The Woo-Woo

by Lindsay Wong

  My grandmother became a patient of Burnaby Hospital’s psych ward for three months. This concluded Poh-Poh’s psychiatric tour of suburbia, and I was admittedly relieved.

  After a while, my mother, too frightened and stubborn, refused to visit the psych ward, because she did not believe Poh-Poh was trying hard enough to fight her demon. She did not like quitters or wimps, and she felt strongly that Poh-Poh was both. But it soon turned out that Poh-Poh’s physical hurt was authentic; X-rays confirmed she had indeed splintered her tailbone violently crashing down a flight of stairs. For once in her life, my mother had absolutely nothing to say. Unlike her sisters, she did not feel any relief, slamming our kitchen cupboards as hard as she could when the doctors phoned with the diagnosis.

  “These doctors,” she finally hollered, frustrated when she had recovered from shock, “can’t see ghosts! They misdiagnose your Poh-Poh all the time!”

  As she stalked around our kitchen, screaming and smashing cupboards, I imagined Poh-Poh in the psych ward like a terrified phantom, trying to call “a mo,” which means mother in Chinese. Mother, mother, mother, are you there? she would try to wail at no one. But my grandmother’s jaw would not close no matter how hard we yelled at her to try.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE EMPTY

  It came as no surprise to anyone that I was having a problem with a girl at school, someone in an affluent Taiwanese gang (her father was minor Taipei mafia). Having never mastered my father’s orders to alternate between two friends “like shoe,” I was still a loner, and those on the Poteau resented, feared, and sometimes mocked me for my meanness, fatness, and newly acquired speech impediment—an old man’s stutter to join my lisp.

  This unpleasant Taipei girl belonged to a gang of left-in-the-West kids, the children of overseas criminals who often bought their teenage offspring their very own Poteau McMansions and left them to fend for themselves when they returned to their home countries for business.

  As a teenager, I often wondered how disrespectful you had to be, or who you must have killed, to be exiled across the eastern continent from a glittering metropolis like Hong Kong or Shanghai and dumped on such a ghastly mountain in Canada, of all places. It made me wonder if my family hadn’t left the slums of Hong Kong, would I have thrived better as a street beggar than a suburban high school student.

  At our high school, the Taiwanese gang was composed of the typical kind of rich kids who got BMWs and Hummers for their birthdays, but they were also the kind of Asian supremacists who would head-bash the pastiest white kids at school with baseball bats in the parking lot, making the Tri-City News once in a while. Anyone they thought wasn’t Chinese-looking enough or was just plain funny-looking was not safe.

  That year, 2002, when I was in tenth grade, classical mythology was in vogue, and all the immigrant assimilation consulting companies in Asia were recycling Greek gods to help new Westerners fit in. For a lot of money, you got a “trendy” white person’s name and some lessons in North American social customs, though the companies often distributed false information. One of my distant cousins, for instance, was taught in etiquette class to say “Thank you!” instead of “Excuse me!” after burping and passing gas. His suggested English name was King Solomon until our family intervened.

  This was because in Asia it was believed that Westerners couldn’t pronounce Chinese names, so our high school had a lot of boys named Artemis and Herodotus, or pimply, round-faced girls called Hephaestus. One poor girl from Macau, with halting machete English, had pronounced her new name as Hepatitis in homeroom, which, unfortunately, stuck.

  Somehow, people in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong thought these names were easier to pronounce than Chow Yun-fat or Zhang Ziyi. The previous trend had been Old Testament names, which had been a lot simpler, as everyone in middle school had just been called Samson or Delilah.

  Demeter, the Taiwanese girl I was having a problem with, was skinny with prickly orange hair. She didn’t like that I was awkward and chunky. Where she came from, everyone was small and slim and size double zero, but my broad back and size-fourteen ass must have blocked her vision in science class because she would jab me with a ruler whenever the teacher wasn’t looking. Being wide and hockey player–sized made me feel queasy and embarrassed, as if I were always wearing too many layers of ill-fitting wool clothing. In regular North America, I might have been average, but in the fussy suburbs of Hongcouver, where the standards were Hong Kong (tougher than Hollywood), where my own mother and aunties worried about their thinness, I was borderline obese.

