Kat Chow - Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir

Copyright 2021 by Kat Chow

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First Edition: August 2021

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The Exodus and A Bird in Chile, and Elsewhere are from Ghost Of 2018 by Diana Khoi Nguyen. The poems appear with the permission of Omnidawn Publishing. All rights reserved.

LCCN: 2021939238

ISBNs: 978-1-5387-1632-8 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-1630-4 (ebook)

E3-20210708-PC-DA-COR
E3-20210607-NF-DA-ORI

For my mother, who guides everything that I do.

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Like many of the ghost stories Ive grown up with, this one needs to start with a death.

So let me begin with this: The first time you faced a dead body, you were a little girl. You told me this when I was eight. I perched on your lap. We were at the kitchen table on a weekend afternoon with plates of mostly eaten cheung fun and bowls lined with the sticky residue of juk clustered in front of us. Caroline and Steph started to clear the table, chattering about whatever concerned high schoolers. Daddy retreated to the family room. I dont know how you settled on this topic.

As you spoke, I imagined you in a village somewhere in southern China. Gray, boxy buildings worn from decades of rain and sun; sheets of green and beige beneath the fog: rice paddies and farms, overgrown grass reaching toward the pale sky. I know now that this specific image from my childhood is wrong. I probably lifted it from a story Daddy told me about his childhood. Or maybe I saw it in a movie, some vague landscape with a pi-pa playing in the background. Kids, so impressionable, always picking up the most subtle things, like the way you slurped your soup or sighed when stressed. I swear to God or the gods or goddesses or whomever that eighty-five percent of my personality traits are yours that I saw and held on to as a kid, the remaining fifteen percent a result of the fallout of your death.

Now that Im old enough to ask questions, I know that day when you found the dead body, you were likely living in Hong Kong.

In my vision of you, your hair was cut short but long enough for your older sister, my yi ma, to pull into pigtails before you went to school. Ive pictured your child self this way ever since I saw a photo of you on a beach with Yi Ma and a cousin. The water is a gray slant that stretches behind you. You are maybe four, and Yi Ma clutches your hand as if to keep you still. There is something mischievous on your face, your gaze distant like youre lost in thought.

That day you saw the dead body, mist rose off of the grass and dew collected on your shoes.

You were all alone on the path to school, which youd ventured down many times before. It was eerie in my imagination. You were on the precipice of danger, though I dont know if, in your reality, you felt threatened. The sun was higher than normal because you were late, and it reminded you to walk faster.

I passed by this bush, you told me, and I saw this hand on the ground.

I pictured, emerging from an overgrown hedge, a set of fingers attached to a forearm attached to an elbow attached to a real human.

There was a person, you said.

I cant recall whom you found, if they were old or young, if their eyes were open wide or shut tight, if there was blood or just gray skin. I wish that I remembered these details, if you shared them with me in the first place. I do recall, though, that you said you knew immediately that the person was dead.

You ran.

Your voice split into a scream as you pumped your legs and raced toward your school, the morning quiet around you.

When I think of this younger version of you, I see with dread what will surface in your life: the strains of immigration, motherhood, money, and then cancer.

But let me correct your memory now, Mommy. Or maybe, let me correct mine: That is not the first time you saw a dead body. The first time you saw a dead body, you were only four years old. It was your own mother.

You lived most of your life not knowing the woman who created you, and I wonder if that terrified you the way just the thought of it terrifies me. I dont even know what your mother looked like. When I try to conjure an image of her, I only see an absence.

* * *

There is a memory I summon to recall how you look: You stood nearly naked by your bedroom closet. Your underwear was giant and saggy around your ass and speckled with little holes. You rolled pantyhose over your calves, careful not to tear them with your fingernails, which youd grown long and filed at the ends so they were round. Your stretch marks were little white veins that ran all over your body. You were not self-conscious. I understood as I looked at you that our bodies were similar, that I was an extension of you, that I came from you, that I could one day become like you.

I watched as you tugged the nylons up and up and up your legs and over your thighs and then your hips until they were taut. Id witnessed this morning ritual as you readied yourself for work so many times from my seat on the floor, you towering above, a little shy of five feet. You leaned back and asked me to zip your dress or fasten a clasp, and eagerly I obliged, wanting any chance to help you.

Your hair was cropped and wavy. You always told us how unusual your hair was in a way that makes me uncertain today whether you liked being unique or resented it.