The Woo-Woo Read online

  “Will you go upstairs and check?” my mother finally wailed at me, plucking at her hair.

  “There’s no point crying if you don’t know,” I said, in what I believed was my most supportive tone.

  “I didn’t pick up the phone,” she said, fumbling for the toilet paper. “Lindsay, I didn’t pick up the phone when she called. I told her to shut the fuck up when she cried.”

  “There’s nothing you can do about it now,” I said, confident that the situation would improve—no one had ever died before.

  But she cried harder; my reassurances did not appear to be helping.

  Perhaps it was time to call a cab to go home, but I would probably have to wait at least an hour for a driver to locate this backwoods suburb of Hongcouver. Unhappily, I headed upstairs to watch our evening’s surprise entertainment.

  I did not recognize my aunt; she was so desperate-looking. A caricature of her former self, wilted and unpolished without her usual plastered movie-star makeup. My heart sank.

  Jerking her head up, sticking her tongue out, Beautiful One was handcuffed to the door of a police car. A cerise housecoat barely covered her thighs, and she wore the tatty sneakers of her teenage son.

  “Shut up!” a cop yelled. Perhaps she had been uncooperative. I would have been pissed at the cop if I hadn’t been so stunned.

  Bending over, Beautiful One complained about her abdomen and began to moan quietly about her hunger. “You see, sir, I can’t keep my food down. Sir, will you please buy me some McDonald’s? Please? Can we go to McDonald’s? Mickey D’s?”

  Suddenly, my aunt shifted tactics and began to thrash and twitch against the car door: “Don’t you see that God wants me to die? Don’t you know I can leave my body if I try hard enough? Just watch me, watch me. I’m dying, you see? I’ve just left my body! Because God wants me to!”

  The death of that mouth-watering piggy was supposed to symbolize the joyous conclusion of the wedding ceremony, but it was upstaged by our flamboyant auntie’s live finale. I was morbidly fascinated by the incident, but it was over so quick I could not be sure what had happened.

  On the lawn, my auntie wiggled her tongue again, then hollered, “Congratulations” at the blessed bride and groom, who did not even know she was there. If she died, Chinese superstition meant postponing the wedding’s pig banquet and transporting the guests home to defer bad luck. I had never seen a human being expire in front of me before, and for a moment I wondered what it would be like, whether it would be difficult to describe to my death-obsessed mother. I wondered if Beautiful One would take a gratuitous amount of time to bleed out; if she would perish with her mouth open, like our lucky pig on the dining room table. But since the cops had handcuffed Beautiful One, it probably meant she didn’t dig deep enough with that steak knife, probably just a melodramatic scratch.

  Fuck Beautiful One, I thought angrily, almost meaning it, for causing such a fuss. I was suddenly furious at her for acting up, for taking her delusion too far, as if she had a choice. Why are you doing this? I wanted to scream at her and shake her, even though I knew it would not help. I thought you were different from everyone else.

  I could not bear to watch anymore, so I quickly scurried to the basement, grabbing another beer from the bar on the way to the bathroom. I wanted to puke.

  “She suicided then?” my mother asked, puzzled, her English suddenly going strange and more accented because she was frazzled. She wanted an instant report.

  I took a seat on the edge of the bathtub, pulling my polyester cocktail dress over my legs. She did not care that I was drunk or high, or perhaps she never noticed. Alcohol and drugs were not supernatural issues, so she would have felt that she had no jurisdiction or opinion over my condition. I felt irrationally calm, and then suddenly annoyed that our family couldn’t have a normal wedding—Beautiful One, who had an instinct for centre stage, could not have waited until the next day to kill herself. I was furious that our brand of “normal behaviour” was causing a stupendous uneasiness. It was like a brain aneurism had transformed everyone from loud-mouthed lionesses to comatose livestock.

  “Nah, she’s not dead,” I slurred, more intoxicated than I had thought I was, and then sighed at the absurdity of the question. Melodrama always made me meaner and considerably less tolerant. It was a defence mechanism that inflated me like a pus-filled pimple. I easily became the most obnoxious person in the room.

