by Yasuko Thanh
The accident still seems like a game to me, with all the excitement of rides on the midway, complete with police lights and the wail of sirens. The boy had a bad reputation; the police would pull him over, subject him to searches, ignore probable cause. He’d been calling the station for days now: he had dynamite in his car, he’d say, and if they didn’t stop harassing him he’d blow himself up. Did they see something of themselves in his bravado? Did his youthful defiance provoke their envy? Or did contempt make them dismiss his threats as the cultivated talk of inner-city high school boys? His girlfriend had called the station and so had his father, warning, “Your harassment is pushing him to the edge. If you don’t stop, something bad’s going to happen.”
No one listened.
The police drew a tighter circle around him even as he was yelling “If you come any closer, I’ll blow myself the fuck up.”
I imagine him believing it would never come to this. I imagine him a moment earlier, before the crash, steering a doomed 1966 Plymouth Fury, removing the crucifix from the rear-view mirror and slipping it over his head, driving with his knees, reciting a Hail Mary, streetlights stringing by like rosary beads.
While he waved his dynamite and his girlfriend screamed “Lethimgobabydon’tdoit” (in real life she arrived after the explosion, saw his body on the pavement half-blanketed by a tarp), the police lassoed him.
What happened next I wrote in my diary. I kept a diary throughout my childhood, as I kept dead bees in a jar. For their calm, which could be savoured. When the boy exploded, I told my brother how his parts were raining down upon us. Newspaper accounts would make note of the 1966 Plymouth Fury being split in half. The windshield flew the length of an Olympic swimming pool. A skylight was pierced by falling debris a football field away. Seventeen windows were smashed in nearby houses. People felt the blast over a two-kilometre radius.
My brother looked like he was about to cry.
“Right now,” I hissed. “Guts like snakes.”
If it weren’t for this record, there are days when I’d say it never happened. Some of the words in my diary are misspelled.
I ran in my pyjamas through the long grass, looking for body parts. I wanted, needed, to see how the pieces fit.
The boy was like the moth that flies toward the light, and my father was like the light. Someone once said that every action of ours is evil for someone else. What happened to the boy was no one’s fault, but that doesn’t preclude looking at who made him feel trapped, at how far people will go to recover what’s been denied. The palpable innocence connected to the colour of that night, see-saws in the dark, an apple tree against orange flames, the blistering paint, a long-ago June, the summer a lake bed, stretching out—this imagined beauty creates our idiosyncratic illusion of freedom, a concrete means to think about the sine qua non of good and evil: that when confronted by a dead end we might be capable of anything.
Chamber of Maggots and Terrible Bee Torture
Nobody cared enough about me to wonder why I cried myself to sleep at night. Why I tried to make myself sick by ingesting mould I’d cultivated on a three-month-old bread crust. No one asked if I was happy. Or if I was sad. I could do brilliant things or horrible things. No one noticed either way.
I tried to make myself lovable. I picked my mother flowers; she asked whose yard I’d stolen them from.
* * *
—
Overtly, I expressed no hostility toward my father for losing his job, for the way things began to break around the house the year I turned twelve: my father’s spirit, his back, and his heart, which he complained about—the weight of shoeboxes he’d lifted and dragged from the stock room to the floor where he arranged them for display.
I was finally old enough for a paper route. After saving enough money I was able, at last, to sign myself up for gymnastics lessons. I couldn’t get enough. I trained away the frustration of my father’s malingering, his symptoms that changed day to day, trained away the reasons he had to stay in bed. His paranoia. He claimed he could smell from two blocks away the cleanser that a woman, scrubbing her kitchen clean then opening a window to let out the day’s burdensome heat, had decided to poison him with, its odour more powerful than a bullet. He said he was dying. He said that even the doctors were trying to kill him.
He thought so, perhaps, because the hospital couldn’t find the source of his pain. Still, he’d cough fiercely—stupidly, I thought—at the scent of a carpet, the aroma of roses, new clothing, used clothing. My mother would have to wash an undershirt five times before she could even bring it into the house.
