The Spirits in My Head

By Megan Zhong

"I just wanted to be myself, someone who would be free enough to move the line around, between Chinese and American within a wider range and far outside of the spectrum."

Mae Li is a Chinese-American graduate student trying to claim her independence as an adult while struggling with her identity. Mae meets Spirit, who

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Apr 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637302972

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The Spirits in My Head

The Spirits in My Head

Megan Zhong

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2021 Megan Zhong

All rights reserved.

The Spirits in My Head

ISBN

978-1-63676-853-3 Paperback

978-1-63730-189-0 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63730-297-2 Ebook

Contents

Author’s Note

The Fields

Prayers

Lunch Line

Chinese School

Marriage Broker

Marketplaces

Grandchildren

The Passport

Leaving Home

Pork Congee

The Quitter

Supermarket

The Watermelon

Chinatown Supermarket

Mooncakes and Bitter Melons

Acknowledgments

To the women in my family: You are all immortal.

You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her.

—Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

Author’s Note

I remember the early mornings of my childhood, when I would pretend to still be asleep just so I could admire my mom’s grace in the dawn light. I still see blurs of her shadow cast across our small room as she rises from bed. As a child, when I asked her how she could wake up this early and gracefully every day, she would launch into stories of doing chores or going on runs at the crack of dawn back in her village in Hainan Island, before heading down the long roads to school. There would be a mix of complaint and sentimentality as she spoke of her childhood. I think she was using these stories to lecture me against indolence.

When my mom told these stories, I could tell she no longer saw me. Instead, her eyes sparkled, and I could almost see the giant green hills reflecting off her deep brown eyes. Her voice would lighten, the way adults’ voices did when they read to a child, and she would say, Every day, I woke up very early. I didn’t even need my mama to wake me up! She liked to make passive jabs at me. During elementary and middle school, I couldn’t wake up without her waking me up. I would run a little bit before breakfast. I would run over mud, grass, rocks, and under big branches. When I got home, I would eat some bread and then walk to school. School was far away—I had to get through the forest to get there every morning! Then she would lower her voice, adding, Children used to get lost in the forest. Maybe even kidnapped. She shuddered, and I was thankful my school was only a few blocks away.

Even now, my mother still tells me these stories. She recalls washing clothes for her many siblings by the streams, watering crops, or falling off her tall bike while riding through the woods. I think she never really wanted to grow up, despite how hard the agrarian lifestyle was for her and her large family.

I wrote a large portion of The Spirits in My Head during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 when I moved back in with my family after living alone for the first time in college. I took this as an opportunity to dive into my parents’ culture and context by living vicariously through their childhood stories as they reminisced to me, with their friends, and with our relatives. As I listened in on the conversations my mom often had with my grandma and her childhood friends, I began to see they had never fully planted themselves on American soil and their spirits would always remain far away from me, in another place and time. Part of me wishes I could go back myself to experience what they had once experienced, to understand them in a different context, and this desire is what fueled me to write this book.

The Spirits in My Head is a celebration of the intergenerational and cultural differences between a mother and her daughter. These differences lead to misunderstandings and miscommunications. They also lead to a lack of communication that can be awkward, irritating, or in the worst cases, saddening. With spoken and many more unspoken expectations between mothers and daughters, navigating the immigrant mother-daughter relationship is complex. When both put in an effort to understand each other, they will learn things about themselves they had never known before.

My book is about a young woman named Mae Li, navigating the expectations from her mother while clumsily learning to understand her place in the Chinese-American community and American society at large. Mae begins to see how suffocating her identity as a young woman and a Chinese-American can be, learns this does not have to be so and finds ways to break free. Ultimately, The Spirits in My Head is a story about a young woman who longs to be by her mother’s side again even as she is trying to create her own sense of self, independent from the expectations her world has given her.

If you study or have studied Mandarin before, you may notice Mae Li’s name is a pun. In Mandarin, 美丽 (mei li) means beautiful. You will find Mae is not the friendliest character, but she has a beautiful soul that needs a little more guidance to grow. Her life is filled with people who meet and breach various expectations, reminding her it isn’t all or nothing—just because you meet one expectation does not mean you have to meet another.

