by Lindsay Wong
“Oh my fucking God,” my mother declared, sighing. “You really are retarded.”
“No, seriously,” I said, eyeing my sister and wondering how many pounds of rice she was worth and whether trading her in would earn me more time with my mother, who was clearly overwhelmed by three kids. Why did my mother have to be so traditional and have my brother? Why couldn’t she just stop with me? Also, did the exchange go by the pound? And how did each party decide what was fair? Some children were bigger boned than others.
This collective obsession with starving meant that our basement, known as the food room, was basically a makeshift earthquake shelter or a post-apocalyptic zombie survival room for all your end-of-the-world needs. Shelves stocked with every type of pasta. Wheat crackers in obnoxious cardboard towers. Plastic bins became vending machines, spewing out every species of granola bar and rice noodle—fresh and stale—manically stockpiled together. I am not kidding when I say that we might buy six family-sized tubs of salsa, and then in the following weeks, my mother would desperately buy another three or four more.
“It’s for emergencies,” she insisted whenever I sniped at her for hoarding groceries. “See that shovel? We’ll dig out the freezer and find water and frozen waffles.”
If western North America did not plummet into the murky Pacific and we did not drown first, if the Belcarra did not topple backwards down the mountain in a mudslide, and if we survived all the terrible afterquakes, the autopsy reports would show that a family of five found shelter but were poisoned by trying to survive on spoiled goods. A nationwide warning would be issued: Update your emergency rations. Look at what happened to those Wongs—they never checked the expiry date. Hadn’t the idiots heard of botulism?
But every August was Chinese Hell Month, also known by Buddhist monks as the Hungry Ghost Festival, which only fuelled my mother’s neurotic worry about ghosts and starvation. Chinese Hell Month proved that my family couldn’t escape the judgment of our ancestors, who came rushing to our house for an overextended visit, so we were supposed to leave out packaged food for our hungry ghosts. Fortunately, we had a year-round food room with countless varieties, which meant we could supposedly please all our dead visitors from last year to the Tang dynasty. In our family, it was believed that those who had abundant food had tremendous wealth and power. Food could make anyone, including monsters, grateful and happy, so if we fed the ghosts, we could prevent possessions and unnatural deaths.
Unfortunately, it was just before Hell Month when news of Gung-Gung’s dying spread, and it was thought that all the hungry ghosts leaving hell were responsible. My grandfather was a long-time sufferer of Parkinson’s disease, and the aunties believed his death was long overdue. Besides, they said, he was paralyzed from the waist down and strapped to a wheelchair, so what else could he possibly do? The best solution, the family had agreed, was to find a convenient date for everyone so that he could kick the bucket.
“He’s a bad man,” my mother explained to my siblings and me, always furious whenever someone mentioned him. “So it’s going to take him many tries to die, not peaceful. He lived in the gambling house and he lost all of our money and brought home other women to laugh at Poh-Poh. So now it really sucks to be him.”
Before his mind went fuzzy, Gung-Gung used to say he didn’t “give a shit” about Poh-Poh and pretended that she didn’t exist.
Over the years, the convulsions in Gung-Gung’s limbs had worsened as his muscles gradually atrophied. It began when he would accidentally catapult his chopsticks across the room. He could be sipping tea or sawing steak, and his miniature Chinese teacup or knife would suddenly spring forward to twirl mockingly on the linoleum floor. “Watch out!” he had to learn to holler in English as his muscles suddenly went berserk and his arms spasmed and pitched whatever utensil he was holding.
In his semi-functional years, as he slumped in his wheelchair, Grandpa became a robot timed to sporadically assassinate his family—he could really turn on you. Then one day his muscles finally stopped quivering, though his feet, which were stuffed into fat woolly ski socks, still shuddered like quaky continents banging into one other: thuck, thuck thuck. But it still looked like he was going to sideways punt you. Sometimes Gung-Gung’s fingers would tremble like they were trying to pounce in a tremulous staccato on the piano or, depending on your point of view, like he very much wanted to claw out an eye or two. It was always an interesting and dangerous experience to be in the same room as him.
Despite Parkinson’s disease and myriad other genetic afflictions, mental illness was our family’s inborn cancer—we would eventually learn that we could not run away from ourselves.
