Later, when I was in high school and briefly took psychology as an elective, I saw my mother’s picture next to the definition of psychotic delusions, but of course there was no mention of the Woo-Woo, whose foul moods ruled our household. My family was so mistrustful of all breeds of outsiders and North American newspapers, choosing to champion instead rambling phone gossip and ancient bullshit tradition: “Aiya! If you have the shit gas, go outside and hit yourself fifty times in the ass with a bamboo stick and it will go away! Fever? No problem. It was a standard practice, like brushing your teeth, which had been handed down by my ancestors and perpetuated among our clan.

And many years later, when I was twenty years old, on Canada Day 2008, my Auntie Beautiful One, the youngest of my mom’s five sisters, would take the city of Vancouver hostage, trapping more than 200,000 people as she threatened to leap off the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge.Īccording to what I would now describe as seventeenth-century Chinese psychobabble, it was thought that we were somehow more prone than other people to “demonic possession.” This wisdom, said to be common knowledge, was superstitious folklore that my family wholly believed in. Too many of us were inclined to nervous breakdowns, mainly in exciting, psychotic instalments. I had a grandmother who had been diagnosed with serious paranoid schizophrenia, who everyone said was mentally weak (or suffered from embarrassing extrasensory perception, a.k.a.

Unfortunately, in our large Chinese family, mental health was not a strong suit. “Okay,” I said, wanting to show her that I heard her, “but does that mean I can have more chocolate?”

The Woo-Woo by Lindsay Wong