by Yasuko Thanh
I was working on revisions to my latest draft of Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains.
My validation and success as a writer were enabling me to provide for my children, giving me the opportunity to meet my literary heroes at readings and festivals. The self-harm and the psychotic breaks battled my new image of myself.
I couldn’t reconcile honouring my past with overcoming it.
Sleepless, I argued with my delusions of persecution.
Screaming Torture and Administrative Errors
A few months later my doctor added Topiramate to my Escitalopram prescription, but the stereo in my head remained, just tuned to a different channel.
The doctor switched my Escitalopram for Citalopram, another antidepressant, then raised my dosage.
But the pitch at which I was falling had grown too steep. I flapped my arms with the wings she’d given me, continuing to fall like a broken bird getting nowhere.
We were kicked out of our house when the owners sold it the same month my agent placed my novel with Penguin Random House during the spring of 2014. I got drunk as often as I could to numb a new delusion: that Eddie was in on a plot to kill me along with my parents.
I had nowhere to go, no one to turn to, I took cover in a corner of the basement. Out of sight, protected by the boxes Eddie had stored there, behind hangers full of winter coats and balls of tangled Christmas lights.
Like Dorothy clicking the heels of her sparkly red shoes, I begged to go home. I opened my eyes; I was still in the basement. I wept bitterly. I drew my knees to my chest and rocked.
By that October, I’d received revision notes from my publisher, and was working on incorporating them, and I’d begun to think, As soon as the book comes out. As soon as it wins a prize. As soon as my agent sells U.S. rights. Exactly what would happen then I wasn’t sure, but I kept my handle on these feelings as though clutching the hilt of a sword.
Then my body got sick. It hurt too much to eat and I lost weight, dropping to eighty-six pounds. Pain curled me into a ball. Ulcers, my doctor said. Kidney infection.
I’d been on strong antibiotics for a few days when, in the middle of a tutoring session, I collapsed.
The hospital ran tests, ultrasounds. My gall bladder had swelled to the size of a banana and verged on bursting. I would have to wait three days in hospital for my surgery. On my first night, yet to be placed in a room on a ward, on a gurney in a hospital hallway, high on morphine, I recalled through a drug-induced fog what would happen—something good—as soon as the book came out. I moved my IV cord out of the way, struggled to prop myself up, then scribbled editing notes onto a hard copy of the manuscript.
I wrote because Eddie couldn’t pay the bills.
I wrote because I selfishly expected him to.
I wrote because I loved my children.
I wrote because when I finished the book nothing bad would ever happen to me again.
* * *
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On my return from the hospital, I slept with a kitchen knife. Unable to protect myself or my children, arming myself gave me peace of mind.
Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains explored themes of resilience, transcendence: not what I had, but what I needed. Complications following surgery on my liver and pancreas resulted in more tests that finally explained what had happened to my body in the first place: eosinophilia. The blood cells tasked with killing parasites, or cancer, had in confusion attacked my organs. Thankfully, the part of my body at war with the rest had launched its assault against my digestive organs and not my heart. The irony of my own body trying to put me out of my misery did not escape me.
I needed strength. I needed an antidepressant and a mood stabilizer to get through the day. I needed to read my novel and love it. I needed to stay in bed but I didn’t have the freedom to be sick, the luxury of having another pull the rope for a while.
As a mother, I felt myself succumbing to my body’s weakness, dizziness, nausea, as if to an undertow when you’ve grown too tired to swim. In the glass viewing booth at Maisie’s gym I’d daydream about how my children would be much happier after I was gone. I was dying anyway. In between the chapters I was revising I researched shooting, hanging, jumping, overdosing.
All I had to do was finish the book, then I could let go.
* * *
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After the book was published, I left Jet, who was by now seventeen, in charge of Maisie and the house, and went to Vancouver, locking myself into a Downtown Eastside hotel room. Smoked cigarettes out of my fourth-floor window, too exhausted, borderline contemptuous, to write. Then I walked down an alley to buy drugs. I lost my room key and asked the desk clerk for another.
The squalor outside the hotel was matched by the dingy lobby. One door led to a bar with sticky floors opposite dirty picture windows and a ridiculous seating arrangement consisting of threadbare couches no one in their right mind would want to sit on. Not to mention the view: people camped on the sidewalk in front of tarps that cradled their useless wares—single shoes, clasp-less necklaces, bruised fruit, things fished out of dumpsters and bartered for drugs.
The clerk stood behind the counter in a suit jacket, subverting its propriety with his choker necklace of prison tattoos.
He said, “How will you get to your room now? Fly?” He had a heavy European accent. He had silver teeth.
I told him he was cheeky.
He yanked my arm over the counter so hard my eyes watered. “Cheeky? What means cheeky?”