A few days before Chinese Hell Month, I got “possessed.” My mother was sure it was because we hadn’t left the ghosts enough food, even though they couldn’t really eat and it was supposed to be a symbolic gesture. Also, because I constantly ridiculed her about rituals, and she seemed frightened that she couldn’t make me her capable conspirator against her spirits anymore. By now, my siblings and father had stopped speaking to her, responding only with savvy silence or a spare “Shut up.” Because my siblings and I took her illness personally, not understanding it, we followed our father’s example and took any opportunity to dismiss her. Retribution, no matter how petty, I felt at sixteen, was real power. This also meant that if our mother forfeited the terms of our acquaintanceship, she’d be completely ostracized in our home, her ranting attributed to just another moaning ghost.
It had been much too hot to stay indoors, and my siblings wanted cheeseburgers, no more steamed fish on rice, which was what we had most nights. We drove the five minutes to a local restaurant on the mountain, and my mother and I gulped down Bellinis to celebrate the upcoming Chinese Halloween/Chinese Hell Month. Beer-drinking age in our household was nine, because my parents had been raised in flea-infested villages in Hong Kong, where homemade rice alcohol was often safer to drink than well water. But this was my first Bellini, which I thought tasted like toilet cleaner and fruit punch. Family dinner in public, rare, and usually only on Chinese holidays to save money, was always strange, since we really did not know how to communicate civilly. This was quickly done, lest any of us should admit to having fun. No one spoke, and the purpose of dining together in public seemed to be a competition of whoever could be the quietest and quickest eater. Really, we had nothing to say to one another.
Later that evening, my father decided to splurge on a movie for us (we went to the movies once a year for blockbuster action films), and while we were standing in line to purchase our tickets at the Poteau’s only movie theatre, “the ghosts got me” and suddenly I was struck blind. Blood emptied from my head as if I had been flipped upside down, and my vision flickered in and out. The room spun. I staggered to the right and bumped into walls and rammed into a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Shrek. I mowed down a few more movie characters.
I heard my mother screaming, “She’s possessed! Help! Help! Ohmygod, help!”
It happened so quickly that there was no time to be scared. No time to be afraid of the Woo-Woo ghosts, no time to realize that I was no longer in possession of my seizing body. Zombielike, I was staggering around in the dark with my arms in front of me. I could hear people shouting, and swiftly, I was toppling over and smacking my head on the carpet of the lobby. My muscles slackened, and there was piss pouring down my legs and soaking my denim skirt a darker hue. People were shouting even louder, and everything went tarry black.
Then I was abruptly waking up on the floor. The theatre manager had arranged maybe twenty standing movie posters—an impressive circus ring—to hide my unintended solo act. It was supposed to give me some privacy, but now I was on display. Most people on Pot Mountain went to the theatre on Friday, since there was nothing else to do, and they were all crowding and staring. I recognized the neighbours and a few kids I disliked, who snapped pictures of me with their cellphones. I was the Poteau’s opening entertainment before they watched Hollywood blockbuste
rs on the big screen. Slumped in a contortionist’s pose, my left arm snagged behind my back; my entire body was freakishly paralyzed. As if my limbs were anaesthetized.
“Don’t move,” the manager instructed me urgently. “You’ve been unconscious for six minutes. The ambulance is on its way.”
This made me a little angry that I had been reduced to a cinematic preview. At sixteen, I thought I might really be dying, but I didn’t feel too bad about it. Dying seemed temporary and brief, like getting a booster shot for measles, or even getting punched in the face. Besides, if I died now, I wouldn’t have to write college entrance exams in senior year. If I died now, I would not have to worry about Chinese Hell Month and would find out if my ancestors would welcome a semi-skeptic and half-believer. Mostly, I think, as a teenager, I felt that death was not permanent or final, as I’d return as a ghost with abundant powers. Wasn’t my family always going on about the power of the undead?
The theatre manager was still arranging the silver movie poster stands at least a foot apart, so people could still see me.
