Why do I chase ghosts?

When someone asks what I do, the convenient answer is that I chase ghosts. It is a useful answer for a doorway, a festival stall, or a film trailer. It lets a person know, quickly, which side of the threshold I am standing on.

But convenience is not the same as biography. I do not have one birth certificate in one old book, stamped by a reliable clerk. I have a long afterlife: early anecdotes, calendar compilations, pictures, ritual uses, popular fiction, and the names other people gave me when they needed a guardian.

One figure, several jobs

The earliest material people often point to is not a modern character profile. It is scattered through textual collections and later compilations. A responsible reader should follow the witness back to its work and chapter, then resist treating a later retelling as if it had appeared at the beginning.

That is why this notebook will use plain labels. “Early textual witness” means a source is early in the surviving written trail; it does not mean every detail in it is historically verifiable. “Later literary retelling” means a story may be vivid and important, while still being later than the event or practice it describes. “Visual witness” means a work of art tells us something secure about that object, not automatically about every household in China.

I am not less interesting because the answers disagree. I am more legible when the disagreement is allowed to remain visible.

There is a difference between saying that a late nineteenth-century painter made a fierce guardian, and saying that all earlier readers saw exactly the same guardian. The first claim can be checked against a museum record. The second needs much more evidence than an attractive image.

What I will claim here

I can say that protection is a durable part of my afterlife. The public-domain works linked from this site show me in that register, and the Smithsonian record explicitly names a work Zhong Kui taming the Five Pestilences. I can also say that the textual trail is plural. What I will not say is that one compact legend explains every object, household practice, novel, game, or portrait.

That restraint is not a refusal to tell a story. It is how a story survives being read by people who care about where it came from. So yes: put “ghost chaser” in the short introduction if you need to. Then follow it with a footnote, and let the footnote open a door.