I. DON’T WORRY
Not yet. Especially since you just had your sixteenth birthday, and with it, gained your learner’s permit and sprouted a row of coarse wiry hair on your upper lip. Don’t worry, even when the book spines along your father’s shelves—mathematics titles and dissertation—flash scarlet red. Or when the family photos are replaced with an old man’s jolly, painted, and round face. “Aiya! Such a joker,” says your dad, after you called him over to look, and only your family’s unsmiling faces at Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, and Disneyland hang in the hallways. Don’t panic. Especially when the boy finally appears in the kitchen one breakfast, and your bones dissolve like the cereal in your bowl.
“Who are you?” you ask.
The boy’s shirt hangs off his skinny torso, and a rope squeezes his oversized pants against bony hips. The boy could be your younger brother if you weren’t the only child. The boy’s crooked nose reminds you of your father’s nose, which hangs to the left after being kicked by a water buffalo when he was younger. It’s one of the few stories your dad will tell you about his life in China. He won’t tell you much else.
The boy’s mouth opens and closes, but no sound comes out. And terrified as you are, you can’t help but want to help this boy, who is flailing his hands, asking you to come closer.
“What?” you say. “I can’t hear you.” You creep forward.
“Get out!” Your father’s shout cracks the air. At first you think your dad means you, but he rushes at the boy like he found a stray dog rooting in your garbage, and he grabs it by the arm. “Quiet! Be quiet!” your father yells as he yanks the boy out of the kitchen into another part of the house.
In the silence, you can only hear your thudding heart.
When your father returns into the kitchen, he says good morning to you and fills his teapot with hot water like nothing happened. When you ask him what happened, he tells you, “Nothing,” with a snap. Warning you to drop it, to ask no further questions. And seeing your wide eyes (you won’t cry, you’re too old for that), he becomes your baba again. Softer, kinder. “Bu yao dan xin.” Don’t worry. “It won’t happen again,” your dad promises.
Later that night, you tell your mother what happened as she stir fries chives for dinner. “Ting ni de baba,” she says. Listen to your father. And you know the conversation is over. That night, as you read in bed, your mother—younger and sadder—dips into your lamplight. You recognize her instantly from your mother’s old black and white passport photo: her thick-rimmed glasses, stylish bob, and collared blouse. Her first and last professional photo taken in Taiwan before she left for America to reunite with your father.
“Mom?” you call out, confused.
As if summoned, your true mother appears, an older and more familiar eclipse to whatever glows at your bedside. At the sight of her younger self, your mother’s fingers fly to her mouth and her face leeches white before your mother pounces. She waves her hands frantically, herding the spirit out of your room, afraid to touch it as she begs, “No, no, no. Shhh! Shhh! Please, be quiet, shhh…”
“What was that?” you ask once she sits on your bed. Your mother’s comforting weight sags the mattress, and you can smell a reassuring cloud of cold cream on the wrinkled ridges of her skin. And even though you’re too old, and she hasn’t done it in years, she tucks you in while her fingers shake. You clutch the blanket to your chin.
“Bu yao dan xin,” she says.
You do.
II. HANDLE IT
For several weeks after, your mother and father’s ghosts (you guess that’s the best word for them) appear at dinner time. They tower over your mom and dad, watching you eat, furiously moving their lips as if they want to partake in the meal. “Quiet,” your father repeats, over and over through gritted teeth, until finally your mom or your dad slams their chopsticks against the table and leave behind empty chairs to usher their ghost out of the kitchen. “Shut up! Shut up!” your dad yells at his. But the ghosts always reappear, taking their time to stroll from the door frame to dinner
“Enough,” your dad declares one day.
You’re accruing your learner’s permit hours so you’re the one who gets to drive the family to the classified ads shaman. You pull off Highway 85 into the same plaza with the better bakery. You pass by a row of glistening roasted ducks and flayed pork ribs, hanging in the supermarket window, to an office wedged in between a stationary store and milk tea café. Inside, a lone oscillating fan blows stale air and the smell of herbal tar. The clean linoleum floor, scuffed.
It turns out the shaman is also an acupuncturist. He offers both services. He bends over your mother and diagnoses her Lung Qi is blocked. He drops needles on your mother’s forehead, right between her eyes, and asks if she feels differently. She does not. When the shaman-slash-acupuncturist asks to examine your father, your dad grows irritated. “We are not the problem,” your father snaps. “Can you help us or not.”
The shaman leans back in his rolling chair, assessing your fuming father.
