ORANGE JUICE | Seven

In the end, in the very, very end, I had to end it where it began. Why ask tarot what I can ask him in person? Why wear myself out with questions I can make him answer?

Certain I would catch him at home on a Sunday night, I cabbed to his block. At his door I was nervous. I thought I heard the television in the house. I tried the doorbell, then the door. No one answered. I went around the block to get a look at the house. It was dark and all the windows of all the rooms were closed. But a man opened the living room windows – someone was in then, not him, but someone – and I tried the door again. A man who looked like a thin teddy bear came to the door and when I asked for “Max” he said, “There is no Max who lives here. Is your address correct?”

I said I was sure I had the right house. “I’ve been in there.”

He said he had lived there on his own for years.

I said I had been in there with a Max in April.

“What has he done?”

“So Max is here?”

He said he did have a housemate but it wasn’t a Max. “I want to help you but tell me what he has done. Has he done anything criminal?”

I almost laughed. “No. It isn’t criminal not to call a girl.”

He said he had a housemate named Gotham, Gautham or something (“As in Batman?” I said but he didn’t get it and gave me a weak smile) who was out but would be back soon.

“Is he from the Maldives? Does he work for a bank?”

“Gotham” works for a tech company, his friend said. Thrown by the unfamiliar name and job, I thanked him and was ready to leave. Maybe my “Max” had left. Or he had lied. Or he had asked his friend to lie. What more did I need to know?

As soon as I was downstairs I had a new plan, however. My inner policewoman thought, why don’t I get the dating app again, go to the suspect’s photo page, show it to the man upstairs and see how he reacts? The app was slow, super slow. By the time I had the pics on the phone, the suspect was walking by me with loads of shopping and a fair and plump woman. (So that is his type. Someone like me.) I followed them, a few steps behind, and they didn’t see me until they got to his door and I went, “Hey…can I talk to you? Two minutes?”

Looking at him again after six months, I saw an uneven colouring on his face, a splatter of vanilla on caramel, that I didn’t recall. It was still a good face but all I felt was…nothing. He said, sure, he could talk. As his girlfriend went into the house he got me to walk with him to the lawn near the block. He said he remembered me, although he hadn’t recognised me immediately; it had been that long. He said he was surprised by my visit, although he didn’t sound it. He was as smooth as I remembered.

“New girlfriend?”

“Girlfriend.”

“Good for you.”

Finally, we were at a pavilion and he asked me what I wanted to talk about. I said he had not responded to my texts since May. (I was trying to be factual and to let him have his say, to be fairer to him.) He said he had gone abroad in May and got a new phone number in June. He said he thought he had told me to “get over” that afternoon.

“No you didn’t and you should have. I’m not a psychic.”

He said he had made a mistake. “It wasn’t planned, it just happened, it can’t be reversed. But we knew afterwards we were not two people who would get along.”

He knew. Did I? Did I know it and wishfully unknow it?

“I thought there was nothing to talk about and we would get over it. But seeing you here now, I know I made a mistake.”

He asked me to blame him. “You have to blame someone. Then one day you can forgive even if you don’t forget,” he said. Or he did not say it and I misheard. I had heard enough, though. His words cost him nothing and I didn’t want more. As I left he wished me good luck. I said bye.

It was windy – a night as nice as that day – when I walked to the road and caught a cab home.

ORANGE JUICE | Six

Finally, I saw an actual tarot reader in Bylands Building, a couple of steps from Guanyin in the country’s most fabled temple; a no-nonsense woman I paid to tell me to let it go. She said he had moved on. She said he hadn’t been ready. I had drawn a King of Cups and she said, “I don’t trust this king. He tells white lies. He’s a sweet-talker.” Move on, she said. Don’t miss your boat. Don’t wait for him and miss your Mr Right.

Even then I had to come home and press the virtual tarot card reader for more answers, a story to tell myself to give him up. Whether or not the cards spoke true, I drew comfort from them (as I took refuge in flu and K-drama, two things which allow me to go around the house with a gooey face, no questions asked).

