THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GHOST AND GHOST AND GHOST
Brandon Toh | Essays, swamp pink Prize
Ghost
鬼[1]
人所归 All men return to
ghostliness
为鬼
in death,
to don their macabre masks
从人，象鬼头
and in so
unbalances their mortal figure.
鬼阴气贼害 All men in ghostliness
harm the living
从厶 and are helpless
in stopping their harming.
凡鬼之属
Ghosts hide in plain sight
皆从鬼
in all ghostly things.
***
I began translating these dictionary entries of ghostly things around the time my father got his prognosis, a kind of coincidence that probably happens all the time, tenuous and rarely momentous.
Late-stage liver cancer, though his first scan was couched in medicalese and explained in non-committal language – suboptimal inspiration, slightly nodular opacity, linear atelectasis, no pleural effusion or pneumothorax…[2]
He was hospitalised for ascites initially, his stomach having bloated up to a disproportionate size that bordered on body horror, veins showing through liver-spotted skin pulled taut. An incision was made on his belly, and a tube was inserted to drain the fluid over two days.
Obesity, high blood pressure, chronic hepatitis, and diabetes long ate away at his health, bolstered by his smoking, late nights, love for oily food, and sedentary cab driver life. Despite that, and despite the array of pills he took every day, he rarely went for checkups. He already knew the endpoint of ill health, and it looked similar to the endpoint of any other life.
***
鬼变也。
Even ghosts
change constantly.
从鬼化声。
***
My grandmother’s wake lasted three days at the void deck[3] of her old flat. We had to keep a small fire burning in a metal basin next to her casket throughout the wake, a beacon to remind my grandmother’s ghost where home, her body, was, should she wander off. We kept vigil in shifts, but still we dozed off a few times, and let the fire die for a while. During one of his smoke breaks, my father muttered, “Now I’m finally done with my duty as a son.”
Then, the cremation. We watched from behind a window one floor above as the casket was wheeled into the furnace. Most tears were shed here. After that, we took turns to pick up pieces of bone to place into an urn, and scattered her ashes at sea, south of Pulau Semakau. On the boat, my aunt said, “There you go, off to paradise,” as my grandmother’s ashes dissolved into the similarly grey waters. I recalled how my grandmother would say that someone “had returned to China” as a euphemism for death when children asked her where an old friend or relative had gone. Perhaps that was why she wanted a sea burial.
But the currents followed the boat back to Singapore’s shores, transformed into waves clawing at the dirty beach.
***
䰡
Vengeful spirits,
厉鬼也。
too easily forgotten,
从鬼失声。
rings of
loss.
***
孟姜女 lived under the Qin Dynasty, the early beginnings of a unified empire, of 2.3 million square kilometres of land diverse in people and climes, under the charge of an immortality-obsessed man[4] who reduced all of them to be the same in different ways.
But this is not a story about him. This is 孟姜女’s story.
It is said that on the night of her wedding, or the morning after consummation, or three days later, no one can say for sure, you know how these old stories go, her husband was summoned to the north. Forced to serve as corvee labour to build the Great Wall thousands of miles from home.
He sent no letters home in the weeks or months or seasons that followed. Worried about him and how bitterly cold it got up north, 孟姜女 packed some winter clothes and walked. And walked. And walked and walked. And arrived at the Great Wall, months later, just in time for winter.
She asked an official, or a soldier, or another labourer where her husband was, and was told that he had died. Of dysentery, or overwork, or another disease. He was buried under a mass grave with other labourers who died of dysentery, and overwork, and other diseases. 孟姜女 asked where the grave was and found out that a fresh section of the Great Wall was built atop it after the officials drew a new curve in the empire’s border.
And so she cried – through the night, for a day, three days, a week, or perhaps two. Her sorrow welled up as tears, welled up into a violent flood. The flood collapsed hundreds or thousands of miles of wall, and revealed that every inch of wall was held up by a foundation of bone.
The Great Wall, which fended off the Mongols, held no power against a woman’s grief.
***
孟姜女 made a prayer to the heavens, or maybe she didn’t, to help her find her husband’s bones. She removed her hairpin. Hair fell. With a prick, she drew blood from finger, the blood let drip onto every skeleton she saw. Bleed, prick, bleed, prick, didn’t matter whether it healed right, till blood found the one skeleton into which it seeped deep. She had found her husband.
