ASIAN PEOPLES have colourful ghosts.
Here are some facts about the pontianak, a female Malay vampire:
An èguǐ, by contrast, is Chinese, literally meaning hungry ghost. Actually, it’s like a super-ghost, because the Chinese believe all souls are ghosts, but an èguǐ is a soul reborn as a hungry ghost, destined to wander through limitless lifetimes in search of release. Here are some facts about the èguǐ:
The creature I met at the laundromat one evening could be one or the other. In the last few months, I’ve been having a tussle with my libido. In order for my mother not to discover how frequently I come in my underpants (or there will be hell to pay), I take them to the laundromat in our block late at night. The uncle there sometimes gives me coins to feed the machines, in return for closing up shop for him.
I was taking my wash out and had discovered I’d left a bar of chocolate in the pocket of my beige trousers. Streaks of brown criss-crossed different items of clothing, like mud tracks. Shit, I said. No kidding, she said. I snapped my head round—there she was, sitting on top of a dryer, her thin blue ankles crossed, her long black hair in dreadlocks. Her eyes were red and bulgy, her mouth also a garish red, except she had a couple of lip piercings. Her smock looked like the tribal one with tassels my sister also wore, from H&M.
Shit, I said again, not now.
Here’s the thing. Ghosts have appeared to me in one form or another throughout my life. I’m that kid from Sixth Sense—I oso see dead people—except I live in a Housing Development Board flat in Singapore with a grandmother, my parents, and two brothers and two sisters. Also, one Indonesian helper. I’m the youngest—small and gangly for a sixteen-year-old teenager, but it’s still pretty cramped in our three-bedroom apartment (my grandmother sleeps on a canvas cot in the living room, and the helper sleeps on the kitchen floor). You can’t get a cup of hot water from the boiled water thermos without banging elbows with the hanging wok or brushing against the dried squid Mother has strung up along the kitchen tiling.
Feed me, the ghost said.
This too is not new. They always appear before me starving. It’s a miracle I still have my kidneys and intestines intact. Where am I going to get food this time of night? I said.
Feed me, or you die.
I laughed. That not even scary. What kind of ghost are you?
She scrunched up her eyebrows, which had the distinct effect of making her red eyes look pinched, like a red dot sighting from an EOTech shooter on Battlefield 4. I lie, I do get scared shitless still. I started humming Ed Sheeran’s ‘The A-Team’. She looked like a modern ghost, I thought she might appreciate a little Ed Sheeran, or maybe One Direction?
I get the feeling I’ve been here before, she said. Like I’ve been wandering around for a long time.
I swear I’ve never seen you before. Are you a langsuyir or a núguǐ, a pontianak or an èguǐ? Or a bhoot—an Indian ghost?
The ghost pondered this for a moment. I guess I don’t know, she said.
When you live in a multi-racial place like Singapore, you’re defined by your ethnicity, even after you’re dead. I ask, What were you before you died, C, M, I, or O—Chinese, Malay, Indian, or Other?
For the life of me, I can’t remember.
That’s funny…life of me…anyhow, I have some leftover kim zua I can burn you.
Kim zua?
Joss paper food the Chinese burn during the Hungry Ghost Festival. If you manage to receive it, that could mean you’re a Chinese ghost. You can follow me home if you want.
Aren’t you scared? Most men I show my face to crap in their pants.
Ah, well, I do other things in mine. Follow me.
On the balcony, I took out a used Milo tin, lit up a McDnalds (correct spelling, yo!) with a single strike of the match—a veritable Mickey D’s with French fries, double cheeseburger and a McNugget meal. The ghost told me she felt a hollowness in her belly that gnawed and she had a feeling it wasn’t just hunger. She said she felt incredibly tired, a fatigue that ached deep in her bones. She must have been travelling for a long time. She turned up the soles of her feet and I wished I’d never asked—they were filthy and covered with pustules—they looked like the floor of a chicken coop.
She said, I think I’d like to retire from being a ghost. Either get reincarnated, or be put out of my misery with a stake in the nape of the neck.
I took a look at her neck as she parted her hair. No hole. So maybe not a pontianak.
I said, I’ve never met a ghost with amnesia before. You don’t even know what race you are. That’s really blur as a sotong.
Still hungry, she said.
I found leftover paper effigies of a half-torn sushi platter and steamboat feast and burned that.
Still hungry.
The hungry caterpillar can’t hold a candle to you, but I’ve got nothing left. Come back tomorrow.
Give me some of your blood.
Straight away, balls dropped and blood curdled. I hurried over to the fridge and found my mother’s Tupperware container of congealed pig’s blood. Mother puts it in zhuzha tang, pig-offal soup, along with pig bones and pickled mustard. Don’t ask me why there’s always a container of it around, we don’t eat zhuzha tang that often. I emptied the container into the Milo tin and set it on fire. Hey, I said, you have a name you can remember?
