Isn't it ironic?

No, I am not echoing Alannis Morrisette here.  I am referring to the funny way that the universe works to stop you in your tracks by giving you some plum just when you are eating handfuls of dirt.  Ha ha, you got me, universe.

So, I started the blog series on my life as a McPhD because I was trying to regain some semblance of a ground to stand on.  June 25th marked the 5th year anniversary of my defense and fearing its approach, I began to string some words together to review what had happened in this period and find some humour (because I was sick of lying in my bed and crying at my ceiling while my tears speckled my pillows.  Very dramatic, I know)  and grace (since humiliation is the hallmark of a McPhD's life, a recuperation of some self-dignity was in order).  I was pleased to know that other people actually read these fragments, and found them interesting.  A lot of people even told me that they could relate.  Wow.  Connection.  In the isolating despair of the McPhD hustle, it is gold to find others to share the dance with.  Thank you!

Now, back to the irony.  I got a job. It's true. Just when I was ready to throw in the towel and blog recklessly about every academic institution that have ever vexed me or my friends, one of them hired me.  Mind you, I have not been hired as faculty, so hold the applause.  I've been hired in administration.  But! I am getting paid in real money that gets deposited into my bank account on a bi-monthly basis. I am finally, regular people.  I even get to line up at the bus stop with all the other nine-fivers at 8:30 am and 5 pm between Mondays and Fridays in my appropriate office ensemble.  This, for now, is enough.  No, it's actually ample.  The chocolate frosting on this cake is that I even get to hold on to my sessional teaching with this institution so that I don't lose my standing. (In this particular school, you spend a maximum of 5 years as sessional and you're out.  But more on that later.)

This means a few things for this blog.  I am committed to finishing the McPhD series.  I must.  There's just too much left to say, so keep reading.  Apologies for the lag between posts, but I was too busy caressing my new desk and new file cabinets and new computer keyboard and new ergonomic chair in my new office to do anything else. 

Last, but not least, University of Venus will be posting the first excerpt from this series next week.  YES!! This both frightens and thrills me - like all really good things.  I better get writing, eh? 

The Colour-Coding of Higher Ed

            The first few weeks of teaching at the college were rough, I will not lie.  Along with the Children and Youth worker program students, I had three classes in the Social Service Worker Program.  All of the classes were on academic writing. As part of the application process, all students have to take an English proficiency test.  There are 4 options that students can be streamed into as an outcome: exemption from writing classes, mandatory class in advanced writing, mandatory basic class with requirements to take the advanced class after completion, and mandatory basic ESL with requirements to complete advanced class.  If you are funnelled into the writing classes, you must pay extra – above the program tuition.  Makes you wish you had paid more attention in high school English class, eh?

                The actual skills level of the classes ranged widely.  Some of them were able to write at an undergrad university level, so why the hell were they assigned into these classes?  No clue.  Then there were some students who didn’t know how to write a complete sentence.  The ESL students had a better grasp of grammar than the “native” English speakers.  And the native speakers could have benefitted from ESL.  Hm.  It was a bit mind-boggling.  Besides from teaching multi-level classes, I got my first real taste of the “reluctant learner”.  In one class, before I would even begin my lesson, inevitably, someone would ask me, “Are we getting let out early today?”  If you need anything to deflate your already frail ego, this was the place and position to be.  I don’t mind telling you that these students terrified me.  Completely freaked me out, and I am talking stomach cramp starting two hours before class kind of freaked out.  

                I started out too nice.  Should have been bad-ass.  I endured a fair amount of teeth-sucking, and texting, and phone-answering in the middle of my classes.  Oh, I let them out early – sometimes 2 hours early (in 3 hour classes) because I could only tread water in the rapids for so long before drowning.  Every week, I tackled it from another angle, trying to make it fun, more engaging.  My Wednesday class was the worse of the bunch while my ESL class was a joy.  I only had 4 ESL students who were paying double the tuition fee as international students and were not going to fuck up.

 

                But.  And this is the really important part.

                Let me give you a better visual to these classes.  In my Social Service Worker program classes, 99.9% of my students were young women of colour.  Aside from the ESL class, all of them came from the burbs.  As I got to know them better – and I did because I dropped the Dr. Leung fancy pants academic facade and became the Scarborough girl that I also am – I realized that for many, many of them, they were in this program because they knew the “system”.  They and their families were products of social services of all kinds – foster care, social financial assistance, subsidized housing, the police, etc.  Their case workers were as frequent visitors to their homes as family and friends.  Now before you start hearing the opening chords to “Gangsters in Paradise”, the theme music to Michelle Pfeiffer’s  film “Dangerous Minds”, please stop.  It wasn’t like that.

                I stopped trying to teach writing as an essential skill to upgrading one’s potential to garner a livelihood.  It is that, but this was not the right approach.  The way that made it work was this: I started teaching them how to beat yet another system that stood between them and something marginally better than what they had.  These women did not “choose” to be social service workers because they had an aching need to “help people”.  They were smarter than that.  They were there because that’s mostly what they knew, what was accessible to them, what was perhaps reachable.  

                One of my students, C, a particularly “reluctant learner” came up to me after class, throwing a graded assignment on the table and cussing.  She had received a failing grade on a “reflection paper”.  Perplexed, I wondered how anyone could fail at sharing their opinion.  In these programs, there were a lot of touchy feely exercises.  Lots of bad 80s flashback circle discussions where people are encouraged to divulge their inner most secrets and cry about them, or in this case, write about them.  I hated them, but never revealed this to my students.  Instead, I just helped put in correct punctuations, re-work run-on sentences, start new paragraphs, etc.

I skimmed C’s paper and found the grammar, sentence and paragraph structures perfect.  I looked at the notes in the margin, the red-penned authority of her teacher and felt like kicking something.  “You don’t express what you FEEL.  These are thoughts, not feelings.”  The same gist of comments coloured the whole paper.  I looked at C, who was already talking about “cutting” this instructor, and I really couldn’t blame her.  

“What does she want??” C screamed. 

I had a really soft spot for C.  She was 19, Black, a single mother to a 1 year old daughter.  She had been in foster care since she was 11 because a family member had sexually abused her.  Her daughter was cared for by an elderly woman in her building while she attended college full time.  Her biggest fear, she disclosed to me was that CAS would try to take her baby away again because someone in the building had called on her before.  These were just some of the facts of C’s life.  What you also need to know is that C was smarter than most people I have ever met – this includes the PhDs, the MDs and all the rest of the alphabet.  She was also one of my loudest teeth suckers, but man, I didn’t blame her after I got to know her.  She didn’t need grammar since her writing was just fine.  She had been racially profiled into this class.  I knew it, and she knew it. 

What did her affective state have to do with her success as a student in this program?  And more importantly, why was she being punished for not “feeling” enough? Why should C indulge this instructor or this program’s fetish for the sad victim story?  These young women did not sign up for therapy.  They signed up to get a piece of paper that would give them some legitimacy in this world.  They were paying through the eyeteeth for a two-year program that many of them could have taught because they actually LIVED through the systems they were studying.  They could tell you how it’s supposed to work, and the hundred ways that it doesn’t.  They could rhyme off any given form you are supposed to fill out to feed the bureaucracy of the ever-eroding safety net.  Why should they have to share their pain too?  Especially to strangers and this institution that were only proving to be yet another wall to scale and escape.

