ORANGE JUICE | Three

That was a dream, that drizzly, dewy afternoon; she knows now. Even there and then it felt like a fantasy. It felt unreal but she wanted it to be real. She wanted it to be fate.

Guy met girl and he recognised her. She was the one standing at the train station the day before while he was waiting to meet some crazy from some dating app who wouldn’t give him her number. Now she was here again, same woman, same slinky dress. “That was you, I wanted it to be you,” he muttered.

She recognised him too and her heart dropped. Slim caramel man, thin face…he reminded her a little of somebody she had known…and why did he have to look so much better than his photo? Why did he have to speak so well and be so cute even when he didn’t seem so confident? Why did he have to smell so good? He was the type she had never, in her whole life, learnt to run from. No, she didn’t want to run and she walked up to his home with him but no, nothing really happened. Nothing that is real. Nothing that hasn’t evaporated, like dew in daylight. Something she will revisit in a never-ending daydream.

ORANGE JUICE | Two

When you have been in a car crash, you try to be careful about being back on the road again.

You have rules: Be paranoid but not too paranoid. Look, really look, before you leap. Find out what someone is like, really like. Find out if he is reliable. Don’t jump into anything.

You have been careful for eight years now, and then in one afternoon you break most of your rules. You’re crazy after all. Who measures out her life with coffee spoons – thousands and thousands and thousands of spoonfuls – and then tosses all her spoons aside in one hour?

You’re a fool but you try to be a philosopher. You think – but you know you aren’t thinking and you aren’t a philosopher – what is one afternoon? What will it matter in a thousand years, when you have all turned to dust? Maybe nothing matters beyond this moment: this man, this woman, this moment.

Afterwards – because there will always be an afterwards, because some afternoons are eternal and fleeting, because some things are ending as they start – you’re happy, unhappy, loony, moony, hopeful, fretful, heartened, heartsick. You want him. You want him to keep wanting you. You believe things, you suppose things, few of which you dare say out loud, for fear they will disintegrate in contact with oxygen, sunshine and common sense. You’re flying at breakneck speed, you don’t know where you will land and you might break your bones. Yet some part of you which has been dead for years is, rightly or wrongly, beautifully or painfully, alive now; you’re alive, so alive.

ORANGE JUICE | One

Dinner with the girls is over; I haven’t had a drop to drink but I feel mellow, so mellow; I’m snug in a woven seat at Fei’s door, waiting for him to come home and pass me a spare set of house keys; the silence of the night is sweet, so sweet, and I seem to have slipped into a Korean show, where everything is more intense and I’m more present.

But here they come – I hear them before I see them – Fei as high as a kite, singing “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday to Mama” at the top of his lungs, Z gurgling and P giggling, pinker in the cheeks and prettier than I have ever seen her. Fei sees me and starts scolding me for forgetting my keys again but he sounds so happy, it comes out like a joke. Going in, he passes Z to me to fuss over a small birthday cake for P and as the birthday song is sung again, I’m so happy that I forgot my keys and got to see them so, so happy together.

Ambling home afterwards, I’m alone and yet it’s like I’m being hugged; I’m sober and yet it’s like I’ve had champagne. Which maybe I kinda did, hours before dinner.

Autumn | Four

Paris. It is a city of such splendour and beauty, I come quite close to believing my life would be brighter, lovelier – better – if I could only be there. Being there with my mother is something else, however. Because I love Paris, I was a little anxious for her to like it and because I was a little anxious, I was less relaxed than I could have been; it was a state of mind somewhere between bringing a boyfriend home and taking your mum to your rendezvous with a lover. I would be planning our outings in Paris, right down to which dress I would wear to which museum; my mother would be reminding me to wear sensible shoes. She was right, sure. But when I am in Paris, in places as beautiful as the Musee de l’Orangerie and the Musee d’Orsay – being there is like being in an enormous yet delicate porcelain piece with see-through detail, through which the sun trickles in – I don’t want to be right. I want to be beautiful. (So, after traipsing, and then limping, along pebbly paths from museum to museum on pretty leg-lengthening platforms for a day, yes, I went back to plain moccasins. But I had to try, right? I had to.)

It must be said that my mother never means to be a party pooper. She is more of a good-natured, well-mannered gatecrasher who wants in on her children’s lives. Her son is going to Venice; can she join him and his girlfriend? Her daughter has gone to a crazy retro birthday bash in her dress; can’t she call and ask how the party is going? Does everyone like the dress? Let my mother in on any drama in your life and she may be more involved in it than you.

The Paris trip was to have been a present to myself. Something to stop the march of time; something to help me recall 2010 down the road, even as the rest of my life melts into one never-ending year. But knowing my mother – feeling her longing – I knew I had to take her with me on the trip. It would be a gift to her, to make up for her tedious trips with my father. I would let her in on my trip.

Was it a present she wanted though? I wonder. We had good days sightseeing and better days shopping in Paris. She was proud of her stamina. My father couldn’t have coped with my itinerary – going here and there on foot and getting lost on the way to this and that bistro – but she could. At the end of an exhausting summer day though (in July, the sun in Paris doesn’t set until 9pm), while we were waiting for darkness and sleepiness to descend, she would wonder what, and how, he was doing at home. He, a loner who isn’t good at being alone. “Sometimes I miss that stupid man.”

It wasn’t something she would have admitted at home. In our modest room in Paris, miles from our home, however, some things were more sayable. She worried aloud about everything. About Fei. About me. About things we hadn’t told her but she had sensed. It was dark and she was beside me on our bed, whispering intensely. “Why aren’t my children happy? Why are things hard for my children?”

I have no doubt, at such moments, that my mother is a drama queen. Nor do I doubt that the drama queen loves us. Even so, I had to shrink away when she asked me why, when I had a chance to be a wife and mother n years ago, I didn’t take it. Why didn’t I stick with someone I had picked? Why did I have a change of heart? Me. A marriage, however miserable, would have been something, wouldn’t it? I didn’t answer her. I wouldn’t. Not even to tell her she had her questions the wrong way around. Not even to tell her I was angry. How could she ask about such things now, after the unrepeatable things she said then? No, I had my reasons, mine, and I wasn’t letting her near them. The night was still; my mind was swirling with words I wouldn’t speak.

And yet. And yet. I began making assuring noises about Fei…the comforting things in his birth chart…I wanted to give my mother something, though it might not have been what she wanted. It was late. She is old. She shouldn’t have to worry about us in the wee hours of a Parisian night.

Autumn | Three

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.

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.

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.