The Woo-Woo Read online

  When I was thirteen, Auntie Beautiful One was still unfamiliar to me and therefore more exciting than my mother; she spoke to me without screaming and did not call me retard, fat, or ugly. In retrospect, I see it was because I did not live with her and only interacted with her on vacations and at family dinners that I believed, on some ideal, glamorized level, that she was sane and more human than my mother. I did not confide in her, yet she treated me like I was her only secret keeper and wholly worthy of her grown-up mysteries, which filled me with nifty, juvenile pride.

  Flowery Face was the only kid who would try to talk her mother down from the bridge eight years later—everyone else refused. When I look back on this, I wonder if, when she was begging her not to jump, she remembered being shunned because her mom seemed to like me better, if she remembered the cutting warmth of the lake in summer and how alone we all felt even though we were together. Neither Flowery Face nor I received specific affection, kindness, or genuine compassion from our mothers, and I think it caused us both to feel a damp and aching sadness, a childhood arthritis in our half-grown bones.

  On the bridge on Canada Day, I wonder if Flowery Face remembered how everyone always snubbed her. If she felt a little resentful or if she mostly felt it was her duty to make her mother love her back, the way I did. We were similar in that way, kids who were bruisingly sensitive and famished for what we didn’t know was missing: a sense that we were valued and liked by somebody. Not just somebody, but our mothers, who were about as maternal as smiling hamsters, who are commonly known to devour their snack-sized babies at birth for fresh protein.

  On the beach, Flowery Face looked like she wanted to punch me, so I made a note to buy her some candy when I had the chance. She was a skinny kid, but she was the product of Uncle E.T. and I did not want to fight her, even though there was a good chance that I could win because I was older and sixty pounds heavier. In our floral bathing suits, competing for the attentions of Beautiful One, she suddenly whacked me in the shoulder when no one was looking and I viciously kicked her back.

  “Get your own mom,” she said.

  “Mine’s currently broken,” I said, wondering if it was too late to bribe her with candy.

  “Too bad,” Flowery Face snapped. “You’re a fat, ugly freak!”

  I sighed, because I was used to fights and name-calling like this, with either my sister or my mother. Flowery Face and I would not be remotely sympathetic to one another until we got older, and back then, I viewed her as an extension of my sister—someone much younger than me, an inconvenience, someone who needed her face and eyes and gums rubbed in hot sand.

  But clenching my teeth, I resisted the urge to knock her down. Because Flowery Face was just another someone I had to beat and be better at in every way, it was not worth my effort, as I had already won my aunt’s attention. We had been raised to believe that the competition that existed in each small family unit extended to everyone; we performed the exact same repertoire at piano concerts to compare who could play a Rachmaninoff piece better, or who wore what dress better, like screaming pop princesses. At thirteen, I was competing with myself, my siblings, my cousins, my parents, my uncles, my aunties, and all the other Chinese people in the world. Another family characteristic that would make Beautiful One want to jump off a bridge, as I think she felt that she could never measure up as an immigrant, wife, mother, and woman. She strived to be the best, and I believe she felt that she had to overcome her tremendous poverty and unfortunate origin story, a cosmic obsession that would lead to her psychotic break.

  “Wear a life jacket,” my mother called to my aunt, genuinely worried. She was scared a ghost would pull her under and never went in water higher than her knees. “You’re with fatty and the boat might sink. Lindsay doesn’t need a vest because obese people float. If your life jacket doesn’t work, just climb on top of her and float back to shore. We should just rent her out to people who want boats and make money.”

  I was glad to be with someone who liked me, even when, hypocritically, I knew Beautiful One treated her child like my mother treated me. In our family, Mother was just a name. A clumsy two-syllable English word like “river” or “building.” A mother was just someone, I thought, perhaps even a ghost, who cried a lot and fought off the supernatural but fed you constantly. Both Auntie Beautiful One and my mother were decent providers of sustenance, but Beautiful One was better in my adolescent mind because she owned several restaurants.

  So ignoring my own monster mother, even though I wanted to belt out a horror-movie scream, I followed my aunt to the edge of the lake, shoved our boat to knee-deep water, and hopped in.