I had no good answers for C.  I had already been rebuffed time and time again by the other instructors to just stick to what I was supposed to do – teach them how to write.  Not what to write.  One instructor even told her students that I wasn’t teaching them the proper way to write a Sociology essay because all their theses were “too political”.  Scuse me?  (I googled this instructor, by the way, and found out that she only had a Masters, but somehow knew way more about Sociology than me)  Why not just teach them something else, you might ask? One of the core subjects that actually had content.  I couldn’t get anything else at this college except teaching writing.  The few jobs I applied for, I wasn’t even interviewed.  Not high enough on the union totem.  I know instructors who spent years living term to term not knowing if they were going to get re-hired, and I was just Johnny-Come-Lately.  Isn’t that a hoot?

I told C to lie if she had to.  Lie about her feelings.  Give them whatever they wanted and pass.  Then get out with her soul intact.  I even hugged her, and I don’t ever hug students.  She seemed like she could use one, and so did I.  Something to remind each other that we were human first and foremost and not just the cast to fill in the spaces between the cinder blocks in this here institution – the role of the cash cow student and the precarious worker. 

I threw out my lesson plans on writing formal essays, and I just asked them to write.  Anything.  I received bouquets of personal essays.  Their pieces were funny, tragic, resilient, stirring, hopeful and hopeless.  Approximately 80% of them disclosed stories of sexual violence.  Many wrote about poverty, marginalization, racism, misogyny.  A lot of them were holding on by a thread, but it was a strong thread.  I didn’t ask them to tell me how they “felt”, but they did, and I am beyond honoured that they trusted me. I only wished I had been able to give them more.

I didn’t pull a Sidney Poitier and uplift them so that they could take their lower rung positions in the neo-liberal rat race or lie to them that it would get better.  I didn’t pretend that the diploma they would receive at the end of this would even guarantee them work.  But I also didn’t disrespect their life choices of entering this school and wanting to join this field of work.   I didn’t disbelieve their dreams of being professionals and having stable incomes, housing, families of their own.  I wasn’t a saviour. For a short while, I was hopefully, a friend.   

In Case of Emergency

The only jobs I have ever gotten in academe have been mostly by accident.  Like the time when I got my first post as a lecturer because the professor broke her leg.  Or the time I got a coveted position because another professor decided that she had had enough of academic life and split home to Alberta less than 24 hours of making that decision. 

I am the hired gun, the last resort, the one who they ask when they need a course syllabus developed in less than two weeks, and who will do all my own photocopying and never go over my limit.  I also have friends EVERYWHERE who are always quick to name me as a competent fill-in and available at the drop of a hat.  (Thank you. I love you all.)

Multiple Organics opened in June 2008, and I started teaching 4 courses at a community college in September. (I will never name names of academic institutions in this blog, from fear of never being hired again!)  I got this gig because someone else had pulled the plug on them just a week before classes were to begin.  Just when I thought I had nothing lined up for the fall, I got a bonanza of 4 classes.  Yay!  It was teaching academic writing and nothing juicy in my area, but what the hell?  It was work and PAID work.  My wage was $84/hour for a 12 hour week.  No funds were allotted for prep, admin work, grading, meeting students, answering their emails ,etc.  (I believe in naming wages because transparency is important, and kudos must be given to the student activists in the unions who continue to fight for fairer conditions.)

Before this, I had never taught college level before.  All my teaching experience was in the crème de la crème of universities in Ontario, where undergrads can only get in with A averages.  This doesn’t mean that there aren’t slackers in the cohort, or that this is truly the brightest bunch in Canada, but these places imply that you are among the best of the best, and if you want parchment bearing its brand at the end of your stay, you better do as you’re told.  There is currency in which schools you attend.  Just look at Maclean’s asinine university ranking every year.  The ranking/branding of academic institutions translate into more administration, more corporate funding to particular faculties, and more enforcement (subtle and otherwise) for compliance and docility in the student and faculty bodies.  This is how the ivy-leaguers and wanna-be ivy-leaguers of Canada see it: they don’t need you.  And you should be bloody grateful for breathing their heady air.  So behave or get out.  (Hey, that’s just my take after hours of fieldwork as both student and teaching staff.)

Accustomed to this climate, I ventured to community college.  I received a textbook and a set curriculum.  They didn’t care how I taught, only that the specified material was covered.  Grammar is lovely.  I love grammar.  However, teaching and learning grammar can be as interesting as watching a dog clean its nether region.  Alas, I was armed and ready.  The classrooms didn’t have a smart board, so I made do with old school transparencies and overhead.  I would mix up my pedagogy – some lecture, some group work, some discussion.  Tried as I might, I couldn’t find any interesting documentaries featuring Stuart Hall or Slavoj Zizek on writing an essay.  

My first class was with first year Child and Youth workers.  They were timid, freshly out of high school, appraising each other and me apprehensively.  I launched into an introductory lecture on the importance of writing skills both in college and in life while they stared back at me without blinking.  Perfect, I thought.  They were enraptured!

10 minutes in, a hand shot up from the back.  Ah!  A question!  What engaged students, I thought. 

“Yes?” I inquired.

A young woman with her face suddenly screwed up like she had just eaten a pickle and didn’t think it would be that sour,  asked, “When you actually say something important, could you let us know, so I can write it down?” 

And we were off. 

The Art of Dealing with Rejection

So I applied for a research job in a non-academic organization about a month ago.  It was a plum – great pay, full benefits, pretty good politics, a long stretch of vacation days, sick days, mental health (!) days, etc.  I worked on the application for weeks, passing it to friends for feedback.  I really thought I had a shot at it.  I even spent all the money in my head.  Repairing the hole in my roof where the water has been streaking down my walls for the last 3 years, a wardrobe of suitable office clothes with complimenting shoes and accessories, maybe even a family vacation somewhere that resembles the rain forest where my son’s idols Diego and Dora live.   

I shouldn’t have let myself go there.  Because.  I didn’t even get shortlisted. 

After I received the thank you, but no thank you letter (unlike academic institutions, they were very prompt with their rejection), I went upstairs and went to bed.  This has been my response to the answer “no” lately.  Drop everything, immediately head upstairs, get in bed and cover myself up with my blanket.  Stay breathing and hopefully, sleep it off.  Sometimes this helps.  Other times, I wake up in a shock of sweat, confused by why I am in bed in the middle of the afternoon.  Then I remember I am doing the rejection sleep again and fall back into bed.  (Note: If you have any out-of-work or underemployed PhDs friends and loved ones, a good gift idea is  really good bedding – fluffy pillows, percale sheets, a warm duvet.  The flinging of one’s body into bed and forming a human cocoon gives a sense of high drama that is called for in situations like this, and props help.)

Anyway, this last rejection really got to me for some reason.  I suppose the NOs added up, took a life of its own and finally piled on top of me like an avalanche.  I was in the fetal position for a couple of days, wondering when my life took this turn.  My son asked me to play tag, and I told him that mama was too sad to play tag.  He gave me that look that 4 year olds give when they don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about and don’t really care, shrugged and ran off to ask daddy and the dogs to play tag instead.  Add mama guilt to the pity party.  

I don’t think I am a pessimist by nature.  I am, in fact, hopeful beyond reason.  Even in grad school, when the concept of hope was thoroughly critiqued as an irrational discourse to have in this moment in history, I was stubbornly unmoved to the side of futility.  But lately, I have been sliding.  Everything looks pretty fucked at the moment with no reprieve.  From tar sands to Afghanistan.  From poverty to the large scale de-personalized violence against peoples, places and things wreaked by states and corporations and state corporations.  And me - not able to do a goddamn thing about any of it because I have no useful place in the world.  Self-importance much?  Depression mixed with self-aggrandizing is a dangerous brew. 

