The Woo-Woo Read online

  This did not feel real to me at all, as I was back on the bench seeing it all through the plastic screens of the ice rink. I felt that I was watching the action like it was a video game manoeuvred by a disembodied controller.

  “How come the girl cry when she get hurt?” my father later asked me in the truck when the girl had been cleared off the ice by the paramedics and the game was finally over. In my fugue-like state, I did not even remember how we had won. “You know if she retarded? Possessed?” he asked. If there were a ghost in the hockey rink, we would know that my mother had inadvertently caught it too, much like how someone could accidentally encounter a ravenous bear in our backyard—shitty luck.

  “I broke her leg,” I said, unsure whether I should feel guilty. His was a real question, like someone asking for the time or directions—my father didn’t seem to understand what crying was for and thought that I could clarify it for him.

  In the backseat, I did not feel well, and I did not feel as if I deserved my thrilling victory. The coiling BC freeway loomed like a concrete serpent, and I could feel my insides twist dangerously, as if I were becoming unravelled, while my father drove us home. The foamy blackness outside felt like it had transferred inside me, gurgling like unruly diarrhea, and I wasn’t sure what was consciously right; I was afraid I didn’t know the answer. While my head tingled from lack of sleep and excitement, I thought about the screaming girl; how much was her own noise, and how much was the wicked ghost inside her?

  It would take a while for me to understand that this incident was just another casualty of my father’s war for control, just an effortless battle outside the house that he could win: he needed to blame someone for his wife’s sudden disappearance, and I was desperate and gullible. He could have blamed my sister, who would have cried for at least half an hour, but I was a better scapegoat because I would be tormented for longer. Prone to guilty sulks, like my daily nosebleeds and constipation, I would have done anything to make things better, even though I had pretended not to care that my mother hadn’t said goodbye to me.

  “The coach says it was just an accident,” I eventually blurted, ignoring the slimy blackness in my gut, which was expanding, like a serving of cold, hard rice, which I then mistook for indigestion. “But I have to write her a nice sorry card.”

  “Don’t bother,” my father said, miffed because he hated inconvenience. “It’s just a game. And postage all the way to Alaska—yikes. I’m happy we won. Are you happy? If I’m happy, you should be very, very happy. Are you loser or winner, Lindsay? No loser in this family, okay? We have to beat up loser. Now because we won MVP, Mommy will come back.”

  “Okay,” I said, because I really believed him, or because I really wanted to. That there was magic in the bronzy medals that my father hoarded like Viking treasure. These prizes from the tournament somehow made me worthy of his parental respect. Nothing in our family came at a low cost—we paid for everything. If I took home a prize that night, there was hope that my father would not blame me for my mother’s absence. I had done my delusional duty, like a good daughter, and my actions, the last ingredient in our homemade spell, would bring back my ghost-driven mother.

  Nearly twelve hours later, at home, we pretended my mother didn’t desert us. That she was on an extended grocery-shopping trip because of all the food she was collecting for hot pot. This was a special household feast that had everyone in the family cooking pimply cow tongue and squashy white longevity noodles that went on forever; if you choked on them, it meant you were going to die within the year. I imagined the wrinkled bundles of bok choy, the silly confetti tails of limp enoki mushrooms, all gurgling in our burner tabletop.

  “Are you worried about Mom?” I asked my father, wanting to know if I should be unhappy or frantic or both or neither. I took my visual emotional cues from him, as I was twelve and a half and didn’t know quite how or what to think.

  “Why the hell do you want to know for?” he asked, perplexed and scandalized, as if I had asked him to expand on his bathroom habits. “Are you conducting survey on bullshit? Why do you think the answer is important? I worry you are all mentally challenged. First, Lindsay has to go to retarded class because she is dumb and can’t talk properly. Then the second one is so bad we need a translator. Don’t get me started on the third. You got your genes from Mommy!”

  In middle school, my lisp was so bad he thought there was a Talking Demon that made me unable to sound out the letter S correctly. However, my sister was definitely worse off than me and visited the speech therapist every day, whereas I went twice a week. My sister automatically added “ded” to every past-tense verb.

