by Lindsay Wong
Moaning like an undead cartoon monster, my mother fed us candy for breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner but would forget to brush our hair and did not scold us for not cleaning our yellow-splattered teeth. In our family, a mother was someone who made sure her children were never hungry, and she tried as much as she mentally could. But at that point, fed up with our life in the court, I saw that my mother had been born with a heart the size of one of my doll’s shoes and would have benefited from some family downsizing—like maybe if it were only me.
Besides, even though I was only six going on seven, I didn’t think I had ever been a baby or a toddler because of the famous Wong family procreation myth, delivered with the also famous Wong half-funny-half-cruel-all-too-confusing-to-untangle wit, which explained that my parents had fished me out of a downtown Dumpster.
“That’s why you’re garbage,” my father would explain, boasting that my origin story was extraordinarily funny. “All garbage have low IQ. Not like Daddy at all. I’m very, very smart because I’m from library.”
“Then why you get me from Dumpster?” I had asked once after starting elementary school, speaking in a churlish, babyish Chinglish. Being sensitive yet spacey, I took his every word at hurtful, no-bullshit face value.
“It’s free,” my father declared, sounding sombre. “You think we want to pay money for you? Mommy and I know how to save money on unimportant things.”
“Why I not important?” I said, sad and a bit resentful.
“Because you are from garbage.”
This was my father’s typical response, a robotic, jokey, unhelpful statement that drove my mother absolutely batshit; it was characteristic of him to carelessly wave a hemorrhaging red cape at a rabid bull, for my mother did not understand humour or indirectness. How they met and married is still a complete mystery to me. It was never once spoken about in our family and deemed irrelevant and irritating as small talk.
“I found your mommy in garbage can,” my father joked when I asked.
“What she doing there?” I said.
“Just like you, no one want her. Like Mommy, like daughter.”
They did not have any wedding photos, and I imagine that my parents’ courtship was non-existent, their wedding a dour but efficient signing of papers. To this day, I have never seen my parents touch one another, as my father kept my mother and everyone at an emotional and physical distance of exactly two feet.
Now it seems exceptionally cruel to mock a small child while taunting a panicky wife, but all this happened before cable television became mainstream affordable, and there were no strong male role models, like Dr Phil, to provide complementary domestic counsel.
“It’s like talking to the fucking answering machine!” my mother often complained about my father when he joked about our Dumpster origins or made fun of her thinning hair. “What the fuck are you supposed to say? Talk to you later? Have a nice fucking day?”
My parents possessed no shared interests and didn’t seem to communicate in the same language.
And even though I find my father’s jokes funny now, his black humour wounded me as a child. Believing that I was from an indiscriminate downtown Dumpster, instead of a clean office wastebasket like my engineering father’s, was like a dull axe through the skull. As adults, my father and I speak an analogous dialogue to each other now: one that is equally foul-mouthed, sarcastic, blunt, and dark. We can laugh sadistically at ourselves, but back then his jokes could break my papery sense of self.
I was so desperate to be noticed that I would do nearly anything for attention. After all, my parents were too busy battling the Woo-Woo between themselves. In those food-court days, just a sprinkling of my mother’s strange affection, even a mild screaming, some trademark volleying of swearing, would make me feel appreciated—anything to make me as important as her ghosts, whom she spoke to at length, saying, “Hello, good morning, good afternoon, leave me the fuck alone, goddammit!” And if I couldn’t get it from my mother, I’d get it from the teachers at the Montessori, earning me a reputation as an above-average bully who used her superpowers to irk the headmistress and special needs teachers who believed that I had ADD and autism. I screamed and howled like a wounded rhinoceros for their attention—mimicking my parents because I thought this was acceptable social behaviour.
“Lindsay, why did you take off your clothes and throw them in the garbage can?” the headmistress asked me in her office, her face haggard with worry.
“I don’t like clothes,” I announced, jumping on her desk and beating my chest. “I’m from garbage!”
