HUNGRY GHOST by May-Lee Chai
I am writing this in April, the month of the lunar calendar where 清明 falls, the festival for sweeping our ancestors’ tombs, for lighting joss sticks and leaving offerings of food so our deceased will not become hungry ghosts, the spirits that roam the earth insatiable, their giant bellies always empty. It is my haunted month, the month of my mother’s birth, and of her death. It is a month for personal beginnings and endings. The month when my memories of my mother’s hunger, her pain, all that I tried and could not do to fill the hole gaping open inside her, spill out, are uncontainable, a wail.
Once when I was in elementary school, I overheard the mother of my best friend complaining about me. She told my mother that she was very sad when our family moved to town and I started the same school as her daughter. Her older daughter had been denied a scholarship to college and instead an Asian girl had gotten one. My best friend’s mother was certain this would happen to her second daughter now that I was here.
I remember the silence in that moment while I stood in the hallway outside the kitchen, neither woman knowing I was there.
I waited for my mother to defend me. I wanted her to say, “My daughter is not causing anyone any problems!” Something to absolve me. Or even to proclaim, “May- lee works very hard!”
My mother said nothing.
Shame lodged in my eye like a shard of glass.
I was learning to read the world around me for my place in it as a young girl of color. Every anecdote, every slight, every silence was teaching me that I was not, nor would I ever be, the hero of my mother’s narrative.
My mother and I were not the same race. My mother was White, my father Chinese, and I mixed-race Chinese- American. I did not pass for White.
My mother liked to complain when I was a child, and later a teenager, that she had been robbed of a scholarship because in high school “a Hispanic girl” had been awarded one instead of her. My mother considered this scholarship hers to win. A teacher had even congratulated her after the winner was announced. “She probably voted for the wrong girl! She got our names confused!” my mother wailed.
Even as a child, I could tell there were holes in this story. Wasn’t it a bad sign that my mother’s teacher didn’t know who she was and could mistake her name for another girl’s, and one with a Hispanic surname at that?
My mother’s parents were highly unstable and moved their family frequently when my mother was growing up. But while my mother was able to tell me stories about her father’s violence, her mother’s angry enabling, she was never able to blame her parents’ erratic choices for her lack of a scholarship or their refusal to pay for her education.
Instead my mother had learned to blame Affirmative Action for her scholarship loss, despite the fact that she graduated high school in 1951, ten years before JFK signed the executive order that would begin Affirmative Action programs in America.
It must have been less painful for my mother to tell this story and blame the Other girl rather than her parents, who kept my mother out of class to clean their home, to watch her younger siblings, to pick up after the fight, the fights, the endless fighting.
Twenty years had passed since my mother hadn’t gotten the scholarship from her high school when she first told me this story, but she still complained with a raw fury as though it had just occurred.
I did not yet see how her anger would turn on me.
When I was very little, I remember my mother praying on her glowin- the- dark rosary. My brother and I climbed into my parents’ big bed to wait for my father to come home from work. He often worked late at night, and my mother was afraid, waiting for him to return.
I held the rosary card for her so that we could look up which of the four mysteries to meditate upon after each decade of Hail Marys. Her Catholic education had been interrupted because her parents moved around a lot, in the middle of the semester, three days from the end of school, a week after the start of the school year. Her father was an alcoholic, and they were always looking for a fresh start. My mother had had only one year in a Catholic school.
My mother whispered in the dark, her fingers on the beads.
Inspired with this confidence, I fly to thee, O Virgin of virgins, my Mother. To thee do I come; before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions.
My mother was the only Catholic in her family, a long line of staunch Protestants. She’d converted when she was 13 after a nun saved her from schoolyard bullies. As a girl, my mother was impressed that a woman could be:
childless
educated
a teacher
in a position of authority
able to save a girl child from boys
As a child, my mother had been beaten, punched, slapped, starved, stung, kicked, worked, overworked, worked over, assaulted, insulted, harassed, touched against her will, slammed against a wall, struck with a fist, tooth knocked from her jaw.
