2. Here is where the attachment we once knew as body begins to disappear, an erasure of time and friction. A palimpsest in waiting. You thought it was there, and then it evaporated. Or it wasn’t there, but instead, pain. Every night I came across another description: holloway, shul. It was an excavation whose imprint held its own meaning or weight. Sometimes the emptiness is a footprint: ‘a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by.’ Sometimes it is a pathway: ‘an impression in the ground left by the regular tread of feet.’ And sometimes: ‘the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood.’

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005).

3. This can apply to many things, but let us start here, the literal houses left behind in every generation of my family—first house, village house, narrow walk-up house, house near the sea, and so on. Where once a dwelling was meant to shelter the entire family, a wholeness of appendages, now it was scattered by chance and by force, it was abandoned and taken, it was forgotten or barely known. What does this do to the body and the knowledge it carries—sense of where it has been, how it moves through the world, its feeling of location? The answer is also the language with which it articulates itself: it holds a shadow space that is and is not. It learns a hollow as home, as body. A confession: at first I read scarred as sacred.

4. Instead, the dust and particles we may not otherwise notice: It was into my adult years when I realized that my mother had older brothers. Living ones, still across the ocean. I had never seen them or heard them mentioned, even when my family lived on that side of the globe. And yet I was not wholly surprised because how could I have known to name a ghost, an empty space, if it had always been part of the atmosphere? All of the families around us were like this. We accepted the shadows we found ourselves in, an author wrote. One of the brothers would eventually come to the U.S. and work in a toothpaste factory for less than minimum wage. He can write beautiful essays in English but cannot speak it, my mother would finally say. Later on he would stop speaking to her because once upon a time one was left behind a border and one was not. Every year my mother mails him money and vitamins.

Tanizaki Junichiro, “In Praise of Shadows” (1933).

6. I map the ghosts; the ghosts map me. For I have written about the strange ambiguous homesickness I have known in the hollow cavity of my stomach every now and then since childhood. It comes out of nowhere and travels like an unwanted tingle through my nerves. I said untethered, abstract and metaphysical. I said, for although as a child I was often homesick—at school, at the neighbor’s house, anywhere unfamiliar or foreign—I also at times felt an inexplicable longing while inside my own house.

Jennifer S. Cheng, House A (2016).

15. This, then, the small things we capture by accident, like a mislaid dust-print or the cut-out of an old shadow. It travels throughout our bloodstreams, our organs, our muscles and joints, and becomes large though silent that way. But when did I finally know that my father was one day reunited with his father and his siblings, after he had left another home and began his own family? How much did I know and not know when we all lived on the same side of the world, eating our meals together amidst the interaction of utensils, bowls, plates, our many-languaged mouths? In lieu of memory, the body transmits circulations of air by which we learn to move and breathe. When I was twelve, my parents, not wanting to risk history repeating itself, traveled ahead to the U.S. to look for a home for our family. I do not remember for how long I felt their absence, but the day they returned was the first time I learned one could cry not from sadness or physical pain but a shattering exhale that tells the body it has been holding its breath.

16. Someone said home and body and history, and that someone was me. Freud described the sensation of familiarity tiding toward unfamiliarity and vice versa; home and un-home. This, too, can apply to many strands of the immigrant body, threaded and intersected toward absented dimensions. If home is a body, and a body is a home, then what does it mean: [an uncanny place]; [in the dismal night hours]; [ghastly; (of a house) haunted]. Or later: A familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it.

Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919).

17. All I can give are scant gestures, wholly inadequate. How much of history can we never really know except in this way? Yet here: My brother, sister, and I grew up watching movies on our television with my parents. By movies, I mean, in our language and sometimes a dialect that required translation. Our eyes on a world, and my father, ever our protector, narrating its happenings in Mandarin like a transcriber. One that didn’t require translation that we watched over and over: [活著] To Live. In it, bodies grow thin like skeletons, bodies are beaten, bodies pile. Our eyes on the screen, our lungs yet letting in air. From a body next to me inside the room: That was my childhood—, a voice made of wooden dolls and landscape paintings and miniature ships. Syllables loiter in the air, they wrap around you or are absorbed through the skin, and then after that: silence, again—

Zhang Yi-Mou, 活著 To Live, film (1994).

20. Here is a circle, a node, at this juncture. Here is another one. What does this have to do with poetics? I will say it again: indentations, hollows, marks, scars. They become containers—for what? Debris of dust, light, broken pieces of the cosmos. An obsession I cannot let go of: the absences and excavations we cannot name, yet carry in the recesses of our bodies. A map we breathe in and out a thousand times as we make into the wayward of the world. In Ghostly Matters, the sociologist says a way of knowing and also, therefore, a way of saying.

Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters (1997).
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005).