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.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Thursday, January 12, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
The Wondrous Woo, Chapter 2
Underwater
The day Ba died, I had just finished my last ever high school exam and was celebrating the graduating class of 1987 at McDonald’s with my best friend, Nida Patel. We were debating the merits of tampons versus pads.
“Using tampons means you’re not a virgin anymore,” Nida asserted, using her best authorial voice. She dipped a french fry gingerly into a pool of ketchup.
“You know jack shit,” I mumbled with my mouth full of a quarter pounder and cheese.
“Jack shit? What kind of shit is jack shit?” Nida waved the red-tipped fry at me. We liked to swear when we were together.
Feeling very much like a woman of the world, I persevered in my impassioned defense of the tampon. “You insert it, and you forget about it. Well, you don’t forget about it. You know what I mean. You just don’t have that big chunk of brick between your legs all day. You can run around, do things, even go swimming. And who cares if you’re no longer a virgin. That’s good. Then it won’t hurt the first time.”
“Ew. That’s so gross. Anyway, my Ma would freak if she saw tampons in the house!”
We both cackled at the thought of Mrs. Patel coming across a box of tampons. She would likely bang down the basement steps, slide open the storage closet doors to where her pantheon of Hindu gods resided, and spend the rest of the day commiserating with them.
It was at this exact moment when I saw my neighbour Stan Knowles through the large glass window facing Warden Avenue. He was running through the parking lot directly towards us. I hoped I was wrong, that he was there to see someone else or he just needed a burger really, really bad, but when we locked eyes, I knew he was there for me, that something was horribly wrong.
“There’s been an accident,” he huffed when he got to the table. “Come with me.”
I didn’t think about how he had always creeped me out with his jogging suits and combed over hair; we just jumped into his car alone together. I tried to ask him questions while we ran to the car, but he was too out of breath. All I knew was that it involved Ba. In the car, we sat in silence the whole way to the hospital.
Ma was there. Sophia and Darwin were at home. Ma had sent someone to find me. She sat in a private waiting room with some of her friends who had come immediately. They were praying. I entered and knew. I felt it. He was already gone.
I pieced together what I was told by the police. I constructed my own scene of the accident. In my replay, I always started with Ba leaving his office, saying goodbye to everyone, walking towards the subway. I saw him pass the travel agency where the Disney World brochures are lined up like soldiers. He boarded his train, his old briefcase by his side. In the train, I imagined him looking up at the ads, searching for more Canadian things we could partake in. Then his stop arrived and he transferred onto his bus. The Scarborough landscape passed him - the wide road, the shopping malls, the early summer day. It was a gorgeous day, I remembered, marked by gentle breezes and an impossibly blue sky. Maybe he hummed. Sometimes he did that. A familiar tune that made him sentimental. He loved the Platters. So he was humming Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. He got off on his stop at Dewey and Birchmount, and instead of walking the extra 100 metres to the crosswalk, he decided to jaywalk.
As he waited on the curb, he probably thought about the word "jaywalk" as he often thought about the origin of English words. He wondered if the term ‘jaywalk’ referred to a bird, perhaps a jay? Did jays take shortcuts? Maybe he felt like a bird caught in a stream of prey when he found himself crossing the street on his way home. He ducked and weaved through the in-between four lanes of cars, running and stopping.. I imagined he loved how his body knew to twist and turn. In these few moments of his 9-5 cubicle day, living in the precarious state between life and harm, I think he must have felt wholly free. This was my only explanation because no chiding from Ma could ever stop him from taking that short-cut.
The moment he stepped off the curb, a baby blue '78 Firebird, emblazoned with red flames threw him 8 feet into the middle of the road. The two birds came in head-to-fateful-head – a dodgy jay and a bonfire of feathers.
# # #
So he died and I plunged underwater. My senses became gurgled and dulled. The voices of adults asking if I was ok came in murmurs. Everything I ate, including the casseroles that neighbors I didn't know dropped by and the wok-fried vegetarian meals my mother’s friends cooked, all tasted like grounded up shells. The light that came through the sheer curtains of the house threw everything in a ghostly grey-blue sheen, and I swam through it in slow-motion. Numb and chilled. Ma stayed in her room for days, attended to by a clutch of her mah jong/church friends who all came out shaking their heads. No sounds emerged from this room, no crying, no talking; just a cold, jagged silence.
