Mistakes to Run With Read online

  Also by Yasuko Thanh

  FLOATING LIKE THE DEAD

  MYSTERIOUS FRAGRANCE OF THE YELLOW MOUNTAINS

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  First published 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Yasuko Thanh

  Patrick Geary quote is republished with permission of Princeton University Press from Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium by Patrick Geary, 1994; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Thanh, Yasuko, author

  Mistakes to run with : a memoir / Yasuko Thanh.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780735234413 (softcover).—ISBN 9780735234420 (electronic)

  1. Thanh, Yasuko. 2. Thanh, Yasuko—Childhood and youth.

  3. Authors, Canadian (English)—British Columbia—Biography. I. Title.

  PS8639.H375Z466 2019  C813′.6  C2018-902404-6

                    C2018-902405-4

  Cover design: Terri Nimmo

  Cover images: (front) Alex Waber (back) Picsfive / Shutterstock.com

  v5.3.2

  a

  For my children

  All memory…is memory for something.

  PATRICK GEARY

  CONTENTS Cover

  Also by Yasuko Thanh

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Part I: Wheel of Rebirth

  Fortunes of All Humans

  Kitchen Gods and Flying Ghosts

  City of Innocent Deaths

  Chamber of Maggots and Terrible Bee Torture

  Road to the Spring

  Living in the Gaps of the World

  Underworld Prison and Chamber of Ice

  Hell Guards

  Torture by Mincing Machines

  Abundance City

  Black Rope Hell and Upside-Down Prison

  Repeating Spring

  Bridge of Helplessness and Chamber of Flames

  Underworld Mansion

  Part II: Tea of Oblivion

  Realm of the Dead

  Town of Quitters

  Iron Web and Office of Fair Trading

  Hot Suffocation Hell

  Mountain of Knives

  Celestial Empire

  Department of Heart Gouging

  Screaming Torture and Administrative Errors

  Part III: Circle of Return

  Acknowledgments

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Many of the names in this work have been changed to protect people’s privacy. Frances is a composite, but the events are true facts.

  Chapter titles are based on Buddhism’s Eighteen Levels of Hell.

  PART I

  WHEEL OF REBIRTH

  VANCOUVER, 1988. I’m seventeen, sitting on an overturned milk crate in the July heat.

  My best friend Frances rubbed her toes through the leather of her stilettos. She was black, half Native, and didn’t know her real father. People said his name was Fergie and that he was from Barbados. This is all anyone knew.

  Although Frances was prettier than the other girls on the track, Japanese dates rarely took her out. No matter that she spoke a little of their language, learned while working at Bradley’s nightclub, which catered to Asian businessmen with thick wallets. If she and I were out on the corner together, chances were I’d catch a date first.

  My hot-pink tube top shimmered in the sun. I sucked a frozen strawberry juice bar, monitoring my tan through my sunglasses. I’d flung my six-inch heels aside; they lay in the shadow of the Korner Kitchen coffee shop. I slathered my legs with baby oil, careful not to spill any on my miniskirt.

  Five years before, the local newspaper in Victoria, British Columbia, where I grew up, had published an article about my academic, athletic, and civic achievements. My place on the school math team had earned us a spot in the Gauss Contest. I’d won a French public-speaking competition that sent provincial finalists to Ottawa to meet the Governor General, Jeanne Sauvé. The article featured a grainy picture I hated: skinny face, acne, poodle perm. My parents had saved the clipping and, before gluing it into the pages of a family scrapbook, had sent photocopies to aunts and uncles in Europe.

  “I need at least four today,” Frances said. Her pimp wasn’t known for setting quotas. I figured she had rent to pay.

  I’d already made three hundred dollars that morning and stashed the money in my bra, where the folded bills scratched against my breasts.

  Frances often worked double shifts to earn what I did in three hours. At the age of seventeen I was convinced of the righteousness of my behaviour, which showed what a person could do when not intimidated. I ate lobster, drove a Camaro. I wasn’t a victim. We smiled from the curb at the men who drove around the block, waved, beckoned with our index fingers, manufacturing a sweetness for even the circle jerks who ogled our flesh through their car windows but never stopped to take us out. This was part of the job, smiling while covering up our fear.

  At the age of fifteen, within the space of two months, I’d gone from losing my virginity to performing half-and-halfs on the street that cost two hundred bucks, half blow job, half lay. Another year of work had brought me to Vancouver, to this point now, deep in the summer of 1988.

  I’d never had a violent date like Frances who’d been kidnapped, bound with rope, held captive in a garage, and forced to eat dog food before being set free two days later. Another friend had been attacked, her head split open, by a guy driving a station wagon with a child’s car seat in the back. She’d tried to block the blows while yelling she was pregnant but he beat her unconscious with his crowbar anyway. I saw her in the Korner Kitchen two weeks later: she’d returned to work with her arm in a cast and seventy-two stitches in her head.