No reply. Ghost happy, ghost gone. But stinky smell.
Just in case she shows up again, I do some grocery shopping. The kim zua shop is also in the same HDB block as the laundromat, and the auntie there likes to sit behind the counter fanning herself while watching Korean dramas on a TV screen screwed to the wall above. It gives me the creeps, looking at all these things for the dead, but I guess the Chinese dead are also particularly enamoured of progress, because there’s an iPad, the latest iPhone and Samsung Galaxy, even a Google Glass. Not to mention a red Ducati and, fuck me, a Joe Rocket leather motorcycle jacket to go with.
The auntie looks at me askance as I pile my shopping on top of the counter. Did someone die in your family? she asks. Your grandmother kicked the bucket?
Nobody died, I say in a low voice. I just like this stuff.
The auntie’s eyes bug out, which she tries to hide by bagging everything double quick. I know she thinks my family is weird. My mother collects kitschy Chinese icons—pink-faced Laughing Buddha figurines now adorn every available surface. My sister Bee Lian is in her Goth phase and often dresses all in black, with heavy mascara and purplish-black lipstick, when she goes out. My other sister, Bee Khing, sleepwalks and has, more than once, scared the urine out of our neighbours by showing up in her long white nightdress at the void deck very early in the morning while old men are doing tai chi. The boys in our family, with me the exception, are totally normal, though. Both my brothers are gregarious and well turned out—both work as salesmen, one sells mattresses and the other sells portable toilets. My siblings can’t stand to have me around, on account of I see dead people, but nowadays I keep mum even if I do see one. Mother, despite her lazy eye, used to bring out her feather duster—this thing with cockerel feathers on one end and a long, hard rattan handle on the other—and use it on me, not on the ghost. For a long time, I was prohibited from going to funerals, just in case I attracted more ghouls than need attend.
I don’t know why I attract ghosts. I’m not particularly bright or angry or resilient or tough. I’m not anything. Other than the fact that I see ghosts, I don’t stand out in anything. I come last in the one hundred-metre dash; I long jump like a cricket, while my best friend Hamid long jumps like a puma; I don’t even have a particularly large appetite, unlike all my friends who are still having frightening growth spurts—Chee Kin’s chest size has ballooned out into a Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, and he weight lifts in the sixty-nine kilo category. Meanwhile, this weird libido I’m struggling with—I’m terrified I’ll get found out and be humiliated.
Later that afternoon, ghost shows up more ravenous than ever and almost makes me drop my bubble tea with her ‘boo’.
Look what I got you. I show her the ten-course variety meal I bought that any Chinese banquet would be proud of: paper abalone and a medley six-pack of Heineken, Corona, Guinness.
Bee Lian pokes her head round the door, her eyes narrowed with suspicion. Si lang gui, who are you talking to?
Nobody, I say, trying to look guileless. It’s kinda funny my sister has just uttered the swear words ‘dead people ghost’ in Hokkien which literally describes the situation in the room.
The ghost breathes near my ear, tickling my earlobe. I swat and Bee Lian yells, Mother! Seng Huat is at it again. I can hear Mother yelling from the kitchen. You best not let me catch you with a ghost, HUAT! or I surely throttle you.
I glance at the ghost’s long, thin neck, a referencing gesture. I say, If you don’t have a name, how about ‘boo’? It seems apt.
Boo shrugs. Call me anything you want. Even I don’t know what I am. I was at the cemetery this morning, the Muslim cemetery in Kubor Road (I give an involuntary shiver—its translation is Graves Road, JC!) just to see if I got some sort of pang or quickening, and nothing. Zilch. Nada. It’s really very depressing. I can materialise before you, but with others, they can’t even see me. I’m totally invisible to them. It feels like shit to be ignored like that. I got on to the No.16 bus heading for Bukit Merah and danced the Soulja Boy, and nobody clapped. Benci lah.
Is that a swear word in Malay? And Muslim cemetery? Scratching my head, I say, You don’t seem like a pontianak to me; I’ve never met a pontianak who can dance the Soulja Boy, not that I even know what that is, and besides, there’s no sound of baby cries or fragrant scent. You have a thin neck, but not a distended belly, and the lip piercings are total red herrings.
Huat! Mother is yelling again, Are you talking to the ghost? I told you not to talk to the ghost.
But a pontianak has more currency somehow, I say. You can be a marker of Singaporean diversity. But Mother shows up in my room with a flyswatter. You best skedaddle, I shout as I get up in a rush, darting out of the room, trying to avoid Mother’s amblyopic aim, but she still manages to clip me on the shoulder.
