Cultural translation and the exorcist: a reading of Kingston's and Tan's ghost stories

The Chinese indeed have many ghost stories about the drowned one. The Chinese think the drowned ones died with grievances and anger, which is why the drowned ghosts wait by the water to find a substitute. That is their revenge and their hope of rebirth. If they cannot find a substitute, they remain forever as wandering spirits without receiving spirit money and sacrificial offerings from their live relatives. Kingston writes down the story on pages of paper instead of burning spirit money or origami houses or clothes to devote to her aunt. She transforms pieces of writing into spirit money in order to appease her aunt.

In the third section, "Shaman," she relates her mother's encounters with ghosts in China when her mother, Brave Orchid, studied at the medical school in Canton. As the eldest and smartest student, she bravely stayed in the haunted room in the dormitory and successfully exorcised the evil spirit. The narrator describes how her mother may have been afraid, but because she is a dragon lady (born in the year of the dragon), "[S]he could make herself not weak" (65). The strategy Brave Orchid adopts to exorcise the Sitting Ghost is to "talk it away." She sneers at the ghost by giving it a contemptible name, "You will not win, Boulder. You do not belong here.... You're no mystery to me. I've heard of you Sitting Ghost before.... You have no power over a strong woman" (68, emphasis mine). By telling the Sitting Ghost what it is and that it does not belong here, Brave Orchid demonstrates her power/knowledge to control the situation. After such a claim, she just ignores the ghost and chants her lessons, the professional knowledge she has learned at the medical school. When dawn comes, the Sitting Ghost scurries off.

She wakes up when the other students come to the haunted room in the morning. She asks them to help call her self back here. They take her earlobes and chant, "Come home, come home, Brave Orchid, who has fought the ghosts and won. Return to Keung School, Kwangtung City, Kwangtung Province.... You are safe now in the To Keung School. All is safe. Return" (69). It is crucial that she reclaim her identity and confirm where she belongs, "not traveling in the past where her children were nor to America to be with [her husband]" (70). She knows who she is and where she is, without confusion about "I" and "here," so she successfully wins in the fight against the ghost.

But the narrator, in a world thick with ghosts, feels confused. She cannot figure out what is true or what is just fantasy in her mother's stories. She feels isolated among all kinds of ghosts; moreover, she is called Ho Chi Kuei, a kind of ghost herself. Caught between a Chinese immigrant family and the "American normal" life, the young narrator seems more attracted by the

"American normal" life. She manages to earn approval from American society. Her school record of straight A's is evidence that she "can do ghost things even better than ghosts can" (179-80). The narrator states, "[T]o make my waking life American-normal, I turn out the lights before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which are in Chinese, the language of impossible stories" (82). She has to overcome fear and disorientation.