by Lindsay Wong
Destitution didn’t seem to worry my sister, but I was more concerned with practical matters—who would pay for our massive food bills if our father couldn’t work anymore?
“We could sell the furniture,” I suggested. I wasn’t being helpful, but I couldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing how anxious and sad, and therefore weak, I was. “But we don’t have any furniture, so I guess Mom and Make Lots of Money have to go if he doesn’t want to support any of us anymore. Think anyone will buy them on eBay?”
“Don’t joke,” my sister snapped, her eyes bulging, fright twisting her face into something strange and unpretty and caterpillar-like. We had always ignored each other, and this was our longest conversation ever. It would define our tense, unsisterly relationship to the present day. “This is serious, Lindsay. When are you going to grow up and start thinking about other people? Dad’s gone crazy and he might go suicidal, like they always do!”
“Good luck with that,” I said. “You like helping people who obviously cannot be helped. I think he’s faking it.”
“Unlike you, I’m not a fucking psycho who thinks the world revolves around her. Why are you such a bitch?”
“The difference is you actually think our parents are okay,” I said. I was jealous of her normalcy, her ability to thrive socially and scholastically. Because she was considerably smarter and thinner than me, in this household, it meant that she was left alone and ignored. She had her teenybopper’s Japanese anime and her phone book stacks of grey and white manga, her brainy middle-child obsessions with the advanced science club at school. I had potato chips and sarcasm, which I mistook for bona fide wit.
“They ignore you, but they can’t stand me because I got the dumb Poh-Poh genes,” I said to her. “You can be a saint if you want, but no one here is going to appreciate you.”
“You shouldn’t have come back,” she snapped, tearing up. Her irises looked soggy and infected by an alien pink virus; in truth, she been crying for days. “How come you didn’t just stay wherever the hell you went?”
“Better go psychoanalyze Dad, just in case he suddenly decides to kill himself while he’s out walking the dog and you’re wasting time talking to me. If you hurry, you can catch him.”
Then my sister did the unexpected (there was too much wildness in us, e.g., hockey, in our blood); she punched me in the gut. (Did I deserve it? Okay, maybe.) Oooof. It hurt like a motherfucker. Fearing my retaliation, she locked herself in her bathroom and refused to come out. Miserably, I took my typhooning futility out on my little brother—anyone and everyone was a reasonable target.
This was the moment the furious continental rift that had been wedged between us since early childhood unmistakably exposed itself, forcing us to acknowledge that we were a very different species. Me, L. Rex: beast-like, squat, and furry, and her: cute and gazelle-thin. Like a messy divorce, she would take my brother with her, and he too refused to speak to me for many years. As long as both siblings died of old age and I wasn’t connected to their downfalls in any way, I told myself that I was perfectly fine with pretending that they did not exist. Since we were all averse to apology, chained together by childhood trauma and faulty DNA, I felt that it was simply better this way. But I wish I had been more understanding in our squabble, sarcastic without being excessively cruel. Unlike me, she was so outwardly calm, untouched by the Woo-Woo, no strange tics or behavioural issues. The reason for her normalcy, I believe, was her fierce refusal to be governed by anything except her rational belief in science. Her encyclopedic obsession with facts.
Usually, my sister would ignore our Woo-Woo situation, lock herself in her bedroom with her Xbox, and declare herself separate from our defective family unit. I could have threatened to kick down the bathroom door and bullied her into feeling better (I’d never apologize—what kind of sissy big sister would I have been?). In those days, I knew that my greatest talent was making my family suffer, and I had been born the eldest for that very reason. As the first-born, I believe that my parents targeted me with higher expectations. In a way, my siblings were treated better because they weren’t held to such high hopes and aspirations, which as children and then as surly adolescents and teenagers we did not understand.
As Deep Thinker cried, I desperately wanted her to let our parents handle their own shitty Woo-Woo-ness. Why should my siblings and I have to micromanage their craziness?
“Sucks to be you,” I finally said to my sister through the bathroom door, only realizing too late that my tone sounded exactly like my mother. I flinched, but it was too late to retract my words.
