The Woo-Woo Read online

  “I think there’s something wrong with Mom?” I said, sucking sour air through my mouth. But everyone tried not to hear me. “Dad?” I said louder, hating myself for sounding so feeble and worried. “Can’t you smell her?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” my father ordered, in one of his intensely unpleasant suck-it-up moods. I didn’t know this then, but he hated pushing his luck, and he was so glad that our lives could finally go back to “normal”—hockey practice was in a few days. “If you can’t talk properly, why talk at all?” he asked, turning on me. “Why the fuck you eating, huh? Fat, fat, fat.”

  I was afraid to show him that this exchange hurt me, so I kept my face blank and stared past him.

  Later, I saw him pacing up and down the halls, while my mother impassively watched her soap operas. In the TV room, we would sit cross-legged with our mother on the floor, because we weren’t allowed to share the sofa with my father, who insisted on maintaining what he called a “personal boundary” from his wife and offspring. As usual, my parents did not touch one another after my father’s frantic stumbling, because of his insistence on keeping us at least two feet away, and their eyes did not seem to leave the TV screen.

  Somehow, at that age, I also knew that if my father lost himself, we were all deeply and indefinitely screwed to the exponent of 10,000. He could not afford to vanish; someone needed to make money and look after us. In that moment I was very aware that my mother might not ever fully recover. And I was scared that we were all going to be spastic cosmic orphans, pathetic little planets spinning non-stop, if my father didn’t pull himself together and teach us how to effectively orbit around our out-in-space mother.

  But in retrospect, I see he was afraid to catch the Woo-Woo ghost from my mother and had to physically, if not emotionally, distance himself. By enrolling us in little league hockey and ordering us not to appear emotionally fragile, he was promoting our self-reliance—in case we needed to fend for ourselves. But he seemed to be struggling with his own life lesson after my mother came home.

  “What should we do?” he suddenly asked me, as the TV blasted conversation. He kept his face more empty than usual during our alien exchange. “My wife … screw up!” he practically screamed at me, heartbroken and petrified. “She go Woo-Woo, you know!”

  For a vaporous moment, I was confused by his shrill, suddenly humanlike behaviour. I think that I understood that winning another hockey game had not entirely fixed our problem, and that I had broken the girl’s leg for almost nothing. But I refused to admit it: yes, my magic trophies and sacrifices in the arena had returned my mother, but she was as maliciously cracked as that damned femur. And she needed special help—a certainty that I was only then beginning to comprehend.

  My father may have talked as if he did not care when our mother was missing, but he was as lost as I was, perhaps even more so.

  “Why you asking me?” I finally snapped at him, unbelieving. “I’m the dumb one, remember?”

  “Yes,” he agreed, and went to ask my sister for unswerving, no-bullshit answers.

  CHAPTER 4

  YOU CAN’T ESCAPE THE WOO-WOO

  I thought Auntie Beautiful One, my mother’s youngest sister, was the sanest in our extended family, as she, unlike my mother, was a thriving franchise restaurant queen of salty Vietnamese food, i.e., a very successful business owner, which seemed separate from the Woo-Woo. Although she had always been moody and vain, I did not think that she could be a lunatic because when I was an adolescent, I thought anyone who, like my father, performed tasks outside the house and was decently paid could not be insane. However, her husband, Uncle E.T., was another matter entirely. Like my mother, he stayed home, as if he had to be hidden from public judgment, so I viewed him as Woo-Woo too.

  With his abnormally large head and thin, crooked tree-branch limbs, Uncle E.T. had been a victim of malicious childhood polio and was nicknamed after Spielberg’s deformed alien. Rumoured to be an ex–Vietnamese gangster, my uncle was an extreme man who spoke in sickly grunts and guttural screams. We were all immensely frightened of Uncle E.T., who force-fed his three misbehaving children cheap supermarket cat food. I am not joking when I say that if you were insolent, you got a container full of crusty kibbles for a school lunch the next day. We had all witnessed Uncle E.T., who supposedly came from Asian street-gang culture, tie his children to a chair with skipping rope if they did not finish all the vegetables on their dinner plates.

