“JUMP, BITCH, JUMP!”
I don’t want to go to the hospital,” Auntie Beautiful One sang after she tried to slit her wrists (just a barely-there scratch, the family complained).
It was the middle of the summer, and consumed by a daytime, vampire-like terror, I would not leave my bed until a family intervention was ordered for Beautiful One. She had been released from the emergency room, but there had been no change in her condition. It had been almost a week since my cousin’s wedding, and I was worried and nervous as we (all eight families, i.e., seventy very frightened people) congregated in my aunt’s living room. Even after everyone took turns yelling at her for what our family called “shitty behaviour,” Beautiful One, her face blank, was not cured.
“I’m dying, okay?” Beautiful One shrilled at us in response.
My heart sank, for I knew she did not recognize herself at all. This was not the woman who had, many years ago on our family camping trip, once assured me that she was different from every Woo-Woo we knew. And as she yelled, she resembled both Poh-Poh and my mother, her face contorted into a mask of paralyzing fear.
She yelled: “I can’t eat because it just comes out anyway. My brain is sooooo alive. Do you know how powerful it is? Do you know how powerful I am? But my body is dying. Dyiiing!!”
If we looked back at her month of screaming and spitting nuts at the kitchen table, the incident at my cousin’s wedding should not have been surprising. If our family had been less occupied by ghosts and paid a little attention to her sadness and her distance from reality, her breakdown may have been prevented. Yet, realistically, we could only have saved her if someone (non–superstition believing) had spiked her coffee with Benadryl, clubbed her on the forehead, and then chucked her into the back of a psychiatrist-bound taxi. Yet I knew that no one would trust an outsider, God forbid a medical professional, to diagnose Auntie Beautiful One, when we all thought willpower and exorcism could rid her of the ghosts.
After all these years, Beautiful One had officially gone Woo-Woo, and only my father was pleased. He had always suspected that his sister-in-law did not have much of a brain.
“She just realize now she Woo-Woo?” he said, amazed. “Wow, took long enough. See, no one listen to me when I say the woman is fucking nuts! She so Woo-Woo she think all food, even just ONE apple can kill her! Karma is fucking great.”
Uncle E.T., horrified by his wife’s “self-cause” mental collapse, decided that she was more hopeless and futile than “the global warning.” Prioritizing his self-preservation more than anything, he ran off to Hongcouver Island.
After her attempted suicide, with the rest of my family (minus E.T.), I watched in absolute horror as Auntie Beautiful One tumbled to the floor because she said that God liked to zap her with his electrical finger. She’d be walking to the kitchen and then an almighty poke would throw her to the ground. The vicious buzzing noise inside her brain made Beautiful One think she wasn’t a real person anymore, just another machine. Zap, zap, zap—she said God’s finger sounded like an electric flytrap. I wondered what it felt like to be fried in the electrical circuit of your robotic nerves, a quick current smacking your fat mechanical heart. He zapped Beautiful One the Automaton, and then he pinched her battery-volted butt.
This was Beautiful One, head thrown back, hands clasped in maniacal prayer, crying for our help, the volume of her terror and confusion amplified to the highest level.
“Shut the fuck up,” everyone said, when she threatened to die and die and die again.
As always, on Westwood Poteau, if you weren’t the kind to have a breakdown, there was nothing to do except indulge in the constant buffet of cannabis. There was soft, sugary cocaine and Skittle-sized pills of ecstasy to be had from any suburban drug-growing neighbour, if you wanted them. There was also the lengthy two-hour commute into the city, but I didn’t know how to drive. I also wasn’t sure what one was supposed to do in civilization. After years of intensive piano practice, I had no hobbies or interests. The Chinese cliques on the Poteau were scared of me because I had happily bashed a ringette stick and a golf club into Demeter’s knees in high school, so there were no invitations to what I imagine were barbecues and sailing, but I told myself I didn’t mind. I was used to it.
That summer after junior year, I bloomed into a bovine stoner with bountiful food and marijuana, and I was getting fatter and slower and nastier by the day. The family-sized tubs of ice cream and entire apple pies combined with pepperoni pizzas added marbled fat to my stomach and thighs. My father didn’t care—I could eat as much as I wanted, as long as I was getting all As in college. I felt smug with how hefty I was getting, as if I could get back at my family and suffocate them with my 165 pounds of sirloin steak bulk.
And while I shovelled food into my mouth, Beautiful One was refusing all sustenance, afraid that eating would poison her. Yet her impending death made her even more obsessed with her looks, as if her beauty could be preserved by suddenly dying.
“You know I’m pretty, right?” she often repeated, shrilled, and obsessed, during her manic episodes. “Everyone thinks I’m twenty years younger than I am!”
My mother was too preoccupied with Beautiful One’s intensifying madness to stop my eating (it seemed that they screamed about suicide on speakerphone for four to six hours every day). I promised myself that I would stop binge eating and become productive again by September, once school began.
Then one day, C.C. called, which surprised me, because I thought our acquaintanceship had an end-of-semester expiry date, like a carton of fat-free milk. It was a relief when she (someone “normal”) phoned, as I could not bear to listen to anyone, even if they were very convincing, cry about becoming a ghost.
“What are you up to, my favourite freak?” C.C. drawled, lazy and glamorous at the same time. I had forgotten how direct C.C. could be. I envied her easy charm—how people seemed to want to be around her even if she wasn’t always very nice.
“Want to go to Europe next week?” she said.
“Why?” I said, instantly suspicious. “What’s in Europe?”
“I don’t know, like, countries, I guess. There’s going to be food. Plural.”
“There’s food plural in Canada,” I pointed out. “It’s a First World country.”
“There’s going to be different food,” she promised me. “Lots of different food. Oh, for Christ’s sake, just come. I don’t care if you eat the entire time we’re there.”
