Although those with the Mandate of Heaven can see ghosts, not everyone with the Mandate is haunted by them. Those who are, most prominently Zhu, Ouyang, and Lord Wang begin their association with ghosts after some traumatic incident, leading the reader to surmise that ghosts symbolize trauma, and those they haunt are the trauma survivors.

Zhu is the most direct example, as she can see her ghosts and, as one of the protagonists, the reader is aware of every step of her journey. She first sees ghosts as a child, after the death of her father and brother. While she was not close with her relatives, she witnessed her father’s violent death at the hands of bandits as well as her brother wasting away, not to mention that her father tried to abandon her to the bandits before he died. This surely constitutes a form of trauma, which is repeated when Ouyang destroys Wuhuang Monastery, her second home.

As an adolescent, she observes that Ouyang has ghosts too, and senses a connection between them, like drawn to like. While there are many parallels between them, surviving childhood trauma is one of them, though she only realizes this at the end of the novel, when Zhu becomes able to understand and pity him.