The Woo-Woo Read online

  “They’re ugly,” my mother announced, but I thought they weren’t too bad. If Beautiful One had heard her sister’s insult, she didn’t seem to care and smiled, showing all her yellow teeth (she refused to see a dentist, because she feared an ongoing assassination conspiracy from her molars).

  “I’m an artist,” she said in a terse, horrible monotone. “I’m the best in the world. I could sell these for millions and millions of dollars. I’m Picasso, would you not agree? I’m so good at art that everyone should just pay me all their money. I’m the best artist in the whole world.”

  Beautiful One had stared at me with her dead eyes, welcoming me into the trio. She grasped my hands and whirled me around, giggling, and asking me to compliment her art for the third or fifth time.

  “Very good,” I said, and she looked at me, expecting more exorbitant praise, because that was what had defined our relationship. Because I knew what she wanted to hear, I said sadly: “You’re incredibly talented, Auntie, the best I’ve ever seen.”

  “Duuuuh,” she said, and stuck her grey tongue between her teeth.

  Wincing, I saw that when you went Woo-Woo, you went directly into the Woo, which was your typical Chinatown aquarium, which had no glassy pebbles carpeting the floor in pearly pink or neon blue. The Woo was undecorated and underfunded. Forget about the little towering castle spires or charming jungle huts in Versailles-inspired gardens. You got a bare holding tank with mildewy green water. An underwater concentration camp that did not discriminate between manic-depressive or paranoid schizophrenic.

  In the Woo, all the condemned Woo-Woos hovered on their sides, squeezed on top of each other, yellow eyes bulging, mouths popping to mimic the battered and barely living. That was why my cousin Flowery Face was gone for good; she wanted to find her own secure and hygienic fishbowl in Hongcouver, and I had not seen her since she had visited me at the Belcarra.

  Now that I was floating inside our communal Woo, I felt almost bad for batty Beautiful One, who didn’t even realize that her daughter was missing, and even sorrier for poor Poh-Poh, who had practically been dumped in its tank as soon as she was born. Going Woo-Woo was just like waiting to be selected by a paying customer so the killing man in the wet and dirty seafood aisle in Chinatown could mercifully end you. Your scales flying everywhere like gleaming fingernail clippings; your noisy thrashing becoming a diluted scream.

  The Woo was where I had spent all twenty-two years of my life, and where I might spend the next twenty-two if I didn’t get the hell out of there. But it was this instinctive drive, this struggle to run away and to always deny, that had gotten me in trouble in the first place. I wanted to swim around the globe and find my own freshwater space, but it seemed like I was destined to travel in my panicked school of fish.

  Throughout my childhood, my mother and I had always just known how to pick the best fish in the Chinatown tanks, the ones that had the most scrap left in them. These were the cold-blooded gladiators, most likely descended from Siamese fighting fish, prepared to thrash to their deaths with ferocious showmanship. These were the most violent survivors. They knew how to give the fish-killing man trouble—they wouldn’t let him guillotine their hot, squashy throats. Even if they were too weak to get off the tank’s floor, they were the ones who stubbornly flapped their tails back and forth, to prove they were morose and still alive. They were the fools who still thought they could escape, even when the fish-man bashed in their heads and chucked their dismembered faces on the floor of the store, even when their blood pooled on the check-out counter like thick acrylic paint.

  In the car once, when I was a little kid, a fish corpse that I had specially chosen for the cleaver jumped and fought me in its clear baggie. I slowly stroked it through the translucent plastic, as if soothing a startled pet. But the zombie fish did not want my sympathy and wrestled me all the way home. And I knew it was total madness: me fighting in the backseat with a decapitated fish, something that didn’t even know that it was a goner, that it was in fact missing its head.

  “But we killed you!” I had shrieked at the fish that had too much optimism, as I tried to buckle it down with a seat belt.

  Anyway, it had tasted delicious and fresh and omnipotent, sprinkled with ginger and garlic and vibrant shallots.

  At my aunt’s house, I couldn’t help but believe in the family curse. The hopelessness in the room felt hot and uncanny, though no one would speak about it openly out of suffocating fear.

