This is not a Ghost Story.

by | May 18, 2014 | China, family, war | 23 comments

The ghost of Yue Fei

The ghost of Yue Fei

When war invades a country like China and many people die before their time, ghost stories multiply. They become part of the landscape. So it was inevitable that in my novel, Tiger Tail Soup, I would mention ghosts. They’re not a big part of the story, but I couldn’t avoid them. The unsettled spirits of those who died too soon were just one more thing my characters had to contend with.

I personally have never seen a ghost or received messages from beyond the grave. But, yes, I have experienced something not easily explained by the ordinary laws of science.

We were living in the Philippines when it started. It was 1976, before email and Facebook and cheap long distance calls. So I kept in touch with my parents who were in the United States by mail, one letter every week.

fear, wikimediaOne evening in April (It would have been daytime on the West Coast of the United States.) I was walking through the family room, feeling fine. The kids were in bed. My husband was in Mindanao on a business trip. Suddenly I wasn’t feeling fine. I was sure I was about to die and I didn’t know why. I couldn’t breathe properly. My chest hurt. I couldn’t think straight.

A few minutes later, the phone rang. It was my husband, calling from Mindanao. I couldn’t concentrate as he talked about his work and his travel plans.

“Can’t you come home?” I asked, interrupting. I knew he couldn’t. I’d never asked anything like that before.

For the next three months the anxiety attacks continued. They were always with me, rising and falling, striking hard without reason. I got a prescription, which helped … a little.

Then it was time for our home leave. My husband, our three daughters and I flew to Seattle. When our plane arrived, we were expecting my parents to meet us at the airport. Instead, my aunt and uncle were there, waiting for us beyond immigration and customs. “Your mom and dad couldn’t come,” Uncle Joe said, grabbing a suitcase. We didn’t learn the rest of the story until we were all in the car.

Aunt Shirley finally broke the news. My dad had lung cancer. He’d been diagnosed three months earlier, at about the same time that I’d started having anxiety attacks. Mom hadn’t said a word in her letters. She didn’t want to worry us.

I stayed on in Washington State for a while after my husband and children left. I cooked and took walks and accompanied my parents to doctors’ appointments. All the while I continued to be plagued by anxiety attacks, now with good reason.

After a few months back in the Philippines, I received a call from Uncle Joe. “The doctor says you should come back,” he said. I knew what that meant.

On the plane, I felt the same ever-present anxiety I’d been experiencing since that evening in April and the constant pressure to keep it under control and avoid a full-blown anxiety attack.

But then, a couple hours before we landed in Seattle, it left me. Just like that. Completely disappeared.

When I saw Uncle Joe at the airport, I knew what he was going to say before he opened his mouth. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, giving me a hug. “Your dad died a couple of hours ago.”

Do you have any ghost stories or tales of the unexplained?

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23 Comments

  1. Mabel Kwong

    Sorry to hear about the panic attacks, Nicki. Even more sorry to hear that they happened during a certain hard time in you life. Coincidence or fate…sometimes the world and universe works in strange ways. It is concerning to hear you felt pain along with the attacks. Usually panic attacks don’t come with pain. But then again, every one and every individual is different.

    I don’t have a ghost story to share. But I do dream sometimes and this year, some of my recent dreams have come true. On New Year’s Day this year I dreamt of eating in a Chinese restaurant with my parents and my dad stuck out his leg as I was making my way back to table and I tripped. The next night in real life, we all went out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant and my dad remarked about the way I lived my life in a way which I did not like. Eerie.

    Reply
    • Nicki Chen

      My dad was a quiet man, not the type to impose himself on others or to show his emotions. And yet, I always felt close to him. The one good thing about my panic attacks was that they confirmed for me how close my dad and I were that I could even feel his fear.

      Your dream seems to have a message. Next time your dad tries to trip you up, just walk around his leg or ignore his negative remark. A message from you to you.

      Reply
  2. CrazyChineseFamily

    This is a really interesting story when it comes to this kind of topic. My mother had a very similar experience while she was pregnant with me. She dreamt during one night that her father had an accident and two days later she got a call that her father had fallen down from his bicycle in December (-20 degrees celsius) and was several hours on the ground as he couldnt get up. Due to these conditions he got a lung infection (just half year ago they had removed one lung due to cancer) and died from it in his weakened condition.
    Few months later she dreamed about him again and in her dream he smiled at her, the very next day I was born and she tells me that I have several behavioral traits from him…

    Reply
    • Nicki Chen

      What a terrible accident! I can’t imagine lying on the cold ground for several hours, waiting for someone to come by.

      My dad and my mother-in-law died within days of each other. A few days later, my sister had a son and sister-in-law had a daughter.

      Reply
  3. Hari Qhuang

    Nicki, I was expecting to read about you encountering a ghost or something like that when I read the title! 😀 L-O-L!
    You just gave me some ideas for a future post. I think I will write some ghost stories ala Binjai. 😀

    Reply
    • Nicki Chen

      Yes, I hope you’ll write some ghost stories. I’d love to read them.

      Reply
  4. Linda

    What a nice story. Thank you for sharing.

    Reply
  5. suzicate

    This is a lovely story. On a spiritual level we are all connected, especially so with those we love. I think we feel things and know them without a word being said. I’m glad you got to spend some time with your dad. I will never regret the five weeks I spent with mine after his diagnosis and up to his death.

