The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (9 page)

Maybe my mother’s secret place was the room in the dormitory which was haunted. Even though they had to crowd the other rooms, none of the young women would sleep in it. Accustomed to nestling with a bedful of siblings and grannies, they fitted their privacy tighter rather than claim the haunted room as human territory. No one had lived in it for at least five years, not since a series of hauntings had made its inhabitants come down with ghost fear
that shattered their brains for studying. The haunted ones would give high, startled cries, pointing at the air, which sure enough was becoming hazy. They would suddenly turn and go back the way they had come. When they rounded a corner, they flattened themselves fast against the building to catch what followed unawares moving steadily forward. One girl tore up the photographs she had taken of friends in that room. The stranger with arms hanging at its sides who stood beside the wall in the background of the photograph was a ghost. The girl would insist there had been nobody there when she took the picture. “That was a Photo Ghost,” said my mother when the students talked-story. “She needn’t have been afraid. Most ghosts are only nightmares. Somebody should have held her and wiggled her ears to wake her up.”

My mother relished these scare orgies. She was good at naming—Wall Ghost, Frog Spirit (frogs are “heavenly chickens”), Eating Partner. She could find descriptions of phenomena in ancient writings—the Green Phoenix stories, “The Seven Strange Tales of the Golden Bottle,” “What Confucius Did Not Talk About.” She could validate ghost sightings.

“But ghosts can’t be just nightmares,” a storyteller protested. “They come right out into the room. Once our whole family saw wine cups spinning and incense sticks waving through the air. We got the magic monk to watch all night. He also saw the incense tips tracing orange figures in the dark—ideographs, he said. He followed the glow patterns with his inkbrush on red paper. And there it was, a message from our great-grandfather. We needed to put bigger helpings and a Ford in front of his plaque. And when we did, the haunting stopped immediately.”

“I like to think the ancestors are busier than that,” my mother said, “or more at rest. Yes, they’re probably more at rest. Perhaps it was an animal spirit that was bothering your house, and your grandfather had something to do with chasing it off.” After what she thought was a suitably tactful pause, she said, “How do we know that ghosts are the
continuance of dead people? Couldn’t ghosts be an entirely different species of creature? Perhaps human beings just die, and that’s the end. I don’t think I’d mind that too much. Which would you rather be? A ghost who is constantly wanting to be fed? Or nothing?”

If the other storytellers had been reassuring one another with science, then my mother would have flown stories as factual as bats into the listening night. A practical woman, she could not invent stories and told only true ones. But tonight the younger women were huddling together under the quilts, the ghost room with its door open steps away.

“Did you hear that?” someone would whisper. And sure enough, whenever their voices stilled simultaneously, a thump or a creak would unmistakably sound somewhere inside the building. The girls would jump closer together giggling.

“That was the wind,” my mother would say. “That was somebody who fell asleep reading in bed; she dropped her book.” She neither jumped nor giggled.

“If you’re so sure,” said an impertinent girl, perhaps the one with the disdainful chin, “why don’t you go out there and take a look?”

“Of course,” said my mother. “I was just thinking about doing that,” and she took a lamp and left her friends, impressed, in a dimmer room. She advanced steadily, waking the angular shadows up and down the corridor. She walked to both ends of the hallway, then explored another wing for good measure. At the ghost room, door open like a mouth, she stopped and, stepping inside, swung light into its corners. She saw cloth bags in knobby mounds; they looked like gnomes but were not gnomes. Suitcases and boxes threw shadow stairs up the walls and across the floor. Nothing unusual loomed at her or scurried away. No temperature change, no smell.

She turned her back on the room and slowly walked through one more wing. She did not want to get back too soon. Her friends, although one owes nothing to friends,
must be satisfied that she searched thoroughly. After a sufficiently brave time, she returned to the storytellers. “I saw nothing,” she said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of in the whole dormitory, including the ghost room. I checked there too. I went inside just now.”

“The haunting begins at midnight,” said the girl with the adamantine chin. “It’s not quite eleven.”

My mother may have been afraid, but she would be a dragoness (“my totem, your totem”). She could make herself not weak. During danger she fanned out her dragon claws and riffied her red sequin scales and unfolded her coiling green stripes. Danger was a good time for showing off. Like the dragons living in temple eaves, my mother looked down on plain people who were lonely and afraid.

