Seeing Ghosts

by Kat Chow

  It was the winter break of my freshman year. I was here because my father suggested my sisters and I join him as he resolved a dispute with the properties that remained in his name. Something about needing to be there in person to sign paperwork. Something about not trusting distant relatives.

  Do you gals want to come with me to Hong Kong and China? I shall take a trip around the end of the year. Maybe we can go over the winter holiday, he had emailed us. Us gals would. It was my first time in China, and my family’s first trip together since my mother passed. Caroline slipped into her usual role of running logistics, and for months, she forwarded us flight deals and we debated which prices seemed reasonable.

  We ambled from sight to sight, taking in the Temple of the Six Banyan Trees and wandering the next day through the city’s Central Park. We examined the fruit vendors’ stands and bought paper bags of apple custard and salak. My sisters and I downed Pocari Sweat, bottled milk tea, and canned drinks with grass jelly. I hummed with a delight that teetered on anxiety, all of this feeling familiar yet, in its entirety, nothing like I had experienced before. This felt nostalgic, though it was perhaps not my own nostalgia. All children live in their parents’ realities or the realities of those who raise them, but to be the children of immigrants is, in a sense, varying degrees of living in our parents’ remaking of the country in which they were born. How adept were my parents at rebuilding that world, and how much had they attempted in the first place? I was only beginning to figure this out.

  Do you know where we are now? Caroline asked my father. I watched his eyes dart along the street.

  It looks so different. His mouth twisted in the same expression of focus and discomfort that he wore when he was scrunched beneath a car trying to diagnose a problem.

  For many years, I mistakenly thought this trip was the first time he’d been back to Hong Kong and China since he’d originally left. But I learned later that in 1974, when he finished graduate school, he returned to cremate his mother’s remains. Since much of their family had left Hong Kong and settled in Toronto, my father resolved to have her reburied there. She would still be physically separated from her husband, whose remains were assumed to be in Havana, though nobody knew for sure. At least in Toronto, she would be at rest in a cemetery where much of her family could pay their respects.

  * * *

  At the hotel, my father requested the least expensive room. Upon arrival, we discovered that meant two twin beds, and he promptly stretched out on one and fell into a jet-lagged sleep that was punctuated with his jagged snores.

  Well, I said, this’ll be interesting. Caroline and I pressed ourselves into the other bed. I tucked in my legs and she let me curl against her like a cat—unusual, since she was always shrugging me off whenever I tried to spoon her. Steph folded herself on top of two chairs. We slept this way, fitfully, until our father woke in the early morning hours.

  For the next week, my sisters and I carried out our lives in Guangzhou. We ran errands that we didn’t have time for back in the States. We shopped for boots and jackets and helped Steph, who had recently gotten engaged, purchase a wedding dress. We met up with our father for dinner with his old friends or relatives. As our father made small talk with his guests, my sisters and I focused on the plates in front of us. We sucked the juice from clams steamed with fermented black beans and we stacked the empty shells on our plates. We passed a dish of silky, steamed eggs between us, and took turns refilling everyone’s cups of tea. When our father gestured at us, reaching for something to say, and finally settling on what we studied or where we worked, we let polite smiles fill our faces.

  * * *

  At a café after lunch, my father and I sat at a table across from one another. My sisters had left to look for a coat for Caroline at a shop next door, and my father wanted to polish off the remaining noodles. We had not talked much in the past few months. I idly tore bits of a napkin and shuffled the scraps into a pile between us. The more time we spent here in Guangzhou, the more unsettled I became. Maybe it was witnessing my father unmoored. Or maybe it was realizing that I would not be able to observe my mother in this space, and that I would not see how she fit into this country.

  Do you miss Mommy? I said suddenly.

  Well, my father said. Life…If he was taken aback by my abruptness, it did not show.

  But don’t you miss her?

  There’s no point in wasting time being sad. Everybody dies.

  He noticed my brows pressing together and he leaned back in his seat.

  Ai, Gah Lee. Everybody dies.

  I know.

