The Woo-Woo Read online

  Two weeks before, without telling anyone, I had booked a cheap ticket with my emergency credit card, gifted to me by my father for any ghost-related catastrophes—my mother had insisted everyone in our family have funds (e.g., if you saw a ghost at school and needed to cab home immediately). Without any luggage, I took a taxi to the airport, flew non-stop to Honolulu, and thought I could stay until I ran out of money. I had $5,000 in cash and my emergency credit card.

  The Honolulu igloo on the twenty-third floor belonged to an Asian Poteau mother who wanted me to be friends with her spazzy, ridiculous teenager, whose English name was Fun-Fun, so she offered to put me up in her Hawaiian vacation home. It was just some inherent Asian networking scheme: the underhanded, global kind that connects the richest, most book-smart, or simply the most helpful (dumb but good for a quick aristocratic marriage) Chinese sons and daughters across the world.

  At school, Fun-Fun, a Honger (a bossy FOB), who dyed her stringy black hair Einstein white and wore alien-green contacts over her shocked, enormous pupils, had told a story about her great-auntie’s impending death, and I had snorted, demanding, “Why are you telling me this?” I did not know I was being insensitive, and that my response was socially offensive. All the Wongs spoke like this. I thought her story had no point; none of us listening even knew her great-auntie in Hong Kong. So it surprised me that Fun-Fun did not want to be friends afterwards.

  Of course, as an adult I realized that my interactions with Fun-Fun, and everyone else, were bright and cruel and toxic, a bleakly radioactive orange, except I was the only one who couldn’t see it.

  In Honolulu, I don’t believe I ever exchanged a truce-like “Hi” with white-haired Fun-Fun and her thin, beautiful, multicoloured-hair Hongers. She was their sulky leader, the ice princess and polar-bear ruler of the apartment, and she viewed me as you would a grotesque spider that needed to be stomped and obliterated. Poor Fun-Fun had no choice but to obey her mother’s overseas orders and let me in.

  She and her friends were not terrible people, but I was suffering from deep social anxiety and a sense that I was an unavoidable failure, an awful cocktail of nature versus nurture. During that period of my life, I could not have run far enough from my surroundings and myself.

  When I got there, Fun-Fun and I grunted twice at each other and that was about it. Afraid to annoy her further, I found a gritty beach blanket in a closet and went to bed on the floor. I did not want to interact with her specific sect of Hong Kong royalty, girls who all suffered from cranky, unmitigated bitchiness. In truth, her ladies-in-waiting couldn’t care less that I shared their living quarters, but I was suspicious and terrified.

  Afraid of their well-adjustedness and of being identified as abnormal, I crept around the apartment like a cockroach. I was not myself at all: my bad habit of scratching my skin raw culminated in being afraid to use the bathroom. I had not had a bowel movement in twelve days, and I could fill the entire Pacific Ocean. My paranoia of being heard, of taking up space in an overtly conspicuous way, prevented me from functioning. I could not speak. I could not eat. I could not bear to use the toilet in case I was caught and blamed.

  Instead, I curled up in a corner of the floor and convinced myself that I was better off asleep.

  When I was conscious again, I was tucked beside the dishwasher, sheltering half underneath the sink. I was groggy and nauseated; my throat felt as if I were choking on a napkin. But I was afraid to get up and use the faucet. What if they heard me drink? I remembered Fun-Fun and her friends, dripping sand and salt water all over the kitchen floor, sunburnt pink from the beach, snickering girlishly. Like a peckish menagerie of exotic birds, their fashionable Honger heads were the blurry colours of the rainbow, all of them staring down at me. But oh so groggy, I had muttered a petulant “Go away” and promptly gone back to sleep.

  “Freak,” Fun-Fun had drawled in Cantonese, even though I had done my best to stay out of her way. I could not have made myself less visible.

  Suddenly, I was a sick, grotesque blur, touching my stomach where my moneybelt was. The cash I had earned from hockey, piano, and family members. Oh God. My moneybelt had been stripped off me. It had disappeared. Gone!