I eventually did get out of bed, mainly because I have to in order to take care of my child, work at the store, and generally keep the rhythm of life moving.  If no one expected me to show up for my life, I may still be under the covers.  Truth.

Rage on!

Yesterday, the students in Quebec reached 100 days of protest.  What began as a student-led protest against the proposed tuition hike has now grown into a wide stand against Bill 78, the latest in attempts to criminalize dissent.  There are still people mystified by the anger, resistance and civil disobedience in Montreal.  You shouldn’t be.  You should be mystified by why it’s not going on everywhere. Rock on in the (not-so-free) world.

A Real Job

There is a lot more to say about the store.   Nupur and I have often talked about how we would make really good reality TV.  As Nupur puts it, we are waaay more interesting than those “Cupcake Girls”.   But alas, I started this blog series to talk about living the McPhD life, so I’ll get to those (mis)adventures first.

            It became quickly apparent that the store was not going to be securing us a stable income until year 3, at the very least.  We had a loan to pay off, inventory to buy, a customer base to build.  While my partner, Andrew had a full-time job as an elementary school teacher, we had expenses and a student loan to pay off.  Besides, my shelf life as a “new graduate” was near expiry, and I really felt I needed to get out in the field.  In the beginning of my academic job search, I would try for REAL jobs.  Real jobs in this context mean tenure-track positions – that gilded cage where the institution puts new faculty in a gerbil wheel and turns up the speed full blast.  Throw in a full teaching load, demand departmental service, and put the fear of god and hell in them to publish or perish come time for tenure review.  Tenure-track scholars have a handful of years to build a portfolio of all their accomplishments, like a prized scrapbook from the most hard-ass boot camp you have ever attended.  Their relationships suffer, they start to reminisce about their impoverished years as a grad student as the good old days, and in the middle of grinding out yet another research paper which they hope will be peer reviewed by a semi-reputable journal that maybe 3 people will ever read in their life times, they will suddenly be caught in an existentialist angst and ask themselves, “what is this life about, anyway?”  

            (Esteemed tenured friends, you can correct me if I am wrong.  Since I’ve never been on the track, I can only glean from observing your lives.  ROFLMAO, as the kids say these days)

            All that said, when the rare posting appeared that kinda, sorta look like something that I could apply for, I heard angels sing as clouds parted and rays of sunshine beamed on me.  Right away, I would start spinning my work into whatever they wanted it to be.  Cultural geography?  Sure!  Gender and queer studies?  You bet!  Do the moonwalk on a handstand?  Absolutely!  I would send off my CV, gorgeous cover letters that I would labour on for weeks, hit up my supervisor and committee for letters of ref and...wait.  And wait.  And wait some more.  Most often, if you are not short-listed, you do not hear anything back.  You are gum on their shoe, and not even a fat wad of it that bugs them, but just the trace of gum that they don’t even notice.  It started to get embarrassing when I had to ask my peeps for references for the 534th time.  I imagined them in their offices, in the middle of their very legit and important research that was going to change how the WORLD thought about EVERYTHING, and ding, there would be my measly plea for yet another reference letter. 

By the time I received insider information that one job I had applied for at a Toronto university had received over 250 applications and the 10^th job I had applied for had been cancelled due to "budget changes", the giant boulder of reality finally sunk in. I realized there were Humanities and Social Science Ph.Ds everywhere, sort of  like the walking dead. They were lined up in front of me at the Tim Horton's.  They were beside me shoe-shopping for their kids' shoes at Payless.  They were crying at some sad foreign film two rows down in a half-empty theatre in the middle of the afternoon. At my local baby/parent drop-in, I met two more.  We bounced our babies and whispered like a secret society while the other parents joined in on yet another round of Itsy Bitsy Spider at circle time. 

 (This doesn’t even include all the PhDs who are driving the cabs, phoning me from call centres, serving me coffee at said Tim Horton’s and cleaning the ivory towers.  These folks make up a special group that are granted settlement in Canada particularly because of their higher education, but quickly stripped of their credentials upon landing. Those fellow scholars from Asia, Africa, Latin America, are the McPhDs of all McPhDs.)

            So, completely freaked out, I started to furiously apply for the sessional and contract positions, scatter-gunning my CV everywhere. Sessional positions are pay by course positions.  They range from $6, 000 to $10, 000 a course depending on the university.  Don't ask me to break this down into an hourly wage because I only did it once, and it put me well below a living wage.  At the college level, salary is calculated per hour, per class hours (there is no accounting for prep, administration, grading, etc). According to a recent US stat, tenure-track, the proportion of tenure-track/sessional ratio is now at 35% to 65%.  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I heard a recent NPR show about the ever-rising number of PhDs on food stamps.  Sessionals do not get benefits or funding for research.  On some occasions, I've even wondered whether I would get a library card.  For reals.

If you're really lucky and secure a handful of sessional courses, you will likely burn out while teaching a bunch of undergrads who will facebook and text all class long about the vastly more important things in life like creating a new cat meme instead of listening to the lecture you have spent two months preparing.  Since you will be drained, and unfunded for your research, the likelihood of producing published articles will grow slimmer, making your chances of securing “the Job” even less likely.  And so goes the vicious cycle of the contingent University lecturer.  

The Toronto market is especially super-saturated.  Everybody wants to stay in Toronto.  I know some people in my cohort who spread out far and wide across the country and beyond to better their chances, but with a child, a mortgage, families nearby, I wouldn’t be able to re-locate.  But I did widen my geography.  I set my limits to the southern Ontario circuit, deciding that I would commute to wherever the Greyhound could go in less than 2 hours.  This would approximately add 4 or 5 universities to my net.  

 More waiting.  If they don’t send out replies for tenure-track jobs, they especially ignore you for sessional positions.  So you are less than that trace of gum on their shoe, you are just the slightest skid mark on the bottom of their sole.  Maybe a smidge of an ant gut that they didn't realize they murdered on the way from the parking lot to their corner offices high above the proletariat. Now, I suppose I should be fairer to “them”.  “They” are the overworked, tenure-track and tenured gerbils in the gilded cages mentioned above, their own rat race set in motion by policies and institutions that are creating a sweatshop of knowledge production. 

            Still, when I do get the odd rejection letter, I am grateful to the school for at least showing some common courtesy by acknowledging that I exist.  And trying.   Because lords and lordesses, I am trying.

                 

We aren't in grad school anymore, Toto!

So I told Nupur about this blog, and she said I needed to back up a bit and write about the two months we spent getting the store ready to open.  For two women who had been living in nerdworld for a long time, the leap to working with tradesmen (emphasis on the “men”), material (“real” material as in tiles, paint, electrical, shelves, fridges, sinks, counters, etc. as opposed to the esoteric material of critical sociologists), and the public (a.k.a. the masses, the multitudes, the “faces of the other”), was jarring, to say the least.  

For the better part of a decade, Nupur and I were immersed in libraries, building fortresses of books around us and mingling only with other theory-heads in that intense and unhealthy way that only grad students can understand.  Our particular clique of nerds communicated in a short-hand language that was both obnoxious (to other people) and charming (to us). We weren’t as insufferable as some academics.  For instance, we didn’t pepper our conversations with French cinema and Crit Lit references or mention important theorists by their first names like we had just Starbucked them the other day.  

Still, our day-to-day parlance was shaped around the contours of our work.  When confronted with the dilemma of whether to shampoo AND condition, we would wonder, “What would Foucault do?”  (He would actually forego both since he was bald) When bored, we resorted to games of mental endurance with inebriated rounds of “Who’d you do?  Lenny Kravitz or Paul Gilroy?” (Well, d’uh!) The highlight of our social life was hitting the wine and cheese events that followed the lectures of visiting scholars. The bigger the scholar, the bigger the cheese.  This didn’t apply to wine.  Although, the bigger the scholar, the less likely you will get boxed wine.   But again, these rules are contingent on which faculty is hosting the event, when in the budget cycle the talk was happening, yadda yadda yadda, so perhaps you should ignore all the above examples as God’s truth...

