The Ghost Who Sat Beneath the Lilac Tree / 痴鬼望妻

A dead husband, a young widow, a remarriage, and the woman who could see what no one else could

From Notes from the Thatched Study (阅微草堂笔记), Volume IV — Luanyang Xiaoxia Lu IV (滦阳消夏录四)

By Ji Yun (纪昀, 1724–1805) · Translated with annotations

Hook. There was a woman in the Cao family — the household of Ji Yun's maternal grandmother — who could see ghosts. Not the dramatic kind. Not the kind that screams or throws objects or writes messages in blood. She was the quiet kind. She saw them the way other people saw chairs: always there, just in the periphery, and if you asked her, she could tell you which ones were harmless and which ones were about to do something terrible. One day she was called to keep a young widow company. The widow's husband had been dead a hundred days. The woman-seer walked into the courtyard and found a ghost sitting under a lilac tree. He was not menacing anyone. He was not trying to possess the widow or drag her into the underworld. He was just watching her. And weeping. And following her wherever she went. The woman-seer later told Ji Yun's mother what she had seen. Years later Ji Yun would write it down — and then add the only line in all eight volumes of Yuewei that sounds less like a judge and more like a man who has been quietly grieving.

The Story

The woman who could see ghosts is introduced in one of the most understated openings in all of Yuewei.^{[1]Ji Yun introduces the woman-seer as xiān tài fū rén wài jiā Cáo shì, yǒu ǎo néng shì guǐ — "in the Cao family of my late honored mother's natal home, there was an old woman who could see ghosts." The story is therefore mediated through three layers: the old woman-seer saw it, Ji Yun's mother heard it from the seer, and Ji Yun heard it from his mother. This triple mediation is typical of Yuewei and is one of the things that gives the collection its distinctive texture — every story arrives at the reader as something that has already been told, retold, and thought about.} Ji Yun does not give her a name. He calls her only aǎo (媪) — an old woman, a Granny Cao, from his maternal grandmother's household. She had this ability the way some people have perfect pitch: matter-of-factly, without ceremony, and with the kind of weary expertise that comes from decades of being the only person at a dinner party who can see the thing standing in the corner.

One day the old woman-seer was visiting the Cao family residence while Ji Yun's maternal grandmother was staying there. They were talking, as women of a certain age do, about míng shì (冥事) — matters of the underworld. The old woman-seer described a ghost she had recently encountered. And then she told the story in a way that made Ji Yun's mother — a woman who, by all accounts in these notebooks, was not easily moved — stop whatever she was doing and listen.

The ghost, said the old woman-seer, had lived in a certain village. He had come from a family that was, in the careful phrasing of Qing estate records, xiǎo kāng (小康) — comfortable. Not rich. Not poor. The kind of household that had enough to be respectable and not enough to be safe. He had died at twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Young, but not tragically young in the way that would have made this story notable to an eighteenth-century reader. What made it notable was what happened after.

A hundred days after his death — bǎi rì (百日), the traditional mourning threshold, the day on which the family would normally begin the final stages of grief-ritual and the living would, in theory, start to return to their ordinary lives — the ghost's widow asked the old woman-seer to come and keep her company.^{[2]Fù yāo wǒ xiāng bàn (妇邀我相伴) — "the widow invited me to keep her company." The phrasing is ordinary and domestic. In the Qing context, a recently widowed woman would commonly invite a female companion — a relative, a neighbor, a woman-seer — to stay with her during the vulnerable period after the bǎi rì mourning threshold. The old woman-seer was, in this sense, doing what any good neighbor would do. She just happened to see more than most neighbors.}

What the old woman-seer found when she arrived was this:

The ghost was sitting in the courtyard, under a lilac tree (dīngxiāng shù 丁香树). He had been sitting there for some time. He was not doing anything. He was not pacing. He was not trying to enter the house. He was simply seated beneath the tree, in the spot where he had, in life, sat many times.

The old woman-seer — who could see him, but whom he could not see, because ghosts, in Ji Yun's cosmology, exist in a different register of qì than the living, and the yáng qì of a living body bī shuò (逼烁) — burns and blazes — against them like sunlight against a shadow — could only watch.

