Fiction

My father’s earliest memory was when he was five years old, looking outside into the darkness at the madwoman who lived a few yards down the dirt road, on the other side of the street. Every night she was there, he said. Every night she would sit outside in front of her house, a faceless silhouette sometimes backlit by the moon, slowly rocking back and forth. Every night for hours she would sit alone in the dark. She was crying out the name of her dead son, trying to call him home. “Gou Er!” she howled into the night. Her sorrowful voice rang out in the summer silence of the Chinese countryside. It echoed in the mountains. “Hui lai!”

My father remembers what his mother told him, when he asked what the woman was doing. “She is calling the spirit of her son,” my grandmother said. “If you call out the names of the deceased, their spirit will come back and sleep in the house.”

She added, very sternly: “Don’t go near her. She has a demon air.”

My father doesn’t believe in ghosts. He is a rational man, a scientist and soft-spoken atheist, thoughtful and patient in abstract discussions, patient with his daughter. We have talked about this story many times, though he hesitates to tell it. He doesn’t think of himself as a storyteller, and he doesn’t like ghost stories. For him, there is no use for the supernatural or perverse aesthetics in a real world already filled with grief and horror, and there is no time for self-indulgence when there is work to be done.

For years he has been trying to get me to write his stories, about growing up during the Cultural Revolution, about his and my mother’s lucky love story, about his experiences in the Red Guards denouncing his teachers and singing the Chinese national anthem in the midst of crowds of students in Tiananmen Square, waving the Red Book in the air and cheering for Chairman Mao. My father has been trying all my life to get me to understand and appreciate my background, his background, and the complicated, difficult chain of events that led him from farming communes in rural China to graduate school in Wisconsin. My father thinks his story of survival — China’s story of survival — will put my life into context and give me perspective on my troubles and grief.

He wants me to write about China, but not in this way. Not through the lens of Oriental superstition that no one believes in anymore. This story is self-indulgent, he would tell me. And I would not argue.

They only lived in that village for several months, in the summer and early fall of 1964. The army had moved into that remote mountainous region between Hubei and Sichuan to build a bridge across the Chang Jiang, and the military families were all housed in villages in the surrounding area. My grandfather was only a low-ranking officer at the time, but he was lucky enough to get a house that his family did not have to share.

They only got the house because no one else wanted to live there. The house was small and shabby, on the outskirts of the village, but that was not why it was empty. It was empty because the villagers said it was haunted. They said in the village that it was often visited by the spirits of the dead landlord and his young son who used to live there, and by the demons that plagued his crazy widow, mad with grief, who still lived in another of their houses, a smaller one, across the road. They said the air itself was contaminated by the devils that possessed the woman and caused her madness. This was the “demon air” of which my grandmother spoke.

No one from the village would live so close to the madwoman. They believed that her demon air was contagious. My grandmother believed it too. She was from the countryside, poorly educated, her heart full of traditional fears and superstitions. She did not want to live in that house with her young son, so close to a crazy woman and surrounded by the spirits of the restless dead. She was afraid of the invisible demons in the very air she breathed. But my grandfather insisted — he had traveled, gone to medical school in the city, and prided himself on being a modern-minded man — so she relented. It would not stop her from trembling with insomnia in the middle of the night, as she listened to the silence between the madwoman’s howls for hints of a ghostly visitor, but my grandmother knew her duty as an obedient wife. Nevertheless, she would warn my father, her five-year-old boy, to stay away from that woman.

My father never told me exactly what my grandmother said in that first, fierce warning, but I can imagine her younger voice — if not her younger self — filling her words with an ominous fear that goes back through generations of Chinese country folk; a still-remembered childhood fear of black-faced, wild-eyed, fire-tongued demons that live high up in the mountains and kidnap children to be slaughtered for dinner and slowly roasted over hellfire. I can hear her voice through the ears of my five-year-old father, confused and a little scared and vibrating with a strange excitement in the transmission of such a primordial fear: