REPLACEMENT KID
As soon as Auntie Beautiful One heard the news that my father had gone quite Woo-Woo (he had bought one of those fat-faced Labradors to replace me when I absconded to Honolulu and spent his days in bed wailing about his failure to reproduce above-average offspring, etc.), she invited me to stay at her house for a few days until he felt better. The truth was, he seemed to take my failings personally, for he felt that his immigration to Canada and sacrifices should have made his children first-rate professionals of his own choosing.
In our Chinese family, it was absolute lunacy to buy a large animal unless it was for eating, and first-born kids did not fail at basic college-level piano: these were absolute truths, in which my father wholly believed. Beautiful One wanted to help us, she said, because it was her duty as a good Christian and most benevolent relative. So my mother, saying that she wanted a break from her “retarded kid,” said that I could stay over for a day or two, just in case Beautiful One’s house was haunted—there had been that incident a few Lunar New Years ago when an auntie was half certain that there was a ghost trapped in the wallpaper of their basement bathroom. Besides, everyone knew that Beautiful One always found this kind of family drama exhilarating and was especially hurt if you did not consult her first if someone required open-heart surgery or was considering painting their kitchen a darker shade. All the aunties agreed that it would have been unseemly to deprive Beautiful One of her only fun.
“I always knew your daddy was crazy,” Beautiful One whispered to me, giggling, when she came a few days later to pick me up in her truck. She could never be serious and did not care much for my father because she felt he was too opinionated, and my father was still complaining that she was gossipy and insane. I refused to believe that Auntie Beautiful One could be off-kilter, so as usual, I excused her behaviour as “quirky.” After all, she had a full-time job and managed several businesses, much more responsibility than my father, so how could she be like Poh-Poh?
“Look at him!” she squealed, sounding as if she was enjoying the situation immensely.
My father, who had once been as terrifying as the Headless Horseman, was crawling on the floor, picking up yellow dog hair to knit a sweater for himself. It seemed as if he had lost his mind, but it felt like a grown man’s tantrum. My disappearance to Honolulu had caused him to react as if he were four years old, demanding attention.
“He’s just not normal!” she exclaimed, and I could not help but wordlessly, if not heart-flinchingly, agree—this was proof that the Woo-Woo could be contagious, and my father had caught our black magic curse.
“Woof!” he said, and then ignored her.
Beautiful One kept laughing at him, and us, which imbued me with a profuse cobweb-like shame, as it made me feel that we were too far gone to be saved. She had looked so pleased with the extent of this family melodrama, had dressed up for it as if she were going to a matinee opera at the supermarket: diamond earrings, bright red lipstick, sneakers, and grungy low-rise jeans. I did not think much of any of this, for this was typical behaviour that back then I considered “normal.”
“How is my favourite niece!” she finally asked, turning to scrutinize me. “I’m so glad that you can keep me company! We’ll go shopping, and I’ll take you to my hairdresser, okay? You don’t want to look like you’re from the SPCA.”
“Um, it’s okay,” I said, uncomfortable with the attention. But I was also secretly pleased that someone wanted something better for me, and that I was worthy of this superficial transformation. “You really don’t have to do anything.”
“Why not? I don’t understand why you want to look so homeless all the time. I mean, just because your mother dresses like a bum, I don’t see why you have to too. Your entire family looks like they’re camping in the woods. Remember, we’re the only sane ones in the family, okay?”
I believe now that Auntie Beautiful One was already in the slow-cooking stages of her breakdown: how else to explain the fly-swatting pantomiming of her hands, the spurts of bird-like giggles? Still reeling from Honolulu, I refused to recognize it then; she might have already been infected. But I had to believe my aunt’s reassurance to continue to survive. The Woo-Woo could not come for both of us.
In her own slightly crass, haphazard way Beautiful One was trying to be kind to me. We drove back to her house and dropped off my overnight bags, and Beautiful One had a special outing planned. Normally, I wasn’t doted on or told that I deserved much better, except sometimes on my childhood camping trips with Beautiful One. I knew what my aunt said was mostly flattery, but it was a nice change from screaming. When my mother took me shopping, she often had panic attacks from the Woo-Woo, which pursued us to the mall, and at stores, she told me that I looked fat, never mind what I wore. And even though my cousin Flowery Face, who was now eleven, had begged to come along, her mother refused, because busy auntie just wanted to spend some quality time with her favourite niece. After all these years, she was still frequently, carelessly, cruel to her daughter, like my mother was to me.