  I gagged, from the starchy dryness in my mouth and the coppery bile of disbelief. I decided that someone, or someones, from Fun-Fun’s clique must have taken my moneybelt. Was that what they were snickering about? There was no one else in the apartment. It must have bulged under my clothing, an obvious giveaway. All $5,000 of it.

  I decided that it was their thinness and normalcy that had allowed them to treat others this way. Filled with shame at my own fatness, I decided Fun-Fun’s FOBs would have to pay.

  With too much melatonin and chemicals in my blood, I drifted furiously back to sleep.

  And because I was embarrassed, I did what my mother and grandmother always did: responded to fear by masking it with spurts of extreme anger. Later that night, when no one was home, I lashed out. The effects of the sleeping pills were wearing off. It took me ten minutes to find my glasses, which I had forgotten were nestled near my head. Another half hour to find my chalk-coloured moneybelt thrown under the white leather couch. Luckily, it still had my passport and credit cards.

  Feeling like a centipede amid the luxury of my surroundings, I could no longer repress my envy and resentment. I seethed. Couldn’t the other girls see my heartache? In a glacial rage, I raided closets and pitched accessories off the balcony. Clunky designer handbags somersaulted like baby bodies; the clothes and scarves became soundless fabric ghosts. No one was home, so I tossed whatever I could find into Honolulu’s empty black street for anyone to take. I screamed in aggravation as the belongings eventually landed like heaped rubbish. Then I ransacked the bedrooms. I threw crisp bed sheets and flighty down pillows. I smashed a grinning glass statue of all-knowing Buddha with someone’s unfussy wedge sandal and felt so much better about myself.

  This was my shame, all seventeen years of it. And it was emptying out of my pores. It was wonderful and toxic when I became a less sane tornado of myself. It was an outlet of rank emotional expression, especially when my culture and family forbade me to have feelings.

  Like my mother and my grandmother, I was a by-product of my culture, history, and volatile upbringing. And I did not want to think about my actions. I just wanted Fun-Fun and her friends to understand my neon-coloured pain.

  As I yelled and littered the street below with pillows and stolen offerings, I felt relieved. My slow-cooking anxiety had been dense, black, and explosive. And even though, deep down, I was often ashamed of my rage, and wanted to be less afraid, less extreme, I told myself that I had been born Attila the Hun. I could feel rage in my fingertips and in the enamel of all my scuzzy, unbrushed teeth—it often made me do things that I would regret later.

  It was ten p.m., and I was still not myself when Fun-Fun and her herd returned home from a day at the shops. I don’t know what I expected, but I had not thought about the consequences.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” Fun-Fun screamed at me when she saw what I had done. Clothes and glass made a frightening mosaic on the floor. “You’re such a freak! Get the fuck out of my house, you fucking bitch!”

  And when I saw her face, greasy from tears, I knew I had misinterpreted the situation, like I always did. I had gone too far. “Sorry” was not in my Wong vocabulary, and I did not know what to do when I had caused someone emotional distress.

  But as an automatic, self-protective reaction, I was ready for a hair-jerking, eye-gashing fight. Because I was terrified of losing face, and because I was terrified of being out on the street, I shoved Fun-Fun with feral instinct, but she called out to her friend for help, a robust high school basketball jock, and I had to be carried out of the building, kicking and screaming. I swear they could hear me howling all the way back home in Canada. Like a hungry ghost. Let me goooooooo! Nowwwwwwww!

  After wandering the streets until two a.m., cranky and afraid, I found a twenty-four-hour
Denny’s. I was lost, fearful, and furious, having been dropped in a strange place. And now I could feel the ungodly stillness of the diner in the early morning as I slid into a red vinyl booth, which squeaked and stuck to my perspiring thighs. I still had my ghost-emergency credit cards, but I thought that I would just dine and dash—just in case my father was checking his VISA account online. He would have been furious if he saw the un-supernatural charges, and I could not risk it.

  For a moment, my mother’s food room seemed almost preferable. Our scummy kitchen, where my meals were laboured over with neurotic worry, was dull and routine. The Belcarra no longer seemed ominous or unbearable but much safer than Hawaii, because I knew exactly what to expect.