For three hundred dollars, your parents bring home pouches with instructions to hang them from curtain rods, or to tuck between the furniture and the walls. The dried plants emanate an earthy and dark scent like oil combed from fur. For extra good measure, your dad rededicates a living room corner as an ancestral altar. Photos of your grandparents are erected on the wall. “See?” your father gestures to the altar, the rooms. He stares down the ghosts, who linger in the doorway as if they’re afraid to approach. “Stay there,” he says.
It becomes your duty to dust the photo frames, clean the incense ash, and replace the fruit. In summer, you lay out apples. Persimmons in the fall. The house becomes quiet. You eat dinners, always under the mournful stares of the ghosts, but now the three of you are uninterrupted. There is less shouting, less pleas for silence from your parents from their ghosts.
Then, a bad day. The worst in a while. Your dad comes home, mentions how a man cut him off in traffic before the stranger yelled out his car window, “Go back to China!” Your father snorts, as if this is a joke but you can’t squeak out a laugh.
“He crazy,” continues your dad at dinner, but you feel a part of him tightening like an over tuned guitar string as you eat—your father twisting and twisting over his meal as he tries to make it funny. “’Go back to China’…he go back to China! See how long he lasts,” says your father. “He no survivor. He first to starve.” Your father’s smile is too wide as he tries again to alchemize the man’s words into a joke, and when your father comes across your backpack and textbooks scattered on the living room floor, the string inside him finally snaps. “Why did you make such a mess! Clean up!” he yells, picking up your pencils and folders, crushing paper in his rush.
You don’t feel their bodies—not even a soft brush against your toes even as they pile up. Sparrows, dead, pooling at your feet. Not even a feather you feel. Even as more bodies waterfall from the house’s popcorn ceiling, landing without sound, without feeling. The sparrows rise around your ankles and shins. And when you see your father’s ghost, smashing two pot lids together, making no noise but summoning more sparrow corpses around you and your father, you taste it. Fear. Like biting into a lemon.
You blink, and birds and boy are gone. You almost wonder if you had hallucinated it, if you are losing your mind except that you see your father’s drained and pale face. He is frozen, unmoving, until you call, “Baba.”
“Go watch tv,” your father tells you and leaves the room.
You heard from someone that rabbits don’t make a noise except for a death cry. One last breath, one warning scream. After the sparrows, you see that your parents know the truth about the ghosts: despite the altar and shaman’s herbs, the ghosts are more powerful. Your family had just one breath to fight, and your cry withered in the air.
The oranges shrivel on the offering plate, gathering dust. Your mother spends more time in bed; your father ignores the boy who stands next to the table while you and your father eat your meals in silence.
Bu yao dan xin. It’s said so often by your parents, it becomes a habit.
You tried not.
You still did.
III. KEEP IT QUIET
For temporary relief, leave the house. Outside, the air is warmer. Outside, spirits don’t slither around hallway corners, or watch you while you eat or try to sleep. Even Thanksgiving at your aunt’s house—with her weird couches covered in sticky plastic, and her repurposed Royal Dansk Danish Butter Cookie tins filled with sweet haw flakes, and salty sweet rice crackers—offers its own reprieve.
Cooking steam fogs every window in your aunt’s house. And over turkey and dumplings, you brace for your aunts’ and uncles’ questions about your college admission score and what school you plan to attend. It has to be a good school because your grandfather bribed a fisherman and buried the family in the belly of a trawler that took everyone away from village officials slicing off your neighbors’ ears and noses for not meeting grain quotas, away from family members eating their dead, away from soups made out of boiled bark and weeds.
Each generation underwent a cleaving from home. That had always been the key to your family’s future, you see. And where each separation took place, a new shoot grew in the wound, letting your family branch. First, along the shores of Taiwan, where the fishing boat regurgitated your grandfather, your father, your uncles and aunts onto the beach like a great whale, sending them to a new life. Then in gray airport terminals, where your father—the first to arrive in America—eventually pulled the rest of his siblings and your mother to California on student visas and sponsorships, like a magician pulling out a string of pearls out of Asia’s mud. Now, your elders ask, bending over you and your cousins, what will each of you do with your bright American lives?
Your stomach drops at the question right as the mahjong tiles clatter across the dining room table. You escape with your cousins to the game console in the living room. You all sink into bean bag chairs, watching on screen as a blocky hand points a pixelated gun at Russian spies. Your oldest cousin calls you upstairs to his bedroom and passes around a bottle of liquor. You each take a swig. Cinnamon burns your throat and stomach. There’s an electricity in the air, all you and your cousins together, sharing a secret. It makes you feel good enough to ask about another—“Do you guys see ghosts?”
“What do you mean?” they ask.
“At your house. Do you parents have them, too?”
