by Sandi Tan
I flew back to bed. I couldn’t wait to announce my achievement to Sister Kwan—I saw a ghost and wasn’t scared!—and watch her mouth fall open in wonder. “You brave soul,” I could almost hear her say. Did Li see her? No, it was me, only me. I was first. I was special.
My brother, meanwhile, continued to doze unfettered. I thought about shaking him awake and telling him about my encounter, but I knew he’d only fly into a rage and call me a liar.
Should I keep the sighting a secret? Reporting it might make my parents fear for my sanity; they’d always considered themselves too modern for ghosts. But Sister Kwan…she would understand.
A new, loving warmth wound its way around my torso, as if the bed were caressing me back to sleep with damp, heated hands, coaxing me away from the sharp snap of wakefulness. I snuggled into its embrace and closed my eyes. Every part of me relaxed. The warmth spread farther. Seconds later, I felt a hard kick to the shin—Li. He’d jolted awake and was crying out, furious:
“Damn you, Ling! You peed on my new pajamas!”
Around the year 250 BC, the Taoist philosopher Han Fei put forth a malignant theory that unfortunately became a founding principle of Chinese art. Since everybody knew what dogs and horses looked like, he said, they were the most difficult subjects to paint, whereas demons and goblins, being invisible, were child’s play. In other words, realism was high art because it involved control and discipline, whereas abstraction was the refuge of charlatans. Ever since that time, the imaginative arts suffered. Works of imagination would never again be as prized in Chinese culture as mundane still lifes of birds and chrysanthemums or groves of soporific bamboo. And this attitude infected the rest of Chinese thinking: Originality would never be as revered as rote learning and the manufacture of flawless reproductions. Copying became our métier.
Having seen my first ghost, I knew I had to produce as accurate an account of the encounter as I could so nobody could accuse me of a flight of fancy. Details would serve as proof that the dead amah I saw was as real as a living one. I waited for the right moment to confide in Sister Kwan. Not Li. He had been my secret sharer once, but no longer. After breakfast, we were separated into our respective routines, our respective routes to our respective schools.
Every morning at seven, Mother placed our fates into the hands of our servants. Quite literally. With our hands tightly clasped in theirs, Sister Choon took Li by rickshaw to the boys’ school at one end of Frenchtown and Sister Kwan took me to the girls’ school at the other. Both amahs waited by the gates until lessons ended at noon, at which time they escorted us home, again by rickshaw, again with our hands tightly enclosed in theirs. At no point in the journey would the amahs let go of us to scratch an itch or even to hold on for dear life when the rickshaw puller swerved to avoid a flattened dog.
It was hard in those days to find a moment without either of the amahs hovering over us, nattering acridly in Cantonese and pulling our ears for the smallest infractions—hawk-nosed Sister Choon especially, but even my favorite Sister Kwan was not immune to ill temper. We were small and had no concept of privacy, so we rarely begrudged their interference and abuse. Chinese children, I suppose, never took scolding very seriously unless it was a person of authority who was doing the scolding, in which case we cowered and cringed and cried. (We Chinese children were preternaturally aware of status.) Yet because we spent most of our time with these grown women who, due to their lack of education, retained a childlike credulity, they often became our confidantes.
Sometimes on the trips to and from school, when I had Sister Kwan all to myself, I would ask her for stories of the strange—the weirder the better. She considered herself an expert in the field. All the amahs did, coming as they did from superstitious families in the South who worshipped their ancestors at dilapidated shrines and said prayers to rice grains. From Sister Kwan I’d learned that a cat could turn a dead man into a vampire by leaping over his corpse, that the beautiful maidens men met on byways at night usually turned out to be ghosts, and that wayward monks could sometimes subsist for decades inside the bellies of large carp.
