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.