by Lindsay Wong
Later, once we got my grandmother into bed, my mother assumed her new role as Woo-Woo doctor. “This is better for you,” she explained to Poh-Poh after we had hid her medication in my mother’s night table and given my grandmother a generous supply of minty Tic Tacs.
“This is yummier,” my mother said, using a false, cheery voice that I did not know she could mimic. “Open wide!”
Of course, Poh-Poh did not seem to notice that anything was off. Whenever she opened her mouth, my mother popped in a white Tic Tac that Poh-Poh swallowed without chewing.
A few days later, my grandmother took a turn for the worse. “Lindsay, there are Japanese soldiers here, so I can’t take a bath!” she screamed, charging out of the bathroom. She was naked, flailing her starfish arms.
“There’s no one there, Poh-Poh,” I said, trying to sound reasonable.
“Also, my arms and legs are falling off!” she protested, ignoring me. “I can’t wipe my ass! Help! Help!”
Terrified, I watched as my grandmother spun in a circle, her eyes bright and twitching.
I stood outside the bathroom door and hollered for my mother, who handed me a brand-new pair of dishwashing gloves and a spray bottle.
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “No way!”
Meanwhile, we could hear my grandmother prancing down the hall, howling, “The Japanese soldiers are here! We have to hide! Run awaaaaaaay!”
Because she did not want to shower, Poh-Poh began to smell rancid. Her hair became shiny and stiff, and her bathrobe became ratty and stained because she refused to let us wash it.
“Lindsay, my poop will save you from the ghosts,” she sang whenever she saw me, and I quickly turned away, more fearful than disgusted. Would this be me by the end of the week? In fiftysomething years? I still didn’t know if pills could save her. She was still taking the Tic Tacs.
As Poh-Poh detoxed from the meds, she scurried up and down the hall all night, broadcasting orchestral farts. One night, she woke me up by tugging on my ankle and insisted that I had to practise my Chinese numbers. She announced that my Chinese was cringingly shitty, and no granddaughter of hers would only know how to count to ten. This caused an internal combustion in me, triggered by severe grouchiness at the mention of mathematics.
“No way in hell!” I bellowed.
“Fuck you,” she said. “You are a very bad girl ghost.”
“Fuck you, no take backs,” I said to my grandma, who countered by howling—she thought that this late-night exchange was hilarious.
Like everyone else in the family, back then I viewed my grandmother as something foreign and embarrassing. When she was manic, she was like a recently awakened mummy from King Tut’s tomb, amazed to find itself in the twentieth century. At thirteen, my perception of my suffering grandmother was filtered through my mother’s combative contempt: Poh-Poh was not someone to be pitied or babied but a wild woman to be contained.
But there was an upside: with Poh-Poh prowling our house at all hours, my mother could pick on someone instead of me. I became a semi-invisible ghost, no longer a life-sized target who disliked but desperately wanted to be accepted by my own mother. She had already given up on the notion that Poh-Poh would ever truly like her, believing that she would never be as good as a son. But I still held out hope for my mother, despite our daily wars. On her decent days, she was good-looking and funny; when she felt like it, she could make me laugh like no one else. I would have done anything for a smidgen of her praise. “You only suck a bit, fatty,” would have been maternal and enough. I was desperate and hopeful that one day she might change, a complete 360.
The police had warned us not to stroll alone on our gloomy Canadian mountain in the summer, because wild animals often attacked the feeble or young. There were reports of coyotes that sometimes chomped on old people, but they were not usually as bold as the bears that sometimes deposited masses of shit on our doormats, muffin-shaped turds that we had to shovel before the neighbourhood dogs huffed them up. But my mother didn’t care—sending Poh-Poh to exercise her demons every day for a week. We all thought she was trying to give her mother a heart attack. And Poh-Poh, oblivious, kept shuffling around the cul-de-sac like any other Poteau granny, a hot-pink beanie slapped on her head—jog-walking faster than any other senior I knew. I believe my mother was trying to quarantine the Woo-Woo, as if Poh-Poh could somehow exorcise her malevolent ghosts by completing daily laps around the neighbourhood.