She lost herself in Bible readings, ignoring his deterioration. I watched her pray before meals with her head bent low like a lamb to the slaughter. I had no idea if lambs lowered their heads at slaughter, but it had a nice ring to it. She always ended with “In Jesus’s name,” the trick for making God aware—the extra stamp on the envelope, the difference between priority post and express.
I didn’t understand depression, and I wonder if she did. The way it pins you to the bed, can make you experience real pain, as my father did, with a coughing attack so severe he cracked a rib. How it can make you feel the world is turning against you, even the people who love you the most. How he could be two people, kowtowing one day and the next punishing me with the thick, glossy wooden ruler or throwing punches at the wall, leaving a hole beside your head.
Because of my father’s “allergies” I couldn’t use perfume, deodorant, hairspray, lotion, bubble bath, soap; no gerbil, no hamster, no guinea pig, no dog, no cat. Back then, if I closed my eyes a flash would pop, as if for a moment illuminating meaning. Back then the world was black and white. I thought my father lacked fortitude.
Now the lens is hazier, as if coated with Vaseline, blurred edges open to interpretation.
I used to visit an elderly neighbour after gymnastics practice; cross-legged in her living room, we’d play cards. She’d make me tea. For Christmas she gave me a bottle of toilet water and a powder puff. Now and then I’d take them out of my closet to inhale what I could of their lemony fragrance through the plastic wrap.
I was good at gymnastics. Within the year I was competing.
Riding home on the bus with my thrift-store bodysuit packed into the bag at my feet, I’d feel something close to integrity. I’d say to myself “I am a gymnast” and enjoy the wholeness that came with the words.
Then, at fourteen, I broke my leg. After that it would be an ongoing struggle to watch other girls my age competing at the international level. I saw in them who I could have been.
I hid the injury from my parents that evening, full of shame. The next morning, knowing full well the look of disappointment they’d give me, I told them. I was sent home from emergency on crutches, overcome by guilt, self-doubt, and self-recrimination for having caused everyone—including the doctor—all this trouble.
I’d never be a champion now.
* * *
—
Through acts of daring, boldness verging on brashness, I waged war on the only brand of womanhood I knew: my mother’s submissive and neutered responses to my father’s illness. I shoplifted, did drugs, smoked. I argued with my teachers. And I fought against, competed against, the only version of manhood I knew: my father’s resigned ineffectuality as he’d shut his bedroom door and curl up in a ball with his disappointments.
The important thing was to brace yourself: to become hard, even a little bit of a bully. As if to prove my point I tied a boy to a tree at recess, and before the playground supervisors could arrive, I pulled down his pants for everyone to see. I noted with disgust, whenever my brother and I fought and he went crying to our father, that the “sissy” gene had been passed down to him like an ugly heirloom. I hated the way he was pampered, his favourite pastimes being hiding in my mother’s laundry basket or riding bareback on her Electrolux. He polished his acts of affection to suit my mother’s clucking and fussing; she doted on him, while my wildness pushed her away.
“I only got to be the baby for five years but he gets to be the baby forever,” I pointed out, in what I thought was my quite clever grasp of this travesty.
She shrugged and sighed.
Like any child who, feeling neglected or abandoned, says “If I were dead, then they’d see,” I played with reckless disregard for my safety. I jumped out of trees, carefree at the moment of greatest danger, exhilarated at the prospect of breaking my legs. I played with knives, examining my own reflection in the blades, holding them to my wrists, toying. When I’d been naughty I punished myself by inflicting small cuts on my arms, hiding them as I hid my counting rituals, my repeated touching of the curtains where their corners met, my compulsion for Jesus to know, minute by minute, every mundane thing I hadn’t told anyone.
I read ten Bible chapters every night.