Without school to occupy us, Sophia, Darwin and I didn’t know what to do with all the hours. Darwin played Space Invaders on his Atari while Sophia played static-ky discs on her record player. Sophia liked to play everything either too fast or too slow which annoyed all of us. Her Flashdance single, played in 331/3 speed, escaped under our bedroom door and seemed to moan quietly through the house. I re-read my stacks of True Confessions magazines, thumbing through the well-worn pages of cheating spouses, incest survivors and middle-class housewives who were kleptomaniacs. It calmed me, knowing there were fucked-up things happening in other houses with closed doors.
Sometimes, we found our friends tapping lightly at the door, kicking awkwardly at the ground. We knew they were only there because their parents had made them. We would spend an hour in awkward conversation, and maybe play some games on Darwin’s Atari before they would leave. Soon, they stopped knocking. Even Nida made excuses that there was a lot to do to prepare for her move to attend university in the fall, even though London was only two hours from Toronto. I thought about the alternate universe, the one where Ba was not dead, and wondered if that other Miramar would be preparing to go away to school too. I had been accepted at Carleton University in Ottawa just two months prior. Now, I wasn't sure if I would go.
The casseroles eventually stopped coming although we had plenty in the freezer that we would occasionally microwave. Ma's friends didn't come as often and only stopping in for quick visits in her bedroom. Silence fell. On our own, the three of us kept the house clean and still poured our Lucky Charms cereal in the morning. We obeyed the eerie hush that had descended, tiptoeing around Ma and Ba’s closed bedroom door. We raised our voices only occasionally to fight over the TV before the rush of events that brought us to that moment returned and muted us.
The day after he died, I reached for the first thing I could see that belonged to Ba. I took his blue scarf from the hall closet and though it was hot and humid outside, I was cold. I wrapped it several times around my neck to hold what warmth I needed in.
Darwin then donned Ba’s fishing hat. It was beige, with a tartan ribbon around it and was too big for Darwin’s head but he didn’t seem to mind constantly pushing it off his face. Sophia chose Ba’s green cardigan, the one that smelt like mothballs, which we all associated with Hong Kong. She rolled up the sleeves three times and it hung on her like a bathrobe. We didn’t talk about our new attire. Wearing pieces of Ba just felt like the right thing to do.
I started to worry about money when the cash ran out of Ma's wallet. We had been using it to buy things we needed like dishwashing liquid and Coke. I found her cheque book and Sophia forged her signature so we could cash the cheques. The bank teller didn't even blink as she shoved the bills at me. I had to wipe my sweaty palms on my jeans in order to take the cash. So I started to also pay the bills and balance the account. Judging from my estimation, we only had a month's worth left. After that, I wasn't sure what we would do.
# # #
At night, we spoke in whispers, and we talked about “it”. Sophia and I shared a room, but when we found Darwin whimpering under the covers one night alone in his room, we dragged his mattress between our two beds. He had said he was just teary as a result of his allergies - ragweek season, ya know.
One night in the middle of Ma’s retreat, lying in our beds, Darwin revealed that he had seen Ba. The darkened room was illuminated by the plug-in night-light. It cast shadows on the posters of Duran Duran (my side) and Madonna (Sophia’s side).
“What d’ya mean, dummy?” Sophia hissed. She had a low tolerance for nonsense.
“I mean, Baba woke me up. He was standing right there,” Darwin pointed at the foot of his mattress. “He said he just wanted to say hi, and to tell you guys not to worry because he’s gonna take care of everything. He has big plans for us.”
“Shut up. It was just a dream,” Sophia still sounded annoyed, but her tone softened.
“You shut up, stoopido. It was real. I even heard you and Mir snoring, so I knew I was awake. He said not to wake you guys - that you wouldn’t believe it. And he’s right. You don’t believe anything I say,” Darwin sulked in the darkness.
I heard the familiar clip of his nail, which meant he was picking his nose and even though it was dark, I saw him flick a piece of snot at Sophia.
“What else did he say, Dar?” I asked gently.
“Nothing. He just said we were gonna be ok. Things are going to change, and that it’s all part of the plan. Then he played Transformers with me, and ate some of the tuna casserole that Mrs. Norway from the down the street brought us. He said too much Velveeta.”
