Seeing Ghosts

by Kat Chow

  I watched my father watch the geyser opening.

  I watched other tourists watch the hole.

  He looked so much like a dad then, with an SLR camera strapped around his neck and his signature faded blue baseball cap and clip-on sunglasses flipped up above his glasses.

  Look, look, he exclaimed. The crowd around us cooed as water punched from the ground skyward, and I felt a brief awe watching it spit hot water and steam.

  For many years, geologists weren’t clear how, exactly, Old Faithful’s underground functioned. But in 2017, a team of scientists from the University of Utah used tiny sensors to measure the vibrations in the ground that the geyser created when it erupted. From that data, they discovered there was an enormous hidden reservoir full of hydrothermal fluid and more than 79 million gallons of water that fed Old Faithful. When I read this, I liked it immediately, this idea of a source of energy and power sitting latent until it was needed. The quick draw of power, the inevitable and consistent return. It felt hopeful.

  My father bared his teeth giddily, his gold and silver fillings glinting. And then, like all the other tourists, he brought his camera to his face.

  Here, I felt a pang. A longing for you. You would have wanted to see this, too. You would have watched your husband, then noticed me observing the both of you. Your eyes alight, you would blush, then try to deflect my attention by commenting on one of the other tourist families. How parents didn’t seem to notice their small children toddling to the edges of the boardwalk, how if it kept on, you would walk over there and point this out. Despite your critiques, you were a woman who understood delight, not immune to the wonders of this place.

  Wah, you would have exclaimed, thrilled at the sight of the geyser and surprised still after the wait, ho dai.

  My father had mentioned a few weeks earlier that he’d always wanted to see Old Faithful. Might be good to see, he’d said. Why not, since we’re there. All casual, like it didn’t matter to him, the most direct way he’d ever communicated his wants in years.

  So there we were at Yellowstone. We were in the middle of a cross-country trip from Connecticut to Seattle, where I’d soon start at the University of Washington. For the past week, we’d been on the Amtrak watching cornfields and mountains fly by. At one of the stops, we splurged on a rental car and took a short trip to Yellowstone.

  You can see the country this way, my father had said as he bought our rail passes. This was cheaper than flying, and we wouldn’t have to worry about paying for checked luggage. The idea was that after he dropped me in Seattle, he’d loop back across the country by himself. There was so much distance between where the train was taking us and our home, further from you. My relief grew.

  During lengthy stops, we climbed down to the platform to stretch our legs and take long inhales of fresh air. We barely spoke—not about what we were seeing; not about how I was moving across the country for school; not about how we were getting tired of train food and, worse, train bathrooms; not about how for the first time in twenty-seven years, he’d soon be living by himself. The latter was something he’d have to deal with on his own in a few weeks when he was home, creating a life in the negative space. For the time being, we stretched our legs across our own rows of seats and used our coats as pillows and slept restless nights, our hands clutching our valuables.

  * * *

  We stopped at a Chinese restaurant near Yellowstone for lunch. It had wood-paneled walls flecked with grease and a menu with all the usual American Chinese fare. We shared plates of moo goo gai pan and beef chow fun and ate them with bowls of rice. My father asked the waitress if they had spareribs, though they weren’t listed on the menu. A few minutes later, she set a small metal plate of glistening barbecued ribs in front of us—leftovers from the staff meal. We chewed on the ribs and spat the bones on napkins. We paused only to wipe the grease from our lips, grateful after days of eating microwaved pizza. At the time, I thought my father insisted on eating here because he was curious about how others had pulled off their Chinese restaurants, but in retrospect, I wonder if there was a comfort—and a safety—in somewhere familiar.

  When I see my father in places like this—national parks or other mostly white spaces—I feel a tinge of irony. Like our presence here is a tiny yet long-formed act of resistance.

  In 1870, the Washburn Expedition came across what is now known as Old Faithful. They admired this geyser, and eventually created Yellowstone National Park.