“Stop doing that,” I slurred at him. Even dying and dizzy, I was still abrasive, a result of my father’s lifelong lesson to never reveal any weakness. I was also humiliated that strangers had seen me in such a weakened state. “Hey, put the posters closer together. You’re doing it all wrong.”
I was still soaking in my pond of pee—it seemed like an hour, but it had only been twenty-five minutes. And then I blacked out again, and the paramedics took a blood sample, pricking my index finger with what looked like a dagger or a thermometer. My stomach churned and cramped. The older, kinder female paramedic rushed me to the bathroom because I insisted I needed to go, but it was much too late and I shat myself. The paramedics, who were incredibly slow-moving in real life, strapped me onto a stretcher and someone propped the movie theatre doors open. I was so groggy I did not care anymore. My mother was jogging enthusiastically beside the lurching stretcher, asking me how many ghosts were housed inside me and if possession hurt at all. She spoke in rapid besieged Cantonese, so the paramedics could not understand. I did not need an interrogation right now, but she was not the kind to ask how you were feeling.
“What’s it like being possessed?” my mother yelled again, as the stretcher bounced up and down a few movie theatre entrance steps. The trip to the ambulance was uncomfortable and dawdling; luckily, I was not an emergency, because the paramedics had parked underground and couldn’t remember where their vehicle was. They argued for a bit, while I tried to move my legs without a lot of luck.
“Am I talking to Lindsay or a ghost?” my mother persisted, looking fascinated. “I’m Lindsay’s mommy. Hello! Hello?”
“Go home,” I mumbled, furious that she was only concerned about the ghosts instead of my well-being. Like anyone and anything else, I was secondary to her obsession, what I didn’t realize then belonged to her cultural superstitions and her mental illness but had only attributed to pure selfishness. “I really need you to get me a change of clothes,” I said.
“Oh, I already sent Daddy and your sister to get your underwear and pants. You know, you smell like shit! Did you poo your pants?”
Before I was clumsily loaded into the ambulance like a package, my mother fiercely argued with the paramedics that she should travel in the back with me, so we could talk in detail about what had happened. I was relieved when I was suddenly plunging into swirly blackness again, a rabbit hole in front of me getting deeper and darker at nauseous velocity. I would not be expected to jabber with her, thank God—she could annoy the ambulance driver instead. But I wouldn’t put it past her to maintain a one-sided dialogue with me even as I gladly passed out. She was panicking about ghosts instead of my health, so I did not want my mother in my conscious space, here, now. I didn’t want her to pursue me into my pause-button blackness, my own intermission from life. I resented myself for being so vulnerable and weak, especially in public. And I could not bear for both my parents to criticize me for passing out.
What I most wanted from my mother was silence, especially if she wasn’t going to ask me how I was feeling. It took a dramatic possession in a movie theatre to be worthy of her attention, and then I didn’t want it if I was going to be accused of having a mental deficiency.
And even though I would have loudly told everyone that I most definitely resented my mother at this point, this wasn’t completely true—she was like a shaggy mole or a bad facial feature that you were born with and had to make peace with or surgically remove. But in this situation, she was a starving mosquito.
In the emergency room, the other paramedic, a junior in college, argued with the triage nurse, who was upset that I had drunk a cocktail underage and wanted to phone a social worker.
“Dude, she only had one drink with her parents,” he said, exasperated and perplexed. “Come on!”
The nurse did not call social services, maybe because she glimpsed my mother, a cliché serious-looking Asian woman. To outsiders, my mother must have looked uptight and terrifyingly accountable; because she was going out for dinner, she was wearing red lipstick, an expensive milk-coloured blouse instead of her usual yoga pants and housecoat. She looked like she shopped at department stores and was clopping along in hoof-like heels.
The ER doctor said I was probably having a bizarre allergic reaction to the alcohol, but he didn’t put it in his report for legal reasons. “I’m going to say you’re allergic to the calamari you ate, okay? It was probably fried in peanut oil and you’re highly allergic to peanuts, right? Say yes, okay?”
As the doctor checked under my hospital gown, I got my period, which stained the hospital sheet and made me cringe. “I need a tampon,” I said.
“Serves you right!” my mother bellowed in English, which so shocked the physician that he did not know what to say. I had offended the ghosts, which meant that my ancestors were punishing me.
