The Ghost Bride (34 page)
A
nd now the days are passing too quickly, one following the other. My fortnight is almost up. I can hardly sleep; my thoughts and regrets weigh so heavily on me. I laugh too much at Old Wong’s jokes and weep in secret over the slippers Amah is painstakingly embroidering for me. The easy thing to do is to marry Tian Bai and spin out my years with him and my family, hiding my strange youthfulness. And at the end of it, wait for Er Lang if he still remembers his promise. But that is the coward’s way.
I think I already knew what I wanted a long time ago. Perhaps it began when he held my hand in the Plains of the Dead, where there were no other living creatures but the two of us. Or, if I am honest, when I first saw his face. It is possible that the seeds were set even further back, when the medium at the Sam Poh Kong temple told me to burn funeral money for myself. Did she know already that I would half-sever my thread with this world and never truly fit in again? Perhaps I really should have died then.
For all who have seen ghosts and spirits are marked with a stain, and far more than Old Wong, I have trespassed where no living person ought to have. I have spoken with the dead, served in their houses, and eaten spirit offerings. My two worlds overlap like distorted panes of glass. Haunted, I chafe at the tight orbit of mahjong parties that I once thought so glamorous, and glance over my shoulder for wind and shadows, yearning for the forbidden.
Tian Bai’s uncle has promised that my father, Amah, and Old Wong will be well taken care of, should I depart on a long journey. He won’t care where I go, as long as it is far away from the Lim family’s good name. I will have to bind him to such an agreement and check on them from time to time, if it is permitted, though I’m not sure where or even when I will go. Perhaps they will think that I have gone away to study, or maybe I will simply vanish one moonlit night, like those tales of ghosts and spirits. I only hope that I may return to visit them, even if it is only as a shiver on the wind. And if they should die before me, as they surely must, I will be waiting to escort them to the Plains of the Dead.
As for Tian Bai, I don’t know how to face him. He will be disappointed in me. Though when it comes down to it, I’m afraid that I will falter and take the easy way out. It has happened before, when I stood tongue-tied in front of him and could not tell him the truth. For all his kindness, he has never really understood me, nor I him. If anyone had said that the opera I heard at the Lim mansion, so long ago, should express my feelings for him, I would have laughed, thinking that we were meant to be lovers. There is a river between us, however, like the Milky Way that separates the Cowherd and the Weaving Maid. And no matter how much I shout and call, I will never cross it. He will smile at my foibles and comfort me with gifts. His eyes are fixed on someone else, not me.
But I want to see Er Lang. I don’t want to wait fifty years, or cheat Tian Bai out of a love that he will never have. In the darkness of a thousand withered souls, it was Er Lang’s hand that I sought, and his voice that I longed to hear. Perhaps it is selfish of me, but an uncertain future with him, in all its laughter and quarrels, is better than being left behind. Though given how much I resisted becoming Lim Tian Ching’s ghost wife, it’s not even funny that I’m willing to leave my family for a man who isn’t human. When Er Lang comes for his answer, I will tell him that I’ve always thought he was a monster. And that I want to be his bride.
The folk tradition of marriages to ghosts
or between ghosts usually occurred in order to placate spirits or allay a
haunting. There are a number of allusions to it in Chinese literature, but its
roots seem to lie in ancestor worship. Matches were sometimes made between two
deceased persons, with the families on both sides recognizing the marriage as a
tie between them. However, there were other cases in which a living person was
married to the dead. These primarily took the form of a living person fulfilling
the wish of a dying sweetheart, or to give the rank of a wife to a mistress or
concubine who had produced an heir. Sometimes an impoverished girl was taken
into a household as a widow to perform the ancestral rites for a man who died
without a wife or descendants, which was Li Lan’s situation. In such a case, an
actual marriage ceremony would be performed with a rooster standing in for the
dead bridegroom.