ORANGE JUICE | Five

The last words he said to you as he stepped off the train were, “Text me.” And you have revisited that moment so many times since that afternoon, wishing you had stepped off the train too and said to him like a cool woman, “When you say, text me, do you mean goodbye? Then say what you mean, okay, and kiss me goodbye.”

But you are not cool, you are just crazy. You texted him, though you said you wouldn’t, then you had the longest two weeks of your life waiting for him to text you again. (He said he would be busy “these two weeks”, another of his roundabout goodbyes.) Then you wrote him a long letter, your rationale being: He started a fire, why should you spare him the smoke? (Listen to yourself. You talk like you are an avenging haze from Indonesia.)

You have stopped saying to your friends you are over him because you can’t seem to stay over him. You live in a dreamland with tarot as your new friend because who else can you trouble with impossible questions like: Did he read the letter? Will you see him again? (You did go to the Guanyin temple to get a divination but why did she say you were “carrying a ferocious tiger and climbing a steep mountain”? What did she mean exactly? But you couldn’t bring yourself to bother her again with your sesame-size crisis when so many other living beings need her.)

And so you wait on and on and on… Some days you are alone yet strong in your certainty that your encounter wasn’t random, that you will see him again. Other days you are alone and anxious…

ORANGE JUICE | Four

In my 20s I was actively looking for love – promiscuously chatting on IRC on a computer I fought over with my brothers, the one and only computer we had – and I found disaster. That might have been why I blotted it out later, the fact that you have to go and look for love, that it won’t come and find you. That might have been why I stopped looking.

But around Chinese New Year, going on a junket to Seoul again, it all came back to me. My first South Korea junket had been eight years ago, one day after I became single. Because it was too soon to speak of the break-up I didn’t; I passed the trip working, shopping and hearing E speak of her Korean guy. Only on the second Seoul junket four years later did I tell her. This year, on the way there with her again, I realised South Korea had become a bookmark in the blank notebook that was my love life, an eight-year blank, before she even asked me to update her.

I realised I hadn’t been doing enough about it, not as much as I had the last time. Signing up for OKCupid and Match.com and deleting messages from men wasn’t enough. I would have to get out and go out with some of them, which I resolved to do the morning I woke up in Seoul and found a blanket of snow outside the window, a landscape of hope.

Dating got quickly disheartening, though. Two promising guys – sporty, articulate Chinese Singaporeans, the sort who never ever asked me out at school – had written me before I went to Seoul and after I came back I asked to meet them. One of them was keener and we pencilled in a date. Then he said he would have sex with me in front of my family and that was the end of the discussion. The other kept saying he would meet me and that was all he was, talk.

The first guy I eventually met, a Taurean, was into sex or talking about it. By way of flirtation, he regaled me with his sexual history, proposed an open marriage and repeated a Russell Peters joke about overstretched sweaters and vaginas. I didn’t laugh. I wasn’t offended but he just wasn’t funny. Like, if I were to tell a woman a vagina joke 10 minutes into a first date, I would blow her away with my timing. (As I told Ms S about the date later she named the guy before I could repeat the whole joke. She also told me he had been named in an underage-sex case.)

The second guy, a Scorpian, was into cycling and sailing. He was sweet but I was bored.

The third guy, a Libran, I never intended to meet. Young, foreign, hot, he didn’t seem suitable. If I met him, I figured, it would be a break from the business of meeting potential marriage partners; a date with him would be a holiday from my life. But I didn’t say yes. A fourth guy wrote me, who was in Britain but would soon move to Singapore. A fifth guy asked to meet me at the weekend but stopped writing me one day before the weekend. Updating S on how I had been left high and dry, I said, “Then there’s a Libran but he’s 28.” And she said, “What’s wrong with 28?” And she had a point and still, I didn’t take him seriously.

But then I thought I would meet him at the weekend and not take him seriously and that was my mistake. Because when I met him I wanted to take him seriously. In the two minutes I walked with him from the train station to his place, I knew I had strolled into a holiday I didn’t want to end. But how could he take me seriously then, when I had sent him a “hey what r u doing today” message that sounded like a booty call, when he asked to meet me at his place and I didn’t say no?