  Unfortunately, I took after the women on my mother’s side of the family, who must have had some overriding troll blood in them. When they were teenagers, pus-filled boils that made acne look silly and mouldy-looking eczema like leathery lizard scales sprouted on their scalp, face, and body. Clucking at the oily scabs on my head, my mother and her sisters said, “Aiya, why so ugly-ah! You will look like a girl maybe when you turn twenty-five or forty.”

  My mother had been bullied for looking like a furry boy gnome in high school: in the late seventies, white kids chucked eggs at her head and told her to crawl back to the smelly hole of China. This made her angry, then sad, and then angry again, and she always said, “If some asshole wants to fight you, you don’t run away, especially if they hate Chinese people. You make them cry until they are sorry.” This was a life lesson that I took as seriously as I would take my post-graduate studies.

  My mother never played the victim card, though she could have, so neither did I. Yet there was something complex about this decision to remain tough at all costs: I was becoming hardened emotionally to protect myself from vulnerability. Like my mother had before me, and her mother before her—you could say it was a family tradition. It would take me years to realize it didn’t work. We just couldn’t grapple with our feelings. We didn’t have time. We just repressed them until they exploded out of us—turned us Woo-Woo. But what choice did we have?

  On the Poteau, everyone said that the Taiwanese were almost as vicious as the thuggish Vietnamese, not as standoffish as the Hong Kong FOBs (i.e., fresh-off-the-boat immigrants) or as snobby as the old-money Singaporeans, but much classier than all Mainland new-money Chinese. We were all ethnically Chinese, all Asian, but we stuck to our own cliques and gangs.

  Since jabbing me in the back didn’t get a rise out of me, one day Demeter struck a match and decided to set my jacket sleeve on fire. My own mother and now my classmate had tried to set me alight, and it seemed to me that this was what you did to people you were not fond of. I thought that it might be my destiny to exit the world on fire and that the sadistic universe was always telling me to be near a functioning fire alarm.

  Stubborn, resilient Demeter, with her Taiwanese work ethic, blew on the tiny orange spark like a giant birthday candle. I slapped the flames out, but the garment was damaged, unwearable. The fire had sizzled some of the meat on my forearm, singed the short feathery hairs. The teacher was having a coffee break in the hallway, too distracted to care.

  “You’ll be thorry,” I lisped-stuttered at Demeter, and threw my jacket in a garbage can and skipped the rest of science class.

  On the Poteau, those who knew me understood I could become a foul-mouthed, frothing bovine if provoked. I liked getting my way and would fight to the end. That afternoon, I exploded like a special-effects heavy action movie. I retaliated the best way I knew how: by bruising Demeter’s kneecaps into beautiful mauve flora with a ringette stick in PE (ringette is a milder form of hockey played with a blue rubber doughnut, which was originally invented for big-boned pioneer-type Canadian females to play).

  My rampage continued. Inside me was a red-eyed hockey fury, a mechanism to cope with the blundering uncertainty of my home life, which wouldn’t let me quit while I was winning. The next day, when the teachers bussed us to the Poteau country club to stand around and pretend to play golf, I struck again. Hockey had taught me to swing a golf club at someone’s legs like a clumsy but powerful slap
shot, and my aim was true. In those days, whenever I lashed out, I was fighting my mother, my father, and the Woo-Woo. I did not yet know that I was also fighting an aspect of myself—the part of me that always felt out of control—and losing.

  “Sucks to be you,” I said unhappily to Demeter, throwing the club on the grassy knoll.

  I thought that the bitch really deserved raw meaty blossoms for knees, and I felt just a bit more human and three-dimensional and a little extraordinary when Demeter broke down and cried on the golf course. Like me, sociopathic toughness was in her upbringing and tempered in her DNA. But when I saw that she was truly broken inside, it did not make me feel sorry for her; it just made me feel that I was less damaged than someone else, because I had made her cry.

  “Stop,” she said, blubbering on the ground, looking afraid of me.