C.C. had a venture-capitalist uncle who wanted to pay for a month in Europe—she was a year above me and had already finished her degree at the University of Billion Chinese, and this was a graduation present for his dearest niece. I was surprised that she wanted to take me, but I guessed that she was bored and wanted a summer project.
I did not want to think of Beautiful One and be reminded of the wedding anymore, and I couldn’t afford to be choosy, so I decided that I had nothing to lose. C.C. had unwittingly offered me a timely break from the chaotic aftermath of the wedding. Was it selfish of me to want to leave? It would be a real vacation away from the Woo-Woo.
“You have to find a new hobby,” I instructed my mother, when I told her I was leaving for Europe. “I’m not available anymore. You can try the Chinese community centre. Lots of great old people there. They’d love to listen to you talk about dying.”
She and I fought about the trip, about me terminating my summer employment as her weak-headed, fucked-up offspring. She argued about how Europe was the most intensely haunted locale in the world, how London, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Paris were practically unlivable because of all the unfortunate people slaughtered in their convoluted wars.
“You know the ghosts are all angry there!” she protested weakly. “Don’t you know Canada is safest? Why are you leaving a country with very little wars? You’ll end up like a dead bitch in a Dumpster,” she cried in warning, saying anything to make me stay with her, anything to frighten me. “Something fucked is going to happen, and I know it’s going to happen to you. You can’t leave the house! You’re too weak in the head! I’ll pay you five hundred dollars if you stay! One thousand? Two thousand? What about the ghosts, Lindsay?”
For once, I did not have to listen to her, for I did not need her money. C.C. was offering free four-star hotel accommodations and fine dining. And this financial freedom gave me a quasi-rebellious power. One that forced my mother to gawk at me, speechless.
“I’ll buy you a souvenir!” I yelled at her, pleased to escape her neurosis and ecstatic that I wouldn’t have to worry about Beautiful One anymore.
In Paris, a member of the Moroccan royal family had lent C.C. one of their dusty, unused apartments. It was almost three weeks of glorious, unimaginable fun: bottomless beer, boys, butter-filled cakes, and crepes.
But then I received a cryptic email (the only family news and lecture) from my father, who assumed that I was an avid reader of the Vancouver Sun. It seemed that some overachieving distant relative was always in the news, because we were Asian. Otherwise, no one would have cared if a second cousin was “up and coming,” or if a grand-uncle’s Chinese opera fundraiser for BC’s children’s hospital was “a screeching success.” This was 2008, and ethnic newcomers usually took turns on the front page with epic world disasters and local hit and runs.
If my father had bothered to contact me, it meant that the Poteau had vanished, or there was some exciting news about his sister-in-law.
July 1, 2008
From: bestengineerincanada@shawlink.net
To: lindsaywong608@hotmail.com
L:
Don’t mention to people that it’s your aunt who
tied up traffic for hours, a lot of people missed the
firework and other important things and they will
curse you. Keep quiet.
Mommy is very upset. We will DISCUSS when you come home
Have you finished Rhode essay yet? I don’t think you’ll get MFA so don’t be hopeful because you will be flipping burger.
I’ve already paid your VISA. Don’t worry so much, relax. Enjoy Paris. But don’t eat too much because you will get FATTER. L Mommy say you like to binge on sweet things such as cake and pie which is disgusting.
Say thankyou and hello to your friend. Don’t chew with mouth open.
Confucius Gentleman Engineering Ltd
My mother was still hurt and miserable at my absence. And I ignored my father’s customary digs about my random and assorted graduate school applications because I did not yet know what I wanted to do after my final year of college. Since I earned straight As in university, my father did not antagonize me as much as before. I had finally succeeded in becoming someone he could brag about, and my reward was still sarcasm but mixed with sly pride and sometimes a generous financial aid package. After all, the new and academically improved Lindsay had been selected to represent UBC on their shortlist for the Rhodes Scholarship. (I didn’t know what the hell a Rhodes Scholarship was until I received the invitational email from the committee and sat through the four-hour information session, but I wanted to take advantage of any beautiful moneymaking opportunities that came my way.)
I sent back a pithy, fast-tempered reply: What the fuck???!!!!!!!!!
It seemed that all our problems stemmed from my mother’s side, whose family crest should have featured a bottle of home-brewed rice wine (drinking) and a deck of cards (gambling) stacked inside an orange life preserver (an affinity for suicide). If my father knew how to cook, he always joked, he might have considered leaving her. But truthfully, my mother, who did not know how to pay bills or use the internet, would fall apart without him. My father was a traditionalist, and I think he saw himself as a martyr. I can only guess what our lives would have been like if he had ever decided to buy someone younger and better-looking from a catalogue in China. Yet despite his frequent mocking, I think he might have secretly loved his wife. Although emotionally distant and frequently absent from home, my father never officially abandoned us and continued to manage our finances.
I wanted to ignore his email, and I think I would have. But this was about Beautiful One, who had, until the wedding, been the person I had looked up to most. And I thought that if this Woo-Woo emergency could happen to her, it could easily happen to me. It went against every fibre and disgusting instinct of my being not to deny what was in front of me, but I fought through my fat, unequivocal terror and reread his email, long after I had replied.
While waiting to hear from my father, I Googled the news.
BEYOND THE CALL: VANCOUVER POLICE MAGAZINE
Just past noon, police saw a woman who was visibly distraught standing on the sidewalk mid-span on the bridge. When they approached her, she climbed over the railing. She perched precariously on three parallel cables, reaching up and behind her to hold on with one free hand. There was nothing beneath her. If she released her grip, she would fall to her certain death.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130)—The Ironworkers Memorial Bridge remains closed in both directions to a police incident that started just after 1 pm. And it’s impacting traffic in Vancouver, North Vancouver and West Vancouver.
TransLink is rerouting buses that normally head over the bridge to instead provide access to Seabus and using Lions Gate Bridge. SeaBus is now at full capacity. With drivers forced to use the 3 lanes of the Lions Gate Bridge, traffic along Georgia St. through downtown Vancouver is gridlocked.