  I felt that I was the last Woo-Woo in the tank: the very last fish to have my head cleaved off. But I knew I could not be Woo-Woo without a fast, spectacular fight.

  “Oooh,” Poh-Poh suddenly moaned, and snatched my sleeve with her wrinkled octopus arm. I struggled to get free. “Oooooooooh, ooooooooooh.”

  It sounded like she was moaning “Wooooooo, wooooooo,” and I felt as if she was surely condemning me. Was I Woo-Woo like them? Or was my brain afflicted with a rare disease? The neurologist and New York City suddenly seemed unreal.

  I shook my head to reassure myself that I was interminably ill, with something thick and rotting in my skull, like a mangy spore or a plucky parasite. Get out of my fucking head! I wanted to scream at what I swore was an extraterrestrial worm drilling a home inside my brain—a burgeoning migraine. I was relieved when the room rotated upside down, as if to confirm the neurologist’s diagnosis.

  “But I’m pretty,” Beautiful One suddenly whispered at me, flicking her slovenly, sea-addled hair. “Don’t they see that I’m not old? I’m only sixteen. Why can’t they see that I’m very beautiful?”

  “Fucked in the head, all of them,” my mother muttered, gesturing at us with maddening distrust, and this made me laugh a little at her continued defiance.

  “Hey,” she barked at one of my many, almost identical little cousins, who were scuttling around the house like nervous ants with plates full of food, “do you want end up like them? Come here, brat. I want to show you what the fucking crazy looks like so you don’t end up over here. If you are weak and think too much, you’ll end up like Grandma over here! Or your retarded cousin, Lindsay!”

  Reeling from dizziness and disbelief, I couldn’t be around the inhabitants of the Woo anymore, so I stumbled down the stairs and locked myself in the basement bathroom, where my mother had hidden when Beautiful One had tried to slit her wrists almost two years ago. For the rest of the dinner party, I refused to come out; I flopped on the floor and prayed that my amphibian claustrophobia would stop.

  The midtown neurologist had prescribed me beta blockers and anti-anxiety and epilepsy medications, which were real proof that I wasn’t crazy, that I had done a stint out in the oceanic world, I told myself, shuddering.

  It didn’t occur to me until much later that the strangeness I was feeling was a newfound empathy for everyone I knew who was trapped in the Woo. Like one of those bratty, insensitive heroines who doesn’t quite understand the wretched plights of others until some significant monetary loss befalls her, I could actually feel something now.

  It would take me a long time to relinquish all my numbing fury, but in the bathroom, I could feel something dark and isolated. I could feel the pebbly hopelessness of the dinner party upstairs, the obsession to finish our barbecued pig and beef and salty fish so we could stare at our possessed patients. And there was always that fishy warning, a low and steady hum, trying to circulate in our Woo-Woo filtration systems in all our seemingly perfect McMansions. But our aquatic system was certainly broken, because everyone eventually became poisoned and sick.

  Our family was determined to hold on to our supernatural beliefs; it was far easier to blame ghosts for our hurt than believe there were genetic miseries making us lash out at one another.

  It was suddenly like the insides of my stomach had spilled out. Every spineless, godawful emotion was pouring out. And it was so sad and frustrating and decidedly overwhelming. I did not understand what each sentiment meant. But I thought that it was wonderful that I could finally experience so
mething.

  For two months of summer, I was forced to stay in bed until the migraines and dizziness began to lessen. The world would occasionally tilt and whirl, but the wicked episodes of instability became less frequent. From the crippling nausea, I lost another fifteen pounds and my skin faded to a ghostly brown-green. I was as skinny as a ten-year-old girl. My mother began to talk about us checking into a nursing home together, maybe in ten years, when she was in her sixties and sufficiently old; the dawdling environment might do my “fucked-up head good,” she concluded, nodding to herself. I shuddered and imagined us as roommates in a cozy retirement palace. And I realized that my mother did not expect me to recover. At that time, I also did not think that I’d ever be able to leave my bed that was becoming a crypt.