  If you’re forty or seventy or a hundred, everybody dies. It’s a fact of life.

  But it’s Mommy, I said. Doesn’t it make you sad being alone all the time? I thought about him and his new routine: Wake up; microwave oatmeal and sprinkle sesame seeds and peanuts on top; spend the morning on the stationary bike; eat lunch while watching the actors from The Young and the Restless grow old; tinker with the plumbing at one of his properties; watch more financial news on his laptop; eat leftovers for dinner; sleep.

  There’s no use crying over spilt milk, he said.

  Spilt milk! Spilt milk, I said.

  Hey. Hey. I don’t run from my problems. I face them head-on.

  What does that mean?

  It felt like a barb.

  * * *

  This was where your father grew up, my father’s distant cousin told us as we pulled into a small village. He had driven the two hours to Hoiping and he had laid on the horn every time we passed another vehicle, someone walking on the street, an animal on the side of the road.

  Hoiping appeared on this cloudy day in beige and monochrome.

  We stopped in front of a boxy, sand-colored house that had sat unoccupied for decades.

  This is it, his cousin said. Does this look familiar?

  Our father shook his head and stepped into the house as if reeled in, his past a fishing line; deceptive and once hooked, an inevitable and precarious path. He ran his hands along the concrete walls, everything shrouded in a thick coat of dust. The first floor was mostly empty except for a couple of chairs and busted knickknacks. He bent to pick a teacup off the floor. Gingerly, he held it with both hands. After appraising it, he wrapped it in a tissue he had in his coat and tucked it into a pocket.

  Our father’s cousin scaled a ladder at the back of the room. He hoisted open a hatch on the ceiling and suddenly, we were steeped in a pearled light that was filtered gray by the clouds. My father followed. Caroline, Steph, and I filed behind. We were no longer mumbling jokes, no longer exchanging looks when our father did or said something outlandish or asked the waiter or his cousin how much things cost or how much they made, no longer whispering leeeeeng luuuuui to mimic our relative each time he greeted any woman.

  The roof was made of large tiles separated by concrete columns. Not far from us, buildings the color of cream hovered behind newly greened tree branches. Slivers of the canal appeared below.

  My father and his cousin climbed higher onto the roof so they could see more of the village. They shifted their weight to accommodate the incline and pointed at structures in the distance.

  Years later, when I am reaching for memories of this visit to my father’s village, I sift through old albums online. Caroline has suggested I look there. Remember, she says, you kept wanting to post photos and text your friends from college and high school? You had FOMO about not being with them even though we were on vacation. In one of the photos, my sisters and I flank our father on this roof. Our expressions are abbreviated, our lips stiff and manufactured creases on our faces. All of us have fresh hair from a salon visit from earlier that week, mine newly permed, Caroline’s and our father’s trimmed, Steph’s straightened.

  We had been so interested in seeing the view from above that we had rushed through the inside of my father’s first home. I wish that I had taken photos of him inside there, submerged in his bank of memories, and that I had asked him to point out
, if he remembered, where he slept. Were there still remnants of the bed he shared with his mother and grandmother? Was there anything he recognized? At the time, all of these questions felt intrusive, but I regret not finding a way to discover the answers. When I ask him these questions now, so distant from this place, he cannot recall. But what is the point of recognition, if it’s absent of memory or meaning? Doesn’t it just become more that we hoard?

  * * *

  On our last evening in Guangzhou, the hotel’s concierge knocked on our door. She had our bill. She peered into the room at the twin beds and chairs. She smirked.

  Four people in here? All of you sleeping here? she said. Why not just get another room or a bed? So cheap.

  My sisters and I blushed.

  Caroline later told us that she’d thought about paying for an upgrade, but didn’t want to offend our father.

  I didn’t think it was my place, she said. I wish I had. Though we were all technically adults, we still fell into our family’s original order. I wondered when our father’s favorite mantra—I’m the father, you’re the daughter—would expire.