I am not kidding when I say that for amusement a freakish 250-pound bear might knock you unconscious with her massive paw in our suburb, but usually, if Mama Bear wasn’t ravenous, she just lumbered away. Luckily, my grandmother spoke in aggressive grunts and could communicate with the wild animals on the Poteau, even though her own family could not understand her. I imagined that on her frustrated walks around the mountain, she was complaining about us to her loyal gang of coyotes, gossiping with one or two sympathetic deer, and maybe egging on the killer black bears to eat her grandchildren as soon as we waltzed out the front doors for summer hockey camp and piano lessons.
The wild animals knew enough to leave Poh-Poh alone, but some Jehovah’s Witness missionaries stalked her to our front door, thoroughly impressed by her noisy lamenting, believing that we required “recent immigrant assistance.”
“Bullshit,” my mother said to the missionaries, who meekly offered her a complimentary Bible when they realized that she was not someone who could be converted. “If you want to believe the Cry Wolf, you can take her with you. Goodbye!”
In the evenings, Poh-Poh howled miserably, as if she knew that her existence depended solely on her ability to make a lot of noise, and my father said, irritated: “Send outside. The coyotes will keep her company. They practise singing together and start a rocking and rolling band.”
The bonds that kept our family together were like the alliances that prison inmates had no choice to form. Talk show hosts like Oprah and Rosie O’Donnell had lied: a good family was not one that forgave, but one that could bravely endure ancient grudges. Family members were people you had the misfortune to inherit, people you didn’t particularly care for but felt obligated to feed and house for nothing in return.
Toe overlapping toe, my grandmother’s feet were practically deformed from physical labour and rheumatism; she could only wear special black running shoes to accommodate her blocky hammertoes. Stiffly, she stamped along in her square sneakers, lurching like a miniature Godzilla. We all knew Poh-Poh had once been athletic and tough. I imagine that she had once been nice or even pretty. After all, as a young girl, Poh-Poh had chopped firewood and planted shrivelled yams when the Japanese bombed her village. She had bound her breasts and pretended to be a boy for three years to avoid being raped.
“Did she ever see anyone get bombed and explode into pieces?” I asked my mother a few days into Poh-Poh’s stay, not bothering to hide my excitement. But my mother didn’t know, and Poh-Poh obviously wasn’t talking sense. As a kid who cherished the macabre above all else, for a little while, I felt that Poh-Poh was as interesting as cable television. But I was severely disappointed. What good was it if you had a grey-haired person in your house and she couldn’t even nod or shake her head when you wanted to know if she had ever seen someone get murdered?
“Shut the fuck up,” she said, when I asked her if she had lived through the Rape of Nanking.
“Mom says Great-Great-Grandpa was blind and instantly died when the bombs fell because he had a heart attack and you guys were all having dinner. Did Great-Great-Grandpa shit his pants when he died? How long did it take for his body to smell? Were his eyes open or closed?”
There was so much of me that couldn’t fathom any of this as real, and it made me unknowingly cruel. That was the luxury of my generation—born in a different time and a very dissimilar place, which was what my mother both gave to me and resented about me, that First-World safety. And ultimately, that was what made me different from my mother and my grandmother, two characters that I f
eared I’d become. But how could I have known that then?
“No,” Poh-Poh whispered.
“No to every question?” I asked, disappointed.
“Too many ghost,” she said, one eye staring at a fly on the ceiling.
In her Hong Kong village, as the only demonically possessed woman, Poh-Poh had been given every generous perk of lunacy—instant fame and a scandalous reputation. When the villagers were done planting their bok choy and killing their chickens, when they had finished their meagre suppers of rice and maybe a delicious fried rat, they must have gossiped about how much Poh-Poh had been sold for and wondered what kind of man would spend his life savings on an insane woman with a low forehead, which meant, according to our Chinese beliefs, that she had exceptionally low intelligence in addition to being unfortunate-looking.