Your cousins stare at you, confused, but before anyone can answer your father calls your name. He fills the doorway. Your oldest cousin tries to hide the bottle, but your dad doesn’t care about that. As your cousins squeeze past your father’s imposing frame, your dad beckons you over to wait him in the hallway until they all leave.
“What did you say to your cousins?” he asks. You don’t need to answer for him to know. He places a hand on your shoulder. “What we see in the house, that’s just for family. Between us, okay?”
“Aren’t they family?”
“You, me, and mama. We are family. Okay? Wo men yao mei mianzi. Our face is important to keep. We don’t need to bother uncle and auntie. Do you understand?”
You don’t, but you say okay and spend the right of the night talking about college, girls, video games—anything but about the ghosts with your cousins. Right after midnight, you use your newly gained driver’s license to drive you and your dad home. You place a tin-foiled plate filled with leftovers in the refrigerator as your father checks on your mother upstairs. You go them in their bedroom, where your father sits, rubbing your mom’s shoulders as she curls cocooned in bed.
Her ghost and your father’s ghost sit at the foot of the bed. You sit next to your parents.
“Did you have fun?” asks your mother, raising her face. It’s puffy and swollen from crying.
You nod. “Good,” she says. “Wo de baobei,” she says. Her strained smile breaks her face like a plate. And even though it’s been years since you ever thought about crawling into her lap, and because it’s only you three, you lay next to her and nestle close. And you, your father, and your mother stay together on the bed like that, taking in the detergent scent on your clothes and the shampoos in your hair as the places where your bodies touch grow warmer and warmer even as you all shiver under the cool witness of your parents’ ghosts.
IV. OK, NOW PANIC
You get into a school. Not a good one, but a school, which your cousins say is fine even though your aunt presses her lips and responds with a neutral, “Oh,” when you tell her. Your parents are proud—you think. They never say it. But your mother gets out of bed for your high school graduation, and on the day you move into the dorms, she packs Tupperware filled with so much sliced apples and mangos and pineapple, the fruit strains against their snapped covers. And after you and your father unload your luggage into your room, your new life, he slips you forty dollars and pats your shoulder while you watch other students hug their parents goodbye.
Your first party happens in a dorm room on a floor run by an apathetic RA. Hold warm beer that foams over your fingers when you open it. Before you left for college, you and your cousins bought keychain bottle openers at CVS as graduation gifts for yourselves. “We’re gonna party hard and fuck harder,” proclaimed your oldest cousin in the parking lot, and you felt giddy at the words flowing out of his mouth like they are benediction meant to catapult you into adulthood. You’re not sure if you’re still ready for all of what your cousin said, but you use your keychain to open a bottle for a girl with a slight overbite and blonde hair tucked behind her ears. She is cute.
“Thanks,” she says, smiling. She keeps tucking her falling hair behind her beautiful ears. You start chatting (You! Talking to girls!), and who you were before coming to college already feels like another person. The ghosts, your childhood—it grows as distant as a shoreline, each sip of beer pedaling you out further. You are both talking about what you want out of college, and when you joke about how bad the dorm food is, it makes the girl laugh and she leans against your arm. You want to sustain the magic.
“Makes you miss home. All you need is better food and someone yelling at the dinner table,” you say, grinning. It’s a joke. You wait for her to laugh at the punchline, to smile in agreement about how all fathers yell at the dinner table. But you watch in horror as her smile dims to something polite and you see her eyes grow—what? Uncomfortable? Sad?
“Oh,” she says noncommittally. “Yeah.”
And then you finally clock how she looks at you—with pity.
You excuse yourself to get more drinks for the both of you. You’re running out of beer. That’s it. You need to be drunker. And your father’s voice chants in your brain: Wo men yao mei mianzi. But you tell yourself that doesn’t matter here. You are a hundred miles away, talking to girls and living a different life. You don’t need to save face, you can wear a thousand faces, any face you’d like. You squeeze over to the mini fridge on the other side of the room and grab two dwindling bottles.
You turn and see yourself. Your high school self, frozen and plucked from time, In the middle of the room as all the other students dance and talk and flirt and laugh around you and the shadow of you. Everyone else is oblivious to the steely glare meant for your alone. Your muscles tense and you can only watch—heart pounding, feet leadening—as the ghost of yourselves unhinges a cavernous, black hole and screams.
Glass breaks and suddenly it’s just you at the party. People are staring. You realize the bottles in your hand are now on the floor, and one jean leg is wet from beer. To break the tension, you joke, “Oops! Did I do that?” The laughter is lukewarm.
You try to talk to the girl again, but for the rest of the night, you keep glancing over her shoulder for yourself.