I rub my elbow and shin, where I have a few bruises forming. One of the disadvantages of living in a cramped HDB flat is that when your mother aims to give you a hiding, the ancestral shrine also gives you a knock on the head, the sideboard gives your hip a wallop, even the footstool joins in on giving your toes a few stubs worth all the trouble.
A few pop-up ads on my computer showing scantily-clad manga girls rattle me and I can feel the rise of that niggling urge, although knowing a vampire might show up any minute sure dampens any joy.
It’s getting towards midnight, and as soon as Mother turns off the light, Boo appears. Your mother still beats you, even at your age. That’s humiliating.
Okay, Boo’s comment stings. Rapidly, I blink to hide my hurt. You want to eat now?
You can just give me some of your blood and I’ll leave you alone.
I don’t respond but head out towards the balcony.
After the ten-course meal, Boo says, What lah, no dessert?
I draw a Japanese mochi for her—even fill it with red bean paste—then burn it. She says it doesn’t taste like mochi. It tastes like paper.
I don’t draw so good, I mumble.
Does your mother hit your other siblings too?
I shake my head. I’m jinxed. I give my mother the heebie-jeebies. Even funeral directors avoid me. Mother thinks the only profession I’m suited for is a Chinese funeral priest. If so, there’s no point even studying, is there?
Boo shrugs. Maybe I can help you?
And how will you help me?
In reply, she climbs on top of the bookshelf, positions herself astride Dickens and Asimov, her heels thumping the spines of The Book of Bunny Suicides and my two favourite manga comics—Hayate the Combat Butler and Gin Tama. She says, Why don’t you ask her why she hates you?
I glare at her. She doesn’t hate me, it’s called tough love.
Boo rolls her neck and it actually makes a ‘pop’ sound. All right, man, it’s your funeral.
I tell Boo how I once overheard my mother and grandmother talking about me: my grandmother thought maybe I was possessed and needed an exorcism, but Mother said, ‘Born like that lor. The first day he came out he used to stare off into the distance even when drinking his milk. Lucky he isn’t the eldest son.’
Boo doesn’t say anything. I guess there’s nothing much she can say. Then she pipes up, Wanna play rock paper scissors?
I have a better idea. Let’s play chess.
I can’t move the pieces, she says.
No problem, I can move them for you. Just tell me what to move.
She adds, Not having a body certainly has benefits, no one can give me a thumping.
I look at her. Don’t know when to stop, do you?
She smiles. Just saying. When she sees me look stricken, she says, Oh lighten up, will you? She giggles. Lighten up, get it?
If the deaf and dumb tend to be clumped together, the ghostly and the astonishingly libidinous must make a right pair. I don’t see Boo for weeks and just when I think she’s figured a way out of her dilemma, she pops up as I’m cleaning myself with a wad of tissue.
Whatcha doing? she says, right in my ear.
I yell, practically jumping out of my skeleton, scrambling to make myself decent. Don’t you knock?
She laughs knowingly. You’re looking huat, Huat!
Leave me alone.
I brought some friends, she says. She puts two fingers to her mouth and wolf-whistles. Four other ghouls pop up. I’m not really able to give justice to any description of these girls—they are a potpourri of scary:
Don’t tell me you all have confused identities too, I mumble.
Feed us, Boo says. It’s almost 5pm and Mother is at the wet market and Grandmother is sunning herself out on the balcony. I make my killer emoji face—upbeat positivity in the face of absolute grimness. Where will I find food for a cadre of ghost women?
Feed us, or we’ll have your blood, they chorus.
Alamak, I have no doubt they will.
I’ve had to do this on one other occasion before, steal from Mother’s grocery money, which she keeps in a Jacob’s cracker tin in the drawer next to the hob. Two hundred dollars rolled up in fifty dollar bills—take one hundred dollars, roll up the other two fifties multiple times to disguise number of folds, can borrow from Hamid tomorrow to cover.
The owner of the kim zua shop eyes me and then my pile of shopping and spits her seeds into a newspaper. Ostentatiously, she pulls out her temple charm—I suppose it is one of those that wards off evil—and places it carefully on the surface of the counter.
That’s no use against five of them, you know?
She swats her hands at me. Curse her ancestors a thousand generations, this ajumma is meaner than a hopping ghost.
Singapore has all kinds of litter laws (hefty fines and potential time in the lockup if caught) and thus, receptacles for burning kim zua are provided, usually somewhere in the vicinity of the void deck, but old uncles often sit in the square scratching their balls and playing mahjong.
You will all have to come back after 10pm, I tell the girl-ghouls. They go berserk. The wailing, ululating, clap of thunder, veritable lightning light show, flying around—it is all very crouching what hidden what, and I hide underneath my bed with earphones on, terrified out of my skull. Girl ghosts, friends or foes? Mother, when she comes after me, love or hate?
