by Lindsay Wong
Before Osoyoos, I had trusted my mother implicitly, believing that she was going to save us from the Woo-Woo and keep me relatively safe. But loss of familial trust is like a screwdriver in the eye or a sledgehammer in the forehead—it’s more the shock that causes the internal damage, and you don’t even think about the pain or the bleeding or the spreading infection of hate until later. My mother had never been violent towards me—she had screamed, yelled, and carelessly threatened, but she had never caused me any real physical harm, and I think that it was this hard disbelief that kept me relatively high-functioning and level-headed in the trailer.
Although I did question whether this was my mother or an actual ghost.
To drown out my freak-show screeching, my ghoulish NOOOOOs, my father quickly turned on the radio to the staticky cackle of the CBC, his soundtrack as he skimmed the newspaper. He was often cowardly, and now I think he was afraid that my mother would set him on fire if he dared interfere, or even worse, force him to survive on nothing but burnt toast for the week. He claimed that he dreaded all “white people food” more than he disliked camping with Auntie Beautiful One. My younger siblings had avoided her anger, picked up their books, and plugged in their music players, pretending to be busy—this is what we usually did if there was trouble near us. Someone could be twitching on the floor, obviously and deliriously Woo-Woo, and we would still be leisurely slurping our breakfast of watery congee and dehydrated egg—as long as it didn’t affect us.
The Wongs: Chinese stoicism gone wrong, too terrified or pragmatic to squeal for help, so we attempted to ignore the Woo-Woo.
And in that moment I felt strangely separated from my body. It was not me on the bunk bed, curled up in a ball, screaming and sobbing. I was somewhere else, watching the entire scene from a panicked fly’s point of view. But that miserable moment was an indication of a loss of my dependence and ferocious loyalty, when my mother became grotesque and cartoonish, when I lost my friend (my only friend) and somewhat untrustworthy household ally. This exciting, paroxysmal woman was not allowed to be a monster, especially since I had always been more than a little sympathetic to her and almost always took her side when she was arguing with my father. But the truth was, like my father, she was both a hero and a villain, someone I could and could not depend on. This knowledge that she was both a kindly Dr Jekyll and an errant Mr Hyde made me fearful and mistrustful of her, and growing up, I continued to wonder (still do) who my mother was. Would she be the concerned woman who phoned me in New York at five a.m. to make sure I ate breakfast, or would she be the deranged harpy who called my midtown internship at noon to scream about ghosts?
I tried to move, but pain neurons suddenly went blitzkrieg all over my ankle. Quickly, I soccer-kicked my mother in the shoulder with the other foot—a reflex. I thrashed against the tangle of blankets and crashed out of the top bunk as she tumbled backwards to get out of my way. I lurched over the linoleum, locked myself in the bathroom, and like an evergreen, fell clumsily into the miniature trailer tub, trying not to panicpanicpanic. The room was getting smaller, but it could have been my woozy, flickering vision, which was blurring with little black spots, like ants crawling over a white television screen.
“It’s not like you need both feet, because you don’t move anyway,” my mother called out, in an almost motherly, reassuring way. She was waiting for me outside because she was concerned about the ghosts getting me rather than worrying about my minor injury. Huddled in the bathtub, the white shower curtain whipping around me like a teasing spirit, I sprayed cold water on my foot, which felt like I had a horrific sunburn. I was trembling so hard I thought my heart would implode. My arms were stiff and awkward, and I had trouble aiming the shower head. It was like I wasn’t in control of my body anymore, fuelled only by unadulterated survival instinct. Like a chicken that keeps going until it notices that its head has gone permanently missing. My instinct was to quickly put the fire out, and then to not think about what had happened if I wanted to get through the day.
It was what I would learn to always do: distance myself from my existing reality, shrinking inside myself, like crumpled aluminum foil, so that I wasn’t a real living person anymore. An eggshell of something cruel and numb and atrocious. Like one of those permanently smiling animal heads displayed in a hunter’s living room, immobilized by the time and trauma of its death. It was here that I became more monster than girl.
“Hey, you have to wake up when I fucking tell you to, okay?” my mother yelled, checking the bathroom to see if I was still alive and unpossessed.
