Ghost Forest Read online

  Advance praise for Ghost Forest

  “Moving…Bracing fragments and poignant vignettes come together to make a stunning and evocative whole.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Ghost Forest is an exceptional debut—risky, precise, witty, and beautiful. How can a painting be distilled into “a single line,” or love take root without a home to ground it? Pik-Shuen Fung creates an almost transparent yet weighted world made of relations. This is a moving, alive, and unforgettable book.”

  —Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

  “Ghost Forest is a debut certain to turn your heart. With a dexterity and style all her own, Fung renders the many voices that make up a family, as well as the mythologies we create for those we know, and those we wish we knew better. I am madly in love with this book, a kaleidoscopic wonder.”

  —T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

  “Like a Chinese ink painting, every line in Fung’s Ghost Forest is full of movement and spirit, revealing the resilient threads of matrilineal history and the inheritance of stories and silences. With humor, compassion, and clear-eyed prose, Fung reminds us that grief, memory, and history are never linear but always alive. Fung writes about the questions we forget to ask, the stories that are hidden from us, and the complex acts of care at the core of family. She reminds us that what is unspoken is never lost. Ghost Forest is an intimate act of recording and reckoning. It trusts us to listen. It shows us all the languages for love.”

  —K-Ming Chang, author of Bestiary

  “In Ghost Forest, Fung gives us a family so aching with tenderness, so incandescent with grief and love, that reading about them felt like reading about my own deepest and most secret longings and regrets. This is a book to break your heart and then fill it to bursting again. What an exquisite, glorious debut.”

  —Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse

  “With a single line, you can paint the ocean,” says an art teacher in Ghost Forest, as apt a description as any for Fung’s spare, gorgeous, devastating debut novel. Here, silences speak. Brilliant and pitiless at first, Ghost Forest mutates in the reader’s hand, until it shimmers with grace and unexpected humor. A mercurial meditation on love and family.”

  —Padma Viswanathan, author of The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

  “Made by an artist who angles her mirror to make room for the faces of others, Fung’s Ghost Forest resembles a xieyi painting, a place where white space and absence are as important as color and life. At once an elegy to all that’s been lost between countries, languages, generations, and a quietly urgent call to love what we have. Inventive, funny, and devastating.”

  —Jennifer Tseng, author of Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

  Ghost Forest is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Pik-Shuen Fung

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  One World and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Brief portions of this work were published in The Margins in 2016.

  Hardback isbn 9780593230961

  Ebook ISBN 9780593230978

  oneworldlit.com

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook

  Cover design and collage by Donna Cheng

  Cover images by Getty Images

  ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Bird

  乖

  Astronaut Family

  So Fresh

  Yew Street

  Chinatown

  A Scene at the Mall

  Another Scene at the Mall

  My Preschool Teacher Calls

  My Beautiful Nose

  The Fortune Teller

  My Name

  The Green Carpet

  My Grandma Says:

  Family Prayer

  My Kindergarten Teacher Calls

  My Mom Says:

  The Brown Sludge

  Afternoon Snacks

  My Grandma Says:

  Parking Lots

  Thing Is

  Monkeys

  Starry Night

  What the Heart Wants

  My Mom Says:

  A Sepia Photograph

  My Grandma Says:

  Lunar New Year

  Summers

  Things Strangers in Hong Kong Said to Me Every Summer

  Lucky Bamboo and Money Trees

  Yellow Tulips

  The Painting of Horses

  The Game

  My Hard Head

  Sir

  My Mother Calls from Canada While I’m in Hong Kong

  My Mom Says:

  Pajamas

  The Artist’s Spirit

  Bamboo Groves in Mist and Rain

  Ghost Forest

  This Beach Would Be Perfect

  Grinding the Ink Stick

  Heart Like Water

  My Grandma Says:

  The Liver and the Spleen

  Would It Be So Different?

