by Lindsay Wong
Life at the Belcarra had reached a sludgy, perverse sameness, so it took visiting Beautiful One’s mental hospital of a household to realize that I was actually living in one. It is safe to say that my visit made me realize I had to leave Hongcouver ASAP. It is hard to know that you’re living in absolute shit until someone else invites you over and proudly shows you the insides of their even grubbier, even shittier, even more bug-infested surroundings. From my new perspective, I could see the impenetrable monstrosity of the Woo-Woo in Beautiful One and her proud, decadent squalor. I was also terrified that what had happened to Beautiful One could happen to me overnight. There had to be a reason, even if slight, why she always said we were so alike on our family camping trips, even if I could not visualize any concrete similarities myself. For I still did not believe that I could be smart or self-sufficient. Until recently, I had more in common with my father and a garbage can. But had she seen a potential for normalcy and talent in me? Or was she simply deluding herself? I wanted her uncanny ability to make money, certainly, but at what cost? Was the Woo-Woo an ineluctable punishment for the female descendants of Poh-Poh? A cosmic curse that only affected the conventionally beautiful and money-grubbing?
On the exterior, Beautiful One’s house was grander and larger and more sumptuous than ours, with its creeping black gate that hugged and spiked the property like a barbed-wire entanglement inspired by the rococo period and trench warfare. But what was more important was hidden inside its filthy interior. It was like looking at a mirage of a terrible yet beautiful palace that transformed into a derelict graveyard upon closer inspection. Our house, though dusty and unkempt, had not reached this stage of Woo-Woo.
“The bitch is fucking nuts!” Beautiful One’s son announced as he opened the door from the garage, which was also his bedroom (my cousin was living in his BMW to avoid his mother). My cousin seemed not to notice or care that Beautiful One had started doing frantic laps on a sticky floor that had not been cleaned in weeks. Where was their housekeeper? Had she quit and no one noticed? My cousin also didn’t seem to care that the furnace blasted thirty degrees Celsius even though it was summer.
“How long has she been walking in circles?” I asked him, horrified.
“Well, she’s been hiding in the goddamn broom closet,” my cousin said, shrugging. “She built a little fort out of black garbage bags. Thinks she’s safe from God in there.” He then mumbled that he had an upcoming examination for business school that he had to study for in the backseat of his car.
This was a typical exchange in our family; no one understood how they were supposed to feel, or why they should experience certain soul-crushing emotions. My cousin was certainly grieving, and he would have screamed and cried had he been allowed to show his godawful despair. But he could not risk a demonic possession right before a final exam.
Why does my mother like you better than me?” Flowery Face asked me as I grudgingly followed her into an even stickier and grimier kitchen.
A month’s collection of dirty dishes was heaped on the counters; chemical-coloured takeout containers from their Vietnamese food franchises volcanoed on the stovetop and table. The only fresh food was a mammoth bag of semi-extinct apples from the Dark Ages—black and putrid. Flowery Face stopped and offered me one; I declined, but she started eating a soft wet apple, chunks of its necrotic flesh falling onto the carpet. She looked like a tired, gluttonous zombie. Poor Flowery Face, who was dressed in too-tight clothing that made her look twenty-eight; her false lashes were practically melting off her face.
Flowery Face and I had spent many major childhood vacations camping together in the interior of BC and, of course, at American outlet malls, but I hadn’t seen her since our family’s annual twelve-course Christmas banquet. She had seemed less haggard then, more childish and buoyant.
“Here’s twenty dollars,” I said. It was all that I had in my bag, but I gave it to her because, being nervous and cowardly, I needed her to shut up about her mother.
F.F. took my money, but she still wanted to know the answer to her terrible, treacherous question. Twenty bucks was not enough to silence her. It was like trying to cure stomach cancer with a tummy tuck. Like my father, in any difficult situation, I had been hoping that suffering could be measured in dollars and cents. This was all I knew how to do; I could not have fathomed anything else back then if it had knocked out all my teeth and shattered a very important bone. I did not have the emotional vocabulary to articulate how devastated I was. How my anger at Beautiful One was like mistaking specialty hot sauce for ketchup at a restaurant—no one’s fault but my own—and how this mistake burned me with terror and helplessness. I stood still, hoping that this moment of gross uncertainty would be over soon.