  “She ‘attempted’ suicide,” I said, correcting my mother’s grammar. “Not ‘committed.’ You can’t ‘suicided.’”

  “Lindsay, I’m positive suicide is a verb. We learned it in ESL class.”

  “Auntie Beautiful One’s okay. They’re taking her to the hospital.”

  “They should press charges. She has to learn to control herself. I mean, fuck her. Did anyone else cry? Can you ask someone else about ‘suicided’?”

  But all the aunties and uncles had immediately driven over to see Beautiful One’s kids, who cried and cried and thought she was dead because my mother’s generation insisted that “she suicided.”

  “Your mother suicided,” I imagined an uncle whispering conspiratorially to my cousins, as he genuinely grappled to conjugate the “verb” because he had a limited facility with Canada’s official languages, French and English. “Kids,” I imagined him saying, “she suicided at your auntie’s house by slitting her wrists. Aiya!”

  Much later, someone rented a movie to entertain Beautiful One’s kids, who were thirteen, sixteen, and nineteen. An auntie stuck Little Miss Sunshine into the DVD player, but Steve Carell’s character tried to “suicide himself” in the opening credits. Beautiful One’s three teenagers wailed again, the television had to be shut off, the DVD returned, unwatchable.

  My memory of the wedding banquet was a chaotic, headachy blur; suddenly nauseated, I vomited on a cakey lace flower arrangement before happily blacking out. My parents later complained about hauling me unconscious to their car. At 150 pounds, I was not a dainty, drooling princess but, my family said, a chunky, slobbering mule. When I woke up in my bedroom, still in my sticky cocktail gown, the incident was over, I was still unwell, and my mother was fiercely muted, serving breakfast at noon: blueberry pancakes, a goopy cauldron of peasant congee, and a tray of flowering wontons. Here she was, cooking since five a.m.—like she usually did, using food to conceal our clan’s imperfections. The starchy, sweet smells saturated the entire house and barely masked her terrific fear. You could tell how upset she was by the amount of food she had prepared.

  “Beautiful One isn’t dead,” she mumbled flatly, and went to pucker more chalky wonton skins, even though she had made 200 already. A while later, she said, in the same scary, desperate tone because she loved her sister, “Beautiful One isn’t dead, right?”

  Our auntie’s mental problems had been contained—“Which fucker called the police?” she would ask later. For weeks afterwards, my mother eagerly collected her bounty of fresh sympathy flowers, a few overly kind Hallmark cards from apprehensive neighbours (supermarket strangers), because she liked to tell people her youngest sister “suddenly suicided.” “I’m so sorry,” people whispered, and offered her a sincere squeeze. I could tell that they genuinely felt sorry for us, while my mother pretended that she didn’t know the difference between suicide and suicided. More than anyone, she needed their comfort, because our family couldn’t give it to her.

  And after a while, I began to pity her. As usual, she blamed herself, saying that she did not understand what she had done wrong to cause her sister’s possession. I almost blamed her for Beautiful One’s downfall, but I realized that I was old enough to be my own person. If I had phoned her in the months leading up to the wedding, our conversation might have told me that something was amiss. I had no excuse. I had been busy with alcohol and college papers and examinations. I felt that I had failed my auntie because I was the only one in our family who didn’t believe that exorcisms and medieval superstitions could cure hallucinations.

 
After the wedding banquet, I spent my summer in bed with a miserable little baggie of weed. A joint made me even more petrified and gave me terrific eye-popping insomnia, so most days, I was as resplendent as a member of the walking dead. I didn’t know what else to do with myself to forget about the wedding and the raw kryptonite shock of Auntie Beautiful One’s suicide attempt. I did not question what the incident at the wedding meant, thinking that maybe it was an isolated occurrence, a quick and dirty plea for some tender affection—at least that was what I told myself. Secretly, I was terrified that I was going batty too. In my semi-comatose, high-strung state, I was obsessed with the end of the world. I couldn’t help but concern myself with what ifs, as my nerves were so rickety in this house that I imagined the world collapsing with its shabby continental scaffolding. I couldn’t trust Europe not to collide with Asia, and what if the United States decided to fall off Canada? Would we sink because we were no longer buoyant and balanced? My room sometimes spun, and I was scared all the time, listening to my own sweaty heart palpitations pound out SOS in wonky Morse code. Under the stickiness of unwashed sheets, I gnashed my teeth, terrified to leave my room.