  The Script

  Mothers

  My Mom Says:

  Fifteen

  My Grandma Says:

  Fresh Towels

  Sleeping Pills

  A Simple Life

  Popeye

  So Handsome

  Hair

  Three Women

  The Fish

  Vacation Time

  Happy Movies

  My Father’s Father

  Morning

  Mom, Say It!

  The Story of How My Parents Met

  My Mom Says:

  The Green Curtain

  Favorite Color

  The Spanish Restaurant

  Something to Talk About

  Fathers

  ICU

  This Place

  Four A.M.

  Dongpo Pork

  Things My Dad Liked

  Yellow

  Returning

  The Biggest Hurdle

  Temple of Red and Gold

  Emergency Surgery

  Waiting

  Hands, One

  Watching

  Hands, Two

  You Can Go in Peace

  Take Care of Your Mother

  Singapore Noodles

  The Picture We Took at the Beach

  The Funeral

  The Cremation

  Seven Days

  108 Prayers

  Translations

  Forgiveness

  Toes

  Best Possible
Day

  Dream

  An Email from My Dad

  A Memory

  Home

  Hair Ceremony

  Tea Ceremony

  Grandmothers

  A Stick of Incense

  So Many Questions

  The Hallway

  My Mom Says:

  Why Not Spend It Happily?

  Sleep

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much.

  —Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street

  BIRD

  Twenty-one days after my dad died, a bird perched on the railing of my balcony. It was brown. It stayed there for a long time.

  Hi Dad, I said. Thanks for checking up on me.

  I lay down on the couch and read some emails on my phone. When I looked up again, the bird was gone.

  乖

  In my family, the best thing a child could be was gwaai. It meant you were good. It meant you did as you were told.

  When I was four, or maybe six, I found out I was supposed to have a baby brother. But my mom said the baby flew to the sky, and that was why my dad was sad those days.

  But why is he sad? I asked.

  Because he’s a traditional Chinese father and he wants to have a son. Try to cheer him up.

  Okay, I said.

  I decided I would be so gwaai, I would be more perfect than a son.

  ASTRONAUT FAMILY

  I was three and a half when we immigrated to Canada. Like many other families, we left Hong Kong before the 1997 Handover. They say almost a sixth of the city left during this time.

  My dad had seen news stories of Hong Kongers who couldn’t find jobs in their new countries, stories of managers who became dishwashers because they couldn’t speak the new language. Like many other fathers, my dad decided he didn’t want to leave his job in manufacturing behind.

  To help my mom, my grandma and grandpa agreed to move with us to Canada. That spring, my dad took two weeks off from work, and the five of us headed to Kai Tak airport. All my aunts and uncles came to the departure gates to see us off.

  In Canada there were more Hong Kong immigrants than in any other country, and in Vancouver, I had many classmates whose fathers stayed in Hong Kong for work too. I didn’t think of my family as different. I thought, this is what Hong Kong fathers do.

  Astronaut family. It’s a term invented by the Hong Kong mass media. A family with an astronaut father—flying here, flying there.

  SO FRESH

  As we walked out of the arrivals at the Vancouver airport, our family friends waved their arms.

  Isn’t the air so fresh in Canada? they said.

  For two weeks, we stayed at their house in the Richmond neighborhood, and they drove us everywhere. We ate dim sum in Aberdeen Centre, a new mall known as Little Hong Kong, and posed for pictures in Stanley Park, feeding breadcrumbs to the geese. But mostly, we were jet-lagged, riding in the back of their beige minivan, asleep with open mouths.

  Two weeks later, after we moved into our new house, they drove us back to the Vancouver airport, where my mom looked at me and said, Say bye-bye to your dad now, he’s flying back to Hong Kong.

  YEW STREET

  Through the windows of our new house, I saw plump pointy trees and blurry swishing trees. Everywhere outside was green.

  At night, my mom slept in her bedroom, my grandpa in his. I shared a room with my grandma since we were always together. Three generations under one roof.

  Dik lik dak lak diklikdaklak diklikdaklak

  In our new house in Vancouver, everywhere outside was rain.

