*Non-Fiction — May 21, 2020
Most Valuable Player
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“On The Ice” from The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug-Raids, Demons And My Crazy Chinese Family
After a year without paranormal incident, when I was twelve years old, my mother suddenly checked out again. It was just before the semifinals of my peewee winter hockey tournament at our home rink, Planet Ice, and I still had to play.
During the year without incident our family had been surviving, at least to our very minimal standards, and one night, my mother and father had woken my siblings and me at two a.m. and ordered us into the van because they had suddenly decided to drive from Vancouver to California.
“No ghost follow Mommy to Disneyland,” my father happily promised us, as he handed out Costco-sized bags of discounted Halloween candy for the trip. During those three weeks we were frighteningly spontaneous, and I think it was the only time my parents seemed like they weren’t furious at each other and themselves.
And then, without consulting any of us, when I was at the start of seventh grade my father signed us all up for little league hockey, which was supposed to keep us “busy” and distract my mother from her ghosts. She had no choice but to become a hockey mom of three, a transformation that bewildered and terrified her—What the fuck is the point of this Canada sport?!
Our manic hockey extracurricular was also supposed to make our family assimilate faster into North American culture. As if possessing enough money to throw three kids into organized sports meant that we had achieved a recreational version of the American sitcom dream. Hockey practice was also a way to toughen us up, which I didn’t realize until I was fully grown—my father wanted his children to learn discipline and heroic fearlessness by participating in a sport condoned by our country’s culture. He did not want us to be terrified and seemingly “weak” like our mother.
Unfortunately, he did not consider that the hectic four a.m. practice schedules and nine p.m. away games on school nights would make my mother crankier and more volatile.
At three one morning, she finally drove off. “Sorry,” she apologized to my sister, who was nine years old and an excellent worrier. “If you’re hungry, Daddy only knows how to make rice, so it sucks to be you.”
I said nothing, because this was her blunt way of stating a fact (Daddy was indeed a shitty cook). I watched her stomp away with her winter coat and car keys, disappointed. I felt like her least favourite child; she did not even acknowledge me, and I was already insecure, so this further unsettled me in a jealous, mercurial way.
“If you won all your hockey game,” my father said to me before the semifinal game, “she’d have stayed. No one like to watch loser. You need to win MVP so she will like you.”
He may have been attempting a joke, but at this point, I think even he knew he had failed at keeping her on track towards middling sustainable sanity. It was getting harder and harder to conceal his sadistic shame with humour—and his humour was becoming uglier and blacker.
“Okay,” I said, not understanding the whole situation, but I was dumb—i.e., desperate and hurt and disturbed—enough to try to please him.
During the preceding year, when the ghosts seemed to have forgotten about my mother, I contentedly spent an hour or two at craft classes at a local arts school, where I learned how to weave Eastern patterned tapestries and operate an old-fashioned printing press. But weaving and papermaking were not as stimulating or exciting to watch as real-time hockey for my father, who felt that I had a second-rate talent for crafts, so I was paid to hit other little girls in AA hockey.
Whether my father was training a small-time thug or just another pragmatic Chinese kid who valued money, I was paid a decent goon’s commission: twenty dollars per penalty, five dollars per goal, three dollars per assist. I did not particularly enjoy organized hockey, but it was a job, much like attending middle school.
In sixth grade, a dirty game of hockey could mean an easy sixty bucks. I became a little sumo wrestler, who leaped around on pointy designer blades, custom-made double E size 3 boy’s skates because I had fat, archless feet that seemed to expand sideways. I just had to vary and combine the main offences: charging, body-checking, tripping. Throw in some comedic high-sticking. If I busted my stick and still played during my shift, it was an automatic penalty (I ruined a couple good sticks before each game). My father checked with the scorekeeper, tallied up the money, and coughed up the cash when we got home, because otherwise, I refused to participate. Paying someone to partake in an organized team sport was much easier than spanking them or hitting them with plastic hangers, which was something he did when money failed him.
“She pull diva again,” he liked to complain to my mother when she called, always a little disappointed that I did not wholly appreciate a game that defined an entire nation. “Lindsay wouldn’t put on her gear, so I had to pay her extra. She doesn’t like to move, that’s why she’s a fat piggy. At least we know our kid will do anything for money.”
Hockey was my stop-and-go routine, as if someone punched play and fast-forward repeatedly on a remote control. Bundled in modern gladiatorial gear, I disliked the grid mask of the helmet. It was like squinting through a frightening checkered prison. And I hated the hefty shoulder pads—perverse spaceship armour that bulked up our wimpy girlish shoulders to look more astronautic. The hockey pants were basically oversized girdles developed by NASA. With three private coaches specializing in applied physical theory (skate, pass, slap shot) and abundant private ice time, I made assistant captain within a year and performed until the end of tenth grade.