Again she cried, no flood this time. She covered her husband in winter clothes, before burying him under bare soil.
The immortality-obsessed man, in admiration of 孟姜女’s fervour and sheer beauty, desired her as concubine.
She agreed, but only if he had a monk chant sutra for 49 days (or held a 49-day wake), attended the burial himself (or with all his officials in tow), and built a terrace 49 feet tall on a riverbank (or seaside cliff).
The immortality-obsessed man agreed.
49 days later, on the new terrace, the immortality-obsessed man stood ready to claim 孟姜女 as his. Yet she cursed him. Cursed the violence he wrought. Cursed the bloody fissures left behind whenever he marked out land to call his own. Cursed the ease with which he could’ve done right. Cursed his trembling hands, his silver-pale skin. Cursed his empire, held up by legions of anonymous ghosts, all of them too far from home. She cursed him, then threw herself into the river, or sea.
Another ghost. Always, another ghost. You know how these old stories go.
***
Monster,
魑魅
鬼属。 从鬼
Ghosts are
the click of a closing door
are
the rhythm
of fading footsteps
从离，
are
the shadows 离亦声。
of the old tree outside
the window,
或从未声。 frayed branches swaying.
Cross your eyes 异体鬽
老精物也。and see monsters
sprouting hair, hair, hair from 从鬼、彡。
彡，鬼毛。 frayed edges.
***
To identify ghost and ghost and ghost, place them against light however dim and check for shadows. Check for the absence of shadows, for ghost and ghost and ghost cast none. Ghost and ghost and ghost are defined by the presence of absence, like the imperceptible chill of a feeble breeze, like my uncle whom I’ve only known as a stranger’s name carved into an ancestral tablet the size of a grown man’s palm.
Every year, when my grandmother was still around, my family would visit the temple with her to offer the ghost joss sticks and food. “Who is he?” I asked on a few occasions. My parents and grandmother would mumble in response, their answers strained through another ghost into incomprehensible whispers.
Then, over a decade later, my grandmother passed away. My mother, waiting for the lift with me to clean up my grandmother’s old flat, lamented the matriarch’s harsh life – her separation from a gambling addict of a husband, her three surviving children who had nothing to show for hard lives endured, her eldest son who died in a fire to save her, and her third son, the one who was the first to go, who jumped to his death.
“Mm,” I replied, not knowing how differently each ghostly thing weighed in my grandmother’s heart, or if she ever despaired. I didn’t dare ask why my uncle jumped, though I suspect no one knows. The reason, the actual reason hiding underneath the clinical trappings of a “depressive episode”, is a ghost.
Ghost and ghost and ghost – my uncle, his unspeakableness, the reason.
I hold them gingerly against light, but still only the living cast shadows. Ghost and ghost and ghost, it seems, wholly exist in that slim blur where penumbras cross.
***
魍魉
monster
从虫网声
从虫兩声。
蛧蜽，
Ghosts are 《国語》曰：
creatures are
monsters
hidden in 山川之
mountains in
rivers in
精物也。 trees in 「木石之怪
stones. 夔蛧蜽。」
淮南王說：
The king of Huainan said,
蛧蜽，状如三岁小兒，
“They look like 3-year-olds,
赤黑色，
skin dark as a swallow’s tail,
赤目，
eyes deep crimson,
長耳，
ears stretched long,
美发。
hair soft and beautiful.”
***
孟婆 Soup
1 drop – tear from a newborn
2 strings – tears of the elderly
3 parts – tears of suffering
4 cups – tears of regret
5 inches – tears of yearning
6 bowls – tears from illness
7 metres – tears from parting
8 drops – 孟婆’s tears
Stir well. Simmer for a lifetime to remove bitterness. 孟婆, an official of the heavens, waits on one end of the Naihe Bridge in the underworld, serving this soup to every reincarnating ghost. They will forget their whole past and they will cross the bridge to enter new lives, burdened by neither old joys nor bygone pains.
