M. H. Boroson

I translated this map of Spirited Away's locations from this blog. The blogger used the phases of the moon to determine north, south, east, and west.

http://ameblo.jp/iiiiiland7iiiiiland/entry-11985177692.html

Our history never leaves us. The issues in this specific case are complicated because the owners are Chinese American and the artist's a Chinese Beijinger; they very well might be trying to reclaim problematic images and histories.

The club's about three blocks away from a statue of Lin Zexu, the Qing Dynasty official who tried to help his country by cracking down on opium smugglers, which started the Opium Wars. Can you imagine that? Britain and its allies made war on a sovereign state, to make sure that British drug dealers were free to earn a dishonest buck off the suffering of addicts. The devastation, subjugation, and suffering caused by the British East India Company is almost impossible to conceive.

And yet it became a smear, a stereotype. Although China was literally forced at gunpoint to stop fighting opium addiction, the American papers never tired of maligning Chinese people for opium usage.

It's on IM Global TV's website, so I guess I can talk about it now?

An adventure story set in late-19th-century San Francisco, [The Girl with Ghost Eyes] centers on a young immigrant woman with the ability to see and interact with the spirit world. Breaking the barriers set for women and immigrants, she contends with ghosts, gangsters, skeletons, and soul-stealers to protect her family and the larger community.

Writer/EP: Matt Greenberg

EP:  Virgin Produced

IM Global Television is owned by Tang Media Partners. "Based in Los Angeles and Shanghai, [Tang Media Partners] is active in the development, financing, production and distribution of entertainment content focused on the intersection between China and Hollywood." TMP has given IM Global Television a $100,000,000 budget to develop new television shows.

The person running IM Global Television is Mark Stern, who used to be the president of Syfy. Stern shepherded the development of Battlestar Galactica and Warehouse 13, among many others. IM Global TV has a number of series under way, including an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle for FX.

To adapt The Girl with Ghost Eyes as a tv pilot, IM Global has hired Matt Greenberg, known for his adaptation of Stephen King's 1408. The Girl with Ghost Eyes features primarily Chinese American characters.

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,

This thousand-year-old painting from Dunhuang uncannily depicts a 21st-century author trying to write, while a thousand demons stir up a ruckus and unhelpfully provide an endless stream of distractions.

This is the demon called OHSHITDONALDTRUMPISPRESIDENT. Permanently hunched over, its only action, endlessly repeated, is to blast tripartite flames from its ass. Note its location in the painting, just below the Buddha.

This is the demon called, STOPWHATYOU'REDOINGANDSAVETHEWORLD. Wielding its battle-axe, and barely aware that a human being is flattened to its face, it raises one hand in impassioned invective that will change no one's mind... but shouldn't you be doing the same thing? SHOULDN'T YOU? Located at the center of the lower-right quadrant of the painting. 

This is the demon TIMETOCOOKDINNER. It balances a platter of flames atop its ridged, barracuda-shaped head. Located center-left of the upper-left quadrant.

This is the demon called, YOU'RENEGLECTINGYOURHOUSEHOLDDUTIES. At the very top, just to the right. 

This is the demon called, OMGIJUSTHADANAMAZINGIDEAFORACOMPLETELYDIFFERENTNOVEL! All over its skin, new demons are erupting. It has seven heads. It opens its mouth to speak, but a weasel-demon shoots out. Located toward the top of the lower-right quadrant. 

These are the demons SELF-DOUBT and UNCERTAINTY. Self-doubt has three snake-heads, each with a single eye; they argue with each other all the time, while the little demon with the bow-and-arrow balances on top of the three bobbing reptile heads. If only he could remain steady, he could aim his arrow and hit the target. If only... Upper left quadrant.

This is the demon LOOKATMEIHAVEAFLAMETHROWER! You're trying to finish your scene but wait, wouldn't it be better if it had a demon with a flamethrower, and three live snakes writhing on its scalp? Dammit, why didn’t you think of that sooner? Toward the bottom of the upper right quadrant.