“Put your clothes back on or I’m calling your mother!” she yelled. And my mother would arrive two hours late, shrugging and unapologetic, with two McDonald’s cheeseburgers and a carton of fries. It seemed that she existed just to feed me.
And her arrival with tasty McDonald’s only encouraged me: I punched a little girl with Down syndrome, snipped another girl’s braid off, and then happily smashed a little boy in the back of the head with my favourite Dr. Seuss book (Green Eggs and Ham), which got me sent to time out in the cloakroom.
At first, I was terrified to be left alone in the dark, my nose pressed against the cold tiled wall, among the mildewed jackets and the sweetly sour smells of half-eaten sandwiches and fruit. After all, the untrustworthy gloom was where ghosts took your unsuspecting body hostage, which I imagined, based on my parents’ constant neuroses about corporeal possession, was supposed to be as unsettling and scary as visiting the doctor for my biweekly suppository. Prone to bouts of heart-heavy insomnia and eye-twitching paranoia from kindergarten to the twelfth grade, I was always cranky and constipated it seemed. Yet after my second or third transgression at school, I felt hope and optimism. Alone, I could imagine that I was my mother, surrounded by shadowy shapes, and that shoes and backpacks and gym strips were whispering ghosts too.
In the cloakroom, a nasty desperation was brewing inside me, something so frantic and similar to my raging mother’s. It was like a poltergeist was trapped inside my ribcage, banging against my small and insignificant heart. It was like a cyclone of rank supernatural premonition.
It was like waiting for someone in my family to get possessed.
Essentially, there was too much sadness boiling inside us, which was why, I like to explain, we blew up.
CHAPTER 2
POT MOUNTAIN
If you do not make friend at school,” my father said, “you will turn out Woo-Woo like your mommy.” Attempting to be funny, he made a cuckoo sign around his earlobe and a face that was supposed to be a drooling, pop-eyed zombie—he liked to imitate his wife to relieve the tension in our household. “Do you want to wake up and look scary?”
“But you don’t have friend,” I said after the teacher called my parents to tell them that I had difficulty adjusting to middle school.
I had gnashed my half-formed molars, frustrated. For how could I adapt? The formative years of elementary school had been squandered in the food court until my father, fed up, hired a woman from Hong Kong to raise us until my mother’s phobias subsided. It was she who equipped my mother with an arsenal of recipes for Chinese cuisine and taught her how to properly clean.
Middle school was a thrilling possibility for the Wongs to start over, perhaps even a real chance for ostensible middle-class respectability.
“Daddy doesn’t need friend because he is not retarded,” my father continued his humour that edged on spitefulness. He liked to quip that I was mentally disabled since my school had me tested (results: TBD) for everything from Asperger’s to hearing impairment. He went on cheerfully, “Retarded people need friend to help them.”
“How much will you pay me if I make friend?” I asked.
“Five dollar?” my father said.
“Ten dollars,” I said, “and ninety-nine cents.”
Unlike my mother, my father would leave the house for work and somehow, two-faced, was able to form business alliances to function in the professional world in a way I
was learning to function in school. In his own sad, peculiar way, I think he worried about his children’s mental and physical well-being, even if he could be like a standoffish circus clown: preaching advice through hurtful humour and shrill, exaggerated pantomime.
My upbringing made me feel alone. I was a bully without realizing that I was a pretty decent one who casually told teachers to “Fuck off!” when I did not want to participate in class, which was often. After all, this was what my parents would do. But I was certainly not charismatic enough to build up a loyal mean-girl following. My sister and brother were cute, popular children, who seemed easy with others on the playground, but as the eldest, my parents’ sour-faced guinea pig in childrearing, I was afflicted with my mother’s neurosis and father’s zealous anti-social tendencies.
