Yin And Yang: Taiwanese Religion, Superstition And A True Ghost Story
(ESSAY) One might assume yin and yang are just esoteric concepts that have nothing to do with everyday life in places like Taiwan — but that would be wrong. The concepts of yin and yang pervade everyday Taiwanese thought and dialogue, whether in idioms, compound words, or as independent concepts.
At the clinic, a negative on a medical test comes up “yin” while a positive comes up “yang.” In the course of small talk, the compound for “sun” literally translates to “extreme yang,” while overcast weather is a sky that’s “yin.” When a guy complains there are no girls at a party, he describes the energy (qi) as being too densely “yang.” And for those who believe in spirits, somewhere that seems eerie or haunted is simply said to be very “yin.”
Taiwanese society is a unique blend of superstition and modernity. For example, Taiwan leads the world in semiconductor technology, yet you’ll find green bags of Kuai Kuai snacks by the same engineers’ machinery to keep it running (kuai means “well-behaved,” and they’re green so the machinery will “go”). I’ve even seen a bag next to a life support machine in an emergency room.
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Taiwanese ghost stories are likewise significant because of these linguistic and religious cultural nuances which they reflect. The following ghost story by a software engineer I’ve known for many years is one example, related to the above concept of places being “yin.” It’s also a window into the psyche of a 30-something skeptic still influenced by the superstitions of Taiwanese society. His perspective is something of a microcosm of modern Taiwanese.
The story is set at a youth center complex where high schoolers go on graduation field trips — a place supposedly very dense with yin energy.
“That’s what I later heard, anyway,” Xu Bokai told me. “You know how it is in school [with the ghost stories and urban legends]. Everywhere is supposedly a mass grave site or the site of some massacre.”
There’s a reason for this, beyond just the fact that kids like to scare each other with ghost stories. There’s limited flat land suitable for farming in Taiwan, and so both graves and schools tend to be built on more hilly ground – in some cases indeed with the schools being built over what were once grave sites. Taiwan has also seen its share of political massacres, including those inflicted on aboriginal peoples, civil rights abuses carried out by the Japanese during the Occupation Period, and the previously authoritarian Chinese Nationalist Party post-World War II.
I’ve known Bokai for nearly a decade. We see each other at least once a week, and I’ve always thought of him as extremely pragmatic and a skeptic. For instance, ancestor worship is on the decline in Taiwan, as practical-minded millennials like Bokai often don’t feel like going through the trouble of maintaining their family ancestor shrines and performing the associated ritual offerings (planting incense, burning ghost money, and setting out food offerings).
You can’t just throw your ancestor shrine away, though. You’re supposed to get a priest and make an arrangement to have your ancestors leave the shrine of their own will first. In this process, one would also perform moon block divination — casting two crescent-shaped blocks to see if they come up “yes,” “no,” or “maybe / laugh” — until an agreement is made.
Bokai told me after his parents passed, he would do the divination as a sign of respect, but he was also clear about his core beliefs: “I’m just going to keep throwing the blocks until they come up ‘yes.’ I mean, it’s just a matter of chance. But if they come up “no” 100 times, maybe I’ll get a priest.”
Bokai is from Keelung in northwestern Taiwan, though his field trip took him to the mountains of southern Taiwan. Unfortunately, as it’s been 20 years, Bokai no longer remembers the exact youth center the field trip took him to. Regardless, you can think of the youth complex as your typical haunted summer camp, with forests, cabins, a lake and maybe a ghoul or serial killer here or there.
The day the graduates arrived, Bokai was assigned to his cabin with some peers, and they left their luggage in the cabin before going their separate ways. Some went off to get something to eat; others went to run errands. Bokai doesn’t remember exactly what he was doing (“I think I had to fill out some paperwork or something”), but he went off alone, then began making his way back to the cabin later in the evening.
Bokai didn’t have a map or a cellphone — smartphones were still in their infancy back then — so he made his way back by memory. At some point, he saw another kid in a school uniform. Figuring he was headed back to the cabins too, he followed him from afar.
“He didn’t know I was following him.”
The sun had already begun setting at this point. Then, the kid made a strange turn. There were bushes forming a barrier on the side of the road.
“They were like the kind you see dividing city avenues,” Bokai said.
The kid squeezed himself between two bushes and disappeared on the other side.
“I thought it was strange, but just figured it must be a shortcut.”
It was getting dark at this point. Bokai followed in the other student’s footsteps, pushing the bushes aside just as he had. As he was about to step forward, though, there was just enough light for him to see that he was about to step right into a lake.
“I wasn’t even thinking about where the other kid went,” he said. “I was just like: ‘S—-, there’s a lake here!’”
It was only later that he wondered where the kid had gone.
“It’s not like there had been a kid thrashing around there drowning,” he said. “The water was completely still.”
