Reader Responses: Ghost Stories, the Immigrant Multiverse, old school Hong Kong pop, and more
Plus, we visit the Ensemble Hall (聲泊廳) in Yunlin County and the upcoming Ukrainian Village in Taipei
Hello from Yunlin County, a rural province on the western coast of Taiwan. The name “Yunlin” is itself poetic: it literally translates to “Cloud Woods,” a nod to the gorgeous trees and clouds in the area.
Today Yunlin is known for its garlic and peanuts, as well as its excellent rice, which was exported straight to the Japanese emperor during colonial times. (As a sidenote, Yulin sometimes is called the “Sicily” of Taiwan, as the Taiwanese mafia used to work from here. Yes, the Taiwanese love The Godfather as much as the rest of us.)
We came to Yunlin to check out a Mozart string quintet at Ensemble Hall (聲泊廳), a cultural hub for arts, music, independent film, and animation. Its tasteful, gorgeous design is modernist in style, putting in mind Scandinavian, Bauhaus, and Japanese influences. Tonight we’re bringing our two-year-old to a kid-friendly interactive opera tonight, and we’ll be back for a jazz concert in a few weeks.
“I reject the idea that the arts are only for the elite,” the director Jennifer Chen told us. “The arts provide us a common ground; they resonate with every spirit and soul.” Chen co-founded Shine Arts with her husband Yu Hsi Ming, a doctor who practices traditional Chinese medicine. Their hope is to invert rural-urban relations, drawing artists and audience-goers from the city to Yunlin. “Rural people sometimes feel like second-class citizens. Why should we always have to go to Taipei or Kaohsiung to access the arts? We want people everywhere to think: The best arts and culture and be found here.” Dialogue is a core part of Chen’s vision. Artists and musicians talk to audience members and lead classes with community members.
We hope to write more about arts and rural areas in the future. For now, enjoy these letters from readers. They explore everything from language learning to the immigrant multi-verse to experiences with ghosts (errr, the good brothers and sisters). If you make it to the bottom, you’ll get the extra treat of two old-school Hong Kong pop recs from a reader.
Reader Responses: Ghost Stories, the Immigrant Multiverse, old school Hong Kong pop and more
We received quite a few replies to our piece on Ghost Month—mostly people telling us worriedly that they’d brought umbrellas into their houses.
Sharon Adarlo, a writer and artist, shares stories from the Philippines. (You can learn about Sharon’s work here and here.)
I really enjoyed learning about Ghost Month in Taiwan. It was a deeply satisfying read with interesting nuggets of information.
It got me thinking about how America is so flat and barren when it comes to legends and supernatural stories compared to the treasures you can find in the Old World, especially places in Asia. Maybe it’s because we as Americans have flattened the landscape with parking lots and other suburban infrastructure and pay little heed to the rituals of death and mourning. The United States used to give mourning a central, defining focus, especially in elaborate Victorian modes of grief, i.e. reliquaries of hair, black dresses, spirit photographs and mourning etiquette. Instead, we hurry to the next video on our social media feeds and get annoyed when people are not over “it.”
In another vein, the latest dispatch from Taiwain is inspiring to me as a writer of fiction, particularly the story about a man marrying a female ghost. Sparks of inspiration were firing in my head while reading. And the Taiwanese ghost stories and Ghost Month also made me think of ghost and monster stories from the Philippines. I have a few that I will relate to you as told to me by other people.
My step-father was a civil engineer assigned to the countryside in Philippines (or the provinces as we call it) for a project. His temporary home would be a hut in the middle of nowhere. That first night, he woke with a start on the floor. It appeared that he had fallen to the floor. So he got up and got back on the bed. While drifting off to sleep, a pair of hands pushed him forcefully off the bed. My step-father was so shocked that instead of running into the dark night, he got back on the bed and prayed with all his might until he fell asleep.
The next morning, the old lady who tended the property during the day asked him how was his sleep. He played it cool and said he was fine. The old lady was astonished. She told him that everybody who slept in the hut ran away screaming because invisible hands threw them to the floor. She then said that the hut was built on the property of an old man who had passed away and his ghost was upset that people were using the hut without his permission.
