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.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Autumn | One
It has been quieter in the house, greyer and glummer. It has been autumn for a year, really, since Fei married P and moved across the street. A couple of days after his marriage I added him as a Facebook friend, figuring we would need a proxy den of some sort to still be plugged into each other’s lives. It isn’t the same though.
Scrolling up and down your Facebook homepage for your brother’s status updates isn’t the same as being plugged into the quotidian rhythms of his life – the comings and goings, the gripes and jokes, the slouching and shuffling, the stuff and nonsense, the sleepy guitar-strumming and drowsy late-night chatting – the background buzz of your life you took for granted for the longest time.
Our childhood had been a long, long winter. Gothic, almost. We feared our father, who was combustible as an anxious young father (always anxious about how he was to afford us all), and we learnt to tiptoe round him as young children. He wasn’t violent towards us; only towards my little rocking horse, which he smashed in a rage when I was too small to remember. I knew he would never hurt me; we knew better than to trigger one of his explosions, however. We were never to be noisy at night when, at the end of a working day, he came home to our three-room and went to his room to cram for his numerous ACCA exams. We had to be good, go to the playground downstairs and stay there with our mother. We were the last to leave, at times long after we tired of playing in the sand, after the others had gone home and gone to bed. Fei, the sleepyhead, would be all bleary-eyed before we could trudge home.
If and when our mother took us shopping – if and when she got us something ever so slightly costly – we would agree to report a much lower price to our father. He didn’t (and doesn’t) like onions so we wouldn’t get any at night. We got them in the day in our mother’s rice vermicelli stew. It was our favourite food; it was our secret food. He didn’t like listening to SBC Mandarin so we would watch serials on the sly. When he went on his first business trip we went on a spree too: a month to openly watch an SBC serial from start to finish! It was a luxury for our mother too, much as she did miss him.
Things thawed out a little, after he gave up the exams and swopped one set of habits (exams and cigarettes) for another (exercise and oat). Then Bak was born and with him, spring. Our father was out of a job in a recession year, the worst year to have one more child. Yet, Bak was for us, from the first day, a happy child. A child we were glad to have. He was born during the school holidays, the day after our mother did her all Chinese New Year shopping in advance of the confinement. If she had cabbed back, if she had not bussed back and hauled bags of food home from the bus stop, if she had not been so cost-conscious, he might not have arrived so soon. But he did and the fact that he was born weeks too soon for a tax rebate was something our father joked about. He didn’t mind too much. Bak got a dad quite different from the one we got.
Then Grandma (the woman kept in the metaphorical attic of our house, in my room) died. We got jobs, Fei and I. Ma and Pa’s worries melted away, most of them. Summer was upon us – seven, eight, nine years of it.
It is no more though. On the wall of portraits in the living room there is a new addition, two photographs of the newlyweds in one frame (a work by Biu Suk, like all the portraits on the wall). The house is barer though. They come home now and then for dinner (our home), stop for a while for whatever is showing on television and go home (their home). The house is quieter – but there they go again, Ma and Pa, going at each other, louder and louder. Isn’t it a relief.
Scrolling up and down your Facebook homepage for your brother’s status updates isn’t the same as being plugged into the quotidian rhythms of his life – the comings and goings, the gripes and jokes, the slouching and shuffling, the stuff and nonsense, the sleepy guitar-strumming and drowsy late-night chatting – the background buzz of your life you took for granted for the longest time.
Our childhood had been a long, long winter. Gothic, almost. We feared our father, who was combustible as an anxious young father (always anxious about how he was to afford us all), and we learnt to tiptoe round him as young children. He wasn’t violent towards us; only towards my little rocking horse, which he smashed in a rage when I was too small to remember. I knew he would never hurt me; we knew better than to trigger one of his explosions, however. We were never to be noisy at night when, at the end of a working day, he came home to our three-room and went to his room to cram for his numerous ACCA exams. We had to be good, go to the playground downstairs and stay there with our mother. We were the last to leave, at times long after we tired of playing in the sand, after the others had gone home and gone to bed. Fei, the sleepyhead, would be all bleary-eyed before we could trudge home.
If and when our mother took us shopping – if and when she got us something ever so slightly costly – we would agree to report a much lower price to our father. He didn’t (and doesn’t) like onions so we wouldn’t get any at night. We got them in the day in our mother’s rice vermicelli stew. It was our favourite food; it was our secret food. He didn’t like listening to SBC Mandarin so we would watch serials on the sly. When he went on his first business trip we went on a spree too: a month to openly watch an SBC serial from start to finish! It was a luxury for our mother too, much as she did miss him.
Things thawed out a little, after he gave up the exams and swopped one set of habits (exams and cigarettes) for another (exercise and oat). Then Bak was born and with him, spring. Our father was out of a job in a recession year, the worst year to have one more child. Yet, Bak was for us, from the first day, a happy child. A child we were glad to have. He was born during the school holidays, the day after our mother did her all Chinese New Year shopping in advance of the confinement. If she had cabbed back, if she had not bussed back and hauled bags of food home from the bus stop, if she had not been so cost-conscious, he might not have arrived so soon. But he did and the fact that he was born weeks too soon for a tax rebate was something our father joked about. He didn’t mind too much. Bak got a dad quite different from the one we got.
Then Grandma (the woman kept in the metaphorical attic of our house, in my room) died. We got jobs, Fei and I. Ma and Pa’s worries melted away, most of them. Summer was upon us – seven, eight, nine years of it.
It is no more though. On the wall of portraits in the living room there is a new addition, two photographs of the newlyweds in one frame (a work by Biu Suk, like all the portraits on the wall). The house is barer though. They come home now and then for dinner (our home), stop for a while for whatever is showing on television and go home (their home). The house is quieter – but there they go again, Ma and Pa, going at each other, louder and louder. Isn’t it a relief.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)