HONG KONG
1938
1.
the house was so famous it had a name. Nam Koo Terrace. Say it five times fast and it dissolves into a chant, a nonsensical nursery rhyme. Or a call into the wild to bring forth something beastly, something even worse than a nightmare.
Since Gigi was a little girl, she had walked by the famous mansion every day, her hand held by her older brother, who dragged her all the way to school, muttering.
“We’ll be late,” he always hissed. “Pick up your feet.”
“But,” she said, “I want to look at the house.” And she craned her neck to look back at the white garden walls, the lush trees that grew fifteen feet tall, the smooth driveway, the columns flanking the sliver of porch she could see from the sidewalk. If she looked long and hard enough, maybe she would one day see the headless woman she had heard about slip between the trees.
“Nobody cares about that stupid rich man’s house. They just make up ghost stories so people won’t try to break in and steal whatever is in there, you dummy,” and here her brother stopped and turned to face her. “It’s all bullshit.”
But Gigi only shook her head and silently wondered if there were English roses in the garden, a lavender walk, or a maze made of boxwood. How would she look in a grand ballgown, walking down the mossy paths, fingers brushing the low-hanging branches of wisteria? Would she look more like Vivien Leigh, small and elegant and flawless? Or would she be like Joan Crawford, with an edge of danger barely concealed by her fearsomely angled face? She might be discovered by a famous Hollywood director there, lit perfectly by the low afternoon sun, and be whisked away to make movies in which she could be beautiful and dance, in which men would fall in love with her and fight to the death for her affection.
In her daydreams, Gigi often chose danger, but she never told anyone this.
She was not a girl who cared about time or school or the rows of numbers her mother squinted at every night, trying to balance what they spent against what she earned as a secretary. Their father had left them a long time ago, after all, and it was just the three of them, hidden away in a small apartment down a narrow street in Wan Chai. To find their front entrance, one had to find the right winding street, follow it only halfway down to a faded green door, pull the chain for the bell, and hope someone in the building was home or cared enough to slide open the small hatch at eye level to see who was there. Gigi often wondered how her father would ever find them. That is, if he ever wanted to.
Nam Koo Terrace was too beautiful for her to ignore for something so trivial as school or time. The red brick mansion stood in the middle of a grove—trees upon trees upon trees. If Gigi stopped at just the right spot in the road, she could tilt her head and see through the foliage. The wrought-iron railings. The majestic round water fountain. The wide porch that stretched from east to west. Gigi never saw anyone arriving or leaving, only a line of shiny Peugeots and Jaguars in the circular driveway, the sun reflecting off their impossibly smooth metallic surfaces. No one in Hong Kong ever drove cars; they rode the trams with bags and bags slung over their shoulders or pedalled skinny bicycles while smoking the unfiltered cigarettes that always made Gigi gag. The people who lived in that famous house, though, they drove, hidden in their cars away from the smog and noise and the smells coming from the fishing boats in the harbour.
Sister Lucia at school told her that a rich silk merchant had built Nam Koo Terrace for his bride years ago. “They were happy for a
while,” Sister Lucia had said, whispering so only Gigi could hear, “blessed with three sons and one daughter, a beautiful girl, the youngest of the family. They say she was skilled at the violin and could read in three languages and the entire family doted on her. But her father was struck with greed, as he had been his whole life.”
Gigi stared at Sister Lucia’s face, the swirl and noise of the classroom barely a ripple in her ears. “What do you mean? What did he do?”
Sister Lucia bent down and further lowered her voice. “He realized what a treasure his only daughter was, accomplished and lovely and sweet. And so he arranged a marriage for her to the son of a wealthy shipping tycoon, so that his silks could be easily transported around the world. She was only sixteen, not even finished with her education.” She looked around and quickened her voice as the restlessness of the students grew. “This is a lurid story, Gigi. Perhaps not one I should be telling to a girl of thirteen.”
“Tell me what happened to her. Please?”
“Well, in the end, she realized she could not marry this boy she barely knew. And so she tried to run away the evening before the wedding, but was caught leaving by her father, who then locked her away in her room. When her mother unlocked the door in the morning, carrying the wedding qipao, she found her daughter hanging from the chandelier.” Gigi gasped, and Sister Lucia frowned. “It was a harsh punishment, but the girl committed the worst sin. Suicide is unforgivable in God’s eyes.”
Gigi nodded, unsure if she agreed or not. “Did she become a ghost, Sister?”