“Please?” Flowery Face had begged at the staircase. “Please! Can I come with you guys? Please? I promise to be good!”
But while Flowery Face ran desperately upstairs to grab her jacket and shoes, Beautiful One shushed me and hurried me along, sneaking me into her car and driving speedily away, like we were two nasty preteen girls abandoning an awkward friend. I felt uncomfortable because Auntie Beautiful One was supposed to be a grown-up, a mother of three, not a trivial adolescent with flawless makeup. It was too reminiscent of our trailer vacation to Osoyoos.
“I just want to spend time with you,” Beautiful One told me as we drove, flipping her long black hair.
She must have been so lonely in her marriage, so she had latched onto me, like the girlish ghost of a slaughtered maiden, auditioning me for both mentee and confidante. Like all the adults in my life, she was present but not quite all there, which meant that she was searching desperately for someone to like, if not appreciate, her—something that I also needed. Although I did not know that she needed someone to like her or that even I wanted an adult to like me then. I felt special that she had chosen me, and I much preferred her company to my mother’s—she was still the only grown-up who did not call me retarded to my face. She seemed to believe that I could be different from the rest of our family and wanted to teach me to maintain an exterior persona that was both distinct and separate from the one I had inherited.
When we had spent our summer vacation in Osoyoos, I had wanted, desperately, to believe that Beautiful One thought that our fates were intertwined, because she was successful and driven—it was as if someone wholly believed in adolescent me. Most importantly, both of us had been willing to sympathize with each other’s bullshitty, arcane ailments (“A flu, you say? That really sucks!”) We never accused each other of having multiple demons. With no other role model, I thought Beautiful One was the personification of how a person should be.
After a while, Beautiful One continued sadly: “Lindsay, you’re the only one who kind of understands me, and you’re the only one who says nice things to me. Your mother screams at me and so does E.T. Flowery Face just isn’t you: she doesn’t listen to me enough to deserve a shopping spree at the mall.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling unsettled and a little sorry for poor Flowery Face, whose mother had left her behind once again. This would not bode well for their future relationship.
“So I want you to tell me all the wonderful things about myself,” Beautiful One chirped, checking her heavy makeup in the rear-view mirror; her wispy tattooed eyebrows needed retouching. “Tell me why I’m your favourite aunt. I just need you to do this for me, okay? You have a lot of time before we get there.”
So I repeated what I had once told her in Osoyoos, that she was the smartest and most talented and most beautiful one in our family. As she drove and fixed her hair, I was beginning to feel troubled by her, but I ignored the feeling; she was just unpredictable. But then again, she was beautiful—and I wanted to be too.
At the mall, Beautiful One took me to the food court, where one of her chain Vietnamese restaurants was, and let me order whatever I wanted (I gobbled eight extra-large plates of lemongrass chicken that tasted like salty citronella bug spray; the gristly grey meat hugging all the gaps in my teeth like waxy dental floss). And then she coaxed me to cut my hair so I looked orderly and neat.
After I had been fed and groomed, she bought me a bridesmaid’s dress that was seventy percent off (she bought herself a matching one too). Unfortunately, the dress did not flatter me, and I looked like a magenta wheelbarrow, a pig in polyester, a bloated five-two, size-fourteen fruit roll-up. I could hear my mother’s voice waterfalling inside my mind; she would have said that I was a girly sumo wrestler who could crush you with her floppy and terrifying gut.
“It’s okay,” I told Beautiful One, self-conscious and embarrassed but secretly pleased with the attention. “I don’t need this dress.”
“Don’t be stupid!” she said, trying to sound wise and generous but failing. “This is what you should wear every day. Just think of it as a costume. You have to show the world who you should be, instead of who you are. Your job is to fit in. Don’t you want people to like you, Lindsay?
“Your mother and I used to be Chinese trailer trash, but look at how far we’ve come! You just have to go to UBC for our family’s sake, okay? I had the best time of my life there!”