I hope you find some parts of Mae’s story relatable, and if you’re not Chinese-American or a child of recent immigrants, I hope you learn a little about the culture in which I grew up. Many of the places and character interactions in The Spirits in My Head were drawn from my personal experiences. I invite you to laugh and empathize, and to feel and think anything while reading my book because you are human (I assume).

Megan

1

The Fields

Last night, I dreamed I was standing in a field, and in the distance I saw fuzzy, green rolling hills. Stoic mountains stood beyond them, blurred to the eye by distance and low hanging clouds. Up ahead was a pond where a little girl, wearing pale, ragged clothing and with hair tied in two low pigtails, sat crouching at the edge, poking at the water with a stick and throwing what seemed to be crumbs. There was also an older girl carrying a basket with clothes slung over the edge, calling out to the younger girl to hurry along. I looked over to my side where a woman with my appearance and stature stood. Her figure had a misty quality as if she always had a foot in another dimension, threatening to fade away without a moment’s notice. She had appeared in my life years ago and called herself Spirit. I was about to ask her what I was doing here, but before I could say anything, she said, This is Hainan Island.

Guang-ah, are you done playing with the fish? the girl holding the basket asked. Guang was my mom’s name. We have to get to the stream to wash the clothes.

Look, it’s eating the bread I’m carrying in my pocket! Guang exclaimed. When she looked back and saw the older girl walking into the forest, Guang ran after her. I followed them, and it was clear they couldn’t see or hear me. Never once did they turn around to the sound of my footsteps. Sticks and pebbles crackled under our shoes, and the ground shimmered from the branches swaying back and forth from above.

I asked Spirit for clarity, So they really can’t hear us?

Of course not, we’re in a memory. We’re not actually here, Spirit reminded me.

The pair paused when a mass of fog appeared ahead. There was a large shadow below the foggy mass even though there wasn’t anything above that would create it. I immediately felt colder, goosebumps appearing on my arms.

Ghosts! Guang yelled. Look, Jiejie, there are ghosts! The older girl was Guang’s jiejie, or older sister.

Forest phantoms, her sister commented. Remember how Mama warned us?

The hell are forest phantoms? I said aloud to nobody in particular.

We stayed where we were until the foggy mass floated away through the forest. Then, we continued walking through the woods until we reached a stream. The water was clear, trickling gently over ovular stones that reminded me of bars of soap, and distorting the reflected image of clouds in the sky and deep green trees overhead. Guang leaned over the edge and kept her hands in the water, making a filter to catch the leaves and grass blades flowing down the stream. Her older sister placed the basket on top of a rock by the stream and knelt down to begin washing the clothes in the water and scrubbing them on another rock to get rid of the dirt and stains. A moment later, Guang found a leech attached to the skin above her ankle.

Jiejie get it off me! Guang flailed around, kicking her foot out and trying to get the leech off. It’s so ugly!

I giggled. This was the same person who would grow up to crush cockroaches, house spiders, and millipedes with her bare hands without a second thought.

Guang’s sister sighed in irritation and walked over to her. Stop moving, you fool. Let me get it off. She used a stick to scrape off the leech at its mouth. It was incredibly gross, a yellow-green, shiny blob dangling from Guang’s skin, but I couldn’t stop watching her sister trying to remove it almost expertly, like in a scene in an amateur medical documentary. Just when the leech was removed, Spirit told me it was time to wake up.

Already? I asked. I wanted to stay a little longer, to listen to the stream gurgle, the birds chirping in the trees, and the general ambiance of the forest that seemed to be whispering something to me I couldn’t quite catch. Soon, the colors before me blurred together until there was nothing left to look at.

I woke up to my alarm ringing and birds obnoxiously chirping and flapping their wings outside. It was only six in the morning, so I had a little more time to lie in bed. I watched the birds’ shadows dance in the box of sunlight that fell across my wall and remembered a night when my mom told me a story to help me fall asleep. I was lying on the crook of her arm.

Mommy, I’m not tired! I don’t want to sleep! I exclaimed.

Okay, what do you want to do? Do you want to hear a story? What do you want to know? my mom asked.

I thought for a moment. I had read a few books about Greek and Chinese mythology in school. I thought they were real and believed there were gods in heaven, Greek and Chinese, flapping around and dictating what we did every day.

Do gods exist? I asked.