Sophia snorted, but I didn’t. I believed in ghosts.
“Do you think Mom’s ever gonna come out?” Darwin gazed at the wall, and asked Madonna. Darwin still needed Ma in those pragmatic ways. Meanwhile Sophia had a much more difficult relationship with her, locking horns over what she wore, the friends she chose, and the music she listened to. For me, I loved Ma, but Ba had always been my best friend.
“Yah, Dar. I think she’s gonna come out soon.” I replied, without much conviction.
Ma worked in extremes, which made her hard to predict. Sometimes she was all organization and efficiency, whirling through cooking, shoveling the neighbours’ walks, and hosting her mah jong group, and she’d keep all this up until she and her nerves crashed, like a wind-up doll that slowed down to a standstill. Then she would stay in her room for days until Ba would bundle her up in her robe and carry her to the car. They always did this late at night, after he was sure the neighbours were all inside. He would return a couple of hours later, looking edgy. His usually neat hair would look like his fingers had raked through it over and over again. He would smell a bit sour, and his eyes were usually red.
We all knew the routine after having gone through it a dozen times. Ma would go away to a hospital (Not a real hospital, Ba assured us. A place to rest. That’s all) and come home in one week. She would return with dark circles under her eyes and thin as a grasshopper, but she would be better. Another week and Ma was back to the mah jong table and making the Pope proud with her good deeds. She would go back to clipping the National Enquirer and show us the latest miracles. She had especially been impressed with the image of Jesus on a piece of grilled toast found in Texas. Ma loved her some miracles.
Now with Ba was gone, Ma would be in charge. This thought made me feel like I was falling from a tall building. Every so often, I found myself taking a large gulp of air, realizing that I hadn’t breathed in awhile.
The day Ba died, I had just finished my last ever high school exam and was celebrating the graduating class of 1987 at McDonald’s with my best friend, Nida Patel. We were debating the merits of tampons versus pads.
“Using tampons means you’re not a virgin anymore,” Nida asserted, using her best authorial voice. She dipped a french fry gingerly into a pool of ketchup.
“You know jack shit,” I mumbled with my mouth full of a quarter pounder and cheese.
“Jack shit? What kind of shit is jack shit?” Nida waved the red-tipped fry at me. We liked to swear when we were together.
Feeling very much like a woman of the world, I persevered in my impassioned defense of the tampon. “You insert it, and you forget about it. Well, you don’t forget about it. You know what I mean. You just don’t have that big chunk of brick between your legs all day. You can run around, do things, even go swimming. And who cares if you’re no longer a virgin. That’s good. Then it won’t hurt the first time.”
“Ew. That’s so gross. Anyway, my Ma would freak if she saw tampons in the house!”
We both cackled at the thought of Mrs. Patel coming across a box of tampons. She would likely bang down the basement steps, slide open the storage closet doors to where her pantheon of Hindu gods resided, and spend the rest of the day commiserating with them.
It was at this exact moment when I saw my neighbour Stan Knowles through the large glass window facing Warden Avenue. He was running through the parking lot directly towards us. I hoped I was wrong, that he was there to see someone else or he just needed a burger really, really bad, but when we locked eyes, I knew he was there for me, that something was horribly wrong.
“There’s been an accident,” he huffed when he got to the table. “Come with me.”
I didn’t think about how he had always creeped me out with his jogging suits and combed over hair; we just jumped into his car alone together. I tried to ask him questions while we ran to the car, but he was too out of breath. All I knew was that it involved Ba. In the car, we sat in silence the whole way to the hospital.
Ma was there. Sophia and Darwin were at home. Ma had sent someone to find me. She sat in a private waiting room with some of her friends who had come immediately. They were praying. I entered and knew. I felt it. He was already gone.
I pieced together what I was told by the police. I constructed my own scene of the accident. In my replay, I always started with Ba leaving his office, saying goodbye to everyone, walking towards the subway. I saw him pass the travel agency where the Disney World brochures are lined up like soldiers. He boarded his train, his old briefcase by his side. In the train, I imagined him looking up at the ads, searching for more Canadian things we could partake in. Then his stop arrived and he transferred onto his bus. The Scarborough landscape passed him - the wide road, the shopping malls, the early summer day. It was a gorgeous day, I remembered, marked by gentle breezes and an impossibly blue sky. Maybe he hummed. Sometimes he did that. A familiar tune that made him sentimental. He loved the Platters. So he was humming Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. He got off on his stop at Dewey and Birchmount, and instead of walking the extra 100 metres to the crosswalk, he decided to jaywalk.
