The Woo-Woo Read online

  In that sickening moment, I felt a sense of hopelessness eclipsing me. A souring, vomit-like desperation and lack of control came over my body, in a reality that was not my parallel unconsciousness. Fuck, fuck, fuck! This was the most Woo-Woo I had ever been. I shut my eyes and prayed that my new demonic image would fade. It did not.

  Later, when we checked out of the emergency room, my mother fearfully complained that I was still very much possessed because I hadn’t been respectful of the hungry ghosts.

  “But I’m not fucking possessed,” I yelled at her, irritated but unsure of myself. “I’m fucking fine, okay?”

  When we got home, I was sent to my room, because it was going to be Hell Month soon, and was told I could not come out. We could not go around spreading to other family members what my father jokingly called “Lindsay’s exorcist,” to deal with the anxious repercussions of the incident. According to seventeenth-century Chinese Buddhist teachings, when monks exorcised the ghosts from the “possessed,” if the afflicted fainted and shat, they had been purified. But my mother thought it was quite the opposite—that a ghost had tried to teach me a valuable life lesson: respect the magnificent undead and get stronger in the head. My public possession made my parents stop arguing with each other, as they focused on scolding me for my weakened state. I disagreed with both interpretations, arguing that I had an adverse reaction to an alcoholic beverage.

  In fact, it would turn out that I was deathly allergic to champagne and peaches.

  More importantly, it was a foreshadowing of what was to come in my first week in New York City. A power outage inside my brain.

  If you asked me then, I would have said that being possessed by a badly behaved Woo-Woo had been quite literally like taking a very humiliating and incredibly public shit. Yet in my gloomy, collapsing chest, I worried that my mother was right, and I did not know how to keep our Woo-Woo ghosts away. If my mother hadn’t been so proud, I’d have fallen at the varicose veins on her knees and begged her to make me sane, which would have meant ceaseless visits to the Buddhist temple to burn hell notes (tiny papier-mâché versions of fake money, sometimes even postcard images of prostitutes and Viagra, sold at Chinatown grocery shops) to appease our ancestors in the afterlife.

  What if I was in the very early stages of Woo-Woo too? Was there a remedy to reverse the small damage? Or was it a one-time deal, a nasty scolding from the universe to listen to my mother’s people?

  By the middle of August, the entire family was required to shelter indoors for Hell Month. No one was permitted in or out of the Belcarra, not even to water the plants. My mother worried that we would all get possessed and act like Poh-Poh if we dared crack open the front doors or even a window—an underhanded ghost might flutter into our brains, like mad cow disease.

  Normally, I’d make a snide remark or roll my teenage eyeballs, but I said nothing this time, which seemed to satisfy my mother.

  Gung-Gung suffered three mini heart attacks the week we declared ourselves hermits, which ended our self-imposed quarantine. The paramedics had pronounced Gung-Gung dead during his second heart attack and zipped him up into a cheerful orange body bag, but he began to jerk his legs a bit and moan—another false alarm. They had to unzip him and take him out, and then zip him back in and out for a third time that week. And I think everyone, including the ambulance workers, was getting a bit tired of what our family called his “flakiness.”

  We could not handle any imminent death in our family, so we had to evacuate the country. We had to go on mandatory vacation. Essentially, a Chinese family functions like a matriarchal dictatorship—if the richest auntie says we must evacuate, the others must follow.

  The truth was that our family was too afraid to be left behind to handle Gung-Gung’s upcoming death and pay for any health costs. Also, my mother said that she was very worried, because after my fainting in the theatre, she felt that I was especially vulnerable to demonic possession. Gung-Gung dying and me suddenly losing consciousness was surely a double omen that our immediate family was in cataclysmic danger. I did not realize then that this was the only way she knew how to protect me.

  So all the RVs were hitched to trucks and vans, a travelling band of caravans. Most of the extended family headed to Burnaby Hospital. My father pulled into the drop-off zone and my mother charged inside to say “a three-minute goodbye” to Gung-Gung, who was dying for the fourth or fifth time.