Our Chinese names were supposed to be personal blessings, our parents’ magical gifts for showy, boastful success. My sister’s name was Deep Thinker, but rather than becoming an intellectual, she sometimes seemed to me to be cursed to agonize her thoughts aloud with worrying frequency. CBC Radio 1, an auntie once called her. My brother, Make Lots of Money, was supposed to be blessed to attract abundant wealth, yet he has struggled with unemployment. And I had been named Talented One at birth but because of my hissing lisp and other wild behavioural issues was mostly called by my English name—it didn’t seem as if I had been born with that much talent (I had the gross misfortune not to live up to my name during childhood). It made me sad that I was considered less than my siblings, so I was determined to prove that I was better than them in every way, which would cause a deep and despicable rift between us, a gully of vicious contention.
Still, my father insisted that I should have at least two friends, so I could alternate between them, “like shoe,” he said, even though he had no friends himself.
At that time, I thought that this double standard was supremely unfair. “I had whole entire village of friends in Hong Kong when I was your age,” he bragged when I protested. “I’m so nice that when someone nice to me, I’m ten times nicer. But when someone is mean to me, Daddy is ten times meaner.”
“Why?” I said, confused. “I can play by myself.”
“You are too retarded to not have friend,” he said, frustrated, and then went back to his AutoCAD blueprints. They were usually spread on the dining room table when he decided to work from home to keep watch over my mother, who was still scared of the Woo-Woo ghosts and couldn’t be alone. At least she stopped taking us to the mall’s food court after school when we got older, and her moods seemed to slowly improve. She spent her days and nights in the kitchen, compulsively practicing what our former caretaker had taught her: sometimes origami-wrapping more than a thousand cardboard-coloured wontons and filling two giant freezers.
As an adult, I can see the likelihood that my father did not know enough English to explain the subject of friendship properly, and he was genuinely worried about my happiness, which was already spotted and sour, like my gym strip that hadn’t been washed in more than a year. Having friends was something I couldn’t understand. Although my father had professional acquaintances, and my mother had five close sisters and two brothers, neither of my parents had any friends—my father, I later realized, did not want me to become like my mother.
Our house had been christened the Belcarra by its builder in an effort to make everyone forget it was a boxy McMansion. The name was supposed to give us an element of inflated class and imply an aristocratic lineage that would never exist on a mountain two hours from the city of Hongcouver, a place known for its gigantic Chinese population.
By looking at us, people with no obvious interest in personal hygiene—my mother, siblings, and I had greasy rag-like hair plus eau d’ogre breath—you wouldn’t expect us to be comfortable suburbanites. I was not (still not) allowed to know our finances. But even though I thought we were very poor, we must have been at least comfortably middle class, but not small-time millionaires like some of my aunties and uncles, though Westwood Plateau was an affluent neighbourhood with a few well-known NHL players. My father had purchased the house because it was the cheapest one on the market in the area. The kitchen, dining room, and living room were on the very top floor, which had turned away every potential buyer except him, as our family did not invite people over.
To any sane person, the house’s interior probably resembled a type of rat-like, labyrinthine madness, a privatized mental institution of tiny, almost claustrophobic rooms. This was where our Woo-Woo dwelled, it seemed, inside the Woo: a netherworld aquatic tank swarming with foggy, morose ghosts.
Our isolated mountain had recently been renovated into Step-ford suburbia: real Canadian waterfalls competed with obnoxious fountains, green grass carpets, and dour-faced garden gnomes. You wouldn’t know it now, but only twenty years from when I was growing up, the mountain was known as the boondocks where the pizza guy absolutely did not deliver.
For millionaire migrants of Asia, this was must-have property and everyone snatched up these luxury boxes like accessories. The Chinese loved the mountain so much because the upward slope meant that the money would supposedly stay in our pockets. Many of the white families moaned about the “Asian tsunami” that had flooded their community and lamented the neighbourhood’s terrific ethnic decline into “Chinky Chinatown.”
But the isolation of the Plateau, shrouded by a canopy of black evergreens, was ideal for illegally growing and harvesting pot. The Poteau, as it was mocked in the newspapers, had been declared “a narco-terrorism zone” because of many moneymaking Asians who acquired luxury real estate for grow-ops and meth labs. This was the hottest Gold Mountain in history. The Poteau had become a neighbourhood of Chinese drug millionaires, and it seemed that everyone’s hardworking Chinese parents (three out of seven houses on our cul-de-sac) were cultivating BC bud for $250 an ounce, helping to generate a $6 billion industry for the province. No one ever suspected a hastily constructed show-off McMansion was manufacturing drugs.
