by Lindsay Wong
Yet leaving my mother in the hotel room felt like I was abandoning some grizzled fraction of myself that was not good or evil, lazy or nice. Like I was amputating an arthritic finger that I could not use, but it had been an intrinsic part of me for so long. Goddammit, I wanted to be somebody different from my mother, or at least, grow up to be someone with a job. I collected my plastic bags drooping with fobby MSG snacks that she had packed, as I still could not refuse free food.
“I’m not a loser,” I said, and my father looked relieved.
My father, not one to waste time, drove us to the airport terminal in less than a minute. He shocked me by submitting to the airline’s demand and buying me a stand-by replacement ticket to New York, which would be refunded later. And then, blaming the airline for his expenses, he pocketed a twenty from the poor airline clerk, who was probably too afraid to argue with my cheap father. Never bothering with social niceties, my father had waved his hotel receipt like a fluttering paper weapon and demanded, “Parking refurbish NOW.”
“Why the fuck you just standing there for?” he asked me, impatient. “You have ticket.”
For a panicked moment, I wondered if he had glimpsed my mother’s Woo-Woo decaying in my brain and veins and was going to order me to leave it behind with him, like a diseased piece of poultry that was not allowed past US agricultural customs.
“You want hug or something?” he barked at me instead. “Last night, I watch FBI show on TV and people in airport always want hug. Don’t tell me you want one too?”
“No,” I said, still shocked that my father was being so goddamn nice. My father had never been actively helpful before, and I was absolutely terrified. “I don’t want a fucking hug.”
“Okay, good,” he announced, reassured and more convinced that I was “normal,” like him. “If you want one, then you ask stranger next to you.”
In his outlandish way, I believe that my father wanted to send me away from my mother and her relations—perhaps he was trying to protect her from witnessing me leave; perhaps he also knew that I would languish in bed, citing vertigo and permanent immobility, if he did not force me to finish graduate school in a strange country. He needed to believe that I could be different from my relations in Hongcouver, that I was more like him than Poh-Poh and my mother.
And I was. By flying for a third time in less than twelve hours, I proved that I was not afraid of the supernatural. Like him, I could pretend to be obnoxiously fearless.
Before I went through airport security, my father handed me my carry-on, and I imagined him driving home to the rank aquarium of the Woo, tempted to leave my mother behind at the hotel. If she woke up alone in room 666, she’d start screaming and sobbing about her malevolent ghosts. She’d probably require a tranquilizer, and the hotel concierge might even have to call 9-1-1. But I knew that my father would dutifully wake her, and they’d go to their favourite mall or parking lot to run a blockbuster marathon to lose the demons, and then they’d make their lonely trek up Pot Mountain without me. And then, because he probably loved her, they’d share a frothy beer or five together before bed.
To leave the Woo, I had cheated, lied as often as I could, and stubbornly bashed and smashed my way through every bizarre and totally unbelievable situation. And now, I was being handed a free pass—by my father. No one would ever believe me if I told them about all the wondrous and terrible and fantastical things that had happened to me. I would be an idiot if I didn’t snatch this opportunity and tornado brazenly through airport security before something else caught fire.
I knew I needed to go back to New York to avoid the family curse and my premature future as a young, mummified corpse in a government-run nursing home. With my genetically resilient, zombie-evolved spores, I convinced myself that I did not need to worry. I decided that I was going to be the last creature left on both sides of the wobbly continent, even if unlucky Manhattan decided to capsize when I got there.
In forty-eight hours, I was also supposed to meet C.C., who had forgiven my nastiness in Europe, for a jaunt around New York. She was on vacation from Oxford and had already scheduled a list of notable restaurants, cafés, and bakeries that we would visit. I was excited to eat.
“Use your fucking head and everything will be okay!” my father shouted, as if to reassure himself as much as me.
I wish I could have told myself that I was going to be more than a little okay. That I could finally stop inflicting misery on others. That I could feel cactus-like crumbs of kindness and any wide-ranging species of emotions, like any malleable human being. I was no longer a thing or object, to be formed by irrational beliefs.
