by Kat Chow
They are here with me, if I allow myself to feel their presence.
Before my mother died more than a decade and a half ago, she asked to be buried with Jonathan.
Sure, sure, sure, we said. After we laid my mother to rest, we had Jonathan’s remains turned to ash. But we balked when it came to the burial.
Now my father had done something my sisters and I considered impossible: fulfill his mother’s unspoken request and reunite his parents in the afterlife. There is a sting that accompanies his loyalty to his mother after all these years. “You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world?” a mother writes in a letter to her young son in Ken Liu’s short story “The Paper Menagerie.” “It’s for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone.” This hurts. It is true, though. The saddest. But then, I take a small comfort in my family’s belief that the dead become spirits, and that after their passing, we tend to our loved ones to provide them the comforts we never could in life. And yet, here we are, my mother’s last wish evaded.
For years, I mistakenly thought that bringing Jonathan to rest in Fairfield meant scattering his ashes. I feared what it would mean to hold his fragments, and I worried what unknown feelings this might provoke inside of me. I did not realize that the cemetery required that ashes be buried—that I would not have to feel his dust between my fingers—though my sisters and I accumulated other excuses, anyway: We couldn’t gather the family in one place; a reburial of a small box is still relatively expensive; we had other family matters. When really, we were afraid to face our mother.
After the incense finishes burning, I lie on the living room floor for another hour. Eventually, I pull out my phone and look up the cemetery where my mother’s remains rest, certain that the time has finally arrived.
8.
The week we open your grave to reunite you with Jonathan, July is July. It thunders up and down the East Coast, like God or the gods or goddesses or whomever—it could have been you, Mommy, for all I know—tromp on the floors of their apartments to make our sky rattle.
Steph and I pick up Caroline and Yi Ma on our way to the cemetery in Fairfield, and we arrive at the same time as our father, a downpour stilting our movements. Our father gives Caroline, whom he hasn’t seen in a while, a pat on her arm. I clutch pots of sunflowers that we’ll plant later, and I raise them at him in greeting. We’d chosen the sunflowers because they were bright and cheerful, and we thought you might like them; we did not consider how tall these flowers grow and that if they thrive, they will dwarf your grave.
Steph distributes umbrellas from her home. Mine has a large logo from a wildlife nonprofit, along with photos of a polar bear, a cougar, an otter, and a wolf on its panels. Steph holds a frilled one that is lime green with tiny cockatiels, blue jays, toucans, and macaws, its handle a tropical bird. My father clutches one with red maple leaves. Caroline shares with Yi Ma, and theirs is outfitted with a panda.
Nice umbrellas, huh. Caroline gestures at the kitschy collection to break the somberness.
We laugh.
For much of the hour-long drive here, Steph and I were quiet as she steered us down the highway and through the rain. Her son was asleep in the back seat. Suddenly, Steph began to talk about how after having a baby of her own, she didn’t understand how our mother could do so much. How tired she must have been. Steph started to cry, trying to keep her voice soft and low so she wouldn’t wake her baby. She said she thought of our mother this way every day.
That is what it means to lose someone, understanding how, after all these years, memories shift and shape us. How we cannot exorcise someone as much as we try; we must learn the ways in which we preserve parts of them in ourselves.
* * *
On top of your grave, a cemetery employee has left a small table for an altar.
I take out my joss sticks and I dump a bag of rice into the tin holder to keep the incense upright. My family forms half of a circle in front of your grave as Steph soothes her toddler on her hip, one of us holding an umbrella over her. I hand out three sticks to each person and thumb a lighter.
There is something communal about the rain. It forces us to pass our umbrellas to one another, my family crowding around whoever lights their incense in order to shield them from the downpour. There is an easy way we slide into this without speaking, all of us in anticipation of one other’s movements.
This reminds me of your funeral. A storm whipped through the cemetery and soaked our family as we lowered you into your grave. At thirteen, I thought that the volatile drama of the weather fit our moods, and that it was punishment. Now, I see the symmetry in the storm that appeared at your funeral and the one here at Jonathan’s second burial. The sky splitting open has heralded your presence.
* * *
A few months after burying Jonathan, our entire family will travel to Toronto. Steph, Caroline, and I will rent a house in the city, forming our own unit. Our father stays with Denny and they hustle around the suburbs, meeting with old friends from Hong Kong whom my father hasn’t seen in years.
The second day there, we convene at Mount Pleasant Cemetery and we bury my grandfather.
My father’s relatives arrive with a whole poached chicken, steamed buns, oranges, and wine, which we lay out as offerings. There are so many Chinese graves in this cemetery; our cousins tell me that multiple times a year, they visit the graves like this, and I listen with envy. The snow is heavy and wet, the temperature dropping as morning stretches to afternoon. We take turns tucking a cousin’s Chihuahua into our jackets, which confuses Steph’s son, who repeatedly chirps gau gau, gau gau, throughout the ceremony. His soft toddler voice is ambient noise. We huddle together in the snow. Steph, Caroline, and I notice that our father has been attempting to give a speech, but people are caught in their own conversations. We notice Denny asking the cemetery manager to begin the burial, since we have other graves and other relatives to visit.
