Essays    Reportage    Marginalia    Interviews    Poetry    Fiction    Videos    Everything   
Ghost Month Zuihitsu

When I left, I stretched far enough away that any tethers I had severed. Now a place exists without me.

Fiction | Fiction, Flash Fiction, Remains, ghosts
December 21, 2022

\

On my first day in Taipei they are burning money in front of the banks. During ghost month, the city becomes a wildfire. Incense prickling the nose, the air thick with spirits and gifts made transparent, diffused into the atmosphere. Fire generates sustenance for the ghosts, rebirths it into a place where past and present can coexist. When a gate opens, a border is eliminated and two places become one. The day I stepped off the plane, it was the new moon. I am crossing into a new life.


\

In a new hemisphere, jet lag induces a separation of spirit from body. Thus, I am a ghost in a city of ghosts. Ghost month is bookended by the new moon and the harvest moon. The month is already swelling with spirits, ripening, threatening split. I flicker in and out of the day, I am here and then gone. 


\

Some who came did not realize this island would be a permanent home. Wild city, we intuit it as contextless waste. Mom says the city is unrecognizable: I attribute this to combustion being a type of transformation. Look, there is no there there. Every day the headache sounds of metal and construction, human labor changing the cityscape bit by bit. As if by frenzied magic, Taipei grows and grows, careening towards an opaque future.


\

Air heavy with moisture sinks down on the Taipei basin, steaming the city like a bowl of rice, an offering. The atmosphere so wet it drenches us like a river. 


\

Maybe a home is a place you cannot escape. When you live in a place long enough, parts of yourself are displaced into that location, and when you leave, you leave those parts behind. You sever yourself from yourself. Migrations are violent this way. When I left, I stretched far enough away that any tethers I had severed. Now a place exists without me. Now not even a hell gate could bring me back. Mom says the city is unrecognizable. Memory is the strongest tether, but there is nothing good tethering her here. I was ecstatic to return, but even then I knew I had nowhere else to go.


\

Season of migraines and languor. The air is so hot that it shimmers; I could evaporate into it. Every summer, golden beams mesh into my body and leach my appetite from me. I cannot eat, so my main form of subsistence is half food and half light. It is ghost month, and all I can stand to eat is white wood ear: a frond of moonlight, a luminous sugared gill, filamentous beam woven into delicate form. 


\

It’s hard to find white wood ear in the shops these days. It is a relic of more rural and rooted times. I have not cooked it as long as your grandmother would, she says. She admits like a failure. She thinks of my grandmother’s spine: the bone as thin as a sheet of paper. So thin it could let light through; a light beam’s length from death. To say digest in Mandarin, I learn to say something first disappears, then transforms. Sometimes what we think has disappeared has really taken on a new form.

This piece paraphrases language from Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s poem “Permanent Home.”

This story is part of the Remains notebook, which features art by Chitra Ganesh.