  “I ate-ded the sandwich you made-ded me,” she once whispered at school. “It tasted-ded bad.”

  “Thut up,” I snapped. “You thuck.”

  As my sister sobbed non-stop, we were supposed to mock her for crying and not hiding her weakness, for surely she was headed for a bout of demonic possession, which was like deliberately going outside in the snow without a jacket and catching pneumonia.

  “Only idiots cry,” my father explained to my sister, looking ashamed of her. His parents had taught him that it was ungainly and annoying to others if you blubbered. Emotional displays, like begging on the street, were a burden on everyone, not just the health care system, who had the grisly misfortune to be nearby. “I never cry,” he continued, pleased. “Learn to suffer in silence. No more talking until tomorrow. Lindsay got concussion and didn’t complain. People who cry become Woo-Woo.”

  Over the years, we only saw our crazy grandmother blubber, so we believed him. We never knew when our father was truly sad. If someone cried, he believed, you were supposed to quit the room immediately, which I now recognize as a cultural but mostly idiosyncratic belief that was specific to my father.

  Growing up, even if I felt a little miserable, I blamed it all on serious dyspepsia, believing that heartburn or gas was the cause of all my unadulterated sadness. I had no useful or tangible name for the Woo-Woo sickness that afflicted us, which was as difficult and impenetrable and coded as a high-clearance intelligence secret. All I knew was that if I appeared weepy and afraid, “a ghost” would slip inside my brain.

  Later, my father demanded that I give him my MVP medal, and he dumped it in his special bedroom drawer with all the other warrior possessions—cheap metal trophies that he almost loved more than the game itself. I didn’t especially like to relinquish my winnings, but I subconsciously knew that he needed them more than me, like beer or black coffee. My awards built up his confidence and fatherly identity. He must have convinced himself that we were on the most righteous path: we were noiselessly suffering while winning medals, which meant that the universe would reward us and bring my mother back. I would be generous and donate my earnings to our cause.

  We then took a seat in the piano room and he proudly insisted we practise for the upcoming concert, which was a year away.

  For a week, maybe two, we still didn’t hear from our possessed mother, so we decided not to speak about the missing time. But all the while, as he neared the edge of all he could take, unused to being a single parent of three, my father reacted by telling more of his perplexingly harsh grown-up jokes. In movies, a missing person always meant a dramatic suicide, like the bad dreams that kept my sister up all night cradling the cordless phone. But we continued with our hockey games and intensive immigrant piano practice schedules—three to four hours of Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 1 in F minor, after a sadistic bout of hockey. You didn’t need a metronome if you had my father: “One-ee-and-ah-two-ee-and-ahh-are-you-fuck-ing-deaf-why-does-it-say-canta-bile-and-then-over-there-it’s-all-eegretto? Why are you so fucking retarded, you buy Beethoven written in French not English?”

  He pretendezd nothing was wrong by throwing himself into my piano practice, kept stubbornly counting off beat. He refused to look for my mother or call the police. He did not trust outsider lo-fahn authority with such horrible family matters—if they located our mother, th
ey might lock her up. Apparently, we just had to wait. Chomp on chocolate bars until our molars decayed. Order in cheap Chinese takeout—hard salted rice with fish bits that looked like overcooked boogers, gooey beef chow fun congealing in shiny fat.

  This was the candid, respectable, saving-face Chinese way: doing absolutely nothing.

  This stoic Wongs was how the fiercely handled their spazzy, unmanageable family crises.

  “Go do battle,” he insisted before every hockey practice, as if he could fix our problems with a simple directive. His pep talk referenced a legend from the Northern and Southern Dynasties. “Hua Mulan saved her daddy from going off to war. She disguised herself as a boy because her daddy was old. So she went off to war for him and killed lots of people and the emperor gave her tons of awards and, most importantly, money. So put on your fucking gear and do battle for me, okay? Her daddy didn’t pay her, she went for free. Would you go to war to save me?”

  “I really have to think about it,” I said, not knowing how to lie yet (this was a trick question that I always failed), but my sister, who was a show-off and brat, always agreed.