My mother said that Poh-Poh’s eyesight was so poor from severe myopia that she had panic attacks when she was sent out to chop firewood during Japan’s second invasion of China. Her blindness exacerbated her ghoulish terror of being sent alone into the war-wrecked woods, and this trauma caused her to also have terrible hallucinations and convulsive, raving fits. Throughout her life, she would always have paranoia about invading soldiers, confusing her heartbreaking adolescence with her present reality. Even years later, she hid from them twice a week, as she believed that soldiers stormed through the floral wallpaper of her house to attack her if she tried to sleep.
She also claimed that her father had repeatedly raped her when she was a small child, but her mother, my great-grandmother Cloudy Heroine, the tough-talking, pragmatic matriarch of the family, did not believe her. Instead, she promptly sold her sixteen-year-old daughter to my grandfather when Poh-Poh’s father in Vancouver wanted to sponsor the entire family over in 1950. At $750 per head, they could save a lot of money (they had three boys) if they left someone behind. As a female, which already made her inferior, and not even a sane one, it was mutually agreed that Poh-Poh’s head was not worth the exorbitant price. This was how practical my mother’s family was—you had to be worth every single penny to call yourself a member.
My grandfather, Gung-Gung, who was the stereotypical gambling man, the frivolous village playboy, purchased Poh-Poh for her family’s merchant fortune and fancy Gold Mountain connections. There was no wedding celebration, just a swift exchange of $100 (in case any party changed their mind), and Poh-Poh was delivered the very next day. It was said that my grandmother understood what was happening, though the Japanese invasion had worsened her already devastating schizophrenia.
My aunties said that being left behind in a Hong Kong slum finally broke Poh-Poh.
Gung-Gung had no clue that his new wife would be cut off from all the gold harvesting (she would not receive a single cent of the escalating family fortune in Gold Mountain), and Poh-Poh was not entitled to a single cow or chicken. Being “not that smart,” as the family said, Gung-Gung had not planned for this unfortunate news, and this devastated him, causing him to gamble and drink. Meanwhile, in Vancouver, the Chan Clan had taken the opportunity to buy up grotesque amounts of farmland, trading shops, and Chinese restaurants, as well as property in the city that would be developed into gigantic strip malls. And Poh-Poh was much too insane to claim her share by then, stuck in a backwater village, not knowing if she was having sex or giving birth to eight children or what to do with those kids she called “the fucking cunts.”
I now wonder if I would have quickly died from malnutrition or PTSD if I had been born in her horrendous time and place. What it might have been like to be a teenage-woman in her totalitarian circumstances, her sanity and social class brutally stripped away. A war survivor and immigrant, illiterate in not one but two languages and despised by children whom she did not recall having.
My great-grandmother, Cloudy Heroine, who had sold Poh-Poh and then felt guilty about it twenty years later, finally sponsored her daughter’s family of ten over to Vancouver in 1975. Cloudy Heroine died in 1995, but it didn’t matter for Poh-Poh because her mother was a recurrent hallucination, a chatty breakfast ghost visitor. A foul-mouthed bedtime caller who regaled her daughter with gossipy stories from the afterlife. Poh-Poh seriously loved her mother, even if her mother had not loved her back.
Like Poh-Poh, I really tried to love my mother, but I was never sure if she had the emotional capacity to love me back.
One morning during her second week with us, Poh-Poh’s mouth became unhinged. Her jaw had seized up, and her lips popped open for more than forty-eight hours. She could not close her mouth.
“Buzz, buzz, buzz,” my father said, making fun of her when he came home early one morning after being gone for twenty-four hours. “Fly get in there and die! We have new fly trap, haha!” He seemed to work longer and more absurd hours when Poh-Poh was around. If I asked him what was wrong with my grandmother, he gave me his usual answer. “You can’t logic with the Woo-Woo, okay?”
I had tried typing Poh-Poh’s symptoms into a search engine, but only advertisements for horror movies had come up.
The family had attempted to keep Poh-Poh out of the psych ward for almost her entire life, but they did not know that my mother had stolen her medication. It would take me a while to understand this, but Poh-Poh was going through serious drug withdrawal. Years later, I’d wonder what my grandmother might have thought: one moment, she believed that she was having a tête-à-tête with her dead mother, and the next, her lips were bulbous and paralyzed. She must have been thoroughly petrified, and not being able to express it, or thinking you were crazy for doing so, had to make it even worse. Soon after, as if truly and deeply possessed, Poh-Poh couldn’t even swallow water. Her mouth: yawning pure shock, a panicked, cartoonish maw. She still couldn’t close it.