Was Beautiful One the distraught woman on the bridge on Canada Day? This could not be true: Beautiful One was not allowed to be Woo-Woo on one of the major bridges in BC. We just didn’t flaunt our mental infection that way. But then again, Beautiful One was an exhibitionist, the family would say.
There were conflicting anecdotes from bloggers and commentators. And the newspapers couldn’t decide if the bridge had been closed for six or eight hours (I averaged seven), and then decided that most of it was bullshit and inflated speculation anyway.
I saw the pictures, she was standing in the middle of the bridge, not on the side ready to jump. She obviously was looking for attention. Someone who is serious about committing suicide would not pick a busy bridge in a big city on Canada day. The police should have tackled her … or shot her with a tranquilizer. Some one should figure out the economic cost of her actions and send her a bill. But then again what’s the point she probably can’t afford it anyway. Now our tax dollars are going to pay for a selfish, idiotic, attention whore’s medical bills.
We actually felt sorry for the jumper, we were sitting back and relaxing on the side of the road for 8 and a half hours, we pulled up some chairs and were just watching the road rage. I have awesome pictures of her swinging on the cable. What made us mad was when the police told us that she tried the same thing earlier in the morning and they released her!! What is that all about?
I chewed my nails and gulped down three beers for breakfast. Suicide usually left me unfazed, but the fact that it was national news made it more tangible and less like an episode in a parallel universe. It was as if my secret life, inescapable, had collided headfirst with the normalcy of a European vacation for college girls. I could no longer pretend that I had not been born of heart-quaking generational tragedy.
The Woo-Woo’s Chosen did not have mental breakdowns in public, especially on public holidays. This was certainly new. We always went quietly back to our houses, put on our frumpy pastel housecoats, and then went hopelessly, incurably insane. As if by hiding our sickness, slamming it away, we could pretend that it did not exist outside of our family’s private sphere and Hongcouver’s closed-door Chinese community. What was once secret to me seemed suddenly explosive: shameful and filthy. I shuddered with this knowledge. I could not bear to think of Beautiful One, who I felt symbolized my very sanity, alone and crazed and desperate, preparing for a final jump.
I shut off my laptop while C.C., in last night’s clubbing clothes, rose from the mtarba, the living room’s Moroccan silk couch, and asked me what the hell was wrong.
“I don’t talk about myself with strangers,” I snapped at my only friend, who had taken a chance on me, invited me on vacation, painstakingly civilized me in girlhood matters, like personal hygiene and socially correct politeness. Understandably, she looked quite taken aback.
Because C.C. insisted that there was no mental illness in her family, I had latched onto her like a confused tick. I wore her hand-me-downs and adopted her opinions, her pragmatic rich-person politics, in the hope of appearing “normal.” I was determined to become C.C., if not a lesser, more invisible version, by the end of my European escape. In my mind then, any person who wasn’t afraid of ghosts and travelled beyond the local shopping mall was sane. But communicating with my family had suddenly turned me into my father. Like him, I became unflinchingly nasty when overwhelmed and burdened by family drama. Surrounded by Moroccan luxury in a Parisian flat, I suddenly resented C.C. for her seemingly perfect life.
“Why the hell are you asking me this question for?” I snarled in humiliation. “Guess you have nothing else to think about.”
Ignoring C.C.’s attempts to talk to me, I escaped to the fancy outdoor café downstairs, where I ate six crepes, two hot fudge sundaes in flimsy champagne flutes, and three girlishly pink gelatos, and sampled every stifled fruit pastry, meringue tart, and slice of caramelized praline pie that was offered (at least fifteen or sixteen delicacies in one piggish sitting). C.C. had followed me to the café, but I ignored her. I ate obsessively, because I couldn’t stop, and I wasn’t the one who was paying.
But everything that pooled and clamped onto my tongue tasted wrong and disloyal. No matter how much I ate, I did not feel like myself, and there was a queasiness, which could only be caused by the Woo-Woo and made me feel as if I were waiting to skydive off a crashing mini plane with no parachute.
I knew that Beautiful One was the distraught woman on the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge, the Canada Day bridge jumper, and I didn’t know if she was dead. And here I had genuinely thought that I could delay the Woo-Woo by hiding out in a delusional fairy tale, pretending to be a carefree McPrincess who shopped, dined in sit-down restaurants, and had a rich friend. Someone who did not have to worry about a family member who may have died a nine-hour time difference away. Someone who did not have to worry about becoming insane. For I had been retreating into a fluorescent fantasy where I would not have to deal with the lunacy and acid-inducing heartbreak that was my family.
“Lindsay?” C.C. asked, looking worried, as she picked at her sludgy gelato.
And I was immediately ashamed that I told her to fuck off. This was right before I puked on the café’s sidewalk, sick splashing over our pedicured feet.
“Have a great life,” I told her sadly, knowing that I could not pretend to be her anymore. “Sorry you wasted time and money on me.”
Finally, back home on the mountain three days later, my father asked me if I had absorbed the entire European continent’s annual supply of butter.
“Your face will make Buddha jealous,” he said, forgetting that he was supposed to be nice to me because I was now his second-favourite kid, right after the dog. “I just knew we should have sent you reminder not to eat every day. Only eat every second day. But I see you have no fucking control.”
“Shut up,” I said, angry and fed up. All I wanted was a dozen supersized cheeseburgers from McDonald’s, which I had truly missed in Europe. C.C. had never taken me to the fast-food chain, choosing four-star restaurants and touristy cafés instead. I did not want another passive-aggressive fight with my father. “If you want to complain about me, you’re supposed to address them to the dog.”
“But you just make Daddy so mad,” he said, sighing. “You always do something so retarded that I cannot understand.”
“How’s Beautiful One?” I asked, grateful to change the subject. It was convenient for me that someone in our extended family was insane—it put my father in a very good mood.