“There is only the Holy Ghost, child, as I’m sure you would remember from your Bible class. But they do say that ever since then, people have heard a woman crying within the walls of Nam Koo. Some have even seen her, walking the hallways in a nightgown. Sometimes her head is loose, held to her broken neck with just muscle and skin. Sometimes she is headless, as if the noose had
snapped her head clean off.”
That night, as Gigi tried to fall asleep in her narrow bed, she could picture the girl’s slender body hanging from a chandelier made of crystal and gold, her neck bent at an unnatural angle that made Gigi’s stomach flip, the girl’s long black hair over her face—a face that must have been blue, if anyone had cared to sweep her hair away to see. I would have brushed it away, Gigi thought, so her face could be seen one last time. Her face deserved to be remembered.
a year later, gigi’s brother joined the army to fight against the Japanese, who, the news on the radio warned, were surely coming to try to occupy Hong Kong. Where he went, Gigi and their mother never knew, only that he was always behind enemy lines, that his ability to speak Mandarin, Cantonese, and English was what led him into jungles and villages he never named. Her mother told the neighbours that he was a spy, that his good grades in science and math meant that he could disarm bombs and build invisible traps in the damp, dense bush, but Gigi thought that this was a story that made her mother feel better, as if his absence served a purpose and wasn’t just painful and futile. At dinnertime, Gigi stared at his empty chair, where he would normally be reading a book, not looking at the food he shovelled into his mouth. There had never been a chair for their father, but that didn’t matter because his absence was obvious and omnipresent. Every time a classmate asked about him, every time she watched her mother haul their garbage down to the street herself, every time Gigi heard a noise in the middle of the night and there was no one to check the apartment for intruders, she felt the hole his absence left in her bones, like an ache. At least her brother had promised to return.
Now Gigi had to walk to school alone. By herself, she could stop and stare at Nam Koo for as long as she wanted, morning and
afternoon. There was no one to rush her, and so she dawdled, peering through the foliage. It was in this way that she saw, for the first time, people leaving the house, loading up the shiny cars with boxes and bags and trunks. On either side of the driveway were two soldiers in khaki uniforms, standing still and straight, hands resting on the pistols in the holsters criss-crossing their chests. Instinctively, Gigi stepped back into the shadow cast by a tall cedar. The Japanese were already in Hong Kong, at Nam Koo of all places. She thought her heart might crack in two.
She could see a girl standing in the driveway in a pale green dress, holding a straw hat at her side. This girl was gazing at the house, as Gigi was, and at her feet was a leather suitcase. Gigi hadn’t thought there were any young girls living there anymore, but then maybe the silk merchant’s sons had gotten married and had children of their own, daughters her age who had grown up in Nam Koo, swaddled by trees and velvet. Gigi wondered what it must be like to be forced to leave a house like that, the kind of house that was big enough and grand enough to hold a lifetime’s worth of dreams and their inevitable fulfillment. If this girl had wanted a pony, there was space for a pony. If this girl had wanted a library of books, a room could be found to line with shelves from floor to ceiling.
How do you leave the manifestation of all the wishes in your heart? What if you loved a place so much you couldn’t bear the thought of moving away? Wouldn’t death be infinitely better? She wanted to know the answers to these questions so badly it ached. She took a step forward and stepped on a pile of dried leaves. She winced at the crunching sound.
The girl turned around, slowly. A gust of wind flipped her skirt, and Gigi saw that the pale green was actually faded, that the fabric underneath was a bright emerald still, the colour the dress must have been before it was washed too many times, before it had been bleached by years of handling and sunshine. When Gigi looked up again, she inhaled sharply and grasped her own throat, as if trying to
stifle the scream that threatened to emerge. Gigi could see, plain as day, that where the girl’s face should have been there was only smooth black waves falling to her shoulders. No ripples that might suggest the contours of a face hidden by hair. No eyes peering through the strands. No bump for a nose. No mouth exhaling breath that might sway the hair even a little bit. But Gigi could feel that the girl was looking straight at her, was assessing her height, the left knee sock that had fallen down around her ankle, even the wrinkle in her school tie that never disappeared no matter how many times her mother pressed the iron into it. Gigi moaned quietly, an accidental release that surprised her for the way it sounded like a stray cat in pain. None of this made any sense. The girl would need eyes to see. And Gigi was sure there were no eyes, nothing at all. She looked up at the sky, hoping that the vomit she could feel rising in her throat would settle if she just turned her face upward, stretched her neck as tall as possible.
