by Lindsay Wong
In the strange buttery light, her everyday ferocity had been replaced by heartbreaking terror, and my new face looked vulnerable instead of deceitful. I saw that we were small and insignificant, sitting as ramrod straight as our car seats allowed, like crash test dummies, preparing for absolute catastrophe. There was a brittle newness to her, despite the harsh smattering of police-style questions that followed.
“Why is there a big hole?” my mother asked, a bit perplexed. “Whose T-shirt is that? I didn’t buy it for you, and it’s not one of your cousin’s. Did you sleep in a Dumpster or something?”
I ignored her and got out of the car, slammed the door, and briefly thought about going back inside the airport, but my knee was fat and globular, a black alien planet stacked on another bruised moon. No walking for me. I ended up collapsing into the back seat to avoid her invasive questions, curling up in an awkward, perpendicular position. Trying to bring my legs closer to my body, I accidentally whumped my injured knee against the back of the driver’s seat and yelped. I was freezing in my skimpy T-shirt, even though it was late August, but I was too proud to ask her to turn up the heat.
“So dirty,” my mother said, turning to stare at me. “Make sure you take a shower when you get home, or we’re all going to get fleas or fucking flesh-eating disease. Do you want to stop at McDonald’s? Burger King? Taco Bell? Oh, I know, Dairy Queen. You like ice cream. You have my permission to have six large sundaes, okay?”
It made me a little sad that my mother thought she could cure me with helpings of soft serve and hot fudge. And it made me sadder still that ice cream would not help, and that she did not know how to help me. My mother thought she could cure me by letting me eat fast food, by allowing me to become heftier and therefore happier; this was a blaring, red-light emergency, so I could eat whatever I wanted. If a twenty-four-hour, all-you-can-eat buffet existed in Hongcouver, she’d have driven us there in an instant; my fatty ghosts would be drawn to the buffet’s lukewarm food under the floating heat lamps and leave me alone. She wanted to appease my hungry ghosts. This was all she knew how to do. What I really needed was extra-strength laxatives, Metamucil, and a dozen bran muffins.
All joking aside, I needed her to tell me that I was not going to die, that I was safe from danger in our car. But I knew that she couldn’t. She still didn’t have the right words for the situation. Feeding me was her version of normalcy, of parental kindness—when her mental illness was not flaring up. Would our lives, our entire relationship, be different and far less antagonistic if she behaved like this every day?
But I could not think of what could have been or what could be better. I was almost done with my childhood, and all possibilities hurt too much.
“I told Daddy you were possessed again,” she muttered when I did not say anything. “But you know him. He’s screwed in the fucking head. You seem fine. Not too possessed. That’s good.”
For once, I understood that she was a little off and did not push the interrogation any further. I suppose other parents would have panicked and phoned the police or, if we were more Westernized, insisted on family therapy ASAP. But like all Wong crises, even messy end-of-the-world ones, this one was taken with little overt discomfort—perhaps some inner confusion and anxiety, but that would be the extent of it.
In the blackness of the car, I felt that I had been born of the extreme nothingness that haunted my mother, a cyclonic unhappiness that was sad and terrorizing and perpetual. I had tried to leave it all behind in Honolulu. As if it could stay there among the pineapples and floury, cake-batter beaches.
In the car, my mother and I settled into a calm, inconsolable silence, the kind that made us too afraid to ask questions, and I think we both felt an appalling willingness, a compassionate virus-like alliance to begin anew. She had no one, and I had no one too, and she was better than speaking to the yellowing carpets in my bedroom.
CHAPTER 10
REPLACEMENT KID
As soon as Auntie Beautiful One heard the news that my father had gone quite Woo-Woo (he had bought one of those fat-faced Labradors to replace me when I absconded to Honolulu and spent his days in bed wailing about his failure to reproduce above-average offspring, etc.), she invited me to stay at her house for a few days until he felt better. The truth was, he seemed to take my failings personally, for he felt that his immigration to Canada and sacrifices should have made his children first-rate professionals of his own choosing.
