The Woo-Woo Read online

  “No way,” I snapped, no longer bothering to hide my irritation but then doubting myself for arguing with her. “I’m not leaving the door open. What about my privacy? Jesus Christ. Are you fucking insane? No, don’t fucking answer that.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?” my mother persisted, looking worried. “The ghosts are scared of me.”

  I ignored her and thought about poor Auntie Beautiful One in her kitchen with her humongous bag of nuts and wondered if she was doing okay.

  Later that night, right before my cousin’s wedding, there was a turning point in the youngest auntie’s downward plummet. At forty-two years old, poor Beautiful One was fully manic but perhaps more uncertain and desperate, spewing musical suicide warnings on our answering machine.

  “Gooooodbyeee?” she trilled sadly. “Goodbyeeeee? La-la-la? I’m leaving nooooow? Goodbyeee! Hahaha!”

  “Get over yourself,” my mother snarled at the recording, refusing to pick up. “Lindsay, listen to that piece of shit!”

  I said I did not want to listen to the piece of shit that had once been my aunt, but my mother insisted it was good for me. “You need to understand what selfish is! What if you grow up to be a bitch?”

  I mimicked her, snidely spitting back her gibberish, and she looked wounded, like she did whenever I challenged her. For a second, I considered whether I was being irrational and nasty, but our exchange would sour my entire evening, as I thought I had overcome my frightening insecurity—if our insanity was so catching, and Auntie Beautiful One had been so easily infected, how long did I have left?

  My mother snatched a beer from the refrigerator and went to check the baby monitors that she had planted in the hallways and bedrooms (she had gotten so scared of the Woo-Woo that she had resorted to this, worried that she would miss a supernatural noise and fearing my late-night abduction by mystical monsters and America’s most wanted).

  “Lindsay,” she said desperately, swigging from her bottle and glaring at the monitor’s anxious static, “why don’t you fucking believe me about the ghosts?”

  Auntie Beautiful One’s death would have to wait. My cousin’s $150,000 three-day wedding with designer tuxedos and tailored Chinese emperor-inspired robes would not be cancelled on account of someone in the family having a shitty ghost encounter. Auntie had plenty of chances to off herself and she hadn’t bothered, I had cruelly thought and then regretted. She was my aunt, and I had looked up to her. Overwhelmed, I was behaving too much like my mother.

  And like my mother, I was going to pretend that she would soon get better.

  At least 1,500 people had been invited to my oldest auntie’s monstrous McMansion, and my brother and sister, who had been avoiding me for months, were probably already getting wasted at the basement bar with our father. Because we were afraid to acknowledge our illness, we were all trying to protect ourselves by denying that Beautiful One had a serious problem. Before going to the bar, I went to pet my auntie’s dogs that had been let loose to roam in the dining room and backyard.

  For the wedding banquet, my mother and one of the older aunts had announced themselves the Chosen, which meant that they were supposed to be the Lucky Aunties, i.e., snide middle-aged women who had amassed some wealth via smart marriages and had been competent at procreating sons. They had selected themselves to bless the bride. I guess they were supposed to be magical boy-producing priestesses, because everyone treated the Chosen like royalty, handing them cash in fat red envelopes while bowing. I felt sorry for the bride, who seemed genuinely nice; she did not deserve to have my mother follow her around like the maid of honour on her wedding day. Luckily, newly possessed Beautiful One had not bothered to attend the festivities. Otherwise, the bride would have cancelled the wedding.

  For the past few days, I had been trying to avoid Poh-Poh, who had finally arrived at the banquet. She had forgotten to put on pantyhose and instead wore dirty soccer socks with sneakers.

  Some grandmothers are just too hard to love. Really, old Poh-Poh was still a ghoulish nightmare, as she enjoyed hitting her grandchildren at parties. Whereas other grannies might demand a phony hug or shoo you away with bribes of money, Poh-Poh was the violent kind who did not like girls and would not hesitate to beat you with her metal walking stick, pretending that she mistook you for a sobering hallucination. Over the years, we had learned that it was best to ignore her. She herself had been beaten for being born a girl, and she thought that this was what you were supposed to do whenever you saw one of your female progeny wandering around at a social gathering.