  Because of my dizzy, debilitated state, my mother told me to stay in the pickup truck and not “let any ghost in.” I sighed softly so she wouldn’t hear me. I wanted her to acknowledge that I was a human being, not a puppet, like Poh-Poh, who everyone believed housed evil entities permanently.

  Like all the aunties, we would cross the border to look for safety in the biggest American grocery store we could find. Because Walmart was everywhere, it was decided that it was a food centre that all the ghosts from hell would instantly recognize. The dead chasing us would love the selection of junk food, which was much better than Canada’s.

  Thank God the Walmart Supercenter in Bellingham was open twenty-four/seven. The aunties decided to camp out at the various Walmarts in the towns across Washington and Oregon States. My aunt Beautiful One’s family was one of the more imaginative ones and was going camping beside Disneyland. They asked me if I wanted to tag along, but I was still quite afraid of Uncle E.T., and I worried about him making me run laps in a sunny Anaheim parking lot.

  “Feel better, Lindsay,” Auntie Beautiful One said on speakerphone. “I heard from your mom that you fainted.”

  “A ghost got her because she was weak!” my mother interjected. “Why are you telling her to feel better? It’s out of her control.”

  I thought my aunt’s response, like the doctor’s in the ER, to be normal when discussing someone’s malady, in contrast to my mother’s sharp shrieking. And I bitterly wished my mother could react more like Beautiful One, who may not have been maternal, but she seemed concerned about my well-being. Unlike my mother, Beautiful One did not blame my medical emergency on my personal shortcomings. Was this how average people handled sickness? And why was my mother so convinced it was my fault?

  “Oh, Quiet Snow,” Auntie Beautiful One finally said, sighing. But she did not speak further of the fainting, because Beautiful One was often afraid of angering her older sister. Instead she asked, “What are we going to do about dad dying?”

  “Save ourselves from ghosts!” my mother declared, as if there was no other possibility.

  To protect ourselves from the undead, while allowing me to convalesce, my mother’s first pick was Costco, but Walmart welcomed loyal overnight camper-customers. The Wongs were going to take refuge in the Walmart parking lot until we thought Gung-Gung was dead and the hell gates were closed, but we had to remember to turn off our cellphones in case the hospital called with bad news. We were ill-equipped for tragedy and disaster, and this was what we always did to evade our spectacular real-life problems—we ran away. If you ever asked my father if anything was wrong, he always said, without giving a straightforward, sincere answer, “What the fuck you talking about? Everything okay except I have dumb kid and not enough money!”

  In previous summers, we had vacationed for two weeks at Seattle Premium Outlets and then spent another week at Oregon’s Woodburn Premium Outlets with Auntie Beautiful One’s family.

  “Do you want to sleep in our trailer tonight?” Beautiful One would often ask me, sounding enthusiastic. “We can have a sleepover!”

  Before I could say no because of Uncle E.T.’s presence, my mother would shake her head and pinch my arm. It was her usual way of speaking for me. “Lindsay, you don’t know yet if they have ghost in their trailer!” she said, looking scared. Normally I’d have argued, but I did not want to have a sleepover.

  This silencing, of course, irked me, but Beautiful One and I said nothing because my mother was in charge. It was sometimes better to let her be the only grown-up, her phobias the supreme queen mother in all dec
ision-making. Whereas my mother held jurisdiction over ghosts and prepared meals in the camper, Beautiful One ordered in fried chicken and fed her children tubs of Neapolitan ice cream. While camping, I preferred my auntie’s way of mothering. No one was ever shamed at the dinner table for being fat or lazy or retarded. And I wondered if our constant fear, which escalated whenever we tried to flee, was a symptom of our mental illness.

  August was RV season at Walmart. The boxy trailers and commercial trucks, the Winnebagos cozying side by side—a camping season fairground. A trailer park suburbia. Parked at the back of the lot for modest privacy, our trailer hid out in concrete accommodations. At night, truck stomachs growled with indigestible thunder, so it was almost impossible to sleep as they lurched in beside us.