My mother had survived Third-World poverty in what had once been the rural outskirts of Hong Kong. Her grandfather’s prosperous merchant family had sold their schizophrenic daughter (my grandmother) to a poor man for just 100 bucks before jumping ship to Hongcouver. Not only had my grandmother been cut off from the family fortune, but she had basically been abandoned in a backwater village to run around barefoot and be infamously crazy. So my mother and her siblings had grown up with nothing to eat but all the cigarettes they cared to smoke. Gung-Gung, my grandfather, doled out economy packs like candy because he got them for free with his gambling, win or lose. I imagined my mother and my aunties and uncles as toddlers: squatting in ankle-deep mud, chubby black flies chewing the thick grease off their scalps, smoking cigarettes, having a blast. Because as soon as you turned two years old, Gung-Gung proudly handed you your very own pack to help with the hunger. When they were lucky enough to buy a whole chicken, only the boys could partake in the skimpy meal, and I imagined my mother as a kid, sulkily huffing and puffing on her cigarettes all day long as she watched her brothers gorge on fresh meat.
Each of the eight kids had a favourite sibling or someone they felt a little sorry for. My mother looked out for my aunt, who was six years younger. She was responsible for plucking lice out of Beautiful One’s thick, horsey hair, and when Beautiful One was too vain to want an ugly boy’s haircut, my mother would slap her into agreement. A sympathetic auntie once told me: “Lucky you! You got the meanest person in the family for your mommy!” which was true, because my mother was certainly the most demanding sister. In times of famine and hardship, having my mother around meant that you had a better chance of survival.
At mealtimes, the quickest or the biggest kid got the most rice through speed or physical intimidation. In those simple village days, dinners were violent world wars, so alliances and strategies had to be forged and schemed. If you were not a blessed boy, the chicken thighs were definitely out of the question, but as a little girl, you could always brawl over a measly gizzard or a bleeding poultry heart. My mother shared her dinner organs with my aunt, and sometimes she did not eat.
This was the compassionate side of my mother that I had never seen, and it seemed that it had slowly leaked out, like battery acid, during her marriage to my father, who had a selfishly polarizing effect on her. It was almost as if she had to hide any slivers of kind-heartedness from my father, to avoid being discovered for what she really was, or what she could be. Show a little self-sacrificing compassion and my father might mock you. Then a nasty ghost would take possession of you.
At dinner parties, when the aunties and uncles talked about the old days, they loved to compare the exact size and length of their parasites. Supposedly, these were dangling snakes that they had to pluck out from their assholes, and my mother always bragged about her squiggling cobra being four feet long, whereas Beautiful One said hers was a beast at six feet. They could spend hours arguing over whose monster worm was scarier, which one was hairier, whose had a googly eye. And I assumed that because they had nothing to focus on back then except their miserable poverty, this was what they discussed to pass the hours as they happily puffed a pack a day. When the dimensions and forms of these mythological serpents had been discussed to death, the siblings all complained about their terrible childhood hunger. To reassure themselves that a food shortage did not exist anymore, they ordered in dozens of cardboard pizzas, soggy boxes of
saturated fried chicken, and entire menus from the greasy spoons for Lunar New Year. The sweet and sour pork bleeding a vicious celebratory red, the black fermented fish heads tossed in maggoty fried rice, everything and anything ordered to make up for not eating when they were children. Of course, all the cousins had lost our appetites by now, and we stared at the foot-long slimy rice noodles, the caterpillar-like vermicelli coagulating in sludgy sauce with queasy, unspeakable horror.
To this day, my mother will defend Beautiful One from anything, and their bond is so savage and sisterly that no one else can compete. Everyone and everything came second to their darkly indestructible friendship. The old days were full of bitter survival stories and used as modern-day scare tactics, carefully employed to guilt and manipulate my cousins and me into behaving. None of us wanted to wake up with worms wriggling out of our butts like hard leftover spaghetti. It was my mother’s heart-thrashing stories about mystical parasites and violent famines that made her and my aunt seem like tough-luck people who could be capable of extraordinary sacrifice or kindness.