In our Chinese family, it was absolute lunacy to buy a large animal unless it was for eating, and first-born kids did not fail at basic college-level piano: these were absolute truths, in which my father wholly believed. Beautiful One wanted to help us, she said, because it was her duty as a good Christian and most benevolent relative. So my mother, saying that she wanted a break from her “retarded kid,” said that I could stay over for a day or two, just in case Beautiful One’s house was haunted—there had been that incident a few Lunar New Years ago when an auntie was half certain that there was a ghost trapped in the wallpaper of their basement bathroom. Besides, everyone knew that Beautiful One always found this kind of family drama exhilarating and was especially hurt if you did not consult her first if someone required open-heart surgery or was considering painting their kitchen a darker shade. All the aunties agreed that it would have been unseemly to deprive Beautiful One of her only fun.
“I always knew your daddy was crazy,” Beautiful One whispered to me, giggling, when she came a few days later to pick me up in her truck. She could never be serious and did not care much for my father because she felt he was too opinionated, and my father was still complaining that she was gossipy and insane. I refused to believe that Auntie Beautiful One could be off-kilter, so as usual, I excused her behaviour as “quirky.” After all, she had a full-time job and managed several businesses, much more responsibility than my father, so how could she be like Poh-Poh?
“Look at him!” she squealed, sounding as if she was enjoying the situation immensely.
My father, who had once been as terrifying as the Headless Horseman, was crawling on the floor, picking up yellow dog hair to knit a sweater for himself. It seemed as if he had lost his mind, but it felt like a grown man’s tantrum. My disappearance to Honolulu had caused him to react as if he were four years old, demanding attention.
“He’s just not normal!” she exclaimed, and I could not help but wordlessly, if not heart-flinchingly, agree—this was proof that the Woo-Woo could be contagious, and my father had caught our black magic curse.
“Woof!” he said, and then ignored her.
Beautiful One kept laughing at him, and us, which imbued me with a profuse cobweb-like shame, as it made me feel that we were too far gone to be saved. She had looked so pleased with the extent of this family melodrama, had dressed up for it as if she were going to a matinee opera at the supermarket: diamond earrings, bright red lipstick, sneakers, and grungy low-rise jeans. I did not think much of any of this, for this was typical behaviour that back then I considered “normal.”
“How is my favourite niece!” she finally asked, turning to scrutinize me. “I’m so glad that you can keep me company! We’ll go shopping, and I’ll take you to my hairdresser, okay? You don’t want to look like you’re from the SPCA.”
“Um, it’s okay,” I said, uncomfortable with the attention. But I was also secretly pleased that someone wanted something better for me, and that I was worthy of this superficial transformation. “You really don’t have to do anything.”
“Why not? I don’t understand why you want to look so homeless all the time. I mean, just because your mother dresses like a bum, I don’t see why you have to too. Your entire family looks like they’re camping in the woods. Remember, we’re the only sane ones in the family, okay?”
I believe now that Auntie Beautiful One was already in the slow-cooking stages of her breakdown: how else to explain the fly-swatting pantomiming of her hands, the spurts of bird-like giggles? Still reeling from Honolulu, I refused to
recognize it then; she might have already been infected. But I had to believe my aunt’s reassurance to continue to survive. The Woo-Woo could not come for both of us.
In her own slightly crass, haphazard way Beautiful One was trying to be kind to me. We drove back to her house and dropped off my overnight bags, and Beautiful One had a special outing planned. Normally, I wasn’t doted on or told that I deserved much better, except sometimes on my childhood camping trips with Beautiful One. I knew what my aunt said was mostly flattery, but it was a nice change from screaming. When my mother took me shopping, she often had panic attacks from the Woo-Woo, which pursued us to the mall, and at stores, she told me that I looked fat, never mind what I wore. And even though my cousin Flowery Face, who was now eleven, had begged to come along, her mother refused, because busy auntie just wanted to spend some quality time with her favourite niece. After all these years, she was still frequently, carelessly, cruel to her daughter, like my mother was to me.