  Despite still feeling woozy and exhausted from the incident at the theatre, I felt a sharp sense of relief in the parking lot, as if I had narrowly escaped some grotesque shadow life, which now seemed to be far away and barely existing. In many ways, the Walmart/McDonald’s parking lot was healthier than our sweaty house. Not only did I have the freedom of an entire supercentre and more than 300 parking stalls, but I could not complain about stewing in this foreign, sultry aroma: car exhaust and tropical blasts from a deep potato fryer. None of the Wongs had showered in a week, and no brand of deodorant was compatible with cars and fast food and summer. I was a souring french fry, a putrid McNugget. The RV required a trailer park hookup so we had no electricity, no running water.

  However, I was still secretly worried that the incident at the theatre meant that there was something wrong, mentally, with me. My mother constantly fussed over me during mealtimes, while my father read his newspaper. “How is Lindsay’s ghost?” she said, sounding anxious. “Is it still inside you?”

  “Shut up,” I said, but she continued trying to communicate with my ghosts. Her reminders only echoed the sharp pounding beginning to pulsate inside my head, which gradually lessened.

  That summer before senior year, for eleven days, I could be seen in my pyjamas, greasy hair gone stiff on my scalp, pushing a shopping cart in the junk food aisle at least twice a day. In this way, left to myself, I could also begin to plan and plot and dream. I could pretend that I wasn’t trapped in a much larger and more fluorescent version of my mother’s food room. Hell, I was unsupervised and free, and the store was so bright at night that it seemed like the Woo-Woo could not exist here. It was as if my mysterious ailment had never happened. Was this what insanity was like? A black crack in the brain that deepened with age and rage and fear?

  Only when I ran out of clean clothes did I leave the fantasy food aisles and disappear into the clothing department to purchase temporary ones, cheap cotton panties in plastic packs. Polyester bras and rainbow-coloured shorts to be used once and chucked away, all for $9.99. Our family flung our grubby laundry into the garbage can under the McDonald’s happy golden arches once or twice a day. This was luxury living—a way to pretend that we had escaped our troubles.

  I like to think that being away from home gave us hope that we could one day become unafraid. For instance, the Wongs were briefly relieved of darkness, where the shopping carts could be our life rafts into simulated happiness.

  At Walmart, we tried to become the very best of families, verbally abusing each other once every few days.

  “Why are you getting so bald like chicken egg?” my father shouted once, half-heartedly, at my mother, who asked him why he was getting so fat and old.

  But could we outrun our mental illness? Could we actually outmanoeuvre our ghosts?

  At first, believing in the brightly lit promise of American supermarkets, I wanted to think we could. But then my mother began to obsess about the ghosts waiting for her when we returned home. Near the end of our asylum, she stopped sleeping again, blasted the radio and TV infomercials all night, the volume at the highest level, keeping us all up in the one-room RV with long monologues.

  “Why can’t we just live here?” she moaned again and again. “I don’t want to go back.”

  “Don’t be retarded,” my father said, putting his headphones on. “I have to go to work and make money.”

  “Lindsay needs to stay here,” my mother yelled, using me as an excuse, since Hell Month would soon officially be over. “See! She’s cured now! No more ghost, right? Lindsay, Lindsay, tell Daddy that you need to live here or the ghost will come back.”

  Groaning, I pretended to sleep.

  “Lindsay? Lindsay?” my mother shouted across the room, while a stranger in an adjacent trailer (the walls were not soundproof) screamed, “Shut up! Oh my God! It’s four a.m.! Don’t you people ever shut the fuck up?!”

  But as usual, my mother did not care. She persisted: “Tell Daddy you are only safe here, okay? You just can’t go back home, okay?”

  Exhausted and afraid that I would one day, like my mother, not be able to control myself, I resisted screaming at her and pulled the covers over my head. But one thing I did know for certain was that even if I wanted to tell anyone about my summer vacations in a parking lot, no one would believe me anyway.

