The Wondrous Woo Read online

  After Darwin let out an astounding rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” on the electric guitar, the store manager ran to the phone and soon a CityTV news van pulled up to put Darwin on the six o’clock evening news.

  Two days after the arrival of Darwin’s miraculous talents, while we were eating our cereal, Sophia began to scratch out numbers and symbols on the Cheerios box with her scented markers. She stood from the table and within minutes had filled the leftover pages of her school notebook. Soon, strange scroll-like formulas that smelled like pineapples and mangoes began to appear on the walls, the floors, and even on the toilet seat. It didn’t seem to alarm Ma at first, like it did me. She was too preoccupied with Darwin and his sudden talents. The phone had already started to ring with people asking if Darwin would make appearances at other music stores as a promotion. So I armed myself with spray cleaner and paper towels. The pens might have been meant for children, but their ink was permanent. Eventually, I would have to buy us another toilet seat, or start replacing Sophia’s markers with pencils.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked my sister who looked possessed during these outbursts. Her one crossed eye was focused intently in a different direction than the other, making her look like a deranged Charles Manson. “Just stop that, already.”

  “I don’t know,” Sophia answered, before continuing her strange markings. “I can’t stop.”

  In the middle of the night, I looked across at Sophia’s bed and her fingers were moving, writing indecipherable symbols in the air. Even in sleep, she was becoming haunted by the strange formulas.

  A few days later, she inserted her formulations, written on a long piece of construction paper, into a manila envelope and took her banana-seated pink bike to school. She wrote the name of her math teacher, Mr. Middleton, in block letters across the front and handed it to the school secretary. A week later, Ma got a call from Mr. Middleton, and could hardly make out what the man was trying to say because he ranted, raved, laughed, and wept rather than spoke. It seemed that Sophia had, by way of complex analysis, stumbled upon — “Oh no, quite the wrong word, Mrs. Woo … hmm, discovered? Worked out? Yes, maybe worked out is more apt” — the most beautiful math theory there ever was: the Euler’s Identity. Mr. Middleton had only heard of the formula from his days at McGill. He remembered his mentor, a Professor Gorky, lecture impassionedly on what he called the most poetic formula ever derived. The Euler Identity was sublime, a study of exquisite symmetry. It was, in short, perfect. Poor Mr. Middleton. He had been up all night since receiving Sophia’s package, pulling down all his mathematic books from their dusty shelves. At the crack of dawn, he called Professor Gorky in Montreal and confirmed what he suspected. Sophia had gone about re-discovering it, even presenting new routes and possibilities in getting to it. He told all this to Ma, while Ma repeated all his sentences to us as soon as he said them.

  “A fifteen-year-old girl!” he exclaimed over and over again. And I knew he wasn’t simply shocked that it was from a fifteen-year old, but rather that it was brassy Sophia Woo who never finished her homework on time, smacked gum loudly even when she bold-face lied about having any in her mouth, and passed notes to her friends during his lessons. That was my sis. She always stuck one toe across the line of all rules, just to prove she could.

  It was indeed, as he said, a miracle.

  News of my siblings’ sudden onset of “The Gifts,” as we began calling them, spread like wildfire. After Darwin’s TV appearance, other media outlets appeared at our door. Everyone wanted to get a piece of him, especially when they learned there were not one, but two child geniuses under one roof. These things didn’t just happen every day in Scarberia. Our house was abuzz with journalists, Catholic priests, and experts of all kinds while curious strangers camped out on the lawn. Everyone had a theory about The Gifts. Among them was a woman completely dressed in white who claimed The Gifts were bestowed by an alien race that created humans as an experiment. She said Darwin and Sophia were the chosen ones to bridge the two species together. This prompted the priests to sprinkle holy water on everything.

  The rush of people was both terrifying and thrilling. Ma insisted on making sandwiches for this mixed crowd, so I was assigned to slap Wonder Bread together with a lather of mayonnaise and a slice of deli ham. It goes without saying that Sophia and Darwin didn’t have to help; no, they got to sit sweetly on the sofa and take questions while I served platter after platter of tiny square sandwiches. Ma insisted the crusts be cut, like they do in England apparently.