Occasionally the living were duped as well. If a
family heard from an exorcist or a fortune-teller that a deceased member wanted
to get married, they would sometimes place a red envelope
(hong bao)
, commonly used for cash gifts, on the road. Whoever was
unlucky enough to pick it up on the mistaken assumption that it contained money
was designated as the husband or wife of the ghost. It is interesting to note
that such tales of ghost marriages seem to be mostly confined to the overseas
Chinese communities, particularly those of Southeast Asia and Taiwan, and even
then they are not very common. I was surprised to find that many mainland
Chinese had never heard of such practices, and I could only assume that it was
due to the Communist influence that discouraged superstitious behavior for
decades.
Chinese notions of the afterlife often seem
to be a mixture of Buddhism, Taoism, ancestor worship, and folk beliefs. Despite
borrowing the Buddhist concept of reincarnation in which souls seek to escape
the endless cycle by giving up all desires to enter a state of nothingness, they
also maintain the existence of several paradises ruled over by various guardians
and deities. This contradiction is further complicated by Taoist beliefs such as
attaining eternal life, magic, levitation, martial arts, etc.
There is also a Chinese literary tradition of
supernatural stories that describe a bureaucratic afterlife closely modeled upon
the traditional official bureaucracy. Thus, in many tales, hell is governed by
corrupt and inept officials who commit crimes and take bribes. Various heavenly
deities are then charged with solving the cases and dispensing justice. Er Lang
is one such minor deity who appears in a number of different stories. In some
cases, he is a human who became a deity because of his filial virtue. In
Journey to the West
, Wu Cheng En’s classic story of
the Monkey King, he is the Jade Emperor’s nephew charged with restraining the
reckless monkey. Er Lang is also associated with water as an engineer who
defeated a dragon to prevent flooding. I took the liberty of making him a dragon
himself, as they were known for their shape-changing and rainmaking
abilities.
The Plains of the Dead specifically is also my
invention, although it reflects a common Chinese belief in an afterlife peopled
by ghosts and their burned paper funeral offerings. It was not entirely clear
how this idea connected to Buddhist concepts of reincarnation, so for the
purposes of this book, I created a more substantive link between them.
Malaya is the historic name of Malaysia
before independence. British Malaya was a loose set of states, including
Singapore, that was under varying degrees of British control from 1771 to 1948.
Malaya was extremely profitable for the British Empire as the world’s largest
tin and rubber producer, and the Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca, and
Singapore were its principal ports of commerce.
Early Chinese migrants to Southeast Asia
from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries were overwhelmingly single men who
intermarried with local women and whose descendants formed unique communities of
overseas Chinese known as Peranakan Chinese. Strictly speaking, the term refers
to the children of intermarriage between natives and foreigners. A Peranakan was
not necessarily Chinese; there were also Peranakan Dutch, Peranakan Arab,
Peranakan Indian, etc., but the largest community in Malaya was the Peranakan
Chinese. They incorporated a number of Malay cultural practices, such as
speaking creolized Malay, dressing in Malay clothing, and eating the local
cuisine. Sons born of such unions were often sent back to China to receive a
Chinese upbringing, whereas daughters remained in Malaya but were only allowed
to marry Chinese men. In this manner, the community retained a strong Chinese
character.
From the 1800s onward, there was a sharp rise in
the number of Chinese women emigrating, and the communities became almost wholly
Chinese, although they retained a great deal of local culture and later Chinese
who emigrated also adopted these customs. Li Lan’s family would be an example of
this, having come from China more recently but assimilating local customs such
as dress and food. Within the community, there were finer distinctions between
those who had older roots and those more-recent arrivals. Still, if they were
born in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca, or Singapore, they were
British subjects who self-identified as Straits-born Chinese.
In Malacca in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, they emerged as the dominant business elite who were quick to learn
English and were anglicized in many respects. Quite a few young men, like Tian
Bai, studied in Britain or the Crown Colony of Hong Kong.
This book uses colonial spellings of Malay words to
reflect the time period and to make it easier to pronounce for people unfamiliar
with the romanized Malay spelling reforms of 1972. Thus
Melaka
has retained its historic spelling of
Malacca
, as have other words such as
Bukit
China
and
chendana
, which, despite no
change in pronunciation, would be written as
Bukit
Cina
and
cendana
today.