His name was Vlady. He was flirting with me. I knew he was flirting in the language we spoke—that all of us spoke, the broken who’d had to fight for every single thing they owned, who’d gone hungry, who knew how to get a thing done, who punished themselves harder than anyone else, who’d shaken off the dust of the past, who’d moved through valleys of death without expecting God to step in, who’d toyed with pain. He clutched my wrist, understanding that I needed to be touched.
Then he laughed.
He let go of my wrist and handed me a new key. For a moment, I’d felt safe.
I went up to my room. 408. Flopped down on the bed. The dresser was littered with sesame balls I hadn’t eaten; they sat on brown butcher paper slick with grease, the room stank of them, and of whisky, empty bottles overflowing the trash can. On the windowsill were half-empty Styrofoam cups of coffee from the lobby swimming with cigarette butts, one knocked over, a fetid brown lake dotted by tobacco-filter islands. Not even a fly would live in such filth. I lay there staring at the cracks on the ceiling, yellow with nicotine and age, thinking about all the things I’d wanted from Eddie, for my children.
I took a shower and my hands, soaping my flesh, were meat, my body, irrelevant. I had no affection for my breasts, my thighs. Even my memories—the children’s birth, their parties, their laughter—I viewed with detachment.
I got out of the shower and lay back down on the bed soaking wet. The tap-tap-tap of the old-fashioned radiator made me think of wrestlers, tapping and tapping and tapping each other out on the mat. Hulk Hogan switching places with Jake the Snake when he was too tired to go on.
I’d severed the cord connecting my spirit to my body, the mechanical tapping of my heart, the numb rattle of my breath, the echo of a migraine. Tap. Tap. Tap. I had one thing left to do.
In 1941 Virginia Woolf wrote a note to her husband, weighed her pockets with stones, then drowned herself in the River Ouse. I needed to head to the Ivanhoe, fill my pockets with scrap metal, and walk into the Fraser along whose banks I’d once written poetry. Terrible poems.
Thomas Mann believed that one might remain as sick as possible without actually dying.
I had a choice. Or did I? Light cycled into darkness. Everything became its opposite in time.
* * *
—
The doctors at the Urgent Short Term Assessment and Treatment service sent a team to take me to the psyche ward. I was admitted to the Archie Courtnall Centre, home of the insane, the l
oony bin. A nurse took my clothes, wallet, shoelaces, cigarettes. The bathrooms had no shower curtains and I wasn’t allowed a toothbrush. They gave me two new medications, including an antipsychotic, meant to help me tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Meds.
People who needed them used that word.
“What kind of meds are you on?”
Or, “I heard they had to switch her meds—the last ones didn’t work.”
Or, the worst one of all, “He did it because he was off his meds.”
For hours I stared at a leaf and, the next day, a wall. It was peaceful here. People played their demons close to the hip. Even when being strapped down to a gurney. This building was so old that everyone slept with ghosts. The memories our bodies held flowed around and through us, nothing sturdy underfoot.
* * *
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By the time I was released a few days later, Eddie had moved his furniture out of the house. I stood quietly in the middle of the empty living room, looking at my children—who sat in the mess left behind, cross-legged on the hardwood floor, encircled by scattered books and the dishes he’d removed from the sideboard—and felt furious. Furious enough to fake a smile and say “Hey. Let’s go for ice cream.”
As we headed out I spotted a spider on the door frame. Spiders meant luck. A spider in the house meant money was on the way. She was spinning her sack; she was building up venom. I watched in horror as my own hand smacked her with my purse, the squashed remains of her body clinging to the wood. The precision and speed with which injury could be inflicted by the powerful.
* * *
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As soon as they knew, friends took charge. A couple I knew brought boxes of their grandmother’s dishes, pint mugs and wineglasses, coffee and end tables they’d been meaning to sell but “Now you can have them. No, don’t worry. Don’t pay us. They weren’t doing us any good anyway.” A friend helped me make lists of what I still needed, drove me to pawnshops and thrift stores, helped me track down the best sideboard, arranging for its delivery when I stood at the cash register, too stunned to make sense of the paperwork.
During our final days together Eddie had returned my futon, the wooden frame I’d thought would withstand an earthquake broken, the cover with its happy polka dots stained. No longer sharing the bedroom, I’d tossed and turned on its narrow width, my office too small to unfold it. Now friends heaved the unwieldy frame through the garage door, wrestled it up the staircase outside and then down the hall into the living room to fill the emptiness Eddie left behind. I’d been right about one thing: it did take up space in a room.
* * *
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The therapist wanted me to say “I deserve love,” but I began to weep instead. I’d long ago decided that to make it in this life you had to be tough.
That discipline, tenacity, ambition, talent, resourcefulness, and hard work were no guarantee of success.