  Uncle E.T. was every kid’s number one bogeyman parent and the reason I was afraid to be invited for sleepovers at the Beautiful One household. But what terrified me most was that Uncle E.T. kept a militant Poo Schedule tacked to the bathroom door. In the Beautiful One household, a bowel movement was an extraordinary privilege, and the Poo Schedule was meant to keep you safe from Woo-Woo ghosts, who attacked lazy children who sat too long on the toilet. It was considered unhealthy to be alone and very hazardous to your mental health, so your bowel-movement time was closely monitored and checked off by a responsible adult.

  Once, when I had been invited to spend a long weekend at their home, I had been too mortified to sign up for a three-minute slot. The bathroom door was always locked, unless you could prove to Uncle E.T. (who had the key) that you had registered. For seventy-two hours, I clutched my aching abdomen and thought about digging a latrine in the backyard with my bare hands, while my cousins argued over double-booking. Finally, I became so constipated and hysterical that I was rushed to the emergency room for what everyone thought was aggressive appendicitis.

  Perhaps marrying Uncle E.T. and then allowing him to run their household was a precursor to my aunt’s breakdown, but at the time, it just seemed to me that she had poor judgment and a very picky husband, especially since Uncle E.T. insisted on tracking the amount of toilet paper that had been used. They were much wealthier than us, but if you dared use more than three pieces, Uncle E.T. accused you of being wasteful.

  My mother liked Beautiful One the best of her seven siblings, so it meant that we often took our holidays together. My mother was the only one who wanted to go with what my father, not realizing the irony, called “that freak show family.” The sisters gossiped on the phone for hours each day, and it saddened my mother that I did not get along with my sister, Deep Thinker. At this point, my sister and I were sworn enemies. I was savagely jealous that she was much smarter than me, knowing instinctively how to mimic her peers’ smiley-faced social cues and receiving all As in school. Unlike my sister, I was hypersensitive despite being a bully, and I allowed my home life to interfere with my gross misperception of the exterior world. And Deep Thinker was furious because she thought that I was the favourite child—“the bestest kid,” who received the most criticism from our parents, which in our Chinese family meant lavish attention. “Fuck you!” somehow meant “I care about you!” because everyone knew that there were multiple ghosts listening to us, so it was better not to show any weakness.

  Most summers, we went camping with Auntie Beautiful One and her family. Our standard vacations often meant RVing, i.e., luxury camping, in Canada’s only desert, in southern BC. To get to Osoyoos, a dry pouch of town in wine country in the Okanagan Valley, we drove five, six, sometimes seven hours on dipping and twisting cement, the fat home-away-from-home trailer bumbling behind our copper pickup truck. From Osoyoos, off Highway 97, you could walk to the Washington State border, bypassing mounds of urine-coloured grass before veering into orchards vending red, swollen fruit. The highway was a callous hummock folding outwards like uncertain origami—a potholed journey that was supposed to take us away from the darkness of our house. But Beautiful One’s family madly pursued us, towing their large trailer—our families had identical pickup trucks, because we had gotten a cheap two-for-one bargain. We did not stop, driving like we were all being chased by some very murderous Woo-Woo, which we were, in a way. My parents suffered from a permanent refugee mindset, acting as if we could be deported or mass murdered anytime, especially when a new prime minist
er was elected.

  This particular holiday to Osoyoos, during the summer of 2000, was also supposed to be a month-long mental escape from my maternal grandmother, Poh-Poh, who had gone off her medications and believed the refrigerator was out to assassinate her. She wanted to move in with us. This was unacceptable, and my parents commanded us to pack the RV and abandon house immediately. My grandmother was always shit news because she brought the Woo-Woo with her, and as extreme people, we believed that we could avoid all our problems by declaring ourselves “Vacation.” Like declaring ourselves “Not It” in a game of constant and childish tag, “Vacation” meant that we could abandon our responsibilities and current lives for as long as possible, because it was far too hard and heartbreaking to live in the present.