She forgave her parents seventy times seven times, again and again and again and again and again. She loved them wholeheartedly so that they might return the favor someday. She’d been taught the only way to safety was silence. But lying next to her in the dark, I heard the way her breath caught in her throat.
I remember the list: The Joyful Mysteries. The Sorrowful Mysteries. The Glorious Mysteries. The Luminous Mysteries.
They alternated: Joyful Mysteries on Monday and Saturday, Sorrowful Tuesday and Friday, Glorious on Wednesday, and Luminous on Thursday. Sunday we had church so we didn’t pray a rosary.
The mysteries were groupings of moments in Jesus’s life, but it was too complicated for me as a child to keep track of. Plus I hated CCD and all the stories of suffering and guilt and pain, so I’d just say the words: The Joyful Mysteries or The Glorious Mysteries or whichever one it was supposed to be, and we’d leave it at that.
My brother fell asleep, but I willed myself to stay awake, lying beside my mother, watching as the beads glowed bright white then faded to green then gray then darkness as my mother’s voice whispered through the decades, seeking a miracle.
Night after night after night, watching the moon rise and set bluely from the bedroom window, I wanted my mother to see my devotion to her. I wanted my mother to see how much I loved her. If my mother could see my love for her, I thought she’d love me, too.
I wanted my mother to side with me and not with the ghost. But her father had beaten his rules into her skin, punched them into her flesh, knocked patriarchy into her skull, rearranged her teeth to silence her tongue. When my mother opened her eyes, she saw the past, not me. She saw her father, always Daddy, not her daughter, curled like a comma at her side.
It was his love she sought, not mine.
Until the months before her death, my mother insisted that her father loved her, that the violence was accidental. Daddy didn’t mean it, my mother said. Mother didn’t know. Or, Mother provoked him.
When her father punched her in the face and knocked out her tooth when she was seventeen, when he punched her in the face when she was nine, when he tried to choke her mother to death and she had to run to the neighbor’s house through the Indiana night and beg them to call the sheriff, when he told that joke in front of my father and brother and me about being called “Chink” in the Navy and liking it because it was so funny, a White man being called “Chink” because his eyes were so narrow, get it? Daddy had a sense of humor. Daddy didn’t mean it that way.
When our family moved to a small town when I was twelve, White kids in school called my brother and me names, chink and jap and gook and Chai Manchu and flat face and moon face and no nose and on and on. I wanted the mother who used to take me for ice cream after school. I wanted a mother who took my side. But my mother said, “Just laugh along. Show them you can take a joke.” Isn’t this what her father had always said?
What does it mean to side with a ghost?
When she took my brother and me to visit her parents when I was eleven, my brother ten, Gramps locked us outside their house while my mother had gone to buy groceries for Grandma. “You brats! You brats are making too much noise!” he shouted, and I shouted back, “We weren’t making any noise! We’re not supposed to go outside! It’s a high smog alert day!” My little brother had asthma, but he kicked us out all the same.
When hours later my mother returned with Grandma and four bags of groceries, I told her what happened, and she said nothing.
When I was growing up, my mother offered a million excuses for her father’s violence, as though trying to find one that fit.
He ran away from home at age fourteen, rode the rails with his best friend Charlie, started smoking and drinking. He didn’t like his bourgeois parents’ snobbery. They wanted him to go to school and become a dentist! “A dentist!” he roared. A dentist, my mother echoed. “What’s wrong with being a dentist?” I’d ask as a child, my voice below the decibel audible to my mother’s ears.
He was forced to play the violin, which he hated. His mother locked him out of the house during the day so that she could clean. She didn’t want a messy boy in her house.
He enlisted at age seventeen. Although the military wouldn’t send him oversees until he was 18 and by then WWI was over. His father, a veteran, enlisted as well so he could watch over his son and the two were sent to France after the war to oversee reconstruction. My grandfather bragged to his daughter this is where he’d learned his gourmet tastes.