  CHINATOWN

  On weekends, my grandparents, my mom, and I rode the bus to Chinatown to see the herbalist because in Canada we felt always cold.

  Afterward, we huddled along the market stalls on Keefer and Main, buying bok choy and hairy gourd, watercress and salted duck kidneys, pork bones and silkie chickens for soup. We shopped enough for the week, and then with a bag in each hand, we rode the bus home.

  But over the years, as more and more Hong Kongers moved to Richmond, as Asian supermarkets like Yaohan and T&T opened their doors, as my mom learned to drive and bought us a car, we didn’t go to Chinatown anymore.

  A SCENE AT THE MALL

  One time, at the food court in Aberdeen Centre, a woman sat down near us with a steaming bowl of wonton soup. My mom looked twice.

  You immigrated? my mom said to the woman.

  You also immigrated? the woman said back.

  The woman once worked in the same building as my mom in Hong Kong.

  ANOTHER SCENE AT THE MALL

  Another time, in an aisle of Zellers department store, my mom and her friend pointed at electric water kettles.

  How about this one? my mom said.

  How about that one? her friend said.

  A stranger marched over to say, You Chinese are too loud!

  MY PRESCHOOL TEACHER CALLS

  One day my preschool teacher called to say, Your daughter goes to the bathroom every two hours.

  So my mom took me to the doctor and we did some urine tests, but the results came back normal. The doctor said maybe I was nervous because of the changes, maybe I didn’t know how to adapt because I was small, or maybe I didn’t have the words.

  My grandma says that when I was in preschool in Hong Kong, I always got in trouble for being too loud. All I remember is that, after moving to Canada, every report card said I was too quiet.

  MY BEAUTIFUL NOSE

  To keep warm, my grandma and I practiced the eighteen forms of qigong in the living room.

  Wherever the hand moves, she said, pushing the air with her palm, it knows when it’s time to turn.

  I turned my palm to my face as if an invisible string attached it to my nose.

  Beautiful, my grandma said. When you were a baby, I told your father, My granddaughter is so beautiful! But he said to me, Her nose is too flat! So, for nine months, on the first and the fifteenth of every lunar month, I pinched your nose. Now you have such a beautiful nose. It wasn’t like that when you were born.

  THE FORTUNE TELLER

  When I was born, my parents didn’t name me. They waited two weeks to see a fortune teller, to ask for an auspicious name.

  Looking down at my birth chart the fortune teller said, Her power is very strong. I’m afraid she might squash the son that you want. Find her a godmother to soften it.

  My parents thought of a kind Japanese woman they knew through work who didn’t have any children. She spoke no English or Cantonese, and lived in the Ibaraki Prefecture. My mom says there is no concept of godmother in Japanese culture, but my godmother accepted right away. To adopt me as her goddaughter, she gave me a pair of chopsticks and a bowl.

  But I remember, as I got older, putting my palms together and praying for a sister.

  MY NAME

  The first character of my name is a generation name, so all the women on my dad’s side of the family have it too.

  It means green, but not just green—it’s the green blue of emeralds.

  And the second character means beautiful jade.

  THE GREEN CARPET

  For a time after we immigrated to Vancouver and before my mom learned she was pregnant again, my grandparents flew back to Hong Kong.

  Without my grandma to cook for us, every night my mom and I walked to the local Cantonese restaurant for dinner. Without my grandpa to watch over me, my mom took me to the community center after school. She signed me up for art classes, like pottery and animation, and sat with me in the library for story time.

  I still remember the long low shelves where I placed my clay cups before they went in
to the kiln, the click-click of the projector in the dark dusty room, and the green carpet where I sat listening to the librarian’s voice, the scratchy green carpet where I rubbed my palms.

  MY GRANDMA SAYS:

  When your mom asked me and Grandpa to go to Canada, I didn’t want to go. I said, I don’t know English. But your mom said if we didn’t go, she wouldn’t go. So we went with her to Canada.