“You okay?” she asks. “You’re kind of like, bugging out.”
You leave the party alone and wind through campus back to your dorm. The lampposts’ reflections spin in puddles, and the building’s silhouettes loom over you. A thousand eyes pull on your spine but you’re too scared to turn around. It feels like to look is it to give the ghost more permission. You swear it is there, following you. You can feel its toe brush your heels. It’s not there, you tell yourself, bu yao dan xin.
You run.
V. PRETEND NONE OF IT EVER HAPPENED
This will work for a time. You get high for the first time. Join a Christian group. Check out the fraternities. See if you can sing acapella. Find out you can’t. You swear it is working because you don’t see your ghost. You keep going to more parties. Flirt with the idea of not being a Math Asian and try majoring in Philosophy or Journalism or Sociology. Find out you don’t like any of those majors. Settle into the comfort of numbers and formulas in the Pre-Med track and feel embarrassed you’re not different.
“How is school?” asks your mother over the landline.
“Good,” you tell her.
“Are you coming home for Thanksgiving?”
“School’s busy right now, mom. Maybe Christmas,” you say.
That night, wake up to find your teenaged ghost sitting at the foot of your bed. He turns to you and you brace yourself for him to scream again, but he crawls across your sheets and you can only watch—frozen—as he reaches out towards your hand, like he wants to hold it. His mouth is moving, but panic’s high-pitched whine rings in your ears, and whatever he is saying is dwarfed by what you need to tell him. “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” you command.
You shove his hand away. You grab his arm and yank him into the closet. When the door slams, it jolts your roommate awake. “What’re you doing, dude?” he asks, groggy. You tell him nothing. For the rest of the night in bed, you stare at the closet door, willing it to weld shut.
Your ghost never follows you outside the dorms. Occasionally, he reappears again outside the closet—standing by your desk when you study, or by your bed when you’re about to sleep. You shove him in the closet whenever he appears until, finally, he stays there and you swear you can still see his pleading eyes through the louver door slats.
You spend as much time anywhere you can—the library, other people’s rooms, the gym – anywhere but your room. To this day, you swear your rage burned your footprints all over campus. Your Nike insoles singed into the quad grass, the classroom carpets. Every minute out of your room, all you can feel is fury. At your parents’ ghosts, your ghost. No one else has this problem, you are certain. So why you?
You telephone your parents less and less. “Give us call when you free,” says your dad over your voicemail machine. The red light blinks, begging you to play the message back.
You leave it.
VI. YOU CAN ONLY HOLD YOUR BREATH FOR SO LONG
Stay out late with your organic chemistry study group. Notice one of the girls in your group, Jennifer, whose blunt cut black bangs remind you of the girls you grew up with in your neighborhood. You know your cousins would high-five you if you ever dated a white girl, and Jennifer is definitely not white. But Jennifer feels comfortable, Jennifer feels familiar. And so go ahead, ask Jennifer out. Say yes when she suggests catching the seven o’clock showing of a martial arts movie for your first date.
Pay for the tickets, even a popcorn. After you find your seats and the trailers wrap up, discover the entire movie is in Chinese. Tears stream down your face as your parents’ language flows like a warm river from the theater speakers and washes over you. The dialogue carries you from the theater seats to watching Chinese soap operas about concubines and medieval nurses in the living room with your parents, to sitting cross-legged on the kitchen counter while your mother sang “Counttryyyyy ruh-ooooooad, take me hooooome,” into a pair of chopsticks with her perfectly imperfect English. It carries you even further still, until you are driving with your dad, just the two of you, on your way to pick up a copy of the Chinese newspaper, which he reads aloud to you in the parking lot before you drive home in the blueing dusk.
You cry throughout the entire film. You don’t want Jennifer to see so you minimize wiping your face and nose with your sleeve. Your hoodie grows wet with tears and clear snot. After the movie is over and the lights turn back on, explain to Jennifer that your red blotchy face are allergies and tell her you need to go home. Forget to call her for two weeks. Have it be awkward the next time you see each other at the study group until you eventually get phased out, and rumors recirculate back to you that, you? Well, you are an asshole.
VII. ASK YOURSELF
As the calendar bleeds closer to Christmas, one of your cousins swings down on his way home for winter break. He scores a fake ID and so you swill down hard lemonade together in your dorm before you take him to the local hot dog joint. While you lick a napkin and try to worry ketchup out of your shirt, your cousin asks, “So when you planning to go back home?”
“I gotta finish finals first.”
“When’s that?
You imagine your parent’s ghosts. See, once again, the blackhole of your unhooked jaw. You hear the high, wild screaming.
