The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,53

herbalist) and the spirit of her deceased grandfather, who returned to this world by occupying the body of a teenage boy to give aid to the living, were celebrated characters in my family lore. After all, it was the Grandfather Spirit who had told us that we had to leave Vietnam when we did. “After your boat leaves, no more boats will leave from here. If you miss this boat, you will have lost your chance for a long time, maybe forever,” he warned my paternal grandmother as his host’s body shook with unearthly tremors. My mother’s parents and all her siblings were supposed to depart on the next boat, due to depart only several weeks after ours, but that boat never left. My maternal grandmother asked the Grandfather Spirit then when they would be able to get out. “Ten years” was his response. I met my mother’s parents and all her siblings at Los Angeles International Airport exactly ten years later.

My family was not so blessed as to have the spirits of our benevolent ancestors come back to us in human form, but we still sought their help. Our family rituals included frequent offerings and prayers to our ancestors, long-deceased great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, who in death became godlike in their omniscience and omnipotence. On the first and fifteenth day of every lunar month, Chinese New Year, and Death Day, the day on which the dead are remembered, my mother would set up in the front doorway of our house a candlelit table full of fruits, fish, chicken, pork, rice, tea, and wine. Bundles of incense burned on the table, the fragrant wisps of smoke inviting the Buddhist gods and our ancestors’ spirits to come feast and listen to our prayers. We also tried to fulfill our ancestors’ material desires for riches they did not have on earth. On the death anniversaries of those ancestors who had been closest to us—my great-grandmother and later my grandmother—and on Death Day, we would throw into a flame-spewing metal drum stacks of shiny, gold-colored paper—money in the afterlife—along with red mansions, blue Mercedes, robust-looking servants, and tailored clothes, all made of paper. Within seconds, the flames transformed our offerings into black ash, releasing clouds of dark smoke that lifted toward the heavens, carrying the riches to our beloved.

“Ask for whatever you want, and if you are respectful and honor the gods and our ancestors, they will listen to you,” my mother taught me. Following her lead, I would stand behind the offering table, holding one or three or five sticks of smoking incense (never an even number, for that was bad luck), close my eyes tight, thank the gods and my ancestors for the goodness they had shown us, and then ask them for things big and small—health for everyone in my family, lots of money next Chinese New Year, straight A’s on the next report card, normal vision…and most of the time, I got what I asked for.

The gods and our ancestors were constants in our home. We felt and were comforted by the eyes of the Buddha statues and of our ancestors, whose images were memorialized forever in dusty, framed black-and-white photos, some of which had been brought over from the old country. They followed us from their perches atop the family altar, situated on the fireplace mantel or a mounted platform, where red, pointy bulbs, which were supposed to imitate real candles, always shone and incense always burned, browning the ceiling above. After my grandmother died, we could feel her in every creak of the house in the night, every movement of a door not caused by a human touch, every flickering of a light. “There goes Grandma,” we would say. For six months after my grandmother died, as her spirit made its gradual way to the next world and before she found her place on the family altar, we left an empty seat at the dinner table so she could eat with us. In front of the seemingly vacant chair would be a bowl full of rice, with a pair of chopsticks standing straight up in the middle of the rounded mound of white. When the grief was so fresh right after her death, we remembered not to sit in her seat, but as the months passed and as the other world called to her more and more, we began to forget and someone would sit in her chair at dinner, I or Lyna or Mau or