I don’t hear the call for dinner, buried as I am under a caterwaul of hard rock and electronica. And then I see my sister Bee Khing’s face peering at me from her crouch beside the bed. You’re in for it, she says solemnly. The kim zua auntie downstairs called Mother just now. You know Mother doesn’t like you consorting with ghosts.
I roll my eyes. Dense as a cement truck, she is.
This has happened once in the past—a tanning so bad I ended up in the hospital with bruised ribs, and the doctor asked how it happened and I lied that I fell down the HDB stairs.
Bee Khing says, Come out willingly, or she will haul you downstairs.
When fear clamps down on you real hard, this is what I discover—something in you cracks wide open and you literally float out of your body, like in virtual reality, as in your body is not your body, so you can get blitzed and feel no pain. Everything is sharp and vivid and glitters, but your senses have actually shut down.
In fact, afterwards, Bee Khing replays for me how I had refused to come out from hiding, so Mother came in, got out her feather duster, dragged me out by the curved rattan handle, and lugged me downstairs to the cement pavement in front of the block; in full view of a row of eateries, she whipped me. This will teach you to play with ghosts! And people stared while sucking on their chilli crab legs.
You good-for-nothing, you think I don’t know what you do with that thing between your legs?
Something fluttered overhead, a light breeze. I felt wet all over.
Nobody will want you, she cried. Who would want you?
The quintet of ghosts, arms interlinked in a row, were swaying kumbaya underneath the drooping banyan in the square, and I fixed my gaze on them. It seemed the only thing I could do. Bee Khing said one of the customers at the eatery had intervened then and called Mother some choice Hokkien swear words.
Over the next few days, the whole thing became a scandal. There was an article on us in the Straits Times and Mother had to write an apology for publicly caning me. She didn’t talk once about ghosts there; instead, she blamed my ‘fornicating habits’. It opened up a public discourse, and one comment from another mother said: It’s quite right that a dirty-minded lan jiao boy like that should be adequately disciplined.
I refuse to eat for a while and my weight drops down to thirty-five kilos and I have to be hospitalised and put on a drip. On the bright side, my bruises fade quicker than I expected; so do the ghosts. Or maybe they don’t know where to find me, or are too pai seh to look me up. While in the hospital, I have a lot of time to think about the girl-ghouls’ predicament. Confusion can really fuck you up, and then I have another thought: maybe those ghosts are confused because they are basically hybrid-beings, like a sphinx or Garuda or a minotaur? Or maybe Peranakan—half Malay, half Chinese? Love, too, is a hybrid thing that contains endless possibilities of twinning with hate.
I find myself missing the ghosts, especially Boo, I was just getting to know her. We could’ve played Monopoly in the ward, I bet she’d pick the boot as her playing piece and she’d chuckle when I stomp her boot for her all over the board. A correlation occurs to me: when they leave me alone for a period of time, my ‘fornicating habits’ taper off too. Or is that due to my drastic weight loss?
When Mother comes to get me the day I’m discharged, she shoves a plastic bag containing three manga comics in my direction—I glance at the covers and realise I’ve already read them, but I take them anyway. Mother doesn’t apologise to me, not that I expect her to.
As I get in the car, I notice one of Mother’s new collectibles on the dashboard. Flesh-coloured this time, to join the other two kitties in black and white. Grotesquely, automatically waving their paws up and down, on account of the strong sunlight powering through the windshield. Their grins are supercilious and smarmy. I feel it then, my overwhelming sense of shame. It makes me break out in sweat, cleaving my thighs to the fake leather seat and making it squeak. I look across at Mother, wearing her polarised sun visor even in the car, to protect her ‘important neurons’, as she likes to say. Her Lacoste T-shirt. Her granddad shorts. It’s as if I’m seeing her for the very first time. An overwhelming love for her swamps me, making it difficult for me to breathe, because I am so angry.
She feels the intensity of my stare. Kuai simi? What you looking at?
When I don’t answer, she looks at me again, not keeping her eyes on the road. She makes a tch sound. You know I just want you to turn out well, Huat. Be normal.
Be normal. Two words that don’t trip up the tongue; even the rounded vowel in ‘nor’ is easy to trot out.
Tears spring forth automatically, hot and stinging, so I turn my head to look out my side of the car instead. Can I go to 7-Eleven to pick up a slushie? I’m so thirsty.
Mother taps her fingers on the steering wheel. You’re a smart boy. If you will just try harder, you can be so much better.
Boo would be proud of me if she were here to witness what I trot out instead.
Cannot.
Cannot what? Mother asks, looking in the rear-view mirror, changing lane aggressively.
Girl ghouls might show up again and it’s not my fault. But when the moment of truth arrives, why does it feel that the truth won’t be enough, that it won’t save me? I wish, though, that Boo could see the way Mother’s mouth falls open when I say: Ma, you look ridiculous and you collect solar meows.