Another story from my step-father: One time, he and his buddies were drinking beer from an old pickup truck next to a rice paddy in the Philippine countryside. It was getting dark and my step-father was enjoying himself. While talking with his friends, he noticed a ghost—a lady in white floating—above the rice paddy. It was so strange and otherworldly that he dismissed it as a random hallucination. He blamed his drunken state for the vision. It was only later that he found out that his friends also saw the lady in white hovering above the field of rice.
Cousins of my husband lived in a house in the Philippines’ provinces, a house that was remote and old. The cousins would hear and see strange things in the house. Voices in empty rooms, household items such as cups getting suddenly turning up somewhere else, and a few ghosts. One cousin said she saw what looked like a Japanese boy sitting at their kitchen table. He would vanish after one glance.
A story from my mother: When she was pregnant with my older brother, she claims that she heard strange rustlings and noises in the forests and blamed it on aswang, a shapeshifting malevolent creature who looks like a comely woman by day but at night it has wings and a long tongue it would use to steal fetuses from pregnant women. Fetuses apparently smelled like ripe jackfruit. Mom would hang garlic from doors and windows to ward it off.
I hope you enjoyed my little snippets from Philippines, which has many ties to Taiwan, especially in my ancestors’ journey from southern mainland China to Formosa and then to the Philippine archipelago.
Jackie Gu, a journalist for Reuters who recently moved to Taipei, writes:
The day before I read Michelle's post last week, I had an eerie conversation with two of my housemates. One of them, Jouni, casually mentioned that she can see ghosts. "I see them all the time when I'm driving"—she works as an Uber driver—"ghosts who died in car accidents, missing body parts and limbs."
What, I said, incredulous. The other housemate, Cassey, nodded without missing a beat. I have another friend who can see and communicate with ghosts, too, she said. They asked me if I believed in ghosts. Sure, I said feebly. They ignored my apparent skepticism and carried on.
Jouni said she started seeing ghosts at the age of 18, when she moved out of her parents' house into a haunted apartment in Keelung. “I didn't realize what was happening at first, but I think my subconscious knew,” she said. She rattled off a litany of signs: laundry that never dried, shadowy figures against the wall when she was home alone, waking up with red, hand-shaped marks around her ankle. Finally, after she came home one day to find her pet rabbit strangled by an opening in its cage, she called her mom—a Buddhist practitioner, who also communicates with ghosts—in a panic. She came over and told Jouni what she had begun to suspect: there was indeed a ghost in the apartment, it was angry, and it wanted her gone. The experience seemed to have unlocked some kind of spirit portal for her: ever since then, she's been able to see them.
Cassey told us that last year, after the Hualien train derailed, her other ghost-seeing friend could feel the spirits of the deceased all the way from Taipei. She said many of them were wandering the mountains in a disoriented daze, unaware they were no longer alive. I suddenly remembered an episode of the Netflix show Unsolved Mysteries that had affected me deeply, about the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. In the months that followed, residents of a town that had been devastated by the tsunami reported hundreds of ghost sightings. One such sighting: A taxi driver picked up a strange passenger one night several months after the disaster, a woman who was inexplicably drenched, wearing a winter coat in the thick heat of summer. In the car, she asked him if she was dead. When he turned around to look at her, she had vanished. More stories like this circulated around the town; the taxi drivers, many of whom had lost friends and family themselves, paid the running meters. We would do it over and over, they seemed to imply. Anything to help them find what they needed.
I keep thinking about Jouni, how she has adapted to the odd poignancy of being chosen to live between worlds. Whether or not I believe in the literal physicality of ghosts now seems to be beside the point. (For what it’s worth, I do. Obviously they are real. I’m not about to call half the population of East Asia delusional.)
For nonbelievers, though, who cares if ghosts are "real"—what is real is how we process grief, find community in it, practice rituals of individual and collective care. What is real is the lingering spirit left behind by a life cut short, the sharp emotional aftershock of an abrupt loss. There's a profound beauty in honoring the dead as these entities with agency and will: still present, still valued, still tangible. "Most of us who experience sudden loss express anger and regret over not being able to say goodbye," says a professor of sociology in the Unsolved Mysteries episode. "The dead feel that too."
If you’re interested in ghosts in Japan, check out Richard Lloyd Parry’s magnificent essay on a priest who exorcised spirits of people who drowned in the tsunami.