As he waited on the curb, he probably thought about the word "jaywalk" as he often thought about the origin of English words. He wondered if the term ‘jaywalk’ referred to a bird, perhaps a jay? Did jays take shortcuts? Maybe he felt like a bird caught in a stream of prey when he found himself crossing the street on his way home. He ducked and weaved through the in-between four lanes of cars, running and stopping.. I imagined he loved how his body knew to twist and turn. In these few moments of his 9-5 cubicle day, living in the precarious state between life and harm, I think he must have felt wholly free. This was my only explanation because no chiding from Ma could ever stop him from taking that short-cut.
The moment he stepped off the curb, a baby blue '78 Firebird, emblazoned with red flames threw him 8 feet into the middle of the road. The two birds came in head-to-fateful-head – a dodgy jay and a bonfire of feathers.
# # #
So he died and I plunged underwater. My senses became gurgled and dulled. The voices of adults asking if I was ok came in murmurs. Everything I ate, including the casseroles that neighbors I didn't know dropped by and the wok-fried vegetarian meals my mother’s friends cooked, all tasted like grounded up shells. The light that came through the sheer curtains of the house threw everything in a ghostly grey-blue sheen, and I swam through it in slow-motion. Numb and chilled. Ma stayed in her room for days, attended to by a clutch of her mah jong/church friends who all came out shaking their heads. No sounds emerged from this room, no crying, no talking; just a cold, jagged silence.
Without school to occupy us, Sophia, Darwin and I didn’t know what to do with all the hours. Darwin played Space Invaders on his Atari while Sophia played static-ky discs on her record player. Sophia liked to play everything either too fast or too slow which annoyed all of us. Her Flashdance single, played in 331/3 speed, escaped under our bedroom door and seemed to moan quietly through the house. I re-read my stacks of True Confessions magazines, thumbing through the well-worn pages of cheating spouses, incest survivors and middle-class housewives who were kleptomaniacs. It calmed me, knowing there were fucked-up things happening in other houses with closed doors.
Sometimes, we found our friends tapping lightly at the door, kicking awkwardly at the ground. We knew they were only there because their parents had made them. We would spend an hour in awkward conversation, and maybe play some games on Darwin’s Atari before they would leave. Soon, they stopped knocking. Even Nida made excuses that there was a lot to do to prepare for her move to attend university in the fall, even though London was only two hours from Toronto. I thought about the alternate universe, the one where Ba was not dead, and wondered if that other Miramar would be preparing to go away to school too. I had been accepted at Carleton University in Ottawa just two months prior. Now, I wasn't sure if I would go.
The casseroles eventually stopped coming although we had plenty in the freezer that we would occasionally microwave. Ma's friends didn't come as often and only stopping in for quick visits in her bedroom. Silence fell. On our own, the three of us kept the house clean and still poured our Lucky Charms cereal in the morning. We obeyed the eerie hush that had descended, tiptoeing around Ma and Ba’s closed bedroom door. We raised our voices only occasionally to fight over the TV before the rush of events that brought us to that moment returned and muted us.
The day after he died, I reached for the first thing I could see that belonged to Ba. I took his blue scarf from the hall closet and though it was hot and humid outside, I was cold. I wrapped it several times around my neck to hold what warmth I needed in.
Darwin then donned Ba’s fishing hat. It was beige, with a tartan ribbon around it and was too big for Darwin’s head but he didn’t seem to mind constantly pushing it off his face. Sophia chose Ba’s green cardigan, the one that smelt like mothballs, which we all associated with Hong Kong. She rolled up the sleeves three times and it hung on her like a bathrobe. We didn’t talk about our new attire. Wearing pieces of Ba just felt like the right thing to do.
I started to worry about money when the cash ran out of Ma's wallet. We had been using it to buy things we needed like dishwashing liquid and Coke. I found her cheque book and Sophia forged her signature so we could cash the cheques. The bank teller didn't even blink as she shoved the bills at me. I had to wipe my sweaty palms on my jeans in order to take the cash. So I started to also pay the bills and balance the account. Judging from my estimation, we only had a month's worth left. After that, I wasn't sure what we would do.
