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
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.