“Lindsay, I had to try to talk her off the bridge,” Flowery Face ranted instead, chucking the apple corpse onto the sofa like a used tissue. “It should have been you telling her not to. Why weren’t you here? On the bridge she laughed at me, okay! She didn’t even listen to what I had to say. I kept crying and telling her not to. What kind of mom does that?”
“I wouldn’t be able to talk her down,” I said, trying not to stammer.
I thought about how, many years ago, Beautiful One had taken me shopping and reassured me that I was going to turn out exactly like her. Because we were alike, she always said, talented and brilliant and capable of rational thinking. Was I supposed to do the same thing for Flowery Face now? I could have told her that we were special, that we did not need to worry about turning into our mothers, because I had already given her all the money that I had. Unfortunately, I did not know how to lie to her. It felt too disloyal, too cruel. So, quickly, I changed the subject instead: “Has everyone in our family been giving you lots of money?”
“Yes, they all feel really shitty, so I made six hundred dollars yesterday. Oh, except Uncle Ugly One. He’s so cheap.”
“Asshole,” I said with emphasis, hoping that I was showing enough moral support.
“Lindsay, just tell me the truth: How come my mom doesn’t like me? Why wouldn’t she listen to me on the bridge?”
“I don’t know,” I lied, looking past her at the gilded wood carving of Jesus’s last supper behind her in the foyer. I pretended to be interested in the infinitesimal details, but my stomach and head and heart hurt.
Eventually, I looked at Flowery Face. I wanted to tell her that her mother’s madness was not her fault, but in that moment I was too afraid, because I believed that words were sickly incantations. Offering reassurance, even if it was an insecure whisper, meant that the worst could possibly come true. It would be like looking into the mirror and calling for the indomitable Bloody Mary three times. And because you were a member of this family, it meant that she would certainly pay you a violent visit. Bloody Mary only existed for certain people—like us.
“You could probably have talked her off the bridge!” Flowery Face insisted again, her face crumpling. “My mom loves you! She used to talk about you all the time, you know. No offence, but why does she even like you? You’re not that great.”
“Maybe you just didn’t cry hard enough when you were talking to her on the bridge,” I suggested. But I was feeling nauseated and guilty. I was not surprised that I was worthy of so much conversational time in the Beautiful One household, because my cousins and I were expected to compete aggressively with each other. It was considered important family news if someone gained five pounds or suffered from acid reflux.
“Ohmygod, Lindsay,” my cousin said. “Tell me what I should do.”
“Well, tell her she’s beautiful and that we all love and forgive her. Tell her it was shit reporting and that she can sue. And everyone thought she was amazing at balancing. Tell her whatever she wants to hear.”
“But that’s bullshit!” Flowery Face screamed. “People fucking hate us! They call her names online, and they all say she should die.”
“Listen, your mom only wants to hear good things, and that’s what I’m going to tell her.
You do want her to get better, right?”
“I think someone should have just pushed her off the bridge,” Flowery Face said, sniffling.
I looked up from the dirt-packed floor that I had been examining for grungy wood bugs and tried to see if there was Woo-Woo in my cousin’s pupils. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw their dog, some designer-purse rat, shit in a corner and hungrily huff up its dry, pebbly turds. At least someone was tidying up after themselves in this house.
“Well, it would have saved a lot of time and money if someone did,” I said, trying not to be too serious. But she didn’t find my joke particularly funny.
As a person disconnected from my feelings and severed from any semblance of self-worth, I did not understand that my cousin and I were experiencing what was generally known as trauma and loss.
“Out of curiosity, would you do it, though?” I asked Flowery Face, forgetting that she was just an impressionable teen.
“I think I could,” Flowery Face said. “I just hate my mom so much.”
“You’re not supposed to like your mother. Welcome to our family.”
“Hey, wanna watch Hannah Montana and smoke some weed?” she suddenly said, brightening.
“I have to go in, like, five minutes,” I lied, making what I hoped was a frowny face even though I felt relieved to leave Beautiful One’s oppressive habitat. “I have to go to the grocery store,” I added when she did not respond.