That no one deserved anything, not a shot, not a fair shake.
Not for being born.
Not gymnastics lessons.
Not their parents’ attention.
Not even love.
She questioned me. Why had I ended up where I did? What made me crazy, what made me self-punish when I failed at a task? I wrote in the hope of finding answers, but what I couldn’t let go of, and what couldn’t let go of me, continued to haunt.
PART III
CIRCLE OF RETURN
TORONTO, 2016. I’m in a theatre downtown, sitting on a not-uncomfortable chair in a row close to the stage.
My editor tucked a strand of glossy brown hair behind her ear. I’d heard she was the youngest woman to have been the president of a major publishing company in Canada. I’d also heard she missed important business meetings to bake chocolate chip cookies with her sons. She impressed me.
Penguin sold bestsellers, but she spoke as if money were the least of her concerns. Like anyone, I’m sure she hoped for good profits, which could then go toward the advances paid to unknown authors like me. Books—the art of them—excited her, and with her voice racing, with hand gestures that would impress any Italian, she championed her favourites.
A cheongsam collar decorated the front of my dress, jazzing up what would otherwise have been a plain cotton number. I could still taste the wine I’d finished in the lobby before ushers herded us in here, the theatre, for the beginning of the award ceremony. I flipped through the Writers’ Trust Prize program, scanning the shortlist, the bios of nominees, including my own.
The week before, the partnered TV studio had clipped mics to the collars of each fiction writer and filmed them as they read their books’ opening lines; computer magic had added their covers floating in virtual space to the left of our heads. I stuttered in answer to the questions producers had prepared to preface my book. Watching it now on a twenty-foot screen, it was impossible for me not to criticize my appearance: frown lines, crow’s feet, the bun in my hair. All eyes were turned to the emcee, who was introducing the plot.
“Here we go,” my editor said. Sitting next to her, my publicist gave me an encouraging nod.
I’d already received a large advance in three instalments. I’d put the money into my credit union account, where, thanks to online banking, I could visit my balance from the comfort of my bedroom.
My agent had worked tirelessly to secure me a living wage. Only now, in my forties, did pride sneak into my view of my work. I’d closed the file months back and celebrated with a bologna sandwich and whisky. The bliss spread like a taproot in my backyard, ideas multiplying like irises I’d planted under the cherry tree; I smiled at those expert gardeners, my agent, my publicist, my editor, sitting nearly close enough to me for comfort. I was a survivor. I held my breath without meaning to as the emcee in his suit and tie read out the list of books against which I was competing for the $25,000 Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize. This was part of the job, hoping without dwelling, however good or bad the outcome.
In less than six months I’d gone from a bed in a psyche ward to a luxury hotel with a TV in the bathroom mirror.
One month from now I’d begin work on another book, a memoir.
Now, unable to sit still in my little black dress, I had the strange sense that my life had prepared me for this moment.
I thought of all I’d been through to get here. The beatings, the rapes. The serial affairs falling one after another like dominoes. Maisie’s OCD, her journey with meds. My journey with meds. My attempt to mediate with parents who’d given me everything they had yet still failed to provide what I’d needed. I saw them as they were then, young, hopeful, eyes glinting with mischief, hands held in love, and I saw them as they were today, a world of two, wrinkled warriors, living in the cloistered shelter of the rooms in which I’d grown up.
As the emcee opened the white envelope containing the winner’s name, I remember thinking that I was lucky. I remember thinking that, win or lose, I’d written a book. That nothing could hurt me now.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK IS FOR THOSE WHO WERE THERE, and for those who are no longer with us. I’d like to thank 12 Midnite for his courage, loyalty, and enduring compassion, Fiona Lam, Jane Silcott, Zoey Leigh Peterson, Anakana Schofield for teaching me what it means to bear witness, Caroline Adderson, Suzie Spitfyre, Stéphane Gagnon, and Anastasia Andrews. I thank my agent, Denise Bukowski, for her steadfast faith in me, and my editor and publisher, Nicole Winstanley, for reading me like a soul sister. Thank you Shaun Oakey and Karen Alliston for line edits. For always being there, I’d like to thank Yvette Guigueno, Terry Glavin, and Andrew Struthers. Thank you to my children Jet and Maisie, and a special thank-you to Mick Garris.
In remembrance of Lucky, Lebanese Sam, Barrington (Buzz) Beswick, Royce, Kimi, Brandy, Sarah, and Toby.
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Portions of this book have appeared in the following publications: Prairie Fire, Vancouver Noir (anthology), Love Me Do (anthology), Taddle Creek, SUBterrain, Speak: Journalist
s for Human Rights, and Walk Me Home (anthology).
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The author wishes to acknowledge the support of the B.C. Arts Council, the Canada Arts Council, and The Writers’ Trust.