On a visit to see my family in Hanoi in 2009, a cousin to whom I’m not particularly close broke away from her Buddhist chant to tell me I was being stalked by a ghost. “I felt it as soon as you walked in,” she said.
The calmness and certainty with which she shared such bizarre news was almost as unnerving as the news itself. She went on to explain that the ghost was a dead man who was in love with me. Apparently, he had been undermining my romantic relationships for years in an effort to keep me for himself.
As is common in Asia, many Vietnamese embrace the world of spirits, the afterlife, fortune-telling and horoscopes – including the concept of ghost stalkers. We spend a lot of time and money trying to manipulate our fates based on these beliefs. The western-educated, rational thinker in me initially dismissed my cousin as silly. But as I settled back into the local culture and its way of thinking, her words began to haunt me.