I loved her stories. They told of an ancient China steeped in magic, color, and fine breeding, far removed from the fetid, gray, unsmiling world that was our Shanghai. Her stories helped to leaven the unpleasant encounters that were such a frequent component of city life. Whenever we passed the distended corpse of a beggar on the street, she’d mumble a Taoist blessing and assure me that the person must have been cruel to his parents to deserve such a fate; whenever our rickshaw man took us past one of those wretched funeral shops that considered baby coffins appropriate for its windows, she’d tell me American children used them for storing their dolls.
“There was an old amah in our room last night,” I told Sister Kwan.
Her eyes widened in anticipation of a juicy story, so I proceeded to describe the encounter in detail. We were in the rickshaw, away from Mother’s disapproving ears and punishing hands.
“The mole…” Her expression was uneasy. “You’re sure it was under her left eye and not her right eye?”
“Positive.”
“And her hair was completely white?”
“Yes. As snow.”
“The jade bangle was white, not green?”
“White as her hair.”
“Oh dear, oh dear.” Sister Kwan muttered a quick oath. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha.
“What’s wrong?”
“You’ve just described Sister Yeung.”
“Sister Yeung?”
“You don’t remember her, do you? She used to take care of you when you were a baby.” Sister Kwan released my hand and clutched at her temple. “I wonder what she wants, coming back.” She looked at me. “Did she say anything? Did she frighten you?”
“She touched my toes.”
“She did?” Her eyes widened again. “What else?”
I shrugged. “She tried to say something but vanished before she could say it. Anyway, I wasn’t scared. I don’t think she meant any harm.”
“Oh dear.” Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha.
“What’s wrong?” I pinched her arm. “Tell me!”
“The first thing that’s wrong is that Sister Yeung died when you were two years old. She threw herself into the Huangpu River. The other thing that’s wrong, my child, is that faced with her ghost you felt no fear.”
I didn’t tell anybody else about the ghost amah. Sister Kwan did. Even after I made her swear repeatedly that she wouldn’t. Her betrayal sent prickles of rage up and down my spine. These Cantonese farm girls were no better than the water snakes that slithered through their paddy fields!
That evening, the amahs gathered in the kitchen with the cook and started boiling noxious mountain herbs and ground-up mutton bone. The entire house reeked of wet soil and rot, like a cemetery after the rains. Sticks of incense smoldered at the kitchen shrine. I begged the amahs to stop—the ghost meant me no harm! No harm at all! I tugged at Sister Kwan’s sleeve but she went on as if I weren’t there.
“Why are you doing this?” I moaned. “Was Sister Yeung a bad person? Tell me! I want to know. Come on, tell me about Sister Yeung!”
The twins were wailing, constipated, and carrying their potties, still attached to their bottoms, like musical chairs around the sitting room. Li chased them, though not in earnest. From her restless pacing upstairs, I could tell that Mother was in a foul mood. It would only be a matter of time before she found out what was going on downstairs. Father remained, as usual, oblivious. He sat in his study on his straight-backed, cushionless chair, nose stuck in a book of Tang dynasty poetry, fingers dancing to some private meter.
Mother clopped down the stairs in high heels. “What’s that infernal stench?” Her wrath was inevitable. “Sister Choon, what do you think you’re doing? Why aren’t you watching the babies? Ah Ying, where’s our dinner?”
The servants said nothing. It was the first time I’d seen them openly defy Mother. Sister Choon unwrapped twig
s, dried fungus, and unknowable black berries from paper parcels and handed them to Ah Ying, the cook, who pounded these things into smaller and smaller fragments with a stone pestle, then scraped the paste into the earthenware pot. Sister Kwan watched the bubbling cauldron, murmuring to herself, rubbing the bright orange rosaries in her hand.
“Ah Ying, I am speaking to you!” Mother stormed into the kitchen. “I paid good money for that duck and I expect to feed my family with it. Now clear out that pot and start cooking dinner. As for your incense, Sister Kwan, how many times have I told you I won’t have those things burning in my house?” She swiveled around and caught me hiding under the altar of the kitchen god. Her eyebrows twitched. “What are you doing here? Don’t tell me you’re part of this coven.”
“Let her be, madam.” It was Ah Ying who spoke, the usually wordless cook who always did as she was told and kept her eyes on the stove.