These demons are the YOURFIRSTBOOKWASBETTER BRIGADE. A dragon, a tiger, a bull, and a panther come out one by one and laugh at you. Along the bottom of the lower right quadrant.

There’s an expression, 把你这猢狲剥皮锉骨，将神魂贬在九幽之处 -- "chop up your bones and banish your soul to the Ninth Hell."   According to many descriptions of Diyu (地獄), the punitive form of afterlife in many Chinese and Chinese diasporic Buddhist cultures, this is what happens to souls in the ninth level. It's a punishment for spreading gossip. 

“Ideas come to those who work hard on them. As for Matthew Boroson, he reads a lot. He reads all sorts of obscure books on Chinese mythology, culture and history and no few biographies. Hundreds of books, tens of thousands of pages. He talks to people about their folklore and mythology, religion and belief systems. All the stories, all the time. Sometimes he even watches Run Run Shaw movies. “Write what you know” is easy advice to bandy about. But what do you know? No, really. What do you know that is interesting, that you are passionate about, that you are an expert about? Boroson wrote this crazy story about a young Chinese exorcist in San Francisco’s Chinatown; he wrote what he knew. His ideas came from a little bit of inspiration. His passion drove him through enough research for a couple of masters degrees. No muses that need bribery with chocolate. Probably a few dreams induced by living in dusty books. No tragedy or trauma meant to create sympathy. Hard work. The result is actually a pretty great book. The Girl with Ghost Eyes reads easily. The stakes are clear in the first few pages and keep escalating all the way. The lead character (Xian Li-Lin) is heroic not because she is imbued with super powers but because she is willing to risk everything. The story even has important existential dimensions... This is the result of work and it comes with my hearty recommendation.”

from http://anewdomain.net/where-does-inspiration-come-from-the-girl-with-ghost-eyes-review/

(An essay by Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong, written around 1943 or 44)

Accepting an invitation from the University of Chicago, I went there to work on my book “Earthbound China.” After I arrived, a secretary showed me to room 502 on the fifth floor of the Social Sciences Building and asked politely if it would do for an office. When I noticed the name “Robert Park” in the brass card-holder on the door, the alert secretary hurried to say, “I was waiting until you decided before putting your name up.”

“Don’t change the name. I like that one,” I told her. But she could hardly have understood why.

Robert Park had been my teacher. He came to Yenching University [in Peking in 1932] when I was an undergraduate there. Though I was just an ignorant student, I absolutely worshipped him—except for the old man’s perverse insistence on teach­ing at 7 a.m. and never missing a class or even coming late, which meant I had to skip breakfast to get there on time. For better or worse, his course determined the direc­tion my life has taken in the ten-odd years since, and to him should go the credit or the blame. The founding father of the Chicago school of sociology, he maintained that sociology should take as its subject understanding human nature. Perhaps I liked him because he wanted me to read novels and not sociology textbooks. More than reading novels, he urged going and personally experiencing different kinds of life. Ten years later I still follow this teaching. On this trip to the United States, I had hoped to go hear his classes again. But I was busy with other things, and it was half a year before I got to Chicago, and the old professor had already gone south to escape the Chicago cold. And so it happened that I was put in his office.

This arrangement, whether accidental or not, was full of meaning for me. I had been an unremarkable student in Professor Park’s class, a matter for some regret, and ten years later, though still without achievements, I remained eager for a word of praise from the teacher. I was secretly happy that, sitting in the chair he had used, I would surely absorb something of his spirit, and hoped to write a book that would compensate for my earlier failure to be worthy of the pains he had taken in rising so early all those mornings to teach us. There is here a sort of historical causal connection: because of a past memory the present takes on a significance greater than anything in the current situation. My strong desire to have the name left on the door arose out of a need for concrete, living, moving history. I felt that if the nameplate, the old books lining the walls, even the air in the room were not disturbed, then, surrounded by this lingering past, perhaps in a few months I would see a draft of “Earthbound China” on the table. But if these were disturbed, all might be lost.