In the glow coming through the window blinds from the streetlamp, I watched her face go from sleepy to pensive. She said, I don’t know, but I’ve seen ghosts. When I played in the woods back in Hainan, I saw ghosts. They would howl, like this. She howled, Woooooooo. She went on to explain, My dad used to tell me this story about a little peasant girl who met a real goddess. This happened a long, long time ago before I was born, and even before your grandma was born. A very long time ago, when the Earth was very young. There was a goddess named Yitong Qiji. She was the goddess of childhood curiosity and became known as the ‘Lost Goddess’ because many people have forgotten about her. Her fairytale went like this:

The mother goddesses wanted children of their own after creating the people on Earth, so they created Qiji to be one of their many children. All of the other children were good and obeyed their mothers, but Qiji was different. She loved to play and traveled all over the country, made friends with many animals, and often came home late because she lost track of time. Her best animal friend was a golden pheasant who could fly out far and bring back stories to tell her. Qiji became best friends with a little peasant girl from Hainan Island and they would run through the hills, swim in lakes and rivers, and play games such as hide and seek. During the game, the goddess liked to hide underwater for a long time just to trick her friend. The goddess even helped the little girl finish her chores in a burst of magic spells so they could play and often caused her to get into trouble because they would still make messes in the house, spilling buckets of water or becoming muddy again after a bath.

One day, when they were playing hide and seek, the peasant girl decided to hide underwater because she knew the goddess wouldn’t think to look in the river. When Qiji couldn’t find her for a long time, she became worried. She traveled up and down the river many times and sent her bird friend to look for the peasant girl. The bird found her dead, not far from where they were playing. Qiji was heartbroken and believed her friend’s death was her fault. She knew she could never play happily again so she ran back to the heaven in the skies, grabbed her friend, and fused her immortal life with her friend’s. The peasant girl lived on, with the goddess’ excitement for adventure. The mother goddesses in the heavens grew furious when their daughter didn’t come back for a long time, but eventually, they forgot about her. They already had many more children to take care of.

When the peasant girl grew old and had children and grandchildren of her own, she spoke to her inner self, Qiji-ah. I’m so happy you showed me the wonders of the mountains, rivers, forests, and the world outside of this little island, but the time has come for you to show others how to live a life full of adventure and curiosity, and for me to return to my older family.

The goddess set the peasant girl’s spirit free, and she fused herself with the peasant girl’s newborn great-granddaughter. The goddess’ essence continues to live through little girls’ spirits in Hainan, according to my mom’s legend.

I remembered feeling drowsy by the time my mother finished telling me the story and with my eyes already closed I asked, Is the goddess inside you? Is that why you came to America from far, far away?

My mom chuckled. No, I’m just a normal person. I felt her throw a small blanket over me before I fell asleep.

A few years later, I looked through encyclopedias and the internet for any mentions of that particular goddess. I found nothing and concluded my mom and her parents liked to make up stupid stories simply because I would believe them. I was bitter that humans flying and living forever could never really happen.

Back in my apartment, I stayed in my bed until the birds on my windowsill flew away. I picked up my phone from my nightstand and turned off airplane mode. It began to buzz with notifications from an email chain a student had sent to the professor and us teaching assistants. I rolled my eyes and sighed in annoyance. They might as well have cc’d the entire biology department.

I scrolled through the email chain to see if the problem had been resolved and, unsurprisingly, it still wasn’t, so I marked it as unread to deal with it later. Begrudgingly, I rolled out of bed to get ready for the day.

My mom called while I was making breakfast. She had trouble hearing me because I kept my voice down as I didn’t want to wake up my roommate and best friend, Clara Fu. I couldn’t hear my mom very well either because of the whir of the range fan and the crackling of oil on the pan for my omelet. She was telling me about her conversation with my grandma the night before.

"Your popo is driving me insane!" she exclaimed.

What did you both talk about? I asked.

What did you say? She couldn’t hear. I turned off the range and repeated myself.

"She told me she sees ghosts at night and in her dreams. She saw your gunggung and some friends who died a long time ago. My grandma saw my grandpa and her old friends. She thinks she’s going to die soon. ‘Nonsense!’ I told her. She’s just seeing things. She wants me to pray more, buy fruits for offerings, so today I’m going to pick up some oranges after work. Need anything? I can stop by this weekend."

With a mouthful of omelet, I said, "No, I’m