Decades later, he felt deeply ashamed when America entered a second world war against Germany. His mother’s family was German. He didn’t want to be related to The Enemy, this Other, this Foreigner. He was proud of nothing so much as his deep American roots. He taught his oldest daughter to say, “We’re Dutch.” She was five and had learned to speak German from her beloved grandmother, when the U.S. entered the war. “You speak Dutch,” he corrected her.
As a young man, in his twenties his addiction to alcohol deepened. He couldn’t hold a job. He married a young German- American woman from a good family, and then she fled back to her family with her infant son and her family refused to let him see her. They were as uptight and bourgeois as his mother. He got hammered and smashed out the window of his in-laws’ furniture store, but they called the police, and he spent the night in jail.
My grandmother was still a child in elementary school, innocent of the violence swirling in her future husband’s life.
It was harder to find work after jail and the divorce.
When he met my grandmother at a Prohibition- era party at his uncle’s house, she was seventeen and newly blonde, courtesy of a free bleach job given to her by her older sister to advertise the older sister’s beauty parlor. The sister had recently married for the second time, an older man. My grandfather’s uncle.
My grandfather was smitten with the blonde teenager. He drank too much. He had to sleep in his uncle’s house that night. He rose in the night, made his way to the blonde girl’s bedroom, and had his way with her.
(Fifty- six years later, after 50 years of marriage, and four years after his death, my grandmother will say to me, “He raped me” in the quiet of her living room, as I dutifully take notes.)
In the sober aftermath, both families agreed he should marry the girl. Make a decent woman out of her. Luckily, my grandmother did not get pregnant; she could at least say, fifty- six years later, It was not a shotgun wedding.
My grandmother said they had to wait a year for the marriage before the justice of the peace because she was seventeen, underage, her fiancé 30. She wore a red velvet dress of her mother’s, taken in and repurposed for the occasion.
“I didn’t know my charms,” Grandma said.
After my grandfather is married again, the chances for redemption are endless. He is a White straight married man with one then two, three, four, and finally eight children, he is a veteran. He is and always has been exactly who the Founding Fathers intended to be a citizen of the United States of America. Every right is written with him in mind. Now when something goes wrong, his wife is to blame.
When I interviewed my grandmother about her life when I was seventeen, after my grandfather had died, Grandma said, “When the sheriff’s deputies brought him home, they’d say to me, ‘You should learn to keep a better eye on your husband, Ma’am.’“
When she spoke to the preacher about the drinking, about the violence, about the fear and the fatigue, the man said, When you are married, you are like the yolk to the egg.
“The yolk to the egg?” Grandma repeated. “What does that even mean?”
Later when Gramps found out Grandma had visited a lawyer, she said he told her, “If you leave me, I will hunt you to the ends of the earth and then I will kill you and all the children.”
“I believed him,” Grandma said.
“Oh, Mother,” my mother said, sorrowful and small at Grandma’s table. But later, on the drive home, my mother will say, “Mother provoked him.”
I remember the bedtime stories my mother used to tell us. The time she said she ran to the neighbors in the night, banging on their door and shouting, “My father is trying to kill my mother. My mother says call the sheriff.” And they said, “This is a matter between a man and a wife” and refused. I remember the time she said her father got drunk and cooked the family pets and when she told her younger brother and sisters they didn’t have to eat their rabbits, he grabbed her by the arm and punched her in the face hard enough to knock her tooth out. When Grandma drove her to the dentist, the dentist said, “Next time try not to be so clumsy, young lady.”
My mother invited my grandparents after we moved to a farm in the Midwest. It was late April, after my mother’s birthday, after the thick snows had finally melted, and the mud in the fields mostly dried. The flowers my mother planted were finally beginning to bloom, tulips and daffodils, bright and cheerful.
Gramps was eighty years of age, with emphysema; he carried a small oxygen tank, attached by plastic tubes to his nose.
