The Woman Warrior_ Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston [28]
“I like to think the ancestors are busier than that,” my mother said, “or more at rest. Yes, they’re probably more at rest. Perhaps it was an animal spirit that was bothering your house, and your grandfather had something to do with chasing it off.” After what she thought was a suitably tactful pause, she said, “How do we know that ghosts are the continuance of dead people? Couldn’t ghosts be an entirely different species of creature? Perhaps human beings just die, and that’s the end. I don’t think I’d mind that too much. Which would you rather be? A ghost who is constantly wanting to be fed? Or nothing?”
If the other storytellers had been reassuring one another with science, then my mother would have flown stories as factual as bats into the listening night. A practical woman, she could not invent stories and told only true ones. But tonight the younger women were huddling together under the quilts, the ghost room with its door open steps away.
“Did you hear that?” someone would whisper. And sure enough, whenever their voices stilled simultaneously, a thump or a creak would unmistakably sound somewhere inside the building. The girls would jump closer together giggling.
“That was the wind,” my mother would say. “That was somebody who fell asleep reading in bed; she dropped her book.” She neither jumped nor giggled.
“If you’re so sure,” said an impertinent girl, perhaps the one with the disdainful chin, “why don’t you go out there and take a look?”
“Of course,” said my mother. “I was just thinking about doing that,” and she took a lamp and left her friends, impressed, in a dimmer room. She advanced steadily, waking the angular shadows up and down the corridor. She walked to both ends of the hallway, then explored another wing for good measure. At the ghost room, door open like a mouth, she stopped and, stepping inside, swung light into its corners. She saw cloth bags in knobby mounds; they looked like gnomes but were not gnomes. Suitcases and boxes threw shadow stairs up the walls and across the floor. Nothing unusual loomed at her or scurried away. No temperature change, no smell.
She turned her back on the room and slowly walked through one more wing. She did not want to get back too soon. Her friends, although one owes nothing to friends, must be satisfied that she searched thoroughly. After a sufficiently brave time, she returned to the storytellers. “I saw nothing,” she said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of in the whole dormitory, including the ghost room. I checked there too. I went inside just now.”
“The haunting begins at midnight,” said the girl with the adamantine chin. “It’s not quite eleven.”
My mother may have been afraid, but she would be a dragoness (“my totem, your totem”). She could make herself not weak. During danger she fanned out her dragon claws and riffied her red sequin scales and unfolded her coiling green stripes. Danger was a good time for showing off. Like the dragons living in temple eaves, my mother looked down on plain people who were lonely and afraid.
“I’m so sleepy,” my mother said. “I don’t want to wait up until midnight. I’ll go sleep in the ghost room. Then if anything happens, I won’t miss it. I hope I’ll be able to recognize the ghost when I see it. Sometimes ghosts put on such mundane disguises, they aren’t particularly interesting.”
“Aiaa. Aiaa,” the storytellers exclaimed. My mother laughed with satisfaction at their cries.
“I’ll call out if something bad happens to me,” she said. “If you come running all together, you will probably be able to scare any ghost away.”
Some of them promised to come; some offered their talismans—a branch from a peach tree, a Christian cross, a red paper with good words written on it. But my mother refused them all. “If I