Don’t drink, don’t swim or go near bodies of water, don’t wear all white, don’t shave your legs, don’t touch walls —lest you walk into hungry ghosts
[Anita Mui in 胭脂扣 Rouge, 1987]
The 7th full moon of the lunar calendar marks the moment that all hungry, discontent ghosts are let out to roam the human realm #鬼月#中元普渡
[Spirit Traces 仙跡, Yeh Wei-li 葉偉立, 2019 at Taipei MOCA - photos of
ghostly, abandoned places]
Ghost Festival #鬼節 always fascinated me as a kid: the idea that, while one honored and fed respectful ghost elders on Qingming (Tomb Sweeping, in April), one needed to appease and avoid hungry, abandoned ghosts in August. The edict against swimming was the hardest to obey.
This year, I happen to be back.
Ghost festival day in Taiwan, where outside every building and storefront, sumptuous feasts await 「好兄弟」, these “good fellows and brothers” — stranger ghosts made temporary kin and fed on this day #中元普渡
Last year I spoke with @heldavidson on ghostliness under the spectre of a global pandemic.
My namesake, the Shanghai writer Eileen Chang 張愛玲, must rank high among the writers to whom I return obsessively. As it is her birthday today (and mine too), a reprise of some favorites.
A few drawings that she made to accompany her and her friends' writings 1/
Born in Shanghai in 1920 to a once lofty Qing dynasty lineage, Eileen Chang always seemed at once latter-born and far ahead of her time - a self-fashioned legend, precocious with the caustic bite of one far older and weathered. 2/
'I want to be let alone' -conjuring Greta Garbo
“Life is a resplendent gown. Crawling with fleas.”
-Eileen Chang
「生命是一襲華美的袍,爬滿了蚤子。」-張愛玲
[Chang’s sketch of perhaps her most famous (anti-)heroine, Bai Liusu, from Love In A Fallen City]
#七夕 : 7th night of the 7th lunar month is, in legend, the one night a year that the separated lovers may meet one another by means of a bridge of magpies in the skies
Tonight is their night: a thread of poems
[📷 Yamamoto Masao]
should a love meant to last beyond time
begrudge mere nights and days
apart?
兩情若是久長時
又豈在
朝朝暮暮
Closing lines from the ci 鵲橋仙 ‘Immortals by the Magpie Bridge,’ by Northern Song Dynasty poet Qin Guan 秦觀 (1049-1100)
Mum Bett sued her master for her freedom & won in 1781. “Any time, any time while I was a slave, if 1 minute’s freedom had been offered me, & I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I wld have taken it – just to stand 1 minute on God’s earth a free woman – I would.”
Elizabeth Freeman (1744?-1829), born as “Mum Bett,” became the first African American woman to successfully file a lawsuit for freedom in the state of Massachusetts in the case known as Brom and Bett v. Ashley, which in turn led to a series of successful “freedom suits.”
Refusing her former owner Ashley’s request to return to him as a paid servant, Freeman instead worked for pay in her attorney Sedgwick’s household, & was also a prominent healer, midwife, nurse.
After 20 years, Freeman bought her own house where she lived w her children. @NMAAHC
Teaching on storyworlds rather than Chinatowns this term.
But given that the recurrent question of our course is how the stories we tell (and are told) shape the world we see (and don't see) around us -I spent today addressing the latest non-random violence against Asian women.
A detour from our current unit on fairy tale storyworlds, yet grimly apropos. After all, in their original tellings, evil is as omnipresent as virtue, and stories oriented towards 'happily ever after' can easily be detoured by suffering and death. Not unlike immigrant stories.
Trumpian 'China virus' 'Commie spy' disease-vector discourse certainly fanned the flames of this current wave of violence, but the shorthand worked because it easily indexed stories that this country has long told, via laws, policy, & culture, about Asians, women, immigrants.
The great pianist Fou Ts’ong 傅聰 passed away last week in the UK, from covid. Many first encountered him not as a lyrical, brilliant interpreter of Chopin (he was), but as the young recipient of extraordinary letters from his father Fu Lei that were later collected: 傅雷家書.
In the sort of happy accident that young autodidacts (avant-Google) often have, I was separately a fan of both father and son without learning of their connection.
Fu Lei 傅雷 was the emblematic Shanghai Francophile: writing on and translating Romain Rolland, Balzac, Rodin.
As a young Francophile myself - stemming from my desire to better know my grandmother, Hsiao Tsong Rang, who had lived and studied in Paris as Fu Lei did - they in fact moved in the same circles there - Fu Lei was of course a legend to me.
Returning to Mary Shelley and her *other* tale of loss, written right after her husband’s death, its title from her diary entry: “Yes I may well describe that solitary being's feelings,feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race,my companions extinct before me.”
And it was more than Percy that Mary Shelley had lost: her father-in-law forbade her from using the family name.
Hence, “The Last Man” is merely the work of “The Author of Frankenstein.” It is a story of radical solitude, by an author bereaved and effaced. As apt now, as then.
“I spread the whole earth out as a map before me. On no one spot of its surface could I put my finger and say, here is safety.”