“I’m so sleepy,” my mother said. “I don’t want to wait up until midnight. I’ll go sleep in the ghost room. Then if anything happens, I won’t miss it. I hope I’ll be able to recognize the ghost when I see it. Sometimes ghosts put on such mundane disguises, they aren’t particularly interesting.”

“Aiaa. Aiaa,” the storytellers exclaimed. My mother laughed with satisfaction at their cries.

“I’ll call out if something bad happens to me,” she said. “If you come running all together, you will probably be able to scare any ghost away.”

Some of them promised to come; some offered their talismans—a branch from a peach tree, a Christian cross, a red paper with good words written on it. But my mother refused them all. “If I take charms, then the ghost will hide from me. I won’t learn what kind of ghost it is, or whether or not a ghost lives in there at all. I’ll only bring a knife to defend myself and a novel in case I get bored and can’t sleep. You keep the charms; should I call for help, bring them with you.” She went to her own room and got weapon and book, though not a novel but a textbook.

Two of her roommates walked her to the ghost room. “Aren’t you afraid?” they asked.

“What is there to be afraid of?” she asked. “What could
a ghost do to me?” But my mother did pause at the door. “Listen,” she said, “if I am very afraid when you find me, don’t forget to tweak my ears. Call my name and tell me how to get home.” She told them her personal name.

She walked directly to the back of the room, where the boxes formed a windowseat. She sat with the lamp beside her and stared at her yellow and black reflection in the night glass. “I am very pretty,” she thought. She cupped her hands to the window to see out. A thin moon pricked through the clouds, and the long grass waved. “That is the same moon that they see in New Society Village,” she thought, “the same stars.” (“That is the same moon that they see in China, the same stars though shifted a little.”)

When she set the lamp next to the bed, the room seemed darker, the uncurtained window letting in the bare night. She wrapped herself well in her quilt, which her mother had made before dying young. In the middle of one border my grandmother had sewn a tiny satin triangle, a red heart to protect my mother at the neck, as if she were her baby yet.

My mother read aloud; perhaps the others could hear how calmly. The ghost might hear her too; she did not know whether her voice would evoke it or disperse it. Soon the ideographs lifted their feet, stretched out their wings, and flew like blackbirds; the dots were their eyes. Her own eyes drooped. She closed her book and turned off the lamp.

A new darkness pulled away the room, inked out flesh and outlined bones. My mother was wide awake again. She became sharply herself—bone, wire, antenna—but she was not afraid. She had been pared down like this before, when she had travelled up the mountains into rare snow—alone in white not unlike being alone in black. She had also sailed a boat safely between land and land.

She did not know whether she had fallen asleep or not when she heard a rushing coming out from under the bed. Cringes of fear seized her soles as something alive, rumbling, climbed the foot of the bed. It rolled over her and landed bodily on her chest. There it sat. It breathed airlessly,
pressing her, sapping her. “Oh, no. A Sitting Ghost,” she thought. She pushed against the creature to lever herself out from underneath it, but it absorbed this energy and got heavier. Her fingers and palms became damp, shrinking at the ghost’s thick short hair like an animal’s coat, which slides against warm solidity as human flesh slides against muscles and bones. She grabbed clutches of fur and pulled. She pinched the skin the hair grew out of and gouged into it with her fingernails. She forced her hands to hunt out eyes, furtive somewhere in the hair, but could not find any. She lifted her head to bite but fell back exhausted. The mass thickened.

She could see the knife, which was catching the moonlight, near the lamp. Her arm had become an immensity, though, too burdensome to lift. If she could only move it to the edge of the bed, perhaps it would fall off and reach the knife. As if feeding on her very thoughts, the ghost spread itself over her arm.

A high ringing sound somewhere had grown loud enough so that she heard it, and she understood that it had started humming at the edge of her brain before the ghost appeared. She breathed shallowly, panting as in childbirth, and could not shout out. The room sang, its air electric with the ringing; surely someone would hear and come help.

