The Woo-Woo by Lindsay Wong

Author:Lindsay Wong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 2018-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

By the middle of August, the entire family was required to shelter indoors for Hell Month. No one was permitted in or out of the Belcarra, not even to water the plants. My mother worried that we would all get possessed and act like Poh-Poh if we dared crack open the front doors or even a window—an underhanded ghost might flutter into our brains, like mad cow disease.

Normally, I’d make a snide remark or roll my teenage eyeballs, but I said nothing this time, which seemed to satisfy my mother.

Gung-Gung suffered three mini heart attacks the week we declared ourselves hermits, which ended our self-imposed quarantine. The paramedics had pronounced Gung-Gung dead during his second heart attack and zipped him up into a cheerful orange body bag, but he began to jerk his legs a bit and moan—another false alarm. They had to unzip him and take him out, and then zip him back in and out for a third time that week. And I think everyone, including the ambulance workers, was getting a bit tired of what our family called his “flakiness.”

We could not handle any imminent death in our family, so we had to evacuate the country. We had to go on mandatory vacation. Essentially, a Chinese family functions like a matriarchal dictatorship—if the richest auntie says we must evacuate, the others must follow.

The truth was that our family was too afraid to be left behind to handle Gung-Gung’s upcoming death and pay for any health costs. Also, my mother said that she was very worried, because after my fainting in the theatre, she felt that I was especially vulnerable to demonic possession. Gung-Gung dying and me suddenly losing consciousness was surely a double omen that our immediate family was in cataclysmic danger. I did not realize then that this was the only way she knew how to protect me.

So all the RVs were hitched to trucks and vans, a travelling band of caravans. Most of the extended family headed to Burnaby Hospital. My father pulled into the drop-off zone and my mother charged inside to say “a three-minute goodbye” to Gung-Gung, who was dying for the fourth or fifth time.

Because of my dizzy, debilitated state, my mother told me to stay in the pickup truck and not “let any ghost in.” I sighed softly so she wouldn’t hear me. I wanted her to acknowledge that I was a human being, not a puppet, like Poh-Poh, who everyone believed housed evil entities permanently.

Like all the aunties, we would cross the border to look for safety in the biggest American grocery store we could find. Because Walmart was everywhere, it was decided that it was a food centre that all the ghosts from hell would instantly recognize. The dead chasing us would love the selection of junk food, which was much better than Canada’s.

Thank God the Walmart Supercenter in Bellingham was open twenty-four/seven. The aunties decided to camp out at the various Walmarts in the towns across Washington and Oregon States.

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