Because I had not signed up for a music audition at UBC, my father, his spitefulness exacerbating his many melodramatic tendencies, eventually dropped hints about my suicide, while having dinner in his pyjamas.
“Why you suck so much, huh?” he asked me, sounding hurt. If we were in a Victorian-era stage drama, he might have pretended to faint. Instead, he scratched his enormous belly, gnawed on steamed chicken feet, and burped.
“Why doesn’t Retarded Lindsay just hurry up and kill herself?” he said in his meanest voice, forgetting that he was supposed to be imitating one of my mother’s breakdowns. “It will be good for everyone. No one likes a stinky truck who take up too much room at dinner table.”
I said nothing. His question made me unhappy that I had failed at my temporary escape, and for a moment, I worried that my parents were right about my disorderly retardedness. Was I especially thick and stupid? It was true that I didn’t catch on so quick at school, so maybe I was born with an extraordinarily low IQ. If I were smarter, maybe the Honolulu cure would have worked, and I would have known how to navigate the outside world and mitigate its freakish tsunami of disasters. But I was only good at one damn thing so far: I could manage the Woo-Woo, refusing to let it bother me on the outside, even when it could be swelling inside me, like an obsidian kidney stone.
Cuckoo was in my blood.
And it was waiting to be released.
But my mother became angry: her eyes squinted and disappeared into her white, clam-like forehead, while her mouth got larger, like it had swallowed up her face. She looked like a mollusk that had been pried open for its gritty, disgusting pearl. My father seemed to have crossed a line, broken something twisted and flimsy inside her, maybe even gutted her yellowing Styrofoam heart, because this was the first time I heard her defend me. This was one of the only times I thought there was some grimy, unspeakable hope for her. That I felt that I could possibly forgive her one day.
“If you want to die, just go right ahead!” she yelled at my father, which bewildered me; I never thought she’d take my side. “No one’s stopping you!” she said. “But don’t tell Lindsay to kill herself! She’s weak in the fucking head. She’s so retarded she might actually listen to you! You want her to die in the house and give us bad luck?”
“What’s wrong with that?” my father asked, as if he didn’t know the answer. He folded his arms and looked bewildered. “I have two other kids already and now I have Doggy, so that makes perfect three! I am so sad Retarded Lindsay fail at piano!”
“Lindsay’s a stupid piece of shit, but don’t fucking tell her to kill herself. She hasn’t done anything to you!”
“I’m just telling Retarded Lindsay the truth!” he screamed, making his new dog bark. “None of you can handle the truth! Can Retarded Lindsay please go die now, thank you very much. Daddy appreciate it. How about early birthday present to me?”
“Ummm, Lindsay is standing right here,” I said, but they ignored me as if I were already one of my mother’s ghosts. “I’m right in front of you. Jesus, you can’t have a discussion about me killing myself without my input. God, what the fuck is wrong with you? You want to know why I’m a fucking mess? You raised me! I’m exactly like you!”
It was the first time that I had confronted them, and it shocked me: my ugly smidgeon of boldness was a terrifying revelation; instead of snarkily avoiding the subject altogether, my all-serious brash
ness had sucked out all the air from inside me, and around me, and it suddenly felt like I, and everyone around me, was deflating. Shrinking.
I had been the first person to point out our unhappy circumstances, and for a second, I like to think my family could see the bewildered hurt splotched and mirrored on all our real faces. Here were the Belcarra’s scuzzy, peeling walls and the stacks of raggedy newspapers and messy spires of expired dry goods.
As always, our makeshift illusion was so strong that reality would always be a mirage, and instead of seeing our misery and their junkyard milieu, my parents could only see their aspiring perfection. Things were not skewed—nothing was tenuously out of place. I had not broken our disaffected disenchantment, had not really blasted away the webby illusion fogging up our frontal lobes with my AK-47 flash of wordy and excruciating shrapnel—maybe just dented our steely supervillain shields for a minute—kapow! I like to think that my parents, for that unsavoury millisecond, saw that this wonderful immigrant family inhabited a chaotic jungle that had to be kept hidden from the outside world.
