Ghost Forest

by Pik-Shuen Fung

  So boring! Back then, there was no Chinese TV yet. I bought a Chinese newspaper every day and read it from morning until night, even all the ads. Seven p.m., it was dark. On the street, there was no one, not even a ghost. Back in Hong Kong, I played mahjong with my friends every day.

  Your grandpa and I didn’t immigrate at first. We went on a six-month tourist visa. So we returned to Hong Kong after six months.

  When I came back to Hong Kong, I couldn’t stop crying. I cried every day. I didn’t want to eat. I refused to drink water.

  Then my mahjong friend invited me to go to Beijing for a seven-day tour. That was my first time going to Beijing. We saw the Great Wall, we walked along some of it. We ate fried dough sticks and Peking duck. That’s when I finally felt better.

  After we found out your mom was pregnant with your sister, your grandpa moved to Vancouver for good. But I only immigrated after your sister was born. When I went to the hospital and saw them draw blood from your baby sister every day, I started crying again.

  FAMILY PRAYER

  My grandma said every family has its own prayer that’s hard to recite.

  In the evenings before we slept, my grandma plucked her string of black beads from our nightstand to pray. We prayed to Kwun Yam for my sister to be healthy. We prayed to Kwun Yam for my mom to be happy. Then I pressed my palms together harder as my grandma recited the Buddhist prayer she knew by heart. I didn’t know the words, I couldn’t follow along, but once in a while it sounded like Pineapple Sock.

  In my heart I repeated it—pineapple sock pineapple sock—thinking of my sister.

  MY KINDERGARTEN TEACHER CALLS

  One day my kindergarten teacher called to say, Your daughter doesn’t play with other children. While her classmates play dress-up and kitchen and house, your daughter stands in the corner all day, furrowing her brows, cradling a baby doll.

  MY MOM SAYS:

  The year after we moved to Canada, I gave birth to your little sister. She was born with a big blood tumor on her shoulder, and almost no platelets.

  The cancer doctor at the Children’s Hospital took her case to conferences in the US and Europe because they didn’t know how to cure her. One week before your sister’s first birthday, they decided to give her steroids again. But after a few days on the steroids, she started crying a lot, and all of a sudden her moods were very strange. The blood from her tumor ran purple down her arm, so I brought her back to the hospital. The doctor decided to stop the steroids, but it took a whole week, because the dosage had to be halved and halved and halved again. He said that the only solution left was to try a new medicine from France, but no child had ever tried this medicine before, so they didn’t know the side effects. Your dad and I decided not to do it. We told the doctor we wanted to try Chinese medicine instead.

  Back then there was a little boy from Hong Kong who lived in Toronto, who was very sick. There was a campaign asking Chinese people around the world to Save Little Boy and donate bone marrow, and it was published in all the magazines in Hong Kong.

  The Chinese doctor who eventually cured Little Boy became famous. Someone in our family, maybe your uncle, read about it and said to me, A doctor in Toronto healed Little Boy. Why don’t you try to ask him?

  I called my friend who lived in Toronto, and she helped me find the doctor’s contact information and sent it to me. At the top of the form, it said that the doctor will treat good-hearted people, but will not treat bad-hearted people. It also said that the doctor never sees patients in person. All communication is through the fax machine, and payment is by donation.

  You had to sign the form with your Chinese name, and if the patient was a child, then the parent had to sign it. Based on the signature, the doctor decided if you were good-hearted or not. So I faxed my signature to the doctor, along with a handwritten description of your sister’s condition. Not long after, maybe a week, the doctor faxed back a prescription. He didn’t write anything else. So I went to Chinatown to buy the herbs and boiled them according to the instructions.

  The instructions said that the Chinese herbs could not be boiled in a metal pot. I had to boil them in a ceramic pot, which was the only way the herbs wouldn’t change in quality. The first time, I boiled the herbs in water until it was reduced to half a porcelain bowl of liquid. I poured this into a bowl and immediately boiled the herbs a second time until it was again reduced to half a porcelain bowl of liquid. Then I mixed the liquid from the first time with the liquid from the second time. I fed your sister right away with half of this mixture, which was two porcelain spoons, and put the other half in the fridge to heat up again later.

  After your sister drank the herbs for one week, I wrote an update on her condition and faxed it to the doctor, and then he faxed back a new prescription.

  A month after taking the herbs, your sister’s platelet count rose from five to twenty, and the western doctor at the hospital said, Amazing!

  At the next appointment, your sister’s platelet count rose from twenty to forty, and the western doctor at the hospital said, So amazing!

  Your sister recovered fully when she was two and a half.

  One time, at the herbal shop in Chinatown, the shopkeeper looked down at the prescription, then looked up and asked, Is this from that famous doctor in Toronto? Is this for an adult?

  I said, Yes, it’s from that doctor in Toronto, but no, it’s for a baby.

  Then he told me that someone else walked in the other day with a similar prescription for an adult patient.

  So, I don’t understand. If an adult with a different illness was prescribed the same medicine, how did it cure your baby sister?

  My friend said, Maybe the doctor healed her through the fax!