“That fucker,” my mother said.
Then she went to bed with an unrefrigerated six-pack of beer, and no one could get her to do anything else. So shocked was my mother at the bridge incident, because she could not fathom losing her favourite sister, that she was acting distant and more brittle than usual. When I arrived home from Paris, it seemed like she would be spending the next few days with the bedroom door closed.
“Is Mom, like, really, really upset?” I said, peering around the kitchen, which was dirtier than usual and stacked with old newspapers and last week’s garbage.
“How the fuck should I know?” my father said, shrugging. “All she do is sleeping and screaming on the phone for twenty-four hours.”
Neither my father nor I understood how to properly decipher emotions. And my mother’s screaming was not foreign behaviour.
“But I have to tell you that it serve Beautiful One right.” And my father narrated, gleefully, what he knew. Early on Canada Day, she had gone missing. The entire family had split up into small search parties around ten a.m., eager to scour Burnaby’s Central Park in case she had been viciously murdered on one of her nocturnal jogs. While I was becoming “a beast” (obese) in Europe, he explained, she had taken to late-night runs in the park every night for hours and hours. Sometimes, she stayed out all night and came home, ecstatic and transformed, at seven or eight in the morning.
My father said that the family had brought heavy-duty garbage bags in case they found her chopped up parts—they all felt it was better to be prepared. But then, when an apologetic police officer phoned in the late afternoon, they had all been relieved and ordered the largest, most economical Domino’s pizza party combo to watch the news like everyone else in Hongcouver. You had to admit, the family said, it was exciting that there was a close relative on the local news. One rich uncle, who felt constantly bored by suburban life, had found this incident to be the most fun that he had all year.
Beautiful One, crazed and blubbering histrionic tears, obviously beyond family intervention, was now locked up in the psychiatric ward at Burnaby Hospital. Newspapers and radio talk shows had reported rabidly on BC’s best bridge jumper.
“It serve your auntie right,” my father repeated cheerfully, and then went to watch TV, like nothing had happened. I think he felt validated that, for once, my mother’s family had to acknowledge their illness, and being generally insensitive, he took the opportunity to gloat openly about Beautiful One’s downfall.
“The cops said I was the best bridge jumper ever,” Beautiful One squealed to me on the phone when I called her that week to see if she was doing better.
Normally, I’d be too afraid to phone my auntie and would rely instead on second-hand news via my mother or father. But being away from my family for a month had prompted a change in me—whether better or grotesque, it allowed me to experience a strange sensation. Was it regret? Was it bruising reality? In gloomy Hongcouver, perhaps because I was fully immersed in our spiralling drama, I often refused to believe I was suffocating in so much sadness. But in Paris, peeking in from the outside, I was able to begrudgingly accept the horror as real life instead of make-believe. Perhaps because the suicide attempt was on the news, disassociating was now impossible for me.
On the phone, it felt terrifying to talk to a manic Beautiful One, but she was thrilled to brag to her “absolute best and favourite niece,” which was what she always said, but now she sounded like a recording of her former self.
Our conversation sickened me. This is what I learned:
Poor Beautiful One, completely delusional and communing with an insistent God inside her brain, had squatted on the observatory deck of the vast Ironworkers Memorial Bridge and then tottered on three parallel cables, gripping a cable behind and above her with just one hand. Beautiful One said that she became a big-shot superhero, whooping, as she swung-swung-swung. I imagined Beautiful One, weighing less than ninety pounds, on a major bridge that spanned 1,292 metres across Burrard Inlet, her legs flailing in a convulsive Wonder Woman cancan.
She had stopped traffic on a crucial part of the Trans-Canada Highway, which families needed to traverse for their Canada Day vacations and picnics and late-night fireworks. But Beautiful One had only cared about swinging and swinging (all that attention!)—she was glad that there was no suicide barrier.
“What are you doing?” a police officer first asked her around noon.
“I’m admiring the beautiful view. It’s such a wonderful day, you know?”
He watched Beautiful One (she was used to people admiring her), so she began to snap pictures with her BlackBerry. The officer might have thought that she was homeless, armed with only a stolen phone, because she hadn’t showered or changed her clothes for a month or so. When her phone ran out of batteries, she wanted more attention from the concerned officer. She threatened to jump.
“I’m very, very clever,” she trilled at me over the phone. She sounded so pleased and exuberant as she reported the incident: “Don’t you think that I am clever to get attention by jumping? I’m probably the smartest one in this whole family!”
For six, seven, or eight hours, depending on which talk show or blog or newspaper you followed, negotiators from the emergency response team, the marine unit, and the coast guard wheedled: “Ma’am, please! Ma’am! Please listen! Ma’am! Ma’am! Ma’am!”
Beautiful One said that she was thrilled to shut down three cities in the Lower Mainland and overjoyed to control the lives of the usual 200,000 commuters, not even counting the additional numbers of those unfortunate families on their way to the Canada Day fireworks. It was the only time in her life when she had so much power. She had even cornered a squad of emergency response workers as her personal hostages to play Mad Hatter word games. This was the best day of her life.
“Why don’t you come down, ma’am?” the officers said. “You must be very thirsty.”
“But there’s lots of water down there, sir. Hahaha! What’s wrong with the water down there? There’s enough to drink for everyone! We can all share!”
“Jump, bitch, jump!” heat-stroked strangers in cars and raging motorcyclists had screamed.
I imagined most of them dehydrated or just desperate to pee, trapped in traffic in the smothering metropolitan heat. While kids complained of thirst, a few of the elderly fainted, so no one had any sympathy for the unhinged woman. But it was the first time Beautiful One felt so respected and truly happy. She needed the public’s unadorned esteem, the SWAT team’s inexhaustible attention—all because she could not get any from her own damned family.
“I don’t care if my kids kill themselves because I killed myself,” she had announced when suicide negotiators warned her about the dangers associated with bridge jumping—“Think of your daughters! Your son!”