Our father would like to say a few words, Steph interrupts.
Daddy, would you like to say thank you? I address him.
He looks around, his expression more indeterminate than usual behind his sunglasses. He opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. Snow catches on his hat, a brown and orange one he’s worn since the eighties. His relatives continue talking among themselves.
Yeah, thank you for coming, he begins. Caroline hushes everyone and gestures at our father.
It’s been a long time since my father passed away and then my mother passed away. It’s always my mother’s desire to be with her husband a final time, and we have this opportunity to bring him back here so that they can be together…It’s been a long journey. His voice warbles. I finally bring his ashes back so that they will have a chance to be together forever. So, I hope that they will be rest in peace. Thank you.
For the first time, I see my father cry.
Steph steps forward to comfort him. She pats his shoulders gingerly, tentatively. Caroline approaches them, uncertain, though stops a couple of feet away. I stand back and make noises of sympathy. I tell myself that having all of his daughters crowd him might embarrass or overwhelm him. But this could be another one of my excuses. I cannot bring myself to comfort my father, and I do not know how to close the distance between us as I witness this wave of grief work its way through him. For more than seven decades, he has shouldered his and his mother’s longings. Though I see within him now a bittersweet relief.
The next day, my family gathers for breakfast at a cousin’s house. She is Denny’s daughter, and she’s made a pot of congee and bought dozens of logs of yau char kwai that I help her reheat in the oven. We are finishing our last bowls when our fathers try to rush out the door. Neither of them say goodbye.
Hey, my sisters and I call after our father.
Hey, my cousins say to Denny.
You’re trying to leave without saying bye? I am entertained by my father and his nephew’s likeness.
Oh, they both say, stepping back inside, momentarily chastened. My father waves a hand, which I take as a gesture that means goodbye or that he can’t be bothered.
I’ll see you gals later, OK? His other nephew has more angelfish to give him, my father explains, and he needs to get them now, since he only has another day left in Toronto.
Don’t you want to bring some food back home? a cousin asks my father, piling leftovers into a takeout container.
No, he says. He is baffled that someone would suggest that. I can’t bring food across the border. That’s illegal.
What about the angelfish? Another cousin calls after him. Isn’t that illegal?
My father laughs instead of answering, and gives the room another flick of his wrist before leaving. In a couple of days, he will drive across the U.S.-Canada border with a small cooler in his trunk, the fish sloshing around in plastic bags.
* * *
In Connecticut, my family stands before your grave, about to bury your only son.
Your husband speaks first. I can barely hear him and can only translate part of what he tells Jonathan.
You grow up to be big up there, I think he says. I hear the word Ah Ma and I wonder if he’s asking his mother to help take care of his son.
It’s Steph’s turn now. She shifts her baby in her arms. We arrange ourselves to light her incense and position her under an umbrella.
All the thunderstorms this week made me think of how, when it thundered when we were little, Mommy used to make us play hide-and-seek, Steph says. We never wanted to because we were scared, but she thought it was so funny. And she always could find us. Mommy always knew how to find her kids. I like to think that Jonathan and Mommy were always together.
Hearing this last part, I envision a new image of you shortly after your death: You stand in a brightly lit space with a white background, some corny movie depiction of heaven, complete with cotton-ball clouds. You rush through a crowd. You shove a few other freshly dead people aside.
Watch it! They give you a perplexed look, as if to say How did this lady get into here?
Where’s my son, you demand. Someone brings Jonathan to you. When the two of you are reunited in body, or whatever spirit-form resembles the body, you finally soften. Your limbs no longer have the stiff, arthritic movements of the Ginger Ghost and the plastination has vanished. Jonathan is a newborn, never growing from what we knew. And though that might not be how the afterlife works, I like this image anyway, because it gives you the chance to mother him like you’d always wanted. Fifteen years later, you can finally listen to his coos. You snuggle your face into his.
I’m sorry it took us this long, Caroline says after she lights her incense.
I address Jonathan. Our parents loved you very much, I say. Thank you for being a big brother to me, even as a baby, even as someone who only passed through this world for a few hours. Even though I didn’t get to spend time with you, you were, and are, loved.
After the incense burns, and after we dig into the wet earth with our fingers to plant the flowers, not caring anymore that we are soaked, we sprint to the cars.
Yi Ma suggests we take a circuitous route home so that your spirit and Jonathan’s won’t follow, and so that you understand you have to stay at the cemetery.
If you pull into this parking lot and then turn around, that’ll work. Yi Ma points us to a nearby pharmacy across the street. It’s good to go inside.
We can buy candy here, too, she adds. The candy will not be wrapped in white paper with nickels, like they were at your funeral, but they’ll work.
I dash into the store, my dress drenched, and the air-conditioner wicks goosebumps onto my arms. At the cash register, my sisters and I study a row of sweets and debate which to purchase. Skittles? M&M’s? Mentos?