But back to the store.  We rented an empty space measuring approximately 650 square feet on the ground floor with the same dimensions in the basement.  To get it ready, we had to build all the shelves, re-wire the electrical, put in new flooring, install lighting, purchase equipment, and a million other tiny details in between.  100% of the people who we worked with in order to pull this thing off, were men.  Old men, young men, White men, Black men, Asian men, nice men, mean men, indifferent men.  Misogynists, feminists, capitalist pigs, burnt-out labourers, artists, anarchists, hipsters – you name it, we came across them.  

A particular low point: We went to the lumber yard to buy 40 two by fours for our carpenter who didn’t have a vehicle.  All the workers refused to help Nupur and I load the wood in her minivan because they didn’t want to take responsibility in case the sheets fell off and killed somebody (their words).  They didn’t mind standing around and watching though.  As Nupur and I grunted, got slivers and bruises, and swore a bloody streak up and down the minivan, a dozen men stood around us with arms crossed and stone faces.  Remember, I had just given birth, and what they call my “pelvic floor” was not having its best moment, especially while hefting heavy lumber around.  I am sure I peed a bit, but under the circumstances, I really didn’t care if anyone noticed.  We shoved a sheet in, and another slipped out.  We tried piling them on top, but the ropes wouldn’t tie tight enough for them to stay still.  I’m not sure what those guys expected us to do.  Perhaps break down in tears, pleading with them in our littlest girl voices for help.  Actually, I was positive that that’s what they expected.  These are the reasons we didn’t:  1) we didn’t own little girl voices because we were 40 year old grown feminists more apt to kickass than to cry, and 2) I would sooner schlep each piece of lumber on my own shoulders across Dundas piece by piece like a crazed Jesus than ask these a-holes for further assistance.  After 2 hours of this (yes, 2 HOURS), the manager finally stepped in and called them to help.  They got the lumber secured in 10 minutes flat, and we finally drove off the lot.  I muttered “fuck” beneath my breath a hundred times and couldn’t wait to change my pants. 

Then, an unexpected experience:  We contacted a lighting company to help us figure out what we needed.  By this point in the process, we were dressed to work – old jeans, stained t-shirts, hair all fucked up.  In strode two men who were dressed like they were going to a wine bar on a second date.  The flattered us, even flirted a bit.  It’s a haze around what was actually said and done, but like all good players, they had finesse. There were moments that I thought the four of us would break into a hot and heavy salsa right there in our dingy, dirty storefront.  I started to regret that I hadn’t applied eyeliner that morning.  Don’t get me wrong.  While I loved, loved, loved my partner (oh, Andrew, you know I do!) and didn’t have the desire to change my FB status to “open relationship”, it’d been a long time since some young guy in nice clothes paid me any attention. When Nupur and I were sufficiently charmed, these players laid it on us.  They whipped out their plan – a detailed depiction of the floor plan we had described on the phone, overlaid with their ideas for lighting.  They included LED spotlights that would make the colour of the produce POP.  Apples would take on a thousand hues of red, each leaf of lettuce defined, the curve of a banana accentuated.  They would look like candy, enticing all the people on the street to march like zombies into our store, dazzled by the array of our wares.  The men swept their arms across the room, describing the soft glow that would bathe the store so that it would always look like mid-morning in the Caribbean.  Light!  Who knew?  We were elated, giddy, spun.  Until Nupur, always the more pragmatic and useful one between us, asked, “how much?”  They hemmed and hawed, trying valiantly to bring us back to the transformative magic of light. How much?  she demanded.  They slipped us an invoice.  10 k.  These are the things that make you go “hmmm”.  Suddenly, I felt dirty.  

While we couldn’t afford the Caribbean morning or the POP, Nupur and I agreed that it wasn’t a total waste of time.  We felt like we had just been on a double date, and as dates go, we’d both been on much, much worse.

My Life in the Academic Industrial Complex, or My Last 5 Years as a McPhD

 I should have paid heed when I was still in my work clothes of sweats and greasy hair. Everyone told me to plan a career while I was a PhD student. Don’t just think deep thoughts and write about them - frame the work in a career trajectory so that I could launch myself straight through the windows of the ivory tower before the ink on the diploma was even dry. I didn’t listen. I indulged in cerebral calisthenics as its own pursuit, wallowing in the pleasure of acquiring and making knowledge without checking to see if what I had was a marketable commodity. People (non-academics who I called civilians) would ask me what the heck my dissertation was about. I boiled it down to the simplest language I could muster: the representation of race and belonging in national narratives, specifically in sites of memory in Canada. Whaaaaa? I didn’t care. I believed in what I was doing. Nothing exhilarated me quite like scholarly work. It killed me and built me a million times over.


Then I got pregnant around the time of my final rounds with committee. I was 7 months at my defense. Surrounded by supportive faculty and the nicest external ever, I became a doctor, buoyed by those feel-good hormones that come with the last trimester of incubation. My supervisor asked me why now? The baby was going to pulverize my brain into oatmeal mush for at least 2 years. Pshaw, I thought, fantasizing myself reading tomes and writing beautiful journal articles while the baby cooed and smiled at me from his crib. Not so much.

The first few months of mothering were a blur. I didn’t know that the sound of newborns crying resemble hyenas in heat , or that those purple-faced screaming sessions could last for hours. I also did not know that my kid would poop and pee like a leaky boat, and that the sights and smells of his diaper contents would send me into retches so bad that I would fall to the floor gagging. The area of my brain reserved for abstract and analytical thinking shut its heavy curtains on me. Instead, the primal parts ignited in full force – feed the baby, change the baby, rock the baby, repeat. I didn’t regret it. I loved my child waaaaay more than I loved my dissertation, but wow, did life change.

My baby was five months old when I received the resounding “NO” from SSHRC for a post-doc fellowship. I had three other freshly minted doctor friends gathered in my living room, each had already received their polite form letters, and we were all anticipating mine. I intercepted the letter carrier before the slim letter envelope could hit the bottom of my mailbox. I ripped it open, and our thoughts turned to alcohol. There were no jobs opening up anywhere. The neoliberal universities were all turning to sessional and contract workers to fill in their slots to maximize their profits, and the coveted tenure-track job was becoming as elusive as the Holy Grail. When the odd posting did appear, Ph.D.s circled like hungry sharks, armed with arms-length worth of publications and American Ivy-League credentials. What the hell were we going to do? Well, for the moment, one of us had to stay sober for the sake of the baby.

Nupur (one of the SSHRC rejects and a long-time friend) and I got particularly frantic while the other two were resigned to a thimble of rum. Let’s just open a business, I screamed, still shell shocked from sleep deprivation and covered with baby puke. Yeah, she screeched back, her eyes shiny and huge with desperation. The next month, we signed a 5 year lease on a storefront located around the corner from my house, and the month after that, we opened an organic grocery store. We thought of calling it PLAN B Organics, but someone else already had that name. Go figure.