  In order to attract white visitors to Yellowstone, park officials falsely claimed that the indigenous people who first lived on that land—who were pushed out and forcibly removed—were afraid of the area because of its evil spirits. They would avoid the park, therefore making it safe for visitors. This supposed fear was untrue, as evidenced by the many archaeological sites throughout the land that link back to tribal nations that include the Crow, the Blackfeet, and the Shoshone-Bannock, among others. Instead, the myth only reflected the era. Yellowstone—and national parks in general—were founded in the late 1800s as havens for white Americans to flee the urbanization happening at home. Madison Grant, who led the national parks movement, was a white supremacist. His tome The Passing of the Great Race served as inspiration for both Adolf Hitler and restrictive U.S. immigration laws. Grant and his followers positioned the parks this way: White people could reconnect with the land; they could flee the new wave of immigrants, and the brown and Black people, too.

  I’m troubled by how our visit to parks can sometimes feel like small triumphs and how our entrance to this space is a conquest of its own. This land was never ours and it is not ours and it will never be ours. What is it about this country that makes it so that to hold something as our own is to have won?

  * * *

  A couple of afternoons later, the train pulled up to our last stop. In the aisle, I stretched each of my arms and cracked my knuckles. Seattle’s King Street Station. I dragged two suitcases and climbed down the stairs.

  We made it, I said to my father as I helped lower his suitcase to the platform.

  Mmm, he said.

  Mmm. I unintentionally mimicked him.

  We kept nodding at one another. I shifted on my feet, thrilled and animated with anticipation. Everything felt fresh here, a reprieve after the days on the train. We took in the brick clock tower in front of us, high-rise buildings shooting toward the sky, which was expansively, platonically cerulean. I helped him untwist the backpack straps that dug into his shoulders and I led us inside to where Caroline waited. This would be my home, now. We had finally arrived.

  In just a week, my father would cross the country once again. He would travel south and then east to the Grand Canyon. It was only when he’d arrived at home that he would call Caroline, Steph, and me. I took the call reclined in my dorm room on my bottom bunk, the outline of Mount Tahoma pinkened by the setting sun, a leaky, cracked egg.

  My father would recall on the phone: When he was halfway down the trail, the Arizona heat was dry and overwhelming. He felt light in the head. It had been relatively cool when he’d started his walk just an hour before. But suddenly, he was drenched with perspiration. He took a sip from his bottle, which was only half full of lukewarm water. For a few minutes, he closed his eyes.

  Are you OK? A hiker passing asked.

  My father nodded. He hauled himself to his feet.

  Aiya, I said on the phone. Why wouldn’t you bring more water? It was less a question and more a reprimand. I should’ve been relieved that he’d made it home, but instead, I was pressed with worry that he’d been reckless.

  Take care of yourself, I said. I wanted to shake him through the phone, to tell him that he needed to be more careful so that he could live forever.

  Part Three

  1.

  Mommy, I can see you now. You’re in a kayak on Portage Bay between Lake Union and Lake Washington. Boathouses bob in place near the shore, and the I-5 bridge stretches across the horizon, the morning traffic dragging with it a ribbon of
sound. This image comes from a photo of you on a family trip we took when I was a kid that I superimposed onto a scene of Seattle. I’ve only been in this new city, at college, for a few days. At sunrise, jet lag flung me out of my bottom bunk. I jogged to the water just a few blocks from my dorm.

  This is such a stereotypical Seattle situation, you in a kayak. You wear a life vest that is too large, and it puffs around your shoulders in a way that makes you look neckless. The vest isn’t even fastened, and I don’t think you know how to swim, so this concerns me.

  But you don’t care. You’re already dead.