  We drifted towards the middle of the greenish lake without the rubber boat collapsing under our mutual mass (we were so lucky!), and Beautiful One, who always looked lonely and heartbroken, suddenly said, “You know Uncle E.T. had a bad life, right? He came in a fishing boat with other refugees and they drank their own urine to survive. His boat was attacked by pirates and he jumped in the water and swam to Hong Kong. That’s why he’s so angry all the time. That’s why he’s making you run. I really hate him.”

  “How come you married him?” I asked, hoping that she might offer me some money if I listened to her.

  “Well, he came to the house with a gun and took Poh-Poh hostage until Gung-Gung gave his blessing. You know how they hate non-Chinese. And I was pregnant.”

  “Oh,” I said, not quite sure how to respond, because her story, which was very likely to be true, didn’t seem that interesting or remarkable to me, mostly because I was thinking of all the things I could buy if I had money. Also, I was thirteen. Hers was a typical anecdote, not hyperbolic or unique to Beautiful One; if no one had died or tried to kill someone or themselves, no one in the family would think the story was worth remembering. Maybe Uncle E.T. had a pocketknife instead of gun, but anyway, he seemed like the kind of man who would cheerfully threaten a future mother-in-law. Everyone knew why Beautiful One had married him: he was so crooked and frightening that he would make Beautiful One look magnificent even as she aged. Besides, I had heard this story about a billion times, even from my mother, who had said that Uncle E.T. was carrying a bomb to blow up Poh-Poh, which she said would have done everyone a huge favour and made E.T. the best brother-in-law in the world.

  As the boat floated in the middle of the lake, I tried to concentrate hard on what Beautiful One was saying. That might mean more of a payoff. If she was going to talk for more than an hour, then I could forget waiting for the money and change the subject, since I only wanted easy-earned cash for fake listening. After all, my aunt, my mother, and my father were all lonely, desperate people (which I did not realize then); otherwise, it wouldn’t have been so easy to earn the contents of their wallets.

  “You know they’re all fucking nuts,” Beautiful One said sadly, and we looked at all the lazy families sprawled on the rocky beach. Like they were some impressionistic painting or a performance piece in a modern museum: people who looked idyllic but upon closer inspection were secretly hellish and tormented. “E.T. wants to take all you kids paragliding and your mom is just like Poh-Poh, nervous about everything. She likes to invent fucked-up things to be scared of. Me and you are the only sane people in this family. We have to stick together, okay? Do you like me better than your mother?”

  “Duuuuuh,” I said, and she gave me twenty bucks, which I saved because I felt it was a magnificent sum, and I had found myself a new idol and ally by agreeing with her. In that moment we were partners, allies who totally understood each other, who could see whatever the others couldn’t comprehend or acknowledge. Me and Beautiful One, both of us absurd and selfish and missing half ourselves, wanted to be exempt from the hot, troubling chaos of having a Woo-Woo inside our brains.

  CHAPTER 5

  WOO-WOO LOGIC

  The refrigerator is attacking me!” Poh-Poh wailed at my mother and me.

  Only a month after our lake trip, we brought her gluey radish cakes and doughy white pork
buns because she said she couldn’t open the refrigerator. That was where the Woo-Woo lived.

  Like my mother and Auntie Beautiful One, my maternal grandmother had a way of charging her Woo-Woo directly at her female descendants. But perhaps forecasting my mother’s mania, I thought, and—I feared—my own impending insanity, Poh-Poh’s Woo-Woo was relentless. Her form of madness was untethered; it was chaotic and loud, like an amateur marching band. Was this who I’d eventually become, the embodiment of sickly terror, darkly hilarious only to those who didn’t have any idea how else to love me? An old joke?

  “Blue lightning is zapping me!” Poh-Poh yelled, her hair greasy and dishevelled. She was not wearing pants. “It doesn’t want me to get my groceries! How the fuck will I eat?”