“I bet you didn’t even bring your tampons, did you?” she ranted on, as if possessed. She had transformed into a much livelier version of herself. This was how she normally acted at home, so I didn’t bother replying. “So fucking irresponsible. So fucking retarded. I do not know why you are so fucking stupid! What the fuck is wrong with your head? I should just sell you on fucking eBay!”
For my mother, who was so disappointed that she hadn’t gotten to meet my ghosts, which meant that she had failed in her duty to protect me from demonic possession, and who also had no clue how she sounded, this was a regular diatribe that did not make me flinch or feel too bad about myself. But the doctor, this lo-fahn outsider, stared at us, a muddle of alarm and shock and pity flickering like shadows over his features. I looked away because I suddenly felt embarrassed. There was something seriously wrong with us, which I could sense but didn’t wholly understand. It was the first time that my mother had lost control in front of a stranger unprovoked, unless someone budged in front of her in the supermarket lineup. I could tell that she did not care, or did not even realize, that she was screaming. Behind her anger was terror. It was all a projection to seem strong. I still didn’t quite get that as a teenager.
It was also the first time she had slipped up and sputtered the wrong, explosive language when she didn’t mean to, but she was so obsessed with fixing me, with trying to be good ghost-fighting mother, nothing else mattered.
“I’ll get you a sanitary napkin,” the doctor quickly offered, trying to interrupt her shrieking. He turned to my mother, shooing her out. “Mrs Wong, can I talk to my patient for a second? You can wait outside.”
“Why?” my mother yelled, folding her arms in refusal.
“Is everything okay at home?” the doctor asked me, looking worried and ignoring my mother, who stood at the edge of the bed. “You can tell me if you took any drugs. Maybe a friend, or say, a close family member, like a parent, might have something that you thought was candy or medicine?”
“I didn’t take anything,” I replied, confused. Why the hell was he asking? Did I look like I wa
s dying? Was the diagnosis some kind of cancer? Maybe he had glimpsed something soft and cadaverous in me, a tumour the size of an obese adolescent spectre.
“Are you sure?” he asked me, while my mother looked at both of us, baffled. “I promise you won’t get in trouble.”
“Can I have my pad now?” I said, because I was bleeding like a pig in a Chinese butcher shop through the crinkly paper gown onto the gurney. I wondered if I had misunderstood his question, because he was still looking at me strangely. Why didn’t he want my mother in the room?
The doctor finally handed me a pad as thick as a pillow. “Tell your mother you’re going to be fine. You should probably rest for the next few days.” And he closed the blue curtain and left.
It occurred to me later that the doctor must have never heard such extreme Chinese-style scolding before. I wondered how my mother’s unhappy machine-gun blasts sounded to an outsider. I guessed that the doctor thought there was more to my “bad food” story and my mother wasn’t who she seemed to be. He had no idea that her DNA was made from small and faulty atomic bombs. What I now believe to be her undiagnosed personality disorder.
When my mother left the room to call my father, in the small private bathroom I ripped the pad out of its pale pink wrapper and started to think about disappearing from the Poteau. I thought that I would very much like to be invisible, but if I couldn’t, I might be able to hide away for a while. I was embarrassed that I could not have a softer, more malleable mother but felt that I was suddenly more mature and worldly and cynical. Blacking out from alcohol and being loaded into an ambulance heralded a new sensibility. I just needed my own un-Woo-Woo space.
I was becoming light-headed and just wanted to knock myself out for another four to six minutes. But I saw something strange in the mirror: my face had become a bloated moon, the colour of rotten milk, and there were two abnormal red pebbles floating on the surface. Under the sickly, fulgent lights, I saw that the red rocks were my pupils. Suddenly, I was so afraid of myself. I looked sly and horrendous. If I hadn’t been possessed at the theatre, I certainly looked unearthly now. I thought sarcastically that shitting myself in public had somehow provided me with self-esteem and a fresh perspective. Surely, my fainting curse was a sign that I was becoming partly Poh-Poh and partly my mother. Was this how the Woo-Woo happened? First, an earth-shaking warning? Losing your eyesight and control of your intestines? But how could I continue to keep the ghosts away?