  As soon as Poh-Poh was settled in the sitting room, she chased my aunt’s Scottish terrier with a pair of orange kiddie scissors. At seventy-five, she was still as sprightly as she had been when she had stayed with us that summer I was thirteen. Poh-Poh, told by her family not to take her antipsychotic drugs, was enacting her surround-sound delusions. She was grabbing fistfuls of the old doggy’s white hair and yanking on his tail, screaming that it affected her eyesight. His tail had to go. Chop, chop.

  “I have to cut it!” she yelled, making snipping motions with her scissors. With her white popping eyes, she looked very much like a rabid toad.

  We had all tried speaking normally to her, but only tremendous yelling and waving our arms could make her lose interest in whatever she was doing.

  “Don’t even try it,” I said, upset because I liked this dog. “Sit down!”

  Moaning, Poh-Poh covered her eyes and slunk to the floor, her bony legs splayed out from her pink dress suit. She peeked over her clawed hands, which had become deformed when she was a little girl, hauling firewood and planting twisty yams like corpses, as Japanese bombs ravaged the sky. In her fancy wedding clothes, she was still lost, a feral woman who had no concept of reality or chronological time. For my grandmother, it would always be 1941 every day of her life, and her enemy, Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoe, was plotting an attack.

  “I can’t see anymore!” Poh-Poh screamed at me, frantic. “I really can’t see!”

  “Take your hands off your face,” I snapped, a little unnerved. “And don’t touch the dog. He’s not yours. Do you even know who I am?”

  Poh-Poh jerked her head no, said she had absolutely no idea, she had no grandchildren (there were nineteen of us scattered through the noisy, sweating house). But this was considered normal. After all, Poh-Poh, too weak to fight the spirits, was allowed to be perpetually possessed because she had survived a major invasion.

  It was always frightening and heartbreaking to see that the woman, who had never received proper psychiatric treatment, did not understand that she was safe, the war had been won.

  The banquet was still being prepared, so I wandered around the kitchen, where a second cousin, who only ever spoke to me when everyone else under age twenty-five was preoccupied, asked me if I wanted to smoke some “pretty okay weed.” Like every Hongcouver cousin of mine, she was pale and dainty, another skeletal peony in outlet Prada.

  Earlier, our hair had been curled and sculpted by the same family stylist who had transformed all my cousins’ heads into prissy botanical gardens. But on me, the seaweed tresses looked matronly, especially with my clunky purple glasses, and the overall effect was, everyone said, well, highly disturbing. It sent mixed messages: Was I a wannabe hipster or a dowdy grandmother? “It’s Sir Elton John’s mother,” someone witty had quipped, but they said something like this at every family gathering while I flipped them the finger. As expected, our generation was still competing inhumanely with each other.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” I said to my cousin, who would be my ally for the next ten or twelve minutes. I tried not to feel ungainly next to her in my mall-bought dress. I did not have money for last season’s Prada; my immediate family had already lost the competition.

  On our way to the balcony, we passed another distant cousin I’d never talked to, some chubby wannabe gangster with pimples—who would turn out to be an actual gangster, buckling a bulletproof vest over his black tuxe
do, telling everyone he was, like, totally scared of dying that night. I thought that he was being unnecessarily paranoid. This was a wedding between my engineer cousin and a gushing Filipino kindergarten teacher—but with a family as disturbed and large and diverse as ours, it was not surprising that we produced either delusional professionals or extra-phobic criminals. I chose to ignore this crazy, scared cousin who couldn’t stop babbling about dying.

  “Is he more related to you or me?” I said, and my cousin, who always had a few grams of weed on her, made a funny face and the cuckoo sign around her earlobe.

  A few months later, I heard that our acne-scarred gangster cousin had his arms chopped off by a rival gang member, some asshole clumsily wielding a machete, and now, his poor mother had to spoon-feed him oxtail soup. I do not know if this was completely true, as he probably only had one appendage hacked off (the Chan clan tended to exaggerate). And the anecdote soon got turned into an exhilarating parable about attending an Ivy League college and not becoming an inconvenience to the family. The distant cousin—an obvious dummy—was thought to be inconsiderate for getting himself disabled, and now he couldn’t be relied on to provide for his aging parents. He had dishonoured the Chan family name, which was nearly as upsetting as getting possessed.

