Chasing Ghosts

O

ne of the first questions typically asked when talking about ghosts is whether one believes in them. This is the kind of question modern, scientific people like to ask, questions about whether something that cannot be empirically observed is real or not. We assume the primary concern of realness is a metaphysical one. But these are also questions about authority because certain people are not permitted to hold any authority on knowing what they know, particularly those who might entertain the idea that ghosts are real. My relationship to authority is rather complicated, if not fraught. So you must understand that when I consider questions about realness, I will dispense with such quibbles as, “Am I really Chinese?” or “Where am I really from?” Instead, I'd like to try to stretch some metaphors with you about nations, languages, and identity. Come along with me and let's chase some ghosts together.

I live with a lot of ghosts, these creatures that are neither here nor there, animate but not alive, maybe real or maybe not. My grandparents taught me that ghosts are a fact of everyday life. You live with them like you live with the rain. In Hong Kong, the city where both of my parents were raised, you can visit temples where you may commune with the dead. You stop by to give offerings of oranges and burn incense the way you stop by the corner store to pick up a carton of milk. The spirit world, a world that remains unmeasurable and unseen, is a part of the quotidian rhythms that make up one's regular routine.

My grandparents taught me that ghosts are a fact of everyday life. You live with them like you live with the rain.

When I visited Hong Kong for the first time, the city was being haunted in new and unfamiliar ways. The ghosts that I encountered during my trip did not hail from my ancestry, nor were they mundane. Instead, they were novel and shocking. I landed in January 2020 when Hong Kongers were still roiling from successive waves of pro-democracy protests and increasing state censorship. The twin spectres of the Chinese Communist Party and COVID-19 loomed over every horizon. The city's infamous queues to popular sites and services now sat dead empty. Whenever police in riot gear appeared, the energy of the streets would contract, the pedestrians spooked into silence. Every spray-paintable surface was dotted with freshly applied whitewash, concealing shadowy slogans spilling from the mouths of subway entrances and high-traffic walkways. Yet phrases could often still be deciphered, a few words passing through the veil, middle-fingers still thrust toward the authorities: FUCK THE PO PO.

In this context, I found myself occupying a space of great privilege. I was accustomed to diasporic Chinese being conceived of as lost and wandering wraiths, torn from our roots. We were the white-washed zuk sing, children caught between segments of a bamboo stalk, neither here nor there. We were fraternizers with white people, pale men, gwai lou. But now we were also beacons of the rights of democracy and free speech. My Anglo-accented Cantonese, once a marker of estrangement, had become one of desired mobility; I could ghost Hong Kong whenever I felt like it.

I had not originally envisioned this trip as my last to the island for many years. At the time, I thought this initial visit would be about orienting myself. To get to know the norms and rhythms of the city in order to map out what a return might look like. To prepare myself, I crammed as much Cantonese as I could manage into my brain in the months prior by watching HK films, downloading language podcasts, and memorizing traditional Chinese characters.

This was no small ambition. While I grew up speaking Cantonese, I made an abrupt transition to English when I entered junior kindergarten. To support my integration into Canadian society, English became the dominant language in my household such that even my grandparents spoke it. My parents also enrolled me in Chinese language classes in a futile attempt to preserve what little I had absorbed, but I dropped out when I reached the age of reason, seven years old, leaving me with naught more than an assemblage of instinctive syntax and a babbling grade-school vocabulary that never developed into any functional symbolic system of the world.

Yet Cantonese remains my mother tongue, a phantom tongue. It haunts and beguiles me. It evokes a bone-deep familiarity to hear it. It visits me in my dreams like the ghosts of family members past are said to do. Indeed, my efforts did feel a little like raising the dead over the weeks as long-forgotten phrases and words began to surface and insert themselves into my thoughts. One evening, right before falling asleep, my neurons still awash in Canto-pop, the phrase “fong sum” emerged. Literally, “release heart,” this means being acquitted of anxieties, to be relaxed and at rest.

