From The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family. Published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2018.

Even a vacation couldn’t give my mother a break from herself. I didn’t realize that I too had been hoping for an interruption in her black hole of madness on this shitty vacation until one morning when it became clear that the Woo-Woo had pursued us, and my mother enacted its violence more wickedly than I’d ever thought possible.

My mother flung back my pink Hello Kitty sheets, thrust a stove lighter under my foot, and set it aflame. She had been normal the night before, serving up canned spaghetti in plastic bowls and asking me if I wanted fourths and fifths, like a very different, separate person. “Eat more,” she had commanded, hurriedly piling noodles on everyone’s plate, seeming excited. Even my aunt seemed to feed off her energy as she quickly dished up steamed tofu, bok choy, and sliced chicken—our families always ate lunch and dinner together when camping. Before bed, my mother began to obsessively scrub the trailer, freezing our camping meals: fried rice and lo mein. She mopped the floor, dusted the cupboards, and complained that she couldn’t sleep. Usually, when she was generous and hyperactive like this, she’d let me stay up all night and we’d frantically bake hundreds and hundreds of cupcakes, decorating the counters and chairs of our house until our crumbly creations went stale and inedible.

We should have recognized this normalized calm before the eruption of a full-fledged Woo-Woo hurricane. Because this morning, she had completely lost it. We were 515 kilometres from the epicenter of crazy (Poh-Poh), but we were parked perfectly in sync beside Beautiful One and her family in a dehydrated RV resort. We had matching trailers, so how could she not go Woo-Woo?

I was beginning to realize that the madness in our DNA was a life-threatening disease, transmitted like a pesky airborne infection, attacking and mutating the pink and grey confetti cells of the brain. It was a twenty-first-century plague that seemed to affect only the women in our family, and there was no standard vaccination. The day my mother burned me, I saw clearly: if you caught the Woo-Woo, you had to let it run its course and hope that you survived with unnoticeable scars.

Maybe she’d had just enough of fighting with my father or she was just truly insane, but I was tired and slept in past ten a.m., so she ignited my foot as if it were a backyard barbecue pit. A utilitarian gas stove. With her multi-purpose utility lighter, with its stainless-steel tip and extendable flame for those hard-to-reach places.

Clickety click-click. The flame suddenly poked the bottom of my left foot. Like something soft but raw and painful. I screamed, the shock radiating into my toes. I would never have expected it from my mother. My father, maybe—he crossed over the blackish border of cruelty so easily. But never from my mother, who was someone who disappeared whenever she couldn’t take it anymore.

“Hey, fatty,” she suddenly said, and climbed up to the top bunk of the RV and aimed again for my favourite cotton sheets, not caring that she could light the entire bed ablaze. But she got the piggy toes of the same foot instead and I shrieked.

That summer, my stomach had begun to protrude with adolescent misery, and my face and breasts had seemed to bloat like oversized helium balloons. Puberty had transformed me into a four-foot-eight, 140-pound goblin, more grungy and cave dwelling than the smiling, bejeweled child’s Treasure Trolls that seemed to horrify everyone, my mother included.

I was used to unnecessary wake-up calls from my emotional insomniac mother, but never like this. She had always been paranoid about Woo-Woo scourging, and I believe that summer she thought a demon had squirmed inside my fragile head when she wasn’t looking. The poor woman blamed herself for not being a vigilant ghost-hunting mommy. I was fat and lazy and stupid, which obviously meant that I was possessed. My mother believed that her sole life purpose was to exorcise any family member’s ailing cranium and banish the evil Woo-Woo. She believed that she had been Chosen and was taking her duty seriously.