Mentos, Caroline says. She always liked Mentos.
In the car, I slide the pink and yellow discs from their sleeve and distribute them among my family. Sometimes, when you picked me up from daycare, you’d toss me a package of Mentos that you bought from the gas station. While I sat in the back, slowly letting them dissolve on my tongue, you glanced at the rearview mirror.
Ho ng ho sik ah? you asked.
Ho sik. I smacked my lips and offered to feed you one.
Now, with a couple of Mentos melting in my mouth, I imagine you standing by Steph’s car. I can just about see you clasping one of her umbrellas. You wave from beneath a flash of blue and green with painted zoo animals on the canopy. Your face is clear, and your lips pull up at their corners and your eyes blink in your mischievous way. You are trying to wink.
For a moment, I want to call out, Hey, don’t go.
But during thunderstorms when it was your turn to hide, you ignored Steph, Caroline, and me as we cried for you to end the game.
Come get me, you whooped while you ran through our house. Although we were frightened, we gripped one another and followed the crackle of your laughter. We knew that if we looked long enough, we would find you.
Your eyes meet mine in the side mirror. You study me, as though you are saving the contours of my face and locking them into the vault of your own memory. I cannot tell how long this goes on, if in some alternate universe, it is still happening. Memory is capital. It is love and survival. And hope. It is all we have. You wink again. To return the gesture, I shut my eyes, slow and long. When I open them, you are gone.
Author’s Note
Language—reaching for it, exploring it, trying to understand it—has always been how I’ve made sense of myself and the world around me. Language provides a connection to something or someone; language is a shield against loneliness. Improving my Cantonese will always be a present tense effort, both because I tend to take my time with picking up languages, and because I don’t believe one ever stops learning how to speak. My understanding of this dialect reflects my family’s migration from Hong Kong to the United States, and the choices my parents made when raising my sisters and me; it reflects that my mother was only able to find Chinese schools in our suburban Connecticut that taught Mandarin, instead of Cantonese; it reflects our isolation from family and the distance between our little unit and a larger community. And with what has unfolded in Hong Kong in recent years, in many ways, this desire to learn Cantonese and its contexts seems especially urgent. It is an expansive act that brings me closer to my family and the many ways in which we engaged—it gives me another way of being open to our past and future.
I enlisted the help of Jaime Chu, an editor and translator, who patiently guided the Cantonese in these pages. We opted for common Cantonese romanization, then Jyutping if there was no common colloquial spelling. There are some exceptions. For example, according to some Cantonese speakers, my name and my sisters’ names in Chinese, should be Ka Lee, Ka Lin, and Wan Lee, but my family always spelled them Gah Lee, and Gah Leen, and Wun Lee, and I wanted to reflect this detail in the text, since that seemed most true to my family’s experiences. Also, when romanizing the Chinese, I chose not to indicate tones. This means that any homographs are not easily differentiated for the English reader.
* * *
In order to write Seeing Ghosts, I leaned on the scholarship and work of many others.
Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History by Kathleen López, Diaspora and Trust by Adrian H. Hearn, Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba by Mark Q. Sawyer, The Chinese in Cuba, 1847-NOW by Mauro García Triana and Pedro Eng Herrera, and all of Evelyn Hu-Dehart’s work, were instrumental in helping me understand Cuba’s history with the Chinese diaspora. Thanks especially to Evelyn for the hours spent over the years answering my many questions. Madeline Hsu’s and Lisa Yun’s scholarship was also incredibly helpful.
The concept of racial melancholia and the trailblazing scholars who have written about it—Anne Anlin Cheng (The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief) and David L. Eng and Shinhee Han (Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans)—gave me
a vocabulary for something I had observed for years but was unable to put to words.
The following guided my research: Ellen D. Wu (The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority), Patricia Chu (Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America and Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return), Russell Jeung (Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity and Religion Among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation), Erika Lee (The Making of Asian America), Priscilla Wegars and Sue Fawn Chung (Chinese American Death Rituals: Respecting the Ancestors), Monica Chiu (Asian Americans in New England: Culture and Community), Rachel Poliquin (The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing), and David Barton Smith (The Power to Heal: Civil Rights, Medicare, and the Struggle to Transform America’s Health Care System). Yung Wing’s autobiography (My Life in China and America), as well as the staff at the Connecticut Historical Society, were crucial. The work of Karthick Ramakrishnan, Janelle Wong, and Jennifer Lee of AAPI Data helped inform so much of my earlier reporting.
Notes
1 Part 2, Chapter 3: This carving of young Cynthia Talcott was perhaps created with the help of a death mask, a sculpting technique that used casts of the deceased’s corpse and was common in the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century. I learned about death masks when reading about Gustave Flaubert, whose story “Un coeur simple” (A simple heart) features a woman who so loved her parrot that she had it preserved and died clutching its taxidermic form. Also of note: Flaubert famously had a death mask made of his sister after she passed.