She watched as the widow wept inside the house. The ghost, sitting under the tree, heard the sound. He could not go near — the living body of his own wife was too bright, too hot, too real for him to approach — but he tilted his head sideways and listened through the window. His face, said the old woman-seer, was qī cǎn zhī sè kě jū (凄惨之色可掬) — so wretched, so piteous, that you could have cupped it in your hands.^{[3]Kě jū (可掬) — "could be cupped" — is a phrase usually reserved for things like xiào róng kě jū (a smile you could cup in your hands) or qíng yì kě jū (affection you could hold). Ji Yun applies it to qī cǎn — wretchedness, desolation. The effect is slightly unsettling: the ghost's grief is so vivid that it has become something you could hold.}

She watched as the child cried. The ghost heard the child and turned toward the sound.

She watched as the widow's brother-in-law — xiōng sǎo (兄嫂), the elder brother and his wife — quarreled with the widow inside the house. The ghost heard the voices raised against her, and his face contorted.

He could not enter. He could not speak. He could not do anything. He could only listen through the window of a house he had once owned, to the sounds of the life he had left behind, and look qī cǎn — wretched, pitiable, the word Ji Yun uses twice in three sentences — and unable to reach anyone.

Then the matchmakers came.

The ghost saw them enter the widow's room and his composure broke. He è rán jīng qǐ (愕然惊起) — started up in shock. He stood. He looked left and right. He stretched his hands out, as if to block the door, as if he could physically stop two people from having a conversation. He could not. The matchmakers, of course, did not see him.

The marriage negotiation failed — yì bù chéng (议不成). The ghost's face relaxed. A slight brightness returned to it. Shāo yǒu xǐ sè — a small trace of joy.

Then the matchmakers came again.

This time they went back and forth between the elder brother's household and the widow's room. The ghost ran after them — bēn zǒu suí zhī (奔走随之). Huáng huáng rú yǒu shī (皇皇如有失) — in a panic, like a person who has lost something and cannot remember what it is.

On the day the bride-price was delivered, the ghost sat back down under the lilac tree. His eyes were fixed directly on the widow's room. Lèi juān juān rú yǔ (泪涔涔如雨) — tears streaming down his face like rain. The old woman-seer, who was standing somewhere in the courtyard where the living could not see her either, said to herself — or perhaps said aloud to no one: chī guǐ hé bì rú shì — you foolish ghost, why must you be like this?

The ghost did not hear her.

From that day on, whenever the widow left the house, the ghost followed her. Zhé suí qí hòu (辄随其后). His attachment deepened — juàn liàn zhī yì gèng dǔ (眷恋之意更笃). The word dǔ (笃) is a heavy word in classical Chinese. It means loyal, devoted, sincere. It is the same word used for a student devoted to study, a minister devoted to his prince, a wife devoted to her husband. Ji Yun uses it here for a ghost devoted to a woman who is no longer his.

The night before the wedding — jià qián yī xī (嫁前一夕) — the widow was packing her dowry. Zhěng shù lián jù (整束奁具). She was folding clothes, wrapping porcelain, arranging the small possessions that would go with her to a new house. The ghost stood outside. He leaned against a pillar. He wept. He put his head down as if in thought. When he heard her cough inside the room, he pressed his eye to the crack in the door and looked in. He did this all night — yíng yíng zhě chè yè (营营者彻夜). The word yíng yíng (营营) is usually used for the buzzing of insects. Ji Yun uses it for a ghost who cannot stop hovering.

The groom arrived. He walked into the house holding a lamp. The ghost stood against the wall to let him pass. Then he followed.

At the groom's house, the gate spirits — mén wèi (门尉) — blocked him. In Qing folk cosmology, every household had spiritual functionaries at the door, the same way it had physical door-bolts. The ghost of a man who was not of that household had no business being there. The ghost bowed his head. He jī sǎng āi qǐ (稽颡哀乞) — kowtowed and begged. The gate spirits let him in.

