The Reality of Ghosts

BY YILIN WANG

“Why do so many Asians believe in ghosts?” Two white yokai scholars won’t stop gawking at us like we’re aliens seen through a telescope. They bait our deceased ancestors to rise up

in a parade of their torn robes, already stained by the handprints of grave robbers. Demand elegies to be bottled up for a weighing of their heaviness, a test of their misty reality.

I must have left my soul in Fengdu Ghost City two summers ago, when I devoured an icy blue popsicle atop the mountain home of Diyu, the Underworld. Perhaps it’s why I see ghosts

everywhere now. In a bookstore, a Chinese granny has my late Wai-Poh’s toothless smiles and stooped shoulders. I trace the spine of second-hand history she leaves behind on the shelves. Count my breaths to check whether I’m dreaming. Each gap between tiny footnotes is a signpost for the names left out.

Wild marginalia peeks out from the edges of peeling white-out. My transcended kin didn’t pass on to have their half-healed scabs ripped open again, paper offerings stolen

like plundered heirlooms, trapped behind spotless display windows so far away from home. It’s much easier to summon spirits than to

cast them away. When they are evoked, they’ll return without fanfare, and they’ll feast. A hunting of the unreal living, a haunting of the faithless.