Combined with 6 degrees and some food experience (hers), we launched into the world of entrepreneurial-dom. How hard could it be, I thought? How hard? THIS HARD. I didn’t take to owning a business like a fish to water. It all felt counter-intuitive to me. Thank god, Nupur was savvy in the ways of profit-margins and price points. I scampered around the store like a wagging puppy. Please love us, please love us! The gravity of what we had done only sank in months later, when we had built a steady customer base and were pushing forward with some momentum. Or maybe I was just getting more sleep and coming back to my senses. I blinked at the picture. What were we doing? Were we just glorified cashiers? Did our immigrant parents hope this for us? Bargaining with farmers for the best produce, lugging potatoes and apples up and down stairs, arranging and re-arranging cans on the shelf? Two Asian women, stepping back into the fragmented histories of our people in the new world. What were we going to do next? Open a hand laundry? As a feminist and anti-colonial scholar, it was confusing for me to reconcile all these things. My critical analysis slowly kicked back in service, as I observed what had become my life.

Chapter 4, The Wondrous Woo

New Chapters

While Darwin and Sophia catapulted into their separate realms of fame, that fall, I went off to university in Ottawa like I had planned. I wasn't sure whether I would go or not. I had asked Ma whether I should stay with her. She wouldn't hear of it. She reminded me that it was what Ba and her had always wanted for me.

When I got accepted at Carleton University two months before Ba died, we all thought that this was the momentous event of the year. No one suspected the things that were about to come, making me going away to university seem like a tiny drop of rain in the torrential downpour. We had gathered around the acceptance letter, Ma and Ba handling it like it was a sacred scroll. Ba told me it was my new chapter waiting, like blank pages in a book. Ma reminded me to always be clean. And helpful.

Sophia and Darwin had also been excited about it for their own reasons. Sophia was thrilled with to finally have her own room, and Darwin wanted to visit the Museum of Man in Ottawa to check out the dinosaurs. The ones in Toronto’s Museum Royal Ontario Museum, according to him, sucked eggs. All of us were going to spend a weekend at a hotel before launching me into my blank pages. Going away to university was to be my thunder.

But now, Ma was with Darwin in Copenhagen at some music conservatory. Sophia was already with Professor Gorky in Montreal where she was attending McGill on fellowship. Ma and Ba had bought me matching luggage when I got accepted. They even had it monogrammed for me. My initials, M.W. were tagged on each buckle. I had thought it was old fashioned when they first pointed it out to me, but one look at their face, and I realized it meant a lot to them. They were pale blue in 3 different sizes. The smallest one flipped open and had a mirror glued to the lid.

I surveyed myself in the mirror and wondered what the other students would wear. My clothes were mainly made up of jeans and sweatshirts. Some of the zippers on the jeans were broken because I always bought them one size smaller. The tighter, the better. Once, I tried putting them on in the shower so the denim would mould into my skin, but had such an ordeal taking them off afterwards that I never did it again. Also, my legs stayed indigo for a week.

I folded the pants and put them into the largest suitcase. I could try all I wanted to achieve the long silhouette of the slender girls at my school, but I would always look more like one of the seven dwarves. Not much of a waist, hips that flared way out and my bum ended near my mid-thigh in the back. I wasn't fat - Nida called me womanly. I hated that. I wished I had a body like Deborah Harry in Blondie. Bone-skinny, all edges and points, like she hadn’t eaten in a year.

I had wanted to get a new haircut before I left for Ottawa, but the flurry of The Gifts completely derailed me. My hair hung all over my shoulders like a forgotten lawn. My bangs reached the middle of my eyes, covering my large round glasses. I was perpetually pushing strands off my face, so I could see.

At least my skin was good. Clear, small-pored, not a pimple in sight. Ma often told me I should be proud of this feature. I sighed, looking at myself. I really didn’t want to take this old Miramar to university, but like it or not, she was coming.

# # #

I thought about taking the subway to the bus station, but I had more bags than hands, so I doled out some of my carefully squirreled money for a taxi and tried to keep my hands steady.

On the bus, I sat back and watched the flat Ontario landscape roll by: endless fields, an occasional cluster of cows. Sometimes, there would be a house, a lone figure in a stand of grass. I wondered about the people who lived out there along the highway, and what it would feel like to watch the world speed by yet remain so still. I felt lonely, more than I had ever felt before. I leaned my head against the cold glass of the window and thought of my friends.

My high school friends were all like me –a small cluster of Asian girls who also wore glasses, got As from the teachers who valued standardized testing (usually multiple choice), and Bs among the ones who wanted participation. We had collected each other along the way through elementary, junior high and high school. Instinctively, we gathered, became friends, bonded at the outer margins of the complicated social organization of school. We ate lunch together in the corner of the cafeteria, and talked about films and celebrities, from Hong Kong, to Bolly/Hollywood. But mostly, we talked about the small world of Holloway High – our classes, assignments, teachers while the rest of the school saw us as shadows pressed in the hallways. We were silent props, fillers to the story and drama of high school where the popular kids were in the real show.

Outside of the school, it was a different scene; for instance, one of our favourite games was “who’d you do”. It would start innocently enough, led by the Denise Pak (“who’d you do? Mickey Mouse or Mighty Mouse? Fred Flintstone or Barney Rubble?”) but it would quickly derail. Often times, it ended with Tina Chan refusing to choose between Mr. Troy (the Phys-Ed teacher with BO) and Gant Banderby (the skinny nerd with acne who brought her gifts of his mother’s homemade cookies wrapped in heart-shaped doilies).

We slandered the cheerleaders (all sluts), the jocks (hunks of burning love but dumb as doorknobs), the brainiacs who ran student council (pretentious and annoying), and the beautiful people who didn’t have to try very hard at anything but got first-rate everything (fated for tragedy sometime in their lives because they just had it too easy) (it’s karma, Nida said.). We called ourselves the 4Some, after a Hong Kong pop band by the same name, and also because there were 4 of us. Now, I was bussing through fields of nowhere on my way to Ottawa, Nida was already at Western, Denise at UT Scarborough, Tina was at Centennial College. Nothing would ever be the same again.

Once in awhile, a town sprung up from the expanse. A rise of buildings, a few houses, a shopping centre off the highway, and then fields again. Signs gave a sense of my bearings. Places with old English names like Prince Edward County, Kingston, Cornwall, peppered with native ones, Gananoque, Petawawa and finally, Ottawa.

After 5 hours on the road, I arrived. I surveyed the bus station, teeny in comparison to the one in Toronto. The taxi was across the street, so I had to drag my three beautiful new suitcases across the pavement to the lone taxi waiting. Mere minutes later (was Ottawa really so small?), the cab pulled over to a mammoth red house set on a steep hill resembling the Amityville Horror. Looming on the edge of two dozen uneven steps, the house looked like it was going to swoop down and eat me. Whoa I thought, gazing up at my new chapter.

I couldn't help, but imagine what things would have been like if my family were here. Ba would have gotten my luggage up the stairs in no time. Ma would have carried boxes of food, all neatly packaged in foil or freezer bags. Sophia and Darwin would have agreed with me that the house did indeed resemble the haunted one on TV.

I took a deep breath. OK, I thought as I started to climb, here is the scenario. I am Ling Ling, poor girl from the countryside who masqueraded as her young master to take the scholar's exam to go to school because women, especially poor women are not allowed into universities. So, I got in, and here I am, determined to keep my disguise so I can get the learning I so desired... OK, I could work with that. My suitcases thudded and scraped on every step. By the time I reached the top they were a bit beaten up, but I was ready.

# # #

I found this house through the university because I didn't win the lottery for a dorm room on campus. By phone, they gave me a number for the landlord. I accepted it without laying eyes on it. All the commotion from The Gifts and Ba's death had caused me to find housing at the very last minute.