But our myopic pursuit of the American dream was so powerful—the heavy, mythic curtain sliding over our eyeballs like a dollar-store mosquito net. So after a moment of intense and choking quiet, they ignored my outburst. I supposed that it was the best way to maintain such a toxic enchantment, an invisible, odourless gas that poisoned and deluded us. It was like I had never uttered the damning words at all. Like I had never been there at all.
For what seemed an eternity, I listened to them viciously bicker about why I should or should not kill myself—obvious pros and cons—which might last for a few days if no one else in the family decided to have a psychotic occurrence. Their quarrelling did not bother me—at least, I managed to convince myself that I did not think they really meant it. And besides, I told myself, they needed something a little controversial to argue about. Domestic topics and extended family gossip were scarce that week. But if I was honest, it affected me on a much darker and subterranean level than I would ever admit. A malevolent kind of inner keloid scar that would manifest in crippling shyness throughout adulthood. A fear that every short-lived anti-social thought was foreshadowing psychosis. In New York, with the severe vertigo, I couldn’t help but believe that I was too lost, too far gone down my family’s rabbit-hole madness to be saved.
After I devoured a family-sized bag of Doritos and licked the chemical cheese debris off my fingers, I felt considerably better. Inside this household, there was nothing junk food couldn’t cure. It settled my nerves and refocused my stifled sadness. In the end, I agreed with my mother: Why should I listen to a man who had bought a dog to replace me?
“Okay, fine,” I eventually said to my father, furious and a little sulky. I enrolled at the University of Billion Chinese in the fall as a general arts student. For once in my life, not that I’d ever admit it, he would be right.
The first month of college was like anaphylactic shock. I pretended not to speak English when approached by toothy, smiling strangers. I did not know how to interact with my eager peers or professors. Choking from severe social anxiety, I stared at the ground, scratching my arms raw. The Belcarra may have taught me that I was stupid, but I had inherited my mother’s and my grandmother’s obsessive tendencies—and like ice hockey, college essays and exams took discipline. To avoid having to socialize, I hurled myself at my studies. Believing that my IQ was possibly fossilized by now, I read every assigned college textbook, like, fourteen or fifteen or sixteen times. I scared the shit out of myself when I got 100 percent on an art history midterm. And 98 percent in music history, 95 percent in women’s studies.
These achievements forced me to see a startling change in myself, or at least in what or who I could be, a hopeful glimpse of someone or something less angry, less fearful, less deadbeat. Was this the type of student my father had always wanted me to be? I had a suspicion he must have thought that I could be above average when he screamed at me to be the “Best Empty.” At the University of Billion Chinese, that year saw the start of burgeoning self-esteem and, dare I say, scholastic pride.
That year also saw the formation of a new self, perhaps normalcy. Whenever I saw Fun-Fun and her gang of high school girls on campus or around the Poteau, we avoided one another and pretended that we had no previous acquaintanceship. One of the older girls, C.C., had been kicked out of their crowd because of gossip mongering and jealousy from the others. Exceptionally tall and swanlike, she had been a fashion model in Singapore. High school cliques did not seem to matter as much at the University of a Billion Chinese, so C.C. shocked me by inviting me to her house on the Poteau after music history one day and showing me her Tupperware of designer makeup and three closets crammed with expensive clothes. For eighteen years, I had never been inside another Poteau McMansion and was astonished when the gardener greeted me and the housekeeper ushered me inside, curtseying and asking me what I would like to eat. The inside of C.C.’s house was decorated like an eighteenth-century pastoral English estate.
Was this how normal Chinese people lived? Like George III, the mad king?
“Here, Lindsay, you can have these,” C.C. said, grabbing a mountain of clothes that she didn’t want anymore. “They’re much better than the ones you have on.”
I was wearing an oversized sparkly sweatshirt that read, JJJ DA LUCK IZ IN DA CLUB, a neon flowing peasant skirt, and chunky leopard-print platform sneakers. Unshowered for weeks, my hair smelled like stale vegetable oil. Even though I was now in college, I still had no sense of personal hygiene or acceptable physical presentation.