  Sophia drank up the attention while Darwin kicked at the coffee table, occasionally asking Ma if he could be excused so he could play Space Invaders. The answer was always a hissed, “No,” from Ma.

  I decided to at least try and pretend my way into having a good time, so I assembled the sandwiches into mountainous heaps and humbly offered them to the guests, taking on a demure servant-girl shuffle.

  The maid act, however, quickly became irritating. Soon, I was also taking orders for beverages, doing all the shopping for more supplies, making sure there was toilet paper in the bathroom, and being an all-around gopher.

  Plus, the phone rang off the hook. Amidst sandwich-making and tea-pouring, I also took on the job of secretary, fielding the calls. Requests came flooding in from all corners of the globe. Professional child psychologists wanted to study Sophia and Darwin, academics wanted to apprentice them, and talk-show hosts just wanted to know everything. We even got a call from a producer at The Oprah Winfrey Show. I started to see the promise of all that offered money, buckets of it, enough that you could fill a room with banknotes and roll around for a few days.

  “What do I do?” I asked Ma nervously. I didn’t cope well with talking to authority figures, which, to me, felt like everyone. She told me to do what I thought was best for my brother and sister. Ma’s job (according to Ma) was to sit beside Sophia and Darwin on the couch, a frozen grin on her face. In some ways, it was like she had been preparing for this kind of thing her whole life. There were two things Ma understood about the world as a Catholic: worldly suffering and miracles. Every time one of those commercials about starving children would come on TV, she would look satisfied as if she was infinitely wiser than everybody, and would turn to us and say, “See how lucky you are?” As for miracles, she had been waiting for them forever.

  At night, when all the people faded from the house, Ma made declarations to us that she would be a servant to these extraordinary happenings. She would occasionally look to the heavens, her hands busily making the sign of the cross, and assigned these strange things to the holy Almighty. Even as she did this, I secretly wondered whether she also believed the craziness had something to do with Ba. She had a large photo of him set up on the coffee table and often smiled at him as if he were in the room.

  When Ma realized that the media requests were coming in faster than I could respond to them, she rounded up her church friends and they fanned out like soldiers. They were delegated into different roles according to their skill sets: management, finances, media, and institutional liaisons. This new infrastructure worked like a well-oiled machine.

  Chapter 6 ~

  Shan’s brothers were too gifted to stay in their little village when they could read and write. The emperor had called them to the imperial city to take up rank with his officials. She would never race, sweaty and happy, to the hills with them again. While she had expected that they would leave, she never considered what it meant to be left behind.

  AFTER MA HAD ORGANIZED her battalion to manage The Gifts, there was nothing left for me to do. I waited, unsure of what I was waiting for.

  “Ba is so proud,” Ma told us, not seeming to notice how I was shifting uncomfortably from one foot to the other. I had done nothing new or special, but I guess she thought I could be a servant to the miracles, too.

  No one said it, but it had been hanging in the air like a large question mark: what
about Miramar? Wherever I went, to the mall, to the grocery store, or to the front of the house to water the lawn, everyone wanted to know about Sophia and Darwin. Mainly, people wanted to know what the early signs of genius were, and how to reproduce the conditions. Were they normal babies? Were they on a special diet? Did they get on well with others? How old were they when they began to talk? Read? Toilet train? Were there other people in the family with exceptional talents? Finally, they would ask if I had developed any extraordinary superpowers. No, I would reply, embarrassed, and take that as a cue to slip away.

  The truth was, I was still waiting for my Gift. In secret, I tried to will something to happen. At night, I snuck out the window and laid on the flat roof of the house to face the stars, my arms stretched out, inviting the mysterious powers that landed on Sophia and Darwin to take me too. “Come to me. Come to me. Come to me,” I beckoned the universe.