  Later, in the shower, trying to alleviate the flu symptoms I had the whole trip, I began to sob. I wasn’t sure what came over me. Steph and Caroline pushed their way into the bathroom.

  What’s wrong? they said.

  I don’t know, I said. I think something’s wrong with me.

  Is it your cold? Should we look for cold medicine?

  No. I dropped to a crouch, suddenly self-conscious that I was naked. Aren’t you two just sad, sometimes? I always feel so sad.

  I feel like I always miss Mommy, I said. That type of sad.

  Oh, Steph said, her glasses fogged.

  Sticky, Caroline said. She reached around me and turned off the water.

  Why don’t you get out of the shower, Steph suggested. Together, my sisters enveloped me in a towel.

  It perplexed me then how grief could still be there like that, injected into my body as if some preserving agent, indistinguishable from my insides. Diana Khoi Nguyen, the poet, wrote: “Some plants have nectaries / that keep secreting pollen even after the petals have gone.” I interpreted this originally to refer to the way our bodies become locked into grief. I finally decide that this image is one of determination.

  4.

  I dragged myself to the dining nook in my studio apartment and leaned against the table.

  It was the summer between sophomore and junior year of college, and for the past couple of months, I had fallen into a routine with my friend Lexie. I headed to my internship in the suburbs, where I worked for the third summer in a row with a cable company’s communications department as part of a scholarship program. Lexie huddled at her desk in the school paper’s newsroom, where she was an editor. After work, we sat in a coffee shop and tapped out freelance assignments. From there, we hung in my apartment watching Hallmark movies or old rom-coms until the early morning hours, passing between us a jug of Carlo Rossi that we’d bought months earlier to make sangria and had since become acrid. Most nights, before the movie ended, I crawled to the air mattress that I’d slept on for the past year and fell asleep. Lexie dozed on my couch, rousing in the early morning to walk the half block to her place.

  But that night, after Lexie left, I woke and was unable to fall back asleep. Still woozy and flushed from wine, I thumbed numbers into my phone. As if a compulsion, I dialed my mother’s old work line. 860-636-XXXX.

  I still remembered this number from all of my childhood afternoons. If I was home from school, bored and missing her, I’d call her at work under the guise of wanting to know what time she’d leave the office or what was for dinner. Never mind that she came home at six p.m. most nights and that dinner was whatever we had in the refrigerator, stir-fried a little, with rice, or a potato she diced and steamed in the microwave and covered with shredded cheese, salt, black pepper, and paprika.

  Each time I called, she answered: DBA Florence.

  DBA was her title; she was a database administrator. I loved hearing her say her own name—the delicateness of the syllables and how elegant it seemed coming from her mouth. Floor-rinse. Floor-rinse. FLOOOOOOR-rinse.

  Maybe when she lived in Hong Kong and attended one of those British schools, her instructors called her that. Or, when immigrating to the states, she thought it’d be easier to take on an English name. My theory is that she chose Florence because she’d admired Florence Nightingale. There might have been something about Nightingale being a famous nurse—a caretaker—who was also known for her contributions to mathematics and medicine, that appealed to my mother. Groundbreaking and could not be swayed by what women did or didn’t do in that era. Nobody in my family called my mother Florence, though. She was Mui Mui to her siblings; Mommy to Steph, Caroline, and me; and Ah Mo to our father. It took me until adulthood to ask after her first name in Cantonese, or to learn the Chinese characters: 余 寶梅. I already had the vocabulary to describe her, so why did I need more? Why would I bother looking outside myself for the words that she might have identified most as her own?

  I had Daddy teach me, years after your death, to pronounce your name.

  Bo Mui, your husband said.

  Bow Moy, I said. We repeated this for a couple of minutes, and the whole time I was sure I was saying it wrong. After all, I couldn’t get my own name right.

  Ngo giu Gah Lee, I’d say at family parties when I was a kid, prompted by Kau Fu because he was tickled by my pronunciation.