When the story of the many marijuana plantations finally broke in 2004, the local newspapers exaggerated the Poteau’s crime rate, making it seem like everyone was always waking up to find a dead body on their flawless turf or a bullet hole in their front door. There was an exciting world that seemed more appealing than scary, from my child perspective. No matter how hard I prayed, I could never come across a corpse sprawled grotesquely on the Belcarra’s ample driveway.
Only once, in 2008, when I was twenty years old, did a meth lab a few streets down go boom, the palatial roof blasting high into the gloomy mountain sky, the glass shards from the foyer’s skylight lashing into the lush fronds of banana trees and splashing into the concave fountain like coins. For weeks, the newspapers raved and gushed and gossiped: “Posh Westwood Plateau House Explodes!”
As kids we heard our parents joke that if you purchased a multi-million-dollar toy castle with a multi-million-dollar view, the sellers threw in the Westwood Poteau Asian Barbie, toting her very own hot-pink meth lab starter kit.
Before the scandal in the news, my family, like everyone else on the block, was on the payroll for our silence. Every week, our neighbours brought over tinny buckets of clacking crustaceans, fine wines, chocolates, and a maybe a small cash gift of fifty dollars or more. There were usually two or three grow-ops on our small cul-de-sac at any given time, which would be immediately replaced after a police raid. At five p.m. at the end of the week, my mother, even when she was unwell, would wait with her carpenter’s hammer, ready to bash our live lobsters before boiling them for dinner. She would gouge out the crustacean’s beady, panicked eyes, and for another week, we would ignore the marijuana plantations reeking next door, and the methamphetamine fortresses down the street that oozed fresh cat piss and dizzying ammonia fumes.
It was only fair that we were paid to tolerate their moist toxic smells.
I grew up to love and expect my bounty of free chocolate—every week was trick or treat, except my neighbours came to me.
&
nbsp; Just a year after we bought the Belcarra, the pinkest Barbie house in the middle of the cul-de-sac, mutual acquaintances whispered that the builder could not pay his debts, so his head was blown off at the Poteau country club, i.e., by Chinese gangsters. His death was hush-hush and did not make the news. I wondered if one of our criminal neighbours had discovered a creative way of killing him.
“What do you mean his head blew up?” I had asked when I was eleven years old, not so secretly thrilled with the wildness of his death. “Was it, like, a bomb? Did his head explode? Did his brains go everywhere? Was it hard to clean up?”
But all the grown-ups in the room told me to shut the fuck up.
“His brain go kaboom because he have low IQ,” my father said, turning this rumour into a lesson about school. He sounded tired and superior, which made me believe him.
There was nothing to see or do on the Poteau, except when our neighbour down the street got her brains eaten by a rebellious teenage black bear (the animal, not the woman, made the news). Everyone who witnessed the attack said the bear had somersaulted through her basement window and eagerly eaten half her head before the police arrived.
I had missed the incident, and then I was at school when another neighbour got his thigh chomped by a coyote when he was out gardening—the coyote only digested a little before deciding he didn’t like the chewy texture of old man. People seemed to forget this was a mountain in rural Canada masquerading as suburbia. You were more likely to be mauled by a gang of homeless bears while unloading groceries than to be bludgeoned to death with a trowel by the Chinese pot gardener.
My fascination with other people’s tragedies made me feel better about my own. I was convinced that nothing would happen while I waited for neighbourly maimings, so I was reduced to spending my summer hiding behind our scraggly bamboo bushes, my double assault Super Soaker sniper rifle pumped full of water and ready to spray at any neighbours I didn’t like. Rowdy and unafraid, I was a yodelling sixth-grade warrior, an assassin orangutan who’d leap out of the shrubbery and soak my screaming victims.