“Please?” Flowery Face had begged at the staircase. “Please! Can I come with you guys? Please? I promise to be good!”
But while Flowery Face ran desperately upstairs to grab her jacket and shoes, Beautiful One shushed me and hurried me along, sneaking me into her car and driving speedily away, like we were two nasty preteen girls abandoning an awkward friend. I felt uncomfortable because Auntie Beautiful One was supposed to be a grown-up, a mother of three, not a trivial adolescent with flawless makeup. It was too reminiscent of our trailer vacation to Osoyoos.
“I just want to spend time with you,” Beautiful One told me as we drove, flipping her long black hair.
She must have been so lonely in her marriage, so she had latched onto me, like the girlish ghost of a slaughtered maiden, auditioning me for both mentee and confidante. Like all the adults in my life, she was present but not quite all there, which meant that she was searching desperately for someone to like, if not appreciate, her—something that I also needed. Although I did not know that she needed someone to like her or that even I wanted an adult to like me then. I felt special that she had chosen me, and I much preferred her company to my mother’s—she was still the only grown-up who did not call me retarded to my face. She seemed to believe that I could be different from the rest of our family and wanted to teach me to maintain an exterior persona that was both distinct and separate from the one I had inherited.
When we had spent our summer vacation in Osoyoos, I had wanted, desperately, to believe that Beautiful One thought that our fates were intertwined, because she was successful and driven—it was as if someone wholly believed in adolescent me. Most importantly, both of us had been willing to sympathize with each other’s bullshitty, arcane ailments (“A flu, you say? That really sucks!”) We never accused each other of having multiple demons. With no other role model, I thought Beautiful One was the personification of how a person should be.
After a while, Beautiful One continued sadly: “Lindsay, you’re the only one who kind of understands me, and you’re the only one who says nice things to me. Your mother screams at me and so does E.T. Flowery Face just isn’t you: she doesn’t listen to me enough to deserve a shopping spree at the mall.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling unsettled and a little sorry for poor Flowery Face, whose mother had left her behind once again. This would not bode well for their future relationship.
“So I want you to tell me all the wonderful things about myself,” Beautiful One chirped, checking her heavy makeup in the rear-view mirror; her wispy tattooed eyebrows needed retouching. “Tell me why I’m your favourite aunt. I just need you to do this for me, okay? You have a lot of time before we get there.”
So I repeated what I had once told her in Osoyoos, that she was the smartest and most talented and most beautiful one in our family. As she drove and fixed her hair, I was beginning to feel troubled by her, but I ignored the feeling; she was just unpredictable. But then again, she was beautiful—and I wanted to be too.
At the mall, Beautiful One took me to the food court, where one of her chain Vietnamese restaurants was, and let me order whatever I wanted (I gobbled eight extra-large plates of lemongrass chicken that tasted like salty citronella bug spray; the gristly grey meat hugging all the gaps in my teeth like waxy dental floss). And then she coaxed me to cut my hair so I looked orderly and neat.
After I had been fed and groomed, she bought me a bridesmaid’s dress that was seventy percent off (she bought herself a matching one too). Unfortunately, the dress did not flatter me, and I looked like a magenta wheelbarrow, a pig in polyester, a bloated five-two, size-fourteen fruit roll-up. I could hear my mother’s voice waterfalling inside my mind; she would have said that I was a girly sumo wrestler who could crush you with her floppy and terrifying gut.
“It’s okay,” I told Beautiful One, self-conscious and embarrassed but secretly pleased with the attention. “I don’t need this dress.”
“Don’t be stupid!” she said, trying to sound wise and generous but failing. “This is what you should wear every day. Just think of it as a costume. You have to show the world who you should be, instead of who you are. Your job is to fit in. Don’t you want people to like you, Lindsay?
“Your mother and I used to be Chinese trailer trash, but look at how far we’ve come! You just have to go to UBC for our family’s sake, okay? I had the best time of my life there!”