  THE BROWN SLUDGE

  I remember standing in the living room, and it was nighttime as they fed my sister the medicine.

  My grandma clutched my sister’s arms with one hand and held down my sister’s legs with the other. My mom pinched my sister’s nose, and tipped a porcelain spoonful of thick brown sludge into her baby mouth. Then my sister sprayed it all over the beige walls with a pucker.

  AFTERNOON SNACKS

  Since my mom was always at the hospital, my grandpa took me to and from school, but it was my grandma who made the afternoon snacks. Sometimes she peeled and sliced juicy crystal pears. Sometimes she twirled a chopstick in maltose syrup and glazed it on saltine crackers. Sometimes she sizzled pot stickers, the warmth of toasted sesame oil filling the house. But my favorite snack of all was her sticky rice roll. In the middle of the rice roll, cocooned by brittle seaweed and sweet fluffy pork floss, crushed Lay’s potato chips crunched in every bite.

  MY GRANDMA SAYS:

  When I was a kid, I didn’t even have rice to eat. Every day I stood with my grandmother in long lines just to buy a few ounces of broken rice from the Japanese army. Broken rice bits, not even grains! We ground the bits into powder with a thick wooden stick, and boiled the powder in water. Like eating warm glue. Then we ran out of money, and my grandmother went away to dig trenches for Japanese soldiers in exchange for twenty-two pounds of broken rice.

  After that, I lived alone. I was twelve or thirteen. My mother was a nanny, I don’t know where. She rented a room for me on Gaoshing Street, in an apartment they separated into many rooms. One of my neighbors saw I had nothing to do, so she gave me all the classic books, like Journey to the West, Water Margin, and Dream of the Red Chamber. I’d only gone to school for one year, but I taught myself to read because I was so clever. My favorite book of all was Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which I read over and over. Sometimes we couldn’t turn the lights on after sunset or we would get bombed, so on those nights I lit a long stick of fir sap—thicker than incense but thinner than a pencil—and held it close to the page. I read all night, I loved reading. By the time the sky got bright, the soot made my nose all black!

  One
time, I went to meet my mother and she gave me a bag of hot pork buns. As I walked home, the beggars along the street stared at me with their big eyes and sunken faces. Four of them started chasing me, so I threw them the buns and ran home. Everyone was so hungry then. On Goldfish Alley, I saw corpses with flesh cut out from their thighs.

  Another time, I saw a man walking along the street smoking. At the end of the street, some Japanese soldiers told him to bow down in front of them. They made him eat the entire pack of cigarettes while pointing their guns at his head.

  Then my mom didn’t have money to rent my room anymore, so she took me to Macau, where I was born, to look for my father. He was the lead detective of the police department in Macau, and his office was right behind the Sing Ping Theatre. What I remember best is going to see Cantonese operas with my father. Back then the leading actress was plump and beautiful, and she wore a jade bangle so precious she covered it with a silk handkerchief before she walked on the street. My father and I went to the theater in the evenings, and if we were lucky, we found seats in the back. But I didn’t live at his house, I stayed with a family friend. I should have figured out why.

  I remember, one night I ran to his office, I burst through the doors shouting, Ba Ba, take me to the theater! Who knew there would be a woman sitting next to him. My father’s coworkers said, Pour some tea for your new ma. I didn’t understand, so I poured her a cup of tea and I called her Ma. Everyone laughed at me. That’s when I found out my father had a new wife and lots of other children. But soon after, my father was being investigated for taking bribes, so my mother came and took me back to Hong Kong.

  Miles away, my grandmother dug dirt all day and slept in the trenches at night. The earth was so damp it made her skin red and itchy. Her supervisor let her go, so she begged her way back to Hong Kong, but she couldn’t find me because the building I’d lived in before was bombed. While she was begging on the street one day, she recognized an old neighbor who knew where I was, so that’s how she found me again.

  After that, my grandmother and I took a small boat to a rural village in Shenzhen, where my great-grandmother lived. She was one hundred years old and lived alone in a house the size of a bathroom. We slept on the ground next to her little bed. Every morning when we went to get firewood, my grandmother would cut down the big fir branches and I would cut down the little fir branches, ha!

  The food in this village was the most delicious I’ve ever tasted in my life. Sometimes, my grandmother and I walked barefoot on the beaches and stuck our hands into the water to feel for clams and small stone snails. We pulled the meat out of the shells and boiled it in congee. It made the congee so fresh and sweet. On lucky days, we ate crispy rice sheets with salty marinated squid that we dried in the sun. But most days we ate tree bark and bits of yams left in the dirt. We were there for a year, I think. The people in the village wanted to marry me into a big family descended from generals in Qing dynasty. They wanted to sell me as a tungyeungsik—to marry me into the boy’s family while I was still a child so that I would grow up in their house working as a servant, and when I was old enough, give birth to his children. Of course I didn’t want that. Luckily, the war ended, so I followed my grandmother back to Hong Kong.

  None of my children know these things. I’ve never told them, and they’ve never asked me.

  PARKING LOTS

  My grandma said I was clever like her because I was also born in the seventh month of the lunar calendar, when the gates of hell open and ghosts roam free. But my mom thinks the two of us need to be more careful.