  I did not want to think anymore, so I ordered my fried eggs bleeding into volcanic black toast, which I wanted to believe would cure most of my discomfort. But a few older American women marched up to me and demanded, “Where are your parents?” I supposed they assumed I was young and lost; with my baby-fat face, I was often mistaken for a middle schooler.

  “Don’t you know Honolulu is a dangerous place?” one of the elderly women asked me (she couldn’t have been more than fifty, but I thought she was ancient). “This is a big city!” she continued. “Why are you out wandering by yourself?”

  “Oh,” I said, a little surprised by her reaction. “My parents are at home. I’m actually on vacation.”

  “By yourself?” the old woman asked, looking skeptical.

  “Um, yeah,” I said. Their shocked expressions had me wondering if she was particularly hard of hearing or I had just said the wrong thing.

  I wished I had pretended that I didn’t speak English so they would go away. They both looked incredibly worried as I ignored more questions. And then the other woman handed me twenty dollars. Twenty whole dollars! For doing absolutely nothing! I was pleased. The outside world was not cheap, and now I had free money for just sitting in a diner.

  It would take me years to understand that these hovering women could see right through me; they weren’t absolute idiots, but the quickest way to handle me was to give me cash like my father—anything to make the problem go away, whatever change they could spare from their flush, touristy wallets. In hindsight, it is almost comical that my father reacted to me like I was a homeless beggar in our day-to-day interactions, but like him, in those days I believed cash could cure any malfunction of the heart.

  After the women left, I decided that to make even more money, I would need to appear as if I were desperate, confused, and crying. Back then, I saw them, and every single person, as intricate puzzle pieces to be cautiously positioned into my grand, spastic narratives and dirty, absurdist schemes. I was not allowed to snivel at home, and I didn’t know how to sob on demand. If my mother or father caught my siblings or me crying, we got an enormous smack on the crown of our head with an open hand or blunt wooden spoon, depending on the parent’s mood. This smack was supposed to distract us from whatever emotional turmoil we were afflicted with and knock the ghost right out of our ears. Of course, in my experience, it never seemed to work. I was more distressed after being hit.

  So I tried to jab my eyes with my fingers to make them look scary and bloodshot so that strangers might think I was in terrible distress and give me even more money. I was furious that my parents had deprived me of such a crucial life skill. A girl who knew how to cry most often got her way, and who knew how long I might be wandering around. So I did my best to make myself cry with my dry pointer finger, but all I gave myself was sore eyeballs and what would later turn out to be mild conjunctivitis.

  In Honolulu, I was far from my family and I imagined them all suffering without me. It was August again (Hell Month) and they had no air conditioning; maybe they had gone to Walmart and were having so much fun they had forgotten I existed. The thought made me very happy; they had been mostly unappreciative of me. At Denny’s, I could pretend to myself that I was a fearless, independent person who had figured out how to make money off concerned strangers. Maybe I had even discovered my true vocation. Getting kicked out of the apartment could be a thrilling adventure. All I wanted in running to Hawaii in the first place was to be on my own for a while and flourish among the healthy and the living—forget toxic Chinese ghosts.

  After I finished my breakfast at Denny’s (I made sure I ate twenty dollars’ worth of food), public transportation tested my abilities as a teenage explorer. I was a suburban princess, used to my parents chauffeuring me everywhere I went. I had never taken the bus before, and I didn’t even know its exotic destination. But everyone else was getting on, so I thought I should too. The bus was like an old-fashioned trolley, with red tasseled ropes hanging precariously on its open sides. It was unbearable and crowded, and I couldn’t understand how real people suffered this daily. The bus was a horrid invention because it did not even take credit cards. Maybe because of my violently pink eyes, a Japanese tourist couple randomly handed me some dollar bills.

  Really, I didn’t even need to try to look pitiable. I was dead-eyed and dirty. I was still wearing the grimy skort that I had arrived in and a T-shirt that I had taken randomly from someone’s closet at Fun-Fun’s apartment. I had not showered in nearly two weeks, so my scalp was intensely itchy and I could not stop scratching. All the tourists appeared to be blooming and glowing in their floral Hawaiian outfits. They wore happy hotbeds of tropical flora, their own private gardens stretched across backs and broad backsides. By my family’s criteria, Americans were fat. At home, and on the Poteau, I was made to feel like an obese Chinese girl, but I was suddenly average weight in Honolulu. This was a revelation! On my mountain, in my Fake Asia, I had never seen girls heavier than a size two, so this meant that I could afford to eat more. It was liberating.