Once I was young and stupid. Now I’m just stupid.

ORANGE JUICE | Three

That was a dream, that drizzly, dewy afternoon; she knows now. Even there and then it felt like a fantasy. It felt unreal but she wanted it to be real. She wanted it to be fate.

Guy met girl and he recognised her. She was the one standing at the train station the day before while he was waiting to meet some crazy from some dating app who wouldn’t give him her number. Now she was here again, same woman, same slinky dress. “That was you, I wanted it to be you,” he muttered.

She recognised him too and her heart dropped. Slim caramel man, thin face…he reminded her a little of somebody she had known…and why did he have to look so much better than his photo? Why did he have to speak so well and be so cute even when he didn’t seem so confident? Why did he have to smell so good? He was the type she had never, in her whole life, learnt to run from. No, she didn’t want to run and she walked up to his home with him but no, nothing really happened. Nothing that is real. Nothing that hasn’t evaporated, like dew in daylight. Something she will revisit in a never-ending daydream.

ORANGE JUICE | Two

When you have been in a car crash, you try to be careful about being back on the road again.

You have rules: Be paranoid but not too paranoid. Look, really look, before you leap. Find out what someone is like, really like. Find out if he is reliable. Don’t jump into anything.

You have been careful for eight years now, and then in one afternoon you break most of your rules. You’re crazy after all. Who measures out her life with coffee spoons – thousands and thousands and thousands of spoonfuls – and then tosses all her spoons aside in one hour?

You’re a fool but you try to be a philosopher. You think – but you know you aren’t thinking and you aren’t a philosopher – what is one afternoon? What will it matter in a thousand years, when you have all turned to dust? Maybe nothing matters beyond this moment: this man, this woman, this moment.

Afterwards – because there will always be an afterwards, because some afternoons are eternal and fleeting, because some things are ending as they start – you’re happy, unhappy, loony, moony, hopeful, fretful, heartened, heartsick. You want him. You want him to keep wanting you. You believe things, you suppose things, few of which you dare say out loud, for fear they will disintegrate in contact with oxygen, sunshine and common sense. You’re flying at breakneck speed, you don’t know where you will land and you might break your bones. Yet some part of you which has been dead for years is, rightly or wrongly, beautifully or painfully, alive now; you’re alive, so alive.

ORANGE JUICE | One

Dinner with the girls is over; I haven’t had a drop to drink but I feel mellow, so mellow; I’m snug in a woven seat at Fei’s door, waiting for him to come home and pass me a spare set of house keys; the silence of the night is sweet, so sweet, and I seem to have slipped into a Korean show, where everything is more intense and I’m more present.

But here they come – I hear them before I see them – Fei as high as a kite, singing “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday to Mama” at the top of his lungs, Z gurgling and P giggling, pinker in the cheeks and prettier than I have ever seen her. Fei sees me and starts scolding me for forgetting my keys again but he sounds so happy, it comes out like a joke. Going in, he passes Z to me to fuss over a small birthday cake for P and as the birthday song is sung again, I’m so happy that I forgot my keys and got to see them so, so happy together.

Ambling home afterwards, I’m alone and yet it’s like I’m being hugged; I’m sober and yet it’s like I’ve had champagne. Which maybe I kinda did, hours before dinner.

Autumn | Four

Paris. It is a city of such splendour and beauty, I come quite close to believing my life would be brighter, lovelier – better – if I could only be there. Being there with my mother is something else, however. Because I love Paris, I was a little anxious for her to like it and because I was a little anxious, I was less relaxed than I could have been; it was a state of mind somewhere between bringing a boyfriend home and taking your mum to your rendezvous with a lover. I would be planning our outings in Paris, right down to which dress I would wear to which museum; my mother would be reminding me to wear sensible shoes. She was right, sure. But when I am in Paris, in places as beautiful as the Musee de l’Orangerie and the Musee d’Orsay – being there is like being in an enormous yet delicate porcelain piece with see-through detail, through which the sun trickles in – I don’t want to be right. I want to be beautiful. (So, after traipsing, and then limping, along pebbly paths from museum to museum on pretty leg-lengthening platforms for a day, yes, I went back to plain moccasins. But I had to try, right? I had to.)

