Seeing Ghosts

by Kat Chow

I struggle to recall tender moments between my parents. I ask my sisters what they remember, and one of the first things they mention is a game we played each time we came home from Marshalls or Bob’s, where our mother took us school shopping for the year.

  Guess how much it cost, our mother asked our father. She held up a shirt that she bought for him from the boy’s section of Marshalls. It was a polo, with the actual Polo logo.

  Guess how much, I echoed. I glanced from my father’s face to the shirt. Sometimes my mother instructed my sisters and me to hide what we had bought. My parents’ finances were such that everything my mother made was the family’s and, also, his. But everything my father made was his.

  The shirt was on sale. Purchased for something like $8.99, original price $30.

  One dollar? my father said.

  No. My mother frowned. It’s a nice shirt.

  Three dollars? he said.

  No.

  Four?

  No. Irritation slipped into her voice.

  Five? He always low-balled the answers, entertained by this game. He thought my mother could have gotten a better deal if she’d looked harder. Tried harder.

  No.

  Six?

  $8.99, she snapped.

  Wah, he said. So much.

  I can still recall his laughter here, derisive, acidic.

  22.

  After the last customers were served, the staff crowded in the kitchen for family meal.

  I had just started working at Green Tea/Green Olive Bistro, a restaurant not far from my house. The owners, Cindy and Denny, were my parents’ age. They’d immigrated to the U.S. by way of Hong Kong and Vietnam, and for the past couple of decades, they ran another restaurant that was also called Green Tea in a neighboring suburb. For their new venture, they rented space in an old Uno Pizzeria, the same one my mother had pointed out whenever we drove home from the grocery store. According to her, that location was tough for any restaurant, including a national chain like Uno, since it was tucked in a sleepy strip mall plaza and not visible from the turnpike. That was one of the problems with Lotus Garden, my mother was certain: its relatively isolated location compounded by other issues. My mother’s comment lingered each time I walked into Green Tea/Green Olive for my shifts as a hostess.

  But Cindy and Denny were optimistic. They wanted to make the most of the pizza ovens, so they hired a chef who had defected from a popular spot in New Haven that was known for its clam pies. They used the word fusion to describe the concept, and I could tell they were eager to try something new. Maybe, they hoped, the idea could catch and give them the success their first restaurant had not found.

  When I saw the menu, though, I understood that it was a restaurant with two separate kitchens, little merging together. On one side, there was a kitchen where chefs turned out plates of General Tso’s and orange chicken—American Chinese takeout food, as my father called it. On the other side were the pizzas, which customers hesitated to order, remarking to me how novel this was while I smiled blandly and poured them water. (These same customers, not surprisingly, were also the type to compliment me on my English.)

  I spent my shifts tethered to the hostess stand, snacking on broken fortune cookies and counting how many people I’d seated, the numbers for the evenings rarely reaching more than forty or fifty guests. I knew this was not optimal and that Green Tea risked a future like Lotus Garden, which now only existed as boxed-up dishware and dusted paper menus in my family’s basement.

  Over the months that I’d worked at the restaurant, I’d developed a protectiveness for it. It was kitschy and so earnest in its pursuit of what Cindy and Denny thought diners might want, though ultimately, in the eyes of its customers, it was overpriced pizza and Chinese takeout. But I found comfort within its walls, in the ways Cindy and Denny were determined to ensure its survival by incorporating elements they hoped would create a sophisticated or exciting ambiance: the jazz band that played each weekend evening; the flaming scorpion bowls that the bartender, a young woman from Hong Kong studying epidemiology at a local university, whisked throughout the dining room.5

  I often tried to coax my father to the restaurant toward the ends of my shifts.

  Just come, I invited him. Get something small, I’ll pay for it. Just sit and listen to the music.

  He visited once and sat in a booth by the bar. He studied the entire menu and remarked how expensive each of the dishes was, and asked what the staff would eat for family meal later.

  He had an exuberant, uncomfortable energy about him. There was a wistfulness that I would see amplified when I took him to Cindy and Denny’s original Green Tea a half hour away, which served dim sum and had a modest clientele that spoke Cantonese.

  At this original Green Tea, I watched my father take in the space. He sat, his mouth slightly ajar, and surveilled the waitstaff as they carried metal trays of har gau and siu mai to tables. He craned his neck to get a better look at the chicken feet, not uncommon in Cantonese restaurants. But Cantonese restaurants were not common in suburban Connecticut, which made this all the more impressive. I understood then that my father was seeing the version of Lotus Garden that never surfaced. This moment unearthed the parallels between us. I was drawn to Green Tea for the ways it reminded me of my parents’ restaurant, and how it might provide answers to some of my unspoken questions. My father had done the same when he’d opened Lotus Garden, curious to understand the father he’d never met, hoping that my grandfather’s successes would transfer to him. I am not sure what answers, if any, my father gained. If Lotus Garden had allowed him a closure or a closeness to his father, or if it only emphasized their distance. It is always strange when a child realizes that they are attempting to recreate their parents’ path with their own; something uncanny within these movements, embedded within it a contradictory worry of recreation and a hope of carrying out a wish that had not been fulfilled.