I was still afraid of him and kept my distance, but he couldn’t walk the property, he hadn’t the energy. He didn’t yell at my brother or at me. More than three years sober, he’d become a genial man, content with the world.
Gramps sat in the kitchen and looked out the window at the brome fields in the back. He dragged his oxygen tank to the front steps and surveyed the cottonwood trees on the neighboring property, the expanse of deep green grass sloping to the gravel road out front, all the dark fields stretching to the horizon as far as the eye could see.
“You’ve really made it, Carolyn,” he said. “I’m proud of you.”
It wasn’t her college degree (first and only in the family), her publications as a journalist, her art, her teaching, her family (the chink, the brats!). It was the farm, this American gothic, that finally made Daddy proud.
Three months later he was dead.
And my mother, despondent, began to chase the love of his ghost.
My mother fell into deep mourning. She joined a prayer group whose leaders believed that mixed- race people were a sign of the devil. Their children explained to my brother and me that we were a sign of the coming End Times when Satan would rule on earth for a thousand years. They believed that G- d had put “the races” on separate continents and only the Devil wanted them to mix. Even as a child I could see the flaws in the logic: Why then didn’t White people stay in Europe? Why come to North America and take the land that G- d had given to the “red race” by their own reckoning? Because they did not like my brother and me, they did not want us at their meetings. My mother went alone.
The White men who led the group told racist jokes about my brother, me. When their children bullied us at school, my mother said nothing.
When I confronted my mother with some new horror, she said to me sorrowfully, “I don’t know why they have to be this way.” Then look away. But she never stopped attending their prayer meetings.
I think they reminded her of her father, the ghost who haunted her. He had liked to tell the same kind of jokes, he’d spouted the same kind of theories. Perhaps these jokes, these racist theories made him feel powerful, in a way that his addictions and his waywardness and his lack of control and his deep shame could not.
Perhaps my mother could find no other way to fill the hollowness in her heart, the empty gaping hole deep in her belly, except through these gatherings of White people who had suffered their fathers’ rage in silence and sorrow.
My father was asked to resign his job in that small town and had to work in another state. We couldn’t sell our house and so he had to commute, back and forth across the country. When he was home, he was tired. He slept or else he yelled at us, bitter at this turn in his life.
White men drove by our house shooting. They killed our dogs, left their bodies in the driveway for my brother and me to find when we came home from school. When my mother called the sheriff’s department, they did not come. When my mother had my brother and me post “No Hunting” signs on our property, it did not stop the men from shooting. But we all knew these men were not hunters. Our dogs did not look like pheasants.
Still my mother could not call them “racist.”
She spent more time with her prayer group. She left early in the evening to attend their meetings and returned late at night. My brother and I were often alone on the farm.
My mother put my brother and me to work. She decided she wanted a working farm, the kind her father had always wanted. She bought at first several dozen chickens, then three hundred, then more than a thousand. She sold the meat and eggs to her prayer group, at a loss. I was never paid. My days began before the sun rose and ended close to midnight. There was no running water inside the barn that my mother had had built so I had to carry buckets of water from an outdoor pump to the chickens inside. This took hours every day. Every Saturday I spent four hours cleaning out the 360 gallons of liquid shit the chickens generated over the week. In the winter there was no heat, and my skin cracked and bled. In the summer, there was no cooling system, and I coughed among the animals. As the workload grew, I got less than five hours of sleep a night, sometimes three, then two. When I complained, my mother said, “God in Heaven sees you suffering and he’ll reward you when you’re dead.” I lost weight. My hair began to fall out. I stopped menstruating. “You’re so lucky,” my mother said. “You don’t get sick. When I was a child, I got sick. I nearly died. Mother nearly worked me to death!” I thought, This is crazy! But I didn’t know to think then when I was growing up: This is mentally ill.