“Why would you think I cared?” she said flippantly. Yet I think she was trying to distance herself—or her callousness meant that extreme psychosis had amplified every unkind personality trait that she possessed.
Flowery Face, who was thirteen, had been put on the phone to plead with her mother to come down, but that didn’t help. “Don’t die,” my cousin begged, because her older siblings were too afraid to talk to Beautiful One just in case she jumped mid-call. Uncle E.T. was still “on vacation” and could not be reached.
“Do you think I give a fuck what you think?” Beautiful One had snapped.
I think she felt exasperated by life, bruised by the chilling indifference from a family as insensitive and internally crushing as ours. She must have been truly fed up and sick when she told her daughter: “You’re better off without me. You don’t need me anymore. You should be very happy for me when I die. Bye.”
Joyously, Beautiful One swung back and forth on the steel cables until two constables distracted her (“Look over there!”) and someone snatched her Q-tip arms. On cue, the emergency response team, leaping out of their black van with safety harnesses secured, plunged behind her and snagged my screaming auntie around the waist.
“I have the most amazing balancing skills,” she bragged to me in an animated little girl’s voice. And then she repeated herself.
Our one-sided phone conversation had lasted almost a whole hour, and I could feel my stomach lurch, a hard, choking bubble, a blister of remorse, forming in my throat. But I could not hang up, because it was like watching a car fall off a cliff. I had never had so much one-on-one time with tragedy, except with my mother, and I wanted to see where it led. I had grown up with my mother, whose bouts of madness were extreme, yes, but expected—yet Beautiful One’s breakdown seemed confusing and unbelievable, as if our family insanity could multiply and spread at random. I needed to understand why my aunt had gone insane, and whether by sheer magical thinking there had been a choice or action that could have prevented her madness. I should not have been so shocked, but I had never wanted to believe that Beautiful One could be so troubled and traumatized by her own childhood of poverty and neglect. She was as damaged as my mother, but I never saw it because I did not live with her. For why else would a grown woman sometimes confide in an adolescent on a family camping trip?
“Oh, Lindsay,” Auntie Beautiful One sang, sighing. “I can balance without my hands and I can perform in a circus act, like the Cirque du Soleil. They said I was the best bridge jumper in BC! And I’m very clever. I’m so smart I told them there’s water down there when they asked me if I needed water! You should be very happy when I die! Don’t you understand that this is good for me? That dying is the best decision I ever made.”
The family would always wonder if she really meant to jump, or if it was just the Woo-Woo talking. Love and affection, being similar to dirty, repressed stage-four cancer among our tight-knit clan, were never expressed, if they did exist, because of our ghosts, so this was the absolute best it would ever get for poor Auntie, who just wanted to feel adored and cherished for once. Being the best bridge jumper in BC made her feel like a celebrity on reality TV.
“I understand, Auntie,” I lied, half singing the words (at this point, she would not acknowledge a reply if it wasn’t musical).
Since no rational explanation was forthcoming, I finally hung up. I felt uncomfortable with the swift, plummeting trajectory of our conversation. Also, I felt an ounce of intense guilt. And I thought there might be a clue to the iPod shuffle of Beautiful One’s brain.
I wondered if the bridge-jumping incident could have been prevented. I kept wondering: If Beautiful One had been given proper psychiatric attention, if she had been checked into a private hospital for treatment right after the wedding, would things have spiralled so completely out of control? Would her firecracker psychosis have spun into the pitiless territory of absolute madness? Was our family mostly at fault for the incident on Canada Day? Was I at fault?
The answer to my irrational blame mongering, despite my oscillating internal confusion, was maybe eighty/twenty, but only if you factored in culture and superstition, counted missing Uncle E.T., and divided the total by the other seven aunties and uncles. But culpability is easy to assign to other people. Because my family was not profound or stupid enough to consign guilt to ourselves, it was much easier to fault Auntie Beautiful One’s lack of determination. Or, as in my case, horrible luck and genetics.
In hindsight, I believe that I initially took Beautiful One’s decision to jump as a bratty but personal one. That she tried to jump not only pissed me off but also broke some amazing resolve or crass, elementary belief system in me. At the time, I did not recognize it or understand what was happening to me. I just thought that I was having a simple if fiendish gallbladder attack, not a crabby emotional reaction. I deluded myself into thinking that I did not know why I was reacting so abnormally.
I felt betrayed in an outsized, abstract way that I could not explain. Like my mother, I couldn’t help but take her psychosis personally.
Two weeks after the Canada Day bridge-jumping incident, Uncle E.T., who had driven back from his runaway vacation on Hongcouver Island when he heard about his infamous holiday stuntwoman wife, supposedly begged the doctors to please, please, please, put the goddamn Woo-Woo in electroshock therapy and then perform a prompt lobotomy—at least, that’s what Beautiful One claimed, though I wasn’t sure if it was mostly her delusion. Like everyone else in our family, he was horrified and saddened by his wife’s actions, but he could not show it (our ghosts were always waiting).
At Burnaby Hospital, Beautiful One enjoyed the psychiatric ward immensely, because she could sing all day to the other patients. Unlike our family, everyone in the psych ward liked her take on unconventional musical theatre—most of the patients sang back to her, she said. And Beautiful One became close friends with a patient with bipolar disorder and a crack addiction, who would later always call her house to ask for money. Beautiful One preferred the ward and its residents to her own uninspiring children. For supposed stellar behaviour (despite proudly admitting to finding a way to unscrew her bedroom window), she was given frequent day passes to visit the outside universe, but she was reluctant to leave the psychiatric ward and her stimulating new friends (they were staging a revolt, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, she said).
“But I have a chess appointment with Mister X,” she would always wail whenever my mother invited her out for cheap Tuesday dim sum.
“Isn’t that the fucking homeless bum who keeps peeing in your shoes?” my mother asked over the speakerphone.