***
As folk legends are wont to do, the figures of 孟姜女 and 孟婆 got conflated over time. Some version of their story says that the heavens, moved by 孟姜女’s devotion to her husband, spared her from the infinite suffering of reincarnation and the karmic cycle. She came up with the recipe for the soup so that she could forget her husband, and was then stationed at the Naihe Bridge to grant all ghosts the gift of amnesia. It is unclear whether the soup can grant 孟婆 the same gift.
***
It is said that the spirit of the deceased would come home one last time seven days after death. Some families would scatter flour on the floor the night before to capture the spirit’s footprints. My family didn’t do that. Finding out whether my grandmother returned wouldn’t provide any answer to the questions she left behind. How did she find the strength to keep going? Did she suffer in her final weeks in the hospital bed? Have we done enough for her, for each other over the many long years to be at peace with the quiet devastation that followed every loss? I imagine what her footprints would look like – small, light, and irregular, her limp due to a bad fall a few years after the fire. I can’t remember how she moved before the limp.
My family didn’t bother with the flour. The clean-up would have been too cumbersome.
***
魘
Nightmare
㝱惊也。
A dream with
an unpleasant twist.
从鬼厌声。
***
It is also said that the deceased could visit the living in dreams over the seven days after death. A last chance for ghosts to say all the things, the consolations and requests, left to be said.
***
My father refused to offer joss sticks to my grandmother in the days following the cremation. He found it tedious and didn’t see the point. Ghosts reincarnate into new lives after death.
We offer joss sticks and burn offerings to no one but our guilt.
Guilt over things we should’ve done – taking her to her favourite restaurant more often, sharing our daily moments of joy with her, letting her know we were glad to be there for her…
My father abhorred this idyllic delusion of what could have been. He knew the hunky-dory scene to be impossible even if time turned back. My grandmother was acerbic in the way she carried herself. She’d ask about work, studies, or health, and could not hide the disappointment in her eyes when she yielded, unchangingly, the same answer. Things were always, always fine. Just fine.
And my father, as well as his two remaining siblings, long built up a pattern of avoiding her, even when they were in the same room. He, for the most part, didn’t believe in ghosts the way many around him did.
But on the seventh day after her death, my father leapt out of bed. He told us to get ready so we could head to the columbarium to offer joss sticks.
My grandmother had appeared in his dream the previous night.
***
鬾
What do you call the clothes
鬼服也。
on a ghost’s back?
Or the ghost of a young child
一曰小儿鬼。 who leaps off a chair
从鬼支声。
(wooden legs creaking
from the jolt).
《韩诗传》曰： Who met those two women
「郑交甫逢二女，
鬾服。」 wearing ghostly clothes?
***
Another practice my father abhorred – burning offerings. He didn’t understand why, if ghosts were supposed to reincarnate after death, they would need money in Hell[5].
He didn’t understand why ghosts would need macroeconomic systems. What would they buy with the infinitely inflating money burned, when we also burn mansions, complete with servants and luxury cars, for them? He didn’t understand why the joss paper industry would follow capitalism’s rallying cry to innovate, creating paper versions of credit cards, Louis Vuitton bags, sports jerseys, and iPhones packaged in convenient-to-burn cardboard boxes. He didn’t understand why the immaterial would have material wants. He didn’t understand why it had to be burned, why it had to be fire, year after year.
He didn’t understand why his eldest brother would go back into a house on fire after he already managed to escape with my grandmother.
She said he wanted to get some water to put out the fire. She said she should’ve stopped him.
***
魃
The ghosts of drought
旱鬼也。从鬼犮声。
left barren homes in their wake.
《周礼》有赤魃氏，除墙屋之物也。
We once sang a melody lost to time
《诗》曰：
about these ghosts,
「旱魃为虐。」
about suffering wrought.
***
For decades, my grandmother tended to a row of potted plants outside her flat. There was a Malay rose apple plant. When I was a child, my grandmother plucked its fruit and shared it with me. It tasted like stale water and soil. She used to prune the leaves and wayward branches gently, gently, until the plant no longer bore fruit, no longer grew a canopy of leaves. Still she pruned, more aggressively, keeping the fruitless fruit tree alive, that misshapen spear of a tree.
I entered the flat. There was a Taoist home altar[6] at the other end of the living room near the charred patch of wall. Short ends of burnt-out joss sticks were sticking out of the censer, with bits of ash strewn about. An effigy of Guanyin sat behind the censer, but it was covered by a piece of cloth then. My grandmother offered incense every day, a bad habit she couldn’t shake.