# # #
At night, we spoke in whispers, and we talked about “it”. Sophia and I shared a room, but when we found Darwin whimpering under the covers one night alone in his room, we dragged his mattress between our two beds. He had said he was just teary as a result of his allergies - ragweek season, ya know.
One night in the middle of Ma’s retreat, lying in our beds, Darwin revealed that he had seen Ba. The darkened room was illuminated by the plug-in night-light. It cast shadows on the posters of Duran Duran (my side) and Madonna (Sophia’s side).
“What d’ya mean, dummy?” Sophia hissed. She had a low tolerance for nonsense.
“I mean, Baba woke me up. He was standing right there,” Darwin pointed at the foot of his mattress. “He said he just wanted to say hi, and to tell you guys not to worry because he’s gonna take care of everything. He has big plans for us.”
“Shut up. It was just a dream,” Sophia still sounded annoyed, but her tone softened.
“You shut up, stoopido. It was real. I even heard you and Mir snoring, so I knew I was awake. He said not to wake you guys - that you wouldn’t believe it. And he’s right. You don’t believe anything I say,” Darwin sulked in the darkness.
I heard the familiar clip of his nail, which meant he was picking his nose and even though it was dark, I saw him flick a piece of snot at Sophia.
“What else did he say, Dar?” I asked gently.
“Nothing. He just said we were gonna be ok. Things are going to change, and that it’s all part of the plan. Then he played Transformers with me, and ate some of the tuna casserole that Mrs. Norway from the down the street brought us. He said too much Velveeta.”
Sophia snorted, but I didn’t. I believed in ghosts.
“Do you think Mom’s ever gonna come out?” Darwin gazed at the wall, and asked Madonna. Darwin still needed Ma in those pragmatic ways. Meanwhile Sophia had a much more difficult relationship with her, locking horns over what she wore, the friends she chose, and the music she listened to. For me, I loved Ma, but Ba had always been my best friend.
“Yah, Dar. I think she’s gonna come out soon.” I replied, without much conviction.
Ma worked in extremes, which made her hard to predict. Sometimes she was all organization and efficiency, whirling through cooking, shoveling the neighbours’ walks, and hosting her mah jong group, and she’d keep all this up until she and her nerves crashed, like a wind-up doll that slowed down to a standstill. Then she would stay in her room for days until Ba would bundle her up in her robe and carry her to the car. They always did this late at night, after he was sure the neighbours were all inside. He would return a couple of hours later, looking edgy. His usually neat hair would look like his fingers had raked through it over and over again. He would smell a bit sour, and his eyes were usually red.
We all knew the routine after having gone through it a dozen times. Ma would go away to a hospital (Not a real hospital, Ba assured us. A place to rest. That’s all) and come home in one week. She would return with dark circles under her eyes and thin as a grasshopper, but she would be better. Another week and Ma was back to the mah jong table and making the Pope proud with her good deeds. She would go back to clipping the National Enquirer and show us the latest miracles. She had especially been impressed with the image of Jesus on a piece of grilled toast found in Texas. Ma loved her some miracles.
Now with Ba was gone, Ma would be in charge. This thought made me feel like I was falling from a tall building. Every so often, I found myself taking a large gulp of air, realizing that I hadn’t breathed in awhile.
The Wondrous Woo, Chapter 1
Chapter 1
SCARBOROUGH, 1987
Disney World
About a week before he died, Ba brought home a pile of brochures for Disney World. Sophia and I were already in high school, and Darwin, being 11 (but looking more like 7), was more into his Star Wars action figures and drawing wanted signs for Boba Fett, the bounty hunter than he would have been riding around in circles to dolls singing “It’s a small world”. But Ba had been so excited; when he poured the brochures out of his cracked faux leather briefcase on to the kitchen table, he couldn’t stop smiling while he sat down. Ma stopped her usual frantic cooking and wiped her hands on her thighs while peering over his shoulder.
“What do you think, Ma? Time to take the kids to Florida?”
“Wah! Florida? They don’t need Florida. What? You think money grows on trees?” Ma sniffed.
“C’mon, Ma. We’ve never taken them to Disney World, la. They deserve it,” Ba chided.