  “Jesus,” an auntie, the mother of the groom, proclaimed loudly, as suddenly everyone in the room was bobbing their mechanical heads, bowing at an embarrassed bride and her gossiping entourage; my cousin and I tried to quickly bypass the gaggle of crotchety women on the marble staircase, most of them dressed in identical Vegas-gold cheongsams. “We moved to Canada so our kids could do sex and make baby with the Filipino? Back in Hong Kong we could own maybe five or six of these people.”

  “It’s because these days our kids want to be politically correct,” I heard my mother say; she was vicious when she was bored and even more inhuman now, too worried about her favourite sister to be nice. She also did not care to acknowledge the Filipina bride, who was standing right beside her, teary-eyed. “Fuck,” she continued, “I don’t want to be here, do you? This is a shitty time for a wedding. Beautiful One isn’t here.”

  “Lindsay!” the mother of the groom exclaimed, and I bowed because I was supposed to. It’d be rude if I did not acknowledge her, though I was tempted to pretend that I couldn’t hear her. “You look abnormally large tonight,” she announced. “Have you had your thyroid checked? Obese is not attractive for someone so young.”

  “Okay, Auntie,” I said, pretending to agree with her but cringing inwardly, and she was so pleased with my answer that she handed me fifty bucks. I had gained ten pounds the previous semester, and I was now a gossipy size 14. But this was the oldest and richest auntie, who thought fifty dollars was fifty cents, and she made sure everyone on the staircase could see our imperial exchange.

  If Beautiful One had bothered to show up, she would not have been outdone: it was Chinese custom to exhibit the gluttony of wealth at extravagant social events, and she’d have handed out brittle twenties to every single wedding guest to make sure that she was the most beloved Chan queen. Unlike my mother, who was considered “too middle class” (i.e., cheap and poor), my aunties used showy displays of money to feel better about themselves and to momentarily forget about their negligent childhoods of Third-World poverty.

  “Fuck,” I said, after the entourage had found someone else to pick on. I averted my eyes.

  And my cousin quickly lied, sensing a bleak insecurity in me, which made my round face blaze like an apocalyptic sun. “You’re not fat,” she said. “Seriously, Lindsay, you look fine. She’s just saying it because she has nothing else to talk about. They invent shit all the time.”

  Nothing good has ever happened when a pig has been barbecued and ushered in on a tray, double front doors propped open, five pallbearers from the butcher’s conveying the wide-eyed carcass, still shocked. Tummy hollowed out, skin like a fitted cape, dyed shocking sienna. One of the uncles hacked the animal into bite-sized snacks with an executioner’s axe. Another uncle yanked out the pig’s underbelly, a metal rib cage inserted to uphold its crispy contour. Extra-large trays of pan-fried strings, tangled noodles with mussels and clams, for 1,500 lip-smacking wedding guests. A final feast to celebrate the bride and indulge in fatty flesh, a status symbol of all good-luck things.

  After the pig had been carved up, Uncle E.T. reported Auntie Beautiful One missing by phone. Beautiful One, in a lively display of mania, had stomped over to the oldest auntie’s house. With a steak knife, she made a half-hearted effort to slit her wrists on the clean-cut lawn. Beautiful One had thought enthusiastically about dying in her own bathroom but later said that God wanted her to expire in front of all “the losers who didn’t believe.” Besides, her kids kept hammering on the door to pee.

  The oldest auntie’s house, the suburban banquet venue, was incredibly tacky and monstrous, with show-off marble staircases and ghostly colonnades. Under the raucous laughter and the nervous erhu, the crucial string instrument of classical Chinese opera, chatty carnivores fed on the succulent carcass that occupied most of the butcher’s dining table. There was bad Korean boy band karaoke to help the guests digest their gluttonous meal. Most of them did not know about my aunt’s performance on the lawn. And when everyone began their drunken karaoke, I worried that my father, who had been avoiding my mother’s relatives at the bar, guzzling at least a dozen beers and a bottle of wine, would launch into his eardrum-gashing rendition of “House of the Rising Sun.” In all fairness, I was a little drunk and stoned myself.