This, in fact, is the “tradition” of which I have written in an earlier article. Tradi­tion need not be an obstacle to innovation. True, it has its bad side. When old peo­ple, with the various privileges and respect that have been accorded them in the past, prevent any change in the status quo, that is a bad aspect of tradition. But it is also undeniable that everything new is born out of that which is old. These ties of kinship should not be obliterated, and recognizing them gives to the connection between old and new the significance of succession and continuity. If we can develop this kind of feeling for history, I believe the world and mankind will be richer. When we go on a trip into the country, we can enjoy the scenery merely as a present phe­nomenon; if we have left there earlier memories worth recalling, this can bring on a pleasant nostalgia; and if this is a historical site, our feelings arc further enriched because of what others did there. People do not live only in the here and now; life is not just a string of moments. We need history, for it is a wellspring of inspiration. When we take tradition in this way, that is another aspect of it.

Sometimes I think the world is very strange. We in the Orient accept tradition, but what we seize on is its bad side. The West seems to want to disregard it, with the result that the good side is lost too.

Of course, it is not entirely true that Westerners purposely disregard tradition. For the most part, they all know much more about the history of their own coun­try than I do. Every child who goes to New York has to go gaze at the huge Statue of Liberty and then on the way back visit the church that George Washington fre­quented. In Washington, D.C., there are the hundred-foot-tall Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and now the Jefferson Memorial. Buildings just a few hundred years old are preserved as historical monuments. On a personal level, Americans keep diaries and write autobiographies. I have elsewhere described how on Thanksgiving the year before last my host brought out a big pile of his fathers diaries. At Professor Redficlds house, Mrs. Park especially wanted me to see the pictures of Redfield ancestors in a corner of the living room. On Professor Ogburns staircase wall were neatly lined up generation after generation of ances­tor portraits. Perhaps because at a dinner party I had once expressed the view that Americans lack any feeling for history, all the friends I came into contact with were particularly anxious to correct my misapprehension by showing me their concern for their ancestors. All this is true, but still I feel their regard for tradition is to a greater or lesser extent conscious, intellectual, and artificial. It is not the same as ours. The reason I feel this way is that I have found Americans do not have ghosts.

When tradition is concrete, when it is a part of life, sacred, something to be feared and loved, then it takes the form of ghosts. This is equivalent to the state­ment by Durkheim that God is the representation of social cohesion. As I write this, I feel in my heart that Chinese culture in its essence is rather beautiful. To be able to live in a world that has ghosts is fortunate. Here let me relate some personal experiences.

When I was a boy, because the family was in decline ... we lived in a big old building of which at least half was closed off awaiting uncles who seldom came home, and in another part of which were dark rooms that had never seen sun­light. ... In these dark and desolate rooms, there were more places for ghosts than for people This environment was already sufficiently frightening, but in addi­tion not a day passed when people did not talk of ghosts to scare or amuse us children I am not exaggerating when I say that to a child like me brought up in a small town, people and ghosts were equally concrete and real....

Because I grew up half in a world of ghosts, I was particularly interested in them. Gradually my fear changed to curiosity and then to attraction, to the point that I even feel a little sorry for people raised in a world without ghosts. The thing that felt most strange to me during almost a year of living in America was that no one told me any stories of ghosts. I do not want to overpraise such a world, but I will admit that children who grow up in it are more comfortable than we and do not have to live with fear in their hearts all day long. But perhaps there is a heavy price for this, a price I would be unwilling to pay.