  Your lips curve and the corner of your eyes crinkle with roguish pleasure. You dip your paddle and bat water at your brother. In this vision, he is somehow also here in his own kayak. You and Kau Fu laugh uproariously and yell tamer Cantonese profanities at one another, the water chilly as it speckles your clothes. You’re wearing that gray polo dress, though it does not bother you here. You tug at the fabric to show that it’s soft and flexible. It is difficult to watch you and your brother without absorbing your lightness.

  Seeing you here isn’t eerie. It’s hard, yes, in the way that my body braces for a crash that will deflate me. I had mistakenly assumed I’d left you behind, that the winding train route throughout the country would have derailed you.

  Everything about Seattle, and its mountains, and its trees, and its lakes, and the stretch of the Puget Sound, has gifted me a propulsiveness. As though, hungrily gulping down this air, I am brand new.

  * * *

  Is this what it means to say goodbye to your ghost?

  I believed that at seventeen, just by leaving home, I could begin to exorcise my grief.

  Sure, sure, sure. If I repeated that enough, it would become true.

  We tell ourselves lies all of the time.

  2.

  A pain shot through my stomach for the fifth day in a row while I texted my sisters mundane details about my week. I was only a couple of months into my freshman year of college. I can’t believe I willingly signed up for a natural science class with a quantum physicist, it is actually very hard, I didn’t think this would be real physics?? or I’ve been getting nightmares lately, which is weird, or Tried out a new Thai spot on The Ave for dinner, or Do you think my stomachaches are just stress cramps or something? I was heading into my dorm when a stretch of sirens sounded off in the distance and approached campus. I would later learn that a man named In Soo Chun had stopped along the oversized concrete and brick platforms in Red Square near the university president’s office. For a couple of years, Chun worked for the university as a custodian. Amid the throng of students meandering to their next class, he doused himself with gasoline. Then, he lit himself on fire.

  The school newspaper published a photo of Chun covered in flames. Seeing this image all these years later, I feel a similar revulsion and need to click away from the screen: A crowd of students surrounds a blazing mass, which upon first glance, is easy to mistake for anything besides Chun’s engulfed body. Students dump water on Chun and try to beat away the flames with their jackets. Everybody looks in motion, bodies leaning toward Chun.

  * * *

  Why did he do it? many asked afterward. The university’s narrative, which most seemed to accept, was that Chun was mentally unstable. A few people online wondered, though, if Chun’s self-immolation was a form of protest; they mentioned that Chun was Korean, implying there might be something “cultural” at play.

  I wasn’t satisfied with these theories, certainly not the latter. I did not know enough to draw any conclusion, but for weeks, I kept surfacing Chun’s story in all my conversations.

  Don’t you just keep thinking about that man, I found myself saying to new friends, the guy I was starting to date, people I met on campus or at parties.

  I don’t know, they said. They entertained me for a few minutes before they slid us toward safer topics, as though talk of death was contagious.

  A few years later, one of my friends will write about In Soo Chun for the school’s paper. Chun was in his sixties and worked for two and a half years as a custodian for the university. Chun had left behind a manifesto that revealed that he thought the university had a covert drug and prostitution ring and that there were Korean operatives who had infiltrated the custodial department. He was certain that he was being monitored. He also wrote that he had, since 1987, “seriously suffered with a thought disorder and a brain slash and a sudden black-out and memory loss.”

  I couldn’t articulate why his death stuck with me. His circumstances were different from my parents’, but something about him brought them to mind, and the way they seemed alone in their interior lives. There was the obvious connection—that they were all immigrants. But there was also the way in which their needs in life had slipped beyond notice; how Chun returned me to a defensive stance—so bothered by how easy it was to look past stories like his.

  * * *

  In a couple of years, during my winter break, my family would convene at Steph’s apartment in Rhode Island, where she was completing a medical residency. My sisters, father, and I sprawled, starfished, on Steph’s sectional, watching the movie A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.

  I need to watch it as part of my honors thesis, I had announced. I was writing about intergenerational grief, so clumsily searching for reflections of my own family. Is it OK if we all watch it?