***
I once asked my father why we didn’t have an altar at home but my grandmother did. He said, half-jokingly, “Because I am god.” This, he knew.
***
魁
Ladle
What are ghosts doing
羹斗也。从斗鬼声。
inside the bowl of a soup ladle?
***
My mother took the numbers that made up my grandmother’s date of death, mixed them around, and bought 4D[7]. She won the second prize. The following week, she did the same thing, and won the second prize again.
She saw it as my grandmother’s way of showing gratitude for taking care of her even though my mother never liked my grandmother. She cried the hardest during the funeral.
***
A cry that escapes
见鬼惊词。
when one encounters a ghost.
从鬼，难省声。 A cry that refuses to be suppressed,
读若《诗》「受福不傩」。
that yearns to be sung.
***
A few months after my grandmother’s funeral, my father’s second eldest brother had a stroke. He went unconscious and fell in the bathroom, head hitting the corner of the sink, blood pooling on the floor.
In the hospital, the doctor said that my uncle would need brain surgery, and it risked reducing him to a permanent vegetative state. The doctor asked my aunt, the second wife, whether to attempt to save my uncle’s life. She left the decision to my cousin, her stepson. He said, impassively, “Do it.”
The surgery was a success. My uncle was left with a crater in his head where a portion of his brain was removed. As he recovered on the hospital bed, half-conscious, he kept asking his family to find the car he bought.
“Why did you buy a car?”
“Dairy Farm Road car park…”
“When did you buy it?”
“Grey Toyota…”
From the incoherent fragments, my aunt surmised that my uncle sold his prized watch collection to buy a new car for my cousin who just got his driving license, and my uncle hid the car at the Dairy Farm Road car park so he could surprise my cousin.
My father drove down to the car park and searched the area for an hour, but couldn’t find the car.
“What’s the license plate number?”
“…”
There was never a car.
***
䰠
Spirit
神也。从鬼申声。
Imagine an outstretched hand defined by clarity.
***
For as long as I could remember, my father had been a cab driver. He moved from Comfort’s blue, to CityCab’s yellow, and finally to TransCab’s white and red sedan. I grew up looking at the back of my father’s head resting on the headrest. Him driving me to school early in the morning before dawn broke, eyes on the road, while I tried to stay awake by counting the number of cars we passed. We were only conscious of each other’s presence during those morning commutes, when we were more or less looking in the same direction, and waking up together with the rest of Singapore.
My father was a rather stoic person. At home, he preferred to stay in the master bedroom, watching old Chinese serials on his iPad. My mother often had to tell me and my siblings what he was thinking and how he was feeling, a translator by circumstance, the last speaker of an extinct language.
It is the one thing about him I take after, this inability to say what I mean. Every mood I’m in is pronounced as “alright”, and “fine” can mean bad, decent, or good all at once. Part of our laconic temperament is due to a misplaced belief in what masculinity is, that being a man means remaining unmoved in the face of everything. Part of it is due to us believing that no self-expression can ever be accurate, so there’s no point trying. Now, I’m learning how to be more honest to the world, and with the world, but I’m not sure if my father ever did.
Through the years, from primary school to secondary school, and finally to junior college, my school got farther and farther away. A drive that took ten minutes became thirty minutes, and then forty-five minutes. Starting from my third year in secondary school, when he drove me to school, he would tune into a local Chinese radio station. At 6:20am, he would turn up the volume, right as the daily radio drama began. 6:20am was also around the time when the morning traffic got heavier. Sometimes, sitting directly behind him, I would notice the same cars day after day plodding onwards next to us. Our time alone in the car became longer, but we still barely spoke.
“When you drive, always look farther than the next traffic light.”
“Set the gear to neutral when stopping at traffic lights.”
“Don’t forget to apply the handbrake when parking.”
“Safety is the most important thing, so go slow.”
My father would dispense the same few nuggets of driving wisdom hundreds of times over the years, with his seatbelt slung loosely over his shoulder, unclasped. Maybe he was filling the silence whenever he felt bothered by it. Maybe he was trying to initiate conversations. Maybe he was fulfilling the role of a father passing down everything he knows to his son. Maybe it was a mix of all the reasons above.