My mother put my brother to work in the appliance store that belonged to a member of her prayer group. My brother now delivered and installed refrigerators, stoves, insulation all over town. One day the son of one of my mother’s friends tried to kill my brother by pushing a refrigerator off the top of a flight of stairs on top of him. My brother survived by pushing the fridge up two flights of stairs until he reached a landing wide enough for him to get out from under the weight. His back was strained. After that, he was in constant pain.
When my brother told us what happened at dinner that night, my mother looked away into the middle distance, a slight smile on her face, lost in some other memory, some other time.
“He’s racist! He calls Jeff ‘Fu Man Chai’ in school!” I shouted about the boy, trying to break through whatever ghostly spell my mother had fallen under. “He tried to kill Jeff.”
“He’s just jealous,” my mother said, then nothing more, her silence more haunting than words.
Because I worked seven days a week, I had to steal moments to study. I rose at five and sat in the dark with a flashlight to look at my notebooks, afraid if I turned on a light I might wake my mother and she might find more work for me to do instead. I carried notes in my pockets as I did my chores in the morning and night, pulling out paper to memorize French verb conjugations, geometric formulas, the boring tolls of the dead in Civil War battles, which was what our history teacher tested us on. Although there was a visible double-digit percentage of Indigenous students, we never studied Native history, not the Oceti Sakowin or the Six Nations, none of it. When our governor was accused of having raped his Indigenous fifteen-year- old babysitter back when he’d been head of legal services on the reservation, there were no classroom discussions.
I hated school. I found it boring at best, oppressively stupid-making at worst, but I kept up my grades. I wanted out of this town, of this community, this life. I did not know another path for escape. I hoped college might be it.
When I was seventeen, and ready to apply to college, filling out forms, looking at brochures, my mother cried when I asked for money for the application fee one day. “I’m so sorry, May- lee,” she wept. “There’s no money for your college.”
I was shocked. Years earlier, my mother had forged my signature and withdrawn all the money I’d saved for college. When she admitted what she’d done, I’d cried and cried, and she said, annoyed, “Oh, don’t worry, it’s just temporary. I’ll pay you back when it’s time for you to go.” She promised.
Now I looked at my mother. I couldn’t even feel anger. Just terror. A coldness descending over my body as I saw my only escape route blocked.
As she cried, turning into a child, I knew my mother wanted me to console her.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll pay for my own college.” And I went to my room and sat on the floor, my back to the door, trying to quiet the pounding in my heart.
I studied the college brochures I kept in a box under my bed. I discovered I could apply to more than one school with one application fee if my parents would sign a statement showing their financial distress before a notary public. My father refused, out of shame. My mother did not try to persuade him. Eventually I applied to exactly one school, one with need- blind admission and good financial aid, a day’s driving distance so I wouldn’t need a plane ticket. I carried the application hidden under my sweatshirt when I went to school. I mailed the envelope myself in town. I did not trust my mother to mail it. I did not trust that if I put it in the mailbox, that she would leave it there unmolested.
I got in with a scholarship.
My mother said, “We can’t send out any graduation announcements. Your brother will feel bad.”
“Jeff doesn’t care,” I said. “He knows I’m graduating.”
But it was not my brother who felt bad.
After I fled my mother’s farm at eighteen for college, I refused to return. Without my labor, she could no longer supply her prayer group with fresh meat. The work was too much just for one person, my brother, to do it all. She told my father and brother, “May- lee has abandoned the family.”
When it was my brother’s turn to graduate, he did not apply to go away to college. He stayed at home, to help my mother, to work on her farm for free, and attended the local school. “You are my heaven’s blessing,” my mother said to him, his name in Chinese.
My mother died at sixty- one when I was twenty- eight. I nursed her through twenty months of chemotherapy but the cancer metastasized to her liver and then she died.
During this time, I cared for her in my apartment while I attended graduate school. My brother and father would drive down from the neighboring state where they now lived and would visit my mother. They took her around town on the week when she felt well enough to go out each month. I stayed in the apartment to try to catch up on my work, clean, do laundry, rest.