  Wow, that’s something, my father had said. You want us to help you with class work?

  I hit play anyway. It was an adaptation of a short story by Yiyun Li. A man named Mr. Shi visits his adult daughter, Yilan, in America. Though he does not speak much English, he makes friends everywhere: with a woman on his flight, Jehovah’s Witnesses in his daughter’s apartment, an elderly woman in a park. Yilan has recently gone through a divorce, and ever since her mother died, she and her father have not spoken much. In her small apartment, the two of them are tense. They circle around one another, litigating and re-litigating their pasts. Yilan grew up believing her father had been unfaithful to her mother. Mr. Shi worried that his daughter, recently divorced, was lonely in America. Though Yilan’s mother does not appear in being, only mentioned in conversation, her absence blankets the film.

  After it ended, my family remained in our seats. We blinked slowly. My father took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  What did you think? I said to the room, cautious.

  Well, my father began. He shrugged and brought up a supporting character, an elderly Iranian woman, whom Mr. Shi had met in a park. The two of them, both immigrants, spoke in a mix of Farsi, Mandarin, and the occasional English. Seems to me that the father has a good, new friendship with the old lady.

  That was your takeaway? The on-screen friendship he mentioned had ended abruptly because the woman had been sent to live in a nursing home against her wishes.

  My father shrugged again and announced that he was tired and going to sleep. After he left the room, Steph turned to Caroline and me.

  I was so worried that this would make Daddy sad, she said. I thought this might make him think of Mommy.

  Yeah, Caroline and I agreed, our voices flat. If we saw ourselves in the film, we did not share. All those years later, we still did not know how to talk about our mother, her death, and what it had done, was doing, to our family.

  In one scene that I highlighted in my college paper, Yilan tries to explain the dissolution of her marriage and snaps at her father.

  “You don’t know what it’s like, Dad. If you grew up in a language in which you never learned to express your feelings,” she says. “It would be easier to learn to talk in a new language. It makes you a new person.” As a twenty-one-year-old, I took this exchange literally, writing that Yilan and her father’s problems arose from gaps in translation. I attributed this to the fact that Yilan had moved to the United States and her father had not. This oversimplification was so hopeful, as though language skills alone could remedy a father-daughter relationship. Now, watching the film again
all these years later, I am devastated instead by the familiarity of the distance between Yilan and her father—how despite their efforts, they continue to talk past one another, or not at all.

  * * *

  A week after Chun’s death, I woke in the middle of the night, sweaty and fevered. In a panic, I burst into the hall, freshly nightmared.

  I ran into a girl I’d chatted casually with a few times. She lived a few rooms down on what my friends and I deemed the quiet side of the floor, where everybody kept their doors closed so they could study. She unlocked the communal bathroom’s door.

  Can you tell me that I’m not dreaming? I floated into the bathroom after her. I just had a nightmare that I was possessed.

  I paced frantically by the showers. Can you please tell me that I’m awake?

  She led me to a bench by the sinks, still carrying her bathroom caddy.

  You’re awake, she said. Her voice soothed me. I fanned my T-shirt and took deep breaths. It was In Soo Chun’s death that had me so bothered, I was certain. I would not realize until a week later, after visiting the medical clinic on campus, that the stomach pains I had experienced for the past weeks were symptoms of a kidney infection.

  You’re OK. You’re OK, she repeated. You’re OK. It only occurs to me now that I had wanted somebody to tell me that for years. Your death warped me. I had not realized that all this time, I had taxidermized myself. My grief had entombed me in my emotions. It made me hyper-attuned to the ways we exchange our bodies for ash.

  3.

  Our first days there, my family and I roamed Guangzhou for hours. My father’s head was locked into a perpetual slant upward to study the storefronts, so vigorous and lost in his gawking that I worried he’d injure himself. He scanned each street hoping to recognize anything from years ago among the endless rows of clothing and electronic stores that were dotted with the occasional McDonald’s or KFC.