  As usual, I believed my mother to be the main cause of my paranoia, more potent than any strain of marijuana or tumultuous stress from Beautiful One’s “suicided.” For the next week, my mother often visited me at three or four in the morning, saying that we should run around outside until dawn to exorcise the ghosts that were chasing me.

  Leaping into my bed, as she did when I was six years old, she stepped on my insomniac face.

  “Hey, Lindsay, wake up! We need to hurry! Fuck! The ghosts are already here!”

  “Ughhhh,” I said, and swatted her toes off my lips and nose.

  I was already fragile and terrified, and I knew if we did not do this, if we ignored her gifted premonitions, we’d have to talk all night, so I agreed. Beautiful One’s decline had traumatized my mother, and she reacted to it by literally barking and charging around like a howling chihuahua.

  In hindsight, it is astonishing that we survived with so little care and attention, though our behaviour only exacerbated my mother’s spastic condition, and mine as well. The first week that I moved to New York, when I began feeling faint and vertiginous and could not sleep, I often thought of my mother, and how if she were present in my shared student apartment, she’d make me run up and down the entire island of Manhattan. “This is the only way!” she would insist, trying to be devoted and helpful.

  Not believing in boundaries or privacy, my mother would often punt open the bathroom door while I was inserting a tampon or articulate a gloomy sermon about Chinese demons while I was trying to have a bowel movement. Her fear strangling her heart and brain, she’d smash the lock on the doorknob while I was showering to check if a wayward phantom was floating among our flimsy floral curtains, if a shy spectre was lurking in a bubble bath (everyone knew that Chinese ghosts were the mousy colour of water with some resemblance to a former person).

  After the wedding, my father, looking horrified, said, “No more wedding for Mommy from now on,” before disappearing from the house with his dog.

  He was right, as her downward descent into madness mimicked Auntie Beautiful One’s. And my future too seemed as if it could be the exact replica of all the women in my family.

  “AHHHHHHHHH!” my mother would howl, seeming ready to tackle any hefty spirit, but what she really meant was, like everyone else in the family, “I’m afraid! Don’t leave me alone!”

  I still could not wholly comprehend her terrors then, so I’d scream at her, and she would complain that I thought I was invincible. She could not bear it if I were to become possessed and meant her protectiveness to be a peculiar expression of affection. Tenderness did not exist in our family, but duty and safekeeping were priorities, like lavish weddings and overeating.

  “Oh, come on,” I said, knowing that I could not convince her otherwise, while fighting a terrific urge to chuck my loofah at her. “The ghosts won’t get me.”

  “But I think I saw one float across your eyelids,” she said. She still assumed that everything, including a funny-sounding sneeze or hiccup, was cursed and mystical.

  “That was probably the light,” I said.

  It was probably more frightening to be ambushed in the bathroom by my mother than to encounter a real ghost. At home, things were usually uncomfortable and chaotic, and I could not spend four months of summer trying to avoid the damned supernatural.

  If I had a fantastic mental breakdown, my family would spend thousands of dollars exorcising the scary Woo-Woo out of me—this was what we did, loyally wrote cheques to bribe away our problems. Yet after Beautiful One’s breakdown, I was beginning to feel afraid that there was something truly deformed inside me, and all summer, I felt as if I were being electroshocked by worry. With my mother jumping out at me from hallways and staircases, it was like living inside a haunted house at a wacky carnival—an apocalyptic heart attack waiting for me every time I ventured outside my bedroom. I could feel myself sinking slowly into my own brain.

  CHAPTER 12

  “JUMP, BITCH, JUMP!”

  I don’t want to go to the hospital,” Auntie Beautiful One sang after she tried to slit her wrists (just a barely-there scratch, the family complained).

