Opinion | Hungry ghosts taught me about the urgency of living in a way that respects the past

Around the world, the climate crisis is destroying lands, homes and species, but it is also ruining important cultural sites and sacred spaces. In recent years, UNESCO has reported on the significant impact of climate change on world heritage. Material and cultural loss are enmeshed, from flash flooding along a Hindu pilgrimage route in Kashmir, to wildfires in Maui and BC destroying significant historical sites and sacred materials, and rising water levels in Louisiana disinterring the dead.

All of this is difficult to take in. One day, the air is clean, the moss-covered trees damp, the forest paths well-trodden. The next day, the trees are alight, the sky fills with thick, dark smoke, homes are evacuated, animals flee and sacred spaces are lost.

The magnitude of environmental disasters is difficult to comprehend. Sometimes, the smallest things evoke the strongest emotions. A single scorched tree, a sad human story on the radio.

The moment that made me realize that ecological loss is inextricably connected with cultural loss, was an unexpected confrontation with hungry ghosts during a trip to my ancestral village in China. The experience inspired me to write my latest book, “Red Pockets,” which is a fusion of memoir and environmental writing.

In the spring of 2018, I visited my ancestral clan village in China ninety years after my grandfather’s last visit as a child, during a research trip to study polluted industrial areas. The trip coincided with Qingming festival, when people return to their home villages to sweep the tombs of their ancestors, offering gifts of food, incense and burnt paper money. Remarkably, the village was almost just as my grandfather had described it: a rural rice village in Taishan, with houses built from overseas Chinese money during the late-nineteenth-century Gold Rush, where clan members share the surname Mah (Ma, or 马).

Yet beneath the calm, rural veneer, was a century of rupture, war and revolution. My family’s ancestral home in the village had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. In local beliefs, homes are the resting place for spirits, so we no longer had a spiritual home in the village. Clan members remembered that my ancestors had suffered untimely deaths, and their tombs had been left unswept. By implication, we had failed in our duty to pay respects to our ancestors, leaving incalculable clan debts.

In Chinese religious folk beliefs, neglected ancestors become hungry ghosts who wreak havoc upon their descendants, unleashing illnesses, crop failures and ecological disaster. Witnessing the pollution in nearby petrochemical villages in South China, I could not help thinking that there must be some truth in the idea of hungry ghosts, that they represented ecological collapse and broken obligations to ancestors as well as to future generations. I left with an inexplicable sense of loss, of connection to ancestral lands, traditions and forms of knowledge. My ancestors had known about how to tend rice, graves and spirits, and they maintained strong connections between the living and the dead.

But the Mah clan knew environmental disaster, too, fleeing to Gold Mountain (North America) from droughts, locust epidemics and land conflicts. Throughout history, many migrants share similar stories of environmental dislocation and mourn the loss of their roots, while carrying knowledge of survival and settlement. Perhaps there are lessons in these fraught histories. As I continued my research on toxic pollution and environmental justice back in the U.K., amid heightening global concern over the climate emergency, I began to see that the climate crisis is not only a material crisis, but a spiritual one.

By spiritual, I mean something beyond loss: ways of knowing and living, and ways of seeing and acting. Return to an ancestral past is impossible, in the sense that time and place are always changing, but it is also open to all of us, no matter where we come from, whether migrants or multi-generational residents of a place, in the sense that ancestral pasts are always part of our present selves, and everyone has ancestors. We need to find ways of living with the ghosts: facing up to our obligations to each other, and caring and fighting for our lands. Otherwise, we risk losing not only our homes and our cherished spaces, but what makes us who we are.