Numbly, I nursed my lightly barbecued foot in the bathtub. The cold water felt refreshing and extraordinary, and seemed to lessen the pain. When it puffed up pink and tingly, I decided it was no longer part of my body. It was not my foot, it did not belong to me, and I would be absolutely fine; such an offensive appendage might eventually fall off. I could have stayed in the bathroom for the entire morning or a month or a year, but it felt like only five minutes.
When I peeled back the sliding bathroom door, my mother impatiently threw the first aid kit at me, which smacked my shoulders like a volleyball. She was being what she thought was motherly and sympathetic and helpful. But at thirteen, I did not know that this whole incident and her reaction weren’t remotely normal. I did not know that it wasn’t socially unacceptable to go around burning people to wake them up—I thought that what she had done was brutal and uncompromising but certainly effective. Was it necessary? No. Painful? Yes. But was there a quicker way to get me out of bed? Probably not. I was beginning to come to terms with what she’d done—in the Wong way, at least. In our family, people did idiotic and medium-evil things to one another because they were possessed and not in control, so it was best not to think too much about the horrors of whatever had been said and done because there was often no answer. We excused our behaviour by blaming the ghosts.
“Finally awake?” she eventually asked me, like she was casually inquiring if I wanted eggs or oatmeal for breakfast. She was acting like it had never happened, and it irked me that the incident was not even a little momentous, like not recognizing a double-digit birthday or graduation from a prestigious college. “Did you fall asleep on the toilet? You’re too young to have hemorrhoids like Daddy.
“You are going running with Uncle E.T.,” she said.
In retrospect, I see she really thought that she was helping me, especially by enlisting my extreme uncle in our family weight-loss project. She looked at me as if I had somehow disappointed her, as if I did not want to get better and fight off whatever demon (i.e., puberty) was making me uncomfortably pudgy. Our family was compulsively preoccupied with an unattainable thinness, so an average-sized North American was thought to require a gastric bypass.
My mother said: “We’re all trying to help you, but you’ll never go anywhere in life because you spend too much time sleeping. It’s twelve! It’s the only way, okay?”
I was not permitted to eat breakfast, so I had to limp hungrily after scary Uncle E.T., who charged enthusiastically across the desert. I was not thrilled to be in his company. Another interesting fact about him: he had been a proud guest of multiple concentration camps and top-security prisons back in his native Vietnam. These were just basic biographical particulars that he casually told people, like you might tell someone where you had grown up or gone to school. He was a tyrant about toilet paper and a convicted criminal.
Uncle E.T. shouted at me to hurry up, because we were going to do what he was forbidden to do in jail: cross-country sprinting. Auntie Beautiful One marrying some moneyed gangster was not shocking to the family, but what was horrifying was that he was Vietnamese instead of Chinese, which disturbed all the blood purists in the family, who thereby considered him inferior. His nationality was thought to be more alarming than his profession and distorted appearance. No one in our family cared that he had gone to jail or maybe killed one or two people. This was all in the past, and what was done was done, and there was no point feeling guilt or remorse. It was a methodical and frighteningly effective means of survival, an inability to hold a pretty decent grudge, which meant that we had much shorter and simpler memories than pet goldfish.
“FAT, FAT, FAT!” Uncle E.T. announced helpfully, as if shouting to warn me about an unforeseen danger, and I worried that I had to go running alone with a highly probable killer; for surely, my uncle hadn’t killed anyone since immigrating to Canada, so what if he were presented with this wonderful opportunity? There were so many places in a vast desert to hide my body, and how would I even outrun him with an injured foot? I was an easy victim, a quick kill. And although my parents might be sad for thirty minutes, forty-five minutes later, they would share a bottle of gin with Uncle E.T. and say it was all in the past.
I really didn’t want to get murdered and then eaten by buzzards and rattlesnakes. I hadn’t even figured out what I wanted to do with my life yet. Middle school graduation was in a year, and it was true that I wasn’t naturally good at anything (classical piano did not count, because I had tutors who screamed at me daily, so I had no choice but to improve). Besides, I could not rely on my family to write a decent obituary for me; it’d be full of errors, and I did not think they would even spell my name correctly.
