Seeing Ghosts

by Kat Chow

  Disoriented, my father did not recognize C.J., and tried to rush away.

  Mr. Chow, C.J. said. I’m here to bring you home.

  My sisters and I were not in driving distance of Connecticut, so C.J. retrieved my father. I hadn’t wanted to involve someone who wasn’t a part of our family—hadn’t wanted to take anyone else’s help, hadn’t mentioned to the friends I was with that this happened—but C.J. and I had been together for a couple of years, and he was living in New York City and could drive to Connecticut in just a couple of hours. It made sense.

  At first, my father fronted for C.J.

  They shouldn’t have bailed me out, my father said, referring to me and my sisters. They shouldn’t have wasted the money. (Later, he would call Caroline, outraged: You let me spend an entire weekend in jail? What were you doing?)

  He’d eaten a lot, he told C.J., his tone light. There were the double-decker bologna sandwiches, with so much meat and no cheese. All of that white bread. The chocolate milk. The juice.

  It was pretty good, my father said, impressed.

  They drove to the garage so my father could look for his hearing aid and glasses. When they arrived, a group of men were hanging out in the parking lot near the market.

  Are you going to let that skinny faggot fuck you in there, one of the men laughed.

  The cops going to come and lock you up again? another said.

  My father ignored them and retrieved his glasses. He dusted off his hearing aid.

  He and C.J. returned to the car in silence.

  Maybe, my father said to C.J., when they were a few blocks away, we can go to A-dong? It’s close by, and also, it’s Lunar New Year.

  I had forgotten in this frenzy that it was Lunar New Year. The weekend’s events were an especially inauspicious sign for what the next year would bring.

  At home, before they began to cook, C.J. documented my father’s injuries, taking photos of his broken glasses and close-ups of the bruises and scratches around his eyes and cheeks. I’m not sure if C.J. knew to do this because he had just started law school, or if because he is generally meticulous and observant. His mother once told me a story, which I think about often when I imagine him with my father: When C.J. was a small child, his grandfather, who had Alzheimer’s, visited them for a short while. His grandfather tried to peel a plastic banana, which was on the counter for decoration. C.J., who must have only been in elementary school, politely and quickly retrieved a real version of that fruit for his grandfather to eat. He had learned as a child how to quietly help in a way that disarmed shame.

  In the photo that sticks with me, my father stands in front of a white wall. He looks beyond the camera, his eyes cast down and puffed, his cheeks scored with thin scrapes. His hair is long and covers his ears, the side part he’s had for years still in place. He has not had a haircut in many months. This is the first time I’ve seen a photo of him without his glasses, and the absence of his wire frames makes him look gaunt and drained.

  Afterward, my father and C.J. cooked the New Year dinner. They stood in front of the kitchen table in their winter coats with the back door open. My father lit incense for his parents, my mother’s family, my mother, and Jonathan. He instructed C.J. to light his own sticks, and one by one, they bowed for each person.

  * * *

  For the next few weeks, and months, and years, my sisters and I take turns helping our father manage the fallout of the arrest. Caroline helps him correspond with lawyers; I ferry him to a court appointment to make sure he arrives on time; we all walk him through tangential situations that arise from this.

  A few years and thousands of dollars later, my father’s charges will be dropped and he will be put on probation. He begins to pay Caroline back for the bail bonds services, and the lawyer for the legal fees. Relatively speaking, he is lucky.

  My sisters and I take turns with varying degrees of patience (Steph and Caroline, more patience and steady tones; me, no patience with my voice almost always bridging into a yell, my arms gesturing wildly, unproductively) trying to convince my father to do the many things that we think are practical or better for everyone.

  For me, this includes selling his properties, since he clearly has trouble taking care of them; buying a reliable car that has four-wheel drive and brakes that don’t feel like stepping on a bike pump, soft and clumsy; donating at least one of the remaining cars that sits on his driveway; cleaning out his house; selling his house and moving somewhere closer to one of us (Steph).

  He waves me off each time.

  This is my life, he says, smiling at first.

  After a few minutes, if I keep asking questions, his face sours. He boxes his shoulders.

  This is my life, he says again. His voice rises.

  Yes, but, I say sometimes, when I think there is a point in trying to argue that his business is my business. This is your life. As if my emphasis on life will change anything. Years pass, filled with many versions of this conversation.

  11.

  On March 4, 1897, twenty-six-year-old Lon Dorsa was struck and killed by lightning in Nevada, Missouri, according to old newspaper reports. He left behind his wife, Neva, who, months after his funeral, had his body disinterred so it could rest in a custom tomb she’d ordered.

  The tomb was made from a Missouri granite. It is massive. Twelve feet long, five feet wide, five feet high, one article says, and weighing around eleven thousand pounds.

  But what is unusual about this stone is not its size. Dorsa requested a Bible be placed on top of where her husband’s head would rest. And with a key, she could unlock and slide the Bible aside to reveal a glass pane, through which she could peer into her husband’s face.

