Working through the quiet, unbroken depths of the night has a strange and unsettling alchemy. In the small hours, when the world outside has entirely surrendered to sleep and the house settles into a breathless stillness, the boundaries between the present and the past begin to blur. It can be a genuinely eerie, isolating experience—a solitary vigil where the mind starts to play tricks.
In those moments of nocturnal solitude, my thoughts were often gravitated by an invisible current towards childhood bedtimes long ago. For reasons I have long since forgotten, when my mother decided I wasn’t quite behaving as I should before sleep, she would settle me by reaching for a grim, old-fashioned threat, warning in her off-the-boat Chinese dialect: “Be good or the hairy-clawed woman will come snatch you.” Her description painted a blood-curdling image in my child’s mind—a witchy figure with coarse skin and dark, sharp hooks, stalking the night specifically to carry off disobedient children. With a child’s unfiltered imagination, that terrifying creature took root with a visceral, gripping reality.
Many years after, I never thought to ask her how she came by that story. It was obvious enough that this was an ancient piece of folklore, a myth passed down through generations to quiet restless children in the dark. I never bore a grudge against her for not tucking me in with tender bedtime stories, the way a mother of a softer nature or higher education might have. Her devotion and deep sense of love for her family were simply expressed in other ways—truths I would only come to fully recognize and appreciate much later in life.
In fact, looking back now, I view it as an odd kind of blessing. My young imagination was fertilized and composted by these shadowy, folksy figures. Children today grow up sanitized from such dark folklore, fully pulled into the glow of screens and modern clarity. But in trading away the shadows of myth, something old and vital is lost: a direct, instinctual connection to the ancestral past.
Yet though more than sixty years have passed—decades filled with rational, adult experience—that ancient fear never truly dissolved; it simply went underground, buried deep within the subconscious. As the years have advanced, the night has taken on a new rhythm. Age now demands frequent, restless trips to the bathroom at night, creating recurrent twilight windows of half-awareness where I am suspended between dreaming and waking.
In those hazy intervals, the old phantom has finally shifted shape. The terrifying image of the hairy-clawed woman has long since blurred away, replaced instead by vivid, sudden vision bof my mother as she was in life. In that half-asleep haze, a brief wave of warmth and cozy familiarity washes over me—an instinctive, fleeting longing for her presence. Yet that comforting illusion is instantly shattered as my mind fully awakens to the stark truth: she has been dead for a long time. Standing alone in the dark, the child’s fear of a mythic monster yields to the older, quieter grief of a parent’s long absence.
