read out loud when we drove past: HARTFORD: NEW ENGLAND’S RISING STAR. In high school, I found that slogan peculiar, if not desperate. It was an unsubtle attempt to hoist Hartford into an economic center—to attract large businesses and their potential employees. It was a billboard sponsored by the Hartford Image Project, a marketing group that created the slogan. The group also funded developmental projects, which resulted in the demolition of some public housing units in the process. The slogan seemed both condescending and a side step of the issues that made Hartford’s poverty and its disparities across race prevalent. In a way, it reminded me of the showiness of my parents’ own markers of class—my mother’s slow payment of the baby grand piano and her purchase of a Land Rover in order to compete with her brother’s new Lexus—despite the reality of their finances.

  * * *

  One of my earliest memories of summer mornings as a kid followed this pattern: Steph and Caroline were at their summer jobs and my mother was at Aetna. My father had stopped taking new office jobs—or perhaps they had stopped taking him—and his button-up shirts collected dust in his closet. He would manage the properties full-time, he insisted to my mother, since his alternatives for making money were dwindling. I woke late to the sound of him downstairs on the phone. I heard half of the conversation.

  When are you going to give me my money? he said.

 
You need to give me my money.

  You owe me so many months rent.

  A pause.

  This IS my normal speaking voice.

  I’m not shouting, he shouted.

  Other mornings, I listened to my father talking into a pocket translator that he bought from Ocean State Job Lot. He was always trying to speak Spanish to his tenants, some of whom were from Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic. He thought he was being clever, or polite, like he would have been tickled if someone tried to speak to him in Taishanese.

  Hola. ¿Cómo estás? ¿Tienes dinero? he said.

  He typed something into the machine.

  Dinero, the little machine said in its robotic voice.

  Dinero, he would say slowly, stretching each syllable. Din-AIR-oh. Hola. ¿Tienes dinero?

  Why not sell? my mother frequently asked my father, anxious because these buildings were only earning our family more debt. Why not? You’re not making any money from these properties. They’re more trouble than they’re worth.

  My father often pointed out two tenants who mostly paid their rent on time—a man who ran the bodega, and a woman who operated the massage parlor. They asked him for very little, he said. This was miraculous to me, since it seemed there were constant roof leaks or ruptured pipes, which my father insisted on fixing himself because he said he could not afford to hire professionals. This just compounded the problems. My father kept these properties to similar standards he had for his own house. This left much to be desired and surely outraged his tenants, and the city would later take issue with this when they condemned one of his buildings. The remaining apartment units that my father rented out slowly emptied and, for the most part, remained that way. The bodega owner would stay for decades, only leaving when he bought his own storefront down the block.

  Good for them that they were doing well enough to get their own spot, I say on the phone when my father tells me.

  Mm, he says. I’m uncertain if his tone is one of approval, or if he’s upset about his lost rent.

  * * *

  When somebody rents something from you, my father says, you cannot control them, so he does not ask questions. He insists he does not care who rents his properties—where they come from, what they do, who they are—as long as they can pay. He has the impossibly hefty mortgage and the bankruptcy on his shoulders, and so he takes what he can get.

  One evening when I was in middle school, I was on the phone with a friend while the local news was playing on TV.

  A reporter was talking about a spa and health club that the FBI, the IRS, and local police had busted in Hartford. It had acted as a front for a brothel for decades, the reporter said, and had made millions of dollars in profit. The reporter stood in front of a building that looked familiar, with its boxy shape and twin panels of windows surrounded by tan stucco. And then I saw the sign—with our home phone number—hanging by one of the windows. FOR RENT 860-XXX-XXXX.

  That’s the building my dad rents out to people, I told my friend. It’s on the news! I dug my fingers into the carpet and tugged at the fibers.

  At this moment, the confounding calls to my house suddenly made sense. The home phone would trill, and I would answer, standing in the kitchen along the red Formica counter with a ballpoint pen in hand, ready to record a message for my parents.

  Chow family, I answered, as instructed by my sisters. May I ask who’s calling please?

  You got girls? A man asked.

  Huh? I said.

  Girls? You got girls?

  I think you have the wrong number.

  These calls didn’t come often enough to make me wonder too much, but still so frequently that I registered them.

  Weird. I returned to the kitchen table where Steph and Caroline were bent over their textbooks.

  When I was in high school, I asked my father about these properties. He needed my help hauling trash from one of the vacant buildings.

  Did you know about it? I asked.

  What, he said.

  You know, I said. The spa.

