If I made MVP, would my mother come back?
Lindsay Wong’s father is convinced pee-wee hockey will distract his wife from the “ghosts” of mental illness. But as she writes in her memoir The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family, the game has unintended consequences. This is the first in a series of excerpts from nominees for the $60,000 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. The winner will be announced Nov 7.
After a year without paranormal incident, when I was 12 years old my mother suddenly checked out again. It was just before the semifinals of my peewee winter hockey tournament at our home rink, Planet Ice, and I still had to play.
During the year without incident our family had been surviving, at least to our very minimal standards, and one night, my mother and father had woken my siblings and me at 2 a.m. and ordered us into the van because they had suddenly decided to drive from Vancouver to California.
“No ghost follow Mommy to Disneyland,” my father happily promised us, as he handed out Costco-sized bags of discounted Halloween candy for the trip. During those three weeks we were frighteningly spontaneous, and I think it was the only time my parents seemed like they weren’t furious at each other and themselves.
And then, without consulting any of us, when I was at the start of seventh grade my father signed us all up for little league hockey, which was supposed to keep us “busy” and distract my mother from her ghosts. She had no choice but to become a hockey mom of three, a transformation that bewildered and terrified her — What the fuck is the point of this Canada sport?!
Our manic hockey extracurricular was also supposed to make our family assimilate faster into North American culture. As if possessing enough money to throw three kids into organized sports meant that we had achieved a recreational version of the American sitcom dream. Hockey practice was also a way to toughen us up, which I didn’t realize until I was fully grown — my father wanted his children to learn discipline and heroic fearlessness by participating in a sport condoned by our country’s culture. He did not want us to be terrified and seemingly “weak” like our mother.
Unfortunately, he did not consider that the hectic 4 a.m. practice schedules and 9 p.m. away games on school nights would make my mother crankier and more volatile.
At three one morning, she finally drove off. “Sorry,” she apologized to my sister, who was nine years old and an excellent worrier. “If you’re hungry, Daddy only knows how to make rice, so it sucks to be you.”
I said nothing, because this was her blunt way of stating a fact (Daddy was indeed a shitty cook). I watched her stomp away with her winter coat and car keys, disappointed. I felt like her least favourite child; she did not even acknowledge me, and I was already insecure, so this further unsettled me in a jealous, mercurial way.
“If you won all your hockey game,” my father said to me before the semifinal game, “she’d have stayed. No one like to watch loser. You need to win MVP so she will like you.”
He may have been attempting a joke, but at this point, I think even he knew he had failed at keeping her on track towards middling sustainable sanity. It was getting harder and harder to conceal his sadistic shame with humour — and his humour was becoming uglier and blacker.
“Okay,” I said, not understanding the whole situation, but I was dumb — i.e., desperate and hurt and disturbed — enough to try to please him.
During the preceding year, when the ghosts seemed to have forgotten about my mother, I contentedly spent an hour or two at craft classes at a local arts school, where I learned how to weave Eastern patterned tapestries and operate an old-fashioned printing press. But weaving and papermaking were not as stimulating or exciting to watch as real-time hockey for my father, who felt that I had a second-rate talent for crafts, so I was paid to hit other little girls in AA hockey.
Whether my father was training a small-time thug or just another pragmatic Chinese kid who valued money, I was paid a decent goon’s commission: 20 dollars per penalty, five dollars per goal, three dollars per assist. I did not particularly enjoy organized hockey, but it was a job, much like attending middle school.
In sixth grade, a dirty game of hockey could mean an easy 60 bucks. I became a little sumo wrestler, who leaped around on pointy designer blades, custom-made double E size 3 boy’s skates because I had fat, archless feet that seemed to expand sideways. I just had to vary and combine the main offences: charging, bodychecking, tripping. Throw in some comedic high-sticking. If I busted my stick and still played during my shift, it was an automatic penalty (I ruined a couple good sticks before each game). My father checked with the scorekeeper, tallied up the money, and coughed up the cash when we got home, because otherwise, I refused to participate. Paying someone to partake in an organized team sport was much easier than spanking them or hitting them with plastic hangers, which was something he did when money failed him.
“She pull diva again,” he liked to complain to my mother when she called, always a little disappointed that I did not wholly appreciate a game that defined an entire nation. “Lindsay wouldn’t put on her gear, so I had to pay her extra. She doesn’t like to move, that’s why she’s a fat piggy. At least we know our kid will do anything for money.”
Hockey was my stop-andgo routine, as if someone punched play and fast-forward repeatedly on a remote control. Bundled in modern gladiatorial gear, I disliked the grid mask of the helmet. It was like squinting through a frightening checkered prison. And I hated the hefty shoulder pads — perverse spaceship armour that bulked up our wimpy girlish shoulders to look more astronautic. The hockey pants were basically oversized girdles developed by NASA. With three private coaches specializing in applied physical theory (skate, pass, slap shot) and abundant private ice time, I made assistant captain within a year and performed until the end of tenth grade.
Hairstyling was my father’s ritual before any hockey performance. It seemed to relax him and appeal to his grand and obsessive tendencies. He would compulsively fix my hair into a tight, twisty ponytail for a regular game or French-braid it beautifully for a tournament. He was responsible for hair because my mother was rough-handed and could pluck a strip raw by accident. My father’s only hobby, besides his family, was gently sculpting hair into tidy creations. This was his only attempt at bonding with me pregame; he did not know how to use words in encouraging ways, so he embraced drugstore hairbands and elastics, just like a girl feebly twining friendship bracelets for her first-grade class.
“Hair okay?” he would ask. “Now go kick ass.”
But if I lost, he sometimes became too involved with the game and punished me by letting me choose a plastic hanger from his closet. He would chase me around the house like a cartoon grizzly, swinging my pink or yellow hanger of choice. I would sprint to the bathroom and lock the door, wondering for how many hours or days or weeks I would have to hide.
Looking back, this is where my father snapped; all humour flooding from him, he resorted to transparent brutality — he intended to smack. He claimed it was to make me harder on the outside, “less of a loser like Mommy.” Once, I stayed in the bathroom for 11 hours, hoping that he might get bored and give up. Even though I had stolen 20 dollars from his wallet, I did not think I deserved a whacking. Hockey was a terrible idea for a parent who was already so tortured. The ritualistic team practices, the demanding tournaments with the fingerbiting 50-50 raffles, the fierce head-cracking penalties — it was too much for a man who loved to win.