Hairstyling was my father’s ritual before any hockey performance. It seemed to relax him and appeal to his grand and obsessive tendencies. He would compulsively fix my hair into a tight, twisty ponytail for a regular game or French-braid it beautifully for a tournament. He was responsible for hair because my mother was rough-handed and could pluck a strip raw by accident. My father’s only hobby, besides his family, was gently sculpting hair into tidy creations. This was his only attempt at bonding with me pregame; he did not know how to use words in encouraging ways, so he embraced drugstore hairbands and elastics, just like a girl feebly twining friendship bracelets for her first-grade class.
“Hair okay?” he would ask. “Now go kick ass.”
But if I lost, he sometimes became too involved with the game and punished me by letting me choose a plastic hanger from his closet. He would chase me around the house like a cartoon grizzly, swinging my pink or yellow hanger of choice. I would sprint to the bathroom and lock the door, wondering for how many hours or days or weeks I would have to hide.
Looking back, this is where my father snapped; all humour flooding from him, he resorted to transparent brutality—he intended to smack. He claimed it was to make me harder on the outside, “less of a loser like Mommy.” Once, I stayed in the bathroom for eleven hours, hoping that he might get bored and give up. Even though I had stolen twenty dollars from his wallet, I did not think I deserved a whacking. Hockey was a terrible idea for a parent who was already so tortured. The ritualistic team practices, the demanding tournaments with the finger-biting fifty-fifty raffles, the fierce head-cracking penalties—it was too much for a man who loved to win.
To make my mother come back from her three a.m. drive, that weekend I hustled in the semifinals against the Alaskan team so I could become MVP. In our league, I was known for playing brutal defence, and bloodthirsty parents liked to watch my “mean streak,” which flowed through me like an all-you-can-eat meal.</div?
I believed that if I won a medal, there was a slim chance my parents might like me, that my mother might come back, even if the kids at school despised me, because it seemed fundamental that one of your parents should feel obligated to you via genetics or societal pressure. Wasn’t the main reason you reproduced to create the same, if not a better, version of yourself ? I sensed that I was an irritation—like dust lodged in the eye or a small piece of meat stuck between the teeth. And friendless, still, I was horribly lonely. However unmotherly my mother was, I needed her home.
On my shift, I charged down the ice, delicately stick-handling our prized puck, but tripped over someone’s stick and somersaulted into the wooden boards like an amateur acrobat. A girl punted me with her skate. I was trapped on my back, and another four or five piled up and pummelled the shit out of one another—our fathers’ live weekday entertainment. This was guerrilla hockey for girls who were practically apes, and I thought I was the baddest King Kong in the arena (a result of watching too many Sailor Moon cartoons). Boxy gloves were flung down. Black helmets were snapped off and tumbled onto the shimmery ice, little guillotined heads bouncing happily along.
To survive this beastly brawl, I was sly enough to shut my eyes and play dead. But a sick feeling lurched in my tummy, like I had swallowed a writhing beetle or part of my own tongue. It was a feeling that I didn’t understand—absolute wrongness.
Suddenly queasy, I threw up a little in my mouth but couldn’t tell if I had smacked my head too hard on the boards. I blacked out for a second, abruptly falling asleep. When I woke up, the paramedics said I had a minor concussion. But I could still perform to win back my mother, so I jumped up and insisted I play now. My skull thumped, helmet suddenly squeezing too tight, something perhaps not right. I felt my front teeth with my tongue, the bottoms were lightly chipped, my mouth guard stupidly left at home. No blood—not like last time I was clobbered in an offside fight. And not like when my father splintered his molar chomping into a walnut, gargling up gritty crumbs of ground-up enamel and nut.
I was going to be okay, and I was going to be victorious. I did not care if my team won, only if I won MVP overall. This was my deeply troubling mindset at the time: to appease my father and fix my mother.
A period later, I charged a girl centre ice and attacked ferociously, cracking the fleshy back of her lower leg with my stick. The shin guard obviously did not extend fully around. There was just the fuzzy, soft hockey sock to defend her spongy skin, and we both knew something had gone very wrong. She dropped. The linesman and referee allowed us to skate around for a few fast seconds. But then there was a sick little animalistic scream in the arena that got louder and louder. The girl I had whacked was flat on her back. Thrashing her arms in a useless backstroke, she looked like she was having a psychotic break, gone ridiculously mad.
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 inconve- nience. “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 letters 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 pretended 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, they 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 was how the stoic Wongs 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.
“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.
Reprinted with permission from The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family by Lindsay Wong (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018).
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 4. View full issue & more.