Navigating Grief and Superstition: A Memoir of Poverty and Cultural Identity
Growing up with Chinese superstitious rules felt like walking a tightrope over an abyss of imminent doom. Break any of these ancestral dictates, and death might find you without warning. The childhood rituals involved praying to Fu Lu Shou, the Gods of a Good Life, appeasing Guan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, and adhering to peculiar warnings. One such rule was never answering if someone called your name while sitting on the toilet—a response could mean accepting a dead person's query to possess your body, sending your soul sliding into the underworld. Losing your identity in such a way was terrifying, especially when you were still figuring out who you were.
A Descent into Poverty and Grief
In 2012, the death of my paternal grandfather, Yeh Yeh, left me unmoored. Yet, his passing opened up a spare mattress in my Mah Mah's 500-square-foot one-bedroom apartment in the Grand Street Guild, a church-run housing project in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Freshly diagnosed with a debilitating neurological disorder that hindered reading and writing, I had no job, agent, or book deal after earning an MFA from Columbia University. With no money or opportunities, I became my grieving grandmother's roommate.
Poverty often feels like choicelessness, akin to being unloved and unwanted. Accepting charity from an elderly widow meant adhering to her rules of ancestral worship, sacrificing the modern personhood I had cultivated since leaving childhood behind.
Life in a Cluttered Apartment
Mah Mah's apartment was cluttered, and we slept side by side on single mattresses donated by kind people at St. Mary's Church. The space was overrun by spotty brown cockroaches—monstrosities lazing on walls, scuttling from under appliances, and fornicating on leftover rice in the refrigerator. Despite regular exterminator visits, the roaches always returned, crawling on our bodies as we slept. Fear kept my eyes open, while Mah Mah cried for her newly dead husband. In the darkness, my sick and afraid brain made the room spin until I vomited and begged for death.
Rituals and Remembrance
Each morning, we bowed to three serious-faced Fu Lu Shou figurines beside Yeh Yeh's shrine, where his framed photo beamed down at us. We talked to him, asking if he needed anything burned for the Afterlife. Then, we walked to the Buddhist temple on Mott Street to set fire to joss money. Unlike with other dead relatives, we never burned food like barbecue duck or sticky coconut buns—we were too poor to buy real sustenance for ourselves, let alone for a dead guy, as Mah Mah rationed our food coupons.
Hope Amidst Hardship
Those post-MFA days were filled with more hope than anxiety. The terror of not being a good enough writer hadn't settled in, and I didn't yet understand how publishing would both praise and criticize my weirdo stories. I spent hours reworking what became my memoir, The Woo-Woo, while crushing cockroaches with Yeh Yeh's bedroom slippers—he was dead and couldn't complain. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! It took three or four downward slaps to kill a roach completely. If writing didn't pan out, I mused, I could have a career as a pest exterminator.
As I rewrote on my hard mattress, Mah Mah sobbed for her deceased husband, feeling abandoned by him. He had been her whole purpose and identity, and together they had raised nine children, with my father as their oldest son. In the seventies, they fled poverty in Hong Kong's countryside for New York's Lower East Side projects, never leaving. What was it like to escape poverty in one country only to find it again in another? At least, I thought, they had upgraded to flush toilets—maybe that was enough.
Grief and Superstition Collide
"How dare you leave me!" Mah Mah screamed at Yeh Yeh's shrine, blaming the gods for his death from a blood clot after a plane ride. Some days, she sat fully nude on a church-donated sofa, refusing to eat or drink. I watched baby roaches crawl around her bare toes and shuddered. In October, Hurricane Sandy descended. When you don't speak English and are neither educated nor literate, all you can do is pray to Gwan Yin and the government for help. Mah Mah accepted death readily and refused to evacuate.
"We should find a community centre," I urged, repeating it when electricity, heat, and running water failed, forcing us to use a bucket for the toilet. "We'll die now," she said, gesturing at Yeh Yeh's photo. Did I imagine him frowning? Surely he wanted us to leave, but it was too late—the elevator wasn't working, Mah Mah wouldn't get dressed, and cell service was down. Trapped on the 14th floor with no flashlights or candles, only a family-sized bag of chips to share with the roaches, Mah Mah shrieked, determined to join Yeh Yeh in the Afterlife. "What about me?" I whispered, but we both knew nobody could exist outside her wild grief.
Reckoning with Fear and Tradition
To crouch in freezing darkness beside your naked grandmother is to reckon with yourself, squelching the ugliest parts of your imagination. With no choice, I clung to the old Chinese superstitious belief system taught from birth, as the Ivy League and capitalism had failed me. Growing up believing a simple faux pas results in death makes everything high-stakes—a wrong word to an ancestor or deity could invite an evil ghost to inhabit your body. Not following tradition meant do or die, a fear-mongering pragmatism seizing control of decision-making. Such an understanding highlights how unimportant you are to the world. Would Mah Mah and I starve if we didn't leave? Probably. But did it matter if we died? Not really. The cockroaches would feast on our eyelashes and lips, and the church would give the apartment to the next impoverished person in line.
Rescue and Aftermath
After four days, Red Cross volunteers saved us with blankets and bottled water, climbing flights of stairs to help those trapped. "No," Mah Mah refused when they tried to make her leave. When cell service returned, I phoned my aunt in a neighboring housing project to stay with Mah Mah. Then, my mother called to report my father's cancer diagnosis. "Come home, the ghosts are angry at you," she said, transferring money for a plane ticket to Vancouver. I moved back into my parents' house in the suburbs.
Months later, Mah Mah died. A scan revealed untreated breast cancer had metastasized after she flew to Hong Kong to visit our ancestors. After her death, a hideous brown moth, the size of my fist, floated through my parents' house in the Vancouver suburbs. By instinct, I rushed to swat it with an electric fly swatter. "It's your Mah Mah," my mother shouted, "tell her you're sorry or she'll curse you!" In Chinese culture, moths are ancestors returned to remind you they're always watching. I had forgotten this mythology. Thwack! I swung, half-crushing the creature, and couldn't bring myself to apologize to a half-dying moth. I watched as it fluttered toward a light bulb to expire.
Finding Voice Through Writing
While suffering from vertigo, I worked on my manuscript. The memoir was published in 2018, six years later. When I felt braver, I wrote Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies to apologize, to say what I couldn't when I was young and both afraid and not afraid to die. I am sorry, Mah Mah. I hope you're at peace with Yeh Yeh in the Afterlife. I am sorry I killed you as a moth. I think of you in the apartment on Grand Street sometimes, in your rage and grief, inescapable.
