What's with the Ghosts?: Portrayals of Spirituality in Asian American Literature

What's with the Ghosts?:

Portrayals of Spirituality in Asian American Literature

In this age of advanced technology and science, I find tales of ghosts in Asian American literature rather intriguing. ¹ From the novels of Maxine Hong Kingston ² and Amy Tan to recent works by Lan Cao, Patricia Chao, Fiona Cheong, Suki Kim, Amiee E. Liu, Anchee Min, Fae Myenne Ng, Ruth L. Ozake, and Julie Shigekuni, ³ we can find stories of ghosts narrated in the context of Asian America. If creating narratives is "a way to articulate and resolve core problems and a way to avoid or heal biographical discontinuities" and these narratives "carry the moral authority of the narrator," what can we learn about Asian American spirituality by reading ghost stories? ⁴ And what can we learn about spirituality in general by taking seriously the spiritual experiences of Asian Americans?

The proliferation of Asian American literature in the past four decades shows a remarkable expansion of literary genres, moving from the "immigrant" and "diasporic" modes of writing to "hyphenated" and "bilingual/cultural" modes to "hybrid" and "trans-" modes. Asian American literature represent deeply spiritual narratives about connecting the past, the present, and the future of Asian Americans in order to fully recover their humanities in yet another "ghostly country" America. As Amy Tan has said, "Writing to me is an act of faith, a hope that I will discover what I mean by truth. I also think of reading as an act of faith, a hope I will discover something remarkable about ordinary life, about myself. And if the writer and the reader discover the same thing, if they have that connection, the act of faith has resulted in an act of magic." ⁵

Despite the ubiquitous presence of ghosts in Asian American literature, few have delineated the spirituality that is deeply embedded within the literature. ⁶ Since Asian American literature has not focused on probing spiritual experiences and no Asian American writer has explicitly named relationships with the ghosts as "religious," calling such episodes "religious" would seem to impose a category from without. Furthermore, a notion of religion without a set of logically derived doctrines and regularly rehearsed rituals defies Western categorization of religiosity. ⁷ The problem of categorization not withstanding, I would argue that these stories of ghosts represent a way to resist the powerful force of assimilating racialized people into the dominant culture. The stories of ghosts can be read as attempts to narrate the "social construction of reality" ⁸ of Asian Americans if we take seriously their experiences of the sacred and their agency of meaning-making on their own terms. I will illustrate three emerging themes of portraying such spirituality in Asian American literature: 1) the danger of telling the "talk-story" of the ghosts; ⁹ 2) the acrobatics of the ghosts; and 3) the renegotiated intergenerational relationships with the ghosts in Asian America.

The Danger of Telling the "Talk-Story" of the Ghosts

"You must not tell anyone . . . what I am about to tell you" is the first lesson a Chinese immigrant mother tells in tales of "no name woman" to her Chinese American daughter in The Woman Warrior. ¹⁰ Imbued with multiple layers of silence and "talk-story," Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiographical fiction depicts the dynamic negotiations in the hyphenated world of Chinese/Asian-America across generation, gender, language and geography. ¹¹ Through the voice of a young Chinese American protagonist, Kingston takes readers deep into ever-evolving and complex processes of separating "what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese" and "What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies." ¹² And in The Hundred Secret Senses, when Kwan, a half-sister from China, confided in her American-born sister about her "yin eyes" to see the ghosts, she starts her story...