0. 

Back-kitchen heat, steam rising like ghosts,

worked in shadows where no one learned our names.

Old Chinatown swept away in smoke and permits,

hands stained with work that built a city

that would never be ours.  

Rent rose like tides.

English twisted in our mouths. 

We carried home in our bones—

a country lost,

a country that would not claim us. 

Then they came—

the new ones, 

like shooting stars across the American sky. 

掃把星, the old ones whispered. 

Broom stars. Bad omens. 

Sweeping away what little we had left.  

They arrived on visas,

spoke in tongues we had forgotten: 

Palo Alto. Suburbs. Integration. 

They blazed so bright 

we almost believed 

the old country was wrong about broom stars, 

that maybe this time, 

someone would stay. 

But they went anyway,

the way everything goes:

toward morning,

toward America,

toward places where ghosts like us

cannot follow.

1.

She drifted along the fire escape of the condemned building on Sacramento Street, five stories above what Chinatown had become. 

The fog rolled in from the bay, cold and ceaseless. Below, the neon signs buzzed in English and tourist-simplified Chinese: “CHOP SUEY.” “KOWLOON KITCHEN.” Words her mother would not have recognized. 

She remembered the day she’d stepped off the steerage deck in the 1880s, one of the lucky ones who survived the crossing from Guangdong. She’d worked in kitchens, scrubbed laundry in scalding water, learned this city one English word at a time: dish, soap, yes ma’am, sorry.

Nearly a century later, she was still here, floating above a Chinatown that no longer belonged to her. The eviction notice was still taped to the door downstairs. Urban Renewal Project #47. Demolition: October 1970. 

They were erasing her world, one wrecking ball at a time.

2.

The night stretched endlessly. She floated west along the cracked sidewalks, leaving behind the hollowed streets of Chinatown—Ross Alley shuttered, bakery steam thinning into fog, fish crates dripping meltwater onto Stockton’s dark gutters. The lanterns on Grant Avenue swayed, their red glow dimming. A cable car bell rang somewhere in the distance, thin and lonely.

The path through Golden Gate Park was empty at this hour—4 a.m., that dead space between night and morning. She continued further west, toward the ocean, toward the edge of the continent. The moon hung low over the Pacific, the same moon that hung over Taishan, over the village she would never see again. 

Then—light. A shooting star streaked north across the sky. 掃把星, her grandmother would have called it. A broom star. A bad omen.

She lowered her gaze. A man walked toward her on the path, his white coat bright against the darkness. A doctor’s coat, she realized—the kind the physicians wore at the Chinese hospital when she’d glimpsed them through lit windows. 

He looked exhausted. His face was pale, and when he came closer, she saw it—the telltale stillness, the way his chest didn’t move, the absence of breath. 

He saw her staring and smiled faintly. “Long shift,” he said in Mandarin. His accent was educated, urban. Shanghai, maybe. His name tag glinted under the moonlight: 张华,  James Zhang, M.D.

He looked out at the ocean, taking a sip from his thermos, and she could smell it: blood, cold and preserved. 

Her body went still. He knew she knew. 

“You’re like me,” she said in Cantonese. 

He switched languages smoothly, responding in her same tongue. “Yeah.” He glanced at the lightening sky. “I’ve got maybe an hour before I need to be inside. You?” 

“Less,” she admitted. “The sun and I... We don’t get along.”

He studied her—the old-style changshan she wore, embroidered but faded, the way she stood too still, like someone who had learned to move but didn’t quite remember how. 

“You’re not from…” He gestured vaguely at the modern city around them. “Now.” 

“1906,” she said simply. 

His eyes widened. “The earthquake?” 

“The fire after.” She looked at her hands, pale and unchanged for sixty-four years. “I burned. Then I woke up. Then I burned again trying to walk in the sun.” She showed him the faint white scars on her palm. “I don’t try anymore.” 

He was quiet for a moment, then: “I’m different. I can tolerate it—an hour, maybe two, if I’m careful. Long sleeves, sunglasses, move fast.” He touched the collar of his white coat. “It hurts, but I can do it. Enough to work, at least.” 

“Night shift?” 

“Every shift, if I can manage it. But sometimes…” He shrugged. “Emergency surgery at 7 AM. Rounds at noon. You do what you have to.” 

She looked at him—this man who could walk in daylight, who wore a doctor’s coat, who spoke English without stumbling, who belonged in this bright American world in a way she never could. 

“What do you call yourself?” she asked. 

“James,” he said, then paused. “张华, Zhang Hua. But everyone at the hospital calls me James.” 

“No.” She shook her head. “What do you call…this?” She gestured between them. “What we are.” 

He was quiet for a long moment, watching the sky pale at the edges. 

“Vampire,” he said finally. “That’s what the medical texts call it. Porphyria, photosensitivity, hematophagy. They have different names, but vampire is… easier.” 

“We call it 僵尸,” she said softly. “Jiangshi. Stiff corpse. When someone dies wrong—bad burial, violent death, unfinished business— the 氣 [Qi] stays trapped in the body. Not alive. Outside the cycle.” 

