The Woo-Woo Read online

  “How much will you pay me to finish the school year?” I countered, stuffing down the sadness of having lost my first and only friend with the sudden realization that I could make some fast money from this awful situation.

  “Two hundred,” my father said.

  “How about five hundred?”

  “Three twenty. But you be little bit nice to Mommy and Sister.”

  “Three fifty. The sister is obviously extra.”

  “Fine,” he said, handing over the contents of his wallet. “But if she WAHH and complain, you pay Daddy refund.”

  “Whatever,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “No school mean you can practise piano and run around block three time every day,” he said, sounding serious. “Counsellor and principal say that Lindsay need to be Best Empty, so next week, you must be Very Full.”

  “Sure,” I said, knowing even then that I’d have to fake being Very Full, and I’d have to do it without a friend.

  CHAPTER 7

  YOUR FUTURE CALLING

  While I was on my mandatory “vacation” from school for fighting, there was a funeral; a very distant relation had died of breast cancer. My mother pointed at her chest and said, “Chop, chop.” She made a slicing motion, giggling shrilly. A joke that I didn’t understand then but find uncomfortable now. Death, in all its forms, always devastated my mother’s fragile mind.

  This was why she went outside: she took awkward steps backwards, thrice around the cul-de-sac, bowing with her back towards the house, up up up the broad pebbled driveway of the Belcarra. Round and round my mother went: speed-walking in reverse, an umbrella over her head. I was used to my relations doing strange and inexplicable things, and tried to mind my own business.

  But I needed to know whether my mother was just an average Woo-Woo: was she spouting Chinese superstitions or was it the never-diagnosed crazy inside her mouthing mumbo-jumbo? Our family constantly dismissed mental illness as “Western bullshit,” making wicked fun of Poh-Poh’s psychiatrist, who was supposedly a very distant cousin (no one really knew how he was related to us). The aunties always crowed, pleased with their own hilarity: “He love Poh-Poh so much he studied Poh-Poh in college! P is for Poh-Poh and phony PhD!”

  In the mornings, I watched my mother perform what seemed to be this made-up ritual, huddling under a busted umbrella. Later, she would claim that this post-funeral rite had probably been invented by our seventeenth-century merchant ancestors; she was just improvising.

  One day she called me out of the house to practise her ritual—just to be safe. She had returned from the funeral, closed casket, thank God, she said. She was terribly afraid of funeral services and dead bodies—she wouldn’t go at all if it wasn’t family. Since I didn’t know the deceased, I had refused to attend the service and thought I was protected from “the ghosts.”

  “No, no, you have to participate too,” she insisted. “You are very weak in the head and the ghosts can kill you!”

  “How about you just walk for both of us?” I said, when I was finally crammed under her umbrella for a marathon of backwards walking. “You can lead the ghost parade; I’ll cheerlead from my room.”

  “Do you want to have bad luck for your entire life? Do you see all the ghosts that I see? Awooooo! Awooooo!”

  “I didn’t go to the stupid funeral,” I snarled after our first out-of-sync loop around the cul-de-sac. And wrenching her bulky purse away to pluck out her jangle of keys, too hot-headed to think clearly, too angry at myself for getting suspended, I went into the house and locked her out.

  Ten minutes later, my father called me. He was worried that I was disrupting the rare peace of our household and felt inclined to side with my mother.

  “Why are you calling me on the best day of my life?” I snapped at him sarcastically, checking caller ID on my cell before I answered.

  “Why did you lock Mommy out?” he said, sounding exasperated. “She called me. She very, very mad. How come you don’t pick up the phone when she call you? She say she go round and round house.”

  “Um, Mommy loves to walk in circles. I’m doing her a favour.”

  I was furious at my mother—for her inability to repress her fears, her Woo-Woo, all the vulnerable emotions that she’d asked me my whole life to bury inside. I didn’t think she was a good mother. I wanted to punish her. I raged.

  “How come we raise such a bitchy-bitch?” my father asked.

  “No, I thought you guys raised me to be passive-aggressive. Goodbye!”

