Ghost Month (10 page)

“Jing-nan,” Mrs. Huang said, with a trace of joy around her bleary and baggy eyes. “I knew you would come.”

There was no doubting that Julia was dead now.

“Mrs. Huang,” I said. “I was so sorry to hear. The news just destroyed me.” I embraced her lightly.

Mrs. Huang moved away and blew her nose. I stepped into their apartment and slipped off my shoes. Mr. Huang stood at a slouch in the kitchen, looking lost.

“I told you! Look!” Mrs. Huang said to him. I think he coughed.

I was dimly aware that Mrs. Huang was leading me toward the altar they had set up for Julia on a wall shelf by the dining table. A photograph of Julia looked indifferently over the smoking forest of half-burned incense sticks. I had never seen her face like that before, devoid of emotion except a hint of a smile. How mature
you’ve become, I thought. I didn’t recognize the striped top she was wearing, either. This photo must have been taken at college.

I felt a tightness around my left arm. It was Mr. Huang’s hands.

“Jing-nan!” he said. “It’s really you!” Mr. Huang was about as tall as me at five feet eight inches, so among people his age he’s a giant. He was the source of Julia’s thick eyebrows and vaguely sad and beautiful eyes.

“I am so sorry,” I said, briefly embracing him and rubbing his back. “I’ve brought some things.”

“Of course, of course!”

I shook out several joss sticks from my box and lit them in my hands. I formed prayer hands and bowed three times to Julia’s picture.

You would have hated this, darling, but I know you would appreciate me doing this for your parents.

My hands shook as I planted the sticks in the holder and placed the CDs on the altar. I had a hard time reaching up to place the candy bars, because I had fallen to my knees and was sobbing. My whole face was raw, wet and salty, like a just-popped blister.

“No, no, no,” I babbled in English.

The Huangs helped me over to the couch and propped me up on some cushions. Mr. Huang pressed a damp and mildew-scented towel to my forehead. I had to cry it out before my sobs stuttered and slowed.

When I was able to talk again, I said, “Thank you.”

Mrs. Huang handed me a cup of hot barley tea, pumped from a hot dispenser. She sat down to my right and swung her knees away from me.

All three of us were quiet for a few minutes. For the first time, I could pick up the soft sound of the
Amituofo
chant from an electronic Buddhist chant box plugged in behind the altar.

Mrs. Huang touched my right arm. “The police brought us in to identify Julia’s body,” she said. “Still beautiful. Looked just like she was sleeping. Part of the back of her head was … gone.”

I sucked in my lips and nodded.

“I made sure it was her by feeling the calcium deposit near her right ankle. You know, it’s just like a little knob. Always had to get her low-cut shoes, or else they hurt.”

“She always carried corn cushions,” I said.

“When was the last time you saw Julia?” she asked.

“Right before we left for college.”

Mr. Huang took a seat to my left in an armchair covered in a pill-infested fabric.

“We know you told Julia not to talk to you,” said Mrs. Huang. “She said you didn’t want to get in touch again until you were going to ask her to marry you.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Sounds stupid now.”

“She thought it was so romantic. I did, too.”

Mr. Huang grunted. It wasn’t clear that he meant to indicate approval.

“Everything was doomed by the way you two left Taiwan,” said Mrs. Huang. “You didn’t ask for Buddha’s protection. You didn’t ask Mazu for a safe return to Taiwan. Now look what’s happened. You abandoned them, so they abandoned you and Julia!”

Now was not the time to argue about this. I took a sip of tea.

“This is the wrong way to talk,” said Mr. Huang. “We’re all in shock. We have to appreciate each other.”

“If it would have made a difference, I would have done it,” I said. “Believe me.”

“We’ll never know now,” she said.

Mr. Huang cleared his throat and moved to the candy bars on the ground. “I’ll put these up,” he said.

“Jing-nan,” said Mrs. Huang, “I know you and Julia meant a lot to each other.”

“Yes, we did.” I drank more tea. It had a pleasant, roasted-grain flavor.

“She told me about the times you went to love hotels.”

Barley tea nearly shot out of my nose, but I managed to swallow and say, “She told you?”