“Mm.”
I replied the way teenagers do, with a dismissive utterance that didn’t even require me to part my lips. A response that scarcely acknowledged whatever he said. He would blunder down the same conversational bits, and I would shut them down with cold indifference. That was the tragedy of our father-son dynamic. I can’t remember if I said “thank you” when I alighted every day, memory being fickle. But, I’d like to believe I did.
He was a driver by necessity, having failed every job interview he went for. I guess I take after him in that aspect as well. He was a gambler by calling, having once proclaimed that most of me and my sister’s milk powder was bought using money he won from mahjong. To him, his greatest achievement was managing to financially support all three children through university without going into debt. It was the one tidbit he would share and allow a hint of pride through.
When I was seventeen, a teacher at the junior college off-handedly said that it’s bad manners to take the backseat while the passenger seat is free. Something about how it’s treating our parents like chauffeurs. Not that I’d ever know how someone with a chauffeur would think. I took the backseat because that was the way it had always been, like how a student always takes the same seat in the lecture hall. Still, I didn’t want to think of myself as someone who’d be rude to my parents. Maybe I should try taking the passenger seat, though I wasn’t sure what difference it’d make. We would probably continue maintaining our appropriate, deferential emotional distance.
A few weeks later, I finally went through with moving up front. Even entertaining the thought of doing it felt like breaching an unwritten contract. I had only four hours of sleep the previous night because of a new video game I just bought. Years later, I’d learn that being tipsy feels the same as waking up after not getting enough sleep. My father, walking ahead of me, reached the cab and got in first. I, groggy and half-awake, opened the car door and hopped in the passenger side before I could stop myself. He was a little surprised by the gesture and looked in my direction, though he didn’t say a thing. After I clasped the seat belt, I turned towards him, not sure why he still hadn’t started driving yet, the way he usually did the moment I got in the car. Our eyes met, and he turned away. He pulled the gear stick into place, stepped on the gas, and drove.
***
魔
Also demon,
also monster,
also sorcery,
also ghost. 鬼也。
从鬼麻声。
***
My father returned his cab to the company on the day he was discharged. His world became smaller that day. He could still take the bus and the train, but it took a toll on his body, and soon he’d only be able to visit places that were a short walk or bicycle ride from home. Then, four weeks before he passed, he got too tired to leave the house.
This is how the world ends, like an imploding star, dimming.
***
He asked me to set up an ebook reader for him so he could reread all 15 Jin Yong wuxia novels. These would be the first books he would read in over three decades. He had wanted to read them for years now, and it took a death sentence for him to overcome procrastination. When he was done, he said, “These stories, they’re all the same, aren’t they?”
***
In 278 BCE, Qu Yuan, poet and exiled official, hugged a rock to his chest, drowned himself in the Miluo River, and became a water god.
Some say that he was disheartened by the corruption and slander that he had to suffer, by the downfall of his country which he was powerless to stop. Some say that when the villagers learned of Qu Yuan’s suicide, they set out in their boats to find his body. However, they couldn’t find it. So, they threw rice dumplings into the river for the fish to eat, hoping they’d spare Qu Yuan’s body and leave it whole.
He must have been much beloved.
***
媿
Shame 慙也。
First defined by
the radicals
从女
for woman and ghost,
鬼声。
but now by the radicals for,
yes, ghost, and
heart.
***
Three months after his initial diagnosis, I accompanied my father to the hospital for a follow-up check. While waiting to collect his prescription of cancer medication, which would slowly lose its palliative properties over the next few weeks, and some morphine, he said, “I think I’ve done the most wrong by you.”
He blamed himself for my wasted potential, for failing to steer the spark he saw smoothly onto a high-flying path. I told him there was no such thing, but knew it to be true yet inevitable. Perhaps revealing a glimpse of the way he saw the world, he then said, with a smile, “Looks like I’ll soon find out whether there’s an afterlife. I’ve been wondering for the longest time.”
On that visit, the doctor gave a prognosis of one to two months.
***
He’d resort to morphine just once, and would never step foot inside a hospital again.