  CHAPTER 9

  FUN-FUN’S IGLOO

  Strangely enough, after the Walmart vacation, our family drama plateaued to a point of semi-normalcy, or at least the sense that I could survive, study enough, maybe even graduate high school. During that year, my siblings and I were nearly grown and no longer involved in multiple extracurricular activities, so my unmedicated mother seemed relaxed and less bothered. And I was able to hope for the future—college.

  But nothing ever stays the same. After my seizure-like episode in the movie theatre, I began to wonder if the problem was really weirdo me. So during the summer after senior year, when I found myself face down on a tiled, space-white floor, I was feverish and nervous and terrified. There was nothing scarier than waking up in a Star Trek living room and thinking that you were trapped in a high-end appliance.

  I was immobilized by some deadly anxiety, and the medical whiteness of the room did not help. I could not remember where I was. Sleek white walls and the cold white floor made me feel as if I inhabited a vast storage freezer in Antarctica that had been scrubbed antiseptic clean. The room was freezing in a chic autopsy kind of way, cadaver-cold with a hostile post-mortem decor.

  I suddenly understood what had happened. I had been killed when I wasn’t paying attention. Someone had murdered me without my knowing, which explained why I couldn’t flex my toes or twist my tired rigor-mortis neck.

  My vision was hot and blurry. I began to panic. Then I remembered I was legally blind without my glasses, which were near me on the floor.

  Suddenly, a shaft of sunlight burned into my bare arm, and I remembered everything else with giddy relief: senior year was finally over, and I was inhabiting a soulless igloo in desperate, sunny Honolulu. Someone’s sterile apartment on the twenty-third floor.

  I had been taking over-the-counter sleeping pills so I would not have to think anymore, three to four a day. I heard my cellphone ring and groggily picked up. My mother was calling, worried and panicked.

  “Did the ghost or alien get you?” she asked. “If they did, you must tell them to fuck off, okay?”

  Predictably, with my erratic academic performance, by the end of high school I had not earned enough credits to graduate, but my guidance counsellor, with pixelated pity morphing in her wet, exhausted eyes, thought it was best to just assign me the missing few.

  “Good luck, Lindsay,” she had said, sighing the first syllable of my name. We both knew that it was not worth arguing with me over two measly goddamn credits.

  The problem with being mostly home-schooled that year, because of my vehement insistence on not attending classes with Demeter and her gang, was that there was no dull-eyed, puritanical teacher to set up due dates. I had not failed biology because I was especially dim-witted or sloppy, but because I had allowed the textbooks to suffocate in their plastic-wrapped casings for the entire school year. Luckily, colleges in British C
olumbia in 2005 emphasized entrance examinations, which meant that my parents could hire tutors to help me pass.

  After high school, everyone in our family was required to attend UBC, the University of British Columbia—or the University of Billion Chinese—because it was the second-best school in the country. With our disturbing and unfocused Woo-Woo genes, it was no surprise that we could only be second-best model minorities. If you belonged to my mother’s side of the family, UBC was the only Canadian Ivy League you were allowed to apply to (it was close to home and you could save a bundle on dormitory fees).

  I was “too retarded to be George Bush or the Donald Trump or even simple doctor,” so my father expected me to major in music, but I had adamantly refused to audition.

  That was why I had come to Honolulu. To flee, to escape—I was legitimately, literally scared shitless (anxiety-induced diarrhea and vomiting) when I thought about the Armageddon that was going to be college. I had been so micromanaged my whole life that I didn’t know what to do with the imminent semi-freedom; ironically, that same fear sent me all the way to Hawaii.

  I was suffering from fear of the Woo-Woo, which some sly part of me still felt could shiv me in the shower. Realistically, I knew that this would not happen. But it was my momentous fear of any change or transition, coupled with the expectation that I was going to fail spectacularly and be kicked out within a month, that made me dangerous. In retrospect, I did not think of post-secondary education as a privilege but rather as another shit-filled familial obligation, one that I would dismiss.