  Hey, he said. His voice picked up volume. They tell me, it’s a spa. Why should I think it’s not?

  I didn’t reply.

  Besides, he said, narrowing his words into a point. It’s none of my business to ask.

  Eventually, when I am in my late twenties, I visit my father’s house to sift through papers on my mother’s desk, looking for anything that might help me understand her better. I am perplexed to find a sun-faded section of the Hartford Courant sitting on top of old bills. Brothel Customers May Face Charges, March 31, 2004. Had my father left this here for me after one of our conversations on the subject? Had this newspaper been one of the last things my mother had reviewed at her desk?

  “There could be a lot of nervous johns out there,” the article begins, “now that law enforcement officials say that hundreds of former customers at a closed Hartford brothel could face charges as part of an investigation into one of the most lucrative prostitution operations ever seen in the city.”

  You must have followed the news of this sting closely, though I cannot imagine your reaction. Shock? Anger? Anger feels right. I wonder if that’s what made you demand that you and your husband fill out bankruptcy paperwork again, finally formally evicting the women who ran the spa and brothel, who owed tens of thousands in back rent. This all surfaced in the last six months before your death. That this was the background to your sickness made me hurt for you and Daddy both.

  * * *

  My father uses an argument about depreciation to defend his attachment to objects. In his view, he cannot put these buildings in Hartford on the market because they are valued at less than half of what he originally paid. He still refuses to sell our family’s old cars that either no longer work or are beyond repair—a Chrysler New Yorker, his totaled Miata, my mother’s old Land Rover, and the minivan—because he thinks each will only get a few hundred dollars.

  My father let our cars rust in our driveway for decades until a new family moved in next door after I left for college. They complained that the cars were parked too close to their yard. Was he still driving them? they might have inquired, passive-aggressively. They planted hedges to block his house from their view. Their message was clear: my father’s presence was driving down their property values. Their requests must have finally shamed my father into moving the Chrysler to the empty garage in Hartford, and their row of shrubs grew nearly two stories high. Each time I see them when I visit my father, I flush with embarrassment.

  If my father felt cheated by the real estate agent, he never said so. He just tells me now: Yeah, probably he was no good, probably he worked with the guy at the bank to get me a mortgage because he knew he’d get a commission. And probably he worked with the owners of the building too to set a high price.

  He also says: I never would have been able to get a mortgage without that guy.

  I can’t tell from this if my father is grateful or bitter; if he feels scammed or like a scammer. His buildings in Hartford—save for another auto repair shop and a small church that has moved into the massage parlor’s former space—sit vacant. But then he says, as if to shake himself out of regret, That’s life though. What can you do?

  So many other people couldn’t have gotten a loan, I say to him years later when we are talking about these buildings yet again, and I am echoing my mother’s sentiments and suggesting that he sell them. Our conversation moves in circles. None of the people who have rented from you would have gotten those loans from that guy. This was by design.

  We are talking about the difference between his story, an immigrant from China by way of Hong Kong, and the stories of some of his tenants, immigrants from the Dominican Republic or refugees from Liberia. We are talking about racism, or at least I am, though I can never be sure with my father.

  Well, he says in the tone he uses to cut our conversations short, it’s a fact of life.

  I’m not sure if it means that he disagrees with what I’ve said, or if may
be he is bothered by it.

  Other facts of life:

  In 1974, at the urging of local activists, federal attorneys sued some real estate firms in Hartford, West Hartford, and Wethersfield, alleging that the firms had “steered” white people away from properties in racially diverse neighborhoods in Hartford and encouraged buyers who were Black or Puerto Rican. The firms denied any wrongdoing, but formally agreed to comply with the Fair Housing Act.

  According to Census data from 2000, in Connecticut, 48.1 percent of people who identified as Asian owned their homes, compared to 72.5 percent of white people, 36.5 percent of Black people and 28.1 percent of Hispanic people.

  In 2017, a report on the Greater Hartford area found that of the people surveyed who received high-cost mortgages, 3 percent were white, compared to 10 percent who were Latino, or 12 percent who were Black.

  * * *

  In my father’s eyes, he was trying to help our family survive. He had always considered himself pragmatic. He told me constantly when I was a teenager that it didn’t matter how I solved problems in physics—I could use calculus equations or I could brute-force the answer with my confounding boxes and diagrams—because the destination was most important, not the process. It all ends up the same. But what if, I often asked, it didn’t start the same? Life is not an equation. Is it any wonder that his version of survival seems so lonesome? I keep wanting to pose this last question to my father, but I don’t know how.

  21.