The Woo-Woo Read online

  It was much sweatier under the plastic shower curtain, but some-how, I felt physically safer. Drowning in sweaty fatigue, I fell asleep.

  At four a.m., the room came alive and tried to devour me. When I phoned the student health line, the health official suggested that I seek emergency medical attention ASAP. “It could be a stroke,” she said cheerfully.

  Panicking, I checked into the emergency room at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital, which was conveniently located next door. The nurses jabbed an IV into my arm. The doctors knew I was dehydrated, but they weren’t sure of the cause—they had absolutely no idea that I was Woo-Woo and sent me back to the apartment spinning. The doctor assured me that I would be absolutely fine in a few days. The hospital visit would end up totalling $1500. Being from Canada, I was shocked that they had charged me so much for medical care—shouldn’t they help a potentially dying person for free?

  I missed the first day of orientation and the next.

  There was no improvement in my condition; the heavy constellations in my blurred vision lingered. I marvelled at mystical halos that would have been divine miracles if I hadn’t been so Woo-Woo.

  The next day at Westside Market, where I tried to buy my breakfast, the fantastic sparks of inconceivable colours from the assortment of precooked food made me rotate, and I keeled over in the cheese aisle and squashed the radioactive cheddar. The kindly gouda cooled my muggy brain fever. Like some astounded drunk, I could not right myself for several minutes, tush in the air. Someone called the manager, and I was escorted from the store and told not to come back until I was sober. I was too furious at myself and my condition to be embarrassed.

  “You should really consider taking the semester off,” the program administrator insisted when I came to see him about my courses. I had only attended a few workshops and lectures but was too dizzy and hallucinatory to commit to the rest.

  “I’m absolutely fine,” I lied, seeing two shimmering replicas of him: double vision. I didn’t know which apparition was real, or if I was even real. His desk was soaring backwards, while I was flying headfirst into it, while he was zooming sideways, and I wondered if we would eventually crash. “It’s nothing I can’t deal with.”

  I was terrified that if I admitted that I was sick, I’d have to face the very real possibility that I was having a psychotic break, even if it was a minor one. How did I appear to a complete stranger? Did I speak differently? Did I look like my mother, unhinged and unfocused? These obsessive thoughts made the furniture in the room soar faster.

  “Well, please give us a call if you change your mind.” (His head was floating like a hot air balloon, up, up, and away!)

  “I won’t,” I managed to stutter, trying to sound gritty and grown-up. Ignore his flying head, ignore it, ignore it!

  But the breaking point happened on my way out of Dodge Hall, where I bounced forty steps outside the Low Memorial Library and gashed my dummy head. I gave up that moment when my forehead swelled into an arterial-coloured moon. I knew that there was something seriously wrong with me, because when I limped to the student medical building (I sprained my ankle in the fall), the astounding vertigo knocked me into a bush, into a tetragon of flourishing, country-club grass. The student tour guide had said that they had shot the Spider-Man movies in this exact spot. Slouching between drooping shrubs to wait out the dizziness, I stared at the reverse blue sky.

  Finally, as I cradled my forehead on a prickly mattress of barbed green, I thought that I shouldn’t be going Woo-Woo so quickly—that I had at least another twentysomething years. The Woo-Woo had attacked Beautiful One at forty-two, and I thought I was safe at twenty-one. I wanted to scream at the filthy ghosts who had followed me to the East Coast. I had refused to believe in the mystical aspect of our illness, but how could I become so abruptly, coincidentally sick upon arriving?

  On my fourth day in New York City I really thought I was having a psychotic break. I saw grinning disembodied faces, whooshing people on flying, mind-bending bicycles, and the excitement of starting my life in New York City spinning wickedly away. Like any effective generational curse, the Woo-Woo gave you an unhealthy amount of hope—and then snatched it all away.