Then Auntie Beautiful One, who neglected to mention that she had gotten knocked up in her junior year, slipped me 150 bucks, like she was fatally embarrassed for me and didn’t want anyone in the suburban mall to see. She was the only adult in my life who believed that I could fit in, even if she herself didn’t know how. I did not see it then, but all the makeup, the ill-fitting clothes, were false and terrible bravado for what she didn’t know was inside her: insecurity and desperation and hope that someone would one day acknowledge this ache to be noticed. To be liked.
And in some ways, I knew exactly what she meant: I wore the Woo-Woo in my hand-me-downs and in my stringy, uncut hair. Like I had already given up, accepted my parents’ foggy, half-living state. Like I was less lively than anything scheming and supernatural. Beautiful One was trying to help me in the only way she knew how: by grooming my outsides so that my insides wouldn’t show. Even when she was completely insane, she would still worry about her looks before attempting to jump off the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge, because she understood that she was on the world’s stage.
Even one of my paternal aunties in New York claimed that she had seen Beautiful One on TV: “She so pretty of course she make the news. Beautiful people have nothing to do all day, which is why they like to have jump.”
Soon I realized that my Hawaii debacle had ruined me, made me mopey and more off-putting. After a bad case of scratch-scratch-motherfucking! head lice, by the end of summer, I had done nothing but create quarter-sized bald spots on my scalp. I watched black bears gorge on the viscous juice of Japanese pears gloomily budding in our backyard. I watched West Coast rains lash into the coppice of trees, the white pears catapulting into textured grass. I watched black bears somersault on the lawn like cute suburban children, gnawing fruit all day, holding it with their scalpel-like claws.
Things were not improving, but I had gotten so used to it I could not imagine anything worse or better.
So I walked around like I was brain-damaged, IQ minus 100 billion. Call it formidable adolescent defeat or paralyzing fear or even half-hearted depression, but my adventure to Honolulu had put me into this state. Like I had been suddenly lobotomized in my sleep. I couldn’t function. Couldn’t sleep. Could only mindlessly eat.
That summer, while I blossomed into Jabba the Hutt and our mountain flooded relentlessly, I thought about my father. How Beautiful One had seen us in our soiled state of disrepair. How she had laughed at us, in a mean but relieved way. Ha-ha-ha! I am glad that I am not you!
Her mocking only reinforced what I knew all along: we were so insane that a member of our tribe could laugh at us, like
we were Poh-Poh attacking a kitchen appliance.
Meanwhile, the shitty foundations of the Belcarra were half-submerged and everyone on the Poteau thought the entire mountain would have to evacuate. Emergency preparations were well underway. I wondered if they would have to helicopter us to safety if the damned monsoons swirled higher. The basement swamped tirelessly, and the grumbly faucets sputtered hot, gelatinous mud. And there were water quakes at night, which tilted and shifted our house so that the walls popped and cracked open in thin jagged wounds. I became convinced our house and others on the cul-de-sac would whirl downhill into squelchy messiness, smashing black conifers into unrecognizable bits. All summer, the rains and the ghastly winds pounded the roof, and when I woke up in the late afternoons, the trees in our greenbelt had been shredded and their massacred limbs had been guttered in grassy funeral mounds.
I became afraid to leave the house because I thought I was not equipped to handle the outside world. I finally understood why my parents rarely left the safety of our fenced-off aquarium, and why they only vacationed at the outlet mall in their RV. It was dangerous outside our cesspool of a fish tank; it was better to be surrounded by familiar shrubbery and live inside the rotting, fortified castle of the Woo than be vulnerable in the world. You could certainly try, but you would end up frantic and desperate, like Poh-Poh and my mother.
“Lindsay, what are we going to do about Dad?” my little sister asked me one day. She was fourteen and troubled by our father’s behaviour. For a week, he had been moaning and moping around the house, like one of my mother’s ghosts, as if to show us that he could also act Woo-Woo.