A broad variety of Chinese dialects was and
still is spoken in Malaysia, though the majority of them were from southern
China, which saw the greatest number of immigrants to Southeast Asia. Overseas
Chinese had strong ties to their ancestral clans and villages, and distinguished
between themselves even after settling in Malaya for several generations. The
most common dialects include Cantonese, Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka, and Hainanese.
The wide variation in spoken dialect meant that many Chinese could not
understand one another, although the written language, for those who were
literate, remained the same.
Many professions often followed clan lines, as
people tended to bring relatives into the same industry. For example, there were
a number of Cantonese amahs, as well as Hainanese cooks, which is what I had in
mind for the characters of Amah and Old Wong.
For the purposes of this book, I debated
standardizing the names to Pinyin but chose not to do so in order to reflect the
diversity of the time. The pronunciation of a particular name would have varied
depending on the dialect and clan of the person. For example, the surname “Lin”
in Mandarin can be pronounced as “Lim” in Hokkien or “Lum” in Cantonese. Even
within a dialect, odd and arbitrary spellings were applied, depending on who was
recording the name and how they decided to spell it. There are many examples of
Chinese names that were butchered by a recording clerk to end up with
inadvertently peculiar meanings.
Traditionally the family name is given first, such
as in Lim Tian Ching’s case. I’ve referred to him by his full name throughout
the book to make it easier to differentiate between Tian Bai and him. Tian Bai
and Tian Ching have similar names because they are both males from the same
generation. Typically, there is a generational name dictated by the family poem.
Each generation takes one successive character from the poem as part of their
name, so that by reciting the poem, you can immediately tell whether someone is
from an older or younger generation of the family.
Meanings of Names
Li
Lan
—Beautiful Orchid
Tian Bai
—Bright
Sky
Lim
—A family name
meaning “a grove of trees”
Lim Tian
Ching
—Eternal Sky
Fan
—Fragrance
Yan Hong
—Red
Swallow
Lim Teck Kiong
—Strong
Morals
Er Lang
—Second Son.
As can be guessed, this is probably not his true name. The Chinese have a
tradition of taking many different names to correspond with various stages in
life. For example, a scholar might have a childhood name, an official name, and
later a literary name if he became famous. In his old age he might choose
another name to signify his retirement from the world.
I
t would have been impossible to write this book without the many wonderful people who supported me in this. I’m deeply indebted to:
Jenny Bent, my amazing agent, whose vision for this novel has guided and inspired me. Rachel Kahan, my editor, whose discerning eye and enthusiasm for this book spurred me on to richer depths. Trish Daly, Lynn Grady, Mumtaz Mustafa, Doug Jones, Camille Collins, Kimberly Chocolaad, and the HarperCollins sales force. It’s been a pleasure and an honor to work with all of you.
My wonderful and long-suffering family, including: my parents, S. K. Choo and Lilee Woo, whose love instilled in me a great wonder and curiosity about the world; Chuin Ru Choo; Kuok Ming Lee; and Jennifer and Spencer Cham, for their love and support over the years.
Sue and Danny Yee, Li Lian Tan, Abigail Hing Wen, and Kathy and Larry Kwan, dear friends who championed this book from the start, encouraged me to submit it, and remained enthusiastic despite having to read endless drafts and analyze imaginary characters. Without you this book would never have been published.
Readers Carmen Cham, Suelika Chial, Beti Cung, Christine Folch, Paul Griffiths, Diane Levitan, and Rebecca Tulsi, who provided fearless and invaluable feedback from the first page to the many alternate endings.
Dr. Teow See Heng, my resident Hainanese expert; Alison Klein, my Dutch adviser; and Mr. and Mrs. Tham Siew Inn, who so kindly showed me around their hometown of Malacca and helped me find a site for the fictional Lim mansion near Klebang.
Most of all, my husband, James, whose patience, love, and wise discernment make my world anew every day, and my children, Colin and Mika, who are my joy.
And to the one who has led me through the valley of the shadow of death. (Psalm 23:4)