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.

AFTERWARDS | Four

Funerals are funny. You lay a man to rest and you want to put all your issues with him in a box and lay them to rest too. You want to, and it is a little like asking a jack-in-the-box not to jump. Days after my uncle’s death – and before his cremation – the jack-in-the-box jumped. Thumped us in the face.

It was Hari Raya Puasa, we were walking homewards from brunch and Fei had to ask, did Suk repay that loan to Biu Suk? I tried to put the lid on it – “he did, he did; Biu Suk said so one New Year” – but the lid refused to behave.

Fei: (Lifting the lid) He repaid everything?

Me: (Snapping the lid shut) He did, he did –

My mother: (Lifting) He didn’t –

Me: (Snapping) Didn’t he –

Back and forth we went till we found ourselves in a fight. I was bothered that my mother couldn’t forgive and forget; she was bothered that I was behaving like my father, that I was siding with my father and my uncle against her, that everyone was siding with everyone else against her. No one loved her and no one treasured her and no one sided with her. We got home and still she roared. “Nobody!”

Nobody? That was inaccurate, that was so inaccurate and now I was angry. (Trust me to go journo at the weirdest time.) Although she wasn’t all wrong about my father and me “breathing through the same nostril”, she was wrong about my brother. Fei, who has a telepathic bond with her. Who had been angrier at my uncle than I had been, on her behalf. Whose loyalty to her is never in question. “That isn’t right. Nobody isn’t right. Your son loves you. That isn’t nobody.”

“I know. Fei knows me best.”

“Good. So don’t say nobody!”

AFTERWARDS | Three

My uncle died today.

We had never liked him; we had barely known him, actually. We met him and his wife three times a year, on Chinese New Year’s Eve, Chinese New Year and Qingming. We met them four times this year because of Fei’s wedding, which was such a historic, happy day that my brother, when he was very, very, very drunk, hugged my uncle. (But not my aunt; he was smashed but not that smashed.)

Like and dislike are such trivialities in the end. You don’t have to like a man to hold his wailing widow in the mortuary. You don’t have to like her to help her file the paperwork. You just have to be adult and be around. Their daughter had to go get her kids. Their son-in-law had gone to Hong Kong. This is what family means: When they’ve got no one you are all they’ve got.

My father had hardly known his own brother and parents. Theirs was a star-crossed family who never had one meal together. Not a single meal, my father marvelled today while we were making our way home. To all intents and purposes, the brothers were orphaned by Woodbridge and separated by the recession in the Sixties, when my father had to work up north in Kota Bharu or starve. “We never had a close bond like you and Fei. We never were together long.”

Yet, previous to his seven years in Kota Bharu, when he was jobless and distressed for eight months, when he was down-and-out, “your uncle gave me $2 a week, and he paid for my haircuts, and for New Year he gave me $5”. He smiled ever so slightly at the recollection. Once upon a time, before there were wives and issues, a 15-year-old who was paid $40 a month gave an 18-year-old comfort because they were brothers. That 15-year-old died today.

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.

AFTERWARDS | One

So it is done. Sometime one Sunday, a cloudless day which was a dozen Chinese New Years condensed into a day, within the couple of auspicious hours when the groom whisked the bride off to his house to serve tea to his elders, Fei married P.

What with all the last-minute things to attend to – here’s the red bucket to fill with rice for the coming-of-age combing ceremony; there’s the roast pig, somebody pay the man please; now, where’s the buffet and will you rinse the teacups and refill the teapot, you, yes, you – the day, to me, came and went in a haze of exhaustion, heat, excitement and something. A slow, slinking something which might have been…

One thing I felt, if I felt anything, was the goodwill: how much people love my parents and, by extension, my brothers and me. My father is not one to ask too much of anybody else (my mother excepted); happily, his old friends are the sort to show up unbidden, to invite themselves to the important occasions of his life. On the big day two of them, Auntie and Uncle J, were here at eight to help the first-time father-in-law and mother-in-law with everything – in particular, the arcane Chinese-wedding protocol – as if it were their own son marrying.

