Mysterious inhabitants of the past

Remembering childhood ghosts and spirits in a small village in China—and dealing with the ghosts of today

Chang-li Yiu

professor emeritus,
mathematics and physics

I am going to tell you about some strange fellows living in the village where I spent part of my childhood.

When I was about 5, my parents moved back from the small city in southern China where I was born to the tiny village they had come from. The village was right below a hill connected to many other hills. It was out in the middle of nowhere, and people rarely traveled through the area.

During the 4 years I lived there, the Chino-Japanese War and the Civil War occurred, yet no soldier ever came to defend or to attack our village. The reason was clear. It was not a place worth fighting for. I suspect that the rest of the world had neglected it throughout its entire history.

As you can infer, it was a very poor place. The villagers scraped together a meager living by farming the land, which was not very fertile because of the long history of agriculture. The only help was from buffaloes, which the villagers rented during the tilling season. The rest of the work was done by hand. Education was not much needed. The ability to read just a few words was more than enough for this little cosmos.

People lived in complexes of four or five families. Each complex had a shared courtyard, a well and a main gate. Each family had a room or two and a fire stove where meals were prepared. To a child, the fire stove was an imposing structure. It occupied an area about six times that of an electric range here and was slightly taller. Two people were needed to cook a meal. In my family, my mother worked with the wok on top of the stove and my sister sat on the floor and kept the fire going. She fed the stove with hay from our rice field or with dry twigs or leaves I collected when hay ran out. The stove was very important, because life in the village was a constant struggle for food.

It was therefore not surprising people believed the stove had its own spirit, a stove god, who observed the family year round except for a few days around Chinese New Year, when he ascended to heaven to report on us. Adults constantly reminded children to show respect to this fellow. I could not bang on the stove, for example.

From one side of the village a little winding trail went off into the forest up on the hill. I had to go into the hilly area quite often, either because my father asked me to fetch water from a stream for his tea—the well water was not pure enough—or because I could not find enough fuel for cooking near the village. Going into the hills was an adventure. First the trail passed by a pond, which everyone knew contained a water ghost. The ghost was the soul of a drowned person. He had to catch another soul to take his place before he could reincarnate. I can still remember the tension I felt when I walked by the pond. A splash of water, perhaps from a frog or a falling twig, would startle me. But the normal quietness also scared me. I walked as fast and as far away from the pond as I could.

When I began to go uphill, in the grim shadow of trees and about 50 feet from the trail, there were a few old, cracking coffins on wooden stands. Chinese believed in finding a good burial place for their ancestors, according to some “wind-and-water” (“feng-shui”) rules. Often people did not have the means to find such a place, so they placed the coffin and body up on a stand in the woods, hoping that some day they could afford to give it a proper burial. Often that day never came. So there the coffins sat, and cracked and grew black with mold. We were told, by wise and knowledgeable elders of course, that skeletons, when long exposed to the “spirits” of sunshine and moonshine, would become animated, and that they were fond of sucking blood from people. It was scary to look at these coffins. But it was also irresistible to peek at those big, dark, gaping holes and wonder what was behind them, dead skeletons or something unimaginable.

On the other side of the village there was a dirt road leading to another, bigger village. From there we could go to the city where I was born and then to the outside world. In the opposite direction, this road led into the hills, gradually disappearing in the woods. One day an old family friend came to our house to tell us of a recent occurrence. A while ago, he said, someone was coming home in the dead of night. Suddenly he was enshrouded in a dust cloud that seemed to drag him into the hill. He struggled and was able to escape. Our friend was sure that some ghosts were taking up residence along that road and trying to capture people. He came to warn us to be careful if we traveled near that road at night.

To avoid running into trouble with gods, ghosts and spirits, children in the village learned all kinds of taboos. One of them was not to point your finger at “Lady Lunar,” the moon, because it was disrespectful. If you did it, Lady Lunar would cut off your ear that very night while you were asleep. Even if you pointed to the moon by accident, you had to pray for forgiveness. Another practice in the village: If a child uttered the word “death,” immediately his or her mouth had to be wiped by a piece of red paper to get rid of the bad omen. Death seemed to be always around the corner and would love to claim a victim given an excuse, however trifling.

I left all these strange characters when I was about 9 years old and moved to Taiwan, where I eventually finished college, majoring in physics. Then I went on to New York City to get a graduate degree, again in physics, before I came to teach at PLU. For many years I did not think about those characters in my village. I was submerged in the study of the frontier knowledge of 20th-century physics. All those shady characters were irrelevant to me. They were 16th century by nature and seemed absurd, invented by people for self-torture. Why 16th century? Because Newton’s great work, “Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica,” was published in 1687, and after that, superstitious beliefs subsided. According to the Principia, the moon was nothing more than a big piece of rock.

As I grow older, I begin to think more about my childhood, about the fear caused by these ghosts and spirits. They were so real. If you asked the village people whether they actually believed in these ghosts, they would have considered the question an insult and perhaps would have felt apprehensive for you, because by asking this question you might incur the wrath of ghosts. After all, the knowledge of the ghosts and spirits was passed on from generation to generation, by respected elders. True, no one seemed to have seen any ghosts firsthand. But who was so reckless as to question the truthfulness of elders? In fact, I doubt it ever occurred to anybody to even ask questions. What we were told was truth, plain and simple.

Julius Caesar understood the reason that ghosts and spirits existed in my village (even though he lived about 2,000 years ago and was no philosopher) when he said, “It happens by a common vice of nature that we trust more, and fear more violently, things to us unseen, hidden and unknown.” And indeed, now that I live in a much bigger village called the world, I see people still believe in make-believe ghosts. These ghosts are just more sophisticated and powerful. They won’t be satisfied by dragging someone into the water for the sake of their own reincarnation. People believe they want to annihilate thousands, for reasons seemingly more elaborate, yet equally absurd. I am sure you can spot them easily. If not your own ghosts, then someone else’s.
For myself, since I was fooled once already, if I believe in these make-believe creatures again, shame on me.

I’ll tell you another story to conclude my letter. Shortly before I moved to Taiwan, one day I passed by a big tree in front of my village. A few men were squatting under the tree as usual, smoking and gossiping. It was 1948, and the Civil War was raging somewhere in the distant north. Those men were talking about the war. One said he heard there was a “death-ray” used in the battle. There was no such weapon then. Maser, which is a close relative of the “death-ray” Laser, was invented in 1954, in a laboratory a few floors up from my office in graduate school. It took me about 15 years to journey from the 16th century to the 20th century.