  Notable also is that she kept a photo of him by his body.

  “If the body should be stolen and another substituted, even a stranger could quickly detect the robbery,” a local newspaper reported in 1905, when Lon Dorsa’s grave had become a roadside attraction, “for all visitors, of whom there are hundreds yearly, compare the features of the dead man with those shown in the picture.”

  It is unclear to me what Neva Dorsa wanted: to preserve her dead husband, or to watch his decay. Her grief reminds me of kusōzu, an art form in Japan from centuries ago that depicted human corpses—most often women—in varying stages of decomposition. In the illustrations I’ve found, the body’s degradation is graphic—skin bloating, blood leaking, animals scavenging, skeletons appearing. It is quite stark and, for the unprepared viewer, disconcerting. But the form itself draws from beliefs in Japanese Buddhism and demands that people reflect on the temporal nature of life and the physical world. In a way, that could be similar to what Dorsa had hoped. Though that might be a generous read.

  * * *

  The Memorials:

  The pots of bamboo and ferns that you carefully tended to in the living room remain in their same spots. They are browned and yellowed and long dead. Cobwebs coat their stems. My father has his own plants on the kitchen windowsill that he’s grown over the past decade and a half: some type of lime-green vine that coils across three pots and sits atop a bed of dried-out leaves. They stand so tall that they threaten to block out all of the light.

  The holiday cards that relatives sent my father that he tapes on the family room door and leaves there for decades. Some of them are from when you were alive and are addressed to you.

  Your clothes that he’s left in your closet. The soiled dresses and underwear and pants still in the laundry basket. The sweaters layered with dust.

  The Memorial:

  In 2013, we installed a new tombstone over your grave. Caroline had been working for nearly a decade at that point. She’d saved up enough money to start the process all over.

  We want to get Mommy a gravestone and I can pay for it, Caroline told our father. Steph retrieved our old designs and worked with Yi Ma to find another monument company.

  OK, our father said. Sure, whatever you gals want. He shrugged and didn’t say anything more on this
topic, though when my sisters and I returned home to discuss the sketches, he hovered near us, curious.

  Your tombstone was the appropriate red that you remarked that you liked. India red, the color of brick. We showed restraint when we designed it this time. The English words were carved in a respectable serif font. We included at the bottom of the stone, barely visible, as if to keep this phrase close to your physical remains and between just us: We love you as high as the sky and as deep as the ocean. The marker had your name in Chinese, as well as Daddy’s; his was painted red to indicate that he had not yet passed. Jonathan’s name sat in the middle—Jonathan Love—with his dates of birth and death. We had not yet transferred his ashes to your grave, and they remained by our father’s fireplace. But none of us mentioned Jonathan as we gathered from our separate lives and stood before your new stone for the first time, brimming with self-congratulations, relieved that we’d done this for you.

  Was it that my family didn’t think we had to carry out your last request, or had we forgotten about it altogether? Our rationale is lost on me now, but I remember thinking that with the installation of your tombstone, we’d finally done all we could to appease your spirit. All our debts had been paid, as if that were possible.

  Part Four

  1.

  Daddy, you told me recently about a dream you had of your mother the night she died.

  This was nearly fifty years ago. You had just started graduate school. You say you don’t know if it was a dream, feeling, or vision.

  You felt a strange wave settle over your body. You kept repeating that word. Strange. So strange. Maybe a pang of familiarity. Strange.

  My mommy was there, you said. In English, you still refer to parents as someone’s “mommy” or “daddy,” leftover vocabulary from when my sisters and I were little. Your mommy was trying to tell you something.

  In retrospect, you think she was saying goodbye. But you didn’t learn of your mother’s death until months later and long after her funeral.

  When you relay this story, I realize I hadn’t known that you’d believed in spirits all this time. When it’s dead, it’s dead, you said previously about your son, which could have easily applied to your wife or your mother or your father. The way you talk about death makes it sound inevitable. I notice how your hair has thinned more each time I see you; how you hardly speak in groups or at restaurants because, you have admitted, you can’t hear what anyone says; how, as you eat, you chew carefully, afraid your teeth might break.

  In this same conversation, you speak of how you still dream of my mother. Your wife. This shouldn’t have surprised me.

  Oh, wow. What do you dream of when you dream about Mommy?

  Just how your mommy used to be nice, you say. But how? Nice how? Once, I asked you what you liked about her, and you said you liked that she took care of you. She sliced you fruit for dessert. You missed that. When you told me this, I was offended. I thought this meant you believed that the women in your life owed you this type of care. That it was our duty. But look at me, so suspicious of intentions. Almost anyone with a Chinese mother knows this small gesture usually means love.

  But trying to remember the contours of the dream, you couldn’t say, didn’t want to say, what it was about. A wall had sprung between us again.

  Just, I dream of her.