  I put off phoning home because I knew my father would be exasperated or furious with me—that was all he knew how to do in times of extreme duress. He still used inappropriate sarcasm as a coping mechanism, humour tainted with serrated annoyance when asked for his assistance. I was beginning to realize that we were so alike that I could instantly predict his behaviour. Bewildered and flustered, my father would tell me to sign up for Retarded Remedial Ivy League Graduate School, i.e., the demands of an MFA program had made me incurably Woo-Woo. And that would be the end of our conversation.

  But the fierce, pulsating pain in my head and teeth worsened. It was like battery acid was stewing inside my brain, so I reluctantly pleaded with my mother to “pleasepleasepleasefuckinghelpme.” It broke my pride and emotional independence to admit that I needed her assistance—yet I thought that she, being oversensitive to danger, might be more willing to listen to my pleas for help than my father, who would pretend to be My Future and hang up on me.

  This would be the turning point of our fraught relationship. When I had to admit that I needed her. As if I were six years old again, living in the food court of the mall, when I desperately needed a mother who could mother me.

  I phoned her when I could no longer walk without toppling over, when I could no longer slide out of bed.

  “I can’t go to New York,” my mother said instantly. She was horrified by the idea of air travel. She had not been on a plane since she was eleven and only left the house to go to Costco or the mall. “There are the black and the gay and homeless ghost in New York and I’m very afraid. Your daddy says that I will die if I go to New York City because I will catch all their diseases. And imagine if I saw a black ghost! I won’t know what to do!”

  “You know, there are black, gay, and homeless ghosts in Vancouver too,” I said, pleading with her. “And if you see ghosts, they’ll all be transparent anyway. You won’t be able to tell what colour they are. Stop being an asshole, okay?”

  “No,” she repeated, very alarmed, as I expected. “I’m very afraid of the HIV. The ghosts may still be carrying it. You wanted to go to New York, so now you fucking stay there. It sucks to be you!”

  Even though my mother was mentally better now—she had not been suicidal or manic for years and had seemed to fully recover from Beautiful One’s attempted suicide—she was still highly paranoid about the undead. She had also bonded with my father’s Labrador, feeding and walking the animal twice a day, and the routine seemed to soothe her. It seemed as if we had acquired a de facto therapy animal. The dog, she often said, protected her from ghosts.

  It had been a long shot, my last resort, to beg my frightened mother to come get me.

  Nevertheless, after our conversation, quaking from fear and frustration, I slammed my cellphone into the cakey plastered wall of my bedroom, and the plastic shell shattered.

  But she must have heard the humiliating desperation, like liquid laryngitis, in my voice, because she shocked me by flying 4,000 kilometres and showing up at my apartment within seventy-two hours. Her mouth was bleeding and crusty and raw from an intense burn wound. I didn’t dare ask her what she had been up to, and she said she had spilled hot tea on herself—nerves from having to travel. She didn’t seem to care that she looked scary—a little bit like a horror-movie special effect.

  “Hey, retard,” she greeted me uneasily when she arrived at the apartment. “Your face is fatter. Are you bingeing on sweets again? I knew you’d have a psychotic breakdown in New York. Didn’t I say it? But nothing we can do about it now.”

  She was nervous, speaking without taking a breath. I said nothing, though I was secretly bothered by her snide remarks. I let her fight her fear through angry chatter.

  My mother said that she almost missed her red-eye flight—the security guards thought
she had looked extremely suspicious, and she said a female guard had combed through her frizzy hair for buried explosives, “like a monkey!” she exclaimed, scandalized by the airport staff’s indecorous behaviour.

  Then she proudly handed me a Costco-sized bag of fluorescent jelly beans that Beautiful One had bought for me, as if to celebrate my mental misery. When my mother arrived, I was starving, having eaten nearly nothing in practically three days. My mother said that Beautiful One was still afraid of doctors and dentists and kitchen appliances, but her slurred speech had improved, even while she was insisting that oil of oregano was a major serial killer—the thyme and rosemary in her spice cabinet were in constant danger. Beautiful One seemed to have already forgotten the incident on the stairs with Flowery Face. She had no broken bones from the fall, just a horrific concussion—which my mother said was a major improvement from her previous state of demonic disintegration.

  “You fucked up!” she announced, because she could not control herself.