  Since hockey had always been my father’s fixation, he required the little league violence to sustain him over the winter months; he risked the slippery, zigzagging roller coaster ride to the rink, swerving on black ice. At the time, it certainly seemed that he loved hockey more than himself, which was saying something, and he woke us up three hours before a seven a.m. game to make sure we would arrive on time.

  On sunny, frostless days, it took a minimum of forty-five minutes to drive from the Poteau to Planet Ice. In the winter, it took hours, and he stocked the pickup truck with a sack of salt, flashlights, and gardening shovels. “Get ready to dig if we stuck!” he ordered, because he could be more obsessive than my mother, who did not want to be up so early, and she would be calling him “a fucking selfish retard” over a thermos of coffee in the passenger seat.

  On one drive to a weekend game, I wondered aloud if she was parked at the mall, but my father refused to slow down to check, saying it was “too much bullshit.”

  I did not know this at the time, but his screwy Chinese stoicism made him so self-conscious that he could not be caught worrying.

  “Kids, she’s not on the news,” he declared as he drove us to the rink, as my heart tumbled into my stomach, like something poisonous, cheap, and deep-fried. I didn’t want to cry—just to throw up—which I took as an excellent sign that I was strong enough not to get possessed by some nasty Woo-Woo.

  “Good enough!” my father continued, trying to reassure us in a much cheerier voice. “Means my wife didn’t bang into a lamppost. She’s such a terrible driver we’d hear it by now. It’d be a domino effect, she’d take down five cars with her and they’d all be lying in ditch.”

  For that week, my poor, obedient nine-year-old sister tidied up the house every day and waited anxiously for our mother. She was a good daughter: my father certainly thought so and paid her fifty dollars to do the chores. My brother slumped after her and called my sister Mommy, and I was relieved that he did not follow me. Even then, I knew I was not a role model or any kind of rousing cheerleader and would gladly relinquish the role of eldest to my sister. She was the most responsible and screamed at my father and me if we did not clean up our messes or if we abandoned her with the dirty dishes. But being the one in charge, she’d still scrub all the plates with sulky diligence. While she mopped the floors, I took advantage of her work ethic and my father’s distraction and watched an R-rated horror movie, which I would not have been allowed if my mother were home. She was always scared that Jack Nicholson in The Shining might lunge out of the TV, smashing the screen with his axe.

  Unfortunately, my sister did not know how to do laundry and my father, useless at domestic annoyances, could not teach her: our hockey gear, three black duffels that looked like frumpy body bags, and our soiled clothes were rotting in the laundry room that we could smell all the way upstairs—our yellow skull-esque helmets and sweaty girl’s jock straps smelled like fresh cat piss. He suggested that my sister and I check the internet for instructions, but our dial-up connection was too slow, and no one knew how to spell “laundry” for the search engine. My sister and I had been tested for dyslexia and the results were inconclusive.

  My brilliant solution was to shut the door, and my sister spritzed it with my mother’s terrible Givenchy perfume, which gave the house a tangier scent of pee and yesterday’s compost. My father said he would just replace the bottle later.

  I decided that my mother was making a retail tour of all the malls in suburban Hongcouver with her Woo-Woo ghost. I was confident that she was having a blast: a real vacation away from her demanding husband and offspring. And no one would hurt my sick, broken mother—she could kick terrific ass if she needed to. At times, she might seem vulnerable, but my mother had a ferocious tongue on her, and she would not hesitate to use it on any poor stranger. Looking back, the woman whose desire for kids at all is still unclear must have really hated driving us to hockey practice at four in the morning three or four times a week.

  “I tried-ded to call-ded Mom,” my sister whispered to me one night, as she cradled an ancient-looking stuffed animal. Our bedrooms were at opposite ends of the hallway, and she had suddenly appeared like some starving ghost-child, in an ugly undershirt with a gaping hole in the chest. “She’s not picking up, Lindsay. I called-ded and called-ded. What if she dead-ed?”

  “People only die in movies,” I said, but she was a precocious kid and she immediately knew that I was lying.