Auntie J, who married into a traditional Teochew family, was the most senior daughter-in-law and the longest-suffering before her mother-in-law passed away. She is a veteran of a very Chinese household who, in any domestic affair, knows when to stand by, when to step in and when to softly suggest something to someone. As she stood by me during the tea ceremony and helped me with the teacups, all five of which had to be rinsed and refilled over and over again, round after round, she felt like family - more so than a couple of blood relations who didn’t lift a finger. When she told me to do whatever I just did it, regardless of my misgivings. Whatever I might have felt about a symbolic assertion of authority, when she told me to hold my head high as I stood and sipped the tea served by P – “you have to be higher than her” – I just held my head high as I stood and sipped the tea served by P. (I would not understand until later it was a pre-emptive strike, until I received a ritual gift from P’s mother, a woven basket laden with beauty products and meaning. It said – please, allow my mother to translate – go get dolled up, go get hitched, don’t mess with my daughter. After all, the Chinese wedding customs are a relic from the age before the nuclear family, when to marry into a large family was, nine times out of 10, to march into a theatre of war. You faced not only your husband but also his mother, his aunts, his sisters, his sister-in-laws and other discontented women. Whomever your family could neutralise or get on your side they would.)

The other thing I felt…I might have imagined. Something, though unspoken, was understood as Fei got sloshed towards the end of the banquet. He was in high spirits, absolutely, and so were we. I was somehow certain though that on the one hand his would be a solid marriage and that on the other hand the solidness of the marriage would be weighty. Possibilities that had ceased to be possible. Doors that had been closed. I imagined them. I lamented them. Then we lugged our brother to the bridal suite, I helped his bride out of her dress and we left them with each other.

The sister hen diaries

Bak is back from America and with him the spontaneous singing, the epic eating and the spectre of swine flu. “You sure you don’t have swine flu and mine isn’t swine cough?” I say for the umpteenth time, all sputtering and sniffing. “Don’t have.”

“You snorting like a pig?” Dr Fei checks. “No.” “Do you have fever?” “Don’t have.” “It isn’t swine flu.” Oh, so I am not dying? Okay, doc.

My mother is relieved. She has been holding herself back for months. Now she can go back to cooking for an army, secure in the knowledge that Bak will clean us out. “I have forgotten how much he eats,” she says with what can only be called a mother’s pride.

We are a full house once more, a happier one. Here are the sounds of mostly affectionate abuse – nothing unites us more than a baby, our 22-year-old baby boy – and there, in the lift lobby within spitting distance of our door, is the sound of our American Idol courageously attempting Chinese pop. (The notion that neighbours and other innocent individuals might hear him has never stopped him before. Why now, when he is mastering a Crowd Lu? Shui lai jiu wo-aaa-eeeee… Well…maybe mastering is not quite the word for what he does to the song.)

The party boy is back, as is the party. But it is just for a few days more. Fei is marrying P and moving out; change is afoot. It creeps up on me one night, amidst the pitch blackness of sleep, when I hear someone shuffle into my room. “Gor, wrong room…?” I mumble. (How did I know it was Fei? I just knew. When you have lived long enough with someone – since you were one year old – you just have a sixth sense.)

In Fei’s house, his room is on his right when he has to half-sleep-half-walk to it after a late-night tinkle. In the twilight zone between the ROM and the Chinese marriage ceremony, he has been staying there only once a week, enough for his muscles to have memorised it, however: for him to be making the wrong turn here. On some subconscious level, unbeknownst to me before, he doesn’t live here any more. Might it be why, hours later, I dream of an earthquake? I am in M’s house in Tokyo when the tremors start. (She is alive again, yes, and it is a sweet surprise.) We are shaking with the little house and watching skyscrapers crumble one after another like tall cakes. Still, the house stays in one piece and so do we.

Bak is back but Fei is leaving but we’re going to stay in one piece. Aren’t we?