The classic Taiwanese explanation would be that this might be a case of “capture to replace” (zhua-jiao-ti). That is, the ghost was trying to lure him to his death so that Bokai could take his place in the spirit world and he could move on and be reborn. Bokai wasn’t thinking about that, though.
He was still looking for his cabin. Luckily, he found it quickly enough once he got back on the main path. His cabinmates were all still out, though, so he started watching TV by himself until, after a while, he heard a knock on the door.
He opened it; there was no one there.
His cabinmates must be pulling a prank on him. He looked around outside. There was no one in sight. Plus, the cabin door was elevated, only accessible by a staircase. It wouldn’t have been easy to knock on the door, then run and hide.
Bokai sat down and continued watching TV. The knocking began again. At first, he ignored it. But the longer he sat, the louder it got — and louder, and louder, until it became pounding. He opened the door and saw no one, yet again. But now he was getting scared.
The third time the knocking started, Bokai even pushed the TV aside so he could open the curtains and get a clear look outside at the door.
There was no one there.
“I was terrified at this point,” Bokai said. “I ended up turning the TV all the way up and just sitting there, trying to ignore the sound until the others got back.”
Only then did the knocking stop.
Memory is a funny thing. All of this happened roughly 20 years ago, so it’s difficult to know how well the key plot points Bokai remembers align with reality.
For instance, there are two things he was sure of: The kid he followed had neither turned back nor gone into the lake; and there was no one on the other side of the door the knocking was coming from.
Bokai’s story affected me. While I don’t believe in ghosts, I admit I started getting jumpy after hearing it: looking over my shoulder; wondering about shadows and strange noises. Then, one night when my roommate was out, my doorbell rang.
This was strange in itself. It wasn’t the buzzer to get into the building, but the doorbell to my apartment on the top floor. This meant someone had gotten into the front gate somehow, and was already standing outside my door. Maybe my roommate had just forgotten her keys and a neighbor had opened the gate for her. Still, it felt off.
I decided I’d better look through the keyhole before opening the door. It was pitch black. Whether it was my roommate or a neighbor, I couldn’t think of anyone who could have gotten into our building, yet wouldn’t have turned on the light before ringing the doorbell — instead choosing to stand there in pitch darkness. I admit it; I’m a coward.
Even though there were two doors between us — a steel one that locked automatically on the outside and the standard wooden door with the deadbolt on the inside – I was too afraid to even open the inner one and face the darkness on the other side of the metal grate. Besides, maybe the light was off because whoever had rang the doorbell had gotten the wrong apartment and left anyway.
The doorbell rang again. I went again to look at the keyhole; maybe whoever was ringing the doorbell had turned on the light this time. Nope; still darkness. This time though, I noticed something even more jarring. The steel door on the outside was open.
Before I could react, the door I was pressed against began to slowly open and push me aside as well. I jumped up, and looked through the crack at who or what was opening it. I saw a young woman in glasses — the light from the apartment reflected uncannily on them so that she had no expression — dead eyes. The rest of her features were obscured in darkness.
“What are you doing? Who are you?” I shouted.
“I’m… I’m Meiru.”
I breathed a sigh of relief.
It was my roommate’s coworker, who also happens to live nearby. I opened the door, and under the living room light, she suddenly looked normal and familiar.
“You scared the hell out of me! Why didn’t you turn on the stairway light?”
“Sorry. I don’t know. Minya forgot to upload something for work, so she asked me to do it for her.”
That’s right. I’d forgotten Meiru had a copy of our keys. My roommate later confirmed that she had asked her to come around.
Everything eerie and off about this story had been created by me, and my newfound belief in (or at least paranoia about) the supernatural. Had I not been too frightened to open the door, there would be no story. Plus, was it that strange that she hadn’t turned on the light?
Through the keyhole, it looked pitch black in the stairway. But it was only just sunset — from where Meiru had been standing, it was just kind of dim. And she had been standing in front of the door. She was no phantom; I just couldn’t see her because of the darkness. Maybe Bokai couldn’t see who was at his door for the same reason – and because he was shaken and panicking.
Beliefs and expectations shape our reality. Maybe nothing really spooky happened to either of us. We were just trying to explain the world with what we knew. For both of us, that knowledge was informed by Taiwanese culture, religion and superstition. Our reactions told us something about the world around us – but maybe even more so, they said something about ourselves.
Eric R. Stone is an American journalist and translator of Chinese Buddhist and Taoist classics. He’s translated four books: Happiness & Suffering, The Tao Te Ching: Wondrous Revelations, Emptiness Energy, and The Secret of Chan. His writing has appeared in Lacuna Magazine, The News Lens, Taiwan News, and The ATA Chronicle. Eric currently lives in Taipei. In his free time, he runs a Mandarin-Taiwanese D&D campaign. See more of his writing at ericrstone.substack.com or learn more at ericrstone.com