Ghost Calls
I live on the Beitou side of Yangmingshan, where sulfur darkens all of my mom’s hidden jewelry. Beitou originates from Ketagalan kipatauw, meaning home of the witches. This place has people who see spirits. Just take the taxi driver, for instance. The one whose car we piled into late one night, the one who we asked to take us up to Wenhua University at the top of the mountain for a view of Taipei’s city lights. He said no, he doesn’t drive up there at this time. In the darkness, around hairpin turns, ghosts just stand there watching him drive by. I know not everyone can see them. I’m telling you they wouldn’t hurt us, but it just makes me uneasy.
Animals can also be clairvoyant; I have yet to see ghosts with my own eyes, but in Minnie’s final months she did and so I slept while they were there. Night fell at seven, we dined at eight, my parents were asleep by eleven. When midnight arrived, I switched off the kitchen lights and pulled her mat into our bedroom where she laid down to lick her paws while I brushed my teeth. It’s time to rest now, so let’s drift off into our dreamworlds: mine of lost loves, hers of oven-dried pork slices and afternoons spent lounging on the patio. Let’s rest now. At four o’clock, the spirits making their rounds will come calling.
They will breeze through hilly alleys and go straight through the window glass. Nothing will so much as move, except the curtains will give a little flutter from cold wind. In twilight hours of Minnie’s twilight years, lonely spirits come in search of familiar friend. I think old Rusty is one of them, a husky-border-collie-mix with one black eye and one blue. Not tonight, our mongrel declined blindly, as cloudy cataracts find light in darkness. I want one more summer, and then some.
On the side of Yangming mountain where witches make breakfast of rotten eggs, see house number twenty five? That’s our house, with the patio and Christmas lights. There we thought about spreading Minnie’s ashes, but the soil goes nowhere and that could be cruel. Maybe we could let her roam free, near the ocean at white sand bay. Near the water — but not in the water, because let’s not forget how she much hated the water. When she was strong and I was little, I held her with full force between my legs. Thighs squeezing ribs while I soaped her down, black eyes of burnt almonds looking up for mercy. Scrubbing and cleaning, though I could never fully scrub the smell of dog away. Inhale: A strange musk of herbal shampoo and drying fur. Do ghosts have phobias like the living? Do spirits feel the coldness of water?
In my home on the Beitou side of Yangmingshan, since Minnie’s death, I started noticing a crack forming in the wall of my dad’s study room. A growing split in the wall — roots extending, splitting from ceiling to floor. The stairs between the first and second floor crumbled last year. And, plink, plonk, sometimes the tiles from our upstairs neighbors sprinkle down. I want to say: WEHAVETOGOTHISPLACEISFALLINGAPART but instead I just run my hand over the cracks, pointing it out to my dad whose head is buried in newspaper. Yes, someday it will fall, he agrees, unmoved. This building will fall over. Except, he doesn’t say “fall over”. Lum is our word for collapse. See a Jenga tower on a coffee table, two children and one grandmother circled around it. Small pink fingers reach naively for the wrong block — or curiously for the right one — and the building, it lums. Hear the cascade of bricks, pattering down onto the floor like rain.
Make a home somewhere, and soon enough, your ghosts will find it. They’ve come to tell you they’ve missed you, and that the afterlife is not so bad. Can I haunt you for a little while? When will we be together again? Don’t be afraid. Close your eyes. Recognize your loved ones in another form, welcome them in, even say something back. I think it’s my dad who talks to the spirits now. I think they’ve come to the agreement that for now, our building stands.
In my home, on the Beitou side of Yangmingshan, this place didn’t used to be our home. It was once the house further down the hill, just before the part where it gets steep and unbearable to trek up in the summer. The ceilings were taller, sunrays reached all of the rooms, especially my dad’s study. Curtains turned golden on Sunday mornings. Floors were marble, and it was in that house that I learned by watching Minnie how to take a nap and cool off in the heat. Press my belly and cheek to the ground. Feel the cold stone, cold like ice. There once was a hammock that my mom brought home from Cambodia. I swung on it for weeks, reading stacks and stacks of books, while the eternal afternoon sun squeezed herself to warm me between the slabs of wood that hid me from street’s view. I read, breathing in all the burning sweetness of mosquito incense, smoke filling up little lungs.
Today, I live in New York City with no ghosts, no spirit visitors. At night before I sleep, I only hear the sound of sirens. I drift into dreamworlds of lost loves, and when dawn comes — and it comes gently — it’s just birds that wake me. It’s just the trash truck on 26th street, ringing in a new day.
(New York City: March 5, 2025)