  My sister began to cry, and somehow we ended up arguing because she called me “a stupid idiot,” so I got angry, leaped out of bed, and punched her in the mouth. I couldn’t help it: my nerves were ablaze and it scared me that I couldn’t control myself. Punching others was how I communicated my unfiltered sorrow, and it let me feel powerful and peaceful again. No pre-teen was more furious, near-sighted, and deluded than I was. I didn’t regret hitting her until her front tooth got wobbly and tumbled out. I did not mean to smash out her tooth in an episode of older-sibling brutality. But my mother should have been there to pluck it from her slippery gums, as she had done with all my movable baby teeth, like she was yanking out an unremitting weed. She enjoyed pulling our teeth, like other mothers took to baking or aerobics.

  “At least Dad will pay you two dollars for it,” I said, trying my best to cheer her up. “He’s a really cheap tooth fairy. But you’ll get two dollars!”

  “WAHHH,” she sobbed, not at all comforted by the fact that she would earn two whole dollars. At her age, I’d have happily taken the money and bought two hefty candy bars from the vending machine. Already, my sister and I were very different people; she feared the loss of only two teeth when she still had, like, twenty extra ones with no cavities. We may have shared the same parents, but we did not understand the other—we were already evolutionary strangers, a billion genetic mutations and maybe an ice age or two apart.

  Having no idea how to calm her down, I ignored her wailing and made her an offer that I thought was more than generous at the time: “Do you want me to punch out all your other baby teeth? You could make twelve whole bucks, which is a lot of money!”

  She did not stop crying.

  “Thut-up,” I said. “Do you want Dad to hear?”

  At six one morning, my mother came back. It had only been a few weeks, but to a kid it felt as if it had been a year. It seemed that my life had an open-door policy: adults magically appeared or reappeared—it was like Narnia or a two-star motel where anyone could check out whenever they pleased. During this period of my life, I was embittered, plagued with blistering spasms of anxiety, which manifested in the form of dry-eyed insomnia. I’d lie awake on my mattress for hours, heart thumping in zombie time, listing out loud the ways that my mother could die. This sounds very gruesome but was bedtime meditation for me.

  And then she was suddenly back, in our kitchen, carelessly frying up green onion
pancakes and pork dumplings, the plump milky fists ballooning and popping in a heated pan. She looked ghoulish, her eyes engorged, skin like our wallpaper: fluorescent yellow-green.

  “Where did-ded you go?” my sister asked, starting to whimper. “Why did-ded you go?”

  “What are you talking about?” my mother barked, looking stunned. She did not like crying because it attracted the ghosts, and I knew my sister would get spanked if she continued to make that awful noise.

  “You went-ded away,” my sister insisted, sniffing buttery snot, and I was furious that she was acting possessed like the stupid girl at the hockey rink. Didn’t she know that we had to be emotionally strong if we didn’t want the ghosts to take our parents away? I decided then that I was going to punch her again if she did not immediately stop. Anything to prevent the Woo-Woo from coming back. So emotionally disabled was I, like a piece of plastic, it was a miracle that I didn’t just give up and agree to be a dense, psychotic thug with a hard Gobstopper heart.

  “You have too much imagination,” my mother said, shaking her head as if her neck were convulsing. “I haven’t gone anywhere. I cooked you guys a big dinner yesterday and the day before. The whole fucking week and the last. No? Well, that’s your problem. You guys are so fucking unappreciative.”

  She grunted, stared at us like we were all grotesque and nutso. Maybe she thought we were playing make-believe. Eventually, we realized she really believed what she was saying or had convinced herself to believe her own tepid lies, that she had been living at home all along. My sister, who was smarter than me, knew not to push it and pretended nothing had happened. She began setting the table. We could all see that there was white Chinese pancake dough in the frying pan, the uneasy shush of splashy oil hissing at us, mocking us. We all must have known that our mother smelled terribly rancid, as she cooked up our delicious ghostly cuisine only a few feet away. But she was our mother, and it felt wrong not to appreciate, if not like, every aspect and spastic version of her. It was an improvement when she wasn’t sad.