It must be said that my mother never means to be a party pooper. She is more of a good-natured, well-mannered gatecrasher who wants in on her children’s lives. Her son is going to Venice; can she join him and his girlfriend? Her daughter has gone to a crazy retro birthday bash in her dress; can’t she call and ask how the party is going? Does everyone like the dress? Let my mother in on any drama in your life and she may be more involved in it than you.

The Paris trip was to have been a present to myself. Something to stop the march of time; something to help me recall 2010 down the road, even as the rest of my life melts into one never-ending year. But knowing my mother – feeling her longing – I knew I had to take her with me on the trip. It would be a gift to her, to make up for her tedious trips with my father. I would let her in on my trip.

Was it a present she wanted though? I wonder. We had good days sightseeing and better days shopping in Paris. She was proud of her stamina. My father couldn’t have coped with my itinerary – going here and there on foot and getting lost on the way to this and that bistro – but she could. At the end of an exhausting summer day though (in July, the sun in Paris doesn’t set until 9pm), while we were waiting for darkness and sleepiness to descend, she would wonder what, and how, he was doing at home. He, a loner who isn’t good at being alone. “Sometimes I miss that stupid man.”

It wasn’t something she would have admitted at home. In our modest room in Paris, miles from our home, however, some things were more sayable. She worried aloud about everything. About Fei. About me. About things we hadn’t told her but she had sensed. It was dark and she was beside me on our bed, whispering intensely. “Why aren’t my children happy? Why are things hard for my children?”

I have no doubt, at such moments, that my mother is a drama queen. Nor do I doubt that the drama queen loves us. Even so, I had to shrink away when she asked me why, when I had a chance to be a wife and mother n years ago, I didn’t take it. Why didn’t I stick with someone I had picked? Why did I have a change of heart? Me. A marriage, however miserable, would have been something, wouldn’t it? I didn’t answer her. I wouldn’t. Not even to tell her she had her questions the wrong way around. Not even to tell her I was angry. How could she ask about such things now, after the unrepeatable things she said then? No, I had my reasons, mine, and I wasn’t letting her near them. The night was still; my mind was swirling with words I wouldn’t speak.

And yet. And yet. I began making assuring noises about Fei…the comforting things in his birth chart…I wanted to give my mother something, though it might not have been what she wanted. It was late. She is old. She shouldn’t have to worry about us in the wee hours of a Parisian night.

Autumn | Three

In July, I took Ma to Paris; in June, after a trip to Tokyo, Fei gave Pa a handsome Japanese automatic watch.

Pa was so, so pleased with the watch. When someone asked him about it he would say, “It isn’t expensive, it’s a few hundred dollars.” But, yes, “it is quite elegant, Fei has made quite a clever choice”. He would beam and it was a look that though I had never seen before, I knew from an account of his early years. When he was four or five, Grandma would say, he liked to dress up and so, so loved to wear his little shirt with little golden buttons.

Watches and habits: I have known them to be important to him since I was little. And knowing his birth chart now, I know just how important they are to him – to the needs and wellbeing of the little boy inside. I look at my parents’ marriage though and it seems my father’s needs have been more than met. Wherever they go in the world they always stay in his comfort zone; he always gets his full hour of pre-dawn exercise, four glasses of water before breakfast and post-dinner fruit (pineapple, preferably); my mother always comes home exhausted. Between the sunrise-to-sunset package-tour itinerary and his morning routine (when he is up and about exercising she is up and about packing) she doesn’t get much sleep.

I look at her and at her chart – and I see the little girl inside. The girl who just wants to have fun. The girl who is tired of travelling with the old guy. The girl who, days after declaring she has travelled enough for the year, leafs through the tour ads again (“I’m just looking”).