I could see that my mother was truly disturbed by this incredible turn of events and did not want to help her mother unless she had to—perhaps she was reliving her horrible childhood again and could not handle it.
“I fucking try so hard!” my mother yelled, throwing a porcelain bowl across the kitchen, which shattered on our linoleum floor. She refused to clean it up until my father came home.
She seemed especially fragile and furious whenever Poh-Poh was around. So when Poh-Poh’s moaning became too loud, my mother quietly slipped me twenty bucks, supplied me with another pair of rubber dishwashing gloves (so I would not catch the demon), and said it was my duty to water “the monster” because she was exhausted, sad, and going to lie down.
“Bad ghost,” Poh-Poh moaned, confused and frightened even after I had hastily put a glass of water to her lips. “Baaaaaaaaaad!!!!”
But her tongue wasn’t working and she could not swallow. That sip of water, mixed with saliva, dribbled back out.
I backed away, afraid she was dying. It hadn’t even been a full two weeks and already my Poh-Poh was falling apart. Poh-Poh’s mouth had taken on the comical look of a shocked tropical fish. Her eyes bulged, her tongue did not fit into her mouth, and she looked as if we had scooped her out of a Chinatown fish tank—unable to breathe outside water.
“Do you want to suck on an ice cube?” I asked her, hoping that I might distract her from dying.
“Baaaaaad,” Poh-Poh moaned in a throaty gurgle. And then my grandmother suddenly keeled over.
I needed Poh-Poh to live until someone else came into the room, like one of my younger siblings, who could share this trauma with me. Unfortunately, we weren’t on speaking terms, as I had succumbed to slobbering, cross-eyed fury the previous evening and hauled both brother and sister down the hallway by their hair for no rational reason. I had always thought that I wanted to see someone explode or get eaten by a black bear, but not if it was a close family member. To a kid who had grown up with suicide threats as daily conversation, death seemed unavoidable, like a badly infected ingrown nail or a recurring eyelid boil.
But as much as my grandmother seemed like an inconvenience, she was like looking into a time-travelling mirror, where I was both appalled and fascinate
d to see my mother and grandmother’s faces gawking back at me. It was as if my future selves had paid me an overly long and obnoxious visit.
Our peculiar family love had transformed Poh-Poh into a wild animal incapable of speech and rational thought. And lack of motherly kindness had turned her into a monster. I was thirteen, so I did the only reasonable thing: I fled the room.
Although our family could certainly be bad-tempered and difficult, we weren’t indefinitely cruel, so it was decided that Poh-Poh would see an emergency room physician as soon as my mother had drowned some woolly pig hoof, a Chinese delicacy, in canola oil for our supper (Poh-Poh wouldn’t be eating). My parents decided that my grandmother might be able to cure herself if given a three-to-four-hour deadline, since she, like many old people, seemed to benefit from some structure in her life.
Making me buckle Poh-Poh into the back seat when it was time to go—it was close to eleven at night—because she would not and could not touch her Woo-Woo mother, my mother declared, as if trying to convince herself: “Even though Poh-Poh was terrible to me, this is still my fucking mother, Lindsay. You know, this is my fucking mother, right? Right?”
At the hospital, when the triage nurses heard an abridged version of my grandmother’s mental history, she was sent to the psych ward immediately, because the doctors believed her paralyzed jaw was part of her ongoing psychosis. I knew my mother was upset when the doctors did not diagnose Poh-Poh demonic and recommend a bath in holy water followed by an aggressive course of antibiotics to fight off the Woo-Woo.
“Those doctors,” she had whispered, horrified, to me in the waiting area, “can’t see ghosts, you know!”
But I wasn’t sure. I thought we had done something wrong, had made Poh-Poh worse. My mother lied to the medical staff about Poh-Poh’s daily medication, pretending that we had been following instructions.