He held me with his gaze. “For over a hundred years I have observed the Dharma, Daonu. I strive to be better than the animal I was born to be. You make that more difficult,” he said. He looked away. “I desire you. Do not come to me again.”
I blinked. There were so many things I wanted to say to him—arguments I wanted to make, longings I wanted to express, questions I wanted to ask. But instead I bowed to the statue of the goddess, turned, and walked down the stairs and out the door.
Early the next morning, before sunrise, I filled a flask with warm water. I found a nice ceramic cup, climbed to the roof of the Xie Liang’s headquarters, and called the ghost of my father’s eye to join me.
The stars and streetlamps spread a pale light over the early morning mists that hung in midair over Sacramento Street. I poured steaming water into the teacup. Mr. Yanqiu climbed into the cup and made happy noises.
I didn’t know what my future held. Sitting on the roof of the Xie Liang headquarters, I told Mr. Yanqiu about the day’s events. It had been a long time since someone had really been interested in hearing what I had to say.
Fog was gathering over the flat roof of the building which was my home for the next three years. Later today my supplies would start to arrive. I would start a Hall of Ancestors for the Xie Liang tong. There I would commemorate the names of the men who had been killed in the Kulou-Yuanling’s rampage. I would burn offerings for Hong Xiaohao, who gave his life for me. I would send letters to China to arrange a wedding between him and some young woman who had died without a husband. It made me feel good, knowing I could do that for him.
This was Chinatown, and it was my world. I thought of my father, and the Ansheng tong, where Mr. Wong would watch the constables clap Darby cuffs on his son’s wrists. I thought of Dr. Wei trying so hard to belong to two worlds at once. I thought of his wife, all alone because the world of her childhood had been destroyed. So much had changed in the last few days. There was a murmur in the air behind me. I sighed. Four or five ghostly faces hovered nearby, spreading a blue glow. They were the last of the ghosts I had liberated from the scream spirit. Most had dispersed, but a few of them still followed me.
Light began rising from the east. I reached out and scooped Mr. Yanqiu out of the teacup. “Hey!” he said. “Careful!”
I lifted him to my shoulder. There was a moment of quiet.
“Li-lin,” he said, “what is this?”
“It’s a pocket, Mr. Yanqiu.”
“And what’s it for?”
“It’s for you. I sewed pockets into the shoulders of all my robes, so you can come with me.”
“Come with you?” he said. “Are you going somewhere?”
“I’m always going somewhere. But right now,” I said, “we’re going to watch the sun rise.”
Author’s Note
The Girl with Ghost Eyes explores the lives of working-class Chinese American immigrants at the end of the nineteenth century. These were people whose values, aspirations, and systems of belief differed from the society outside Chinatown. Like any work of historical fantasy, some elements are factual and some are not. There are areas where cultural details have been compressed or skewed for the sake of telling a good story.
Culture is not monolithic, and these thousands of people were individuals. For storytelling purposes, The Girl with Ghost Eyes has condensed some of the extraordinary diversity of these people who came to America driven by dreams of a better life.
Language:
Most of the people in Chinatown were from the Sze Yup region of Canton, now known as Guangdong. But some immigrants came to Chinatown from other parts of China and other parts of Asia. They came from different regions and different ethnic backgrounds, bringing numerous distinct languages and dialects with them. For the sake of simplicity, all Chinese words in The Girl with Ghost Eyes appear in Mandarin rather than Cantonese and other dialects. Most of these words are written in the modern mode called Pinyin. But Pinyin contains many diacritical marks—imagine accents, umlauts, and other markings. These diacritical markings have been stripped off. If you wish to learn more about the terms, please visit my website, where I’ll present both the Pinyin and the Chinese characters, as well as their pronunciation.
Other terms have entered the English language to such a degree that I chose to use the familiar spellings rather than the Pinyin. These include terms such as tong, Buddhism, and kung fu.
Measurements:
It’s likely that immigrants would think in Chinese measurements, such as chi, bu, and li, but the Qing Dynasty fell a hundred years ago, and these measurements have changed a number of times in this turbulent century. In order for the details to make sense to readers, characters in The Girl with Ghost Eyes measure space in inches, feet, and miles; they measure weight in ounces, pounds, and tons.
Religion:
The Girl with Ghost Eyes focuses primarily on Daoists. In the immigrant community, there were also Christians, Buddhists, and Confucians, as well as people who came from ethnic minorities, bringing their own forms of reverence.
The Maoshan traditions of Daoism were real. Eight thousand monasteries once dotted the area around Mt. Mao, and the systems of belief that spread in this area are famous for their focus on exorcism, mediumship, and occult practices.
But the origin of the Maoshan tradition, as described in The Girl with Ghost Eyes, is purely fictional. There was no such historical figure as Li Zhenren. Maoshan was not founded to compensate for any supernatural transgression. Instead, intellectual curiosity drove Maoshan’s founders to formulate theories regarding the underlying logic behind life and death.
Li-lin and her father perform Daoist spells and make use of talismans, incantations, deities, magical hand gestures, ritual dances, peachwood, burnt paper offerings, and astrological almanacs. Without exception, every single detail of their ritual magic is closely based on reality, but these details come from a variety of sects, schools, and lineages. I described them as accurately as possible, but by drawing from more than one tradition, I represented a tradition that has never existed—a fictional tradition.
Etiquette:
In this place and time, a number of conventions would have guided the conversations of Chinese and Chinese American people. I decided to write the dialogue without many of these rules. After all, conventions of etiquette guide conversations in today’s America: we begin with Hello or Hi, we shake hands or hug, we cover our mouths when we cough, we say “bless you” when somebody sneezes, we end with a Goodbye or See ya later. To an outsider, this etiquette seems artificial, but to someone within the culture, it feels natural. Everyone has a culture; it’s just that our own culture is often invisible to us.
Folklore:
Within the folk tales of any single nation, there are regional traditions that should be considered distinct. The tales of ethnic and cultural minorities may intersect with the mainstream, but they also deserve to be understood as their own traditions, and preserved as such. Some tales were popular during a certain era but not before or after. In The Girl with Ghost Eyes, I aimed to represent these cultural specificities with depth and insight, but there are still some areas where, for the sake of telling a story with contemporary resonance, elements of traditions have been folded together.
One example is The Night Parade of a Hundred Demons. Many, many sources of Chinese folklore describe nocturnal hordes, crowds, armies, and processions of ghosts and goblins, devils and ogres. I could not find any specific term in Chinese for these armies or processions. The story needed a term, so I found a Japanese term, hyakki yakko, which translates as “night parade of a hundred demons.” Japanese folklore and Chinese folklore are distinct from each other, and should not be considered interchangeable.
It’s my hope that you take The Girl with Ghost Eyes and these notes as a starting point in an exploration of cultures and historical events, not a definitive source of knowledge. I hope you feel inspired to learn a new language, take a class, go on a trip, or read s
ome non-fiction.
Even better, I hope you’ll politely ask your friends, neighbors, or relatives to tell you stories they heard when they were young—and preserve this lore for future generations.
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