The beginning of my gradual change in attitude toward ghosts occurred the year my grandmother died. One day not long after her death, I was sitting in the front room looking toward her bedroom. It was almost noon. Normally at that time Grandmother would go to the kitchen to see how the lunch preparations were coming along, soon after which lunch would be served. This had been a familiar sight for me, and after her death the everyday pattern was not changed. Not a table or chair or bed or mat was moved. Every day close to noon I would feel hungry. To my subconscious mind the scene was not complete without Grand­mothers regular daily routine, and so that day I seemed to see her image come out of her bedroom once more and go into the kitchen.

If it was a ghost I saw, it was the first one in my life. At the time I felt nothing unusual, for the scene was so familiar and right. Only a little later when I remem­bered that Grandmother was dead did I feel upset—not frightened, but sad the way one feels at a loss that should not have occurred. I also seemed to realize that a beautiful scene, once it had existed, would always be. The present loss was just a matter of separation in time, and this separation I felt could be overcome. An inex­tinguishable revelation had struck; the universe showed a different structure. In this structure our lives do not just pass through time in such a way that a moment in time or a station in life once past is lost. Life in its creativity changes the absolute nature of time: it makes past into present—no, it melds past, present, and future into one inextinguishable, multilayered scene, a three-dimensional body. This is what ghosts are, and not only did I not fear them, I even began to yearn for them.

I cannot get used to people today who know only the present moment. To take this moment as [the sum of] existence is a delusion. Our every act contains within it all the accumulated history from the beginning of the universe right down to the present, and this every act will determine the destiny of endless future generations. If the present moment, fragmentary, abstract, false, is taken for life, this life will necessarily be shallow and base and even empty—since the moment cannot last, one might as well indulge oneself and revel, for when the instant is gone what is left?

American children hear no stories about ghosts. They spend a dime at the “drugstore” to buy a “Superman” comic book. This “Superman” is an all-knowing, resourceful, omnipotent hero who can overcome any difficulty. Let us leave aside the question of what kind of children this teaching produces; the point worth not­ing here is that Superman is not a ghost. Superman represents actual capabilities or future potential, while ghosts symbolize belief in and reverence for the accumu­lated past. As much as old Mrs. Park, trying to lessen the distance between East and West, might lead me over to the corner of the living room to look at faded photographs, it was the Redfields little boy who showed me the heart of American culture, and it lay in Superman, not ghosts.

How could ghosts gain a foothold in American cities? People move about like the tide, unable to form permanent ties with places, to say nothing of other people. I have written elsewhere of the gap between generations. It is an objective social fact that when children grow up they no longer need parental protection, and the reflection of this in the family is childrens demand for independence. Once when I was chatting at a friends house, his daughter sat with us chain-smoking. The father happened to remark that it was senseless to smoke like that, but she paid no heed and afterwards told me that she was eighteen, it was none of the old mans business, smoking was her own affair. Eighteen is an important age for a girl; after that her parents need not support her, but neither can they tell her what to do.

I also know an old professor whose son teaches in the same university as he but lives apart from him—which might be all right, but he seldom even visits. During the war they could not get a maid and it made my heart sick to see the professors wife, old and doddering, serving a guest coffee with shaking hands.

When I was staying at the Harvard Faculty Club, I noticed sitting at the same table every morning a white-haired old gentleman who lived upstairs and who from his looks was not long for this world. Whenever I saw him I felt outraged. He must have been a famous professor who had educated countless people and worked hard for society. Now old and failing, cast out of the world into this building, with­out relatives even to care for him much less give him pleasure, he might as well have been dead. One day he said softly to the waitress, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it down the stairs tomorrow.” Afterwards I asked her where his home was, but she did not know the answer and only shook her head. In America, when children grow up they have their own homes, where their parents are mere guests.

Outside the family there is certainly much social intercourse, but dealings with people are always in terms of appointments. On my office desk is an appointment calendar marked in fifteen-minute intervals with a space for a persons name beside each. Apart from business there are various kinds of gatherings, but if you go to one you will find it is no more than social pleasantries: a few words with this person, a few words with that one—it is hard even to remember their names. I cannot say all Americans pass their lives like this. But I once asked a fairly close acquaintance how many friends he had whom he could drop in on at any time without a previous engagement. Counting on his fingers, he did not fill one hand. In fact, unless they have business or an engagement they spend most of their time at home, where they don’t much like to be disturbed by guests. At any rate, friends warned me not to go barging in on people all the time.

