Water Ghosts by Shawna Yang Ryan

With Ghost Month starting this week, this is the perfect time to review Water Ghosts. This book was originally published under the title Locke 1928, and until I neared the end of the book, I would have said Locke 1928 was a better title than Water Ghosts. This is one of those novels in which the town becomes a kind of character, similar to Empire Falls by Richard Russo. And indeed, author Ryan paints the town with sensory-rich detail. After reading this book, I enjoyed visiting the tiny delta hamlet of Locke, CA, still extant with Chinese gentlemen presiding over all. I walked the wooden sidewalks and peeked in narrow storefronts, all the while envisioning the characters of Water Ghosts.

In creating Water Ghosts, the author peoples this unique location with quirky characters such as the psychic brothel owner who employs white prostitutes for Chinese men. Through such characters, Ryan explores the tug of old world traditions against new world desires. First wives in China feel abandoned, losing face. Their husbands in Locke forge new lives and turn away from the old ways. Everyone suffers. Unrequited love and unfulfilled dreams abound.

Much of the novel follows Richard whose life intertwines with those of three women: Ming Wai, his China wife who becomes a water ghost; Poppy See, the psychic madam; and Chloe Howell, Richard’s lover and prostitute barely out of her teens who, in turn, loves the preacher’s daughter. If it sounds complex, it is, and the writing is further complicated by multiple viewpoint characters and confusing time shifts. Actually, I began this novel in an audio format, which I don’t recommend. There was just no way I could change lanes, merge into traffic, and make any sense of the narrative. As a printed book it works much better though it tends to drag in the middle. The story-telling is so interior, so thought-rich that not a lot happens for a very long time. If the author had eliminated just one narrator (I vote for Chloe), the novel would have benefited.

Yet, that said, the ending coalesces with a magnificently rich weaving of myth into story. The repeating water motif is both symbolic and literal and adds wave upon wave of thematic significance. The prose is beautiful and lyrical as in this sample of Richard musing about one of the water ghosts: “The sadness of Tuesday’s song still lingers, drawing up curiosity about what luck or misfortune brought Ming Wai here…When wisps of the song drift through his head, he feels like he’s crouched in the woods without the will to scream, watching a retreating trail of lanterns bob over hills and disappear into valleys” (215).

If you’re in the mood to explore folklore such as The Hungry Ghost Month and Dragon Boat races (a celebration which continues in California to this day), to delve into the ways in which centuries-old Chinese tradition is braided into 20^th century western reality, or to mine the history of Chinese American levee workers, you would do no better than to read Water Ghosts.