This was their routine. Ba got excited about something, and Ma would put up a tough front, but eventually she always gave in. She liked having him work for it, and he liked to work for her. It was cute, but it got embarrassing sometimes.
“We haven’t had a vacation since living in Canada. Time for us to relax. Have some fun, huh?”
“Hrmph,” Ma was not going to give it away that easily.
Sophia and I stared at the pictures of Snow White in front of her castle. Sophia flicked her hair behind her shoulder as if she was way above such things. I imagined what it would be like to be in Disney World together. Ma in her giant sun hat, Ba in his sports socks and sandals, the sullen teenage daughters - me the slightly overweight, ginormous glasses-wearing nerd and the cross-eyed beauty Sophia, and a Darwin dressed in his Jedi Knight robes. The perfect immigrant family living out the Canadian dream by visiting the American one.
"What’s for dinner?” Darwin flew into the kitchen, light saber in hand.
“Dar, we’re going to Dis-Nee!” Ba exclaimed as he tried to wrap his arm around Ma’s waist while she pushed him away.
“Disney?” Darwin looked blankly at the wide-eyed Mickey Mouse. “Will Darth Vader be there?” He picked up one of the brochures and eyed it skeptically.
“I don’t think Disney made Star Wars,” Sophia said in her know-it-all voice. “ They're more into the baby animals - Dumbo, Bambi. And the princesses. Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty.”
“Then forget it. I don’t want to go to some baby place!” He dropped Mickey Mouse back on to the pile and ran out. “Call me when dinner’s ready, Ma!”
Ba looked like he had been trampled on. “What about you girls? Don’t you want to see the princesses? You used to love the princesses.” As he said this, his smile fell.
He looked at me, his eldest, his rock, for support. “Miramar? You, too?” he asked quietly.
“Well, yeah, Ba. We’re too old for that stuff.” I said quietly, regretting that I had to say it.
“Ah, OK. I made a mistake. Only that so many of our neighbours have gone with their families. The travel agent said it’s the great Canadian getaway,” Ba said tunelessly as he swept the colourful brochures into his bag.
Ma turned back to her pots on the stove and stirred in silence. Ba clicked his briefcase closed and went upstairs to change like he always did after work. We didn’t talk about it again.
I watched his back retreat up the stairs and turned back to Sophia.
"Maybe it wouldn't be so bad?" I prodded.
"Yeah, right. Like, I want to go anywhere with you guys." Sophia scoffed.
"You're a creep," I told her. She flipped me the bird.
Ma, oblivious to us, continued to jump from cutting board to stove as if she was in the cooking Olympics.
# # #
In our Canadian lives, the only Chinese things that Ba imparted were Chinese New Year and kung fu films. The former was marked by an extravagant meal cooked on the eve of New Year, lanterns, flowers and stories about Hong Kong. The latter was his passion. He was obsessed with martial arts even though he had only taken a smattering of lessons when he was a kid. He took us every other weekend to Chinatown to watch the films where the annoying sound of pumpkin seeds cracking between teeth lasted through a triple bill.
Other than these two things, everything he wanted for us was Canadian. Ba loved Canada. He described himself as gung-ho for Canada, gung-ho being a word he used every chance he got. It was even almost Chinese, he said.
When we were first in Toronto, Ba enrolled us in skating classes and skiing lessons because that’s what Canadian kids did. He even invited neighbours over for a barbeque when we first moved in to our suburban neighbourhood so we would have some friends right away. In his plaid Bermuda shorts, a neon-coloured polo shirt and his fishing hat on his head, Ba had an easy charm about him that won him friends immediately. He worked hard at enunciating his words, never forgetting to round the “r” and “w”s. I used to hear him practice reading the newspaper out loud at the kitchen table late at night. Our barbeques had things the neighbours had never seen before – pork marinated in some red sauce, skewered squid and shrimp, and a salad mixed in a whole jar of mayonnaise. The neighbours treated these events like a trip into the exotic, and asked us polite questions about China. Is there plumbing there? What’s it like to live with communism? How are they enjoying freedom?
Afterwards, we would analyze the gweilos like some anthropological field study. Some gweilos were very hairy, sometimes even the women. Their children were grass-smeared, ketchup-faced, and jumpy as monkeys, but their parents didn’t seem to mind. They liked to talk about things like the weather, insecticide for the lawns, and the cars they drove. The women loved Loblaws and invited Ma to come to their coupon-clipping coffee meetings.