  But Green Tea/Green Olive would not last. This seemed clear to me long before it became true.

  * * *

  A memory from when I was five:

  It was a summer evening that was thick with humidity and mosquitoes. My father broke stalks of sugar cane into small pieces with a cleaver. He drew the blade back and slammed it into the cutting board until cane splintered. I winced each time. He handed me a small piece while he popped another into his mouth.

  Ho sik, he said.

  Ho sik, I agreed.

  This is like candy. This is where sugar comes from. Make sure you chew out all the juices. He demonstrated, his teeth macerating the fiber. They grow a lot of sugar cane in Cuba.

  I was young, but not too young to know that this was where my grandfather had lived. At the time, I did not understand how grief could be consumed, how food was one way to process a memory, or the absence of one. My father could not speak of what questions the cane made him ask about his own life. All I could taste was sweet juice, which I sucked from the woody pulp until it was dry.

  Mimicking my father, I whacked the trash can open. I spit out the cane.

  * * *

  During family meal, I filled my plate with leftovers from service, along with blistered green beans with soy sauce and black bean paste; chicken, sliced and sautéed with carrots and other leftover vegetables; a tender beef stewed with daikon that was soft like a pat of butter; a soup with a thin broth and briny, boiled knots of seaweed. In Cantonese, I answered the chefs’ questions about my family and where they were born, laughing when they teased me about my lack of fluency and promising that I’d work on my pronunciation.

  Our dishes in hand, we fanned along empty tables. The band that Cindy and Denny hired was finishing their set, the last few customers readying to leave. We ate in companionable silence. When everybody came together at the end of the night like this, it felt familiar, something joyous and relieved in how we bent over our plates. It was amazing how we could create our own space this quickly, even if temporary.

  * * *

  Whenever I take my fat
her for dim sum or to a Cantonese restaurant, I let him pick what we’ll eat. He enthusiastically reads the menu out loud. I always expect him to order in Cantonese or Taishanese. When he does not, when he instead asks for another napkin or a pot of chrysanthemum tea in English, I am perplexed. Maybe he is self-conscious about his fluency these days. Maybe he worries he doesn’t know the right slang. His Chinese finally emerges when the waitress asks what dialects he speaks. A familiar conversation in Cantonese unfolds.

  My father sits up straighter, enthusiastic and eager to have a rare audience when the waitress poses these questions to him:

  Where were you born?

  What is your last name? How do you write the character for Chow?

  When did you come to the United States?

  Oh, your daughter lives in [Seattle or Boston or New York or D.C.]?

  Oh, there’s no good dim sum where you live? Where is that, again? Connecticut?

  Yes, such a shame. You should visit your daughter more. She’ll treat you.

  Ha ha ha. You’re right. A daughter should always take care of her father, ha ha ha.

  * * *

  After the staff meal, Cindy gathered leftovers into quart containers.

  For your daddy. She pushed a bag into my arms, insistent. When I first started at Green Tea, Cindy had asked about my parents, and after I mentioned that my mother had died, she made sure I left my shifts with plenty of food. This small act was so comforting in its matter-of-factness; though it made me long for my mother—to be mothered—it did not highlight her absence, which was a relief.

  When I returned home, my father and I fell into a routine we had only recently established—as though working at this restaurant had provided us an armistice. He’d rise from his seat in the family room, where he’d spent my whole shift watching a documentary about space travel or a war or whatever the local PBS station aired. While I took off my shoes, he pulled the containers from the bag and appraised each one.

  At the kitchen table, I watched my father spoon soup into a bowl. He chewed on a tangle of seaweed while he lifted open the container with the braised beef. Steam fogged his glasses and the gentle scent of star anise floated across the table.

  They gave you a lot of meat. Approval lined his voice.

  I arranged the rest of the food in front of him. The school year would start again in just a few weeks. I hoped that in less than a year, I’d be far from this house.

  Under the dim kitchen light, watching my father slurp the soup, I understood I was witnessing a memory in progress—of the two of us, separately, recalling this moment, and of our future selves returning here to this scene.

  23.

  I drove through Wethersfield’s surrounding towns in your old van, slowly, cautiously, leaning into the newfound independence that a license afforded. I did not want to be in the house. The house was diseased, dark and sickly and sad.

  I was lucky that my father let me use the van, that he hadn’t gotten rid of our old cars, that he added me to his car insurance policy without much begging on my part. Driving meant I could be away from the house, which was good for us both. I had no curfew, or at least I ignored my curfew and any of its potential consequences, and I often stayed out late and slept at friend’s houses.

  I drove from my weekend shifts at Green Tea, and from my job at a high-end clothing store near the high school.

  I drove to the bagel shop where a friend worked, and the gelateria where another had a couple of shifts each week.

  I drove to therapy, my counselor agreeing to see me for free after she moved to private practice and did not accept our state insurance.

