The Ghost Who Tried to Love Me by Adam Tervort Page A

suppose
they were hoping I could go to the other side of the world and sow
my wild oats so I could come back and farm for the rest of my life,
I don't know. Maybe they really wanted to learn about my heritage,
whatever that means. I went, though, and I'm still in Taiwan. It
turns out that teaching conversation classes is a lot easier than
harvesting grain or running cattle, and I like life here. My
Chinese has never taken off though. One of the hard things about
living in a Chinese country if you are an ABC (American-born
Chinese) is the prejudice. Oh, you're Chinese but you don't speak
any Chinese, how interesting. (Roll of the eyes.) Hope you enjoy
your vacation here. I usually don't want to spend the energy to
tell people I've been here for 15 years, they aren't interested in
a Chinese they don't consider to be Chinese.
    No matter how "in touch" I get with my
"roots," I still act like an American. Want me to believe in your
silly traditions? Fat chance John Chinaman, show me the evidence
and I'll show you my belief. I'm a realist, like most Americans are
when it comes to folk traditions and strange customs. Taiwanese
people think they see ghosts everywhere, and maybe my doubt is what
got me a meeting with the creepy one in the first place. Every year
during the seventh month of the lunar calendar (sometime in late
August) Taiwanese celebrate ghost month. To them it is a chance to
offer sacrifices to ghosts so that the ghosts will leave them alone
for another year. To me it always seemed like a great chance to
sell lots of "gold paper" for burning as offerings. It's just a
racket set up by the traditional vendors to pick up their profits
during a slow time of the year, right? Ask your normal Taiwanese on
the street and they'll tell you they burn the gold papers and offer
food because they think they probably should, not because they
think it really does anything. Some really believe the customs work
but not most. But even though most people tell you the money and
the sacrifices don't do anything they still believe in ghosts.
    I'd been teaching English for a few years
when I first talked to a student about this. We were having a
conversation class and I asked who believed in ghosts. Everyone
raised their hand. I laughed and asked if they were serious. They
laughed and seemed embarrassed, but the ones who would talk about
it said they believed in ghosts, they had a distant relative who
had seen one once, and then they would tell an urban legend. (At
least that's what it seemed like to me.) It made for a fun
conversation class, but I knew they couldn't be serious.
    The next class I asked if anyone had
actually seen a ghost before. One girl in the back of the class
raised her hand, looking pretty timid. She told us that when she
was in university she lived in a small house with three other
students. They were classmates but came from different areas in
Taiwan. Not long after they started living together she would wake
in the night and hear the sound of running water. (She was a light
sleeper.) Every time it was the tap by the washing machine. She
just assumed one of her roommates had been washing clothes and
forgot to turn the faucet off. The next day she would mention it
but none of the girls admitted to washing clothes the night before.
No big deal, she’d say, just make sure you turn off the water next
time. A few months later she woke up in the night when the TV
turned on. They had a really old TV set with a dial to change
channels and a button that had to be pushed in hard to turn it on.
When she went out to see who was watching TV no one would be in the
room. Once or twice when this happened one of her roommates would
come out to see why the TV was on as well, but they never saw who
had turned it on.
    The months passed and these kinds of things
would happen from time to time but never consistently or in any
kind of pattern. One night one of her classmates brought a boy to
the apartment after their date. They were sitting