“Yes,” Beautiful One admitted, “but he has an intellect almost as amazing and grandiose as mine.”
When she was allowed home on a day pass for good behaviour, she printed out internet comments about the Canada Day bridge-jumping incident and stuck them to the refrigerator. She trilled her favourite comments over the phone, screeching at everyone to listen when she read the wittier ones.
“To seaaaa or not to seaaa,” she quoted, tittering, hehehehe, asking me what I thought. The internet comments were cruel, yes, but they gave her a formidable sense of purpose:
Posted 01 July 2008 – 06:03 PM
The female dog should just jump and let thousands of people get on with their lives on a holiday evening.
I’m trying to feel sympathy for the “distraught woman,” but if you really were distraught, you’d just end it at home somewhere. Pulling sh!t on a major bridge during the afternoon of a national holiday is just a stunt to get attention.
Happy Canada Day.
I really don’t think she wanted to kill herself, if you want to kill yourself, you can’t be stopped, and it would be fairly quick. Maybe she wanted attention? I don’t know why people say they want to die, but then just stand there, i’ve seen on this tv.
I hope this chick is proud. And you know what really sucks? I heard she didn’t even jump.
Beautiful One said that she was extremely proud of all the commotion she had caused—it seemed that nearly everyone trapped in traffic wanted to personally push BC’s best potential bridge jumper off the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge. The public’s anger was the reason the police and government reassigned Beautiful One to an at-risk age group. The public would be more sympathetic to a senior citizen, so a press rumour spread that on Canada Day an old woman was in a severe economic crisis. With no money, no employment, no housing to speak of, why shouldn’t she jump?
This of course had made Beautiful One extremely upset, because reporters and journalists had called her “an elderly woman.”
“Elderly?!” she had shrieked, and I couldn’t help but laugh in a sharp, uncomfortable way. Beautiful One was not old. “An elderly woman?” she said, wounded. “I’m only forty-two!” Beautiful One had been so frantic when she read the newspapers that the nurses had thought she needed to be sedated.
And she resented the anonymity; she wanted to be known for her famous balancing feat. Vancouver Magazine had lumped her in with “one of the dozen or more people who leap from Metro Vancouver bridges each year,” which meant God had lied—she wasn’t so special after all.
Police officers even invented a nine-year-old son (in real life, my cousin was nineteen) to gain public compassion for the potential bridge jumper. “We gave that lady another chance at life,” Inspector Chapman said. “We gave her a chance to go home to her family and her nine-year-old son. We saved her life.”
But Beautiful One was not grateful; she displayed only unadulterated anger. “But I’m pretty!” she screamed, as if that was all that mattered, howling into the phone like a cartoon coyote. “You don’t understand! Like, I’m really pretty! Why didn’t they say that? Didn’t anyone notice?”
And Beautiful One planned to do it all over again—perhaps Labour Day, perhaps Remembrance Day—just to prove to the media that this bridge-jumping diva was spry and young, “not ooooooold!” She basked in the vindictive outpouring of online attention, and I wondered why she couldn’t just be happy with our family’s criticism of her public behaviour.
“Why are you so fucking pathetic?” my mother, shrunken and terrified, had screamed at her sister any chance she got.
Yelling multiple fuck-yous at the demon(s) inside Beautiful One somehow made ugly, abstract things, like our fear and sadness, much easier to manage.
Something in me crumbled and broke the day I saw Auntie Beautiful One post-breakdown. Paris had made me soft, fattened me with pounds of butter and refined sugar, and then destroyed all my sinewy defences. Cute little pastries and melt-in-your-mouth gelato had mutated me into a corporeal globe of convulsive nerves and jittery human emotions.
Back in Hongcouver, I missed the carefreeness of Europe, the straightforwardness of food and shopping and C.C.’s friendship. Most of all, I missed knowing someone who wasn’t constantly stuffed with personal misery.
When I saw Auntie Beautiful One, I suddenly felt as desperate as my mother when she had cried in the basement bathroom at my cousin’s wedding. I could not control the terror and sadness spiralling inside me and felt undisciplined and utterly wrong.
Nearly a month after her Woo-Woo on the bridge, Beautiful One didn’t seem to recognize anyone. The hospital had declared her mentally fit enough to be a part-time resident, but she was still vacant and restless. It seemed that she only cared about shuffling around her house when I visited. According to our Chinese superstitions, the Beautiful One family were considered contagious, and they were not allowed in anyone’s houses for the next month or so, until their “bad luck” had dissipated. They were in special quarantine, but my mother had risked sending me over so I could check on her sister for her. I didn’t know what medications she was on, but I assumed that she was on a zombifying brew of antipsychotics. Her eyes didn’t seem to flutter anymore, and she spoke in a flat, sloppy monotone. Her voice sounded masculine and machine-like, as if an oversized butterfly were trapped in her throat.
Auntie Beautiful One was no longer manic, but with her filthy clothes that were too loose and her mangled hair sticking up, she looked as if she had rolled out of a coffin. She had been transformed into a sullen corpse from a horror movie. Her eyes were black and dead and a little sandy. She couldn’t be convinced to brush her teeth; she believed that toothpaste had been specifically designed to kill her.
“I am the smartest one in this whole family,” Beautiful One had rasped at me in greeting. “I have discovered that you have to be careful of toothpaste. You see, I am so clever that I know there’s poison in it, and we can all die. Pick up this tube and tell me you can feel the stinging in your arm, right? If you can feel the pain, it means there’s poison in it.”
This seemed like the most deranged thing that Beautiful One had ever said, which convinced me that she was too far gone for anyone’s non-medical expertise.
I didn’t know what to say to Beautiful One. And the situation got worse when she stopped her frantic pacing and mumbling and tried to give me some money. She opened her wallet, but there was only a ten-dollar bill left. She looked so confused and dejected. Grunting, she tried to make me take the ten dollars, but I couldn’t accept it from this ghost of my former auntie. Beautiful One had been replaced by someone or something else entirely. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. Years of hockey practice and emotion-resistance training from my father made me ashamed to show my sadness. Instead, I pretended to be nonchalant and unaffected.