“Fong sum” was an apt phrase. People assumed I was visiting Hong Kong because I was trying to recover something, clinging to a thread to some lost part of myself. The truth is, Hong Kong didn't answer any questions I might have had about my own identity because I wasn't asking. No city exists to welcome anyone into a fictional fold of a stable and static ethnicity. To meet Hong Kong meant releasing myself and any stories I might spin about who I was or what my life could or should look like there. I arrived with nothing to prove or resolve in terms of belonging, and in any case, in January 2020, Hong Kong was open to any and all tourists after the industry had taken such a hit.

In this way, my concept of a motherland is like my mother tongue: an autonomous apparition of something that never quite came together. It is the word at the tip of my tongue whose aura I feel but cannot recall. It is a shadow in my peripheral vision, wavering at the edges of existence. This hazy, spectral idea of home with its lack of clear definitions left me with more space for Hong Kong itself, for its wonders, its secrets, its little anarchies.

In this way, my concept of a motherland is like my mother tongue: an autonomous apparition of something that never quite came together. It is the word at the tip of my tongue whose aura I feel but cannot recall.

If I did not visit Hong Kong hoping to find anything in particular, what in fact, did I find there? Rather than a kind of mute and nostalgic diasporic mimesis of symbols that us third culture kids love so much—all Wong Kar Wai cheongsams and chewy white rabbit candies—I was enamoured by the vibrance of the city and its loud, irregular, disobedient voices. Defiant graffiti on every surface and debates sprawling over Lennon Walls. Street fortune tellers peddling luck, both good and bad. High-strung electronic sounds from every street corner, including the hysterical crosswalk beeping. Locals not giving me shit for my stumbling Cantonese unlike pockets of the diaspora. There was nerviness, vitality, and quite unexpectedly, a bone-deep familiarity. Why would I ask questions about belonging here, among all the people who looked so much like me but did not speak like me, when I could simply listen?

Some of my Canadian-born relatives who have visited Hong Kong feel differently. They have treated their travels like a kind of ancestral pilgrimage. For them, there was a special, authoritative meaning in walking the sites that marked their parents' lives and visiting the tombstones of our forebears. The physical land of Hong Kong made their origins a material reality. I can respect these travel stories—the mythos of a homeward journey and the deepened connection to one's family line—but that narrative simply never developed in me beyond an incipient curiosity.

“Do you ever speak to your ancestors?” an older Gwich'in friend once asked me. Perhaps she already knew about ancestor worship in Chinese culture. “I can't,” I replied, “I'm not fluent in any Chinese dialect and they wouldn't know English.” She laughed at my assertion. Of course, in such a hypothetical world, the same language barrier would exist for her; her parents had been sent to residential school and now we were taking the same beginners Gwich'in class together. She insisted that my ancestors would understand me perfectly well. I'm not so sure they would appreciate my nihilism, my disloyalties, but I also feel like every time I cross a line, every time I go somewhere I'm not supposed to be, I'm following in their footsteps. After all, they were the ones who birthed unruly children who chose to immigrate to a freezing settler-colonial state where most trees refuse to bear fruit and food is for caloric fuel before it is for the pleasure of taste, and the pleasure is a guilty one at that.

I like the idea of ghosts because they are like my forebears and myself; they go where they're not supposed to be. That they are denied or actively reject a straightforward path to heaven and instead linger among the living asks us to consider how the ultimate boundary, the divide between life and death, is not as simple as we might like it to be. In this way, the transparent figure of the ghost, a being that can walk through walls and fences, a being with ties to both the material world and somewhere beyond, begs us to consider how all cultural boundaries might themselves have a kind of permeable, phantasmic quality.

Browsing hundreds of paper goods in the Mong Kok neighbourhood for the upcoming new year, I paused to rifle through sheets of fai chun, decorative banners varying in size from dollar bills to large scrolls. I found one with a phrase I'd never seen before, emblazoned with fat gold calligraphy on cardinal red paper: “baak mou gam gei,” which translates to “nothing is taboo.” With this blessing, I imagined a year without boundaries, a year without heres and theres, a year that could include anything and everything, another year full of ghosts.