  She threw herself at the old Maytag refrigerator, as if to push the ghosts out of it. Exhausted, she jumped backwards and suddenly slumped to the floor, unconscious. I stared at her on the linoleum in fascination and horror. I was tempted to poke her to see if she was pretending or if she had died, but I was afraid she’d jump up and scream at me.

  This was just a typical visit to my grandmother’s house.

  “The fridge electrocuted me!” Poh-Poh exclaimed after she woke up. Then, shoving her hands into oven mitts, she quickly grabbed the door handle. “Eeeeee. Ahhhh,” she shrieked, as she attacked the nasty aluminum beast—whack, whack, whack, poor battered refrigerator.

  She was having a psychotic break, believing that all inanimate objects were threatening to assassinate her. My mother—no stranger to mental illness herself, of course—only gawked, then sighed. And even I, who was thirteen and not immune, rolled my eyes.

  It didn’t matter how hard you fought or what closet or refrigerator you tried to battle. The Woo-Woo ghosts were never far behind—our Chinese family still believed that these supernatural ghosts were responsible for irrational behaviour. We still didn’t believe in Western medication or psychiatrists, which meant that we prolonged our suffering.

  During my visits to my grandmother’s house as a child and teenager, I would point to the blender, then the microwave, and finally the oven, asking: “Poh-Poh, does this have a ghost inside it?” but she refused to acknowledge my nosiness.

  “Who the fuck are you?” she snapped in her usual foul-mouthed Chinese. “Never seen you before,” she continued. “Must be ghost!”

  “Boo!” I said, affirming her distrust.

  I was frightened of her, but I had to find ways to make our visits as entertaining as possible. Otherwise, I would never have been able to tolerate her constant screaming and sobbing. But my grandmother did not feel the same way, and my jokey response made her so upset that she had to lie down. How does someone go crazy? I wondered. Like a rabid werewolf or a zombie, did she wake up and suddenly find herself septic? Or was her madness, slow and irrevocable, something that you just inherited, like high cholesterol and sociopathy?

  And if that was the case, was that what had happened to my mother? Especially in our trailer in Osoyoos? And if so, when would the genetic mutation awaken within me? I shuddered—real fear was beginning to override the harsh humour I’d sometimes find in my grandmother’s very authentic mania.

  Even though everyone in our family claimed not to believe in Western medicine, a sneaky auntie, worried about my grandmother, had taken her to a distant cousin who was a psychiatrist.

  After the visit, where I now know she was prescribed the common antipsychotics lithium and clozapine, she was so doped up that she couldn’t speak. It was decided that because my mother did not work outside the home, she would be responsible for looking after our grandmother as she fought off what everyone called her “demonic possession.” It didn’t help that my mother was fighting her own sinkhole of depressive battles, which would be worsened with my grandmother in our house.

  When my father, who had somehow escaped the Woo-Woo but was nonetheless a believer, heard that we would have a new guest, his mother-in-law, he shuddered and announced that he would be “so very busy” at his engineering firm. It was shocking that my father agreed to house my grandmother, but he was becoming more afraid of my mother. If he insisted my grandmother not be allowed in the house, my mother would destroy cupboards and hurl dishes.

  Shortly thereafter, an auntie drove up to our cul-de-sac and my grandmother appeared in the driveway, carrying a black garbage bag full of her clothes.

  “Be aware,” my aunt said, as she escorted my grandmother to our front door. “I try to fix Poh-Poh, but there are still many ghost. She just throw herself down the stair because she think her head is not attached to her body.”

  “How many ghost inside her?” my mother asked, looking concerned.

  “Probably a dozen,” my aunt replied, sighing. “Might take a year to get better.”

  Having her own mother in the house seemed to bring back my mother’s childhood rage. Because when she had come down with a fever in their village in Hong Kong’s countryside, my grandmother sent her outside to die without a blanket. But my mother, always disobedient, even as a little girl, spent a week shivering and hallucinating in the hellish heat and came back alive. I thought that my mother had acquired some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder from it because she always said, “I was going to kill your Poh-Poh when I recovered because I fucking hated her,” and “Who sends you out to die without a fucking blanket? No common sense! Screwed in the fucking head!”