“We were very close. We had no secrets, mother and daughter, until a few years ago.”

I nodded. I didn’t want to say anything upsetting. She knew we were sleeping together the entire time! I caressed my puffy eyes and kept quiet.

“I think my relationship with my daughter started going a
little wrong around the time your parents passed away, Jing-nan,” Mrs. Huang said. “I asked her if she wanted to come back for the services, but she insisted you wouldn’t want her here. She felt so terrible for you! She was crying like crazy. I told her that under the circumstances, the deal was off. You two had to talk to each other. But she insisted you would see it as a broken promise.”

I nodded.

“That was really something. It was the first time she wouldn’t do something I told her to. My little girl was slipping away. Pretty soon we were talking less on the phone. I could hear it in her voice, no more emotion. Then she told us about the expulsion from NYU, at the end of her junior year. Daddy went crazy.”

Mr. Huang spoke up. “I was very upset,” he said. “I left messages and cursed her. I told her she wasn’t good enough for you.”

“She never called Daddy back,” said Mrs. Huang.

I let a few moments of silence go by before asking a question. “Why was she thrown out of NYU?”

“She cheated,” said Mr. Huang. “She plagiarized from a book for a paper.”

I couldn’t imagine Julia cheating. She wouldn’t look at another student’s paper, not even in cram school, where everybody developed serious cases of giraffe neck. It must have been a huge misunderstanding at NYU. A missed attribution. A footnote gone astray.

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“We didn’t want to believe it, either,” said Mrs. Huang. “But she told us she did. She was taking too many classes and tried to take a shortcut. She only copied a few paragraphs, but it was a serious enough violation.”

“When did she come back to Taiwan?” I asked.

“We don’t know!” said Mrs. Huang.

“I thought she would try to get back in to NYU,” said Mr. Huang.

“You had no idea she was here?”

“We had no idea she was in Hsinchu City!” said Mrs. Huang. “Less than an hour away all these years.”

“Maybe it was my fault,” said Mr. Huang. “I was too harsh. That’s why she didn’t call us again.”

“Who else’s fault could it be?” said Mrs. Huang. “If you really cared about her, you would have told her to just come back to Taiwan and finish her degree here!”

I knew Julia wouldn’t have wanted to do that.

Mrs. Huang launched another attack on her husband. “If you really loved your daughter, you wouldn’t let this go. You would make the police find out who did this! Make the murderer pay!”

Mr. Huang rubbed his hands. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“Call them every hour!”

“That’s not going to do anything.”

“See? You still don’t care!”

I spoke up. “Is there anything I could do to help?”

“Jing-nan!” Mrs. Huang looked me over like I was the last chocolate in a box. “Help us! The police don’t care about Julia. They haven’t done anything! Not one person brought in for questioning.”

“You have to give them a few days first,” said Mr. Huang.

“Not even one person! They should bring in everybody who works at that betel-nut stand! The police won’t even tell us which stand it was.”

“They probably don’t want us to interfere with their work.”

“They’re not working!” Mrs. Huang thumped her fist against her breastbone. She sounded empty. “They just want everyone to forget about Julia! The owner of the betel-nut stand must have bribed the police! The news stations don’t even talk about her anymore, just two days later!”

“That’s true,” I said.

“There’s nothing keeping the pressure on! Jing-nan, you have to do something!”

“Don’t put Jing-nan in this position,” Mr. Huang pleaded.

“What position? Her father won’t do anything, and Jing-nan is the closest thing to a husband Julia had!”

Mr. Huang shook off the sting and said matter-of-factly, “Jing-nan hasn’t even seen her in years.”

“Wake up! He never bought a ticket, but he got to ride the bus when they were still teenagers!”

I was spurred to speak up. “Please, I want to help,” I heard myself say. “I know two people who went to NYU with her. I can talk to them and see if they might know something.” I wasn’t really friends with either of them, then or now.

“Thank you so much, Jing-nan,” said Mrs. Huang. “We appreciate your help.”

“Anything you could find out would help us a lot,” said Mr. Huang. “We haven’t known our daughter in a long time, and as you can see we’re losing touch with each other every day.”

“When is the funeral?” I asked, feeling my mouth go dry.

