I started laughing. I couldn't stop giggling because I wasn't what my family termed Woo-Woo: I was only medically damaged – the spirits that have plagued my Chinese family for years be damned. Thank God. I was a freak with terrible, mutinous genes, but at least I was not turning into my permanently sad mother, my suicidal auntie Beautiful One, or my maternal grandmother, Poh-Poh.
When author Lindsay Wong was a twenty-one-year-old MFA student at Columbia University, she finally received a diagnosis for the vertigo/hallucinations/fatigue that had been plaguing her for years: Migraine-Associated Vestibulopathy. Despite learning that she had a chronic debilitating neurological disorder (which her doctor warned would likely prevent her from reading or writing for the rest of her life), Wong was relieved that she could now prove that she wasn't suffering from “Woo-Woo”: the ghosts that her Chinese-Canadian family blamed for every disappointment, instance of bad luck, or psychological disorder that seemed to haunt their clan. After introducing her story in this way in her memoir The Woo-Woo, Wong then goes on to describe her childhood growing up in the affluent Westwood Plateau neighbourhood of what I assume to be Richmond, B.C.; nicknamed “The Poteau” for all of the grow-ops and meth labs run out of neighbouring McMansions. And what a miserable childhood it sounds like: Her mother had undiagnosed psychological problems, which caused her to act in irrational and dangerous ways, and her emotionally distant father only interacted with his children to demand perfection at school and piano and sports; usually referring to his eldest daughter, Lindsay, as Fatty or The Retard. Lindsay herself learned to become emotionally walled off (both of her parents believed that crying would “let the ghosts in” and Lindsay did everything she could to avoid sporadic “exorcisms”, which might even involve lighting her on fire), and she became a binge eater, a bully at school, and a terrible friend and sister (she has been estranged from both of her siblings for years, and just recently reconnected with her brother). While this book is described as “darkly comic”, I really just found it all kind of sad – made more sad by Wong's emotionally distant tone. I'm quoting at length to give a sense of that:
Moaning like an undead cartoon monster, my mother fed us candy for breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner but would forget to brush our hair and did not scold us for not cleaning our yellow-spattered teeth. In our family, a mother was someone who made sure her children were never hungry, and she tried as much as she mentally could. But at that point, fed up with our life in the court, I saw that my mother had been born with a heart the size of one of my doll's shoes and would have benefited from some family downsizing – like maybe if it were only me.
Besides, even though I was only six going on seven, I didn't think I had ever been a baby or a toddler because of the famous Wong family procreation myth, delivered with the also famous Wong half-funny-half-cruel-all-too-confusing-to-untangle wit, which explained that my parents had fished me out of a downtown Dumpster.
“That's why you're garbage,” my father would explain, boasting that my origin story was extraordinarily funny. “All garbage have low IQ. Not like Daddy at all. I'm very, very smart because I'm from library.”
“Then why you get me from Dumpster?” I had asked once after starting elementary school, speaking in a churlish, babyish Chinglish. Being sensitive yet spacey, I took his every word at hurtful, no-bullshit face value.
“It's free,” my father declared, sounding sombre. “You think we want to pay money for you? Mommy and I know how to save money on unimportant things.”
“Why I not important?” I said, sad and a bit resentful.
“Because you are from garbage.”
That was my father's typical response, a robotic, jokey, unhelpful statement that drove my mother absolutely batshit; it was characteristic of him to carelessly wave a hemorrhaging red cape at a rabid bull, for my mother did not understand humour or indirectness. How they met and married is still a complete mystery to me. It was never once spoken about in our family and deemed irrelevant and irritating as small talk.
“I found your Mommy in garbage can,” my father joked when I asked.
“What she doing there?” I said.
“Just like you, no one want her. Like Mommy, like daughter.”
Near the end of the book, Wong writes, “No one would ever believe me if I told them about all the wondrous and terrible and fantastical things that had happened to me”, yet this is that story: bizarre coincidences, family members who make the national news, actually suffering a neurological disorder after a lifetime of being told by superstitious parents that she was weak-minded and prone to Woo-Woo possession. But it's also a book about abuse and the cloistering effects of an immigrant community – neither the kids nor the adults thrived in this large extended family, and no one on the outside seemed to intervene; and I found the whole thing sad. Based on her diagnosis, it seems heroic that Wong completed her MFA in Creative Nonfiction – but now that her family's story is told, I wonder what other stories she has; wonder what tone she would bring to topics that don't have the power to hurt her.