Then Auntie Beautiful One, who neglected to mention that she had gotten knocked up in her junior year, slipped me 150 bucks, like she was fatally embarrassed for me and didn’t want anyone in the suburban mall to see. She was the only adult in my life who believed that I could fit in, even if she herself didn’t know how. I did not see it then, but all the makeup, the ill-fitting clothes, were false and terrible bravado for what she didn’t know was inside her: insecurity and desperation and hope that someone would one day acknowledge this ache to be noticed. To be liked.
And in some ways, I knew exactly what she meant: I wore the Woo-Woo in my hand-me-downs and in my stringy, uncut hair. Like I had already given up, accepted my parents’ foggy, half-living state. Like I was less lively than anything scheming and supernatural. Beautiful One was trying to help me in the only way she knew how: by grooming my outsides so that my insides wouldn’t show. Even when she was completely insane, she would still worry about her looks before attempting to jump off the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge, because she understood that she was on the world’s stage.
Even one of my paternal aunties in New York claimed that she had seen Beautiful One on TV: “She so pretty of course she make the news. Beautiful people have nothing to do all day, which is why they like to have jump.”
Soon I realized that my Hawaii debacle had ruined me, made me mopey and more off-putting. After a bad case of scratch-scratch-motherfucking! head lice, by the end of summer, I had done nothing but create quarter-sized bald spots on my scalp. I watched black bears gorge on the viscous juice of Japanese pears gloomily budding in our backyard. I watched West Coast rains lash into the coppice of trees, the white pears catapulting into textured grass. I watched black bears somersault on the lawn like cute suburban children, gnawing fruit all day, holding it with their scalpel-like claws.
Things were not improving, but I had gotten so used to it I could not imagine anything worse or better.
So I walked around like I was brain-damaged, IQ minus 100 billion. Call it formidable adolescent defeat or paralyzing fear or even half-hearted depression, but my adventure to Honolulu had put me into this state. Like I had been suddenly lobotomized in my sleep. I couldn’t function. Couldn’t sleep. Could only mindlessly eat.
That summer, while I blossomed into Jabba the Hutt and our mountain flooded relentlessly, I thought about my father. How Beautiful One had seen us in our soiled state of disrepair. How she had laughed at us, in a mean but relieved way. Ha-ha-ha! I am glad that I am not you!
Her mocking only reinforced what I knew all along: we were so insane that a member of our tribe could laugh at us, like we were Poh-Poh attacking a kitchen appliance.
Meanwhile, the shitty foundations of the Belcarra were half-submerged and everyone on the Poteau thought the entire mountain would have to evacuate. Emergency preparations were well underway. I wondered if they would have to helicopter us to safety if the damned monsoons swirled higher. The basement swamped tirelessly, and the grumbly faucets sputtered hot, gelatinous mud. And there were water quakes at night, which tilted and shifted our house so that the walls popped and cracked open in thin jagged wounds. I became convinced our house and others on the cul-de-sac would whirl downhill into squelchy messiness, smashing black conifers into unrecognizable bits. All summer, the rains and the ghastly winds pounded the roof, and when I woke up in the late afternoons, the trees in our greenbelt had been shredded and their massacred limbs had been guttered in grassy funeral mounds.
I became afraid to leave the house because I thought I was not equipped to handle the outside world. I finally understood why my parents rarely left the safety of our fenced-off aquarium, and why they only vacationed at the outlet mall in their RV. It was dangerous outside our cesspool of a fish tank; it was better to be surrounded by familiar shrubbery and live inside the rotting, fortified castle of the Woo than be vulnerable in the world. You could certainly try, but you would end up frantic and desperate, like Poh-Poh and my mother.
“Lindsay, what are we going to do about Dad?” my little sister asked me one day. She was fourteen and troubled by our father’s behaviour. For a week, he had been moaning and moping around the house, like one of my mother’s ghosts, as if to show us that he could also act Woo-Woo.
Destitution didn’t seem to worry my sister, but I was more concerned with practical matters—who would pay for our massive food bills if our father couldn’t work anymore?
