Every lost story is a hungry ghost (2024), C. Grace Chang

1.

Any way I try to tell this, the water is always the beginning. The water as border. The water as connector. The water as witness.

2.

I started filming the rotting pier back in the early 2010s, after I’d just moved to Sweden with the plan of coming home again in a few years’ time. Every visit since, I’d check in, see how much had rotted away. A twenty-something, constantly on the move, it’s no wonder I lost track of those old phones and, with them, the footage. This is the only video I have of the pier now. Up until 2007, a ferryboat had floated off the gangway, crisp white and hulking. A steamboat turned restaurant turned fallow wreck disappeared.

The first filming I remember was around the time Ama passed away. My mom’s mom. The homesickness I’d felt for the New York I left behind, the one that couldn’t exist again, compounded with the feeling that everything was slipping away—no doubt exacerbated by the death of our matriarch. She was as bright and unknowable as the sun, the gravity that grounded our lives in the States.

I felt a wild hunger to film and photograph (however well or poorly) everything I could. Even taking photos of photos. (One of my favorites is still the photo of Ama wearing a t-shirt featuring a photo of herself.) Maybe the hunger came from more than grief. I definitely regretted not returning home sooner as promised. When I got the call during a midsummer dinner in the archipelago, the weather had finally cleared. I remember crying in the attic of the cottage, listening to hold music from airline customer service.

It was only around the time of the funeral that more stories of her life began to surface. Not just from the service but from cleaning out her apartment in Queens, the family home since 1971. The days of sorting became a mapping project. Photographs, fashions, jewelry, and keepsakes. Old maps and subway tokens. I’d always judged her packrat tendencies, but in the end, I too kept everything I could.

The service itself exploded with guests, requiring a second viewing room with a livestream, and more still in the hall of the funeral home. Fashion folks, performers, politicians, her old Buddhist congregation, the Taiwan Senior Center people, and her vast network of friends. And us. The turnout floored me, even though I knew how busy she’d always been, engaging with friends and the wider community, cancer walks and volunteer work, theater, parties, and seeing the world. I thought back to the plaque on her wall from President Obama, a commendation for her exemplary volunteer work alongside the Taiwan Senior Center in Flushing, Queens.

After the service, the guests filed towards us to shake our hands and mourn her passing. They came and went like the tides of an endless black river.

3.

It wasn’t until after Ama retired that her civic work began. She’d spent decades as a garment worker in Soho and Chinatown before my dad got her a job as a pattern-maker for a high fashion brand in Midtown in the early 1990s.

As the youngest in our extended family nebula, I’d never had deep conversations with Ama. My job was to eat and exchange pleasantries about our general health. But in early adulthood, thanks to the miracle of the internet, I started learning about old movements organized by Chinese American garment workers.

I came across images from two pivotal moments: the Jung Sai Garment Workers Strike of 1974 in San Francisco, and the 1982 Garment Workers’ Strike in New York’s Chinatown. Black and white photos from opposite coasts 8 years apart, an army of working aunties 20,000 strong who had had enough. Their dissent paved the way for new grassroots movements, secured better pay and improved working conditions for immigrant women workers.

“We workers must be united. It’s not spring until all flowers bloom.” The late Shui Mak Ka, a lead organizer of the 1982 Garment Workers’ Strike, spoke these words during a 2019 interview for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

The figures in the photos from these two strikes felt so familiar, though I didn’t know any of these people. And yet, I did. I knew these aunties. Neighborhood figures and members of my own family. Strong, tired, unstoppable. Creating oases so the rest of us could grow. Often pulling plaid wheely carts of groceries behind them. Always picking the freshest, sweetest fruit with such regularity that I thought it had to be magic.

Some information came through digitized archives from orgs and museums. Some came from personal blogs. A few were webpages from guerrilla researchers, piecing together snippets from archived newspapers, interviews, and photo submissions. It felt like the losses were adding up. The more I learned, the more visible the hole became. The fading of movements. The exhausting rebuilds of knowledges and frameworks. The suppression of whole histories. And of course, the loss of those who made such movements possible.

4.

A Taiwanese American New York congressman spoke at Ama’s funeral. His name escapes me now. But he may have had the best eulogy by far. In it, he described Ama. How her short stature seemed to underline her larger than life personality. How she spoke to everyone the same way, regardless of status. How every phone call from her began with the same Taiwanese casual greeting: “Ei!” A straight shooter til the end.