  You’re called ‘curry’? Kau Fu teased, laughing into my face and pinching my elbow while I spat out my name over and over, flustered, trying to will a sense of self into place. After my mother died, I tried to convince my father to speak to me only in Cantonese. But he often had to supply both sides of our dialogues, the expansiveness of these conversations unnatural and overwhelming. Soon, my vocabulary exhausted itself, his patience also depleted, and we slipped back into the hard sounds of English.

  In my apartment in Seattle, I listened to the thrum of the phone’s rings. It forwarded me to an answering machine of some employee, perhaps the one who had replaced my mother years ago. I hung up. I wondered if this person had heard of my mother, or if anyone on her team still thought about her. I was afraid of what thinking too much of her might bring. I guzzled another glass of wine before falling back into bed, the air mattress buckling under me and compressing my sides in a makeshift swaddle.

  I pictured calling you again. You’d pick up this time.

  DBA Chow Bo Mui, you’d say, forgoing your last name for our family’s.

  Hi, Mommy, I’d say, relieved and ecstatic that you had been here all this time. Had you aged in the afterlife? Would your hair still, in this imagined world, be wavy? Had it grayed, like Daddy’s?

  Wei, you’d say. Lei sik jor fan mei ah?

  The rest of our conversation played out in Cantonese. In this alternate universe, I was fluent and we discussed everything I’d eaten that day: popcorn chicken at the bubble tea spot I always studied at with my friend Colin; half a sandwich; three cups of coffee. I’d ask the same to you, and over the phone, you’d demur.

  Oh, just this and that, you’d say.

  I wasn’t sure if this meant that dead ghost-you didn’t eat, had no need for calories, or if nobody had recently left out offerings.

  Here, I could not conjure more of the conversation. Too much guilt. Too much worry. I pushed these thoughts aside and fell asleep.

  5.

  The next summer, I was visiting my father for a few weeks. I woke late to the sounds of him on the stationary bike downstairs. The pedals were connected to a fan that had a gentle, constant hum that blew air across the family room while he watched a morning talk show, our rear-projection television that he bought sometime in the early 1990s shouting the latest news and family-friendly gossip. I ate an apple and leaned on the counter, brushing a pile of grocery store flyers aside to make room for myself. In the afternoons, my father ran errands. He glided down the dri
veway in his Miata, which was dotted with black nail polish, his attempt to hide its many scratches. He was on his way to Hartford to clean up one of the vacant buildings, trash bags and a bucket of tools jammed into his car’s trunk. As soon as he left, I dampened a paper towel and cleared away the cobwebs that had grown thick and matted across his kitchen windowsill. I dumped out containers of spoiled leftovers and scrubbed the Tupperware, leaving them to dry in the dishwasher. I collected some of the detritus he had scattered on the floor in the hallways and kitchen—an old bookshelf, a smashed TV, a mirror, a chain saw, used car batteries—and I hauled them to a corner where I decided he’d be least likely to trip.

  One late morning, when my father and I had nothing else to do, we set to work making dumplings from scratch. We had never done this before.

  While my father sifted through his books for a recipe, suspicious of the one that I found online, he sent me down to the basement to retrieve a baking sheet so we could lay out all of our dumplings. Upon seeing my list of ingredients, he broke into his half laugh, half scowl. He gestured to the refrigerator at the groceries we already had. You can just substitute char siu for the pork and leeks. It can be like char siu bao.

  Sure, OK, I said, not wanting to argue. In the basement, I eyed pots and pans, barely used, resting on top of their boxes. A dozen empty plastic tofu containers sat on the floor next to expired spices.

  I was about to tug a tray from a shelf when I noticed something out of place across the room. A few feet from me, past cardboard boxes that were empty but still intact, lay a fish. It was real. It was dead. It was about a foot and a half long and resembled a striped bass, though it was hard to tell in its condition. The fish was positioned on a small table on top of two wooden planks that served as a makeshift stand. Its eyes were congealed, its scales peeling and fins flaky as though it had been deep fried or dipped in Elmer’s glue. Its mouth hung open, which gave it the appearance that it was mid-gasp. A couple of pliers and screwdrivers sat next to it.