Yi-min Wang, a law student at National Taiwan University, replied:
Yimin adds:
I don’t know if ghosts and spirits exist but I try to minimize the risk of any encounters. I live next to a place where Chiang Kai-shek's government executed political dissidents and stored their bodies, so I'm really careful when it comes to the ghost month taboos. I try to be careful and respectful as well.
A friend of mine can also see ghosts and spirits. I became less doubtful of ghosts and spirits after many conversations with her. They have a name for this, called Yin-Yang Eyes (陰陽眼).
We are now reaching out to Yimin’s friend and will get back to you with a report!
Jessica Chen writes to us from Los Angeles with a reflection on Nina Rastogi’s essay on Everything Everywhere All at Once. Nina’s essay inspires her to think of the immigrant experience as a multiverse:
Oh my gosh. I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once a while ago, and because of so much going on (in the movie and in the world), I didn't bother thinking about it too much afterward. Until I read Nina's excellent review, which made me want to rewatch the movie and also sparked some thoughts that I had to process through writing the paragraphs below. I'm still trying to make sense of it, but this is what came out. Thank you as always for sharing your thought-provoking newsletter with us.
A few weeks ago, my mom asked me whether I thought she and my dad made the right decision by leaving China. (We immigrated to the US when I was seven.) I didn’t have an answer because it seemed to involve an impossible tallying of gains and losses, pros and cons. After reading Nina’s review, though, I thought: what if our immigrant experience were more like the multiverse? What if these binaries had no hold over us?
In recent months, I have been nostalgic for a childhood I never lived. I’ve been listening to Hong Kong pop from the 80s-90s and watching Youtubers in Guangzhou walk its streets, browse its markets, and eat an endless array of local delicacies. These are the songs I would have grown up singing and the markets and food stalls that would have fed me—if we had stayed. Instead, I vaguely remember hearing my mom hum these songs around the house and my parents’ reminiscing about these neighborhoods, while my attention was spent on MTV and loitering around mall food courts. But now, when I sing along to 海闊天空 or watch strangers amble down 上下九路, something within me resonates, and I feel at home, as if this were the life I had lived all along.
I associated this phantom nostalgia with that particular immigrant brand of loss and guilt, but Everything Everywhere encourages me to embrace a different perspective. In the multiverse, the focus is not on what you lost or gained from your one life, but the infinite lives that spring forth from each of us. Like Evelyn, I can peer into snippets of those alternative lives now; through a bricolage of memory, experience, imagination, and narrative, I can reach for something far away and find a connection to a version of me that feels authentic and alive, even if not wholly real. As immigrants we’ve crossed oceans, cultures, languages, histories, within one lifetime. This vastness of experience and transgressing of borders give us a superpower that frees us to see and understand, to our very core: we contain a multiverse of lives and possibilities—all at once, embodied in who we are, the places and people we call home.
Instead of my old paradigms—like, not American or Chinese, not at home here or there—what if I think about it in terms of being everything and everywhere, all at once? Not a liminal space, displaced from either axis, but fully encompassing all possibilities, being able to experience pieces as we choose, and letting go of what doesn't serve us? It imparts a sense of autonomy, creativity, playfulness that I don't really feel when it comes to my immigrant-ness. I don't know if it makes sense really, but it's an interesting thought experiment, and I wouldn't have thought of this without your newsletter and Nina's essay!
Graham Oliver, a writer and teacher in Taiwan, responds to our piece about pro-China media in Taiwan. He reflects on the polarization in Taiwan from the perspective of an American who sought to escape the ugly divides back home. (Check out Graham's wonderful newsletter here.)
Thank you for the thoughtful analysis of the two "versions of the truth." While I understood the split was there, I didn't understand the severity of it in terms of lopsided resources and attraction. I think this is part of the downsides of the internet. While I have access to creating a likeminded space, it means my understanding or willingness to confront those working against my ideals is deadened. One of my grad school advisors often blamed social media for making people feel like they're accomplishing something without them actually accomplishing anything as being the reason for the powerful to have a growing totality of control in the US. At the time I thought it was more socioeconomic, but more and more I think they work hand in hand.