  At the time, I couldn’t imagine the impossibility of staring your mother’s vortex of insanity in the eyeballs, as though seeing your future before you, in the form of a person, crumbling—though I would soon enough. Looking back, I can see the two sisters must have been finding comfort, even a sense of normalcy, in each other.

  All the way to the desert, my mother cracked sunflower seeds with her back teeth, spitting out the grainy, streaked carcasses as she screamed at my father in the harassed bluntness of her bazooka Chinese. When in “Vacation” mode, my parents’ fights escalated, and we all knew my mother would lose, because she was sitting in the passenger seat in a car driven by a very bad-tempered man.

  “Why are you so negative all the time, huh?” she spat, annoyed at my father for his sulking.

  “I hate Beautiful One. I thought this was a family vacation, but you bring that crazy harpy along,” my father complained, making it known to all of us that we should hate Beautiful One because he hated her. Since he was the boss of our family, it was assumed that we should take on his opinions and beliefs, just as we had inherited his last name.

  “She’s my sister, okay?” my mother eventually said, sounding defensive. “It’s not like you even have a family. You don’t even call them. Beautiful One isn’t crazy. You’re just a fucking weirdo who has no emotions and thinks everyone who cries is crazy.”

  “Beautiful One is a liar, a selfish bitch, a hypochondriac who thinks she’s going to die every day. I buy a truck, she buys same truck and says hers is better. Then we get trailer, she has to buy a bigger, more expensive trailer. Next time don’t tell them where we’re going. They can house Poh-Poh, that fucking piece of shit. You and her are both crazy, always on the phone, three hours a day. All day long, bullshitting. You tell her everything, and now everyone in Vancouver knows about my hemorrhoid.”

  This was a typical rant from my father, and my mother started shrieking. They continued screaming at each other, and my father drove as fast as he could, and I was scared that we would lose control and flip over on the freeway; the truck and trailer would smash us all into unrecognizable charred bits. This kind of thinking, of course, was absolutely ridiculous. If my mother had been at the wheel, I’m sure we’d have immediately crashed. But thank God my father was always on autopilot and did not seem remotely affected by the fight, except that arguing made him break all the speed limits. My siblings and I, who desperately wanted to pick on each other and fight, decided it was best to be invisible and quiet until we were closer to our destination.

  But even a vacation couldn’t give my mother a break from herself. I didn’t realize that I too had been hoping for an interruption in her black hole of madness on this shitty vacation until one morning when it became clear that the Woo-Woo had pursued us, and my mother enacted its violence more wickedly than I’d ever thought possible.

  My mother flung back my pink Hello Kitty sheets, thrust a stove lighter under my foot, and set it aflame. She had been normal the night before, serving up canned spaghetti in plastic bowls and asking me if I wanted fourths and fifths, like a very different, separate person. “Eat more,” she had commanded, hurriedly piling noodles on everyone’s plate, seeming excited. Even my aunt seemed to feed off her energy as she quickly dished up steamed tofu, bok choy, and sliced chicken—our families always ate lunch and dinner together when camping. Before bed, my mother began to obsessively scrub the trailer, freezing our camping meals: fried rice and lo mein. She mopped the floor, dusted the cupboards, and complained that she couldn’t sleep. Usually, when she was generous and hyperactive like this, she’d let me stay up all night and we’d frantically bake hundreds and hundreds of cupcakes, decorating the counters and chairs of our house until our crumbly creations went stale and inedible.

  We should have recognized this normalized calm before the eruption of a full-fledged Woo-Woo hurricane. Because this morning, she had completely lost it. We were 515 kilometres from the epicentre of crazy (Poh-Poh), but we were parked perfectly in sync beside Beautiful One and her family in a dehydrated RV resort. We had matching trailers, so how could she not go Woo-Woo?

  I was beginning to realize that the madness in our DNA was a life-threatening disease, transmitted like a pesky airborne infection, attacking and mutating the pink and grey confetti cells of the brain. It was a twenty-first-century plague that seemed to affect only the women in our family, and there was no standard vaccination. The day my mother burned me, I saw clearly: if you caught the Woo-Woo, you had to let it run its course and hope that you survived with unnoticeable scars.