  Crying, I cruelly thought, was for sissies and my mother’s ghosts. I am ashamed to say that I thought I had won the fight because I made Demeter boo-hoo in front of a small, wonder-eyed audience, and in my aberration of black Wong logic, this meant that I was better, stronger, and tougher in every petty and sadistic way.

  Unsurprisingly, the principal sent both of us home for a two-week head-clearing vacation and told us “to cool off.” I was also sent to anger-management class, but my mother, who didn’t believe in therapy, pulled me out after just one private session.

  “Bullshit!” she had yelled in exasperation on our way home. “White people don’t understand how things are done. Don’t they know that cowards don’t get anywhere? I heard from Auntie Beautiful One that anger management is a cult!”

  Apparently, in our sophisticated modern century, you couldn’t smack people with golf clubs or ringette sticks whenever you wanted to. Life was not an epic hockey game, even though I spent four days a week at the rink and my father had paid me to hit people in the head so they might get moderate to severe concussions.

  But the problem with attacking someone in a gang was that Demeter had many connections, and my parents were convinced that I would end up on the six o’clock news, my head smashed in with a custom-designed baseball bat. Their anxiety confused me (they chose odd moments to be concerned parents). But I did not want their help when I overheard my mother phoning her sisters and her brothers-in-law, casually inquiring if someone knew a dependable Chinatown gangster that we could hire for protection. It was suggested that Uncle E.T. be notified, but he was Vietnamese, and his kind of people were not to be trusted unless supervised. It wasn’t an attack from that bullheaded Demeter that concerned my parents. They knew I could take care of myself. Instead, it was confronting an entire gang of angry teenagers who were too lazy to exercise their fists and preferred to use professional sports equipment to give their victims brain damage.

  “They probably won’t even drive you home,” my mother said, a little indignant.

  Was she kidding? As usual, she was worrying about the wrong thing, which irritated me like a light bulb–sized blister. I think some part of her was trying to be maternal, but she was scared and didn’t know what to do, and this made her seem clueless. Like all the women in my mother’s family, she seemed to repress her weaker emotions, stuffing down sadness and fear, while distorting them into other feelings.

  “It’s the least they can do,” she continued. “We all live so close by! You know, these Taiwanese can be so rude! Not like Hong Kong or Singapore!”

  “Good luck,” my father said, dropping me off at school the first day I was allowed back, and he meant it. I suppose he was of the take-care-of-yourself-don’t-die parenting mentality. Even though I was a disappointing extension of himself, we were still related by powerful and dangerous Wong blood, after all. I hated him for his resignation, but once again, I was facing a grave fact: how little control my parents had been given in this New World. My father didn’t know what to do, either.

  “Lindsay, if you get coma,” he continued apprehensively, “you will be a sad potato for rest of your life and you will have no future. Remember, potatoes don’t get to watch TV! So don’t get fight, okay? Stay alive.” As usual, he tried to lighten the mood with his signature black humour.

  My guidance counsellor sounded worried. I had been sent to her office for another “casual chat” as soon as I sat down in homeroom. Our conversation mirrored the one I would have with the neurologist in midtown.

  “Lindsay, your teachers say you’re aggressive and display anti-social tendencies,” she said. “You don’t have any empathy, and the other kids have told me that they are afraid of you. Normally, I have to teach students to be less passive and more assertive. But you need to learn to control yourself, okay? I want to welcome you back to school but also to remind you to please think of others.”

  “Okay, I’ll try not to do it anymore. No promises, though.” I didn’t think this was a huge deal or realize that I sounded frighteningly glib.

  “You should spend the rest of the day thinking about our conversation,” she said, looking unhappy. “I need you to take this seriously.”

  Having no idea what I was supposed to contemplate, I thought about how much I needed to work on Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu, how my music tutors and judges at local competitions said I was technically good, but I had no emotions or credible feelings whatsoever; me playing Chopin, with his tricky, romanticized rubato, was a terrible, mechanical mismatch.

