The first time I wrote a haunting, I was living in a fog born of heartache. It was year one of the Pandemic, and I’d been drafting a novel at personal record speed; flying through a story I loved, while within me, new life bloomed. She was the tiniest seed of a dream at a time when hope felt like a mythical thing.
Then, spot bleeding turned to pregnancy loss, and my life ground to a halt. The shock of it was like a crack in the earth. On one side sat who I’d been before, and I could only stare across the widening chasm. I needed to write, to find mental refuge away from the pain, from the constant, inescapable what-ifs. But I couldn’t think about opening my manuscript without calling forth all that devastating anticipation I’d felt while writing it.
Out of desperation, I let myself start something new. What emerged was more bloodletting than writing: the tale of a woman haunted by a creature born of the mess that escapes her once-pregnant body.
In that feverish writing session, I inadvertently unearthed something I needed, rather than wanted, to explore. Shortly after, I wrote my first haunted place book—about two best friends who break into a Chinese garden and ghost museum overnight to perform a ritual honoring their dead children and accidentally summon a ghost.
Grief still held me in its throes, but for the first time, I found myself working elements of my experiences with identity into the story. The Chinese folklore I was learning, the Mandarin language I have a complicated relationship with, and—to my own surprise—the unwanted envy of having a best friend with whom you share a larger diaspora label (Chinese American), but around whom you can’t help feeling not quite (Chinese) enough.
Since that novella, every book I’ve written has been a twist on the haunted house. Story after story built around creatures from Chinese mythology, a range of Chinese and American settings, suppressed and untold histories.
I love the grandeur of the gothic, the way it lures us in with its beauty, revealing its foundational rot only once we’re nicely settled in. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, Alexis Henderson’s An Academy for Liars, and Roshani Chokshi’s The Last Tale of the Flower Bride all accomplish this beautifully. To me, the agony of that slow realization holds an endless fascination; yet it was only upon reflection that I began to consider why I can’t stop writing haunted houses. And why they, so often, wind up as explorations of what it means to be part of a diaspora.
I was born in San Francisco, home to a robust Chinese American community. While we didn’t live in the center of it, it was part of our lives. My brother and I attended a Chinese dual language immersion school. We often went to Chinatown for meals. There were Lunar New Year Parades and Mid-Autumn Moon Festivals. Even the Chinese name for San Francisco, 舊金山 (Jiù Jīn Shān), means Old Gold Mountain, after the gold rush that brought many Chinese immigrants to California.
When I was ten, we moved to the Portland, Oregon area. The Pacific Northwest is known for its scenic landscapes—snow-capped mountains, clear blue bodies of water, and lush greenery all year round. It’s grand, and beautiful, and Portland, in particular, treasures its reputation for progressiveness, for inclusivity.
It is also extremely white. Suddenly, I was the only Chinese kid in many of my classes. I found myself drawn to making friends with other BIPOC children of immigrants, some of whom had migrated alongside their parents. In a suburb that was over 90% white, a disproportionate number of my friends were a blend of Chinese, Japanese, Brazilian, Korean, Chilean, Samoan. All of us American, too, but not in the way others thought of Americans.
We held onto one another through the end of elementary school, through junior high and high school. Along the way, we shared food and music, and we made jokes to express a feeling we weren’t ready to put into words.
It wasn’t until years later, when my family spent two weeks visiting China, that I began to understand what I’d become accustomed to. I was a teenager, surrounded for the first time in my life by people who looked like us, who were fluent in the Chinese languages everyone thought I should know. There, it was impossible not to notice that I’d spent my life in a country where I’d never felt fully welcome. And yet, Chinese people clocked me as foreign immediately. I didn’t move or dress like I belonged, my Mandarin was barely passable, and I probably looked as out of place as I felt.
It is much the way I imagine a ghost stuck in a place shared with the living might feel.
Haunted locations generally contain two things—a history, and one or more supernatural entities that do not belong yet cannot leave. In my debut novella, Bound Feet, the garden holds personal history for Jodi, the main character—it is the place where her daughter drowned, and where Jodi begins to suspect a version of her child’s spirit might live on. It is also home to a ghost that has been brought there against her will. And the setting, like Jodi and her best friend, is both Chinese and American.
In my forthcoming second novella, Demon Song, Megan and her mother find refuge in a Beijing opera house with a hidden, brutal history. Megan grew up in America, but the circumstances of her and her mom’s lives have led them to China. In Megan, I had the chance to explore what it felt like as a teenager discovering both the beauty and disconnect in what others would call my homeland.
Megan has a feeling of near-constant displacement in the opera house. She longs for the land she considers her truest home, for her best friend back in Portland. Yet, as she begins to learn all the ways in which her new home is tied to her mother’s mysterious past, she wants to know it deeply, to understand the grooves of her own family’s history. It is the push and pull of the diaspora. To belong to more than one place, and to simultaneously belong nowhere at all.
In my forthcoming novel, Stormraven, Lydia is an artist suffering heartbreak. She marries a man she barely knows and moves into his beautiful mansion on a private island off the coast of Washington state, only to learn she isn’t its first Chinese American inhabitant—and that the others might, in some form, still be there.
Lydia’s story begins with a rejection of home. She grew up in a tight Chinese American community—like the ones my extended family in New Jersey were part of, but which my little family on the west coast only ever visited. Lydia is living apart from the community that raised her for the first time in her life, and to her, in that moment, home is heartbreak and expectation and overwhelm. She is drawn to the escape of joining someone else’s family, of leaving hers behind. It is only through another’s tragedy, through the haunting of her new home, that she learns what community means to her.
As Megan was born of my teenage self, Lydia reflects my experiences as an adult discovering the history of Chinese Americans in the region that has been my home for over two decades. In school every year, we seemed to learn more details about the whitewashed version of Lewis and Clark’s expedition; yet not once was the violent expulsion of Chinese residents from cities across the Pacific Northwest in the 1880s mentioned.
I moved to Seattle to attend university and, after, built a life there. And still, I didn’t learn the phrase “The Chinese Must Go,” nor did I hear about the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Hells Canyon Massacre, or the murder of Chinese hops pickers in what is now Issaquah. It wasn’t until I began actively researching Chinese American history that I understood a key piece of the rotten foundation upon which my home had been built.
These painful, buried histories never lie far from my mind. I think about them as I raise my children, as I consider how and when to teach them of these horrors. As I craft more stories.
In each of my haunted houses, the setting carries both a sense of belonging and a rejection. And I’m not alone in writing this. Diasporic identity and haunted places come hand in hand in Trang Thanh Tran’s She Is a Haunting, Isabel Cañas’s The Hacienda, Cassandra Khaw’s Nothing But Blackened Teeth, and Tananarive Due’s The Good House.
In all these texts, there is beauty in the setting, a meaningful personal tie or a promise of welcome on the surface. But there’s also a feeling of wrongness, of something just out of sight. There’s a corpse decomposing somewhere in the soil of its history that takes pain and reckoning and discovery to dig up; and even when brought to light, a part of it will never be fully separated from the landscape.
To both the ones doing the haunting and the ones being haunted, it is home. And, simultaneously, frustratingly, it will never fully feel like home.
• • •