“What is this? Mutiny?” Mother grabbed my wrist and twisted it. I groaned.
“Madam,” Sister Choon said calmly. “Perhaps we should have explained our actions. We’re cleansing the house with a protection spell. You see, Sister Yeung returned last night. We don’t know what she wants, but we don’t want her causing any mischief.”
“Sister Yeung? What are you talking about? That woman died five years ago.”
“That’s precisely what we’re talking about. Her ghost was seen in this house last night. She must want something. You recall she didn’t exactly have a happy death.”
“Who’s responsible for these rumors?”
I held my breath and tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. Too late.
Sister Kwan turned to me. As her outstretched finger formed an accusation, I felt a burning hatred for her—her hypocrisy, her cowardice, her class. She averted her eyes.
Mother gave a harsh laugh. “And you grown women are foolish enough to believe the words of this little fantasist?” She went straight for the boiling pot and grabbed it with her bare hands. For a second I feared she would fling it at me, but instead she dumped its throbbing contents down the drain. The servants jerked back from the putrid steam.
“Enough is enough. Ah Ying, start cooking the duck. Sister Choon, please make the twins stop crying. And you,” she said to Sister Kwan, “give this girl a bath. A well-scrubbed child doesn’t make up stories.” Sister Kwan was slow to take her cue and Mother lost her patience. “Oh, forget it. I’ll bathe her myself. Just go and open some windows. I can’t bear this smell. You’re driving me insane, the lot of you.”
As she washed me, Mother made no mention of any ghost. To her, the whole thing had been a figment of my fevered imagination. I didn’t dare bring it up either. She cleaned me in grim silence, a maid scrubbing a stained spittoon, her thoughts so distant that she forgot I was made of flesh. I hated it when she bathed me. She was always unnecessarily hard, digging her nails into my scalp and rubbing the rough cloth across my back until I gripped the sides of the tub. But I never cried out or whined; I never wanted to give her any satisfaction from hurting me.
At one point, Li came to the doorway and stood watching us with meaningful silence, like someone who hadn’t been let in on a secret but wanted us to know he knew it anyway. He’d been strangely quiet since the park. Mother shooed him away with a light kiss.
As I dried myself, my skin still raw, she grabbed both my shoulders and forced me to look into her unaffectionate eyes.
“Sister Yeung was an unstable woman. Whatever happened, happened a long time ago. It’s all in the past. I don’t want you listening to any more of the amahs’ rubbish. They’re cheap, ignorant country girls, full of silly ideas. You are a city girl. You’re educated and come from a good home. If you believe their stories, then you’re no better than they are and I might as well give you away to the orphanage. Let me know if you want that, and I’ll tell the rickshaw man to take you there.”
After toweling dry my hair and putting me in pajamas, she sent me back downstairs with a hard smack on the bottom.
I scampered back to the kitchen area, where the servants were wordlessly and grimly preparing dinner. On tiptoes, I crept up slowly behind Sister Kwan, who was at the chopping board slicing ginger. I got as close as I could and then roared with all my might. She jumped and dropped the knife. “Aiyah!” Her left thumb began to bleed. I glowered at her as I made my cocky exit to the back door.
“You wicked child! You demon!”
In the back of the house, by our small garden patch, I found Cricket, our errand boy, tending to the lilies with complete disinterest. A chunky, sullen kid of about fifteen, he was supposedly Ah Ying’s adopted son, which meant he could have been anything from her nephew to a child beggar she’d taken in from the slums. Everybody called him Cricket because he spent all his spare time catching spiders and moths, yet for some inexplicable reason refused to touch crickets. He was my last hope; he’d been around the servants long enough that he might have overheard gossip about Sister Yeung. I rarely spoke to him because his position in the house was so ambiguous—he was young enough to be my brother, yet he was one of the servants. At the same time, he never displayed the deference to us the other servants did, so I never knew how to gauge him. Mother, on the other hand, made it plain she couldn’t stand his insolent face. To cut through the awkwardness, I bribed him with a box of matches printed with a picture of a half-naked girl. He fingered it awhile, then pocketed it.