“We could sell the furniture,” I suggested. I wasn’t being helpful, but I couldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing how anxious and sad, and therefore weak, I was. “But we don’t have any furniture, so I guess Mom and Make Lots of Money have to go if he doesn’t want to support any of us anymore. Think anyone will buy them on eBay?”
“Don’t joke,” my sister snapped, her eyes bulging, fright twisting her face into something strange and unpretty and caterpillar-like. We had always ignored each other, and this was our longest conversation ever. It would define our tense, unsisterly relationship to the present day. “This is serious, Lindsay. When are you going to grow up and start thinking about other people? Dad’s gone crazy and he might go suicidal, like they always do!”
“Good luck with that,” I said. “You like helping people who obviously cannot be helped. I think he’s faking it.”
“Unlike you, I’m not a fucking psycho who thinks the world revolves around her. Why are you such a bitch?”
“The difference is you actually think our parents are okay,” I said. I was jealous of her normalcy, her ability to thrive socially and scholastically. Because she was considerably smarter and thinner than me, in this household, it meant that she was left alone and ignored. She had her teenybopper’s Japanese anime and her phone book stacks of grey and white manga, her brainy middle-child obsessions with the advanced science club at school. I had potato chips and sarcasm, which I mistook for bona fide wit.
“They ignore you, but they can’t stand me because I got the dumb Poh-Poh genes,” I said to her. “You can be a saint if you want, but no one here is going to appreciate you.”
“You shouldn’t have come back,” she snapped, tearing up. Her irises looked soggy and infected by an alien pink virus; in truth, she been crying for days. “How come you didn’t just stay wherever the hell you went?”
“Better go psychoanalyze Dad, just in case he suddenly decides to kill himself while he’s out walking the dog and you’re wasting time talking to me. If you hurry, you can catch him.”
Then my sister did the unexpected (there was too much wildness in us, e.g., hockey, in our blood); she punched me in the gut. (Did I deserve it? Okay, maybe.) Oooof. It hurt like a motherfucker. Fearing my retaliation, she locked herself in her bathroom and refused to come out. Miserably, I took my typhooning futility out on my little brother—anyone and everyone was a reasonable target.
This was the moment the furious continental rift that had been wedged between us since early childhood unmistakably exposed itself, forcing us to acknowledge that we were a very different species. Me, L. Rex: beast-like, squat, and furry, and her: cute and gazelle-thin. Like a messy divorce, she would take my brother with her, and he too refused to speak to me for many years. As long as both siblings died of old age and I wasn’t connected to their downfalls in any way, I told myself that I was perfectly fine with pretending that they did not exist. Since we were all averse to apology, chained together by childhood trauma and faulty DNA, I felt that it was simply better this way. But I wish I had been more understanding in our squabble, sarcastic without being excessively cruel. Unlike me, she was so outwardly calm, untouched by the Woo-Woo, no strange tics or behavioural issues. The reason for her normalcy, I believe, was her fierce refusal to be governed by anything except her rational belief in science. Her encyclopedic obsession with facts.
Usually, my sister would ignore our Woo-Woo situation, lock herself in her bedroom with her Xbox, and declare herself separate from our defective family unit. I could have threatened to kick down the bathroom door and bullied her into feeling better (I’d never apologize—what kind of sissy big sister would I have been?). In those days, I knew that my greatest talent was making my family suffer, and I had been born the eldest for that very reason. As the first-born, I believe that my parents targeted me with higher expectations. In a way, my siblings were treated better because they weren’t held to such high hopes and aspirations, which as children and then as surly adolescents and teenagers we did not understand.
As Deep Thinker cried, I desperately wanted her to let our parents handle their own shitty Woo-Woo-ness. Why should my siblings and I have to micromanage their craziness?
“Sucks to be you,” I finally said to my sister through the bathroom door, only realizing too late that my tone sounded exactly like my mother. I flinched, but it was too late to retract my words.
Because I had not signed up for a music audition at UBC, my father, his spitefulness exacerbating his many melodramatic tendencies, eventually dropped hints about my suicide, while having dinner in his pyjamas.
“Why you suck so much, huh?” he asked me, sounding hurt. If we were in a Victorian-era stage drama, he might have pretended to faint. Instead, he scratched his enormous belly, gnawed on steamed chicken feet, and burped.
