Lindsay Wong is the author of Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies
It was a childhood with its own Chinese superstitious rules: break any of them and imminent death found you. Pray to Fu Lu Shou (the Gods of a Good Life), appease Guan Yin (Goddess of Mercy) and never answer if someone calls your name when you’re sitting on the toilet – you’re accepting a dead person’s query to take possession of your body. If you respond, your poor soul slides into the underworld. You cease to exist. And isn’t losing your identity the scariest thing in the world when you barely know who you are?
Lindsay Wong, author of Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies.Shimon/Supplied
At least that was what I thought, when my paternal grandfather, Yeh Yeh, died in 2012. I was unmoored, but his death meant that a spare mattress (space enough for me) was available in my Mah Mah’s 500-square-foot one-bedroom apartment in the Grand Street Guild, a church-run housing project in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I had recently been diagnosed with a debilitating neurological disorder, which made reading and writing difficult, and had no job or agent or book deal lined up after graduating with a MFA from Columbia University. With nowhere to live, zero opportunities and no money, I agreed to be my grieving grandmother’s roommate.
Poverty feels like choicelessness, sometimes akin to feeling unloved and unwanted. Accept charity from an elderly widow who might be the only person who tolerates you, but you must follow her rules of ancestral worship. You must sacrifice any sense of modern personhood that you’ve cultivated after leaving your childhood behind.
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Mah Mah’s apartment was cluttered. We slept side by side on the floor, on single mattresses donated from kind people at St. Mary’s Church. The place was overrun by spotty brown cockroaches, and these oversized monstrosities were everywhere: lazing on the walls, scuttling out from under the appliances, and when you opened the refrigerator door, six or 15 or 30 of them were fornicating on a bowl of leftover rice. The exterminator came regularly, but the cockroaches always returned, crawling on our bodies while we slept. I was too afraid to shut my eyes in the apartment, and Mah Mah cried for her newly dead husband. It was in the darkness that my brain, sick and afraid, made the room spin, faster and faster until I vomited and begged for death.
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In the mornings, we bowed to three serious-faced Fu Lu Shou figurines, arranged beside the shrine of Yeh Yeh, a thin bespectacled man who beamed down at us in his framed photo. We talked to him: How are you? Do you need us to burn anything for you in the Afterlife? Then we walked to the Buddhist temple on Mott Street and set fire to joss money. Never burning food, like we did for my other dead relatives, setting fire to pieces of barbecue duck and sticky coconut buns. Too bad if Yeh Yeh was a hungry ghost in the Afterlife. We were too poor to buy real sustenance for ourselves let alone for a dead guy, as Mah Mah rationed our food coupons.
Those post-MFA days were filled with more hope than anxiety. The terror of not being a good enough writer hadn’t settled in yet, and I didn’t understand yet how much publishing wouldn’t want my weirdo stories but also praise and criticize my voice simultaneously. I spent hours reworking what became my memoir, The Woo-Woo. I crushed cockroaches with Yeh Yeh’s bedroom slippers. I mean, the man was dead and couldn’t complain. No way was I using my own sneakers. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! It took three, maybe four downward slaps, to kill a roach completely. If writing didn’t turn out, I’d have a career as a pest exterminator.
While I sat on my hard mattress on the floor, rewriting, Mah Mah sobbed for her deceased husband. She felt abandoned by him, as he had been her whole purpose and identity, and they had raised nine children together. My father had been their oldest son. In the seventies, Mah Mah and Yeh Yeh arrived in New York from Hong Kong’s countryside, settling into the Lower East Side projects, which they never left. What was it like to flee poverty in one country and only find it again in another? At least this time around, I thought, they had upgraded to flush toilets and maybe that was enough?
“How dare you leave me!” Mah Mah screamed at Yeh Yeh’s shrine, blaming the gods for his death (a blood clot from a plane ride led to his demise). Some days she sat fully nude on a church-donated sofa, refusing to eat and drink. I watched baby roaches crawl around her bare toes and shuddered.
In October, Hurricane Sandy descended. When you do not speak English, are neither educated nor literate, all you can do is pray to Gwan Yin and the government to help you. Mah Mah accepted death readily and refused to evacuate.
“We should find a community centre,” I told her, and said this again when the electricity, heat and running water stopped working, and we were forced to use a bucket for the toilet.
“We’ll die now,” she said, gesturing at the photo of Yeh Yeh, who watched us. Did I imagine his photo-self frowning? Surely he wanted us to leave the building? But it was too late, the elevator wasn’t working and Mah Mah wouldn’t get dressed. Cell service was down. We were trapped on the 14th floor: without flashlights and candles, only one family-sized bag of chips to share with the roaches. In the apartment, Mah Mah shrieked, determined to join Yeh Yeh in the Afterlife.
“What about me?” I whispered, but we both knew that nobody could exist outside her wild grief.
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To crouch in freezing darkness, beside your naked grandmother, is to reckon with yourself. To squelch the ugliest parts of your imagination lest you accidentally soil your pants. To have no choice but to cling onto the old Chinese superstitious belief system that you were taught from birth because the Ivy League and your own capability to succeed at capitalism has failed you. When you grow up believing that a simple faux pas results in death, everything seems high stakes: a wrong word to an ancestor or deity, inviting an evil ghost to inhabit your body. Not following tradition. Do or die is what you’re told, and a type of fear-mongering pragmatism seizes control of your decision-making. Such is an understanding of knowing how unimportant you are to the world. Would Mah Mah and I starve to death if we didn’t leave? Probably. But did it matter if we died? Not really. Surely the cockroaches would feast on our eyelashes and lips, the church would take the apartment back and give it to the next impoverished person in line.
After four days, volunteers from the Red Cross saved us with blankets and bottled water, climbing flights of stairs to help those who were trapped inside the building. “No,” Mah Mah refused when they tried to make her leave the apartment. When cell service returned, I phoned my aunt who lived in a neighbouring housing project to stay with Mah Mah. Then my mother called to report on my father’s cancer diagnosis. “Come home, the ghosts are angry at you,” she said, transferring money for a plane ticket to Vancouver, and I moved back into my parents’ house in the suburbs.
Months later, Mah Mah would be dead. A scan revealed that untreated cancer in her breasts had metastasized after she flew to Hong Kong to visit our ancestors.
After she died, a hideous brown moth, the size of my fist, floated miraculously through my parents’ house in the Vancouver suburbs. By instinct, I rushed to swat it, wielding an electric fly swatter. “It’s your Mah Mah,” my mother shouted, “tell her you’re sorry or she’ll curse you!”
In Chinese culture, moths are ancestors returned to remind you that they’re always watching. Of course I had forgotten about this mythology. It was too late. Thwack! I swung, half-crushing the creature. And I couldn’t bring myself to apologize to a half-dying moth. I watched as the broken insect fluttered toward a light bulb to expire.
While suffering from vertigo, I worked on my manuscript. The memoir was published in 2018, six years later. When I felt braver, I wrote Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies to apologize. To say what I could not in those days when I was young and both afraid and not afraid to die.
I am sorry, Mah Mah. I hope you’re at peace with Yeh Yeh in the Afterlife.
I am sorry I killed you as a moth.
I think of you in the apartment on Grand Street sometimes, in your rage and grief, inescapable.