    Reply
    • Nicki Chen

      Thank you, Suzicate. I didn’t realize how closely connected to my dad I was until this happened. In a way, it was a gift to be able to share his suffering.

      Reply
  6. gracebuchele

    This gave me goosebumps.
    As a kid, I never had any problems with anxiety attacks – they started all of a sudden right before I got to college.

    I remember the first time it hit, I ran out of class and called my parents, afraid of the worst. They said everything was fine.
    Since then, for the past 7 years, I get attacks once or twice a month. I have no idea why. I keep expecting something to happen, some sort of pattern, but it never does.

    I’m glad you were able to spend time with your dad before he passed on, though. Even if you didn’t get to see him in the end.

    Reply
    • Nicki Chen

      I hope your anxiety attacks stop before long, Grace. You’ll probably find some more ordinary cause for them than I had. Anyway, I hope they’ll just fade away. But aren’t they strange?! We always think we have to be scared of some actual thing to feel that way. To feel frightened out of the blue is very strange. Best of luck.

      Reply
  7. nrhatch

    Nicki ~ wonderful tale, well told. You are a terrific story teller ~ including enough detail without being heavy handed.

    Glad that you had a chance to spend some time with your dad after his diagnosis.

    Reply
    • Nicki Chen

      Thank you, Nancy. You’re right, I’m glad I was able to spend that time with my dad.

      Reply
  8. evelyneholingue

    This post gave me the shivers. I have not experienced such moments, although I trust my intuition when it comes with bad feelings about going somewhere or doing something. If I don’t feel like it, I pay attention. Don’t know if this qualifies as ghost moments but certainly as unexplained. Great post as always.

    Reply
    • Nicki Chen

      I don’t think of myself as very intuitive, but over the years I’ve learned to pay more attention to the way I feel about something. I used to think every choice had to be made based on logic. But logic isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Intuition serves us by gathering from perceptions and feelings we aren’t even unaware of having.

      Reply
  9. victor

    There are numerous stories that don’t fit “classical”/”Newtonian” physics.

    Within “quantum” physics/mechanics, scientists have come to learn about “entanglements”, when two elements become entangled, actions on one affect the other, regardless of distance – Einstein referred to this as “spooky”

    During WW II, with no (normal) communications, my grandmother told my uncle to look for my father, she knew something had happened. My uncle found him – in the hospital.

    A few years back, at a party, one lady told the story of knowing something had happened to her daughter – proved correct

    And, a retired, career naval officer told me – in the middle of the night, his wife was thrown from her bed. Turned out, at about the same time, on his ship, a large wave threw him against a wall.

    “Entanglements”???

    Reply
    • Nicki Chen

      It’s interesting that all the stories you tell involve people with close ties to each other. These are the kinds of stories I also have heard.

      My late husband was a teenager living in Japan when the grandmother he had been very close to died in Taiwan. No one knew she was sick. In the middle of the night he woke up and told his mother, “Grandmother died.” “No, she’s fine,” his mother said. “Go back to bed.” The next morning they received a telegram confirming that his grandmother had indeed died the night before.

      This is just one of several similar stories I’ve heard.

      Reply
  10. foreignsanctuary

    I have never experienced anything of that nature long term but there was this one time that I will never forget. It was a regular weekday morning. I was getting ready for work but my mind just kept wandering to my husband who was making the 2 1/2 hour drive to Taipei for a business meeting. I just couldn’t shake this ‘feeling.’ So, I picked up the phone and called him. He answered in a panic. He had nearly feel asleep at the wheel but the sound of the phone woke him up. I am not sure why I had that feeling to call him that day but I believe that something made me put up the phone that morning. I advised him to pull off at the nearest rest area and take a nap. He did and arrived back from Taipei safe and sound that evening. We still mention it from time to time, even to this day.

    Reply
    • Nicki Chen

      Your story reminds me of something I heard from a woman from my hometown. Her husband was a logger. One day while she was at home, his pickup went off the road on a logging road up in the mountains. You’re probably familiar with the rough, lonely roads loggers build and use. No one knew he was missing or that he was unconscious somewhere down a steep hill. Somehow, though, she had seen the accident–in a vision or something. She enlisted some relatives to take her up in the mountains, and, even though there were no skid marks and the pickup couldn’t be seen from the road, she was able to identify the spot. The men were skeptical, but they climbed down the hill and found him.

      Reply
  11. katecrimmins

    I don’t have a ghost story but my mother had asthma for about 12 years before she died. There was usually a hospital trip or two every year as they didn’t control it as well as they do today. Although she never needed an ambulance for these trips I started to have sobbing spells whenever I heard ambulance sirens. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t for her. Just the sound would put me in a panic. On her last trip to the hospital, she needed an ambulance. She died that evening. I never experienced the crying spells for sirens again.

    Reply
    • Nicki Chen

      Wow! How can one explain something like that? It must have something to do with the close tie between you and your mother.

      Reply
  12. Mindy

    Nice story Nicki. I have had ghost experiences and am a true believer in some instances – not all. People can get carried away with superstition, but then there are those times, like yours, that defy the gravity of explanation. .

    Reply
    • Nicki Chen

      I think writers tend to keep an open mind. In fact, it’s our job to observe and report. And since there’s so much about life we don’t understand, we shouldn’t close ourselves off to possibilities–without getting carried away, of course.

      Reply

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