“SO YOUNG SHOULD NOT BE SO FAT,” Uncle E.T. crowed, laughing, and then I was certain he was not going to kill me if he wanted to fix me. Like my mother and every adult in my life, he claimed to always have my best interests in mind. As I watched his large dented basketball head bounce up and down, he cheered: “YOU HAVE MAJOR PROBLEM, LINDSAY! I WILL REPAIR! What happen if Lindsay have to go to jail when she grow up? The fat first to get killed! Hahaha!”
The quails sang a thick and horrible song, and a few black flies buzzed near my ear, biting me and drawing blood. I could see our trailers parked beside each other and hear the eerie, wild animal noises of the desert, which seemed less frightening than our makeshift travelling asylums.
Osoyoos was a popular holiday town surrounded by the scorched tangles of barbed briar bush, a fried shrubby mess. It really didn’t make sense to come here unless you skinny-dipped or sailed sleepily across the country’s most tepid lake. Our family preferred the vast shopping mall to desiccated nature. Mostly, my family liked how far away the town was from crazy Poh-Poh.
“It’s Osoyoos, Mom,” my mother had said on the phone, clearly relieved that she had an excuse not to take our grandmother on vacation with us. “If you can’t pronounce it, you can’t come. Boo hoo, I know it really sucks to be you.”
There was nothing to do in Osoyoos for our type of suburban Chinese family, so to pass the time, we huddled miserably, suffocating in the choky desert heat, inside our claustrophobic 150-square-foot mobile cabins, skinny, rectangular travelling motels that had the frigid luxury and malfunctioning comfort of unplugged commercial freezers. This was what we thought real North Americans did: that we were fruitfully living the American dream if we owned a brand-new RV per family.
So for an entire month, to prove that we had assimilated and succeeded in the New World, we sat in our housecoats and mostly watched each other across a foldable table. The emergency travel keyboards were brought out daily for piano practice because all the cousins had a competition in a few months and we all had to learn an identical repertoire. I did not want to practise in the desert and annoyed everyone by only playing “Flight of the Bumblebee” to encourage the killer bees, which burrowed persistently through the RV’s screens, to go right ahead and s
ting the shit out of my mother. I was still furious at her for burning me and then seeming to forget about it.
Eventually, Auntie Beautiful One complained loudly about her boredom, so one afternoon, she bought a rubber collapsible boat and told me I had to keep her company. I didn’t mind; I was tired of practising the piano. Her youngest daughter, Flowery Face, wanted to come along too. But Beautiful One sent her away, because it was no secret she disliked her five-year-old daughter, blaming Kid Number 3 for her slightly saggy belly. She claimed that my cousin had stolen some of her beauty while in the womb, for which she could not be forgiven. Ours was a culture and a family of deep blame. Already I was realizing that you could easily become a leper if you were born with the wrong ears or a mole in a suspicious, unlucky place. Her other two kids were more independent and didn’t seem to care what their mother was doing.
Never happy, Beautiful One had been born vain, cursed for modern-day life when my grandfather, Gung-Gung, foolishly gave her such a lofty name at birth, as he wanted her to grow up to be divinely beautiful. She did grow up to be quite beautiful, with spongy, unblemished skin and boar-like, black hair—the kind of mythological Chinese beauty that could be effortlessly auctioned. At just four years old, she had almost been sold to a man who admired her good looks, and Gung-Gung could have gotten six months’ worth of food money in exchange for Beautiful One. My mother, afraid to lose her favourite sister, had begged her father not to, and promised to eat less if Beautiful One could stay. Luckily, Gung-Gung had a soft spot for my mother, whose birth been followed by two revered sons, which in Chinese culture, meant that she was Quiet Snow, bringer of boys: lucky, blessed.
“Go away! I see you way too much,” Beautiful One snapped at poor Flowery Face, who cried and gave me a mean look. Auntie had never been maternal, the kind of silly, very colourful girl-woman who shocked people when she said that she had three children. “Out of sight, please! Can I just talk to my favourite niece in fucking peace?”