  When I could walk again without falling, and became tired of watching thick raindrops sizzle against my window on the Poteau, I ambled around the Belcarra, sneezing and suffocating because I had developed a serious allergy to the Labrador. The family doctor spoke to my father, saying it was “Lindsay or the dog: one of them has to immediately go.”

  “Oh, not even a choice,” my father joked and, because he said he loved the dog the most, bought me a one-way ticket to New York.

  “But I can’t finish my program,” I said, mimicking my father’s derisive tone. I was terrified to return for the upcoming fall semester, but I also knew I desperately needed to finish what I had started to prove to myself that I was capable of success. Without my awful allergy to the dog, I’d have never gone back to graduate school.

  “It’s too hard,” I said, hating to declare defeat. I felt that I couldn’t cope with my long-term disease alone. “I’m too stupid for school. I have to quit. Besides, I’m sick.”

  “We all know how much you like to suck,” he snapped, not even noticing that I was imitating him. And he made my choice for me. “But Retarded Lindsay has to go, too bad. Daddy doesn’t want to see you anymore. Seriously, Daddy is very sick of you because you cry and moan all day. You fail piano, and now you fail the Columbian University. You think you can’t function even if you are Woo? Fake it until you make it. How come Beautiful One so Woo-Woo she can still be business owner, huh? Why people trust her is a big mystery to me.”

  I had no choice. The vertigo now came on mostly at night, and I could stumble around for up to six or eight hours without fainting. According to my father, that was good enough to finish a master’s degree. “It’s not like you do PhD,” he said, rolling his eyes.

  But during my last-minute red-eye flight from Hongcouver to JFK, the engine caught fire twice, and there were two emergency landings. I could not have made up this anecdotal horror production if I tried. At the risk of sounding neurotic and narcissistic (not to mention spastic and delusional), it was almost as if the universe was plotting against me, and I couldn’t leave Hongcouver.

  When the plane smacked back down in Hongcouver for the second time that night, all the passengers were given a crusty egg sandwich for our flammable troubles. The tiny palm-sized sandwich was supposed to keep us preoccupied as we evacuated the aircraft. But I finished my sandwich long before the fire trucks arrived. From the very back and centre of the plane, I could not see anything but assumed the fire was dire from the grimacing of the flight crew. I was most definitely not going to expire on an empty stomach.

  I had been quite pleased that the plane’s door did not drop off while we were pinned to the reticent purple sky. The aircraft could not fly more than a few hours outside of Hongcouver, as if the ghosts haunting my mother’s family were hauling it down with their undetectable gravity. Their aerial bodies were weighing on the wings—the spirited friction causing the mid-air blaze.

  During both takeoffs, the air smelled a lot like barbecuing plastic and shoe polish with the brassy undertone of overcooked leather. I was surprised that my fellow seatmates couldn’t smell our impending mid-air plummet. It was the seedy plastic of the airplane seats tinged with fire and the unmistakable smell of the Woo-Woo, which lingered longer than the smelliest junkyard perfume.

  When we landed for the second time, I was thrilled that the plane did not implode, and then I was worried when I had to spend the night in room 666 at the Sheraton near the Vancouver airport.

  “Room 666 is in a separate tower. It’s not in this building,” the front desk manager had muttered, handing me a mystical plastic key to an isolated dimension.

  It was four a.m., and my mother called to see if I had landed in New York yet.

  “You’re in room 666?!” she interrogated me, not really interested that my flight had caught fire. “It means the ghosts are angry at you! This is what happens when you try to leave Vancouver!”

  An hour later, to add to the surreal horror and implausibility of the night, there was a clipped and very Chinese pounding on my hotel room door, as my parents had arrived to de-possess me. Being obsessive ghost hunters, my mother and father were always equipped for supernatural emergencies. No other parents, except in a made-for-TV Lifetime movie, would have driven to the airport to de-possess their eldest child.