He hid in a corner of the wall and watched the wedding ceremony. He stood there, the old woman-seer said, níng lì rú zuì zhuàng (凝立如醉状) — frozen, as if drunk. As if the sight of another man marrying his wife had put him into a trance from which he could not wake.

When the bride went into the room, she passed near a window. The ghost saw her through it. His expression was the same as it had been when she was packing her dowry.

The lamps were put out. The couple went to bed. The ghost did not leave.

He was driven out, eventually, by the zhōng diān shén (中癫神) — a household deity, perhaps a spirit of the bedchamber or a guardian against malevolent presences. Ji Yun does not name this deity in detail. He only says the ghost was láng bèi (狼狈) — harried,狼狈, the word for a creature caught between two states and belonging to neither — driven out into the night.

The old woman-seer then asked the widow to come home with her to check on the child. And the ghost — of course — followed them back.

Back in the dead man's own house, the ghost went directly into the room. He looked at every place the widow had sat. Every place she had slept. He went from spot to spot, the old woman-seer said, yī yī shì dào (一一视到) — examining each one in turn, as if he were trying to memorize them for a country he was about to be exiled from forever.

Then the child cried for its mother.

The ghost ran to the child. He stood around the boy — or girl, Ji Yun does not specify the child's sex — and he put his hands together. Yǐ liǎng shǒu xiāng wò (以两手相握). He clasped his hands the way a person does when they are praying, or when they are holding something invisible, or when they do not know what to do with their hands and the grief is too large for any gesture. He looked at the child, said the old woman-seer, zuò wú kě nài hé zhuàng (作无可奈何状) — in the posture of someone who has absolutely no power to change anything.

Then the sister-in-law came out and slapped the child.

The ghost stamped his feet. He clutched his chest. He stood at a distance and yáo zuò qiè chǐ zhuàng (遥作切齿状) — gnashed his teeth in fury. He could not touch the woman who had struck his child. He could not protect the child. He could not do anything. He could only stand at a distance and gnash his teeth at a sister-in-law who would never know he existed.

The old woman-seer could not bear to watch anymore. She went home.

The Aftermath

The old woman-seer later told Ji Yun's mother — xiān tài fū rén (先太夫人), "the late honored lady," as Ji Yun always refers to her after her death — what she had seen. Ji Yun's mother told Ji Yun.

The widow, when she was told that a ghost had been sitting under her lilac tree for a hundred days, weeping and following her every move, niè chǐ zì huǐ (啮齿自悔) — bit her lip and reproached herself.

And then Ji Yun reports, almost as a footnote, that in the same village, there was a young widow whose family was discussing remarriage for her. When she heard the story of the ghost under the lilac tree, she swore on her own death that she would never remarry. Wǒ bù rěn shǐ wáng zhě zuò shì zhuàng — I cannot bear the thought of making the dead one look like that.

And then Ji Yun closes the tale with the only passage in all of Yuewei that reads less like a legal brief from the underworld and more like a man sitting alone at a desk, thinking about something he cannot solve:

Alas. The gentleman, in loyalty, does not fail another person — whether the other is alive or dead. The petty person fails everyone, equally, whether the other is alive or dead. The ordinary feeling is: while the person is alive, the feeling is there. When the person dies, the feeling dies too. If one could only hold in mind, even for a moment, the way the dead one looks — then one would never fail to be moved.

The Confucians, seeing the flattery and superstition of popular religion, have rushed to proclaim the doctrine that there are no ghosts. In doing so, they have lost the deeper intention of the ancient kings, who established ritual to guide the people through the sacred. They have made the common man and common woman feel bold and without any restraint at all. They would do better to listen to the village granny's story — which moves in people a feeling for life and death that no philosophy has ever matched.

Translator's Reflection

There is a reason this story sits in Volume IV of Yuewei, and not in Volume IX where Ji Yun puts his most explicit moral lessons, and not in Volume XVIII where he puts his most entertaining supernatural anecdotes. It sits where it sits because it is doing something that Ji Yun does not do very often, and when he does it, he does it very carefully. He is not collecting evidence for the existence of ghosts. He is not making a doctrinal argument about the afterlife. He is not warning anyone about anything.