These were things that gweilos clearly liked, and Sophia, Darwin and I also quickly got a taste of what they didn’t. At school, we overheard them making fun of Ba’s accent, his clothes, and our food. Sometimes we’d hear singsong Chinkychong taunts. Once, a girl walked around imitating Ma and the herky jerky motions of her snow-shovelling. Sophia socked her in the eye, sending the bruised and battered kid scampering home while they chanted, Fight! Fight! A Chink and a White!
We never told Ma or Ba that this promising new subdivision, with its young trees and neat cookie-cutter houses was often transformed into a battleground of who belonged, who didn’t and who would survive childhood. It would have especially broken Ba's heart to know that his new people didn't have much love for his old ones.
For me, my whole body shook during these episodes. I hated that these scrawny white children scared me out of my skin. But they did. It was the worst kind of fear too, the kind that would grow and swallow you head first you let it. I knew this instinctively, but wasn’t sure how to stop it.
Sometimes, I wondered if I was translucent, that people could see right through me, select my most unprotected parts and help themselves like I was an all-you-can-eat buffet. But deep inside, I was sure I was a superhero, a rock star, an avenger for the downtrodden. I was the heroine in all the kung-fu movies I ever watched - the humble, peasant girl who was really a warrior princess. I counted on one day, my true self would break through the layers of the scaredy-cat Miramar Woo.
I think Ba knew this about me. What you know best doesn’t have to be spoken. And I was supposed to be his ally, we were a team. It became clear to me later on, after he was dead, that Disneyland was part of his gung-ho plans for us in the new country. It was what real Canadians did.
SCARBOROUGH, 1987
Disney World
About a week before he died, Ba brought home a pile of brochures for Disney World. Sophia and I were already in high school, and Darwin, being 11 (but looking more like 7), was more into his Star Wars action figures and drawing wanted signs for Boba Fett, the bounty hunter than he would have been riding around in circles to dolls singing “It’s a small world”. But Ba had been so excited; when he poured the brochures out of his cracked faux leather briefcase on to the kitchen table, he couldn’t stop smiling while he sat down. Ma stopped her usual frantic cooking and wiped her hands on her thighs while peering over his shoulder.
“What do you think, Ma? Time to take the kids to Florida?”
“Wah! Florida? They don’t need Florida. What? You think money grows on trees?” Ma sniffed.
“C’mon, Ma. We’ve never taken them to Disney World, la. They deserve it,” Ba chided.
This was their routine. Ba got excited about something, and Ma would put up a tough front, but eventually she always gave in. She liked having him work for it, and he liked to work for her. It was cute, but it got embarrassing sometimes.
“We haven’t had a vacation since living in Canada. Time for us to relax. Have some fun, huh?”
“Hrmph,” Ma was not going to give it away that easily.
Sophia and I stared at the pictures of Snow White in front of her castle. Sophia flicked her hair behind her shoulder as if she was way above such things. I imagined what it would be like to be in Disney World together. Ma in her giant sun hat, Ba in his sports socks and sandals, the sullen teenage daughters - me the slightly overweight, ginormous glasses-wearing nerd and the cross-eyed beauty Sophia, and a Darwin dressed in his Jedi Knight robes. The perfect immigrant family living out the Canadian dream by visiting the American one.
"What’s for dinner?” Darwin flew into the kitchen, light saber in hand.
“Dar, we’re going to Dis-Nee!” Ba exclaimed as he tried to wrap his arm around Ma’s waist while she pushed him away.
“Disney?” Darwin looked blankly at the wide-eyed Mickey Mouse. “Will Darth Vader be there?” He picked up one of the brochures and eyed it skeptically.
“I don’t think Disney made Star Wars,” Sophia said in her know-it-all voice. “ They're more into the baby animals - Dumbo, Bambi. And the princesses. Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty.”
“Then forget it. I don’t want to go to some baby place!” He dropped Mickey Mouse back on to the pile and ran out. “Call me when dinner’s ready, Ma!”
Ba looked like he had been trampled on. “What about you girls? Don’t you want to see the princesses? You used to love the princesses.” As he said this, his smile fell.
He looked at me, his eldest, his rock, for support. “Miramar? You, too?” he asked quietly.