  I remember thinking I was lucky. I remember thinking I was careful. Such things could never happen to me.

  Fortunes of All Humans

  The previous year, in September 1987 when I was sixteen, a psychologist wrote to my probation officer in my case file: “Her responses on the Rorschach are the type of responses that might be expected from a neglected and deprived child and leave me wondering about the adequacy of care that has been provided by her parents, even in the most basic physical areas.”

  In a city known for its trees, I grew up on a street with none. Victoria, 1974. My father, a Vietnamese national who spoke four languages and had a degree from a Parisian university, found work in a shoe store, a far cry from the financial industry and the bank he’d thought would employ him. Before immigrating to British Columbia and settling on the west coast he’d studied business management. He’d met my mother in Europe when he was twenty-seven and she was sixteen. Handsome as Bruce Lee, he promised a ticket away from her home in dour grey postwar Germany. They came to Canada in 1970, a year before I was born. My mother had fantasized about riding escalators in glamorous North American shopping malls, but what greeted her in Victoria during those heady days of Trudeaumania was more grey. Rain. A rooming house. Mo
re rain. My father found himself walking to the shoe store next to a bowling alley to sell pumps to women who couldn’t understand his thick accent and asked him to repeat “What size do you take?” My mother still spoke to me in German at home. During the afternoons, when the sun shone on our balcony, we played school. She practised the English phrases she’d heard on TV while I sat cross-legged next to her, writing “Mama, do you love me?” in an orange exercise book.

  When my brother was born, in the winter of 1976, my parents gave him my room. I was relegated to a flip chair—Her responses leave me wondering about the adequacy of care—that unfolded into a kid’s bed a few feet from the front door. I didn’t understand why I had to give him anything, to share anything. Why didn’t they put him in the living room? Or in the kitchen? Better yet, why couldn’t they take him back to wherever he’d come from? I’d trade him in for a Barbie doll.

  When my parents needed the living room to watch a movie or the news, they put me to sleep in their bed. I once squirted my mother’s nose drops onto her pillow to wet it the way tears would so she’d know I was sad. My mother didn’t notice the wetness; or, if she did, she said nothing about it the next day.

  It shouldn’t have surprised me. Comfort was a foreign currency in my family. If I was upset, my father would splash my face with water cold enough to take my breath away. This much I knew: voicing unpleasant emotions made you unlovable. My craving for acceptance and my inability to express my need made me misbehave; my father would spank me with a thick wooden ruler. My mother’s slaps, they at least touched me. I must be a bad girl, I thought, yet I didn’t understand why. My parents’ expectations of me were as baffling as they were mutable. All day I would follow the rules to have my mother confront me at bedtime with a list of sins I’d committed without knowing it.

  In the years to come I would give them perfect report cards, ribbons won at track, certificates of academic achievement. I went to church and volunteered, spoon-fed boys and girls crippled with cerebral palsy at the Queen Alexandra hospital. I’d bring home these offerings yet saw no reason to be proud of my achievements. Perfection was expected. Not praised.

  For my entire childhood—and still, today, part of me waits—I’d needed to hear three simple words from my parents: You Are Good. Good. Worthy. Valuable. You are valuable to me. You are valuable to the rest of the world. Not because of what you do but because you are you, inherently important to us. You are not a bad girl. You are good.

  I plotted revenge against my brother, and would pinch him to make him cry. But there was something else. I pinched him not to hurt but to comfort him, so that I’d have a reason to pick him up, dry his tears. Whisper, “Hush, hush, hush.”

  * * *

  —

  To escape my confusion I’d often play outside our apartment building near where the grass ended and the road into our housing project began. There the grass grew tallest and the St. John’s wort was bushy enough to act as a forest.

  I had one doll—my father had inexplicably thrown away all my toys when the rest of us weren’t home—and my favourite game was doctor. I inflicted Barbie with injuries, scrawled blood drops with red ballpoint. One day, when I was five or six, I decided to run away. Woolco would be a good, safe place to go, lots of toys, bright lights, a Popsicle machine. I knew the way down the road that circled our building toward a busy six-lane street. A friend’s mother saw me on the road, fiddling with my doll, and invited me to their apartment for a cup of tea. She felt sorry for me. I drank the tea instead of running away, enjoying how much sugar I could use, when helping myself, to sweeten my cup.

  I finished the tea and went back outside. I found an abandoned construction site. Standing atop a pile of wood I became Queen of the Two-by-Four, Queen of Nails, Queen of Drywall. I picked out my bedroom and showed my doll hers. It was all there in plywood and rebar—the framework to a happy life.

  * * *

  —

  Years passed. My parents’ tenacity and dreams gave way to disappointment—misfortune has a way of misering its victims. My mother did not get her promised yearly trip home to visit her six brothers and sisters; it was out of the question. Winter rains ushered in mud puddles and a road wet with oil slicks. My mother told me later that in those years she dreamed of running away across the rooftops of our neighbourhood, clutching a suitcase in one hand and my hand in the other, my brother on her hip as we escaped. It haunted her.