He pulled out a newsboy’s cap from his pocket and put it on to hide the pink birthmark on his forehead. Sister Kwan had once joked it was shaped like a penis.
“They said she was always unhappy,” Cricket grunted in his thick Shanghainese patois. He unscrewed a glass jar and released a hairy black tarantula. Possibly to scare me, he let the creature run up and down his bare arm, where the thick flesh was mottled with bites and bruises, old and new.
“What else did they say?”
“She had a younger brother in Canton who swindled her out of her money. Blew it all on gambling”—he smirked—“and girls.”
“But why did she kill herself? It’s just money.”
“She was an old woman. It was her life savings. She’d set aside the money to build herself a house to retire in. They said she’d even found the perfect spot in her ancestral village. Next to a lake, supposedly, with lily pads so big you could sit on them. This was her dream. So you see, it wasn’t only about money. It’s about the trust lost between brother and sister.”
I imagined Li’s betrayal in the park amplified by ten, a hundred. And I remembered the hollow, empty feeling Sister Yeung had brought to my gut. I internalized her grief in an instant.
“You’re too well-off to know disappointment.” Cricket unleashed another spider onto his arm. He watched for my reaction. “People like you will never have empathy.”
“What do you think her ghost wants?”
“Sorry, Your Highness, I’ve told you what I know. I don’t believe in ghosts. I only believe in things my eyes can see and my hands can touch.”
“But I saw her myself, I swear.”
“The Song dynasty scholar Zhu Xi once said, ‘If you believe it, you will see it. If you don’t, you won’t.’” He brought both spiders so close to my face that I was staring into their multiple eyes. “Me, I don’t like scholars. I think they’re all sissies. So I say the opposite. I believe in spiders because I can see them. Want to touch?”
Over dinner that night, Mother’s revulsion for Father reached another of its increasingly frequent peaks. I think I was the only one in the house who ever registered her looks of nausea. In each grimace, she conveyed exactly what she thought of him—that he was worthless, unmanly—and betrayed her enormous self-pity, her sense that, deceived by his love poems and genteel manners, she’d married a pauper when she could have had a prince.
She sprang from the dinner table before her tears fell, and shot up the stairs.
“Bad stomach, Mother?” Father asked without looking up from his food.
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A door slammed.
Father turned to Li and me and shrugged. “Must be something she ate.”
We polished off the braised ginger duck, though it was awful; the amahs’ herbs had left a nasty aftertaste in the pot. I felt sure I could detect Sister Kwan’s blood in it.
After dinner, I went to play with the twins. They pretended to be baby pandas, fighting for choice bamboo—me—but I had other things on my mind. As soon as Father stepped outside for a cigarette and Li was taken upstairs for his bath, I abandoned the twins and rushed into the study.
I climbed into Father’s chair and sat at his rosewood desk, surveying his things. Framed photographs of the entire family lined the far edge. They were taken the year before in a studio in the American Settlement. We all appeared unnaturally stiff, posing against painted backdrops of trellises, sunsets, and Greek columns. There was one of Li and me flanking a cardboard cocker spaniel that even at the time I thought looked ridiculously fake. Father did his work surrounded by these pictures of us yet never paid us any attention when we were in the same room with him. A strange irony. But in these pictures, we were perfect: backs straight, hair groomed, clothes starched, smiles locked into place like a model army. It was probably how he preferred us—flat, silent, pocket-sized.
Pulling open the drawers, I located what I’d come for. Father’s Four Treasures. Not his four children, of course, but his calligraphy tools: a brush with purple rabbit’s fur, an ink stick made from compressed pine soot, an inkstone carved out of river rock, and finally, a ream of pure white writing paper. In one of his more affectionate moments, he’d told me that with these four portable Treasures, it would never matter where he was or how little money he had because he could always dream up a better world for himself in letters. It would take years before I stopped thinking that those were the ravings of a deluded old fool.