“The cycle?” 

“Reincarnation. I could have been reborn thirteen times by now.” She smiled without humor. “Instead I’m still here. Still in Chinatown. Still in 1906, in a way.” 

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he glanced at the horizon, where the first hint of light was starting to show. 

“Come on,” he said quietly. “I know a place. We can talk there. Away from the sun.”

She hesitated. His place would be safe, sterile–somewhere borrowed, somewhere temporary. He moved through this city like a visitor. But she had been here nearly a century. She knew where ghosts could rest. 

“Follow me,” she said, and didn’t wait to see if he would. 

She led him through the maze of alleys he’d probably never walked. Past the shuttered herb shop, the basement tailor, the buildings marked with red X’s for demolition. Down to the bookstore on Waverly Place, its door unmarked, its windows dark with old posters advertising plays from 1852. 

She pushed the door open. The bell didn’t ring—it had broken years ago, and no one had bothered to fix it. 

3. 

The bookstore smelled of dust, old paper, and faint incense. Narrow aisles wound between shelves stacked with thread-bound classics, Republican-era novels, and newspapers yellowed with age. He looked around slowly, taking it in.

“How long have you been coming here?” he asked. 

“Since it opened. 1947.” She moved between the stacks, fingers brushing spines, pausing at titles printed in traditional characters. “It’ll be gone by next year. Everything will.”

He followed behind, careful on the uneven floorboards. The low ceiling forced him to duck. He glanced at vertical banners and handwritten signs in Chinese, reading some easily, letting the unfamiliar ones slip past. 

She stopped by a stack of brittle newspapers from the 1910s and read the headline: “CHINESE LABORERS THRONG TENEMENTS: SQUALOR A DANGER TO HEALTH OF ENTIRE CITY.” She thought of her memories of that time, formed long before James had been born. Twelve men to one room, most working two jobs to send home money they didn’t have. 

“Chinese hospitals pay well?” she asked, though she already knew the answer. Not compared to American hospitals. 

“Well enough. Better than most places that would hire someone with a foreign degree.” He pulled off his white coat and folded it carefully. Underneath, his shirt was wrinkled from the long shift. “I’m trying to get into Stanford’s research program. Medical school here didn’t accept my Shanghai credentials, so I’m…working my way up.” 

“From doctor to… not doctor?”

“From foreign doctor to American doctor.” He smiled tightly. “Different thing.” 

She understood. She’d been through her own version of that—Chinese-person to Chinese American, paper wife to widow to ghost. You could never just be what you were. You always had to translate yourself. 

He shifted his weight, eyes flicking to a sign written in traditional characters, one he could read, but without the ease she had. “But things are better now,” he said. “Chinese Americans can go to college. Buy houses. Move out of Chinatown for good.”

She smiled without warmth. “You say that like leaving is freedom.”

“You don’t think it is?”

“For people like you, maybe.”

He didn’t argue. He couldn’t.

She picked up an old poetry collection, its pages soft as ash. “I wash dishes until my fingers crack. Sew shirts until my eyes blur. I try so hard to be small, to stay out of the way.” She looked around the bookstore. “This is the only place that doesn’t push back.”

He was quiet for a moment. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know,” she said. “You weren't here when they hunted us in the streets. When we learned to move like shadows just to survive. I was.”

Silence settled like dust.

Finally he said, quietly, "I wasn't supposed to live long either."

She looked up.

"Shanghai, 1966. Red Guards came to the university. I spoke too loudly, believed in the wrong things." His jaw tightened. "I barely escaped. Came here on a student visa, thought I was free." He paused. "Then I was attacked. First year in America. White men outside a bar in North Beach. And I became... this."

"I died in a basement,” she said softly. “Hiding during the fire. I tired so hard to disappear that when the flames came, no one knew I was there.” She looked at him. "You died because you refused to hide."

He leaned on a shelf, gently, as if afraid of breaking the past. “I came here to start over,” he said. “To blend in. To become whatever America wanted.”

“And did it work?” she asked.

“Mostly,” he admitted. “People like me survive by not looking back.”

She nodded. “People like me survive by holding on to what’s left.”

He looked around the bookstore — its sagging beams, its fading signs, its fragile survival —and finally understood why she stayed here, why she haunted these condemned buildings even as they crumbled.

4. 

A low rumble crept in from the street, growing heavier by the second, shattering the stillness.

She turned toward the windows. Construction trucks groaned down Sacramento Street, tearing the old buildings apart, brick by brick. Dust rose in choking clouds, curling through the narrow streets like incense smoke, swallowing everything she’d known for nearly a century. This had been her world. These streets, these signs, these voices speaking Cantonese in the dark. Now they were erasing it. 

“Please… don’t,” she whispered, voice breaking under decades of grief.

He stepped forward, his hand hovering near her shoulder, then settling there—light, careful. A gesture that said: I'm here. I see you.