***
魖
Tap the incorporeal skin of an avaricious ghost, 耗鬼也。
and hear it echo hollow 从鬼
like a false wall threatening to crumble. 虛声。
***
In my adolescent years, my father spent countless all-nighters playing mahjong in a haze of cigarette smoke of his own making. His regular spot was a small Chinese temple in the neighbourhood. I never liked that place. There were always crass middle-aged men talking with their grating, gravelly voices. They would, between tile discards and liberal swearing, work up bountiful balls of spit and launch them into the patch of grass next to the mahjong table. Eventually, a sign that said “No gambling allowed on sacred grounds” was put up, but all it did was push those men to play with a defiant edge as they placed their feet on the chairs and brick-tiled floor in obstinate comfort.
Occasionally, I’d accompany my father, and the temple’s steward would limp over, greeting us with a light wave and a smile that showed the gaps between his yellowed teeth. He was a diabetic amputee who seemed to wear the same dirty singlet every day. When no mahjong game was ongoing, he’d have a mutt for company. It used to be a stray, but made the temple grounds home after the steward tossed it some burnt meat.
During the mahjong sessions, I’d find a place to wait. I’d sit inside a room housing altars of Taoist and Buddhist gods. This room, dimly lit, housed 阎罗王, the ruler of Hell. His altar was flanked by effigies of 黑白无常, Chinese deities who escort the spirits of the dead. They, too, are spirits. One has a ghastly snarl. The other, a long, drooping slug of a crimson tongue. To scare off evil spirits, so I was told. Or the merely curious, I thought.
I knew I wasn’t yet due for Hell. The noise of mahjong tiles being shuffled kept me tethered to reality, like the patter of rain and the soft white noise from an old television at once. I’d hear it, that irregular flurry, that night song.
Until the sky turned a static blue.
Then, I’d prepare for the day before the day was ready.
The tinge of spurious solitude waned like the translucent moon, and I’d go back to being a pair of feet hurrying along the concrete footpath on a blue Singapore morning, moving slightly out of time.
***
醜
Ugly
可惡也。
Ugly ones
从鬼
come out of hiding
酉声。
between sunset hours.
***
After my father’s diagnosis, he told us to carry on as is, as always, as if he were air. He wanted neither a wake nor any of the tedious rituals. Were it possible, he’d have chosen to be cremated without a casket and have his ashes scattered without ceremony. He wanted us to continue living, without pause.
***
Three weeks before he passed, we bought an electric scooter for him. He could drive again, family dog in the basket, for the occasional lunch or dinner, up till his final week. This is how the world ends. Dead quiet supernova, heart-rending shockwave, fireworks of gamma rays.
***
The night before he died, he craved a cigarette. Even though he tried to quit several times over his lifetime, he’d always return to smoking. Perhaps he found relief in the familiar scent and the practised routine of lighting up. My brother bought a pack of Next Purple Blast for him. He’d smoke just one stick from the pack.
That same night, he told my mother not to let me know when he died. He didn’t want to be a burden. I was attending a writing workshop in New York, working on portions of this essay, which wasn’t yet about him.
***
Soul 魂魄
Tear a ghost into
two halves,
soul-halves,
base ingredients
of that
which makes humans
whole.
阳气也 A breath
of yang
从鬼云声 that rings of
passing clouds,
of mist,
of vapour.
A pith 阴神也
of yin
that rings of stark, 从鬼白声
unvarnished truth.
***
So ends the tale of two star-crossed lovers:
Liang Shanbo died of abject depression after learning that Zhu Yingtai was betrothed to another man. When Yingtai passed by Shanbo’s grave on her way to marrying that man she didn’t love, lightning struck the gravestone. It cracked right in the middle, and the crack crawled onto the earth, splitting into a chasm. Yingtai jumped in, joining Shanbo in death. Then, a pair of butterflies was seen floating out and away.[8]
***
嵬
Mountains
with buried ghosts
高不平也。
all grow tall
and uneven.
从山鬼聲。
凡嵬之屬
皆从嵬。
***
It was 7:02am. I just woke up. My siblings broke the news to me.
For a moment, 12 hours behind ground zero, I thought it was happening in the near future and not yet real.
***
傀
It once meant grand,
偉也。从人鬼聲。
defined by the radicals
for people and ghost, 《周禮》曰：
「大傀異。」
but now translates
to puppet.