When I was planning a trip to Paris I knew I had to take Ma. Just her. So it was a good thing that Fei gave Pa the watch. We didn’t even discuss it, Fei and I; we were just on the same wavelength.

Autumn | Two

Theirs has been a noisy, not-unhappy marriage. This is something I say factually and hopefully, as a daughter and war correspondent.

This is how I know I am a rubbish reporter: I have been embedded in their marriage for decades, yet whenever I wake up to the rumble and crackle, it makes me uneasy even now. My mind, still in a fog of sleep, struggles to unscramble the shouting. Are they in the kitchen? Who’s on the defensive? Who’s on the offensive? Is it a dispute over the transfer of boiling water from kettle to dispenser, the watering of plants or…yoga? World War Three? Another of their silly romcom skirmishes?

Sometimes one of them starts giggling and I go back to sleep. Sometimes it dawns on me that they are discussing dinner the evening before – what they truly, vehemently think of the Hong Kong liver sausage I bought, which they couldn’t and didn’t tell me during dinner – and my ears prick up. At other times they stop fighting only after one of them goes out, which is when I get out of bed to assess the damage. “What is it now?” I say, careful to sound neutral. Adult. What were you kids fighting over? Was he overreacting to something you said or were you overstating it? If it is serious I don’t joke. If it isn’t I say, “So divorce him.”

When I was younger it was harder to be neutral, much less jokey. Then, as now, only one side called the news conferences. We had only one side of the story, hers, and we sided with her, naturally. As it was, our experience of his work was second-hand but our familiarity with her work – the things she did for us, for our family, for our extended family – was first-hand. I grew up with the idea of marriage as loads of hard work, requiring resolve and professionalism, which I should somehow master for someone someday.

In all fairness to her, she tried to be fair. After her angry sobs subsided, after she had told us angry, terrible things about him, she would tell us about his terrible childhood. She would try to explain to us and to herself that he wasn’t a brute, that he had suppressed too long his helpless anger as a boy. She would tell us they were effectively orphans who had found their family in each other, she who had lost her mother to illness and he who had lost his to madness. She would say, “Your father is a good man.”

I believed her. But it didn’t make the fights less upsetting for me. It was fun only after one very violent fight, when she took us to her uncle’s for the weekend. He had a car! He took us to McDonald’s! It was a holiday from our lives. I remember how calm and comfy – how unreal – it was in the car as we sucked coke through straws and gave uncertain answers about what our parents had fought over.

We had to live with the tension otherwise, waiting one night, two nights, three nights for the cold war to end, for one of them to start speaking to the other at dinner.

Only when I was older did I understand how isolated Pa must have felt after a fight. He might have felt frozen out by his family. Once he went missing before dinner and Ma sent Fei to search the neighbourhood. He was found looking a little lost at a playground.

He’s more relaxed around us now. It has taken him some 30 years to be more relaxed but he’s here, sort of. While Ma is unquestionably ours and we are unquestionably hers, Pa has been more like our host and we have been more like his guests. When he gives us a speech about university, about love, about life, it’s exactly that: a speech some adult gives to some children, not necessarily his. After all the years we have lived under his roof, however, he is familiar enough with us to tell us his side of the story sometimes.

One morning months ago, after some 40 years, my father finally tells me how he met my mother. We are having brunch one Saturday, the two of us, and out of the blue he tells me he hadn’t just seen her one day in an alley in Kota Bharu. He had also heard her, “that loud woman”, coming and going from her aunt’s house next door. “Suk Mei,” she would greet her aunt so loudly, though so sweetly, that their houses would all rattle. (“She rocked his world,” I think to myself.)

Another morning, he tells me how his dates with that boisterous girl set the tone for the marriage. “We would go out and before I could ask her what she wanted to eat, she would ask me. We would be going home and before I could say, ‘Let’s hail a taxi,’ she would be raising up a hand to flag down a taxi.”

It is no news conference but it is the closest he has come to an acknowledgement that money matters apart, he has left to her much of the heavy lifting in their marriage. Because she could. Because she can. Because she is forceful, fearless.