Chapter 23
it all happened so fast. They had met in their final year of high school at Sir Charles Tupper, a flat box of a building that seemed the dull architectural opposite of romance and magic, but it was there they fell in love.
The kind of love that plummets through a body with a heavy velocity before landing like lead, pinning you to the very spot you first laid eyes on your future beloved.
Then you have no choice: you can’t move without the other, your hands and feet and tongues are no longer separate parts on separate bodies but one whole mass, double the density, double the nerves.
Their parents never tried to keep them apart so they could focus more on their studies, on getting into UBC, the benchmark for successful Chinese kids of their generation, because it was a futile endeavour.
After all, how do you divide what has fused together, how do you separate musculature from blood from bones?
School and goals and the mechanics of the future—none of that had a chance.
His name was Tom. He wanted to be a photographer. Her name was Judy. She had a head for business.
When he asked her to marry him on their grad night, Judy said yes and then she cried.
It was only later that she would realize those tears came not from joy but from somewhere else deep inside, the place where she stuffed old hurts, where nothing ever really died, instead bubbling up to make happiness—even a proposal—ugly and dotted with rot.
That dark place was full, and Judy knew exactly what she had placed there.
Her mother, who alternately loved her fiercely and beat her, who used to whisper terrifying and unbelievable stories to her at night as she fell asleep, stories about a grandmother who was a ghost or spoke to ghosts, who had been tortured and then died.
Her mother, who watched her school concerts and piano recitals with a terrifying blankness, as if her eyes were made of glass or rocks, as if they saw nothing at all because maybe seeing too much hurt more than she was ready for.
Her father, who made her kneel with her forehead on the floor for three hours as a punishment; who timed how long she spent in the bathroom or awake and alone in her room and wrote the minutes on a pad of paper next to the phone, a tally of idle time that could never exceed an hour and a half; who ignored how well she did in school, who never looked at her report cards, shrugging whenever he saw them on the kitchen table.
Her older brother, who made her kiss him as practice until she gagged on his tongue, who slapped her, who read her diary and told her friends at school what she really thought of them.
In her memories of these moments, she was floating above her terrified, battered self, watching as her mother kicked at her small curled body, as her father took away her dinner because he said she was getting too fat, as her brother hovered over her and forced her to lie still so he could do whatever he wanted.
Judy watched as her body writhed or shivered, watched until her face began to disappear, features dissolving until there was a horrifying blankness where her eyes or mouth or nose should have been.
Maybe I have been a ghost this whole time , she thought.
Then, and only then, would she be sucked back into her physical self, back from the dark place she never wanted to talk about.
There were other stories buried there, too, so many that Judy had trouble remembering them.
For as long as she could remember, whenever her mother put Judy to bed, Bette would whisper about the Gigi who used to be a schoolgirl, who dreamed of visiting Hollywood one day, who held on to her fantasies of glamour for as long as she could, until it became achingly clear that glamour, like everything else, was an illusion.
Gigi might have been driven insane. She might have been haunted. Or she might have been both.
Bette always began her stories the same way.
“Nam Koo Terrace,” her mother would say, “is abandoned now, empty. There are rumours of ghost hunters who climb over the garden walls with cameras, looking for evidence of the crying, headless women who are said to roam through the grand ballroom and the long hallways, their long skirts swirling in the wind that blows in from the broken windows.” Her voice lowered, and it was as if she was chanting, or in a trance, repeating sentences so deeply remembered that she barely had to think.
“People outside hear long wails that could be the howls of wild dogs, or could be the cries of sad, sad women.”
Judy did not know how much of this was true, how much of it had been made up by her mother to keep her in line, to warn her off poor decisions and bad behaviour.
Maybe her grandmother really was one of these Nam Koo ghosts.
Maybe she was here in Canada, where she hovered over her descendants, waiting for the right moment to unleash her otherworldly rage on anything that might threaten to destroy them.
When her mother pushed Judy down and smacked her on the head until all she could see were stars and flashes like sirens on a dark, rainy street, or when Judy locked the door to keep her brother from the bedroom they shared, or when she could hear her father drunkenly pacing the hall, she wished for the ghost of her grandmother to save her, but she never did.
These whispered stories were the only times her mother held her, when Judy felt like someone, anyone, wanted her.
“You have to know,” Bette said, “so you can recognize the signs of a haunting, or madness, or both. You will need options. Look for options, for ways to escape, for possible outcomes.” It was only then that Bette held her, cuddled her in her arms until she fell asleep.
And so she let her mother talk on and on, even if Judy believed her less and less as she grew older.
Tom didn’t know any of this. Not the stories, not the retellings of stories that continued to expand whenever they were repeated, Bette adding more details as the years went on: a green dress that Gigi liked best, a soldier who was a little bit kind, how Gigi loved nian gao.
Judy could never tell Tom because it was all too much, too unbelievable, stories that grew with time and stretched the boundaries of what could be real, what could be fiction.
If even some of it was true, she was from a broken, disgusting family.
If it was nothing more than myth, then she was the child of a mother who had created a horror story to police her daughter’s behaviour, to scare her into compliance.
Judy knew Tom would stop loving her if he learned any of this.
In the summer he worked at the PNE, operating the Wild Mouse, laughing at the children screaming, mouths so wide they seemed unhinged.
Tom heard joy in the noise. Judy heard only terror.
Sometimes, after a beautiful evening spent walking the seawall with Tom, she awoke close to dawn with her heart galloping, breathing sharp-edged breaths, and it was then that she thought the things her mother told her must be true.
She knew, truly knew , the ugly things from her rotten, no-good core were trying to get out.
In the thin morning light, she could almost feel the hidden evil inside her, clawing and clawing at her abdominal walls with something that felt like sharp, inflexible talons.
Terrified, she would stumble to the living room and turn on the TV and watch the Technicolor bars flicker across the screen until the sun rose, all the while touching her face, her belly.
Still regular Judy , she’d reassure herself.
She must always be regular Judy, even if she had to pretend.
But by the time the morning news roared to life, the certainty that she contained ghosts or something evil began to pass, and she padded to the kitchen, slightly ashamed of her panic, and poured a bowl of cereal, eating it dry with her hands.
the wedding was lovely . The family church, the Chinese church on Frances just behind a McDonald’s and a London Drugs, went all out.
The church ladies made pink-and-white bunting and hung it like talismans from the windows and pews.
Even her mother helped them, dutifully cutting triangles with long shears, answering their questions about Judy’s dress with a not-quite smile on her face.
The pastor’s wife had driven to the floral wholesaler on Marine Drive and bought buckets of carnations in fuchsia and baby pink and white, and they burst from the tall urns at the altar.
At the reception, held at the Fraser Flamingo Restaurant, each table ploughed through the traditional ten courses and bottles of Johnnie Walker Red.
Uncle Mak got her father drunk. Minnie Lam sang off-key to the tinny deejayed music.
The little cousins danced, sweaty black bangs stuck to their foreheads.
That night, in their room at the Hotel Georgia, Judy got pregnant.
She could feel a small pit in her abdomen, something new and tiny growing in hardness, growing in ferocity.
A baby. At first, she lay in the king-sized bed while Tom snored, her eyes wide open, unsure if she could even move.
What if the baby was born all wrong, like the ones she had read about in the newspaper, the ones with no brains, whose heads were just blobs of skin and tissue?
What if she couldn’t love a monster? Would that make her the worse monster?
She put her hand on her stomach, and the warmth from her palm matched the warmth in her abdomen and she knew this could never be true. Finally , I am full of goodness.