  * * *

  All of these years later, when I am an adult living on my own and I don’t see or speak to you much, you never feel far. You surface in my thoughts frequently, ghostlike but not quite. Daddy, all of this time, perhaps I have been trying to preserve the memory of you, too. To hold you in my mind; to try to see all the ways light reflects off of your image. Or maybe I’m readying myself for when you move on to the next life, what I could not do for Mommy. (Mommy: I have long known I’d never be able to truly know you. That knowledge came quick like a bolt of grief, until it just was.)

  I’m walking the dog through Red Hook while visiting C.J. in Brooklyn. The dog—who does not like strangers, who barks until the person leaves—mistakes a man for you. Over the years, he slowly warmed to you. Probably because each Christmas, you dehydrated sweet potato for Steph and Caroline and me to give to our dogs. You saw that a pet store sold a bag of those for $9.99. Ho gwai, you said, horrified. People pay that much for eight pieces?

  When visiting me, you sat on my floor and broke off bits of potato for the dog.

  Sit, sit, sit, roll over, you said. You thumped a hand on the floor like a WWE referee and the word sit came out like shit. You demonstrated and dropped onto your back and rocked left and right. You repeated this for hours. I laughed each time. Didn’t correct you, didn’t tell you to stop feeding the dog so much fiber. The dog still refuses to roll over.

  But on the sidewalk, this man has your same build, silvered hair, and tanned complexion, though he looks Hispanic. He shares your cheekbones, skin mostly taut over his face. Sun freckles. Dressed in a loose collared T-shirt and linen pants with sandals that are a couple of sizes too large. He shuffles like you.

  The dog wags his tail and tries to jump on this man in greeting.

  I smile apologetically and pull the dog down the block.

  That’s not who you think it is. I say this loudly and mostly to myself.

  This must be a vision of you. Some alternate version from another world beamed into my reality. It unsettles me for days after, this potential of your future apparition. Strange, so strange.

  In our conversation about your dream of your mother, I asked if you had any idea what you’d want for your own afterlife.

  I don’t know, you said. Good people come back as people. Bad people come back as animals.

  It wasn’t clear if you thought of yourself as good or bad, or if you were uncertain.

  But what about ghosts? Who becomes spirits?

  You didn’t say anything for a while. But then you began a vague rant about how these sorts of Taoist, Buddhist beliefs were used to control people.

  But what would you want to return as?

  You found another way to hedge. You brought up Democrats these days and their socialist agen—

  Daddy. What do you want to come back as?

  You guffawed. I waited, am waiting, for your answer.

  2.

  One recent spring, I call my father to let him know that one of his neighbors has passed after a long sickness. This neighbor is the father of one of my childhood friends; quiet, affable, never cared if we were loud when we played inside. She texts me to share the news and mentions the memorial service. When I relay this information to my father, he says he’d like to attend.

  Oh, really? I say.

  Sure, sure, he says. It would be the nice thing to do. We’re neighbors.

  Do you want me to drive up—

  —Besides, I’ve never been to an American funeral.

  A funeral for white people?

  Yeah, he says. This is my first time. It’ll be really interesting.

  OK, I say. But please don’t treat this like some anthropological experiment.

  And then: I’ll come too.

  I have not kept in touch with this childhood friend over the years, and I have no explanation for attending, other than this seems like the polite thing to do. But in retrospect, her father was born the same year as my father, and any grief is lonely. I drive from my apartment in D.C., and on the way, I pick up ingredients to make lasagna. One for the bereaved family, and one for my father.

  When I arrive at my father’s house, I have to pee. I run to the second-floor bathroom. For the past decade, this has been the only toilet I’ve used in the house, but now one of the valves has partially disintegrated and doesn’t connect right. Every time I flush, water rushes onto the floor. I never remember this will happen. I run from the bathroom and call for my father like a child.

  You always forget, he says.

  I know. I’m flustered and blushing and hoping my piss doesn’t spring back at us. I pile towels onto the floor.

  * * * />
  I worry he’ll slip on one of the envelopes on his carpeted stairs and cascade down his steps, or that as he climbs onto the exercise bike in the family room to complete his morning routine, he will hurt himself, and nobody will be there to help. Just Jonathan’s ashes and the photos of our dead relatives. The house will take him. I look into setting up cameras so that I can check on him, but I don’t suggest this to him because that feels like admitting some sort of defeat.

  He’s only in his early seventies, Steph says. He’s not like her high-risk geriatric patients in New York City who have Alzheimer’s or dementia and are unable to live on their own.

  Yeah, I say. But he’s so alone.

  You can’t change how he lives, Caroline tells me.

  But can’t I? Can’t I? Can’t I?

  I am cloying and trying to fight this. Is this my mother’s fight, now, or mine? But maybe that was both of our mistakes.

  * * *

  The therapist in high school had told me, The only person you can change is yourself.

  She said it so often that I would finish her sentence, not bothering to mask my exasperation.

  The only person you can change—, she’d say.

  —is myself, I know! I said.

  For many years, I misunderstood this and thought this meant that I wasn’t allowed to be angry—that I could not be mad at my father or the way he parented me, or didn’t. I had thought this was meant to assign blame, and that my problems were my own.