“Why doesn’t Retarded Lindsay just hurry up and kill herself?” he said in his meanest voice, forgetting that he was supposed to be imitating one of my mother’s breakdowns. “It will be good for everyone. No one likes a stinky truck who take up too much room at dinner table.”
I said nothing. His question made me unhappy that I had failed at my temporary escape, and for a moment, I worried that my parents were right about my disorderly retardedness. Was I especially thick and stupid? It was true that I didn’t catch on so quick at school, so maybe I was born with an extraordinarily low IQ. If I were smarter, maybe the Honolulu cure would have worked, and I would have known how to navigate the outside world and mitigate its freakish tsunami of disasters. But I was only good at one damn thing so far: I could manage the Woo-Woo, refusing to let it bother me on the outside, even when it could be swelling inside me, like an obsidian kidney stone.
Cuckoo was in my blood.
And it was waiting to be released.
But my mother became angry: her eyes squinted and disappeared into her white, clam-like forehead, while her mouth got larger, like it had swallowed up her face. She looked like a mollusk that had been pried open for its gritty, disgusting pearl. My father seemed to have crossed a line, broken something twisted and flimsy inside her, maybe even gutted her yellowing Styrofoam heart, because this was the first time I heard her defend me. This was one of the only times I thought there was some grimy, unspeakable hope for her. That I felt that I could possibly forgive her one day.
“If you want to die, just go right ahead!” she yelled at my father, which bewildered me; I never thought she’d take my side. “No one’s stopping you!” she said. “But don’t tell Lindsay to kill herself! She’s weak in the fucking head. She’s so retarded she might actually listen to you! You want her to die in the house and give us bad luck?”
“What’s wrong with that?” my father asked, as if he didn’t know the answer. He folded his arms and looked bewildered. “I have two other kids already and now I have Doggy, so that makes perfect three! I am so sad Retarded Lindsay fail at piano!”
“Lindsay’s a stupid piece of shit, but don’t fucking tell her to kill herself. She hasn’t done anything to you!”
“I’m just telling Retarded Lindsay the truth!” he screamed, making his new dog bark. “None of you can handle the truth! Can Retarded Lindsay please go die now, thank you very much. Daddy appreciate it. How about early birthday present to me?”
“Ummm, Lindsay is standing right here,” I said, but they ignored me as if I were already one of my mother’s ghosts. “I’m right in front of you. Jesus, you can’t have a discussion about me killing myself without my input. God, what the fuck is wrong with you? You want to know why I’m a fucking mess? You raised me! I’m exactly like you!”
It was the first time that I had confronted them, and it shocked me: my ugly smidgeon of boldness was a terrifying revelation; instead of snarkily avoiding the subject altogether, my all-serious brashness had sucked out all the air from inside me, and around me, and it suddenly felt like I, and everyone around me, was deflating. Shrinking.
I had been the first person to point out our unhappy circumstances, and for a second, I like to think my family could see the bewildered hurt splotched and mirrored on all our real faces. Here were the Belcarra’s scuzzy, peeling walls and the stacks of raggedy newspapers and messy spires of expired dry goods.
As always, our makeshift illusion was so strong that reality would always be a mirage, and instead of seeing our misery and their junkyard milieu, my parents could only see their aspiring perfection. Things were not skewed—nothing was tenuously out of place. I had not broken our disaffected disenchantment, had not really blasted away the webby illusion fogging up our frontal lobes with my AK-47 flash of wordy and excruciating shrapnel—maybe just dented our steely supervillain shields for a minute—kapow! I like to think that my parents, for that unsavoury millisecond, saw that this wonderful immigrant family inhabited a chaotic jungle that had to be kept hidden from the outside world.
But our myopic pursuit of the American dream was so powerful—the heavy, mythic curtain sliding over our eyeballs like a dollar-store mosquito net. So after a moment of intense and choking quiet, they ignored my outburst. I supposed that it was the best way to maintain such a toxic enchantment, an invisible, odourless gas that poisoned and deluded us. It was like I had never uttered the damning words at all. Like I had never been there at all.