  I drove home from school after tennis, after band practice, after study sessions.

  Slowly, and often without a map, I navigated the highways and streets around our house. Intuition and years of watching you and Daddy in the driver’s seat led me. I flipped my blinkers on hundreds of feet before I turned. I looked over my shoulders multiple times, anxiously, before switching lanes. I wanted to yell out to the empty rows of seats behind me, Girls, all of you help me merge, OK? the way you had, as if invoking the child selves of my sisters and me—as you. You had always turned driving into a team sport, starting most trips by holding up a packet of Wrigley’s and asking if anyone wanted any gums. Your tendency to pluralize everything was contagious, as if you were delighting in the bounty around you. I want some gums, my sisters and I hollered back at you, a chorus.

  Before I unlocked the car, I did as you had frequently instructed me, Caroline, and Steph: I peered in the back seats and under the van to make sure no one was hiding there. You had heard stories of dangerous men lurking beneath women’s cars in grocery store parking lots. Somebody could be waiting to getchu, you told me, your usual playfulness gone. Yet when I checked those spots as a teenager, I was not only worried that I would find a threatening man—I was anxious that I would find you.

  Route 2 was one of the only freeways that didn’t scare you, Mommy. That you had sat in this same driver’s seat years earlier never escaped me. This muscle memory that guided me—it was not just mine—was our version of autopilot.

  * * *

  A year before, when I was fifteen, I wrote in my journal: “My father once told me, ‘Success makes a person survive.’” He repeated this frequently when we argued about college—where he thought I should apply (all the Ivy League schools), where he thought would actually admit me (definitely not any of the Ivies, possibly not our state schools, despite my honors classes and decent grades).

  I was never sure how to respond when he leaned on this phrase. When you died, we had clutched at whatever it was that might translate to survival. My father thought accolades or money would do the trick. At the time, this confounded me; it did not seem we had either. I understand now that is all relative. We had what my father had always hoped for when first moving to America: a house with a mortgage, a seemingly assured way to go to college, enough food. This ascent up the so-called societal ladder, made possible because American law had so conveniently decided he was the right type of immigrant, was enough for him.6 My father wrote on my financial aid forms that he spent $500 on food a year, and to him, this was due to frugality and not a sign of poverty; our dependence on the state’s Medicaid program for healthcare was a product of circumstance, not class. This was his rationale, which he passed on to me, which would take me years to question.

  On my way home from hanging with friends or school, I drove the same route you took from the barn, my left foot bare and tucked under my right leg and my shoes kicked under my seat. After midnight, Route 2 to Wethersfield was dependably empty. I let its stillness comfort me. The Glastonbury woods and the Connecticut River snaked black underneath the pavement and the concrete bridges. On summers, I rolled down the windows and crooned along to whatever CD that Kiah or another friend, Meg, had burned me. In many of these moments, I felt calm and contemplative, and the loneliness that often registered instead felt right. I would miss these moments later in life; how freeing it felt to be by myself, with so much in my future feeling like a possibility.

  Success makes a person survive. But considering the two of you and where we had wound up, I wasn’t sure I could agree. And besides, why stop at survival? I wish I could ask you. Why not want something more, like joy? But maybe this is what you thought you couldn’t have; maybe this is what you wanted your daughters to have as our legacy.

  24.

  The thought of leaving home did not come without guilt. I knew that once I moved away, it would just be my father and the balloons. Steph and Caroline had brought some home years earlier for his birthday, and afterward, he and I had let those balloons bob in the corner of the family room. They eventually gravitated toward the fireplace on the back wall. Simple physics probably explained why the balloons began to list: air from the chimney had created a vacuum, maybe. But I was never good at physics, and had to read my textbook many times over to understand the most basic problems. Instead, I preferred to imagi
ne there was some spirit clenching the strings in her fists. Slowly tugging them closer. You, with your face locked in concentration.

  I shouldn’t have to do this, you seemed to say. Why am I the one doing this? Your shoulders slouched in defeat.

  As the balloons shriveled, they came to their own resting spots at the base of the fireplace, folded gently over the tin box of Jonathan’s ashes to make a shiny, crinkled blanket. As if you had wanted the remnants of our birthday celebrations to keep your dead son warm. As if you understood we had forgotten, or were close to forgetting, what you had asked. But a lethargy had settled into our remaining family, and the wilted balloon only obscured Jonathan from our sights. Together, they would linger as my father’s companions.

  25.

  A few months after I graduated from high school, my father and I stood in front of Old Faithful with dozens of other tourists. We leaned against a fence and waited for the geyser to erupt. Old Faithful, true to its name, is a “highly predictable” geyser. It erupts twenty times a day, 60 to 110 minutes between its blasts of scalding water that soar 184 feet.

  I thought it was a little cheesy how we waited an hour for this thing that would only briefly appear. Like we were at a zoo, anticipating the emergence of a great animal in an enclosure, only to see it immediately turn and scuttle back to its hiding spot.