Hungry Ghosts: Three Hauntings in the Chinese American Diaspora

• In Event: Hauntings

Abstract

This paper is about the “present absences” that haunt Chinese American life. Using original interview and ethnographic data from a project on Chinese American “roots seeking,” I draw on theories about haunting to examine moments of spectral presence. I take my cue from respondents’ own descriptions of their experiences of immigration, assimilation, racialization, and return, and propose haunting—the presence of ghosts—as a portal into embodied diasporic experience. In three moments, I explore respondents’ encounters with the ghostly traces of Chinese labor on an American landscape shaped by empire, their conversations with the spurned spirits of their ancestors, and their ritual return to the haunted homes of their ancestral dwellings. Using stories of haunted landscapes, distressed ancestors, and ancestral homes-as-memorials, I propose that spectral appearances in roots seekers’ narratives suggest important but difficult-to-voice facets of the emotional experience of Chinese American identity: 1) the exploitation and erasure of Chinese labor at the center of US imperial history and respondents’ racialized affective identification with these distant figures; 2) gendered dispossessions in the history and narration of Chinese American immigration; and 3) in-betweenness and intergenerational rupture as a constitutive experience of diasporic moments. Here, the ghosts that accompany roots seekers as they endeavor to untangle their identities are not only an intellectual imposition, but felt presences, described and understood as such by the individuals and groups I encountered.

Author

• Charlotte Xue Lian Wang, Columbia University