But, hearing about a spirit is different than witnessing one. In the latter, there is no choice.

That day, the day of the possession, I bowed three times before the woman and pled for mercy until a bruise appeared on my forehead. Then I cried until I had the hiccups. That day, my father scolded me, the harshest he had ever been. “What blasphemy,” he said. “Don’t ever invite that energy into your mind again.” That day, I waited until it got dark and felt my eyelids open and shut, over and over to erase what I had seen, to pretend that when shut, the gray shadows did not linger on the other side.           

Grandma Lanh’s mouth is not completely sealed: in between her lips, specks of gold dust peep through, along with grains of rice and a special coin.

“For toll to the afterlife,” says my mother.

“No. For good luck,” says Auntie Chin. “YouTube it.”

A yellow sheath with red Chinese characters drapes the body, followed by the new birth certificate — also in Chinese. Except for “1929,” the year of her mortal birth and “November 7, 2012,” the date of her mortal death, no one in the family can make out what the cardstock says. No one cares to, either. “Vietnamese would not be authentic enough,” is all my aunts say. Heaven or hell, it seems, the gatekeepers speak only one language.

On the altar in front of the casket, there are three bowls of rice. The one at the center has a pair of chopsticks in the rice; the ones on the two ends have only one stick each. When Grandpa Toan died, Grandma Lanh explained that this was to prevent the two demon guards accompanying his soul from eating too quickly.