  Once, I even tried to conjure Ba. None of us said it aloud, that he was probably responsible for all of this, but I think we all thought it, though we were scared to tread into such supernatural territory. “Ba, what about me?” I wondered. Silence echoed around me on the roof, and the stars seemed close enough to crush my chest. If Ba came to Darwin, it was clear, then, he didn’t want to come to me. Perhaps it still had to do with Disney World, and Ba was holding a grudge, though I never would have thought he’d be so small about it. We were friends.

  I reached my fingers out and touched the leaves of the maple tree we had planted when we first moved into the house. It had been a patriotic gesture, to commemorate our first home in the new country. The tree grew from a sapling to a full-fledged adolescent — awkward and graceful all at once. The top of the tree now hovered just above the roof of the bungalow. I held an unfurled young leaf in my hand then stuck a finger into the curl.

  Beneath my disappointment of not receiving a Gift, I missed Ba. Why had he not given me something to hold onto? Something I could grow that would take the ache of his absence away?

  And I was jealous. It ate through me like an army of green worms, occupying me like an invasion.

  Once again, I faded into the background, something I was used to doing in the outside world, but never had to do within the world of the Woo. I was, at least, the eldest, which had some cachet, but I was also on equal footing with my siblings and felt loved and was safe. Now I could barely look at Sophia and Darwin because I thought I might scream or hit what I imagined as smugness off their faces. My perceptions were indulgent, I knew; Sophia was too self-absorbed to ever be competitive with me. And I also knew Darwin was too sweet to ever want to hurt me. Still, no one noticed me or the green worms that had taken up residence in my heart. I continued to serve sandwiches, and said nothing.

  Scarborough was a decent-sized suburb, but it proved to be too small to contain The Gifts. Several European and American conservatories wanted to meet Darwin and recruit him into their schools. Professor Gorky wanted Sophia to start right away at McGill in the Mathematics Department under his tutelage while Yale and MIT also waged furious bids, upping their offers of scholarship money. Ma and her friends stayed up late into the night, playing mah jong and weighing all these opportunities. As they clicked the tiles around the table, debating the merits of each option, I sat on the stairs eavesdropping in the dark.

  Finally, it was decided. Darwin would take the Western European tour — London, Paris, Vienna, and Munich — but be housed mainly at the Royal Conservatory of Music in London. Sophia would go to McGill to Professor Gorky since he came referred by Mr. Middleton.

  Sophia spent hours deciding on which outfits to pack. Heaps of clothes littered her bedroom floor. Her shoes alone wouldn’t fit in one suitcase — red Sparx high-top sneakers, the Nike Wafers, ballet slipper flats, pink and yellow jellies, Cougar boots, and all her sharp-toed pickle stabbers.

  We had never been a sentimental bunch before, but a few days before Darwin was scheduled to fly out to his new life, he called us into his bedroom.

  He sat down cross-legged on his bed and motioned grandly that we should do the same on the other twin bed. I noticed his old teddy bear that he hadn’t played with in years sitting in his open suitcase. “No matter what happens, we have to meet on my birthday for the rest of our lives. No matter what. Deal?” he offered his pinky finger.

  “Why your birthday?” Sophia asked with a scowl.

  “’Cause it was my idea!” Darwin cried.

  “How about this?” I offered. “We’ll meet on Chinese New Year. Ba’s favourite holiday. We’ll do what we always did. Make pomelo lanterns, cook with Ma, fill the house with flowers…. That way, we’ll be together every Chinese New Year for the rest of our lives. All of us.”

  Darwin seemed satisfied and lifted his little finger to lock on Sophia’s.

  “Swear,” Darwin said to me. I crooked my finger through theirs.

  “Swear,” I replied.

  “Swear,” repeated Sophia.

  “Hey, maybe we should do a blood oath, too,” Darwin tilted his head to consider this.

  “We’re already related by blood, dummy,” Sophia said, swatting him in the head.