On the main floor of the house, I was to be sharing with 3 other people in an apartment unit. I opened the unlocked door and found a petit woman perched on a chair, wiping a window in the hall. She was dressed in a printed tunic and leotards when I walked in, dragging the luggage.

“Well, hello new roomie,” she called when she saw me. She hopped down the chair, wiped her hand and gave me the strongest handshake I had ever had.

“Um, hi,” I stammered. “I’m Miramar Woo.”

“Welcome, Miramar Woo! I’m Kathleen Longbridge. Obvious name for the kind of nose I have, eh? Well, I think it gives me a dramatic flair”, she turned to give me a profile.

Not knowing what to say, I looked down at my shoes, noticing she had on silver ballet slippers. “Here let me help you with these. I’ll show you around.” Kathleen grabbed a hold of the biggest bag and gave me a tour of the place. It was hard to keep up with her because she walked as quickly as she talked. From the five minute tour, I learned that she was an ex-cocaine addict, returning to school at the age of 28.

"I'm in English Lit. I'm a writer", she called over her shoulder while I followed. She had lived in the house for the last two years. The phone rang, and she dropped my bags in what I presumed to be my room and skipped to it. Waving with one hand at me, I took that as a sign that our conversation had ended. I dragged the rest of my bags into my new room and closed the door, exhausted.
Later, I met Lara, an architectural student.

"You'll never see me. I eat, sleep and shit at school," she told me.

I also met Dave, also a freshman from somewhere called North Bay, Ontario.

The house was settled into a hill, which made the apartment a semi-basement. I got the underground part, the window being a slit of light at the top of one wall. The room had a single mattress on the floor, a dresser and a large wooden desk. In the first two days, I stayed mostly in my room, sitting on the mattress and staring at the veneer-paneled walls. School wouldn't start until Monday, and I had missed most of frosh week. Unpacking took me three minutes. I thought about the posters of Duran Duran and Simple Minds rolled up in the corner and debated about putting them up. Maybe I should look for something edgier now that I was a university student? In the end, I decided not to decorate because the emptiness of the room felt right somehow. All of life was reduced to this square. It was a good space to start again.

I could hear my housemates outside, having conversation and laughing as if they'd known each other forever. Like normal people. I tried to make myself leave the room and join them, but frankly, they terrified me. What would I say? They were so different. Go out there and embark on this new adventure already, stupid, I told myself. Only when I worried they could hear my stomach growl through the walls would I finally emerge to cook dinner in the small kitchen. I cooked quickly, a pack of instant noodles from my giant stash that Ma insisted I take since I never learned to cook. She had always said I would pay the consequences for not observing her more closely when she made us dinner.

I made sure to clean my pot thoroughly before rushing back into my room to eat. I was afraid to use the phone to call Nida in case one of them needed it, so I would wait late one night to dial Nida’s number in London. Nida, unlike me, was having a rocking time. When I got her on the line, our conversation was full of Nida’s animated stories of new friends, parties, frosh week, all told without punctuation so that everything spilled in one large rush. Afterwards, I tip-toed back to my room in the darkened apartment and pulled my covers over my head.

# # #

One night, Kathleen knocked on my door. I peeked out, while Kathleen tried to peek in. “Hey, whatcha doing in there? Come on out. Watch TV with us,” Kathleen spoke as if she was talking to a wounded animal.

Not knowing what else to do, I said, “OK,” and followed her to the living room.
Dave was sprawled out across the couch with a can of Blue, but scooted to one end when he saw me. He was large, over 6 feet, and looked odd as he tried to fold himself into something small. “Hi, housemate,” he waved.

“Hi,” I replied with a small smile, and settled in beside him. Magnum P.I. was on the small TV that they'd perched on a long wood-paneled coffee table. The room was a motley collection of second-hand furniture, like the rest of the house. Prints of the great masters hung on the walls. Mona Lisa smiled from one wall, and Monet’s water lilies bloomed on another. I sat stiffly on the 60s, green upholstered couch, my hands on my lap.

“Sooooooo,” Kathleen began. “ Who are you, Miramar Woo? Tell us about yourself.”
I stared at the TV as Tom Selleck in a Hawaiian shirt wielded a gun from behind a palm tree. “What do you want to know?”

That may have been too open-ended. I realized this because it triggered a long list of questions from Kathleen who seemed to want to know a lot, while Dave just watched us with a dopey grin of someone who smiles when he doesn’t know what else to do.

By the time Tom Selleck had caught the bad guy, and zoomed away in his Ferrari 308 GTS, Kathleen and Dave knew this about me: I was Chinese (I was accustomed to this always being something gweilos wanted to settle first). I was from Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto. I was 17 years old, 18 next month. I had one brother, and one sister. No, I didn’t drink, but it wasn’t for religious reasons. I just hadn’t had opportunity. Heroin? Nope, never. Not even pot. I liked to read. Novels, mostly. Sometimes magazines, but I didn’t tell them about True Confessions. Yes, I liked to write (which made Kathleen very happy) and planned to major in Journalism which was the reason I was at Carleton.

Kathleen, flipped her curtain of chestnut hair, and sank her tiny frame back onto a large brown corduroy armchair. She seemed temporarily satisfied. But then she sat up as if struck, "Wait. Your parents."

"What about them?" I asked.

"In what ways are they fucked up, and how did they fuck you up?” I would learn later that Kathleen minored in Psychology, which she drew on for her own recovery process. I swallowed, feeling a knot in my throat.

“My father is dead,” I began. It was the first time I had said it, and it felt wrong to hear it from my own voice. “He was killed by a car a couple of months ago.”

The perma-grin dropped off Dave’s face, and he took a long swig of his beer. Kathleen just stared at me with unblinking eyes.

“I’m so sorry, kitten,” she finally said softly. No one had ever called me kitten before, but I could see in Kathleen’s face that it was heartfelt.

“Same here, Miramar,” Dave said. “That’s rough.”

“Thanks. It is,” I answered. And just like that, the tears fell like an unclogged spigot. They fell in big, sloppy drops on my arm, and then streamed into circles that grew larger on the fabric of the sofa.

I felt Kathleen sit on the edge of the couch beside me, her arms wrapped around my shoulders. She whispered, “It’s OK. It’s OK, kitten,” while Dave unfurled a roll of toilet paper, square by square and handed the pieces to me.

Chapter 3, The Wondrous Woo

Chapter 3

The Gifts

It was Darwin who finally brought Ma out of her bedroom. Two days after his sighting of Ba, Darwin, picked up his violin and began to play Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major. It was frightening to witness the torrent of music that flew from the tiny boy whose bowed head dumped a cascade of thick jet-black hair over his face. Prior to this, he had only rendered awful squeaks from the violin, and hated his lessons. He consented to trying the instrument when Ma and Ba bribed him with the Atari game station.

Sophia and I ran to hear what all the noise was about and then, Ma appeared, on the threshold of his room. On one side of her head, the pillow had flattened her greasy hair so that it sat straight up. She was wearing Ba’s pajamas and the extra length in the leg pooled on the floor. I didn't know what state she would have been when she finally emerged. I was surprised that she didn't look as bad as I had thought.

Ma watched Darwin play, her eyes regaining focus.

“What the hell was that?” Sophia yelled.

“Dunno, heard it on CBC,” said Darwin shrugging. He went to put his violin back into its case when he looked up and saw their mother. “Ma!” he jumped.

Ma went towards Darwin in fast steps. She held his face on her hands, looking down at him and then hugged him to her body. I could tell that Darwin was uncomfortable by the way his eyes bugged out because Ma had him in an iron grip. "Tsai tsai," little boy, Ma said, "Ho teng, ho teng." Sounds good, sounds good. Then she released him and went to the kitchen to cook us lunch. And so, Darwin broke the spell by restoring Ma back to the world of the living, and our house was finally lifted from the murky cover of grief.