  One time, after we ate dim sum with our family friends in Richmond, my grandma carried me in her arms as we walked down into the parking lot. Halfway down the flight of stairs, she tripped and fell and rolled into the lane. A car screeched to a stop and ran its tire down my grandma’s hair.

  My mom was scared, seeing her mother and daughter lying there, scared that my little fingers were crushed. She once heard that spirits like to linger inside parking lots and at busy intersections, waiting for someone to take away. She says my grandma had curved her entire head and body around me, to protect me, and that if I hadn’t been there, my grandma’s arms would have flung out, her neck would have been straighter, so it would have been not her hair but her head under that tire.

  My grandma says that day it felt like she was pushed by something—there was no way she would fall like that on her own.

  That’s why, to this day, she likes to say it was I who saved her life.

  THING IS

  A story we love to tell in my family is that after my sister recovered, she followed me everywhere, and whenever I sat down, she pinched me.

  On a typical afternoon, my sister, a toddler, chased me around the dinner table, and I, five years older, with tiny blue bruises on my arms, ran screaming.

  But why didn’t you just pinch her back? People would ask at this point of the story. Why did you let her?

  Thing is, I would say, one day she suddenly stopped.

  I stayed on guard for a long time, ready to run at any moment. But month after month passed, and she never pinched me again. She still followed me everywhere, jolly. But all she did now was copy my clothes and make me laugh.

  MONKEYS

  My sister and I loved sounds. We loved the way Cantonese sounds, like when our mom said bing ling baang laang when things fall and crash, and when she said ding ding instead of the tram.

  When we heard a sound we liked, we echoed it through the house, and in our free time, we invented a laughing chant.

  wahaha wabaHahahahaha!

  wehehe webeHehehehehe!

  wohoho woboHohohohoho!

  wuhuhu wubuHuhuhuhuhu!

  We laugh-chanted from morning to night, and then, when it was time to sleep, we clambered up the stairs like monkeys.

  STARRY NIGHT

  On weekends my mom drove us to art classes, even on Saturday mornings, even to the other side of town, even in the middle of winter when the streets were covered in snow.

  In my very first memory of painting, the teacher held up a laminated print of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. She scattered orange and yellow oil pastels across the table, and taught us to press curving dashes into the paper to make stars. We swirled deep blue watercolor and swept it over the dashes. As the blue water settled around the edges of the orange and yellow marks, I gasped, watching the stars emerge against the night sky.

  At home, I practiced painting starry nights, while my sister drew fat multicolor cats. The floor rippled with paints and pastels. The walls danced with our art.

  WHAT THE HEART WANTS

  People often asked me, Do you come from a family of artists?

  And I would say, There are no other artists in my family.

  Only recently did I think to ask my mom, Why did you take us to so many art classes when we were kids?

  My mom said she had always wanted to draw, but didn’t know how to do it well. She thought if my sister and I learned how to draw, then we would be able to draw whatever we wanted.

  She said, Lik bat chung sam—do you know what it means? It means, what your heart wants but you cannot do. It is an uncomfortable feeling. It’s the feeling of wanting to do something and not being able to.

  MY MOM SAYS:

  When I was a kid, I was always alone. Your grandma and grandpa worked all the time, your uncles had their own friends, and your aunts were two peas in a pod. I was the youngest and no one paid me attention.

  At school, I was a lump of rice. The teacher’s words went in my left ear and went out my right ear. But when the school wanted me to stay back and repeat the grade, your grandma found me a new school, and it was at this school that I started playing basketball. I joined a group that practiced every day after school, and by grade nine, I was on the school team. Did you know I was known throughout my school?

  One time, it was almos
t the finals. We were practicing at school, and one of my teammates accidentally rammed into my left thumb. She started crying because I was in the starting lineup, I was one of the strongest players. As soon as practice was over, the coach took me to the bonesetter, where they wrapped my thumb over and over.

  At the finals a few days later, my left hand was still in a large wrap, so when the game started, the coach told me to stay on the bench. All my teammates were worried because they were missing a strong player, and as the first half ended, our team was losing.

  So the coach sent me out in the second half. Once I stepped on the court, everyone’s morale went up, and my teammates became more steady. I didn’t think about my thumb, I just played. Luckily, our opponents were fair and didn’t bump into my left hand. Then I got two free throws, and each free throw had two shots. The first time, I scored both shots, and the second time, I scored one of the two shots. I was quite an accurate shooter then. In the end, we beat the other team by one point. That’s how we won first place at the championship.

  The game was on a public court, and lots of friends and classmates came to watch and support our team. That’s how I got my nickname. After we won, my classmates shouted: One Hand Hero! One Hand Hero!

  I remember best that your grandpa ordered fresh milk for us, two glass bottles every day. I poured myself a big glass of fresh milk when I got home after the game.

  We were living in a public housing estate in Wang Tau Hom at the time. We were lucky because we got one of the biggest apartments on our floor, which was shaped like an H, with the big apartments at each of the four corners. Our apartment had a kitchen, so we plugged a plastic hose into the kitchen tap and took cold showers there. There was a drain in the kitchen floor, so we would pee there and flush it with water.