“We aren’t having a funeral,” said Mrs. Huang.

“Is it because you couldn’t find anybody to handle it?” Undertakers are loath to handle funerals during Ghost Month because they are unlucky to stage—they’re unlucky to even attend. Many of the wandering ghosts never received proper rites and burials, so a funeral could incite their wrath and turn it upon everyone involved.

“We could have found someone,” Mrs. Huang snapped. “The problem is that she had her beliefs, just like you. We could have had a very proper Buddhist ceremony, but I knew what Julia’s final wish was. She wanted to be cremated and her ashes to be scattered at sea, so that’s what we did this morning.”

I took a deep breath and sank lower in my chair. So I wouldn’t get to see Julia one last time.

In the Huangs’ silent apartment, the light seemed to dim and time became lumpy.

Julia and I had made so many plans. They changed a little bit every time we discussed them, but we already had a basic narrative established.

We’d had a few ideas as to what sort of job I would have when it was time for me to come for her. Engineering was the traditional Taiwanese ticket to America. Americans hated studying math and science, so there was always a shortage of engineers. Best of all, the starting salaries among engineering majors were the highest you could get for an undergrad degree.

Yet I really enjoyed poetry, both English and Chinese.

I hadn’t declared a major yet when I left UCLA, but I had aced
the freshman coursework for all engineering majors, and I also did well in a survey class of American poetry of the twentieth century.

Julia was certain she was going to study political science, and that she was going to see it through to a doctorate degree.

Since I was probably going to have less flexibility in landing a job than the brilliant and eminently admissible Julia, who would have her pick of grad schools, when I came for her we were going to get married in a civil ceremony and settle in to whatever town I was already working in. She was going to transfer to the nearest big university and continue studying until she had her master’s degree.

Somehow we were going to get permanent residency cards or US citizenship. We didn’t know what the climate for immigration would be, but we figured our English was good enough that we could blend in well with ABCs.

Then we were going to have two kids. Well, sometimes we thought just one. By that time, with a number of years of work experience under my belt, I would probably be in a position to kick back a little bit and help more with raising the kid or kids while Julia focused on her PhD. She would also probably have to teach a few undergraduate classes. Maybe Mandarin, too. At some point she would be done with her PhD. She would either hold on to a post in academia or open a consulting firm and do … whatever those consultants do.

We would be in a holding pattern for a few years until our kid or kids were old enough to attend college at Julia’s university, since the tuition would be heavily subsidized or entirely free. If they wanted to go to another school, they’d better have Julia’s smarts to get a mega-scholarship.

Once those kids were done with college, I could quit my job and open up a little music store. Not one that stocked racks and racks of major-label, deluxe-edition, reissued vinyl I personally didn’t care for but sold to make money. If I was going to have a business like that, why bother selling music when it could be power tools? My store would focus on Joy Division and associated acts. I also wanted to carry a select inventory of contemporary indie bands I liked, and I would probably like quite a few of them by that point since I would have more time to listen to music. I still wasn’t sure if
it should be a physical store or an online one. Maybe an online one would be better, depending on how much storage space we had in our house after our kids left. That’s how it is in the US. They don’t wait to get married before they move out. I know we had a lot of pipe dreams and fuzzy definitions baked into our expectations, but we were crystal clear on one thing. Although we would maintain our fluency in Mandarin and Taiwanese, and even make the odd trip to the island to visit (we couldn’t cut off family entirely), we were never going to live in Taiwan again.

Yet here we were, reeled back in by our respective bad circumstances. Maybe Julia, like me, had been planning to save money and get back to the US. When I came for her, we could’ve laughed about how we had to go back to Taiwan for a little bit before resuming our American lives.

We had never planned out our deaths, though. I actually hadn’t known Julia wanted to be cremated, as in so many Taiwanese funerals. Most don’t choose to have their ashes scattered, though—the preservation of ashes has led to the construction of condo-sized columbaria up on the sides of mountains.

Julia and I had thought we were going to have long and happy lives together, but fate had other plans. When my parents died, what kept me going was the knowledge that I would see Julia again. What a foolish, false hope! How stupid and prideful it was for me to refuse to reach out to her for the sake of plans made by teenagers!