That night, as Ma cleaned the house of the dust that had fallen while she was in bed, Darwin demanded to be taken to a piano.

"Dar, cool it, ok? Ma just came out. We'll find one tomorrow," I told him, nervously eyeing Ma as she plugged in the vacuum. She had even taken a shower and was looking almost like her old self, except that she was very thin.

"Mir, I've got to. Please, Mir! I need to...," Darwin implored, his hands flapping up and down as the vacuum started its loud whir that drowned out the rest of his voice.

He tried again, screaming this time, "TAKE ME TO A PIANO, DAMN IT!"

The roar of the vacuum suddenly ceased. "What's that? What did you say, Darwin?" Ma asked him, a hand cupped to her ear.

He ran to stand in front of her, "Ma, I need a piano. Right now. Please, Ma!" He bounced up and down, reminding me of when he was little and needed to pee.

Before he whined anymore, Ma had her apron untied. "OK, OK, Darwin, lets go."

Ma drove super fast as Sophia and Darwin slid back and forth in the back vinyl seats. "Whooooaaaa," they squealed. I gripped the handle bar in the front passenger seat, sneaking peeks at Ma.

"Hey, Ma, we don't have to go right now...."

"No, no. Darwin needs a piano. Something is happening to him. We have to listen!" She made a sharp right turn into the driveway of the mall, the back of the car slamming and springing back from hitting the sloped pavement.

In the mall, we took Darwin directly to a music store. He walked along a row of pianos, running a hand softly over each one. At one black Yamaha upright, he sat down and a technically perfect Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu poured out of the tiny fingers even he struggled to reach the pedals with his feet. After he had finished, we were once again stunned into speechlessness. Sophia's mouth hung open. He got up from the piano and moved towards the percussions. We followed him like zombies. Among the startled customers and shopkeepers, he picked up random instruments and immediately launched into pieces of complicated music. An Indian sitar? He knew the fingering by instinct. West African Djembe? He understood the complex mono-rhythmic patterns upon first listen. Stringed, percussive, brass, wood – it didn’t matter. He knew them all. Passersby in the mall, drawn in by the music, gathered around him in the store.

After Darwin let out an astounding rendition of Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze on the electric guitar, the store owner could no longer contain his excitement. He dialed the number to CityTV, and Darwin made the 6 o'clock news.


Two more days after the arrival of Darwin’s miraculous talents, while sitting eating our cereal, Sophia began to scratch out numbers and symbols on a napkin with a scented marker. Soon, her coloured markings (smelling like tropical fruit) could be found on every available surface of the house. Strange, scroll-like formulas resembling ornate snakes began to appear on the walls, the floors, and even on the toilet seat. It didn't seem to alarm Ma at first, like it did me. She was too preoccupied with Darwin and his sudden talents. The phone started to ring, asking if Darwin would make appearances at other music stores as a promtion. So I armed myself with Fantastic Spray Cleaner and paper towels. The ink didn’t always come off the surfaces, and I had to go buy us another toilet seat, as well as hiding Sophia’s markers and replacing them with sharp HB pencils.

“What’s wrong with you,” I asked my sister who looked possessed during these outbursts. Her one crossed-eye was focused intensely in a different direction than the other, making her appear Charles Manson deranged. "Just stop that, already."

“I don’t know,” Sophia answered, before continuing her strange markings. “I can’t stop.”

In the middle of the night, I looked across to Sophia’s bed to her moving fingers, writing indecipherable symbols in the air. Even in sleep, she'd become haunted by the strange formulas.

A week later, she inserted her formulations written on a long piece of construction paper into a manila envelope and took her banana-seated pink bike to school. She wrote the name of her math teacher, Mr. Middleton in block letters across the front and handed it to the school secretary. A week later, Ma got a call from Mr. Middleton, and could hardly make out what the man was trying to say because he ranted, raved, laughed, and wept rather than spoke. It seemed that Sophia had, by way of complex analysis, stumbled upon (Oh no, quite the wrong word, Mrs. Woo…hmm, discovered? Worked out? Yes, maybe worked out is more apt) the most beautiful math theory that there ever was – the Euler’s Identity. Mr. Middleton had only heard of the formula from his Math major days at McGill. He remembered his mentor, a Professor Gorky, lecture reverently on what he called the most poetic formula ever derived. The Euler Identity was sublime, a study of exquisite symmetry. It was, in short, perfect. Poor Mr. Middleton. He was up all night since receiving Sophia’s package, pulling down all his mathematical books from their dusty shelves. At the crack of dawn, he called Professor Gorky in Montreal, and confirmed what he suspected. Sophia had gone about re-discovering it, even presenting new routes and possibilities in getting to it. He told all this to Ma, while Ma repeated all his sentences to us as soon as he said them.

“A fourteen-year old!” he exclaimed (and echoed by Ma) over and over again. And I knew he wasn’t simply shocked that Sophia was just any fourteen-year old, but that it was brassy Sophia Woo who never finished her homework on time, smacked gum loudly even when she bold-face lied about having any in her mouth, and passed notes to her friends during his lessons. That was my sis. She always stuck one toe across the line of all rules, just to prove she could.

# # #

If Ba’s death came like a silent storm, then what happened next arrived like a hurricane. I had never been in one, but it would have felt just like that when “The Gifts” came, which is what these occurrences with Sophia and Darwin became forever known as. News spread like wild fire. After Darwin's TV appearance, other media outlets appeared at our door. Everyone wanted to get in on it, especially when they found not one, but two child geniuses. These things didn’t just happen every day in Scarberia. Our house was abuzz with journalists, Catholic priests and experts of all kinds while curious strangers camped out on the lawn. Everyone had a theory about The Gifts. Among them was a woman completely dressed in white who claimed The Gifts were bestowed by an alien race that created humans as an experiment. Darwin and Sophia were the chosen ones to bridge the two species together. This prompted the priests to sprinkle holy water on everything.

The rush of people was both terrifying and thrilling. Ma insisted on making sandwiches for this mixed crowd, so I was assigned to slap Wonder Bread together with a lather of mayonnaise and a slice of deli ham. It goes without saying that Sophia and Darwin didn’t have to help.

Sophia thrived with the attention. She was named after a movie star after all. Sophia Loren had been Ba’s screen idol. Sophia came out of the womb already two-finger whistle gorgeous. She had double eyelids (something that the mah jong/church ladies remarked on right away), and deep red lips as if she was born wearing lipstick. On her head, there sat a mass of frenzied black hair that defied direction. I used to comb my fingers through it to try to get it straight like my own. Ba named her after the most exquisite specimen of womanhood he knew. It was a big surprise when little Sophia’s eyes began to cross. Ma tried to train the wayward eye by moving lollipops left to right, right to left, up and down, in order to get it to behave again. But no matter what, Sophia’s left eye stubbornly preferred to veer right.

Darwin, meanwhile, sat politely and addressed questions too, but he kicked at the coffee table, occasionally asking Ma if he could be excused, so he could play a game of Space Invaders. (The answer was a hissed, "No" from Ma)

Darwin’s name had come from Charles Darwin, one of the smartest men that Ba could think of. A man so ahead of his time that he torpedoed the rest of his era to catch up with him. Ba had also considered Einstein, Freud, and even Marx, but he had settled on Darwin as the most suitable since he loved animals.

