By Emily Chan for Room, Issue 45.1
We are an unlikely couple. Me, twenty-three and adrift. The House, so planted in the earth, its walls sagging from decades of rain
When I move in, I worry I’ll find ghosts: not only the spirits of my ngin-ngin and yeh-yeh, but the spectres of other things lost to time. A faded Sailor Moon umbrella, echoes of Sunday evening dinners, flattened patches of grass from the summer I tried to learn how to cartwheel in the front yard. Quiet and benevolent phantoms, but hauntings nonetheless.
I arrive, suitcase in hand, in a moment of necessity. There are four, maybe five bottles of pills zipped into the top flap of my bag, chalky hexagons for seizures and smooth ovoids to stabilize my mood. I am on an extended sick leave from work and too broke to pay Vancouver rent. I am healing-but-not-healed from my immune system’s sudden attack on my brain—the neurological equivalent, I imagine, of a tiny, cataclysmic lightning storm in my skull, fizzing out my ability to properly sleep, speak, remember.
The House isn’t the only one that’s haunted.
~
Like many Chinese immigrants who arrived in the city in the 1960s, my grandparents wrapped their Canadian dream up in a two-storey behemoth called a Vancouver Special. Brick siding on the first floor, too many bedrooms.
Despite the surplus square footage, my ngin-ngin and yeh-yeh were empty-nesters by the time they moved in. They sold the café where they served chow mein alongside fried liver and onions, used the profits to buy a plot of land in East Van, and built their oversized dream home.
Even in retirement, they woke up at 6 a.m. and ate rice porridge for breakfast. My grandmother exercised every morning, taking a tour around the block that she called her “walk-along”—both a verb and a noun. She shopped at T&T a few blocks away, sewed matching dresses in clashing patterns for my sister and me, and chopped crisp Chinese pears for us, the texture of jicama.