For what seemed an eternity, I listened to them viciously bicker about why I should or should not kill myself—obvious pros and cons—which might last for a few days if no one else in the family decided to have a psychotic occurrence. Their quarrelling did not bother me—at least, I managed to convince myself that I did not think they really meant it. And besides, I told myself, they needed something a little controversial to argue about. Domestic topics and extended family gossip were scarce that week. But if I was honest, it affected me on a much darker and subterranean level than I would ever admit. A malevolent kind of inner keloid scar that would manifest in crippling shyness throughout adulthood. A fear that every short-lived anti-social thought was foreshadowing psychosis. In New York, with the severe vertigo, I couldn’t help but believe that I was too lost, too far gone down my family’s rabbit-hole madness to be saved.
After I devoured a family-sized bag of Doritos and licked the chemical cheese debris off my fingers, I felt considerably better. Inside this household, there was nothing junk food couldn’t cure. It settled my nerves and refocused my stifled sadness. In the end, I agreed with my mother: Why should I listen to a man who had bought a dog to replace me?
“Okay, fine,” I eventually said to my father, furious and a little sulky. I enrolled at the University of Billion Chinese in the fall as a general arts student. For once in my life, not that I’d ever admit it, he would be right.
The first month of college was like anaphylactic shock. I pretended not to speak English when approached by toothy, smiling strangers. I did not know how to interact with my eager peers or professors. Choking from severe social anxiety, I stared at the ground, scratching my arms raw. The Belcarra may have taught me that I was stupid, but I had inherited my mother’s and my grandmother’s obsessive tendencies—and like ice hockey, college essays and exams took discipline. To avoid having to socialize, I hurled myself at my studies. Believing that my IQ was possibly fossilized by now, I read every assigned college textbook, like, fourteen or fifteen or sixteen times. I scared the shit out of myself when I got 100 percent on an art history midterm. And 98 percent in music history, 95 percent in women’s studies.
These achievements forced me to see a startling change in myself, or at least in what or who I could be, a hopeful glimpse of someone or something less angry, less fearful, less deadbeat. Was this the type of student my father had always wanted me to be? I had a suspicion he must have thought that I could be above average when he screamed at me to be the “Best Empty.” At the University of Billion Chinese, that year saw the start of burgeoning self-esteem and, dare I say, scholastic pride.
That year also saw the formation of a new self, perhaps normalcy. Whenever I saw Fun-Fun and her gang of high school girls on campus or around the Poteau, we avoided one another and pretended that we had no previous acquaintanceship. One of the older girls, C.C., had been kicked out of their crowd because of gossip mongering and jealousy from the others. Exceptionally tall and swanlike, she had been a fashion model in Singapore. High school cliques did not seem to matter as much at the University of a Billion Chinese, so C.C. shocked me by inviting me to her house on the Poteau after music history one day and showing me her Tupperware of designer makeup and three closets crammed with expensive clothes. For eighteen years, I had never been inside another Poteau McMansion and was astonished when the gardener greeted me and the housekeeper ushered me inside, curtseying and asking me what I would like to eat. The inside of C.C.’s house was decorated like an eighteenth-century pastoral English estate.
Was this how normal Chinese people lived? Like George III, the mad king?
“Here, Lindsay, you can have these,” C.C. said, grabbing a mountain of clothes that she didn’t want anymore. “They’re much better than the ones you have on.”
I was wearing an oversized sparkly sweatshirt that read, JJJ DA LUCK IZ IN DA CLUB, a neon flowing peasant skirt, and chunky leopard-print platform sneakers. Unshowered for weeks, my hair smelled like stale vegetable oil. Even though I was now in college, I still had no sense of personal hygiene or acceptable physical presentation.
“I’ll do your makeup,” C.C. offered, pointing to a stool beside her vanity. “Then we’re going out for drinks.”
From Auntie Beautiful One’s early attempts that summer, I recognized this as a gesture of friendship, or at least, girlish friendliness. Letting someone give you clothes and paint your face was some sort of centuries-old bonding ritual. Unsure how to respond, I sat on the proffered stool, mute and anxious but hoping that I could pretend to be someone wholly different if I just transformed my outer self. With combed hair and matching clothes for once, would I finally embody the best superficial traits of Beautiful One?