“Take money, Lindsay,” Unbeautiful One rasped, stuffing the bill into the front pocket of my hoodie.
Life at the Belcarra had reached a sludgy, perverse sameness, so it took visiting Beautiful One’s mental hospital of a household to realize that I was actually living in one. It is safe to say that my visit made me realize I had to leave Hongcouver ASAP. It is hard to know that you’re living in absolute shit until someone else invites you over and proudly shows you the insides of their even grubbier, even shittier, even more bug-infested surroundings. From my new perspective, I could see the impenetrable monstrosity of the Woo-Woo in Beautiful One and her proud, decadent squalor. I was also terrified that what had happened to Beautiful One could happen to me overnight. There had to be a reason, even if slight, why she always said we were so alike on our family camping trips, even if I could not visualize any concrete similarities myself. For I still did not believe that I could be smart or self-sufficient. Until recently, I had more in common with my father and a garbage can. But had she seen a potential for normalcy and talent in me? Or was she simply deluding herself? I wanted her uncanny ability to make money, certainly, but at what cost? Was the Woo-Woo an ineluctable punishment for the female descendants of Poh-Poh? A cosmic curse that only affected the conventionally beautiful and money-grubbing?
On the exterior, Beautiful One’s house was grander and larger and more sumptuous than ours, with its creeping black gate that hugged and spiked the property like a barbed-wire entanglement inspired by the rococo period and trench warfare. But what was more important was hidden inside its filthy interior. It was like looking at a mirage of a terrible yet beautiful palace that transformed into a derelict graveyard upon closer inspection. Our house, though dusty and unkempt, had not reached this stage of Woo-Woo.
“The bitch is fucking nuts!” Beautiful One’s son announced as he opened the door from the garage, which was also his bedroom (my cousin was living in his BMW to avoid his mother). My cousin seemed not to notice or care that Beautiful One had started doing frantic laps on a sticky floor that had not been cleaned in weeks. Where was their housekeeper? Had she quit and no one noticed? My cousin also didn’t seem to care that the furnace blasted thirty degrees Celsius even though it was summer.
“How long has she been walking in circles?” I asked him, horrified.
“Well, she’s been hiding in the goddamn broom closet,” my cousin said, shrugging. “She built a little fort out of black garbage bags. Thinks she’s safe from God in there.” He then mumbled that he had an upcoming examination for business school that he had to study for in the backseat of his car.
This was a typical exchange in our family; no one understood how they were supposed to feel, or why they should experience certain soul-crushing emotions. My cousin was certainly grieving, and he would have screamed and cried had he been allowed to show his godawful despair. But he could not risk a demonic possession right before a final exam.
Why does my mother like you better than me?” Flowery Face asked me as I grudgingly followed her into an even stickier and grimier kitchen.
A month’s collection of dirty dishes was heaped on the counters; chemical-coloured takeout containers from their Vietnamese food franchises volcanoed on the stovetop and table. The only fresh food was a mammoth bag of semi-extinct apples from the Dark Ages—black and putrid. Flowery Face stopped and offered me one; I declined, but she started eating a soft wet apple, chunks of its necrotic flesh falling onto the carpet. She looked like a tired, gluttonous zombie. Poor Flowery Face, who was dressed in too-tight clothing that made her look twenty-eight; her false lashes were practically melting off her face.
Flowery Face and I had spent many major childhood vacations camping together in the interior of BC and, of course, at American outlet malls, but I hadn’t seen her since our family’s annual twelve-course Christmas banquet. She had seemed less haggard then, more childish and buoyant.
“Here’s twenty dollars,” I said. It was all that I had in my bag, but I gave it to her because, being nervous and cowardly, I needed her to shut up about her mother.
F.F. took my money, but she still wanted to know the answer to her terrible, treacherous question. Twenty bucks was not enough to silence her. It was like trying to cure stomach cancer with a tummy tuck. Like my father, in any difficult situation, I had been hoping that suffering could be measured in dollars and cents. This was all I knew how to do; I could not have fathomed anything else back then if it had knocked out all my teeth and shattered a very important bone. I did not have the emotional vocabulary to articulate how devastated I was. How my anger at Beautiful One was like mistaking specialty hot sauce for ketchup at a restaurant—no one’s fault but my own—and how this mistake burned me with terror and helplessness. I stood still, hoping that this moment of gross uncertainty would be over soon.
“Lindsay, I had to try to talk her off the bridge,” Flowery Face ranted instead, chucking the apple corpse onto the sofa like a used tissue. “It should have been you telling her not to. Why weren’t you here? On the bridge she laughed at me, okay! She didn’t even listen to what I had to say. I kept crying and telling her not to. What kind of mom does that?”
“I wouldn’t be able to talk her down,” I said, trying not to stammer.
I thought about how, many years ago, Beautiful One had taken me shopping and reassured me that I was going to turn out exactly like her. Because we were alike, she always said, talented and brilliant and capable of rational thinking. Was I supposed to do the same thing for Flowery Face now? I could have told her that we were special, that we did not need to worry about turning into our mothers, because I had already given her all the money that I had. Unfortunately, I did not know how to lie to her. It felt too disloyal, too cruel. So, quickly, I changed the subject instead: “Has everyone in our family been giving you lots of money?”
“Yes, they all feel really shitty, so I made six hundred dollars yesterday. Oh, except Uncle Ugly One. He’s so cheap.”
“Asshole,” I said with emphasis, hoping that I was showing enough moral support.
“Lindsay, just tell me the truth: How come my mom doesn’t like me? Why wouldn’t she listen to me on the bridge?”
“I don’t know,” I lied, looking past her at the gilded wood carving of Jesus’s last supper behind her in the foyer. I pretended to be interested in the infinitesimal details, but my stomach and head and heart hurt.