  To avoid any emotional exertion, he would camp out at his firm for weeks. This was how he retained his robust mental health. “Twenty-four/seven-hour workday!” he had begun saying, panicking if someone in the family “acted up.” “Bye-bye! Sorry! Too bad! Daddy’s office is now closed.”

  It was true that he cared enough to make sure everyone was ensconced in the house (as long as we kept the screaming indoors), but he believed in a hands-off, laissez-faire approach to domestic bliss, either via phone, text message, or his favourite means: email. “Daddy is just like God,” he would often boast. “I watch and tell you what to do from a distance.”

  Another phone call later, my father was now pretending to be an omnipotent entity, which was an ineffective child-bullying technique.

  “Hello, hello,” he yelled. “This is your future calling. I am calling with friendly prophecy. As your future, I am telling you that you are garbage. You are flipping burger at McDonald’s because you locked Mommy out and since your parents have kicked you out, you are now a homeless at skid row. As Lindsay’s future, I am calling to tell you that it SUCK living in a Dumpster and it’s very hard work flipping burger—”

  “Hey, do you want to hear my new nocturne?” I said, ignoring him. “I’m putting you on speakerphone.”

  I played half an arpeggio to impress him, but he had hung up on me.

  A few minutes later, he phoned again and said, “Lindsay! I have lunch client in fifteen minute! I can’t come home! Open door for Mommy! Your future is saying thank you in advance! Your future is very grateful! Your future is—”

  My mother was now hitting the back windows with a gardening broom. The window frame quaked, the patio door shuddered, and she began to howl. I knew I had to open it before glass sprayed everywhere. I was doing a very dangerous thing—provoking my mother. It was like teasing a grizzly bear with a stomach ulcer, but I couldn’t help it, because my heart really hurt.

  And my heart wasn’t going to be healed anytime soon; after all, my mother was not well, nor was she being treated. Because I did not have school in the morning, and to show that she had forgiven me for locking her out, my mother decided that we would drive all night. She jumped on my bed, stepped on my face, and ordered me into our hillbilly pickup truck. Of course, I screamed, begged, and cried fake tears, but she would not have any of it. She was in charge and had to let me know it. Because nothing my mother did was strange to me anymore, I soon stopped arguing. But I was still twitchy-eyed with resentment. I was furious at my mother’s inability to control herself; her undiagnosed illness made me irritable like a tiger with a toothache.

  At two a.m., she stopped at the twenty-four-hour casino in a highway’s backside boondocks so she could play slots. I realized that this must be a really nice break for her, especially from the isolation and gloominess of the Belcarra. Exhausted and still furious, I had no choice but to wait in the parking lot. Gambling, like diabetes, lupus, and Parkinson’s disease, was rock hard in our gene pool; if any of the aunties drove past a casino, we knew we might never see them again, their bank accounts drained. In Hong Kong, Gung-Gung had gambled away his household supply store and all the monthly cash his mother-in law sent over from in Canada, and a couple of great-uncles had gambled their entire savings after helping to build the continental railroad, so they could never return to China.

  Fortunately and unfortunately, my mother’s other compulsions drove her away from the slots. It was the battle of the two illnesses, and luckily,
the less expensive one won. After four hours, our night drive finally terminated in a Starbucks parking lot, which was when my mother asked me if she should kill herself. Poh-Poh was always trying to commit suicide, so this announcement did not shock me. My mother was just a carbon copy of her mother. Also, wanting to kill oneself was a fact in our family, ugly and upsetting, yes, but truer than any sentiment I understood. And I knew her dying, my mother’s choice to live or not, would depend directly on my answer.

  “Will you miss me if I go bye-bye?” she said, as if inquiring about my day.

  “Shut the fuck up,” I said. “You are not allowed to die.”

  Seeming not to hear what I said, she continued: “I’ve made enough fucking food in the freezer to last until the end of the month. Then you will have to learn how to fucking cook. T&T Market does not have fresh meat, so you have to eat it as soon as you buy it.”