“Thanks for stopping by,” Flowery Face finally mumbled. “Lindsay, I’m really glad you’re my cousin.”
“I know,” I said, and I wanted very much to invite her to stay with us at the Belcarra, which wasn’t much better, but at least it wasn’t a tomb-like prison that smelled of gross, perfumed death in its various stages of decomposition.
But I had to leave. I realized I had to leave the graveyard suburbs of Hongcouver with frightening urgency. Otherwise, it would just be me and Flowery Face—bad pot and worse television and constipating psychosis.
“Enjoy your drugs,” I eventually called out to my cousin. But she was too absorbed in her singing show on the Disney Channel to take any notice of my leaving, and it made me remember that she was just a lost, broken kid.
Before I turned to go, I remembered that I had the ten dollars that Beautiful One had given me, so I left the money for Flowery Face on the kitchen table, near the bag of black apples.
It wouldn’t make a difference. In a week’s time, yet another Woo-Woo scandal would occur in our family, when Flowery Face, overwhelmed by what she couldn’t handle, would kick her own mother down a flight of stairs. On my way out of their foyer, I tried not to look at emaciated Beautiful One, who was still parading around the house.
“Bye, Auntie,” I called out, but she did not know it was me and stared disgustedly at a crack in the ceiling.
“Don’t talk to me anymore, roof!” she bellowed. “You cannot kill me.”
Shuddering, I fled their house, half sprinting, half walking to the SkyTrain station. I could not bear this revelation of sadness and suffocating madness. I would rather confront an axe murderer, because running for my life seemed much simpler than witnessing my poor auntie like this.
Yet the absolute best thing about a Woo-Woo incident that didn’t affect the members of your immediate family was that you could exit the dramatic scene and take a break whenever it was most convenient. It was like pressing pause on a deliciously violent movie, and then coming back after you had relieved your bladder and gobbled down a salty snack.
That summer, there were three ongoing cinematic world war experiences.
You might first visit Beautiful One’s house, where the structural damage was an irreparable 10 on our Woo-Woo scale, and then stop over at Poh-Poh’s house for a solid 7. But with Beautiful One’s newfound Woo-Woo, Poh-Poh’s viewer ratings had severely declined. By evening, you could finally de-stress by ambling over to my home for a more low-key theatrical production; your continuous Woo-Woo experience might be a 2 or 3. Nowadays, my parents’ arguments were only an unsatisfactory magnitude of 1, because my mother was too sad about Beautiful One and the bridge-jumping incident to react anymore.
Who needed the local movie theatre when you had my kind of thrilling relations?
As much as my upbringing was frequently heartbreaking and spastic and extreme, I could say that I had never been bored for one moment. Surely, this was a sign that I’d blossom into something interesting (I did not think of myself as someone, an entirely real live person yet). If I was lucky, I’d be much less pedestrian by the time I was in my late twenties. I certainly had enough bizarre anecdotes to last me until I was miserly and thirty-five. Growing up, surely other kids like C.C. had complained about hours spent without internet or decent television, but I got to watch Poh-Poh attack kitchen appliances until she passed out.
Yet it killed me to admit that it was the saddest thing in the whole world seeing my cousin and auntie so completely ruined and unfixable. It was like they had become Poh-Pohs overnight.
CHAPTER 13
THE WOO-WOO’S CHOSEN
Somehow, I had gotten into a school called Columbia University, a higher learning institution in New York City that no one in our family had ever heard of. The Columbian University, as my father mispronounced it, had accepted me into the master of fine arts non-fiction program, which meant that “anyone, including the bum, can go to higher learning in America!”
For an undergraduate creative writing class, I had clumsily drafted weirdo character profiles on all my relatives, and a few professors thought that I had raw potential. “We can tell that you are a first-time writer,” one of them had said, “but you can’t fake that voice. Have you thought about graduate school?”
“There are more than a billion book in the library,” my father had said when I proudly announced my acceptance, “so how hard can bullshitting story be?”