My jar of dead bees filled with yellow jackets, bumbles, honey bees, mud, and paper wasps. I’d pick them up from the sidewalk, cupping their black and yellow bodies like jewels in my hand until I could get home and put them in their glass museum. As the layers deepened each melted into the next, the improbably delicate feelers and gossamer wings becoming one with the pollen-encrusted legs. I’d open the lid at regular intervals to inhale the scent, which by now was growing a little rank.
I wanted to test my mettle. Force myself to enjoy the foul smell. How much could I endure? The reek of the bee jar was worse than the fish market where my parents shopped, and it was will, sheer will, that enabled me to inhale it with a dignified smile. One could get used to anything. At that age, my mettle was my victory.
When I was older I discovered that the question wasn’t whether you could get used to something, but what price you had to pay.
* * *
—
My preconceptions about my parents equalled the size of what they didn’t know about me. I’d never had to spend a lot of time studying. I talked too much. Teachers called me either brilliant or meddlesome for contradicting them in class and for roaming from desk to desk “helping” others with their work. I learned to hide parts of myself, learned the line between smart and too-smart. I let classmates copy my tests to quell their jealousy. I was expected by my father to do well in school, and my intellectual generosity gave me a tenuous popularity.
One day back when I was about ten or eleven, before breaking my leg, before the gymnastics and the paper route to pay for it, my friends and I wanted candy money. Earlier that morning we’d failed to sell some old toys, including a doll I’d played with so long her hair had fallen out. I sat fingering the doll’s face, smearing the ink left behind after slashing her forehead with a red marker, thinking about how we’d tried fishing trash bins for pop bottles, checking every pay phone for change. That’s when I remembered the Harlequin novels, those beautiful women. I yelled “Striptease!” at the top of my lungs, shocking my friends. Boys came running from every street, none with sidewalks but all with potholes deep enough to swim in. We put a sand bucket on the ground and the money they dropped in glinted.
I stole a bedsheet from my mother’s linen cupboard, toppling the neatly folded stack with my grubby hand.
In my bedroom, I rehearsed what I was about to do.
When I went back outside the boys hooted and hollered, not at me but at the pictures their imaginations drew, inspired by National Geographic photos and the lingerie pages of catalogues.
We began.
“Da-da-da-da-dum,” my friends sang.
They held the sheet in front of me. Silhouetted by the sun, behind my fabric wall, I began to undress. I doubted, as I peeled off my clothes, parcelling out titillation, that they could see much beyond a suggestion of skin, the innuendo of a bare shoulder, my short hair tickling the back of my neck.
I was acting the part of stripper. I couldn’t yet have fathomed her ability to perform black magic, to manipulate the desire of her weak-kneed audience, but I understood the power for which I was competing. I threw my T-shirt, my cut-offs, and my halter top over the sheet.
A boy stands, bored, petulant. “What kind of show is this?”
“Sit down,” I tell him.
Instead, he approaches. Peers over the sheet. “You’re not naked!” he shouts. “Hey, everyone. She’s not naked!”
I’d cheated or I’d been smart, depending on your point of view: I was wearing two layers of clothes.
The boys were jeering. Would they pounce? Demand a refund? I swallowed hard. The air now felt cold. The asphalt spread like an oil stain under the see-saws. I was scared and embarrassed. I stared—at the swings, the concrete elephant, the cigarette butts, the road that wound down toward us on the playground, the flat baseball diamond protected from the busy street by a steel fence—unsure of what to do.
In every situation there’s something expected of you, something that won’t stop, like a ball bouncing down a hill that must reach rock bottom.
I decide to roll with it.
Don’t think about it, I tell myself, and peel off the rest of my clothes as fast as I can, as if I didn’t care.
The boys move as one animal, attacking the sheet. My friends do their best to protect me, anchoring the corners of the sheet to the ground. I’m pinned beneath it, fighting blind.