Ghosts, she thought. The ghosts are real. And then she felt even sicker.
When one of the Japanese soldiers turned to look at the street, Gigi picked up the hem of her knee-length skirt and ran all the rest of the way to school, as fast as she could, trying to shake off the feeling that the faceless girl was watching her still.
for a month, she avoided Nam Koo altogether, adding fifteen minutes to her walk, often arriving at school out of breath. It didn’t matter though. At home, in class, trudging to the market stalls with her mother—the faceless girl never left her mind, turning and turning toward her, her hair never moving, her hair so black and opaque. Was it possible that Gigi had seen the ghost of the silk merchant’s daughter? Or had she seen the ghost of someone else? What Gigi did know was that she never wanted to see her again.
But then, on a grey and rainy afternoon, Gigi was running late. Her drama teacher had asked her to stay after class so they could finish up
the costumes for the school play, a melodrama about a soldier returning home with a war injury and the virtuous sweetheart who tries to nurse him back to health. Gigi bent her head over the sewing machine, feeding yards of cheap fabric under the needle, using her sharp eyes and steady hands to make the seams tight and straight. By the time she looked up, the clock hanging on the wall said it was almost five.
“I have to leave,” she said, standing up and pulling on her jacket. “I have to get the rice on before my mother comes home.”
As she hurried down the sidewalk, her small umbrella held uselessly over her already soaking head, she knew she could not take the long way around. Her mother’s moods, always volatile, had grown gloomier and angrier ever since her brother had left. If Gigi did not get the rice cooked, her mother might rage, might throw the pot out the window, or she might sink into a deep sadness and refuse to eat at all. Gigi didn’t know which she feared most, and so she turned to walk right past Nam Koo Terrace.
In the driving rain, there was no way of knowing if anyone was inside. Maybe the lights were on. But the branches on the trees were so heavy and thick with water, who could see past the leaves?
“Don’t look,” she muttered to herself, as she broke into a run. “If I don’t see anything, I will never know.”
As she passed the entrance to the driveway, she lowered her head and closed her eyes. So she saw nothing as an arm wrapped roughly around her waist and another hand pinned her own hands behind her back. Her umbrella fell from her grip, and cold puddle water splashed her ankles when it hit the pavement. Water seeped into her shoes. Her feet were wet. She felt it.
She saw nothing.
Years ago, when her mother had watched their neighbour’s baby for extra money, she had taught Gigi how to swaddle him, and she
tucked and folded until the baby was wrapped tight. In Gigi’s arms, the baby’s face quickly grew redder and redder, until his cheeks were burning hot to the touch. He screamed, and Gigi, panicked, dropped him onto the sofa.
This was how she felt, being dragged up the driveway toward Nam Koo with so many arms wrapped around her she couldn’t tell if there were two people or twelve. She wanted to scream, flail her arms, feel air on her skin, but she couldn’t; she could only allow her body to be pulled up the steps, every sharp edge digging into her muddy, rain-soaked calves.
Later, when she was given her own room inside Nam Koo—a room with a bed, a dressing table, and long thick velvet curtains suffused with the smell of hot sweat and cold fear—she would reflect on this moment, how she kept her eyes shut tight, how her whole life changed so swiftly, but she could not tell you how. This would be the last time Gigi wilfully chose not to face all the things that were happening to her, even if they were ugly or hurtful, the consequences of war or bad men or her own bad choices. After that, during all those years she was locked inside the famous house, she promised herself that she would never turn away again. Her survival meant seeing it all.
VANCOUVER
2024
2.
if you had asked the child Alice if she had ever felt haunted, she might have told you about her dead father, about how she would walk down the hallway to the bathroom at night, only to see the framed photograph of him, holding an oversized rainbow trout and wearing sopping wet waders, moving at the edges of her vision. When she turned to look at the photo directly, the moonlight shining through the vertical blinds, she swore his face changed expression, the familiar wide grin she saw every day behind that sheet of thin glass briefly dropping into a loose-cheeked sadness. She wondered if he—or his ghost—couldn’t hold that performed happiness for twenty-four hours a day, if he had to relax into wistfulness or regret or loneliness while his family was asleep, before his expression stiffened into that smile again in the morning—or whenever Alice caught him. Every night, it was as if she surprised him. She’d stand still and stare, waiting to see if his mouth might droop again, if he might even drop the fish so he could wipe away a tear. But he never did. Or at least not when she was in front of the photograph, eyes inches from the frame, watching. After she went back to bed, she was certain he had been keeping watch, checking the shadows behind her for danger, sweeping his two-dimensional eyes along the path in front of her for anything that might be waiting to pounce, anything that she, sleep-addled, could not see.