  I had no way of understanding it then, but it was my grotesque fear of not understanding the world outside the Belcarra that paralyzed me, making me numb to everything. I decided that if the other kids did not like me, not even realizing that my behaviour was hostile, I would concentrate on hoarding piano trophies and winning glossy gold medals rather than wooing their elusive friendships. The other Chinese kids travelled in brutal teenage packs, communally smoked grade A Poteau cannabis in bathroom stalls, and attended each other’s Cantonese dance parties with an eccentric, unexplainable excitement. Since I did not know how to introduce myself or integrate myself into any tribe at my high school or in my neighbourhood, I had decided to stay far away. I was envious that other kids knew how to get along, how to make friends to do things like hang out at the mall or go to the movies.

  Instead, I stayed home to numbly practise the piano for eight or nine hours a day or attended private skating and puck lessons at the rink to increase my speed and improve my caveman slap shot. In my coaching sessions, we did not address wishy-washy feelings and emotions but emphasized winning and cutthroat competition. This would help me later in life: I seized obstacles like a pockmarked pit bull in a fighting ring, refusing to accept failure or long-term illness. At home, my parents did not ever ask how I was feeling; we spoke only about guaranteed results and supernatural entities. “You get gold?” my father would ask at the dinner table, whereas my mother wanted to know if I had seen a poltergeist in the living room.

  “Empty?” my father asked after I grudgingly explained the events at school. “Why the counsellor think you are empty? But you show them all your big piano award and they will be impress and say you are very full. Lindsay, why they call you empty? Some new bullshit term for well rounded? You have hockey, music, and you will get all A this semester because you have tutor for everything, no excuse. Mommy and I found you the guy who write your geography textbook to tutor you because you complain you don’t understand his bad writing skill and get sixty-five percent on test. No more excuse for the Empty to not understand how to read a map.”

  “Empathy” was not a word my family could define, so of course I was raised to be “empty.” Feelings, I had been taught, were for unseemly Poh-Pohs, pathetic people prone to demonic possession. The more vulnerable emotions, such as sadness, fear, and even affection, were seen as threats. Empathy was a luxury reserved for those with enough emotional reserves to care for more than themselves, who were beyond survival mode. My family had not gone beyond survival. I frequently rotated between fear and anger, spiralling into anxiety, and then plummeting into distress, but I could not explain the g
odawful Woo-Woo emotions inside me.

  “Hungry?” my mother or father would ask at the dinner table, which really meant, “Are you okay? Are you sad?”

  I might then reply that I had gas, which meant that all was fine and all ghostly weakness would pass. Yet as a teenager, I was made from tragic turbulence, a godly 7.5 on the anger-management scale.

  Really, I didn’t know why the guidance counsellor was making such a terrible fuss.

  There was no fixing me, but there were attempts. For example, the school guidance counsellor contrived a friend for me that I would most certainly unravel; at least, I didn’t see any other way to connect with another person than through destructive means. To fix my “empty problem,” the guidance counsellor assigned me a project whereby five days a week I had to push a disabled girl around in a wheelchair to learn “empty.”

  This Human Empathy Project truly unnerved me. How could I care for myself and someone else? I was not a natural-born nurse or kind-hearted caregiver—how would I survive? I begged the guidance counsellor to hold me back a year or give me permanent garbage duty, but she rolled her eyes and sighed.

  Wheelchair “Wobin,” as the other kids called my charge, was deemed by my classmates to be “strange-looking,” with her hefty head and mini spider limbs. She was half Chinese, half Indigenous, which further frightened the large East Asian population at the school: “She’s in a wheelchair because Chinese and Indian do not mix,” the other kids gossiped, fascinated. “My parents said this is what happens if you have sex with a non-Chinese person, and that it serves her parents right.”

  If Wobin’s boxy torso was a tree trunk, her arms were branches. And her poor fingers were practically lobster claws, clenched together in fleshy baseball mitts—she was a cruel caricature of Frosty the Snowwoman. Wheelchair Wobin had been born paralyzed from the waist down, and because fate was grossly unfair, she had a terrible speech impediment, so she could not even pronounce her own name—Robin. Kids thought this was wildly funny, even more amusing than my lisping stutter.