#maxine hong kingston

I found this passage in V.R. Burkhardt’s CHINESE CREEDS & CUSTOMS, published in 1953. “A ghostly manifestation peculiar to the Chinese is a high wall, which erects itself round the traveler at night, and follows his movements, never letting him escape. The defense against the Kuei Tang Ch'iang (鬼揣牆), or Wall-building ghost, is to squat down, and look steadily in front. Having exercised the power of the human eye, the face must be covered with the hands. When they are removed it will be found that the obstruction has disappeared.”

In Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Brave Orchid says,

“I walked from the Gobi Desert to this room in the To Keung School. That took another two years, outwitting Wall Ghosts en route. (The way to do that is to go straight ahead; do not play their side-to-side games. In confusion they will instantly revert to their real state–weak and sad humanity. No matter what, don’t commit suicide, or you will have to trade places with the Wall Ghost.)”

Hong Kingston’s version presents these as chang gui (償鬼), compensation ghosts, but Burkhardt did not. Neither of them is wrong; neither is right; this is the nature of folkloristics; the variations could be regional, they could diverge from teller to teller.

But Burkhardt also didn’t understand the nature of folklore; he says this figure is “peculiar to the Chinese,” but there’s actually a straightforward Japanese analogue, the Nurikabe (ぬりかべ). When nations are connected by commerce, for over a thousand years, folklore travels as freely as merchandise.

At the same time, a nation’s borders don’t define a universal folklore within the country. A place like China is diverse, with dozens upon dozens of ethnic minorities telling their own tales, and secluded regions where people have likely never heard most of the tales that get misnomered as “Chinese folklore.”

In Mandarin, 鬼揣牆 would be pronounced Gui Chuai Qiang, though a more typical linguistic formation would read, 揣牆鬼, Chuai Qiang Gui.