by Yangsze Choo
The dim light entered the room and paused. At first, all I saw was the back of a figure clad in old-fashioned garments, the hair elaborately dressed with dangling ornaments. It was a young woman, not as thin as the poor hungry ghost who had spoken to me. When she turned, however, I saw the slight shriveling of her features, as though a slow process of mummification had begun. She began to wander around the empty dining room, pausing for a moment at the old man’s chair. At the rice bowl offering, she stopped.
“Who has eaten this?” The corpse light that enveloped her rippled in agitation. “How dare you trespass here?”
Her sharp eyes roved around the room like needles. I raised my hand before my face and was horrified to see that it too emitted a faint glow. Not the eerie green that bathed the woman, but a pale shine like moonlight. Enraged, she swept around the room, finally catching sight of me the second time.
Her eyes widened as she examined me. “I thought you were a hungry ghost, but now I see that you’re not of the dead. Are you here to call me back?”
Perhaps it was only natural, I thought, that each ghost’s thoughts instantly flew to his own situation. After all, I myself could scarcely forget my disembodiment.
“What are you, demon or fairy?” she demanded.
Not knowing how to reply I said, “I’m sorry I took your rice. The old man said it was an offering.”
“It was on the altar. But for years it has been mine.”
Despite her initial hostility, she seemed eager to talk. Perhaps it had been a long time since there had been anyone to communicate with. I couldn’t tell when she had died, as the fashion in funeral garments remained antique and unchanging. Still, I might learn something from her.
“Were you waiting for a messenger?” I hazarded.
Glancing doubtfully at me, she said, “So you were looking for me! I’m not yet ready to go, though.”
“I’m not sure,” I began, but she cut me off.
“My name is Fan, of the Liew family. I can explain why I’m still here.”
“You’re not a hungry ghost.”
“Of course not! By rights I should have gone on to the courts already. Did the border officials send you?”
“My business isn’t with you.” I felt I ought to put her straight before I floundered into deeper waters.
She sighed. “I suppose it’s silly to expect them to send someone like you. Are you a fairy maiden, then? I’ve always wanted to meet one. I know they sometimes come from paradise. Yet—” She broke off, studying my pajamas.
“I’ve lost my way.”
“Did you lose your steed too?”
“My steed?”
“Don’t you have a carriage or a horse? Or maybe your rank is too low,” she said dismissively. “It’s just that your clothes . . . I mean, you’re very pretty of course. That’s how I knew you were a fairy.”
Stalling, I said, “I am but a humble handmaid on an errand.”
“Oh!” she said. “Is it a love affair? Because that’s why I’m here too!” Once she started, it was as though she couldn’t stop talking. “I died for love, did you know that?”
Yes,” said the ghost as she folded herself on one of the dining chairs. Unlike myself, she had far less mass, for her sleeves trailed through the wood of the chair and she was so light that a puff of air would have dislodged her from her perch. “It was really very romantic. I still remember when I first saw him. He was already married, of course, but she was much older than him. Anyway, it didn’t bother me.”
“You didn’t mind being a second wife?”
She waved a hand negligently. “I was the one he loved. My father refused, of course. He was only a petty shopkeeper, not good enough for me, whereas my family owned a lodging house near Jonker Street. So when I locked myself in my room and refused to eat, my father said he would ship me back to relatives in China. He bought me passage on a junk through the Straits of Malacca. I think he really intended to marry me off to a business acquaintance in Singapore, but there was a terrible typhoon and our ship capsized. Never having learned to swim, I quickly drowned.” Fan shook her long sleeves out with a sigh. “If I had known how easy it is to lose your life, I would have treasured mine better.”
If she only knew how heartily I agreed with her. But I was desperate to discover as much as possible about this afterlife and how things worked. “If you drowned, why are you here in this house?”
She turned to me in astonishment. “Didn’t I tell you? This is my lover’s house.”
“The old man?”
“He stayed with his wife and had more children. Still, he dreams of me every night. My father of course gave me a funeral and burned offerings, though my lover was never told of this. For all he knew I had been disowned and become a hungry ghost. That’s why he puts out rice every evening. He means it for me.”
With sudden anxiety, I wondered whether I would even realize it if my own physical body stopped breathing. “What was it like when you died?”
“I saw other souls streaming toward the gateway of the Courts of Judgment. I was supposed to go too, except I wanted to see my beloved again. Oh, his wife was relieved when I died, I tell you! But I made sure that he still loved me in his dreams.” Her laughter was a thin tinkle. “Though I’ve always been afraid that they’ll send someone to fetch me. But the time is almost at hand anyway.”
“What time is that?”
“Why, I’ve been waiting for him to die, of course! He almost did several times. He fell off a ladder once and another time he contracted typhoid. But now I think the end is near.”