“Well, yeah, Ba. We’re too old for that stuff.” I said quietly, regretting that I had to say it.
“Ah, OK. I made a mistake. Only that so many of our neighbours have gone with their families. The travel agent said it’s the great Canadian getaway,” Ba said tunelessly as he swept the colourful brochures into his bag.
Ma turned back to her pots on the stove and stirred in silence. Ba clicked his briefcase closed and went upstairs to change like he always did after work. We didn’t talk about it again.
I watched his back retreat up the stairs and turned back to Sophia.
"Maybe it wouldn't be so bad?" I prodded.
"Yeah, right. Like, I want to go anywhere with you guys." Sophia scoffed.
"You're a creep," I told her. She flipped me the bird.
Ma, oblivious to us, continued to jump from cutting board to stove as if she was in the cooking Olympics.
# # #
In our Canadian lives, the only Chinese things that Ba imparted were Chinese New Year and kung fu films. The former was marked by an extravagant meal cooked on the eve of New Year, lanterns, flowers and stories about Hong Kong. The latter was his passion. He was obsessed with martial arts even though he had only taken a smattering of lessons when he was a kid. He took us every other weekend to Chinatown to watch the films where the annoying sound of pumpkin seeds cracking between teeth lasted through a triple bill.
Other than these two things, everything he wanted for us was Canadian. Ba loved Canada. He described himself as gung-ho for Canada, gung-ho being a word he used every chance he got. It was even almost Chinese, he said.
When we were first in Toronto, Ba enrolled us in skating classes and skiing lessons because that’s what Canadian kids did. He even invited neighbours over for a barbeque when we first moved in to our suburban neighbourhood so we would have some friends right away. In his plaid Bermuda shorts, a neon-coloured polo shirt and his fishing hat on his head, Ba had an easy charm about him that won him friends immediately. He worked hard at enunciating his words, never forgetting to round the “r” and “w”s. I used to hear him practice reading the newspaper out loud at the kitchen table late at night. Our barbeques had things the neighbours had never seen before – pork marinated in some red sauce, skewered squid and shrimp, and a salad mixed in a whole jar of mayonnaise. The neighbours treated these events like a trip into the exotic, and asked us polite questions about China. Is there plumbing there? What’s it like to live with communism? How are they enjoying freedom?
Afterwards, we would analyze the gweilos like some anthropological field study. Some gweilos were very hairy, sometimes even the women. Their children were grass-smeared, ketchup-faced, and jumpy as monkeys, but their parents didn’t seem to mind. They liked to talk about things like the weather, insecticide for the lawns, and the cars they drove. The women loved Loblaws and invited Ma to come to their coupon-clipping coffee meetings.
These were things that gweilos clearly liked, and Sophia, Darwin and I also quickly got a taste of what they didn’t. At school, we overheard them making fun of Ba’s accent, his clothes, and our food. Sometimes we’d hear singsong Chinkychong taunts. Once, a girl walked around imitating Ma and the herky jerky motions of her snow-shovelling. Sophia socked her in the eye, sending the bruised and battered kid scampering home while they chanted, Fight! Fight! A Chink and a White!
We never told Ma or Ba that this promising new subdivision, with its young trees and neat cookie-cutter houses was often transformed into a battleground of who belonged, who didn’t and who would survive childhood. It would have especially broken Ba's heart to know that his new people didn't have much love for his old ones.
For me, my whole body shook during these episodes. I hated that these scrawny white children scared me out of my skin. But they did. It was the worst kind of fear too, the kind that would grow and swallow you head first you let it. I knew this instinctively, but wasn’t sure how to stop it.
Sometimes, I wondered if I was translucent, that people could see right through me, select my most unprotected parts and help themselves like I was an all-you-can-eat buffet. But deep inside, I was sure I was a superhero, a rock star, an avenger for the downtrodden. I was the heroine in all the kung-fu movies I ever watched - the humble, peasant girl who was really a warrior princess. I counted on one day, my true self would break through the layers of the scaredy-cat Miramar Woo.
I think Ba knew this about me. What you know best doesn’t have to be spoken. And I was supposed to be his ally, we were a team. It became clear to me later on, after he was dead, that Disneyland was part of his gung-ho plans for us in the new country. It was what real Canadians did.
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