We all wanted her to see our love, to side with us, to acknowledge us as worthy of love. We had all been damaged by the years on the farm and the violence of that community. Now that my parents had finally moved away from the farm, now that my father had a secure academic job in another state, we wanted to be victorious as a family, to show the world we were stronger than the racists.
After my father and brother left, she complained non- stop about my choice to study Chinese language and literature. She complained about the Asian- American student groups that I belonged to and the work I did with them and the articles I wrote about our activism. She complained, too, about her mother, all the work Grandma had made her do, and without any thanks.
I could see my mother’s illness, even if I could not name it then.
During her chemo, I remember the first time she woke from a dream and turned to me, seated at her bedside, as I graded papers or completed homework for my master’s degree, and she called out, “Why? Why did he do it?”
“Who?”
“Daddy! Why did he hit me?”
“He was a drunk,” I said. “He’d hit anybody. He hit Grandma. He hit you when you were closest.”
But the next night, the same dream, the same question. Why? Why? Why? she wailed. Sometimes Daddy seemed like he loved me!
The fifth and final mystery.
The night my mother lay dying, I held her hand in mine in the hospital room. I sat at her side, offering her sponges dipped in water to suck on, as the morphine dripped into her veins to alleviate her pain. I held her hand for six and a half hours, as the hospital chaplain came and left, as we waited for my father to arrive, as my mother grew still, no longer turning her head to seek the watered sponge, as her extremities grew colder, until I felt my entire body shaking with cold, as though I were clinging to ice.
I wanted her to feel my love for her. In movies, the nearly dead always offer some final word of encouragement; they awake from comas and find strength for some final act of love. My mother did not wake. She did not speak.
I held her hand tightly, through the hours, as her breathing slowed.
I did not let go until the final breath rasped from her lungs and then simply stopped.
Only a demon leaves the suffering to die alone.
It’s been twenty- five years since my mother died one night in April, and I don’t want to be forever trapped like her, chasing the dead for love, calling to the air.
What does it take to chase away these demons? There’s always a new scapegoat, always someone in power looking the other way. I think of my mother fingering her rosaries, praying for protection, whispering in the dark, trying to hide her pain.
I used to wish I could improve my feng shui, mount a ba gua to deflect the qi, but after my mother died, I didn’t hang cloth over the mirrors, I didn’t light joss sticks or bow to the cardinal points. I didn’t wear white to her funeral. I didn’t burn ghost money or leave bowls of rice and plates of fruit before the grave. It wasn’t her tradition.
After I cleaned out my apartment, I found her rosary, dusty, broken, fallen behind her bed. I threw it in the dumpster.
I’ve got her hunger for love gnawing inside me, my belly bloated, my throat constricted. I feel trapped in the sixth realm of human existence, without a shaman to guide me.
So I am excavating these memories, laying the bones out in the air. In the spirit of 清明, the festival of pure brightness, I am clearing the tomb of my own heart, I am building the bridge to the yellow springs. I am declaring my love to my mother loudly until she can hear me on the other side, until I have filled her empty belly and mine with the sound of my voice.
My mother was broken and could not speak. But I can be strong enough for the both of us.
I’ve seen what it’s like to be haunted unto death, my mother’s silenced voice choking in her throat. Instead I vow: I won’t laugh along. I’ll denounce the hate. I’ll get out the vote. I’ll march in the sunlight. I’ll stand up, speak up, shout until I’m heard.
Let me exorcise this demon need for unrequited love, hers and mine.
In the name of the mother, the daughter, and the hungry ghost.
May- lee Chai’s essays have appeared in the New England Review, Longreads, Paris Review Online, Kenyon Review Online, and the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of eleven books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation, including her original translation from Chinese to English of the 1934 Autobiography of Ba Jin (University Press, 2008). She has two collections of short stories from Blair: Tomorrow in Shanghai & Other Stories (2022) and Useful Phrases for Immigrants (2018), winner of the 2019 American Book Award.