* * *
—
I’m in grade seven when the new girl, Brandy, transfers to my school. Impressed by her skin-tight jeans and eye makeup, I fawned over her. Rumour had it she’d been in a knife fight at her last school. I wanted that—her toughness, her confidence. I copied her style, bought Peter Pan boots and a purse with my paper-route money. I followed her to Topaz Park where we smoked on the bleachers; she bit the filter and grinned, her small blue eyes like ball bearings. I shuffled my feet in the alder leaves, pigeon feathers nestling against the seat. I knew Jesus loved me even when I sinned. I knew God forgave my smoking with Brandy because His Son had died for my right to be forgiven.
Brandy dragged deeply, then blew the smoke out through her nose. I tried to do the same but coughed until I heaved and my eyes watered.
She laughed.
We’d done this before and would do it again, many more times. I’d take her shoplifting, or I’d pinch my father’s antidepressants and share them in the girls’ washroom at lunchtime, washing them down with a homemade swill of coffee liqueur and red wine.
I continued to bring home straight A’s and awards for academic achievement. The smoking, drinking, shoplifting part of myself that I hid from my parents also begged God’s grace: I put religious tracts under windshield wipers in mall parking lots, proselytized to shoppers with brimming bags as they waited by the elevators. “Did you know that God, loves, you?” In contrition, I stopped eating to see how long I could survive on, say, an apple. Scored my skin with the tip of a protractor. Typed poems about corporal punishment, nuclear war, growing up on a potholed street with no trees.
I panicked if something prevented me from writing in my diary. I wrote as if bingeing and purging. I wrote as if to cocoon myself in lined sheets of loose-leaf. I wrote as if the words provided extra insurance that God would forgive my sins.
Brandy exhaled. “Here.”
I took another drag and didn’t cough this time.
After I smoked I’d wash my fingers with spit—my father picked up smells like a bloodhound. Later I’d learn to smoke out my bedroom window, tipping my body over the sill and my mother’s bedding plants below.
* * *
—
That year, grade seven, no one came to watch me win first prize in a French public-speaking contest. The newspaper article written about me afterward mentioned that having won the provincials, I’d be going on to represent B.C. in Ottawa at a festival of the French language. It didn’t mention how I stole my father’s antidepressants to share among friends as we pretended to get high in the girls’ washroom. “She’s active in sports and a top student overall.” I was a model child.
Two weeks after I shook Governor General Jeanne Sauvé’s hand, summer holidays began. I was sent to the home of an aunt who worked as a nanny in Orange County, California. I shared the floor of her maid’s quarters with my cousin, or if my aunt’s job required her to attend to other things, she’d leave me in the home of refugee friends. In this home children relaxed like Peter Pan’s clan of Lost Boys, spreading out on couches in front of a TV that was left on all night long. These friends owned a Vietnamese nightclub. There I’d wash and iron tablecloths with the others; we were all between twelve and eighteen. Two of us would work the door, collecting cover charges in a tiny cubicle that filled with cigarette smoke so that by the end of the night our eyes were watering. Other times the bunch of us would pile into a car and head to the pool. I called my parents and asked them to extend my flight date. This was my first taste of freedom. In this atmosphere of benign neglect, among these young Vietnamese refugees, a long-awaited sense of belonging filled me. It brought with it pride, and the feeling that I’d found home.
* * *
—
Every Saturday, in a playroom of the Queen Alexandra hospital where I volunteered, I’d sit in the lap of a Vietnamese man my father’s age and admire his straight white teeth. He liked me because I was half Vietnamese, and would ask me questions about my family. He even came to our house and joked with my father, having somehow broken through his boundaries.
One Saturday my father told me I wouldn’t be seeing him anymore: he was in jail. The man had been at the pool in a bathing suit and had hugged some children—he’d done nothing wrong, my father said; it had been a cultural misunderstanding. I believed him until the day he told me about an uncle of his who, while still a boy, had become a “hustler” to feed his family. They had been abandoned by his grandfather. The boy would meet men at the train station where he sold peanuts. One day, on his return home, the baby was crying but they had no food to give him, so he inserted his penis into the baby’s mouth. My father told this tale in a tone of admiration. “So the baby had something to suckle on.”