***
That night, another writer from the workshop saw a field of fireflies for the first time. She said, “It should be a life-changing thing, but I don’t know.”
***
䰰 Weep
鬼鬽聲，
Some ghosts
need to weep
从鬼需聲。and are known
to eternally weep. 䰰䰰不止也。
***
As he wanted, there was no wake. But my aunt insisted on having a Taoist priest to perform the last rites, just as there was for my grandmother and two uncles; the last funereal throughline that felt almost like a family curse. The priest summoned my father’s ghost and asked if he was present. My sister tossed the moon blocks[9] to get his answer. “No”. The priest gestured for my sister to try again. She got a “no” five more times.
***
魒[10]
This is how to write
the name of
an ancient star.
***
I have run out of words for ghost.
***
In frustration, my sister told my father to stop screwing around, and tossed the moon blocks for the seventh time.
***
“Yes”.
[1] These loosely translated dictionary entries are taken from 《说文解字》 by Xu Shen. It is the first extant 字典 (dictionary) of Chinese characters published circa 100 CE, though there is a difference between 字典 (dictionary) and 词典 (dictionary) and 辞典 (dictionary).
[2] The doctor found multiple tumours in his liver with the biggest one being 14 cm across, bigger than a human heart. My mother asked what stage his cancer was in, but according to the doctor, that they didn’t use the one to four staging system for liver cancer. Then he said my father would likely live for three to six more months. My father wasn’t surprised.
[3] The open space on the ground floor of public housing blocks in Singapore. A mostly liminal piece of architecture used for occasional wakes, weddings, and improvised soccer games. It seems I have to repeat this footnote with every essay I write, all invariably about home.
[4] 秦始皇 : the first emperor of China. In his quest to live forever, he concocted an elixir that contained mercury. He hastened his demise with his consumption of mercury pills. When he died, he was entombed in a mausoleum teeming with mercury in its soil. He never gave up on immortal life even beyond the grave.
[5] We know what Hell looks like. There’s an attraction, the Ten Courts of Hell, in Haw Par Villa. It displays each court as a diorama of what awaits us, should our bad deeds outweigh the good in our lives. Each court is ruled by a different king, and each court dishes out its own punishment for its set of sins. Liars get their tongues pulled out, those who disrespect elders get their hearts cut out, prostitutes are drowned in blood, tax evaders are pounded by stone mallets into mush… Then, with dues paid, the ghosts can finally reincarnate.
[6] In some folk Taoist and Buddhist tradition, homeowners set up an altar at home so a patron deity can protect the family. Typically, there will be an effigy of the deity displayed and a censer in front of it. When my parents bought their first flat, my father asked my mother if they were to have an altar, could they use LED plastic joss sticks so they wouldn’t have to pray every day. My mother replied that if he didn’t want to offer joss sticks properly, then might as well do away with an altar altogether. A full rejection over a half-hearted compromise.
[7] A form of lottery in Singapore.
[8] Here’s how the tale starts: Zhu Yingtai was a woman with a passion for literature in the Eastern Jin dynasty, when women weren’t allowed to enrol in school. However, she convinced her father to let her disguise herself as a man and attend classes in Hangzhou. On her way there, she met Liang Shanbo, who was also studying in the same school. They hit it off immediately. Over the next three years, they grew closer as they studied together. Yingtai fell in love with Shanbo, but he remained blind to her identity and feelings, despite Yingtai’s numerous hints. Then, Yingtai was called home and had to discontinue her studies. Shanbo finally discovered that Yingtai was a woman after a visit, and wanted to propose, only to find out that she was engaged to a wealthy merchant.
[9] A pair of wooden crescent blocks painted red. Each block has one round side and one flat side. They are held together between one’s palms in prayer, then dropped onto the floor after one asks a deity or ancestor a question. Both blocks showing the same side up is a “no” response, while one block with the flat side up and the other with the round side up is a “yes”.
[10] This character is not recorded in 《说文解字》. It remains largely forgotten.
Brandon Toh is a Singaporean writer and translator. He is an ALTA Travel Fellow and his works have placed in the Stephen Spender Prize and Another Chicago Magazine Nonfiction Contest.