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.
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