“I’m not sure,” you say.
Gauzed streetlight shines through the smudged window behind your cousin’s head. And when he asks you his next question, his tone isn’t unkind. “Don’t you miss your parents?”
VIII. GO HOME
Your father greets you in the car, parked in the BART station’s pool of orange light. Inside the car, you scan him for any changes in the half year since you’ve seen him. He smiles the same. “You look taller,” he remarks. You’re pretty sure you haven’t grown.
Your stomach twists each time you countdown the high exits to your town, and when the mall signs greet you, winking red hellish letters, your intestines feel like a ribbon of needles. The garage door opens up and swallows you and your father into the house. As you reach for the pair of slippers your father hands you, he suddenly rubs the back of your head. “It good to have you back,” he says. You scalp tingles as if combed by lightning.
Inside, the house is clean. Inside, star of anise and caramelized soy sauce spice the air You hear your mother before you see her. “Zhe shi shei. Zhe shi wo erzi ma?” She hugs you and you settle against her body. You inspects you and pronounce you too skinny. She forces you to sit. All your favorite dishes stretch across the kitchen table’s horizon. Shiny cabbage and scallions tangle in glassy rice noodles, candied walnuts and fried shrimp glisten with mayonnaise, a covered pot of soup sits on a burnt oven mitt. On the stove, you can hear the pak-pak-pak-pak of steam escaping a clay pot as rice crisps inside with meat. Your father fetches the drinks, pulling out a liter bottle of Sprite, chilled like champagne.
“Welcome home,” he says.
You settle in as your father pours the glasses. Your mother carries the clay pot over with a toweled hand. “Make sure to eat,” she says and removes the lid.
Thousands of maggots writhe in the rice. In the center, a pulsing and glistening heart beats as the dish steams. Your mother takes her seat and as if on cue, the ghosts of your parents stand behind where they sit. They rest their hands on your mother and father’s shoulders. Their lips move frantically, feverishly—but again, you cannot hear them. You feel, instead, a hand on your own shoulder.
You don’t need to turn around to know whose hand it is. You don’t need to turn around to know it finally escaped from your dorm closet.
You mother stares over your shoulder, her eyebrows tented together as she takes in your ghost. Her small mouth frowns. A trickle of sweat runs down your father’s face as he ignores the heart and the ghosts that surround you. And for a minute, watching your father, you wonder if you are imagining it all. If you have lost your mind and are the only one who sees what’s happening, but you glimpse the tremble in his hand as he picks up the serving spoon.
“Kuai dian chi,” urges your father, gesturing to the heart.
The thudding heart grows louder and louder, until the walls of the house throb in time. The doors evaporate and you understand now they will forever be with you, these ghosts. No matter where you run or how long you stay away. Yours will follow you from your parents’ house, back to the dorms, and to wherever you go next.
Your father takes a spoon and scoops into the heart.
It becomes shredded beef and crispy rice as he services it on your plate.
“Go on,” he urges. “Eat.”
IX. LISTEN
You help with the dishes, washing away the meal down the sink. When the last plate is slotted into the drying rack, your mom rests a papery hand against your cheek. “It’s so good to have you home,” your mom says to you. “I wish you come more often, but I know must not be easy with school…and your baba and I, we,” she pauses. She stares past you like the words she needs are behind you.
“It’s not easy,” she tries again. “Be happy, okay?”
“Okay, mom.”
She pats your cheek gently.
Later, when the last Chinese news segment broadcasts, and the television flickers off, crackling cool, you tell your parents to go ahead upstairs as you take care of the lights. You hear them shuffle up the stairs, slow with sleep.
You turn off the last lamp when you see them in the backyard. The ghosts, together in a row on the backyard bench. A little boy, a young woman, and you. A strange family, transparent in the dark night. As you watch them, you hear the story of your family play in your mind. Each generation underwent a cleaving from home, you remind yourself, and you open the screen door and pad barefoot into the backyard.
Outside, under the moon, you step onto the wet grass and the ghosts of your parents rush to you, moving their soundless mouths, desperate to be heard. You know you cannot help them, cannot hear them if they try to talk to you, and you move past them. You approach yourself sitting on the bench. Your ghosts looks at your with wet eyes.
Now that you are here, it no longer needs to scream for your attention. You take the seat next to it. Breathe in the heavy cold air.
You do not flee a starving farm into a fishing trawler, nor do you board a plane to a country whose language you do not speak, whose people you do not know you nor fully understand you. But when your ghost reaches for your hand, you hold it, and it feels as soft as fertile soil.
“What do you want to say?” you ask.
And finally, with your permission, it turns to you and speaks.