I personally struggle with this problem in my circle of family and friends in the US. How to choose who to confront and try to persuade versus who to just excise from my life? This happened especially during 2014-2016 from the murder of Michael Brown to the election of Trump. At that time, I knew there existed multiple realities we were living in, but it wasn't until then that I felt I was betraying my own beliefs by allowing people to remain in my life uncontested who subscribed to the beliefs I saw as hateful and destructive. However, by moving to Taiwan and living a life that is nearly entirely of my choosing (free from social trappings of proximity or family and almost free even of work relationships), I no longer have to make that decision. And, that's a privilege, right? But am I also abjuring some kind of responsibility there? Of course, I am not asking you but rather myself. I think this is going to be something I'll have to reflect better on the longer I live here.
Thanks as always for the food for thought.
Jennifer writes in response to Catherine Chou’s piece on learning Mandarin and Taiwanese:
I just returned from a trip to Kaohsiung. Coming from Taipei, I was surprised at the amount of Taiwanese that's spoken in the South. Even when I try ordering with Mandarin, I get stares because the menu item is more commonly referred to by its Taiwanese name. Something I've been thinking about as I'm nearing five months spent in Taiwan is what it was like for my parents to raise children in a country where their native language was not spoken and for communication to constantly be in a language that is not their "heart" language. Even then, they both grew up speaking different dialects at home so Mandarin is like a second language for them. When I walk on the streets and see grown children talking with their parents in Mandarin, it makes me sad that it's harder for me to have deeper conversations with my parents in Mandarin. Of course this mismatch of language proficiency created miscommunication and I also wonder how much of their personality I didn't get to see because we were just striving to be understood by each other. As I'm learning more Chinese, it's been a joy to be able to converse more with local Taiwanese people as well as my extended family members. It sort of feels like I'm recreating a version of myself for others that maybe they never got to see before.
Finally, we asked Jessica Chen to send along old school Hong Kong song recs. She writes:
“Beyond.” 海闊天空 (Boundless Oceans, Vast Skies) (1993). Quintessential Hong Kong rock anthem and the unofficial anthem of the 2014 Hong Kong protests. The chorus says: "forgive my lifelong reckless and indulgent love of freedom/ still, I'm afraid that someday I might fall/ abandoning ideals—this can happen to anyone/ I'm not afraid if someday there's only you and me." This song is still popular and recently was covered in a Chinese variety show that celebrates Hong Kong music in the context of the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong returning to China (heh). Regardless, the song hasn't lost its power or resonance.
追 (Chase) (1995): A classic ballad from Leslie Cheung, legendary Hong Kong actor and musician and LGBTQ+ icon. This song popped into my head a while ago, and I had to Google it based on a snippet of the lyrics because I didn't know what it was. Turns out my mom used to play it around the house. I've rescued quite a few old-school ballads from the recesses of my memory this way, but this is my favorite.
If you enjoy responses from readers, check out the full archive:
On reverse migration, accents, parrots, nativity scenes, and informers in Albania
On the misery of waiting in public spaces & Chen Shui-bian’s election and downfall (including responses to guest essays by Zito Madu and Nick Haggerty)
On leading and trailing spouses, loser status and native status, and moving “back” and moving forward
On adoption and heritage, moving abroad, and trailing and leading spouses
On "decider" guilt, atomic bombs, restorative approaches to intimate partner violence, and more
On heritage languages, moving to Asia, and modernist art in Taiwan (including responses to Catherine Chou’s essay on learning Mandarin and Taiwanese)
The best thing about writing this newsletter is hearing from you! You can write to us by replying in the thread, writing to broadandampleroad@gmail.com, or responding to this email.
Two events this coming weekend: Ukrainian Village in Taipei and Taiwan Innocence Project conference
Oleksandr Shyn, a Korean-Ukrainian student living in Taiwan, has helped to organize a Ukrainian village in Taipei this weekend. If you’re in Taiwan, we’d love to meet up with you there. We’re also excited to attend the Taiwan Innocence Project conference; if you’re interested, you can register here.
Book Club: Lisa Hsiao Chen’s Activities of Daily Living and Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses
We’re looking forward to our book club about Lisa Hsiao Chen’s wonderful book Activities of Daily Living on Friday, August 26th, 4 PM PDT/7 PM EST. Can’t wait! Please email us at broadandampleroad@gmail.com (or reply to this email) if you want to join. For September, we’re going to read Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses.
And to round out this missive, check out this beautiful space for an artist colony in Yunlin, which was created by a feminist nonprofit that also runs an independent bookstore.