Since he was only familiar with Canadian Ivy League universities, he did not recognize the Columbian University as a prestigious institution until he checked Wikipedia. “Must be mistake!” he said, looking at me with rodent-like shock. “Maybe you are like Daddy and not so retarded after all!”
Yet he had also sounded so pleased that I was on my way to higher education—his radioactive American dream. Perhaps there was even secret pride too that I had finally done something correct, because an Ivy League school had accepted me.
But New York City fried my brain as soon as I arrived in August. Something happened to my head when I got out of the plane at JFK airport. It was as if the Woo-Woo knew I was here.
Less than fifteen hours later, as I wandered outside my assigned student apartment on 114th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam, I passed out.
Before I did that, I had started to notice that I was falling while standing still. I felt like I was whirling 360 degrees, like I had been skillfully beheaded and my skull was bouncing along the ground. A breezy darkness had eclipsed my vision, and I felt as if my eyeballs had been flipped backwards and I was staring at the unoccupied inkiness of my hard, shameless sockets.
I felt the ground tear open, and I was nose-diving down a feral rabbit hole. I pirouetted backwards, clumsy-toed.
There was a flash of Zeus-like light and soft, shimmery constellations. Then: hammering beat-box music in my bashed-up temples, the lardy scent of fried chicken. I could smell a street fair on 120th and Broadway—what was I even doing in NYC? For a second, I thought that I was having a seizure or a strange hallucination. Although I was not the kind of person who was deeply aware of their feelings, it struck me as odd that I felt absolutely nothing. It had to be a dream, a visceral nightmare, right? Had I taken some designer drug without knowing?
Then a frightening thought struck me—I had gone Woo-Woo and this was a motherfucking delusion. Oh God. I could be lurching down the streets of New York City in a full-blown psychotic state, a grinning, cross-eyed, flesh-chomping zombie.
Was this what had happened to poor Auntie Beautiful One? Did God s
uddenly appear in front of her, and had she just been taking basic instructions from Him all along? No wonder she thought she was a modern-day Joan of Arc—the visions were freakish and beautiful and utterly obscene. Had Beautiful One just accepted her Woo-Woo so easily? Did she fight it?
Surely, I thought, this wasn’t happening to me when I had been in New York for less than fifteen hours. This had to be severe heatstroke or a formidable case of dehydration. Maybe it was as simple and uncomfortable as a climactic allergy.
But whatever it was, I was bouncing in the blackness, my own unchaperoned madness.
The nice thing about New York City was that if you fainted, no one caused a ruckus. You could somersault into space-age darkness and wake up without an entourage of excited ambulance workers and nosy individuals tugging at your underclothes and asking if you had illegal drugs colonizing your blood.
It was freeing and quite nauseating to go insane, and for a second, I could understand why my relations often did it. But the pain in my head became shooting, and I swear all the parked cars on the street began to levitate. For the first time in my life, I cared whether I lived or expired. I had an alternate path, a potential future in a new country. I was following the trajectory of my immigrant ancestors on my father’s side, who had once settled in Manhattan’s Chinatown. I had hope for a separate life where no one knew who I was.
Also, I knew that if I didn’t care, I’d never find myself again.
I woke up in what I thought was a sweltering deep fryer, but I was lying on the sidewalk. I was freezing even though it was thirty degrees. I stood up and tried to stumble to my three-student shared apartment on West 114th Street. My eyes weren’t working, so I couldn’t read the signs and I staggered along 112th Street until I asked someone where I was.
The Columbia University Housing Office had mixed up my arrival time by a day, and my room had not yet been prepared. It had been freshly painted, but there was no furniture yet. Groaning, I stumbled to the musty elevator and ended up in the basement storage, where I found an orphaned mattress (duct-taped to keep the yellow stuffing from falling out). Willing myself not to fall over, I dragged the flimsy mattress to my assigned bedroom and kicked it to the corner of my room. As a suburban girl from Canada, I was unaware of bed bugs and how they had plagued the city that year. Then, spinning and feverish, I wrapped myself in a Christmas sweater from my still packed suitcase. I had no blanket or bed sheets, so staggering to right myself, I stole the black-and-white checkered shower curtain from the shared bathroom and used it as a duvet cover.