Everything, from the bones deep inside her body to the foundation of this house to the memories she could never shake even if she wanted to, was always about her father.
If her mother pulled out an old dress, looking for something to wear to a wedding, she invariably said, “Your father loved this dress, especially when we went dancing.” If Alice was looking for paper clips in the junk drawer, she would come across his old business cards, furred on the edges and faded, reading TOM CHOW PHOTOGRAPHY. His gardening gloves still hung on a hook under the deck; his bucket of tools was still shoved under the stairs in the basement. Alice’s mother didn’t do yardwork, had never moved or wiped down the rusting machete that was stuffed in with all the other, less ominous things, the spades and rakes and twine. No, Judy hired people, two refugee brothers from Vietnam, who knew better than to ever meet her eyes and trimmed the grass exactly as they were told, before packing their truck and driving away as silently as possible.
In the summers, Alice liked to escape to the back garden, where her mother never ventured and where the signs of her father’s presence were not so stagnant, not so frozen at the very precise moment he had died, struggling for breath. The peonies he tied up, the magnolia he watered, the creeping thyme he tucked between the stones of the path—all of them were still here, but they had grown, filled in spaces, created canopies of intertwined overhead branches that hid the one spot, piled with rocks, where nothing ever grew, no matter how many times her father had scattered wildflower seeds or transplanted ferns. Judy had always told her that her father had buried a dead cat there before Alice was born and covered the grave with mismatched stones he picked up from the alley. She liked to sit there, her fingers slowly picking at pebbles, the dirt soft and granular at the same time. She would try to remember her real father then, not the artifacts that had come to replace him.
She remembered that he only shaved on Sunday evenings. By Thursday, his scruff tickled Alice’s cheek when she hugged him. He liked meatloaf and Salisbury steak, anything with the cheap ground beef her mother hated. Ever since he was a child, he had been in love with Cher and Tina Turner, taping up
pictures of them from magazines on the walls of his childhood bedroom, the very same bedroom Alice’s son slept in now. He built a darkroom in the basement, right beside the suite he and Judy lived in after they got married, and Alice could hear the running water whenever he was working, like the big fountain at the planetarium. Her dad had loved that place, sighing with deep contentment when the padded chairs reclined and the stars lit up the domed ceiling. He always reached for her hand then, as if he might float away with joy and needed to be anchored by his daughter’s presence.
After a while she didn’t know if she was remembering her real father anymore, or if she was recalling an endless funhouse mirror of moments that, as time went on, became less and less real, and more and more a trick of the brain. Maybe they were all just gaps and rips in time that she filled in herself, with stories that she unwittingly created, always more serene than any memories ought to be, with a more polite Alice whose hair was brushed and sleek, who never pushed her father’s hand away when he tried to hold it to cross the street.
This, she might have said, was how she was haunted, caught in a loop of wished-for memories. If she had ever felt a presence as she was falling asleep at night, it was just her longing for her father to read her bedtime stories (though he had always sung her lullabies instead). If she heard noises coming from the basement, she was just remembering her father’s clumsy body moving through his small darkroom (though he wasn’t clumsy, he knew how to dance). If, in the moment before she turned the light on, she glimpsed a flash of brightness in the dark reflection of the bathroom mirror, she told herself she was still half asleep, that she was lonely without her father (this, at least, was partly true, she was indeed very lonely). If there were other explanations, more supernatural ones, Alice never thought of them and
was therefore never scared, only sad. Sad to the bone.
This was how she grew up—and how she was able to stay—in the house where her father had also grown up, gotten married, had a baby, and died. She was repeating her father’s life by staying here, in a house that could very well have been haunted without her ever really knowing it. In retrospect, Alice considered this ignorance a mercy.
mornings were the worst. Alice hadn’t set her alarm in years, not since Luna was born fourteen years ago, her small, wrinkled body tearing through layers of Alice’s skin and muscle. From that first day, Luna barely slept past dawn, and so Alice was forced awake too. By the time Luca arrived, four years later, Alice had given up on sleep as a concept and instead organized her life into periods of rest and activity that lasted for minutes, not hours. Her days began with twenty minutes for breakfast, ten minutes for coffee, which could be construed as rest, and six minutes for driving to school, and ended with fifteen minutes of self-care, which usually meant turning on a cooking show and then immediately falling asleep, her head thrown back against the sofa.