I feel the loss in new ways now, not being able to ask about that part of her life. What sparked her volunteer work upon retirement? Was this civic-mindedness new, or had it been simmering all along? What had she thought of the garment workers strike in ’82? Did she participate?

Not long ago, I tried to google her name both in English and Mandarin, plus any combination of words that might help narrow it down. The first result read: “Your search— Lucy Shuchin Chow Flushing, Queens activist seniors—did not match any documents.” Just like that. Another hole where she should be.

5.

I think about movements that get lost and die, only for another generation to pick up the reins (knowingly or not) years later, being told that their problems are new. That they are the first. That they are alone. So much time is wasted on rebuilding and re-organizing for the same issues: labor, housing, immigration, basic human rights. It’s a whole project to even establish (or, more accurately: re-establish) the simple fact the simple fact of our history here and in other parts of the Global North.

This thought always brings me back to the Filipino sailors who arrived in California as early as 1587. In the mid-1700s, another wave of these sailors created the earliest permanent Asian settlement in the Americas in a Louisiana bayou.

Along with enslaved people and other people of color, the Filipino immigrants created the village of Saint Malo. Together, they revolutionized the Louisiana shrimping industry, an industry today worth 1.3 billion dollars. But over time, a confluence of storms, vanishing coastlines, and assimilation disappeared St. Malo and many of its records. The story has survived by the skin of its teeth through oral tradition and the tireless work of modern historians like Marina Estrella Espina and Randy Gonzales, and organizations like The Asian American Education Project. In an interview with the BBC in 2022, Gonzales stated: "we are still here [in Louisiana]. I'm telling the Filipino story to talk about a story that's been kind of lost – and [as a warning] that all of our stories can be lost in this way."

This was a kind of precarity I’d felt keenly but for a long time, couldn’t name. I could explain it, and friends across diasporas had also expressed a similar feeling. But it wasn’t until 2018 that I came across the work of US scholar and activist Diane Fujino, who coined the term intergenerational discontinuity to describe “the disruption of information between generations.” No doubt about it, there have always been and always will be aunties, uncles, and so on clearing the way for us, though their names may die with them and their loved ones. Fujino writes about the many waves of Asian American activists across the country who felt utterly alone and without roadmaps, disconnected from their history. Activists in the 60s and 70s had forgotten about the work of those in the 40s (who were fighting for many of the same things), those in the 40s having forgotten about their own predecessors all the way back until the 1910s, the protest poems scratched and inked onto the walls of Angel Island Immigration Station, a detention center for new arrivals crossing the Pacific Ocean. A place largely meant to hamper the entry of Chinese and Japanese migrants into the United States via San Francisco.

One poem, in particular, feels especially harrowing to me. It reads:

There are tens of thousands of poems on these walls
They are all cries of suffering and sadness
The day that I am rid of this prison and become successful
I must remember that this chapter once existed…

After a fire, a rebuild, a brief stint as a prisoner of war processing camp, abandonment, and finally, rediscovery of the wall poems, in 1983, Angel Island Immigration Station became a museum. Their Google Maps page features some reviews from the descendants of people who were detained there. One person in 2023 gave it 5 stars and wrote:

Very well-done and informative museum about the past and present situations of immigration in USA. Especially the entry-free hospital is the best part. It is a pity that history repeats itself, in Europe EU is also shutting off its borders for immigrations.

Angel Island’s new life as a museum feels like an inverse echo of the anguish etched into their walls. There’s a bizarre irony in so much free movement in a place like that. A purgatory surrounded by water and, beyond that, the untouchable land. Its foundation of xenophobia still lingers in the exclusionary and harsh immigration procedures targeting Latin and Muslim migrants today.

But having grown up on the east coast, where we’ve had a comparatively shorter history of East and Southeast Asian immigration than the west coast, so much of what I know has come to me through internet searches, digitized archives, and private museums. Especially when it came to solidarity movements between people of color more broadly, and even more so when searching for information regarding queer people of color. It took a concerted effort to try to piece together our history in the U.S. At the time, I wasn’t aware of scholars like Fujino who had already done so, at least regarding Asian American activism. The term itself—Asian American—can feel like a tangled thing, wrangling almost too many voices. Originally, this broad coalition was formed in the 1960s as a way to organize against war and empire, and in solidarity with Black and Brown grassroots movements. A moment that feels familiar lately.