  Maybe she’d had just enough of fighting with my father or she was just truly insane, but I was tired and slept in past ten a.m., so she ignited my foot as if it were a backyard barbecue pit. A utilitarian gas stove. With her multi-purpose utility lighter, with its stainless-steel tip and extendable flame for those hard-to-reach places.

  Clickety click-click. The flame suddenly poked the bottom of my left foot. Like something soft but raw and painful. I screamed, the shock radiating into my toes. I would never have expected it from my mother. My father, maybe—he crossed over the blackish border of cruelty so easily. But never from my mother, who was someone who disappeared whenever she couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Hey, fatty,” she suddenly said, and climbed up to the top bunk of the RV and aimed again for my favourite cotton sheets, not caring that she could light the entire bed ablaze. But she got the piggy toes of the same foot instead and I shrieked.

  That summer, my stomach had begun to protrude with adolescent misery, and my face and breasts had seemed to bloat like oversized helium balloons. Puberty had transformed me into a four-foot-eight, 140-pound goblin, more grungy and cave dwelling than the smiling, bejewelled child’s Treasure Trolls that seemed to horrify everyone, my mother included.

  I was used to unnecessary wake-up calls from my emotional insomniac mother, but never like this. She had always been paranoid about Woo-Woo scourging, and I believe that summer she thought a demon had squirmed inside my fragile head when she wasn’t looking. The poor woman blamed herself for not being a vigilant ghost-hunting mommy. I was fat and lazy and stupid, which obviously meant that I was possessed. My mother believed that her sole life purpose was to exorcise any family member’s ailing cranium and banish the evil Woo-Woo. She believed that she had been Chosen and was taking her duty seriously.

  As a child, I did not know burning someone was wrong, that violence was evil and even illegal in many countries in the world. Certainly, I felt queasy, baffled, and betrayed, but I did not understand the horrendous soul-shattering implications. How do you begin to recover from a nuclear stabbing to the heart and brain? How do you begin to understand that what was done to you is hateful and intolerable? As an adult, it is both saddening and infuriating that my mother did not seem to understand her actions or remember her potent mania. I wanted to hate her, but I couldn’t. She was my mother, but I despised what she did to me when I was an impressionable young teen.

  Those in our Chinese community, Little Hongcouverites who knew my mother, said she looked like the Hong Kong actress Faye Wong, sleepy eyes with a coarse, bitchy temper. Not that I could see the resemblance, but I agreed about my mother’s weird, shitty mood
s. Her black hair was always in linty pink and yellow curlers; she weighed only ninety pounds, agile enough to swing into the top bunk of our RV to exorcise me. Uncle E.T. had forbidden Beautiful One to have frizzy hair like my mother, because he thought all the toxins and chemicals might leak into his wife’s brain and make her go insane, and who knew what she could one day do?

  “Curly hair means brain problem,” Uncle E.T. once told me at a dinner party. “That’s why I think your mommy crazy. If she straighten her hair, she won’t be. Tell her that for me.” Eight years later, when Auntie Beautiful One would try to jump off a bridge, he would blame her new haircut; it would be the hairdresser’s fault for making his wife Woo-Woo—choppy, blunt ends meant that bits of her brain had gone missing, left on the salon’s floor. We were far too literal in our family, and so quick to blame.

  Apparently, I thought, my father and my sister and brother don’t even understand what the world “Help!” means. English was our second language. My father could not have been more useless.

  At the time, I didn’t understand why my mother didn’t burn the shit out of my nitwit siblings too. But the truth was, I was a convenient target for her intense frustrations. How could she scream at my two siblings when they were up and already following her orders? I was sleeping and perhaps peaceful, which may have irked her on some cruel, fundamental level; my ability to sleep soundly as a teen may have been annoying to my mother, who was lucky to have three hours of sleep per week. Until now, I had been pretty loyal to her—not exactly perfect but good enough to earn maybe fifteen or twenty bucks in my job as eldest daughter. This was the first time she had actually hurt me.