  Despite the gentility between us three siblings that night, the next day I bitterly added “bag carrier” to my list of servant duties, first accompanying Ma and Darwin to the airport in rush hour, and then, the next day, doing it again for Sophia at the train station. She wore a long scarf and sunglasses, looking every bit the movie star, and when I dropped her off and prepared to wave goodbye until she entered the building, she hefted her bag, turned and walked inside without a look back.

  Now home alone for the first time in my life, I ate my cereal in front of the TV, left my things wherever I felt like, and every afternoon when I was finally ready to face the world, I went to the corner store and bought up every newspaper and magazine I could, clipping articles about my gifted siblings and pressing them into a scrapbook, waiting in my cocoon.

  Labour Day came and went, and I was still wondering what I should do.

  Chapter 7 ~

  Ling wrapped her long hair tightly against her skull and donned her brother’s hat. The only way to take the imperial exams and prove her worth as a scholar was to assume a disguise. She would laugh loudly and hork, spitting on the ground, and no one would ever know she was a girl.

  IN MID-SEPTEMBER, I still wasn’t sure whether I should go off to Ottawa or not. I had phoned Ma at her hotel in Helsinki to ask whether I should stay back in Scarborough with her, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Or she could not hear it at all as our connection was really bad. But she did remind me that my going to university was what she and Ba had always wanted for me. Plus, she wouldn’t be home for a while so what else was I going to do?

  Over the crackly phone line, it sounded more like she was trying to get rid of me or just making sure I kept myself busy. When I had been accepted at Carleton two months before Ba died, they had treated it like it was the most momentous event of the year. We had gathered around the acceptance letter, Ma and Ba handling it like a sacred scroll.

  Sophia and Darwin had also been excited about it for their own reasons. Sophia was thrilled to finally have her own room, and Darwin wanted to visit the Museum of Man in Ottawa to check out the dinosaurs. The ones in Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, according to him, sucked eggs. All of us had been planning to spend a weekend at a hotel before launching me into my new life.

  Going away to university was to be my thunder, my way of making some waves in the world. Now it was just a tiny drop of rain in a torrential downpour. Ma extended her trip to stay with Darwin through to Copenhagen where he would have a brief residency at some music conservatory there. In photos of Darwin in the newspapers, he held himself with a calm grace, looking perfectly humble and unaffected, like a Mozart in miniature. One review claimed that Darwin seemed otherworldly as the music that came from his tiny tuxedoed figure carried his audience to tears.
/>
  Sophia was now with Professor Gorky in Montreal where she was about to start at McGill on fellowship. She was about to become the star feature in the international mathematic forums for a season, and earn accolades from scientists and artists alike with her trademark sensibility for balance, her great cross-eyed beauty, and her penchant for off-the-shoulder sweatshirts. In the meantime, the matching luggage Ma and Ba had bought and had monogrammed with my initials on every golden buckle when I got accepted, sat in the hall closet still in its plastic wrapping.

  I was going to have to lock the door, get myself to the bus terminal with all my quaint new suitcases, and pretend my family was still making the same fuss they had made all those months ago, all on my own.

  After everything that had happened, I was hardly in any shape to start a new life. Between the grief snacking and the casseroles, I didn’t have much to wear that still fit.

  I surveyed myself in the mirror. My clothes were mainly made up of jeans and sweatshirts. Some of the zippers on the jeans were broken because I always bought them one size too small. The tighter, the better, I figured. Once, I tried putting them on in the shower so the denim would mould into my skin, but I had such an ordeal taking them off afterwards that I never did it again. Also, my legs stayed indigo for a week.

  I folded the pants and put them into the largest suitcase. I could try all I wanted to achieve the long silhouette of the slender girls, but I would always look more like one of the seven dwarves. I did not have much of a waist, my hips flared way out and my bum ended near my mid-thigh in the back. Nida called me womanly. I hated that. I wished I had a body like Debbie Harry in Blondie: bone-skinny, all edges and points, like she hadn’t eaten in a year.