As for me, I was named Miramar because my Chinese name was Mei Lai, meaning beautiful. (I guess I got trumped by Sophia on that one.) They wanted something that was similar in English. Ba, at the time, was working with a Mexican colleague who came from some place called Miramar. Miramar - a view of the sea. Ba loved the sound of that name and practiced saying it. His Cantonese tongue stubbornly refused to wrap around the “r” sound, so he repeated this word over and over until he had perfected it. Mi-Raa-Mar. Ma opposed it, not having as much success with the rounded syllable, often saying Mi-La-Ma instead. Regardless, it was a fancy name for a not-to-fancy person like me.

Ba chose our names with great intention. These were names destined for big things.


Sure enough, here were my siblings, gone from normal on to the fast track to greatness. Dar and Sophia presided over the crowd like a couple of pros, taking questions while I served platters of tiny square sandwiches. Ma had insisted the crusts be cut, like they do in England apparently. I imagined myself in the character of a young girl (usually orphaned, always poor, her beauty hidden under her dirty face and the rags of her clothes) who lived inconspicuously until the opportune moment arrived when I could reveal myself to be the true hero of the story. I often did this, disappeared into the fantasy world of Ancient China of the kung fu movies. So, with a bowed head, I assembled the sandwiches into mountainous heaps and humbly offered them in platters to the guests.

The maid act got quickly irritating. Soon I was also taking orders for beverages, doing all the shopping for more supplies, making sure there was toilet paper in the bathroom, and being all-around gopher.

Plus, the phone rang off the hook. In between sandwich making and tea-pouring, it was also my job to field the calls. Requests came flooding in from all corners of the globe. Professional child psychologists wanted to study Sophia and Darwin, academics wanted to apprentice them, and the talk show hosts just wanted to know everything. There was even interest from the people at the Oprah Winfrey Show! With the offers, came the promise of money. Buckets of it. Enough of it that you could fill a room with banknotes and roll around for a few days.

“What do I do?” I asked Ma nervously. I didn't cope well talking to authority figures which to me felt like everyone. She told me to do what I thought was best for my brother and sister. Ma’s job (according to Ma) was to sit beside Sophia and Darwin on the couch, a frozen grin on her face. In some ways, I think she had been prepared for this kind of thing her whole life. There were two things Ma understood about the world as a Catholic: worldly suffering, and miracles. Every time one of those commercials about starving children would come on TV, she would look satisfied as if she was infinitely wiser than anybody and ask us, “See how lucky you are?”
Ma’s mah jong/church friends came every day again. They stood on the periphery of the living room, occasionally looking to the heavens, their hands busily making the sign of the cross, and assigned these strange things to the Man upstairs.

At night, when all the people faded from the house, Ma made declarations to us that she would be a servant to these extraordinary happenings. When she realized that the requests were coming faster than I could respond to them, Ma rounded up her friends and they fanned out like soldiers. They were delegated into different roles according to their skill sets: management, finances, media, and institutional liaisons. This new infrastructure worked like a well-oiled machine. There was frenzy in Ma’s eyes, something I recognized every time a new senior citizen moved on to the block who needed a good Catholic to help.


Since there was nothing left for me to do, I waited, unsure what I was waiting for.

“Ba is so proud,” Ma told us, even though while I shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. I had done nothing new or special, but I guess she thought I could be a servant to the miracles, too.

No one said it, but it hung in the air like a large question mark: What about Miramar? Wherever I went, to the mall, to the grocery store, watering the lawn, people wanted to know about Sophia and Darwin. Mainly, people wanted to know what the early signs of genius were, and how to reproduce the conditions. Were they normal babies? Were they on a special diet? Did they get on well with others? How old were they when they began to talk? Read? Toilet-train? Were there other people in the family with exceptional talents? Finally, they would ask if I had developed any extraordinary super powers. No, I would reply, embarrassed and take that as a cue to slip away.

The truth was, I was still waiting to be touched by The Gifts. I tried to will something to happen. At night, I snuck out the window and laid on the flat roof of the house to face the stars, arms stretched out, inviting the mysterious powers that landed on Sophia and Darwin to take me too. “Come to me. Come to me. Come to me,” I beckoned the universe.

Once, I even tried to conjure Ba because I secretly attributed The Gifts to him. None of us said it, but I think we all believed it too. “Baba, what about me?” I wondered. Silence echoed around me on the roof, and the stars crushed down. If Ba came to Darwin, he didn’t want to come to me. I reached my fingers out and could touch the leaves of the maple tree we had planted when we first moved in to the house. It was a patriotic move, to commemorate our first home in the new country. It grew from a sapling to a full-fledged adolescent - awkward and graceful all at once. The top of the tree now hovered just above the roof of the bungalow. I fingered the wide leaves, uncurling the edges.

Beneath the disappointment of not receiving The Gifts, I missed Ba. Why had he not given me something to hold onto? Something I could grow that would take the ache of his absence away?

And I was jealous. It ate through me like an army of green worms, occupying me like an invasion. Once again, I faded to the background, something I was used to doing in the world outside, but never had to do within the world of the Woo. I could barely look at Sophia and Darwin because I thought I might scream or hit what I perceived as smugness off their faces. I knew this was probably not the case. First, Sophia was too self-absorbed to ever be competitive with me. And I also knew Darwin was too sweet to ever want to hurt me. Still, no one noticed me or the green worms that had taken my place. So I continued to serve sandwiches.


Scarborough was too small of a place to contain The Gifts. Several European and American conservatories wanted to meet Darwin and consider him in their schools. Professor Gorky wanted Sophia to start right away at McGill in the mathematics department under his tutelage while Yale and MIT also waged furious bids, upping her scholarship. Ma and her friends stayed up late in the night, playing mah jong and weighing all these opportunities. As they moved the tiles around the table, they debated the merits of each option, I sat on the stairs in the shadow, eavesdropping on their conversations. Finally, it was decided. Darwin would take the Western European tour - London, Paris, Vienna and Munich. Sophia would go to McGill to Professor Gorky since he came referred by Mr. Middleton.

Darwin and Sophia were excited. Darwin prepared for this next phase as if he was going off on the Millennium Falcon with Chewbaca to explore new planets. Sophia spent hours deciding on outfits to pack.

Darwin and Sophia started to prepare for their different journeys. Before they dispersed into their new adventures into the future, Darwin made us pinky swear.
"No matter what happens, we have to meet every Chinese New Year for the rest of our lives. No matter what. Deal?" he offered his pinky finger.

"And if we need anything, we have to call each other. Nothing too small or big to call, K?" Sophia added, linking her pinky to Darwin's.

“Swear,” Darwin said to me. I crooked my finger through theirs.

"Swear", I replied.

"Hey, maybe we should do a blood oath, too," Darwin tilted his head to consider this.

"We're already related by blood, dummie," Sophia swatted him in the head.


In those first few months of The Gifts, Darwin headed out into the world of music conservatories and concert halls, while Sophia was whisked away into her new-found destiny, formulating her own formulas and breaking ancient codes. She was quickly the star feature in the international mathematic forums for a season, earning accolades from scientists and artists alike with her trademark sensibility for balance, her great cross-eyed beauty and a penchant for off-the-shoulder sweat-shirts. Sophia handled it all with great aplomb. Darwin held himself with a calm grace, perfectly humble and unaffected. He was Mozart in miniature. At his debut at Carnegie Hall, it seemed unreal that this other-worldly music came from his tiny tuxedoed figure carrying his audience to tears. Ma went with them, dividing her time between them. Ma, who had never taken a plane boarding one to immigrate to Canada, was suddenly jet-setting all over the world.

I clipped all the newspaper and magazine articles, pressing them into a scrapbook, waiting in a cocoon.