And because I was embarrassed, I did what my mother and grandmother always did: responded to fear by masking it with spurts of extreme anger. Later that night, when no one was home, I lashed out.
I can’t say that I identify with everything Lindsay Wong discusses in The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family Her upbringing was much more erratic and troubling than mine ever was. Her mother in particular was obsessed with the “woo-woo,” spirits or ghosts that cause all sorts of illness and harm… and emotional outbursts.
For my part, at least now in my adulthood, I know that my anxiety manifests itself as irritability. And yes, even outbursts of anger on occasion. Through this lens, I’ve come to understand that the outward expression of emotion doesn’t always reflect the inward experience or the underlying cause.
While it was explicitly instructed to Lindsay Wong as a girl, it was more implicitly implied in our family. We were raised to be stoic. Public displays of affection were nonexistent, but equally so, public displays of rage or fear were to be avoided. Just keep quiet and keep to yourself. Don’t bother anybody. Don’t attract any unneeded attention to yourself.
This was my shame, all seventeen years of it. And it was emptying out of my pores. It was wonderful and toxic when I became a less sane tornado of myself. It was an outlet of rank emotional expression, especially when my culture and family forbade me to have feelings.
Like my mother and my grandmother, I was a by-product of my culture, history, and volatile upbringing. And I did not want to think about my actions. I just wanted Fun-Fun and her friends to understand my neon-coloured pain.
Lindsay Wong grew up in a quiet residential area in Coquitlam, a suburb of Vancouver. She’s a few years younger than I am, and her family frequently went “camping” in the parking lot of a Bellingham Walmart. There are some very notable differences, of course, but I could see some of my childhood as a Chinese-Canadian kid reflected in her stories too. We are the products of our environment.
My childhood was filled with cultural superstitions I didn’t (and still don’t) understand. Some parts of her childhood were more stereotypically Chinese, whereas others — she played in an ice hockey league for years — are decidedly more western. But this feeling of bottling up your emotions really hit home for me. Outward emotional expression is seen as a sign of weakness.
Fair warning: This book can be very troubling as we peek into her toxic upbringing. She gets cursed out and belittled by her parents, called fat and dumb and useless, told she was picked out of a dumpster. And yet it’s presented as a form of comedy. It’s not for everyone, but this is a story that’s possibly much more common than you might think.
Because as Chinese-Canadian kids, we’re just taught not to draw attention to ourselves. The Woo-Woo by Lindsay Wong is available now.
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