  I was only now fully understanding her way of coping was name-calling and unpleasant verbal belligerence. She screamed because she was constantly afraid. I knew that just flying to New York had been incredibly traumatic for her because her eyes were cockroach-sized and twitchy.

  “Big time,” she added uncertainly, probably scared that there were black/gay/homeless ghosts haunting my apartment. I resisted the urge to teasingly call out to the ghosts, in case she dropped dead from coronary shock, or worse, had a full-blown breakdown, suddenly becoming suicidal, like Auntie Beautiful One on the bridge.

  I knew that my mother didn’t think that I was lost yet. She wasn’t screaming while peeling off twenties and handing me money from our relatives, like we had all done for poor Flowery Face.

  My mother did not waste any time, and within half an hour, she had shoved me into a yellow cab, relieved to be taking me home.

  “What the fuck?” she repeated all the way to JFK and on our flight to Hongcouver.

  Like any proper Chinese mother, she kept smacking my head to see if the ghosts were causing my hallucinatory brain fever. Unfortunately, no ghosts fell out of my inner ear—she expected at least half of one.

  “You seriously fucked up, Lindsay,” she said, a little more sincerely, while passing me handfuls of gluey jelly beans.

  But she did not know why the ghosts were refusing to come out.

  “Mind your own business,” she barked at the flight attendants, who looked slightly alarmed when they saw her trying to exorcise me, but everyone seemed to understand that my mother meant business.

  But I was filled with shitty, disgusted rage—how could I have allowed myself to become so Woo-Woo so quickly? I had always felt that I was in control and resistant to hysteria or psychological malfunction, which seemed to be a precursor for any psychotic breakdown in our family. If this was a sudden test or just fateful DNA, there was nothing I could have done. As usual, the Woo-Woo curse had impeccable timing.

  We had not bothered to pack any bags, leaving everything behind in the apartment, and I held out some surreal hope that I’d come back to New York City. That I’d recover and feel refreshed within a week.

  But this was not the case, and I felt useless and foolish when I phoned the program administrator and told him that I was going to need that semester break after all. Between my mother’s hysterics and the uncertainty of my illness, I couldn’t help but believe that I had fallen into madness.

  In Hongcouver, with our free health care, there was a twelve-month waiting list to book a decent neurologist and even longer to undergo an MRI. I was relatively young, and I was a graduate student, so I only had to wait four months for a CAT scan. According to my parents, this meant I could skip ahead of dying seniors and homeless drug addicts and the unemployed. The government thought that I still had a starry, infinite future, and I was more valuable than much of the Canadian population. My physician, a family friend, agreed, which led to the Ministry of Health shaving off eight months from my waiting time—just like that.

  While I was waiting for my CAT scan appointment, Beautiful One called to check up on her “absolute favourite niece” to see if I could hurry the fuck up and get well so we could go cross-border shopping. Her speech was fast and shrill, but at least she wasn’t singsonging anymore.

  “Lindsay, none of my kids listen to me,” she said in a tangent. “You’re the only one who cares.”

  Unsure how to respond, I stayed quiet, which she took as my unreserved agreement.

  I found out later from eavesdropping on my mother’s speakerphone calls to one of her sisters that Flowery Face had run away from home. No one had seen my cousin since she had kicked her mother down the stairs a few months ago, and there were rumours among family that she was living in a local mall, where she was “very happy with the pimple because she have lots of fast food and clothing,” the auntie solemnly explained to my mother. But my mother wasn’t sure if the auntie had mistaken the word “pimple” for “pimp.”

  In a way, I was jealous that Flowery Face had gotten away, even if she was living in the food court of a mall with a pimp (no one knew for sure). But I couldn’t help but wonder if I had been nicer to her, if I had been less honest with her about her mother and our family curse, she would have tried to stay. Was this my punishment for failing her? My own alter ego of Woo-Woo? Was I feeling guilty in some unexpected cousinly way? Her own mother, improving slowly but too mentally unwell to think of her children, had proved to Flowery Face that she could not depend on anyone in our extended family.