6.

Among museum visitors, blog commenters, YouTubers, and so on, I’ve always observed the same wonder and surprise, the same rage and raw hunger for a history Whose importance our own public school boards, our own mainstream culture, tell us is nonexistent.

I remember visiting the Museum of Chinese in America in New York in 2017. I left feeling vindicated somehow, even after overturning so many horrible horrible rocks. And plenty of wonderful ones too, to be fair.

There’s a lot to be said of archives and their colonial roots, and of the lawlessness of the internet. There’s as much to be said for the value of fact-checking with multiple sources regardless. But for those who have been shut out of official narratives, a lot can be found through  sleuthing and analyzing old gossip. People on the margins know better than anyone how much information gets dismissed—how the people at the center of that information get dismissed. Trying to recover suppressed histories in your own country can feel a lot like building a legal case against a corporation.

7.

Every time I return to the rotting pier, I’m stuck by how little connection I actually have to it, aside from a lifelong curiosity. It was a historic site, technically. A gangway to a turn of the century steamboat with many lives. Not that we’d ever gone in. But something about this giant relic on the Hudson feels significant. A sentinel on the water that follows our movements along major highways, watching us commute to family and friends, keeping vigil even as it decays.

Maybe I felt a stronger fascination with it after the rot set in. Or maybe it was just that I could feel it slipping away after years of neglect, then Hurricane Sandy, then finally, the fire. But it felt like, with every viewing, even as it faded in real time, I got to see something new emerge from the decay. A changing sculpture. A seagull kingdom. A ghostly monument.

8.

As a kid, my mom would tell me this story about when she’d first immigrated to New York as a very unwilling 9 year old. She imagined that if she could just touch the river, it would flow out carry her touch across the Atlantic, across where the oceans meet, back to everyone she loved in Taiwan. Since hearing this, I’d always looked at water as this vast connector. Like, however far away I went, I could always reach out somehow. I’ve carried that story with me. It’s something that I’ve turned over in my mind with increasing frequency as I’ve aged and realized the profound sadness of a child thinking these thoughts.

Recently, when I asked her about it, she denied ever having told it. She claimed that it must have been my father who’d told it to me. That is not how I remember it. And we’re still at an impasse. But maybe it doesn’t matter whose story it is. It’s a good one, and one that’s given me comfort .

9.

Lately, I’ve thought more and more about remaking rituals that my parents would have grown up with. Something to do with a desire for greater connection with my far flung relatives. (Though, I guess, I’m the far flung one, being the only one in Europe that I’m aware of.)

I couldn’t get it out of my head, this remade ritual. After so much time and distance, even with my atheist brain, the core ritual of ancestor worship—burning incense—felt like a powerful connection. Though the ritual would be different when I tried it, it would be mine.

I started digging into other Sino/Chinese diasporic rituals involving incense and stumbled upon the Hungry Ghost Festival, a month of sweeping tombs and burning incense and paper offerings for both ancestors and wandering spirits, or: those who no longer have anyone left to remember them. There seemed to be infinite local variations. Platters of food left in places of significance. Burning paper iPhones and paper sports cars. I think about the piles and piles of fake US dollars, Euros, and other currencies. Joss paper, the traditional monetary offering, has always been known as ghost money or, my favorite alternate name: hell money.

Later on, I devised a plan to remake the ritual on the beach with my partner on the evening of the Mid Autumn Festival. But pouring rain reduced it to a sad facsimile on the balcony. 3 burning sticks in the pot of our withering strawberry plant. Not exactly the meaningful gesture I had planned.

But the idea stuck, and evolved into something more. After 3 filming attempts on the beach in my adopted hometown of Malmö, one frigid, rainy dawn, it finally worked.

Throughout this process, the hungry ghost festival kept popping up in my mind. There’s something so devastating about an unremembered soul, even though that’s the eventual reality for many of us.

But it’s not just human spirits who wander hungry, is it? Grief and curiosity demand feeding. Rifts and gouges demand filling. Stories want telling. These things are often defined by what they crave. A loved one, information, a confirmed history. Someone to hear you.

10.

When we finally arrived at the beach at 6am for that fourth and final filming, I was struck by the unexpected delight of having help, and wondered if Ama and Agung had had anyone during their first few months in New York.

Staring out, it was hard not to imagine the unseen places. What is a horizon but a moving line? And the sea makes everything feel so very infinite.