Is It Possible to Love a Ghost? // Erin Kang

The last time we visited, the playground from our school was gone. Two big patches of dusty gravel are all that remain, crunchy little ghosts of thousands of shoes pounding over them in pursuit of the swings. I didn’t realize there was a different smell to the air, a different feel, until we went back there for the first time, years after leaving. It is strange that when I inhale that air now, it fills me up. For most of my childhood it simply drained me. Is it possible to love a place only for its memories? The eye that looks back to my childhood is, at times, unflinchingly uncritical. It echoes those moments when my heart aches for things that hurt me in the past, for people who have hurt me in the past. It blots out the dark and remembers the light. The way he cooked for us. The way he would laugh and swell with pride as he told us to dream big. Is it possible to love a ghost? To cling to water? The second-last time we visited, we stood at the spot our old restaurant burned down on the main street of the town. It wasn’t an Asian restaurant, since everybody asks. But we did attempt an air of exoticism by featuring chicken teriyaki, a dish that is not even Korean, on the menu amongst the bruschetta and roast beef au jus. I wondered where the echoes of us have wandered to, having lost the walls within which they must have swirled after we left. Does it matter that this place is gone, a building that has not belonged to us in over a decade? And yet I am certain I left behind a piece of my lungs in the place where I first began to watch dad’s slow descent, the place where he covered his face with a shirt so we could not look into his eyes as the police led him away. Is it a betrayal to return to a place that helped spawn the monster of self-hatred living in my gut? To long for a place that rejected me, us, that rejects me still when I return, via expensive Bed and Breakfasts, via faces that still don’t look like mine, via looks of mild surprise when they learn that I, in fact, grew up there? When Princess Diana passed, mom cried. I was seven. She loaded our little arms with roses and we walked the two blocks to throw them into the lake. I never understood her romantic attachment to colonial royalty until I understood my own tendencies towards escapism. She asks us why we return to this place, a place she risked everything to escape. We don’t have clear answers. It is a place where scenes of us throwing rocks into the lake and building huge snow forts collide with scenes of broken glass and skin. The ghostly scent of roasted chestnuts in the wintertime wafting up to my window mingle with the scent of old alcohol breath that still raises the hairs on my neck. The first place I was told with scorn, “Go back to your country. No one wants you here.” Is it a betrayal to her to return to her place of imprisonment? There is an old tree on my school grounds that I used to read under, my sanctuary away from the other kids. Where my love for Harry Potter and ketchup chips blossomed during recess. I have wondered how many other tears may have watered the roots of this tree. Would I find a ghost of myself if I unearthed the roots, would I be able to hold myself in my dirt-covered hands, whisper consolations and songs of strength for future ghosts that may end up there? The town itself is nostalgia. It is a heritage town, a town that would bring busloads of tourists whose faces looked like mine in the summer, take their money, and wave goodbye again. To this day the town fights to continue preserving its heritage. I don’t hear people asking what heritage is being preserved, and for whom. Is it possible to love a ghost?

Erin Kang is a facilitator, curriculum developer, event producer, and storyteller who has felt the fiery grip of the written word in her heart since she was a young weirdo. As a Korean-Canadian settler living on the land presently known as Toronto, Erin is passionate about critically examining diasporic communities and their relationship to land, the past, the present, and each other.