  But I did not want to think about frozen food or my mother killing herself, because it hurt too much, so instead, I thought about finding a high school that would register me ASAP, tomorrow, at eight a.m. I could not allow myself to feel slug-like sadness and despair, in case my brain or heart or stomach broke. I was afraid to be vulnerable and weak, like a one-eyed rabbit.

  What I didn’t know then was that my mother was desperately depressed and needed someone (like my father) to give a shit—in addition to intensive treatment. My mother needed an outsider, a certified psychiatrist to diagnose her phobias and talk her through severe mood swings. Without help, there was no hope for any of us, and I was terrified that I’d end up, broken and emotionally unmoored, like my mother and grandmother.

  The only friend my mother had was my aunt Beautiful One, and all day long, they compared ghosts. If my mother claimed that she saw three benign ghosts at breakfast, Beautiful One argued that she had conversed with six malignant ones, and this unhealthy cycle would go on and on until someone, usually my mother, had a nervous breakdown.

  My mother did not like us enough to stick around, but her grand obsessiveness would ensure that we would be well fed, at least for a month, ensuring that she had done her duty as a mother while she was part of our lives. It was perhaps a deformed version of motherhood, maybe even self-sacrifice to the point of death.

  Eventually, as we sat uncomfortably, my mother attempted to lure me out of the truck and into the empty parking lot, brandishing a crinkly twenty-dollar bill. She must have still thought she could buy me like a grocery store transaction, which made me evaluate myself in dollars and cents (back then, my self-esteem plummeted and rose like the New York stock exchange).

  “Go buy coffee,” she pleaded weakly and began sobbing.

  It was four a.m.; Starbucks was brightly lit but closed, the inverted chairs on tables. She quickly buckled up and keyed the engine on.

  “No thanks,” I said, knowing that she needed to get rid of me so she could go die. I was not going to let her off that easy, especially if she wanted to pay me only twenty dollars. Because I knew by the next morning she might change her mind, and what good would that be, when she was already dead, her eyes pecked out of her head by Canada geese? I didn’t exactly like her in that moment, but I didn’t hate her that much either. I just pitied her for crying, like I did with Demeter. Besides, she knew that I knew her plan, so she exploited her Chinese-mother bargaining tactics: “Okay then, how about forty? Fifty? Sixty. You love moolah.”

  Her animal-like begging me filled me with a bleak rage. I kicked the glove compartment, but my mother ignored me.

  For forty, fifty, or even sixty dollars, I did not think I deserved to be dumped in the ghostly parking lot of a strip mall so she could die, but for $500, out of spite, I might have punished both of us and slogged home. I might have taken the two-hour grind up our eerie mountain path, plodding uneasily towards the murky, phantom-infested woods that surrounded the Belcarra. Walking home in the necrotic night might have been my personal test, an ungodly pilgrimage in my Hello Kitty pyjamas; for a moment, I could redeem myself for being subhuman, and my mother would not really die or disappear, because I had succeeded in my gruesome trials.

  I felt strongly that she had failed at being maternal, someone who didn’t scream obscenities at me and call me lazy and retarded. A grizzly bear was kinder to its cubs, and as a bad-tempered teenager, I had been forced to be my own mother and parent, only knowing how to solve issues with blunt force and violence.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” my mother sobbed into the steering wheel. “Why are you just sitting there like a goddamn sack of rice?!”

  I stared at her, amazed. What did she want me to do? Was I supposed to punch her between the eyes? The option of walking home sounded more appealing.

  But it was also too chilly and too late. I was wearing tennis socks, not even flip-flops. Not dressed for any kind of redemption or punishment. And I knew that my mother was just delaying our life, postponing our exact same tomorrow, our same future.

  I did not want this woman, my mother, to die.

  Because a part of me had known all along that the Chinese mumbo-jumbo only exacerbated my mother’s fearfulness. Hyperbolic medieval superstition did not adequately explain why we were parked in a vacant strip mall at four a.m., our pyjamas making us look like escapee mental patients. I also knew we were inhumanly alike, sharing sharpened pieces of the same sad ghost. The demonic fury that often possessed her leaped into me more often that I wanted it to. How else to explain why I could not control myself, why I lashed out, like a teenage crime lord, at my siblings and peers without fear of death or punishment. In this moment I began to view my mother through a cleaner, uncracked lens, to see her as someone that I could easily become if I did not chomp on my tongue and apply myself to rigorous social convention. Her way of being, existing, was the opposite of what I wanted. I hated her Woo-Wooness, her screaming, how she explicitly showed her feelings, while I buried mine.