  Several weeks later, Flowery Face would surprise me with a sickbed visit. My only visitor from outside the Belcarra. She seemed to have recovered from our conversation at her house; her clothes looked expensive, plus she had developed a chain-smoking habit, clutching her Marlboros like crayons. At fourteen, she was living with a new boyfriend, a twenty-one-year-old Vietnamese drug dealer, one of my Poteau neighbours, she said. Flowery Face had found a better life, she explained. And she sincerely hoped that I would fucking recover. I was worried about her but knew that it would do her no good to call the police, in case she decided to never come back. Despite the sadness of her situation, I surmised it could be better than living with a crazy mother. At least someone, albeit unfit, was taking care of my poor cousin.

  Frowning, Flowery Face handed me $300, a new digital camera, and a list of essays that she needed to complete to receive her online ninth-grade diploma.

  “I’m sorry you’re, like, nuts,” she said, looking really miserable, “but I really need your help to graduate from English class.”

  Out of familial obligation and unmitigated shame, I thanked her for the get-well gifts and handwrote all her essays, which was a struggle because of my severe vertigo; she would receive As and one B-minus. Flowery Face talked hysterically non-stop while I scribbled agitatedly, saying that we both could change because she was a new person now, even if she was still furious at our seriously fucked-up family.

  This would be the first and final time we would try to talk about anything so honest and optimistic yet sombre. How we both did not fully understand why our families were messed up and aching.

  “It’s like they don’t even try to be happy,” she said, her girlish voice breaking.

  The Belcarra’s yellowing walls suddenly began twisting like wacky funhouse mirrors. I couldn’t leave my bed for the deluges of nausea, migraines, and vertigo. Up, down, up again, and sideways, I’d revolve and soar for twenty-four hours, even in my few hours of sleep. Meanwhile, the ceiling would fall and the carpet would automatically push it back up—BOOM! I’d puke twice a day, and in a month, I had lost a good thirty pounds. Becoming Woo-Woo had finally made me slim. I had become one of them, now. My pyjamas wore me, and I looked like I was dressed as a ghost for Halloween.

  Rather than appease my mother, my weight loss frightened her. She tried again to exorcise me, thumping me in the head like it was amateur boxing night at the Wongs. But no bulky ghosts ever dropped out of
my body. I was relieved when she finally gave up.

  My father had avoided me by working long hours. Work must have been the only way he could maintain a structured existence—I didn’t take it personally; that was how I was raised, how he normally dealt with our chaos. My screaming, however, was what finally summoned him.

  “Retarded Lindsay scream like that, just for a little dizzy?” he said, as he ran into my bedroom, sounding scared and simultaneously disgusted. I rolled my eyes as he continued: “Fuck, imagine if she had cancer? She’d wake up the whole block! Thank God Mommy and I are not Woo-Woo like you! Please stop screaming and go back to school!”

  “I can’t help it,” I said, while my mother wailed noisily in the background.

  It did absolutely no good to think about what I was missing in frightening and unpredictable New York City, where everyone thought that I had my first psychotic break, including the administration and professors. Instead, I thought of Poh-Poh and how I did not envy her permanent and severe schizophrenia, but at least she did not seem to understand what was going on.

  And then I thought about how Beautiful One had despised our family’s “psychiatric” care and enjoyed the mental health ward better. At first, I had thought that it was because she wasn’t so lonely and unloved at the local psychiatric hospital. But it was much more than that. The doctors and nurses and other patients listened to her and took her pain seriously. Mostly, no one told Auntie to “Shut the fuck up,” or if they did, they said it nicely and promised her extra chocolate pudding at dinner. Our family was incredibly fearful of the diseased and dying, and only by being ill could I experience this firsthand. I took my parents’ superstitious and impatient reactions, internalizing their reactions as my own inward unhappiness, like septic radioactive shocks to my nervous system. As if I was storing away their collective insensitivity, like fatty tumours, for no purpose or future use. Luckily, I was too nauseated to dwell on their hardness; otherwise, my damaged spirits would have been significantly less optimistic.