He is telling you that a man loved his wife so much that he sat under a tree for a hundred days after he died and watched her pack her dowry.

The word Ji Yun uses for the ghost is chī guǐ (痴鬼) — foolish ghost, obsessed ghost, ghost who cannot let go. The word chī (痴) in Buddhist and literary Chinese is the same word used for the second of the Three Poisons — 痴, sometimes translated as delusion or ignorance — the mental state of not seeing reality clearly. But it is also the word used for a person who loves someone so much that they cannot stop loving them even when loving them is irrational, or impossible, or when the person they love has already moved on. Chī qíng (痴情) — obsessed love, devoted love, love that refuses to be rational — is one of the most common phrases in all of Chinese fiction. It is the love that kills you and that you would die for anyway.

The old woman-seer calls him a foolish ghost. But she also says — and Ji Yun makes sure we hear this — rán qíng zhuàng kě lián, yì shǐ rén xīn pí qī dòng (然情状可怜，亦使人心脾凄动): his situation is pitiable, and it moves a person's heart and spleen to tenderness. The spleen, in Chinese medicine, is the organ of worry and pensiveness. The ghost is not frightening her. He is making her spleen ache.

The most extraordinary passage is the one in which the ghost follows the widow to the groom's house and the gate spirits stop him. In most Chinese ghost stories, gate spirits are terrifying. They are divine functionaries with real authority. A ghost who violates a household's gate protocols is, in principle, subject to punishment. But this ghost does not argue. He does not try to talk his way past them. He kowtows. He begs. And the gate spirits — who, in Ji Yun's universe, are not stupid and are not sentimental — let him in.

Why do they let him in? Ji Yun does not say. But the implication, I think, is that the gate spirits understood something that the Confucian philosophers who deny the existence of ghosts have forgotten: that there are forms of attachment that are not rational, are not useful, are not even healthy, but that are nonetheless sacred — and that the universe, in its deeper protocols, makes room for them.

The closing passage — in which Ji Yun says that a village granny's story can move people more deeply than all the philosophy in the world — is not, I think, an argument against rationalism. Ji Yun was a rationalist. He was the chief editor of the Siku Quanshu, the largest bibliography in Chinese history. He spent his professional life organizing knowledge. What he is doing here is something more precise. He is saying that there is one thing that a village granny can do that no philosopher can do, and that one thing is make you feel, in your spleen, the weight of a dead man watching the woman he loved pack her dowry. Philosophy can explain ghosts. Philosophy can explain grief. Philosophy can explain why the widow remarried and why the sister-in-law slapped the child and why the gate spirits let him in. But none of that explaining, says Ji Yun, will move you the way the old woman-seer's story moves you. And if you have lost the ability to be moved, then no amount of explaining will give it back.

The story is, in the end, about one thing: What does a ghost do when the person he loves is still alive? He sits under a lilac tree. He watches through a window. He follows. He weeps. He clasps his hands around a child he can no longer hold. He gnashes his teeth at a sister-in-law who will never know he exists. And then, eventually, a household deity drives him away, and he goes back to the room where his wife used to sleep, and looks at each spot where she sat, one by one, as if memorizing a country that is about to disappear.

Ji Yun wrote this down in the 1790s. The old woman-seer told the story decades earlier. The ghost sat under the tree a hundred years before that. And here you are, reading it, in a language the ghost never heard, in a century the ghost could not have imagined. He is still under the lilac tree. He is still watching. And if the old woman-seer was right — and Ji Yun thought she was — then he will be there as long as there are people willing to be moved by the sight of a dead man who cannot let go.

Related Tales

• The Bandit Whose Father Came Back From the Dead to Warn Him — another Yuewei tale in which a ghost returns to the world of the living, but with a message rather than a vigil
• The Ghost Who Kept Her Lover Alive — a ghost's love expressed through action rather than observation
• The Scholar Whose Love Brought a Flower Back From the Dead — Liaozhai tale of love that crosses the boundary of death
• The Son Who Cut Off His Own Head for Revenge — a very different kind of ghost who refuses to rest