The (merry) widows

We who have observed Tony’s birthday for five years wouldn’t have overlooked his wedding.

So we had a black widows’ bash to commemorate our loss and our liberty, Grunge Widow, Mob Widow, Ballet Widow and I. Black was worn gratuitously; pasta was eaten copiously (La Strada was Mob Widow’s choice); we had studied all the bridal snaps and worried about whether Tony’s smiles were real or resigned and now we were having fun.




Photos: Zann

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Fourteen

I can only take our mother’s word for it because I was too small at the time. I was one year and five months old when Fei was born and when he was brought home from hospital, according to her, my first act as big sister was to offer my little brother my bed. It was one of my few acts as big sister probably because by the time I was old enough to remember he was big-brothering me more than I was big-sistering him. I would be in trouble with our mother, trying to hide from her and her cane maybe after I talked back to her too much, and he would be saving my hide. It was a three-room flat and there weren’t many hiding places. If I ran out of ideas (again) and ran to the bathroom, he would run with me, get me inside and locked, stay outside and stop my mother. He wasn’t even five years old then.

Sure we did brawl, we did fight and we did have our wars growing up. If he thrashed me in chess, I would be a bad loser and I would have to thrash him back or die trying in countless rematches. I wasn’t adult enough then to accept that he would know better; now I am.

He knows his chess and his Chinese history (he is well-versed in Qing history, having read the non-fiction that I haven’t bothered to because “you can’t write like Louis Cha by reading him – he read history”); he knows his economics and his engineering; he knows how the world works. (When I think about it I think I got most of our parents’ silliness and he got most of their sense.)

When I had problems with a previous boss he said, “Didn’t you read The Deer and the Cauldron?” I did, I said. I read all five books of the Louis Cha novel more than 10 times and laughed myself silly each time. He got very different things out of the very same books, however. He gleaned from the tale of Wei Xiaobao, his Manchu boss, Emperor Kangxi, his anti-Manchu boss, Chen Jinnan, his seven wives and three children the art of human relations.

When I had knee problems he ran with me. He came down to my level and ran at my pace, to teach me a better technique – Chi Running – to save my knees from me.

When I was in real trouble, the one time I was in real trouble, he did what he could. Although I didn’t say anything at the time, he somehow knew why I was in a black mood (…Oscar…) and why my mood was changing from black to bleak (…our parents…). So he took me to How the Grinch Stole Christmas and when it didn’t work he took me to breakfast. Over kway chap he fed me a Louis Cha tale I hadn’t read, about a couple with the most ideal, happy marriage. Who never fight. Who are the envy of every other couple in the whole jianghu. But as it transpires, their marriage is a sham. So. People fight in real relationships, he said. We know how our parents’ fights go. Our mother will do this and our father will do that. We know how their fights come and go as wayang do, he said. I heard him; I heard the things he said and the things he didn’t say; and when there was no more to be said to me in my darkest moments he went shopping with me.

So. He is married and moving out soon. For years I thought I was prepared for the day we would have very separate lives. I had bought extra Louis Cha books for the day we would have very separate libraries, hadn’t I? I was big-sister prepared, wasn’t I?

Silly me.

BEIJING | Day three

On a windy wintry day we conquer the Great Wall. Which is to say three of us, Bak, Fei and my mother, climb to the seventh, topmost tower at the Badaling leg of the wall while five of us do the we came, we saw, we waited thing. Then we go and celebrate by getting ice cream at the foot of the wall, guzzling beer on the way to lunch at a rundown rural restaurant and getting eaten alive.

There we are in the restaurant, too tired to study the menu or manage anything other than saying yes to the waitress’ thoughtful recommendations (yes, waiting was tiring too). Do we want greens fresh from their farm? Okay. Lamb? Okay. Fish fresh from their pond? Okay. We have never heard of xunyu; sounds good; how much could it cost anyway?

The fish arrives tail first. It is a most impressive steamed tail, about as long as a forearm and as jiggly as J.Lo because it is so cooked but still so springy. Jiggle, jiggle, jiggle…it is brought to the table. Altogether six dishes of the fish arrive (soup, sweet and sour and so on). So does the lamb. So do the greens. We eat or try to, those of us who are not trying to digest all the ice cream and beer. Then it is their turn to eat us for lunch: The bill is 2,700 yuan (S$540), inclusive of an impressive 1,700 yuan for the impressive fish. My father, finding himself in a surreal Money No Enough moment in the cheap and good country, has to pool his cash with my uncle’s and is none too thrilled.

Ever quick on the uptake, the waitress takes us on a tour of their pond (she doesn’t know Cantonese, I don’t think, but she knows disbelief when she hears universal sounds such as hah and wah) and in it we see some 34,000 yuan swirling, whirling and swimming.

It is the most mesmerising thing, swimming money. Not enough to hypnotise the older ones, however. They spend the rest of the day theorising that our drivers (400 yuan per man per day) conspired with the restaurant against us. They are old-world about things like justice: A person is guilty until proven innocent. “Didn’t he tell us not to eat too much on the way there?” my mother goes. “Didn’t he tell us 2,000 yuan wouldn’t be too much for a meal?”

They spend the rest of the week philosophising about it. My father, the master of nicknames, decides to call their driver “our teacher”. “There is our teacher,” he goes when he sees the man at the car park at the hotel. “Our teacher has taught us a lesson and we have learnt it. Now we go to the food court next door.”

I try to remind them about the basics of the case, “We didn’t read the menu, did we?” Fei goes and speaks man to man with the accused, who says he didn’t know about any xunyu. But they don’t believe him.

In the end it is Y who solves the case. At dinner mere days after we come home he says he spoke of our fishy banquet to a China-born co-worker and discovered we hadn’t been overcharged. We had eaten a whole zhonghuaxun, a Chinese sturgeon, a first-class protected animal in China – “as protected as pandas”. Right away everyone agrees that the restaurant was right not to have warned us of the price, absolutely right. “We wouldn’t have eaten it. We would have missed out,” my uncle says.

Many months later a sturgeon, bitten to death by barracudas in Hong Kong, hits the world’s headlines. “A state funeral was almost held. Hu Jintao almost attended,” my father says with pride so palpable, I have to laugh.

When my family come round we really come round.