“I’ll do your makeup,” C.C. offered, pointing to a stool beside her vanity. “Then we’re going out for drinks.”
From Auntie Beautiful One’s early attempts that summer, I recognized this as a gesture of friendship, or at least, girlish friendliness. Letting someone give you clothes and paint your face was some sort of centuries-old bonding ritual. Unsure how to respond, I sat on the proffered stool, mute and anxious but hoping that I could pretend to be someone wholly different if I just transformed my outer self. With combed hair and matching clothes for once, would I finally embody the best superficial traits of Beautiful One?
CHAPTER 11
THE SUICIDED
Before my cousin’s wedding, the family said that poor Auntie Beautiful One had gotten herself possessed. By that I mean she had never been so loopy before. Sure, she had her moments of paralyzing sadness and ghoulish uncertainty, but didn’t everybody? One day she said her brain suddenly “detached” from her body, and her arms started swinging like a deranged weathervane. Then her foot tap-tap-tapped a jazzy quickstep, as she quaked like a mechanical mummy before doing a possessed person’s pirouette.
“My brain can’t control my body anymore!” she sang when we saw her. She said that God was now chit-chatting exclusively with her floating cortex.
For months, Beautiful One had been gnawing and sucking on the same Costco-sized bag of almonds before spitting them out. Starving herself into a size smaller than zero, crooning that God wanted her to DIE, motherfuckers, why couldn’t she just die-die-die?
“I’m being killed!” she screamed at us. “I can’t swallow anything!” Hunched over her kitchen table, she spat out nutty purée.
She was a thriving franchise queen, recently opening three new and different Vietnamese restaurants in and around Vancouver, but had dialled everyone to broadcast that all nourishment would kill us and we’d better quit eating at once.
“Shut the fuck up!” everyone in our family had said, which was our way of being supportive. “Just eat and you’ll be okay.”
But I was horrified, because Auntie Beautiful One had once been the sanest relative I knew. Despite her moments of sadness, my aunt had always appeared mostly outgoing and normal, a role model who seemed cheerfully unhindered by ghosts. How could she have ended up this way—unable to control herself, like my mother and grandmother?
I felt betrayed that she had gone completely insa
ne without consulting me. After all, we had trusted each other, liked each other enough to arrange annual shopping trips to Seattle when our families no longer had time to go camping. She had tried to be an older sister to me, if not a typical mother, that one time after I had gotten back from Honolulu.
I still cannot believe that I had ignored all her symptoms, but I had been unwilling to consider Beautiful One’s escalating depression, because it meant that my standard for normalcy wasn’t as normal as I had thought it was.
But it was also not surprising that someone in my family wanted to kill herself. In our family, you had to be vigilant twenty-four hours a day because you could become “possessed” anytime, anywhere—particularly in a private bathroom. The Woo-Woo loved it there, my mother said. Showering was terrifically dangerous. So was taking too long on the toilet. Every kid in our family knew creepy-crawlies could jump us when we were alone, which was why my mother insisted on chaperoning my siblings and me to the bathroom anytime she could, even as adults. Auntie Beautiful One, the littler cousins whispered, had violated a sacred spirit code: she had hogged the bathroom in the hours it took to slather on her makeup and been accosted by a zealously vain Chinese ghost. It’s not like I believed any of this crap of course, I told myself, but being home was always like entering a parallel universe, where certain rules had to be acknowledged and maintained.
“Lindsay, you should leave the door open when you pee,” my mother said, sounding concerned. “It’s not safe anymore. The ghosts are acting up.”
I had finished exams only five hours before, and now we were fighting about my risky bathroom habits. During the academic year, I spent three days a week in a private hotel room on campus and then bussed back to the Belcarra, since my parents were paying for my tuition and living expenses. Despite my parents’ faults, the Bank of Mom and Dad was always open, which I took for granted. There I was, back in the land of the Woo-Woo, where my mother and her demons were in charge. I was twenty years old and had just finished junior year, and I would not pee supervised, especially because of an invisible threat.