  However, most of the family saw Beautiful One’s attempted suicide, text messages beeping helpfully on our cellphones. Beautiful One missing! SOS! SOS!

  My mother charged into the stately basement bathroom that had a gold-plated toilet and bidet so she would not have to watch her sister die.

  “Is she dead?” she asked me. I had followed her, perhaps unwittingly sensing that the bathroom would be an effective place to temporarily hide.

  “Does it matter?” I finally said, wondering when our hosts would bring out dessert. I was starving; anxiety always made me think about my stomach, as if I could cure myself with a plate of expensive cakes. Feeling passive-aggressive in addition to scared shitless for Beautiful One, I said: “I thought you said you didn’t care about your sister.”

  “It’s bad luck to die at a wedding,” she said, becoming an email auto-reply when it involved her feelings. “Did you call nine-one-one?”

  “I’m sure somebody already did.”

  “Shut the fucking door,” she said.

  She began to cry, collapsing on the edge of the toilet seat, allowing the spidered hem of her cocktail dress to sag into the bowl.

  “Lindsay, I said close the fucking door. I don’t want anyone to see.”

  My mother did not like to cry, in case there were ghosts around who wanted to possess her. Witnessing her cry was always an exceptional and uncomfortable and judgmental experience, much like one of our family members marrying someone not-Chinese.

  “It’s not your fault, you know,” I said, trying to be kind.

  “Close the door.”

  “It’s not like you killed her, you know,” I said, trying to sound composed.

  I thought that being realistic in this situation was much better than trying to be pleasant—my mother would be too distraught to remember a gentler tone or semi-friendly phrase, but a week or a month or a year later, she’d remember my unwavering practicality. She appreciated pragmatic and uncompromising behaviour in any tragedy, from broken dishes to car crashes. Unwittingly, I still craved a little of her approval, especially in these terrible moments, and needed her to understand why she had given birth to me, even if it was just to recognize that eldest children are always the most useful in an emergency.

  Over the years, my mother had shrunk sideways and inwards, becoming a scary, skeletal chicken-woman and even more foul-tempered in her day-to-day interactions. Her up-and-down moods were still hazardous, but I cou
ld not even be sure I knew this strange witchy creature perched on the toilet seat, cakey black circles under her eyes, her dress wrinkled and looking very much like a bad costume. Her hair had been carefully poofed by a stylist in the morning, but now I saw all the patchy bald spots in her imposing curtain of curls, which had become loose and unravelled. There was a frightening paper-thinness to her scalp that she could only hide temporarily—her animated Medusa head had wilted, almost comically. In this moment, I was embarrassed more than usual for my mother.

  Yet this was certainly not my mother bawling in front of me. I had never witnessed my goofy-haired, manga-looking mother blubber over anyone except herself, and I thought she was headed for a cerebral crash. Her sudden transformation totally unnerved me. Tough, self-assured, tactlessly mulish, my mother was never touchy-feely. She was unequivocally, 100 percent a tough Chinese mother when she was not obsessed with her poltergeists and phantoms. The woman in the bathroom, however, was steeping her fuchsia dress in toilet water and bawling smeared mascara tears over someone living; she was a weirdo doppelgänger from an alternate dimension.

  One thing I did know was that Auntie “acting up” was a family disaster because it involved evil ghosts, but attempted suicide did not count as a noteworthy crisis anymore. It was a basic side effect of possession. There was always someone in the family who abruptly wanted to off themselves, but they never succeeded. I did not blame these sad people for having had enough—it was tiresome work always protecting yourself from an unseen ghost-enemy.

  Although I was secretly worried and nauseated about Auntie Beautiful One, I was quite certain that she would not die—because everyone in our family always talked about self-extermination as if they were casually commenting on dinner. A rejection from a top-tier college, a late mortgage payment, failed basement renovations—all the customary suburban bullshit, the failings of the immigrant American dream—and someone was yelling for a cocktail of household bleach. My mother’s people were a twitchy-eyed theatrical tribe, inventors of jittery hysteria. No one in our family would ever admit it, but it was incredibly exhausting and distressing to believe that you could be attacked any hour of the day. It was like building a tornado shelter on the West Coast when everyone knew that our undoing would be a 9.8 magnitude earthquake. We were a product of untreated mental illness that had escalated for generations.