AFTERWARDS | Two

At the banquet my mother admitted within the hearing of just about anyone, she would be happier to be marrying me off. “Well, maybe when you are 80,” I would say to her, which she would then translate to her friends as, “She wants me to wait. She wants me to live longer.”

Well, although it was just her son’s wedding, she was on a high. Everyone was happy that evening. They loved her dress (so deluxe!) and her hair (so tall!). They loved the restaurant (so red, so retro, so festive!), the cooking (so ample!) and the live singing (so fun!). They were happier than they had ever been at other people’s banquets, surely. Her one and only regret was that when Fei got smashed at the end of that evening and kissed her between 22 and 852 times – we lost count – she was too shocked to kiss him back.

She was over the moon for two days; on day three she crashed back down to earth. I had spied in the fridge a carton of the soya milk we always bought for Fei’s breakfast and said matter-of-factly, “We needn’t buy this any more.” In an instant she was teary. The meaning of the wedding on a daily basis was suddenly clear; the innumerable small things she did for her son, which were equal to a chunk of her everyday existence, someone else would do henceforth; when he came back from his honeymoon he would go home to his apartment and not ours.

Before that week was over she had bumped both her knees accidentally, one time on the hill around the corner and another time right against the fridge. Her legs were swollen and swathed in bandages. She would bump into somebody in the neighbourhood some mornings, start to speak about the honeymooners and cry. She was having a breakdown of sorts, although she didn’t and couldn’t quite collapse. We needed her. We had to live on leftovers (from the buffet and the gorgeous, gorgeous roast pig). We needed her to do some delicious things with the scraps.