  The brightness of the sun depressed me as we lurched along the touristy streets that looked like a grown-up’s Disneyland, expensively clean and palm-treed. But suddenly, there was a screech and a bang; a white rental sedan slammed into the trolley’s exposed sides, and I flew across two seats, crashed headfirst, and cracked my kneecap upon emergency landing. Like a gunned-down bird, a deluded turkey attempting flight. I could not find my glasses. Luckily, the Japanese couple who had paid my fare found them at the front of the bus. The frames were crushed, twisted, and lopsided.

  I did not stay to wait for the paramedics because I did not know that I should go to the hospital with the others who had been injured; instead, I fled the crash site in a daze. I was running away again, and by now, I knew that no one would ever stop me, even if I wanted them to. Everything seemed brighter and, unfortunately, much louder; my neck and head were squeezing tight, and I swore I had injured my brain because certain areas of it felt raw, as if enthusiastically tenderized by a steak cleaver. There was a bombastic ringing in my ears: a high G or C (it varied). I would have a permanent neck injury from the crash, but I was too young and naïve to think about seeking medical attention. I began to experience a strange floating sensation, like I was skydiving inside my own corneas—a lesser version of the vertigo I would later suffer in New York City.

  I decided that it was time to leave Honolulu and, limping, hailed a cab to the airport. I did not have any cash and shrugged mutely when the driver screamed obscenities at me for not paying. He may have thought that he could frighten me, but I had grown up with my mother, and “Fuck you, bitch!” sometimes meant “Thank you” or “How are you?”

  “Shut up,” I told the driver as unfeelingly as possible, and hopped out of his cab.

  At the airport, I bought a stand-by ticket to Hongcouver with my emergency credit card and waited in a frantic daze.

  I checked the messages on my cellphone. “Daddy has many ghost inside him!” My mother had filled the mailbox with the same message, sounding as if she were the answering machine voice. In my ringing eardrums, her voice crackled and dinged with achy electricity: “I’m going to fly over there and pick you up right now!”

  But I did not think either of my parents had flown
on a plane since immigrating, and if she hadn’t come by now, she was in her food room or sandwiched in the abundant aisles of Walmart or Costco.

  “I’m coming home,” I announced to her on the phone when I was in the boarding area.

  She had picked up on the first ring.

  Hey, why are you so fucking dirty?” my mother exclaimed, as I slid into the passenger seat at the international pickup zone. She turned on the interior car light to get a better look and reached across to rap my forehead as if checking for any ghosts, but I pulled away. I had transformed, and she knew it.

  “It’s none of your business,”

  I snarled, ready for another hair-pulling, jaw-shattering fight.

  For a moment, I thought I saw concern in her eyes, but it could have been the flickering airport lights on her pencilled eyebrows imitating dainty distress lines. Then my mother’s usual face was back. I worried that I was beginning to see things that weren’t there. What if the Woo-Woo was here in our car? Oh God, what if I was Woo-Woo and this was a hallucination?

  I didn’t know how I felt about my mother being concerned for me, because it was so new. My ordeal made me want something familiar, even automated screaming from a family member. I like to think that my mother understood the monstrous fear that had pursued me on my round-trip from Hongcouver to Honolulu.

  There was something about being away from the Belcarra that made life at home much clearer. As if I had been wearing anamorphic, distorting goggles my entire life, and I could truly see now that she was genuinely worried about me, even if she refused to ever say it. As an adult, I understand that she was too preoccupied with her ghosts to be a mother and a human; she was a grieving, shell-shocked victim of her illness. In the car I could see that my mother and I both looked different, half-submerged by compact shadows and eerie streetlights. We both seemed a little less proud and much less malevolent, though we were both still afraid of ourselves, of what we were inherently capable of. Almost as if we could become possessed by being too honest with each other and ourselves.