White Ghost Girls by Alice Greenway (Black Cat/Grove Atlantic)

Hong Kong in the summer of 1967: Across the border, above the line where the New Territories meet mainland China, Red Guards rampage in their goal to purify Mao’s revolution. Hungry mainlanders plunge into the sea, hoping to swim to Hong Kong.  And only a short plane ride away from the peace and prosperity of England’s prize colony, a war rages in Vietnam.

Kate and her older sister Frankie are Americans in Hong Kong, endowed with a wild freedom that’s bred by their home country and fostered by benign neglect. Their father is a photographer for Time/Life, his lens and his attention claimed by Vietnam. Their mother is a beautiful practitioner of selective blindness, an artist whose paintings are “light, pretty, airy,” drenched in “the charm and comforts of the colonial era.” Ah Bing, the girls’ amah, is the only one to provide attempts at discipline, buttressed with Cantonese curses and epithets, but she’s old and too slow to keep up with her gwaimui, her white ghost girls.

Frankie and Kate escape to the beach, building shelters from whatever is washed up by the sea, playing Castaway, calling themselves secret sisters, Viet Cong sisters. They know they’re too old for the games they play; Kate is thirteen, Frankie is nubile--or as a friend of her father’s remarks, voluptuous. Both girls are feral and neither wants to grow up.

Then comes the day that they find a woman’s body floating in the sea, “swollen and bloated like a buoy,” a peasant who tried to swim to freedom and failed. They see students march in protest through the city streets, holding up pictures of Mao. When they accompany Ah Bing to a Kwan Yin temple on a nearby island, they run away, bump into a Red Guard demonstration in a market, and leave when they see the police are on their way. As they begin their return to the temple, the girls are accosted by two men who grab Frankie and  give Kate a bag, Lychees, she’s told, a gift for the captain of the police boat. “You no come back, you no big sister.”

Terrified, Kate ends up throwing the bag into a garbage can near the market and hears it explode as she rushes back to Frankie. Neither girl has been hurt. Both of them are changed. Kate, feeling responsible for the death and injuries incurred by the explosion, becomes secretive. Frankie, molested by her captors, has discovered her sexual power. The summer darkens and takes on a dreadful momentum that their parents fail to recognize nor even notice.

White Ghost Girls is a story of loss and grief, a love letter to a vanished home written by an exile, a eulogy for a girl who would never leave Hong Kong. Alice Greenway, who also grew up in Hong Kong during the 60s, illuminates the city with a sense of place that’s meticulous, visceral, and wistful.

“Can you give me hot rain, mould-streaked walls, a sharpness that creeps into my clothes...The smells of dried oyster, clove hair oil, tiger balm...The feverish shriek of cicadas, the cry of black-eared kites?” Kate begins her story with these questions and ends with this answer. 

…”this is all I want: a wooden stool, a bowl of rice, an army canteen, a secret comrade, the whooping cry of wild gibbons,” the summer when her Viet Cong sister left her forever.~Janet Brown