Eventually, I looked at Flowery Face. I wanted to tell her that her mother’s madness was not her fault, but in that moment I was too afraid, because I believed that words were sickly incantations. Offering reassurance, even if it was an insecure whisper, meant that the worst could possibly come true. It would be like looking into the mirror and calling for the indomitable Bloody Mary three times. And because you were a member of this family, it meant that she would certainly pay you a violent visit. Bloody Mary only existed for certain people—like us.
“You could probably have talked her off the bridge!” Flowery Face insisted again, her face crumpling. “My mom loves you! She used to talk about you all the time, you know. No offence, but why does she even like you? You’re not that great.”
“Maybe you just didn’t cry hard enough when you were talking to her on the bridge,” I suggested. But I was feeling nauseated and guilty. I was not surprised that I was worthy of so much conversational time in the Beautiful One household, because my cousins and I were expected to compete aggressively with each other. It was considered important family news if someone gained five pounds or suffered from acid reflux.
“Ohmygod, Lindsay,” my cousin said. “Tell me what I should do.”
“Well, tell her she’s beautiful and that we all love and forgive her. Tell her it was shit reporting and that she can sue. And everyone thought she was amazing at balancing. Tell her whatever she wants to hear.”
“But that’s bullshit!” Flowery Face screamed. “People fucking hate us! They call her names online, and they all say she should die.”
“Listen, your mom only wants to hear good things, and that’s what I’m going to tell her. You do want her to get better, right?”
“I think someone should have just pushed her off the bridge,” Flowery Face said, sniffling.
I looked up from the dirt-packed floor that I had been examining for grungy wood bugs and tried to see if there was Woo-Woo in my cousin’s pupils. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw their dog, some designer-purse rat, shit in a corner and hungrily huff up its dry, pebbly turds. At least someone was tidying up after themselves in this house.
“Well, it would have saved a lot of time and money if someone did,” I said, trying not to be too serious. But she didn’t find my joke particularly funny.
As a person disconnected from my feelings and severed from any semblance of self-worth, I did not understand that my cousin and I were experiencing what was generally known as trauma and loss.
“Out of curiosity, would you do it, though?” I asked Flowery Face, forgetting that she was just an impressionable teen.
“I think I could,” Flowery Face said. “I just hate my mom so much.”
“You’re not supposed to like your mother. Welcome to our family.”
“Hey, wanna watch Hannah Montana and smoke some weed?” she suddenly said, brightening.
“I have to go in, like, five minutes,” I lied, making what I hoped was a frowny face even though I felt relieved to leave Beautiful One’s oppressive habitat. “I have to go to the grocery store,” I added when she did not respond.
“Thanks for stopping by,” Flowery Face finally mumbled. “Lindsay, I’m really glad you’re my cousin.”
“I know,” I said, and I wanted very much to invite her to stay with us at the Belcarra, which wasn’t much better, but at least it wasn’t a tomb-like prison that smelled of gross, perfumed death in its various stages of decomposition.
But I had to leave. I realized I had to leave the graveyard suburbs of Hongcouver with frightening urgency. Otherwise, it would just be me and Flowery Face—bad pot and worse television and constipating psychosis.
“Enjoy your drugs,” I eventually called out to my cousin. But she was too absorbed in her singing show on the Disney Channel to take any notice of my leaving, and it made me remember that she was just a lost, broken kid.
Before I turned to go, I remembered that I had the ten dollars that Beautiful One had given me, so I left the money for Flowery Face on the kitchen table, near the bag of black apples.
It wouldn’t make a difference. In a week’s time, yet another Woo-Woo scandal would occur in our family, when Flowery Face, overwhelmed by what she couldn’t handle, would kick her own mother down a flight of stairs. On my way out of their foyer, I tried not to look at emaciated Beautiful One, who was still parading around the house.
“Bye, Auntie,” I called out, but she did not know it was me and stared disgustedly at a crack in the ceiling.
“Don’t talk to me anymore, roof!” she bellowed. “You cannot kill me.”
Shuddering, I fled their house, half sprinting, half walking to the SkyTrain station. I could not bear this revelation of sadness and suffocating madness. I would rather confront an axe murderer, because running for my life seemed much simpler than witnessing my poor auntie like this.
Yet the absolute best thing about a Woo-Woo incident that didn’t affect the members of your immediate family was that you could exit the dramatic scene and take a break whenever it was most convenient. It was like pressing pause on a deliciously violent movie, and then coming back after you had relieved your bladder and gobbled down a salty snack.
That summer, there were three ongoing cinematic world war experiences.
You might first visit Beautiful One’s house, where the structural damage was an irreparable 10 on our Woo-Woo scale, and then stop over at Poh-Poh’s house for a solid 7. But with Beautiful One’s newfound Woo-Woo, Poh-Poh’s viewer ratings had severely declined. By evening, you could finally de-stress by ambling over to my home for a more low-key theatrical production; your continuous Woo-Woo experience might be a 2 or 3. Nowadays, my parents’ arguments were only an unsatisfactory magnitude of 1, because my mother was too sad about Beautiful One and the bridge-jumping incident to react anymore.
Who needed the local movie theatre when you had my kind of thrilling relations?
As much as my upbringing was frequently heartbreaking and spastic and extreme, I could say that I had never been bored for one moment. Surely, this was a sign that I’d blossom into something interesting (I did not think of myself as someone, an entirely real live person yet). If I was lucky, I’d be much less pedestrian by the time I was in my late twenties. I certainly had enough bizarre anecdotes to last me until I was miserly and thirty-five. Growing up, surely other kids like C.C. had complained about hours spent without internet or decent television, but I got to watch Poh-Poh attack kitchen appliances until she passed out.
Yet it killed me to admit that it was the saddest thing in the whole world seeing my cousin and auntie so completely ruined and unfixable. It was like they had become Poh-Pohs overnight.