  At our first dinner together, my grandmother squealed and shoved her fingers in the overcooked lasagna on the kitchen table, so no one wanted to eat anymore. My sister and brother wisely fled to their bedrooms, but perhaps because of the camping trip, I still wanted my mother’s approval, so I stayed behind and grudgingly gulped down three enormous helpings of burnt noodles.

  How was this crazy woman with ringlets really my grandma, someone who, according to Hong Kong soap operas, was supposed to bake almond cookies and dish out cash to grandchildren at birthdays and Lunar New Year, especially when she yanked off the lids of the salt and pepper shakers and began flinging fistfuls of seasoning all over the carpet?

  “EEEEEE!” she shrieked, so I, not being one to miss out on fun, instantly picked up a handful to join her. “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! AHHHH! OOOOOO!” she yelled, and I screamed too.

  “I didn’t sign up for this!” my mother yelled. She looked like she wanted to cry. “There is a place in hell for crazy, trouble-making people like you! Lindsay, if you don’t behave, you will have to spend all eternity with Poh-Poh.”

  When my mother really could not cope with my grandmother’s erratic and bizarre behaviour anymore, she stormed out of the kitchen, shaking.

  Soon after, she enlisted me on a mission: we were going to rummage through Poh-Poh’s garbage bag to search for her medication and put a stop to all this bullshit. We were going to cure Poh-Poh ourselves, she said.

  “I’m helping your very lazy grandmother,” my mother said, and then wondered aloud if she should bury the orange pill bottles in her own underwear drawer. Like most of our family, she believed that pills were evil and unnecessary and expensive, as people in medieval times did not need them and our brains in modernity were certainly more evolved.

  Anxiously, I stood watch at the door, in case my grandmother caught us stealing her drugs—not that she would notice anyway. But because I was the eldest, I was expected to be supremely loyal to my mother. After our camping trip, I was still afraid of her spasming percussion of rage, but I was immensely curious about fate versus genetics.

  I was also dubious: if a psychiatrist, someone with an advanced medical degree, had given my grandmother medication, why were we undoing the treatment? Didn’t we want my grandmother to get better so we could send her home as soon as possible? Moreover, the idea that my grandmother’s insanity was caused by a medical condition that could be eased simply with pills reduced my fears about my own life—pills could solve my future problems if they could solve Poh-Poh’s present ones, and I was ready to find out what would happen if sh
e popped one.

  It was this new kind of thinking that had been bothering me lately—emerging like a red, bulbous zit inside my teenage nose. Daytime television had taught me that people’s brains could make them do wacko things. There seemed to be a terrible disconnect from whatever I was learning on TV and at home. On the Jerry Springer Show and Judge Judy, experts were to be revered and obeyed. But in my parents’ house, knowledge was feared and loudly dismissed. The more rational the information, the more they protested.

  If my brother or sister and I were to succumb to a sudden fever, we were ordered to strip naked and were rubbed with foul-smelling Chinese herbs. Tylenol was the devil. If we had the common flu, we were just lazy. Viruses were caused by ghosts and exorcised by running laps around our suburban neighbourhood.

  Besides, the public school curriculum in British Columbia did not include ghosts that possessed people like germs. I was finally at an age where I was beginning to question and worry that I was missing something obvious.

  “Didn’t the doctor say the medication was good for her?” I asked my mother, as I nervously peered down the hallway to see if anyone was coming.

  “You know that doctors don’t know what they’re talking about, right?” she answered, as she sorted through my grandmother’s unwashed clothes to find the stash of antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication that she was supposed to take, along with her mood stabilizers, sleeping pills, and tranquilizers.

  “Ummm … did you go to medical school?” I asked, a little sarcastically. After Osoyoos, I knew not to piss my mother off by being openly confrontational. But I was preteen enough to try a soft, non-neutral tone.

  “I know it all!” my mother said. “These kinds of doctors don’t believe in ghosts,” she declared. “They can’t see them. They think Poh-Poh is fucking crazy, but they can’t see that she’s possessed! The medication hides the demons, you see.”