“Do you wish him dead, then?” Repulsed by her cheer, I was reminded of the negative influence ghosts were said to be on the living.
“No!” she said in alarm. “Oh, you mustn’t report me to the authorities! I thought that if he died then I would wait for him to go together. After all, we’re linked by this.” She held out an invisible object pinched together between her fingers. Try as I might, however, I could discern nothing.
“How odd,” she said. “For I can see it clearly. It’s a shining thread.”
My heart gave a leap. “I’ve been searching for something like that. What is it?”
“It shows the intensity of your feelings,” she said. “When I was alive we exchanged tokens. I gave him a hairpin and he gave me a jade thumb ring that had belonged to his father. Once I was dead, I found that if I followed this thread it led me straight to him. He still has my hairpin in a wooden chest upstairs.”
I thought about Tian Bai’s watch and the comb that I had slipped him the day he had come to our house. But how was it that my thread hadn’t gone toward the Lim mansion?
“Perhaps your task is difficult because only lovers can find their own thread,” said Fan.
“Does your thread float in the air?”
She frowned. “The other end is probably at the bottom of the sea with the ring that he gave me. But I manage quite well with this end. If I leave the house I hold on to it. It’s so hard to get around as a ghost, you know! Corners, mirrors. Such things make me lose my way. And I’m so light now, I would blow away down the street if I didn’t have this thread to hold on to.”
Her words confirmed my suspicions that I was, indeed, different from the dead in the manner that I could move easily from place to place. Even the hungry ghosts that had chased me had fluttered wildly and dispersed.
“I don’t go out much anyway,” Fan continued.
“It’s so much of a bother. I’m sure I don’t know what ordinary ghosts without a thread like mine do.” She looked pointedly at me again. “You don’t seem to know much about anything.”
“We led a sheltered existence,” I said, realizing that I had to come up with something to satisfy her curiosity. “My job was to pick fruit in the Blessed Peach Orchard.” Though I felt guilty lying to her, she was enthralled.
“How very boring! Heaven must be overrated.”
“It was marvelous fruit,” I said cautiously.
“Then it must surely have been the fruit of longevity. If I only had one, I’m sure I could bribe the border officials to be lenient with me!”
Lim Tian Ching had also mentioned border officials. “Where can I find them?” I asked.
“At the gateway, of course. I can see it as soon as I go out.”
“Why don’t the hungry ghosts go there?”
“They can’t find it,” she said contemptuously. “What do you expect? They had no proper burial, no prayers or offerings. They’re hopeless.” I listened to her with a sinking heart.
In the end, I persuaded Fan to show me the gateway. She was reluctant to do so at first, coming up with a number of excuses. Eventually I managed to winkle out of her the fact that she had not left the house for almost three years. “I’ve just been keeping him company,” she said with a sly glance.
I was suddenly reminded of something she had mentioned earlier. “Dreams,” I said, thinking about Lim Tian Ching’s access to my own dreams. She gave a guilty start. “You said he wouldn’t forget you in his dreams. How did you manage that?”
Fan began to pleat her sleeves again. “If I tell you, you must put in a good word for me.”
“I can’t promise you that. But I’ll try.” Uneasily, I thought that if only she knew how desperately I was groping for information, barely even knowing who or what the border officials were, she would hardly bother to waste her time on me. But Fan looked satisfied.
“Well, I found that if I press this thread into his body while he’s sleeping, sometimes I can make my way into his dreams. There he’s young again, and we’re together. Lately, though, his dreams have been getting stronger than reality, which is why I think he’s going to die soon.”
I shuddered. This was almost exactly what happened to itinerant scholars in the novels I had read. A beautiful ghost enticed them into a world of dreams until they wasted away in search of phantom pleasures. I didn’t really understand the rules of this afterworld, but I was certain that they must exist from my conversations with Lim Tian Ching. No wonder Fan seemed fearful of the authorities. But she was already leading the way through the long shop house, passing through the front door with no resistance at all. With my greater mass, it took me longer to catch up. When I emerged onto the street, I stopped in wonder. The dark night was lit up with spirit lights.
Some were green, like Fan’s corpse light; others were different colors, like strange flowers that bloomed in the night. Among the crowds of hungry ghosts and other human phantoms were carriages and sedan chairs lit with swaying lanterns, and drawn by horses and other scaled creatures I had never seen before. There were tiger-headed men and tiny birds with female faces. Women with backward-pointing feet mingled with lizards dressed in court robes. The walking trees and enormous glowing flowers must be the plant spirits and minor deities that Fan had mentioned. In amazement, I stared at this parade of otherworldly creatures. Dimly, I could hear the sounds of a busy street but the noise was muffled, as though it had traveled a great distance. And at the same time, I was assailed by the same suffocating sensation that I had encountered at the Lim mansion. Retching, I gasped for breath.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Don’t you know? It’s the spirits. This is nothing, you should see how many come out on feast days.”
