My family moved to the east of Taiwan-Hua Lie when I was a third-grade student. I spent 15 minutes each day walking along the lane to school. Halfway to school, there was a farmhouse surrounded by a bamboo forest and a harvested vegetable field. One late autumn morning, which was cloudy and windy, a classmate and I, on our way to school, stood with a crowd of people surrounding a felled bamboo. People occupied the vegetable field. We ran to the crowd, but we couldn’t get past, because we were too short and small. So we asked a stranger, “Uncle! Uncle! Would you please tell us what happened?” The guy said the wind had blown violently last night. A bamboo tree had fallen down onto the ground. This morning, the owner of the farmhouse had carried his saw to cut the bamboo. However, when he sawed the tree, a lot of blood erupted from the bamboo.

A frightening feeling sprang up, unbidden. I remember a relative had warned me, “Don’t cross a fallen bamboo tree. Once a guy did that. The bamboo jumped up suddenly, the guy bounced up to the sky and died when he was thrown back to the ground.” The other warning was, “Don’t turn back to look behind you when it is dark.”

My classmate and I snuck out of the vegetable field, then ran faster and faster to the school without looking back. In the classroom, everyone discussed this event, and exchanged the news. I was fascinated when it was said that perhaps the owner of the farmhouse had buried his dead baby under the bamboo tree, and then the bamboo tree had absorbed the baby’s blood. For many years after, whenever my classmate and I passed by the farmhouse, we always ran as fast as we could. After I grew up, I suspected two things. One was that a dead baby’s blood wouldn’t be red and couldn’t be absorbed by the bamboo tree. The second was that a good storyteller had fabricated the whole story.

When I catch sight of Halloween decorations, or during nostalgic moments, I think of childhood as a time of naiveté. I smile about how gullible I had been long ago, running through the farmhouse property to escape from the ghost of bamboo.

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Ting-Chang (Kenny) Hsieh is a 66-year-old native of Taiwan. His first language is Mandarin. He arrived in the United States in 2006. He studies English at the Queens Public Library’s Elmhurst Adult Learning Center, where James McMenamin is his writing teacher, and Michelle Johnston is the center manager. Ting-Chang Hsieh writes, “I would like to learn forever. It’s good to sharpen your brain.”