  I was sure my mother had scurried to the pickup truck as soon as she finished our phone call. My parents had no difficulty finding room 666 in its special, private hell-tower, and I knew that this was all part of our family’s perverse curse—Chinese and Western superstition always got scrambled together. The number 666 was a Western, religious superstition, but it sounded dangerous enough—they had watched enough mainstream horror movies to believe in fiendish numerology.

  I was clearly being punished for leaving, and I thought my mother had come to gloat. But they probably thought they were being “Best Mom and Dad in World” by rescuing me from supernatural disaster. In their obsessive way, I realize now that this was how they showed affection. Despite screaming profanities at everyone and each other, my parents, teeming with frustration, still only sought to protect their offspring from dead people.

  “Surprise!” my father said, handing me an emergency pack of rations (a bucket of leftover KFC from last night’s dinner). “Your mommy insist we get rid of the demon for you! She make me drive here to help you. Here we are! Lindsay’s special helpers!”

  “WHERE IS THE GHOST?” my mother demanded, peeking into the bathtub. “ARE THEY HIDING FROM ME?” She frantically checked under the bed, and then scourged the room’s closets and drawers, expecting shifty apparitions of dead people to jump out and murder her. She screamed: “You can’t leave! We leave you alone and you made the plane catch fire! It’s all your fault! ALL OF IT! The ghosts are giving us a warning!”

  I could tell that she was terrified, even more upset that I was responsible for making a plane combust, not once but twice.

  “You can’t go to New York,” she kept repeating, but her warnings were no longer crazy and nihilistic, just cheerless, broken, and a little pathetic. I felt bad for her, so I said nothing and allowed her to vent, which seemed to make her feel better. “You need me to fight off the fucking ghosts for you, Lindsay,” she pleaded. I knew she thought that I needed her, but what she needed was a licensed psychiatrist and a husband who didn’t spend his spare time collecting dog fur.

  “You’re too fucking retarded to function on your own,” she said, peering under a sterile dresser. My father moved the hulking decoration from the wall so she could conduct a more thorough psychic investigation. For nearly thirty minutes, we flipped over queen-sized mattresses and gently combed between the bleached sheets—as if checking for bed bugs, but we were looking for deceased people playing hide-and-seek in room 666.

  Eventually, my mother relaxed a bit, and she gulped down her sleeping pills and conked out on one of the pillowy beds—the room was ghost-free and safe. We were obviously insane, but we were meticulous in our methodology.

  Exhausted, I fell asleep eating my bucket of fried chicken on the other bed.

  Almost three hours later, my father insisted that I “go now.” He shook me awake and fetched my luggage and carry-on for me.

/>   “What the fuck are you doing?” I asked him, dazed. Fried chicken grease was on my pillowcase and a drumstick was tucked beside me, a reminder that I was still a gruesome mess. “I haven’t eaten breakfast yet, and you don’t know if the airline cancelled the flight,” I said, stalling.

  “Use your head, retard!” he announced in an irritated whisper. “Get up now! Time to go! Your stupid mommy sleeping. So Daddy is helping Retarded Lindsay to make sure she don’t blow up plane with her fucked-up thinking. Also, I really want to make airline pay Daddy back fourteen dollar for parking in stupid hotel.”

  “I don’t think I should be flying so soon,” I said nervously, wondering if my next flight would enthusiastically explode as soon as we smashed through an inconsequential cumulous cloud. “My plane just caught fire, twice, you know.”

  “You let little thing like plane burning bother you?” my father said, looking disappointed. “Geez, I thought you tougher than that. Are you loser or a winning Wong? You still have two arm, two leg, and two eye, nothing wrong. Even dead people in body bag fly, so why can’t you?”

  His prime parenting plan had always been to harden me, and in the hotel his expression seemed to say that he took my reluctance as another of his personal failings. Yet this time, his decade-long strategy for teaching me to endure mass misfortune worked. For I had no argument for him about dead bodies flying, so instead, I looked at my mother snoring on the bordering bed. She was still wearing her puffy winter jacket and looked like the Abominable Snowman. Especially in her sleep, she looked small and scared. I shuddered. For I knew we were somewhat alike, but I was more like my father—derisive, frequently insensitive, but un–Woo-Woo.