  It was the middle of the summer, and consumed by a daytime, vampire-like terror, I would not leave my bed until a family intervention was ordered for Beautiful One. She had been released from the emergency room, but there had been no change in her condition. It had been almost a week since my cousin’s wedding, and I was worried and nervous as we (all eight families, i.e., seventy very frightened people) congregated in my aunt’s living room. Even after everyone took turns yelling at her for what our family called “shitty behaviour,” Beautiful One, her face blank, was not cured.

  “I’m dying, okay?” Beautiful One shrilled at us in response.

  My heart sank, for I knew she did not recognize herself at all. This was not the woman who had, many years ago on our family camping trip, once assured me that she was different from every Woo-Woo we knew. And as she yelled, she resembled both Poh-Poh and my mother, her face contorted into a mask of paralyzing fear.

  She yelled: “I can’t eat because it just comes out anyway. My brain is sooooo alive. Do you know how powerful it is? Do you know how powerful I am? But my body is dying. Dyiiing!!”

  If we looked back at her month of screaming and spitting nuts at the kitchen table, the incident at my cousin’s wedding should not have been surprising. If our family had been less occupied by ghosts and paid a little attention to her sadness and her distance from reality, her breakdown may have been prevented. Yet, realistically, we could only have saved her if someone (non–superstition believing) had spiked her coffee with Benadryl, clubbed her on the forehead, and then chucked her into the back of a psychiatrist-bound taxi. Yet I knew that no one would trust an outsider, God forbid a medical professional, to diagnose Auntie Beautiful One, when we all thought willpower and exorcism could rid her of the ghosts.

  After all these years, Beautiful One had officially gone Woo-Woo, and only my father was pleased. He had always suspected that his sister-in-law did not have much of a brain.

  “She just realize now she Woo-Woo?” he said, amazed. “Wow, took long enough. See, no one listen to me when I say the woman is fucking nuts! She so Woo-Woo she think all food, even just ONE apple can kill her! Karma is fucking great.”

  Uncle E.T., horrified by his wife’s “self-cause” mental collapse, decided that she was more hopeless and futile than “the global warning.” Prioritizing his self-preservation more than anything, he ran off to Hongcouver Island.

  After her attempted suicide, with the rest of my family (minus E.T.), I watched in absolute horror as Auntie Beautiful One tumbled to the floor because she said that God liked to zap her with his electrical finger. She’d be walking to the kitchen and then an almighty poke would throw her to the ground. The vicious buzzing
noise inside her brain made Beautiful One think she wasn’t a real person anymore, just another machine. Zap, zap, zap—she said God’s finger sounded like an electric flytrap. I wondered what it felt like to be fried in the electrical circuit of your robotic nerves, a quick current smacking your fat mechanical heart. He zapped Beautiful One the Automaton, and then he pinched her battery-volted butt.

  This was Beautiful One, head thrown back, hands clasped in maniacal prayer, crying for our help, the volume of her terror and confusion amplified to the highest level.

  “Shut the fuck up,” everyone said, when she threatened to die and die and die again.

  As always, on Westwood Poteau, if you weren’t the kind to have a breakdown, there was nothing to do except indulge in the constant buffet of cannabis. There was soft, sugary cocaine and Skittle-sized pills of ecstasy to be had from any suburban drug-growing neighbour, if you wanted them. There was also the lengthy two-hour commute into the city, but I didn’t know how to drive. I also wasn’t sure what one was supposed to do in civilization. After years of intensive piano practice, I had no hobbies or interests. The Chinese cliques on the Poteau were scared of me because I had happily bashed a ringette stick and a golf club into Demeter’s knees in high school, so there were no invitations to what I imagine were barbecues and sailing, but I told myself I didn’t mind. I was used to it.

  That summer after junior year, I bloomed into a bovine stoner with bountiful food and marijuana, and I was getting fatter and slower and nastier by the day. The family-sized tubs of ice cream and entire apple pies combined with pepperoni pizzas added marbled fat to my stomach and thighs. My father didn’t care—I could eat as much as I wanted, as long as I was getting all As in college. I felt smug with how hefty I was getting, as if I could get back at my family and suffocate them with my 165 pounds of sirloin steak bulk.