Love is all in the footnotes

“Did I ever tell you…? Did we ever tell you…?” K asked one night when we were all in 2am, the dessert bar I describe to people as my boyfriend. They are talented and young; their sweets are subtle and thoughtful, though none has been as orgasmic as anything by Pierre Herme, the George Clooney of pastry masters; they remember my favourite foods, or rather, the things I have capriciously professed a preference for. If I love them they love me back.

“No,” I said, “tell me.” Nestling against a couch, I hadn’t been taking much note of K and C’s talk about old Melbourne times. Down under is a closed chapter of my life, after all.

“That day when we were in Crown Casino…we stalked you.” “You what? Crown Casino?” “We stalked you.” They were to have chaperoned me on my first offline date that day, ten years ago, with some man I had met online. A tallish, thin man with haunted eyes and a hunted, jumpy walk. And somehow or other, soon after everyone was introduced to everyone else, in the instant of a heartbeat, I pretty much made off with him – what was I thinking? I wasn’t – and gave K a heart attack.

OMG! She let her idiot friend leave with a man who looks like a South Asian terrorist! What if something happens? Should she call the idiot’s mum? What if nothing happens and she shouldn’t have called the idiot’s mum? So they had to stalk me. They went all the way to the man’s house – what was I thinking? I wasn’t – and stood outside, trying not to look like stalkers.

“You were outside?” “We were. We were saying there were no bushes to hide behind…” “There were bushes!” “Nearer the window. Not outside…” C said as she showed me some stoop-and-hide moves and re-enacted how he nearly saw her at the window. “I was like, shit.” K remembered how she gave C a hard time about wearing a yellow parka. “Yellow! When we were on a mission! I gave you such shite about that…”

And I realised, 10 years later, not too late, what great girl friends I have. They love you back; they love you more than you know.

The sister hen diaries

It has been quiet in the house after the youngest and noisiest one flew the coop to America, where they don’t know what hit them. Bak is not just out-studying them – 21 study credits to their average of 12 – but also stupendously out-singing them, in Chinatown, Atlanta, at least.

“The Chinese here are awful singers, awful lor,” he updates us over Gmail video chat. In the midst of William Hungs he is Aretha Franklin: minus the bodacious range, plus puppyish eagerness, dogged attempts at high notes and the superpower to mean every of the earnest Wang Lee Hom love songs he sings. “Everybody says, ‘Do you take private lessons?’”

We are taking all the credit of course. Clearly he has improved since he started singing with me – I really should patent my matchless stand-up-and-sing-in-the-KTV method, which is genius in its very obviousness – and also in the hearing of the Cowells, Fei and Y. “Wah, American Idol ah? We taught him. We insulted him.”

We are about tough love, much as we miss him. We miss him primarily during major dinners. On Chinese New Year’s Eve we wake him up at 6am his time to show him, over video, the food we have to somehow finish without him. “See, Bak? Roast pig.” (Roast pig, not to be confused with roast pork, is a festive must in the family. It is rare in Singapore and can be bought only from cleaver-wielding fierce Cantonese old women in Kreta Ayer market.)

Hugging his pillow, he just grunts. We are fooling about; he is playing along, time zones away.