  The nights my father worked late, my mother, brother, and I occupied the chesterfield, bolstered by pillows my mother had made herself. The awkwardness that blossomed between us as I grew dissolved when we watched TV. Sometimes I even pretended to fall asleep because when I did my mother would smooth back my hair and kiss me.

  We didn’t live in absolute poverty, only the relative sort. My classmates had money for nail polish and velour sweaters from Woodward’s; they went to movies, slept in a bed, rode a bike. I did these things too, but much later than everyone else.

  At eight years old I’d take the bus to the Y downtown. Every Saturday I saw other parents dropping off their children, but I never expected a ride. I’d sit in the seat to the right of the bus driver reserved for people with mobility issues. I’d look forward to chatting with him. He asked lots of questions.

  * * *

  —

  Forty years have gone by since the two photographs were taken that I withdraw from a shoebox and place before me, their corners yellowed. It’s difficult to reconcile the images I see of myself in old photographs with how I felt at the time.

  A crack runs through one of them: I’m nine or ten, turning a cartwheel on matted grass. I have on the red vest with pink crosses that my mother had knitted me. I remember disliking the vest but wearing it anyway, guilty about not loving it more. In the photograph my mother hunkers ten feet back, watching me from the front steps in sunglasses, a shiny blouse. She cups her chin—no, mashes it—against her cheek. It is the face of a general, grimacing, frowning.

  My mother loved the idea of hope, feeding it with more dreams than it could swallow. By now she’d taken up with an evangelical God, telling the Christian stories of resilience—mouth painters who’d become quadriplegic in horrible accidents, Holocaust survivors—that filled my childhood. She inducted me into the Pentecostal army of God with a vengeance, and I complied enthusiastically.

  My mother was like someone behind glass that divided her from me, froze her gaze. Yet I fantasized that beneath her cold blue eyes she had a fire, an inner Mrs. Brady, because I’d once turned my head to see her turn her own cartwheel. In that moment of laughter I saw her spirit. Somewhere in there another woman, the happy version of my mother, was trapped and trying to get out.

  We moved from the apartment to a townhouse down the street. I was entering grade three, eight years old. I don’t remember packing. I don’t remember moving trucks. What I remember is walking through the empty new house followed by the echo of my footsteps. What legroom and breathing space smelled like. The dresser left behind in one of the rooms was antique—I took the drawers out, examining their workmanship. Why? Because that piece of furniture would reveal something about the earlier occupants. I found a handwritten receipt with a 1940s date on it.

  The townhouse had three bedrooms, a tiny yard; it faced a playground with a concrete elephant covered in graffiti, a swing set on which older kids would sit after I’d gone to bed. I could hear their hoots and hollers through my window, their robust party yells. The sound of breaking glass after they’d lobbed an empty bottle—I imagined the high arc of some smooth, clear, exotic bird following its own trajectory through the night to inevitably, thrillingly, crash down to earth, strike the asphalt, and explode in a rainbow prism of glass that I’d sidestep the following day as I played. All I had to do was show my face in this community space separated from the adult world by an invisible force field, sacred ground preordained for small feet alone, and approach a kid. “Wanna play?”

  For the next hour we’d pretend that on
ly these swings, this gnarly apple tree, this concrete elephant existed. This tree is a fort. The ground is covered in snakes. You can’t go down or you’ll be eaten. These apples are grenades. Launch them at the boys.

  * * *

  —

  These days, having my own room means survival in a world that presses in. My own room is the bubble that surrounds me; I retreat there when the pressures of the world get to be too much as if into a diving bell under a hundred feet of ocean. If I sense a crack, I seal it up by halting communication with the outside.

  Sometimes the space contracts around me, mordant, until the sound of my own breathing swallows me. The awareness that what protects me sanctions my survival doesn’t stave off the ensuing claustrophobia. The patient in an oxygen tent still hates her immobility. Her weakness. The sickness that put her there in the first place. She wishes she could get up and walk through the transparent walls—beyond them she can see others living their lives—yet what she’s suffered makes this impossible. Any outside contact carries the potential of a fatal infection. So the patient learns to live with her lot. Learns to appreciate her separateness.

  * * *

  —

  Back then, before having my own room, my own setting to house the items symbolically meaningful to me, I’d choose a section of hallway in the apartment, between the living room and the bathroom, and lay out the books I’d withdrawn from the library earlier that day in a row. My own room meant I could do the same thing but in private, with more than books. I took meticulous care in arranging every object I owned. Tiny plastic animals the dentist gave away after an appointment, ceramic figurines from tea boxes, my stuffed animals, my dolls—each had a location, a private corner they didn’t have to share with anyone.