  “Hey, Lindsay!” she finally screamed when I did not respond to her unbreakable sadness. “You want Mommy or not? You want Poh-Poh? I guess you have no appreciation for me, huh?”

  Seeing her as a hysterical mess stalled my momentous resentment for a second. Her trauma had manifested in all-night driving and all-night screaming. Like any fifteen-year-old, I liked my villains to be pure evil—my mothers to be one-dimensional monsters who wore last season’s yoga clothes and my fathers to be unavailable, distant, three-headed horned beasts who took their instant coffee black.

  Huddled in our pickup truck, I suddenly felt pity for my mother, and I didn’t like it one bit.

  Was I destined to become as batshit as my mother?

  Jesus Christ, we even had the same boxy faces: skullish cheekbones and jack-o’-lantern dimples. If you looked closely, I knew that she had many admirable qualities: on her good days, she could be a proficient housewife/feeder who cooked three elaborate meals a day, folded the laundry, tended her peonies with neurotic fervour, and sliced our egg sandwiches into enviable triangles. My mother was also never dull, even if she went for weeks without shampooing her hair and wore the same soiled outfit for months: sweatpants and a sacky fleece pullover. Other Asian neighbourhood mothers wore Chanel or, if they were the Mainland Chinese wives of new-money billionaires, had terrible dental work with large piranha-yellow choppers. But my mother defied classification; she was a mash-up of West Coast yoga homeless.

  So although she was proficient in many things, including being a formidable screamer, she had many household oddities. You might wonder why our off-white carpets were peculiarly grimy, or why eight months of soggy newspapers were stockpiled in the Belcarra’s hallways, or why pieces of cardboard junk were accumulating on the kitchen counters. We were pack rats, the enthusiastic, obsessive immigrant kind, who were too paranoid to unpack, just in case the government decided to send us back.

  To the world, my mother managed an exceptionally thriving immigrant family, who lived on a very desirable mountain, in a very sprawling house with three white garages, always with
three or four new American cars. In some ways, she was the head of a proper middle-class family that seemed to do everything right.

  And the worst part of this charade was admitting that this unstable creature sometimes accepted me, took me home and fed me three meals a day. That I could one day be unable to control my despair, like her. I could one day become this sad, yo-yoing woman. And thus, as a reminder, I was obligated to take my expected place beside her, in our unsmiling Christmas photo, in a house souring with sadness.

  I resented her drama and manipulation, resented that I was taught to equate fucked-upness to something akin to love. It was hard holding out my love for her. She was a monster, yes, but she was also my mother, someone who needed me in this moment, just like when she was terrified, sleeping in my bed when I was six years old.

  Instead, I blurted: “You better not kill yourself. You are just not allowed, or else.”

  CHAPTER 8

  CHINESE HELL MONTH

  Because she feared starving so much, my mother shopped three days a week at Costco, which meant that we hoarded food, and that eating was almost as essential as money. In our family, a large gift of cash was better than love, but a platinum credit card showed genuine affection. Food, however, was real currency. It was a symbol of our family’s unusual makeup. In the Hong Kong slum of my mother’s childhood, you could sell a whole person for enough rice to last one or two months (depending on how much you liked your children).

  “Couldn’t you just sell, like, parts of someone?” I asked my mother one day, several months after she had recovered from our all-night drive to Starbucks by sleeping three days straight. I was genuinely curious, and after being marooned with my mother in the car, I think part of me knew I could lose her. And I was getting bolder, more willing to say the craziest shit, even if it was cruel, to hold her attention. “I mean, what if you only wanted enough rice for two weeks? Like, couldn’t you offer up one of your sister’s legs, and then next week sell another sister’s arm?”