Hong Kong and I

People with only a passing acquaintance with me know I love Taipei. Mention Taipei to me and I say, “Taipei? I love Taipei!” (Or, “Taipei? Jay Chou! I love Jay Chou!”) I am as animated and unsurprising as a wind-up toy about the city I have loved like a boy with a new toy.

Hong Kong and I, we are quieter. I go to Hong Kong as, I imagine, a man goes home to his wife. There is more than a touch of inevitability; it has been years since anyone said anything about love; she is too tired to even look at him today. She is old and ordinary – and he sees it – and yet she is somehow lovely.

So it is with Hong Kong and me. As a very Cantonese girl going there for the very first time in the 1990s I was a little like a visitor at a club realising I had membership after all. (I had done my homework. When classmates busied themselves with foreign languages I filled my timetable with Cantonese, from the TVB shows on TV3 to the Leslie Cheung concert on LD.) I have gone there a zillion times since. Only on the trip before last, however, did I see for the first time in years how gorgeous Hong Kong was. A city of peaks and harbours, thrills and spills, alive with buildings and billboards and bamboo scaffolding coming at you at all angles such that when you and your tram go around them intact it feels as spectacular as a Jackie Chan stunt and as exquisite as a taiji exercise; a city of accidental Daoist aesthetics. On the last trip I was floored by how posh Hong Kong was. To go to ifc mall is to grasp once and for all that we don’t know how to do posh; they do. On this trip I saw Hong Kong’s trees. I was with S, who was visiting for the first time, and whenever she stopped to photograph trees I saw them too, pushing their way out of walls along sloping, winding streets. I saw the banyans on Nathan Road. I had never noticed them. Am I as bad as men who don’t notice their wives’ hairdos or what?

I like being in Hong Kong all the same. When I have been away for too many moons – distracted by Taiwan, Turkey and other destinations – I always gravitate towards it.

The sister hen diaries

Out of the blue Fei calls, “Eh be my MC leh.” I was brought up to believe in magic, particularly in my mother’s magic: When you truly want to do something impossible for somebody you love you can – you just can. So if Fei wants me to be his MC, the magical doctor’s document that frees him from work, I have to be it somehow – how? “Your MC?”

“My MC, my wedding MC.” Right, sitting in an eatery with my mother, whose days and nights have for a year revolved round trying on dresses, jewels, heels and hairdos for that day and that night, I should have known. “’Kay, let’s talk when we get home,” I say and in the same breath I update my mother, “Your son wants Bak and me to be the MCs.” “Bak and you? Well, why not Bak and A?” Well, why not me? I can. I am the master of making all the right noises, I have the dress for it…two dresses, actually…and I could sing…I shouldn’t, actually, but…

As it transpires, Fei is telepathic. Over breakfast the next morning he is updating me on how he phoned Bak’s girl, A, and asked them to be the MCs and she unhesitatingly said yes. Which was when he asked her to call Bak in Atlanta and tell him it had been decided he would be her co-MC. Which she did. Which was when Bak – he who is careful with his money and never ever calls home except on Skype – picked up the phone and called Fei in a fluster, “Cannot lah cannot lah – I’m getting on a Panama cruise ship now, getting on – cannot lah cannot lah –”

But we know, and Bak knows, he isn’t getting out of it. He who says no to his kin does not say no to his girl, as Feicius says. A cunning man my brother is.

My parents are all for it certainly. My father, a fan of A’s polite Mandarin and perfect Taiwan manners, says she would be a good MC; my mother says she is a better choice; and I can’t say I am not disappointed, although I do admire the beauty of Fei’s strategy. I would have been okay, if less world-class than A. Isn’t it better to keep it in the family? “You are the older sister,” they say. Yes I am and isn’t Bak the younger brother? “The older sister shouldn’t be on stage.”

Right, the old spinster shouldn’t be on show. She should be protected. I hear them. I have an ear for the things they don’t say. Do they hear the things I don’t say though? A isn’t family yet. She might not be. Who is protecting her from memories she might not want one day…?

Well, we will just have to hope for the best. That, and roast pig that rocks our socks off.

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.