“But I can hardly breathe.”
She peered at me. “That’s spiritual pressure, caused by the congregation of yin from the ghosts. I don’t know what heaven is like, but the longer you mingle with the dead, the less it will bother you.”
With horror, I realized that she was right. After all, when Lim Tian Ching had begun to haunt me, I had suffered from this choking sensation in my dreams. Earlier that day, when I had first seen such lights at the Lim mansion, I had been so overcome that I had been forced to leave. But now I was able to talk to Fan without any particular effect, though perhaps her long-dead spirit was more insubstantial. I braced myself against a wall until the intensity began to subside. This in itself was probably a bad sign, but there was nothing I could do about it.
“And there is the gate,” she said, pointing upward to a brightness in the sky. Faintly, I could make out a great arch through which a host of spirits streamed in like an endless river of lights. But it was so far away.
“How do you get there?” I asked.
“You float,” she said. “Can’t you feel the pull it exerts? I’m sure that if I climbed on a roof and let go, I would drift there.”
“I don’t think I can float like you.”
“Fly, then,” she said. “Isn’t that how you came from the heavenly realm?”
I was saved from having to reply by a sudden commotion.
Make way! make way!” Driven by these cries, the crowd surged like a wave. Beating them back were four monstrous creatures with the heads of belligerent oxen joined to the bodies of men. Each carried a halberd and wore a black uniform with scarlet edging. With snorts and fearful bellows, they parted the crowd easily. Beside me, Fan gave a convulsive shudder.
“Who are they?” I asked.
Frantically she motioned me to be silent. Behind this escort came a blood red palanquin. There was something about the ostentatious trappings that seemed familiar to me and I pressed forward, hoping for a closer look. The shutters were drawn but an errant gust of wind blew them inward. Impatiently, a plump hand batted them back but not before I had seen its owner. There, sitting at ease within, was Lim Tian Ching.
I cried out in amazement and started forward. In that instant, though, my voice was lost in the roaring of the escort, Lim Tian Ching’s eyes turned toward me as though he alone had heard my cry. Instinctively, I ducked behind a beast with curling antlers. A frown creased his features. In another moment, the entire procession had passed.
“Who was that?” I asked Fan. She had been creeping back toward the shop house, but I forestalled her.
“Those were the border officials!” she said. I blanched. I had been hoping to find some sort of bureaucrat to appeal to, but these monstrous creatures were beyond my comprehension. Fan looked queasy. “Well, those were only foot soldiers, but the border officials are the same type of ox-headed demon. We ghosts try to avoid them as much as possible.”
“But there was a human ghost in the palanquin,” I said.
“Then he’s probably someone important. Or has plenty of money. The authorities can be bribed to extend all sorts of privileges. Don’t you know that this part of the afterlife is ruled by the judges of hell? Before entering the courts for judgment and reincarnation, there’s a place called the Plains of the Dead, where you’re allowed to enjoy the funeral offerings that your family burned for you. It’s only for human ghosts, though; you can’t stay forever. I have a little house there and a couple of servants. But I haven’t gone back in a while.” Despite herself, a shiver ran through Fan’s frame.
“Why not?”
“I told you! My time is up. I
was supposed to report to the gateway and have my case processed for judgment a long time ago.” A stubborn look crossed her face. “If my father had only burned more funeral money for me then I could bribe the border officials. I hope that when my lover dies his family will burn a great deal of cash for him. I’ve been watching them for years and they’re very fond of him.”
“Won’t you need to report to the courts eventually?”
“Well, certainly. But that may not have to be for a long time. Centuries, if we have enough money.” I looked doubtfully at Fan.
“Don’t look at me like that!” she said. “Didn’t you see that ghost in the palanquin? He’s proof that you can do what you like if you have the resources. Now, are we done?”
I watched as she slipped back through the shop house door. I hadn’t particularly liked her, yet she had a pathos that made me pity her scheming. Still, something she’d mentioned stirred me. Studying the darkened doorway, I had the impression that Fan was still waiting, pressed against the other side. I walked over and addressed the silent facade.
“Just one more thing,” I said. “How do I find the Plains of the Dead?”
There was a faint gasp, then Fan’s pale face reappeared, floating upon the surface of the wooden door. It would have frightened me badly before but I had become accustomed to such sights. “How did you know I was there? You really are a fairy maiden after all!”
“Where are the Plains of the Dead?” I repeated. Somehow the place seemed to draw me. My thoughts flew, unaccountably, to my mother. Amah had always been so certain that she had been spared the torments of judgment and long since been reborn, but I could not help wondering if she was still there.
“There are entrances all over the place, like the gateway. The hungry ghosts can’t go there either. They have no clothes and no money for the journey. They can’t even steal, as spirit goods must be given freely.”