But I was also too scared to think about a possibly bleak future. Because the truth might have been that I was just another giddy scuba diver fleeing the stagnant aquarium of Hongcouver. This new Lindsay had a third chance to discover a normal, un-marine life outside the Woo, and she was going to jostle and push her way to the front of the lineup at airport security.
I turned around to see my father. He still looked miserable and moustached like Hitler, but under the twinkling airport lights, in his agitated pacing, he began to resemble an idea of a human being, a half-formed question mark of someone who might be capable of cantankerous emotional reasoning.
“Good riddance to your bad, bad brain,” he called. “Don’t fucking suck too much in the Bad Apple, okay?”
“Fuck you,” I said sadly, knowing that he was doing his best to be constructive and helpful, but I couldn’t help feeling resentful of him at the same time. “Worry about your own brain.”
I felt that I had not been entirely Chosen by the Woo-Woo, and I was somewhat safe for now. So I slipped off my shoes, removed my jacket and belt, and watched them float, as if by sheer miraculous gravitation, past me on the conveyor belt.
EPILOGUE
From 2008 to 2010, Beautiful One continued plotting her suicide on every national holiday, but thankfully, did not carry through. She is eighty-five percent recovered from her bridge-jumping attempt. The family pretends that Canada Day 2008 never happened. Flowery Face graduated from high school and has a job in finance. She and her mother have forgiven each other.
My mother is attempting to make amends with her children. She is still deathly afraid of ghosts. In 2012, my father was diagnosed with colon cancer; he is in remission, and everyone in the family agrees that the experience made him a more compassionate person.
Gung-Gung (my grandfather) died in 2006 from bronchial pneumonia, nearly two years after the family took sanctuary at Walmart. Poh-Poh (my grandmother) is still alive. She still does not know that her husband is dead (no one has told her yet).
Eventually, with the steadfast support of friends, professors, my mother, and my father, I graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in non-fiction. Even though there are days when writing, reading, and fundamental tasks are difficult, I am learning to live with migraine-associated vertigo. I work part time as a freelance editor and college admissions consultant.
Deep Thinker is a recently certified veterinarian in Australia. We are estranged.
Make Lots of Money is a graduate student in Hongcouver. We didn’t speak for many years, until he needed assistance with a portfolio for admission into a prestigious writing program. But, God help him, he’s a writer too.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing makes me want to gouge out my eyeballs.
This is why I have to thank and salute the following people for their incredible belief in my work: the indefatigable Carly Watters and the team at P.S. Literary; the wonderful Brian Lam, editor extraordinaire Shirarose Wilensky, the talented Oliver McPartlin, word-savvy Doretta Lau, Robert Ballantyne, and Cynara Geissler at Arsenal Pulp Press.
Immense gratitude to the irreplaceable and exceptional Marni Berger, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, and Marie-Hélène Westgate; thanks also to Jill Rothenberg, Gina Leola Woolsey, and everyone else who read discordant fragments of the manuscript. Alexis Marie, for your rare, unshakeable friendship; Teri
Cho and A.H. Reaume for your support. My family for teaching me not to accept failure but to seize the microscopic improbabilities of the universe.
To my brilliant Columbia professors for patiently showing this bumbling rookie how to write: Richard Locke, Sonya Chung, Cris Beam, Patricia O’Toole, Lis Harris, Leslie Sharpe, Rebecca Curtis; all my talented classmates, especially Shira Schindel and Jennifer Ohrstrom. My generous mentors at UBC: Linda Svendsen, Mary Schlendlinger, Alison Acheson, and Andreas Schroeder.
I’m also incredibly grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center in Nebraska City, Joy Kogawa House, Studios of Key West, Caldera Arts in Oregon, and of course, the Bank of Mom and Dad, Inc. Thank you for your patronage.
LINDSAY WONG holds a BFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in literary non-fiction from Columbia University. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in No Tokens, The Fiddlehead, Ricepaper, and Apogee Journal. She is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including from The Studios of Key West, Caldera Arts, and Historic Joy Kogawa House. She lives in Vancouver.
lindsaymwong.wordpress.com