Earlier in the night, on the other side of the ringing, she could hear women’s voices talking. But soon their conversations had ceased. The school slept. She could feel that the souls had gone travelling; there was a lightness not in the dormitory during the day. Without looking at the babies on her back or in their cribs, she had always been able to tell—after the rocking and singing and bedtime stories and keeping still not to startle them—the moment when they fell asleep. A tensing goes out of their bodies, out of the house. Beyond the horror in the ghost room, she felt this release throughout the dormitory. No one would come to see how she was doing.

“You will not win, Boulder,” she spoke to the ghost. “You do not belong here. And I will see to it that you leave. When morning comes, only one of us will control this room, Ghost, and that one will be me. I will be marching its length and width; I will be dancing, not sliding and creeping like you. I will go right out that door, but I’ll come back. Do you know what gift I will bring you? I’ll get fire, Ghost. You made a mistake haunting a medical school. We have cabinets full of alcohol, laboratories full. We have a communal kitchen with human-sized jars of oil and cooking fat, enough to burn for a month without our skipping a single fried meal. I will pour alcohol into my washbucket, and I’ll set fire to it. Ghost, I will burn you out. I will swing the bucket across the ceiling. Then from the kitchen my friends will come with the lard; when we fire it, the smoke will fill every crack and corner. Where will you hide, Ghost? I will make this room so clean, no ghost will ever visit here again.

“I do not give in,” she said. “There is no pain you can inflict that I cannot endure. You’re wrong if you think I’m afraid of you. You’re no mystery to me. I’ve heard of you Sitting Ghosts before. Yes, people have lived to tell about you. You kill babies, you cowards. You have no power over a strong woman. You are no more dangerous than a nesting cat. My dog sits on my feet more heavily than you can. You think this is suffering? I can make my ears ring louder by taking aspirin. Are these all the tricks you have, Ghost? Sitting and ringing? That is nothing. A Broom Ghost can do better. You cannot even assume an interesting shape. Merely a boulder. A hairy butt boulder. You must not be a ghost at all. Of course. There are no such things as ghosts.

“Let me instruct you, Boulder. When Yen, the teacher, was grading the provincial exams one year, a thing with hair as ugly as yours plopped itself on his desk. (That one had glaring eyes, though, so it wasn’t blind and stupid like you.) Yen picked up his ferule and hit it like a student. He chased it around the room. (It wasn’t lame and lazy.) And
it vanished. Later Yen taught us, ‘After life, the rational soul ascends the dragon; the sentient soul descends the dragon. So in the world there can be no ghosts. This thing must have been a Fox Spirit.’ That must be just what you are—a Fox Spirit. You are so hairy, you must be a fox that doesn’t even know how to transform itself. You’re not clever for a Fox Spirit, I must say. No tricks. No blood. Where are your hanged man’s rotting noose and icy breath? No throwing shoes into the rafters? No metamorphosis into a beautiful sad lady? No disguises in my dead relatives’ shapes? No drowned woman with seaweed hair? No riddles or penalty games? You are a puny little boulder indeed. Yes, when I get my oil, I will fry you for breakfast.”

She then ignored the ghost on her chest and chanted her lessons for the next day’s classes. The moon moved from one window to the other, and as dawn came, the thing scurried off, climbing quickly down the foot of the bed.

She fell asleep until time for school. She had said she was going to sleep in that room, and so she did.

She awoke when the students came tumbling into the room. “What happened?” they asked, getting under the quilt to keep warm. “Did anything happen?”

“Take my earlobes, please,” said my mother, “and pull them back and forth. In case I lost any of my self, I want you to call me back. I was afraid, and fear may have driven me out of my body and mind. Then I will tell you the story.” Two friends clasped her hands while a third held her head and took each earlobe between thumb and forefinger, wiggling them and chanting, “Come home, come home, Brave Orchid, who has fought the ghosts and won. Return to To Keung School, Kwangtung City, Kwangtung Province. Your classmates are here waiting for you, scholarly Brave Orchid. Come home. Come home. Come back and help us with our lessons. School is starting soon. Come for breakfast. Return, daughter of New Society Village, Kwangtung Province. Your brother and sisters call you. Your friends call you. We need you. Return to us. Return
to us at the To Keung School. There’s work to do. Come back, Doctor Brave Orchid, be unafraid. Be unafraid. You are safe now in the To Keung School. All is safe. Return.”