With interpersonal ties like these, naturally they seldom see ghosts after death. Moreover their movements are so easy and they have contacts with so many peo­ple, that there seldom comes about the kind of relationship I had with my grand­mother, living interdependently for a long time, repeating the same scenes, so that these scenes came to seem an inalterable natural order. Always being on the move dilutes the ties between people and dissolves the ghosts.

As to attachments to places, that is another thing that made me uncomfortable in America. Not the beds and mattresses, for I believe there are none more com­fortable than those of the Americans, but the constant moving around that year was the cause of my discomfort. I visited many places, but when I think of them now it seems I went nowhere, for I felt no particular attachment to any place as all were alike, differing only a little in the height of the buildings. The cities are all more or less the same, at least for a traveler: you get off the train and your bags are taken by a black man who everywhere wears the same type of cap (you may not encounter this kind of man, but you will not encounter any other); you take a similar taxi to a similar hotel—no matter what hotel, if you have stayed anywhere once, you will not feel it unfamiliar. The hotel rooms are all comparable, some big­ger and some smaller, but none lacking a bathroom, a cold-water tap, a Simmons mattress, and nice stationery and envelopes. Since it is the same everywhere, you can never take away a particular impression from any hotel.

Hotels are not exceptions; it is basically the same with homes in American cit­ies. Moving house is no more difficult than changing hotels; a phone call is all it takes. Move here, move there—the houses are about the same. In New York I thought of renting a house and visited ten possibilities in succession. In the end I said to the friend who was accompanying me, “Why bother to see each one? Why not draw straws?” Moving here and there dilutes peoples ties with houses.

Whenever I return to my native place, I go to see the house I lived in as a child. I have lots of questions about the tung tree and the loquat tree; the tung tree still has my name carved on it. In London, where people do not move so frequently, I still remember where I lived on Lower Station Road and Ridge Avenue [?]; while I was in the United States I heard that the old buildings there had been bombed, and it made me feel bad for several days. In America, at least for me, no house has yet produced such a feeling.

I cannot get used to the way lights illuminate all the parts of a room either. Liv­ing in such rooms gives you a false sense of confidence that this is all of the world, that there is no more to reality than what appears clearly and brightly before your eyes. I feel the attitude of Westerners toward the unknown is very different from that of Orientals. They think of the unknown as static, waiting for people to mine it like an ore—not only not frightening, but a resource for improving life in the future. They are very self-assured. We Orientals feel some measure of reverence for the unknown; our reverence for fate makes us content with our lot, makes us aware of human limitations, and keeps our eyes fixed on the humanly attainable. I cannot assert that this attitude is ultimately due to the form of the houses we live in as children, but I believe that my own early feelings of uncertainty toward the big kitchen and the back garden and my fright toward the closed-off rooms have still not dissipated, but only expanded into my view of the universe. If many people in traditional China had similar experiences, then these experiences may have deter­mined the basic structure of our traditional attitudes toward people and things.

In a world without ghosts, life is free and easy. American eyes can gaze straight ahead. But still I think they lack something and I do not envy their lives.

The paperback edition of THE GIRL WITH GHOST EYES, coming in October.

Hello Anonymous! I don’t check in to tumblr very often. The list is here: http://thegirlwithghosteyes.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-novel-girl-with-ghost-eyes-uses.html 

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Hello chrisharlar! I’m so glad you enjoyed The Girl with Ghost Eyes. It means a lot to me that it connected with you, and I’m touched that you took the time to let me know.

I’m currently writing book 2. I only had the one-book contract with my publisher, Talos Books, so I’ll have to make sure they want it before it can be released.