This morning, Luca was shaking her by the shoulder, rocking her toward the window and back. Still, she kept her eyes closed against the sunlight burning through the thin curtains.
“Mom, I know you’re awake.” Alice could hear the irritation in his voice, that verging-on-adolescent crack that ran through all of his words these days. “Mom. I’m hungry. Mom. Please get up.”
When Alice sat up, she saw Luca, rubbing his eyes with his fists. He was small for his age, and bony, with the joints of his elbows and knees growing against the fabric of all his clothes, including his oldest and most loved pyjamas, the set printed with sharks eating pizza.
“Okay, I’m up. Go brush your teeth first.”
the way.
In her bathroom, Alice pushed all the bottles and tubes to the side and placed her palms on the toothpaste-stained counter. She looked at her reflection, squinting at the messy black topknot on her head, the lines from the wrinkled pillowcase on her cheek, the shape of her breasts under her old CBC Radio T-shirt. In her twenties, her breasts had pushed against every shirt she tried to button, every cardigan she shrugged on in a cold office. Now that she was forty, they seemed to have melted into the rest of her torso, no longer round shapes of their own, but dragging, barely perceptible and empty. Alice raised her hand to the mirror and ran her finger over the cracks, the black snakes and spots that meant the mirror was disintegrating from behind. Her reflection wavered as she blinked the sleep from her eyes, and when she looked again, she saw a fresh-faced version of herself, hair artfully mussed and beachy, a sprinkle of freckles scattered across her nose, lips pink and full and glossy. A perfect mom on a perfect morning. This is the way you should look, but you don’t, you really fucking don’t. She closed her eyes again to brush her teeth, not even bothering to rinse the minty suds out of the sink, then rubbed the dead skin off her face and lips with a burning-hot washcloth. This time when she looked in the cracked mirror, it was her real self who stared back, puffy and hunched, a pimple growing on her chin. Alice escaped into the hall, relieved she no longer had to consider the accumulated droop and decay of her own body.
Luna was already in the kitchen, picking at a bowl of dry Corn Pops, staring at her phone. Alice could smell the dirty dinner dishes from the night before, the frozen butter chicken she had heated up in the oven and managed to dry out. When she peered in the sink, a cloud of fruit flies rose into the air and she wondered if the maggots were in the drain or the compost bin. When had she last emptied the compost bin? She swatted at the flies before turning around. Easier to forget if she just never looked. Easier to forget if she was just drunk. Alice patted Luna’s hair, but she twisted her head away, never taking her eyes off her phone. “Mom, stop.”
“Did you put on full makeup already? It’s seven in the morning.”
Luna sighed heavily and flicked her eyes up to her mother’s face. “I couldn’t sleep and had to pass the time. Whatever. Who cares?” Her eyeshadow was a blend of yellow, green, and blue, like the stages of a healing bruise, like someone had smeared a wound over her lids. Alice searched her daughter’s dark brown eyes for any sign of hurt. Lines of red snaked through the whites. She could see Luna had used an ivory pencil in her waterline to try to hide how tired she looked.
“Did you have a nightmare? Again?”
Luna turned her head away, and her cheekbones glittered with drugstore highlighter. “I guess. It’s no big deal. It’s not like I’m not used to it.”
Since Luna was four years old, she had had regular night terrors, waking up screaming indistinct words and, once, running in circles in her bedroom, still fast asleep. She claimed to never remember what haunted her in the night, but Alice sometimes wondered if she did know and just didn’t want to give daytime shape to those dream monsters, those dream fears. Better, perhaps, to leave them unlit and indistinct.
“You can have a nap after school.” Alice touched her daughter’s cheek. “You look nice. I like it.”
“It’s not supposed to look nice. It’s supposed to look like despair.”
Alice dumped yesterday’s coffee grounds into the sink and took a breath before answering. “You do whatever makes you feel good, honey. But I think it looks pretty.”
Luna snorted, which was as close to laughter as she got these days. “That’s such a mom thing to say.” She stood up, leaving her half-full bowl on the table. “Maybe I have some foundation powder that can save this look.” reflection in the window, her replicated self wavering and transparent, a floating body emerging from the branches of the sour cherry tree in the backyard. ...
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