paper, incense, need

Content warning: story mentions self-induced abortion

You’re already dead when you cross the ocean.

You cross it like your brother once did, with a piece of paper. His claimed he was the son of a man who was not his father. Yours is stamped with gold leaf that melts when it burns.

Your brother’s children are the ones who call you, forty years after he left.

You never had children of your own. Your village was too small and too poor and too famine-hungry for you to marry. The boys left one by one, first for other villages, then for the cities and the harbours, and finally for the beautiful country across the sea. Girls like you tilled the crops and fed the cattle and looked after aging grandparents, then aging parents, then each other. It was a quiet life, and often a hard life, but it was yours and you loved it until you were put into the ground.

What summons you across the ocean is the scent of char siu, so smoky and rich that you can practically taste the fat melting on your tongue, though you no longer have a mouth or a body. What calls you is the crackle of paper money burning, the droning of prayers, the force of the desperate need in your niece’s heart.

She’s carrying a child she doesn’t want, fathered by a man she doesn’t love. She is fifteen years old and she cannot tell her living family this is happening.

There are small favours you can grant—a premonition of which friend to trust, whispered in a dream, a nudge down the right street to find a dropped fifty-dollar bill. And there’s one large favour you can give her. When the pills take their effect and she bites down on a chopstick so that no one will hear her miscarrying in the bathroom, you try to swallow her pain. You swear there is a moment where her eyes sharpen and she’s able to see your face, which is so like her own.

She keeps every ritual, for the rest of her life. Later, when she is ready, she has children, and she teaches them to light incense during Qingming, to fill a bowl with rice and fish and the crispest skin on a roasted duck. You have no grave in this country, and there never were any photographs taken of you to place within a shrine, but you know the rice and the incense and the burning joss paper are all for you anyway.

Your brother dies and moves on, happy to shed his role as patriarch to this clan he never expected, which wears a name that was never his. You stay and prod fortune in whatever ways you can. You become an excellent eavesdropper to learn what is important in this place. It’s so easy. Everyone chants the same litany of school names, the same aspirations, the same desires. You’re determined that your family will not lack for any of these things, and you tell yourself you are happy, though each step forward takes them away from you.

There comes a day when your brother’s children’s children move out of the small apartment in Chinatown, and you bob in their wake like a kite carried by an unsteady string. You get lost often in the new neighborhood, where you cannot read the street signs and all the large houses look the same. The cats here can sense you. The dogs cannot. You’ve been in America longer than you ever were alive. Everyone who knew you in life is now dead.

SHARON HSU is a second-generation Chinese American writer whose work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Tor.com and Uncanny Magazine. She also co-hosts and co-produces As My Wimsey Takes Me, a fortnightly podcast about the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery series. Sharon lives and writes in Oakland, California. Find links to her writing at sharonyhsu.com and everyday musings on Twitter @pensyf.