She didn't pull away. For three weeks, he'd been the only person in sixty-four years who knew what she was, who didn't turn away. She closed her eyes and let herself have this, just for a moment, before the world outside finished crumbling.

He looked at the buildings outside, “What’s left to stay for?”

“What’s left is all I have,” she said steadily.

He was quiet for a long moment. Then said, "Come with me."

She looked at him, surprised.

“I got the position,” he said. “Stanford Medical Center. Research assistant in the hematology department.” 

Of course, hematology, she thought. Blood diseases. He was trying to understand what they were through science, through microscopes and blood counts and Western medicine. 

“When?” she asked. 

“Two weeks. I have to give notice at the hospital.” He looked at her. “Come with me. You could work–” 

"I cannot," she said softly.

"Why not?"

"Because I don't have papers that say I belong. Because I don't speak English like you. Because..." She looked at the crumbling street. "Because if I leave, who will remember this place? Who will know what was here?"

He hesitated, then said quietly, “You’ll remember. But will anyone else? Will anyone else care?”

The wrecking ball swung again, and another wall came down.

5.

They stood in the predawn darkness outside the Transbay Terminal, buses idling in their bays, diesel exhaust mixing with the salt smell from the bay. 

For six weeks now, they'd met like this—after dark, in the forgotten corners of Chinatown. The bookstore. The tea shop after closing. The fire escape of her condemned building. He brought her thermoses of blood from the hospital where he worked night shifts. She showed him the old places, taught him Cantonese phrases his Shanghai Mandarin had never learned. It was the first time in sixty-four years she hadn't been alone.

Now he was leaving in daylight. She couldn’t follow him to the platform. 

“The clinic in Palo Alto starts Monday,” he said, adjusting the strap of his duffel bag. He still wore his white coat from the hospital, wrinkled from the night shift. “It’s what I’ve been working towards.” 

She nodded. Of course it was. He’d been studying their condition like a disease, looking for patterns in blood work, reading Western medical journals about photosensitivity and abnormal metabolism. As if understanding science could make them less cursed. 

“You could come with me,” he said.

She heard the question he wasn't asking: Would you? And beneath it, the relief when she shook her head. ,

“In a basement?” she smiled sadly. “You tolerate the sun. I only have the night.”  

The sky was lightening at the edges. She could feel it—that prickle on her skin, the way the air changed texture before dawn. Five minutes, maybe less. 

He wanted to argue, but couldn’t. 

“I have to go,” she said, backing into the shadow of the building. The horizon was pink now, dangerous. 

He stepped closer, and for a moment she thought he might try to stop her, might say something that would make staying possible. Instead, he just looked at her—this woman who’d survived the 1906 fire, the exclusion years, the slow erasure of everything she’d known. 

"再见," he said quietly. See you again.

She didn't correct him. They both knew it was a promise neither could keep—he was walking toward a world she couldn't follow, and she was staying in one he'd already left behind.

"再见," she echoed.

He picked up his bag and walked toward the terminal’s glass doors, toward the ticket counter where the 6:30 bus to Palo Alto was boarding. The automatic doors slid open, swallowing him into brightness. 

She watched until she couldn’t anymore. Then she turned and ran. 

Down Mission Street, through the empty wholesale district, past the sleeping produce vendors and shuttered storefronts. The sky was flushing pink and orange now, the sun minutes from breaking over the East Bay hills. Her skin was starting to sting. 

She made it to Chinatown as the first direct rays hit the Ferry Building's clock tower. Down Grant Avenue, the red lanterns swaying in the morning wind. Into Ross Alley, into the narrow stairwell, into the basement apartment with its blacked-out windows and smell of mildew and a hundred years of other people’s cooking. 

She locked the door. Drew the curtain. Stood in the darkness, breathing hard even though she didn’t need to breathe. 

In three hours, his bus would arrive in Palo Alto. He’d find his apartment, unpack his white coat, and maybe sleep a few hours before the orientation. In a week, he’d be in the lab, pipetting blood samples, discussing cell counts, speaking the language of American science. 

In a month, she might have faded into something he could bear to set aside.

She sat on the thin mattress on the floor. On the wall, she’d taped a newspaper clipping from 1910—an advertisement for a long-closed restaurant, the characters printed in traditional script that almost no one could read. Next to it, a photo of Portsmouth Square from before the earthquake, when the buildings were different. The people in the frame were all long dead. 

掃把星, she thought. Broom star.

Her grandmother used to say they swept things away—the old ways, the old people, everything that couldn’t move fast enough to keep up with the changing world. 

Like all broom stars, he'd swept through, leaving her world a little emptier than before. She’d known from the beginning he wouldn’t stay. People like him never did. They moved toward the future, toward the bright American dream that had never been meant for people like her. 

Things leave and people change. That’s what they do.

She lay back and closed her eyes. 

Somewhere above, the sun was rising over San Francisco. Cable cars were clanging up the hills. Tourists were taking photos of the Dragon’s Gate, laughing at the fortune cookies in the windows, buying postcards of a Chinatown that never really existed.