The Ghost Bride

by Yangsze Choo

This practice of arranging the marriage of a dead person was uncommon, usually held in order to placate a spirit. A deceased concubine who had produced a son might be officially married to elevate her status to a wife. Or two lovers who died tragically might be united after death. That much I knew. But to marry the living to the dead was a rare and, indeed, dreadful occurrence.

Most of the time I wore loose cotton cheong sam, which is a long gown, or sam foo, the blouse and trousers used by working girls.

Women had little security other than jewelry, so even the poorest among us sported gold chains, earrings, and rings as their insurance.

She too wore blue and white mourning colors, but her stylish kebaya had a waspish cut, and her jeweled hairpins gave her an insect-like glitter.

They had all my favorite kinds of kuih—the soft steamed nyonya cakes made of glutinous rice flour stuffed with palm sugar or shredded coconut. There were delicate rolled biscuits called love letters and pineapple tarts pressed out of rich pastry.

Amah looked as pleased as a cat that has caught a lizard. “Well! The Lim family has so much money that perhaps a good upbringing matters more than family fortune.”

The Chinese considered the moon to be yin, feminine and full of negative energy, as opposed to the sun that was yang and exemplified masculinity. I liked the moon, with its soft silver beams. It was at once elusive and filled with trickery, so that lost objects that had rolled into the crevices of a room were rarely found, and books read in its light seemed to contain all sorts of fanciful stories that were never there the next morning.

Of course, she was perfectly capable in the next breath of scolding me for going into the sun and ruining my complexion.

We Chinese did not like to give or receive certain gifts for superstitious reasons: knives, because they could sever a relationship; handkerchiefs, for they portended weeping; and clocks, as they were thought to measure out the days of your life. If any of these were presented, the recipient usually paid a token amount to symbolize that it was a purchase and not a gift.

The hours, days, and years that had bled away in his opium haze demanded a payment from my future.

Amah had warned me earlier that the medium preferred payment not in the Straits dollars minted by the British but in the older tin currency of small ingots shaped fancifully like fish, crickets, or crocodiles. These were increasingly rare, and as we had none at such short notice, I could only hope that the copper half-cent coins in my purse would suffice.

It seemed to me that in this confluence of cultures, we had acquired one another’s superstitions without necessarily any of their comforts.

hell banknotes, their colors garish with the seal of Yama, the god of hell. In addition to this, she had also bought gold paper to be folded into the shape of ingots, another favorite currency of the underworld. The numbers of the banknotes were in tens and hundreds of Malayan dollars. Hell must surely have seen inflation, given the recklessly high amounts of currency that were regularly burned.

It was a shame that dying had done so little for his physique.

My feet were sore and I checked them for blisters. It seemed utterly unfair that the spirit should suffer the torments of flesh without having any. But perhaps that was the whole point of the afterlife.

How strange it was that the spirit could sleep, eat, and rest, yet how else could one account for the quantities of paper funeral food and furniture that were burned to accompany the houses and carriages of the dead?

“If I had known how easy it is to lose your life, I would have treasured mine better.”

Although there are some who were poor in life but were assiduous about burning funeral offerings, so that they’re now rich in the afterlife. But as soon as someone departs for the courts, then their possessions here vanish as well.

The problem with the dead was that they all wanted someone to listen to them.

The image of the Anglican church in Malacca rose before my eyes together with its green and quiet graveyard. When I died, I thought, I would rather rest there undisturbed than continue like that old concubine, eaten up by her schemes of vengeance from beyond the grave.

His corpulence only served to accentuate his resemblance to a pig, especially when he sank his jowly chin into his neck to regard me.

I wondered what the afterlives of Sikhs, Tamils, Malays, and Arab traders were like. Indeed, what was the Catholic paradise? For some reason, Tian Bai’s dream of the Portuguese girl Isabel Souza crossed my mind. If she died, I thought, did she have to scuttle around the grounds of a hostile mansion like this? I had my doubts.

Whisper of sorcery, like those Javanese women who inserted gold needles in their faces and ate children.

In the Chinese tradition, nothing was better than dying old and full of years, a treasure in the bosom of one’s family. To outlive descendants and endure a long span of widowhood could hardly be construed as lucky.

It was strange to think that power in this world belonged to old men and young women.

unlike Tian Bai’s uncle who valued pretty women, it was important to impress upon the women of the Lim household what a virtuous and hardworking daughter-in-law I would make. Amah announced she would go and serve the many-layered kuih lapis cake that I had made (a complete fabrication) and that we ladies should come in for tea.