The signs of death were there already, months before it took place, at the birthday party itself. There was the laboured breathing as he was helped up his chair to thank the guests and acknowledge the yam sengs; his voice was barely audible and the stiff wispy beard on his chin quivered as he rasped his ‘thank you’ and sat down again. There was the strange brief fit of crying – fortunately, so brief that only those at his table noticed it; he had begun to talk of a brother long since dead. It was strange, for he had never referred to this dead brother before.
Signs of death – but they went unnoticed in the loud festive atmosphere of the restaurant, the best Chinese restaurant in Singapore. Twenty tables booked for the occasion, the menu carefully chosen by Angela herself, offering the famed restaurant’s most expensive delicacies.
“I’m sick to death of the usual sharksfin soup and spring chicken and steamed pomfret,” she had said and proceeded to order 12 dishes, each more exotic and expensive than the preceding one.
The cost, the cost – it was just like the stingy Wee Tiong and his equally stingy, spiteful wife to worry about costs for an aged parent’s 75th birthday dinner. The brothers always shared out the costs of the birthday dinners and the costs of medical treatments of the old ones; it was a vague, understood thing from the time each brother had started working and drawing a salary.
The cost – Wee Tiong had been most concerned when Wee Boon told him that it would be at the Shanghai Restaurant.
“I thought we had agreed it would be at the Kai Leong Restaurant – ”
“I know, I know,” said Wee Boon, “but Angela said the food there is no good, and for a 75th birthday dinner, it might as well be the best.”
And at this point Angela had stepped in and said, with the casualness of a well-rehearsed response, “You needn’t worry about the extra cost, Wee Tiong. Boon will see to that. You pay your original share, that’s all.”
The shifty eyes behind the thick lensed glasses had glanced up sharply, the muscles on the long narrow face tensed to deflect barbed words, but Angela had wandered off, leaving behind a faint fragrance of Helena Rubinstein, to talk to Mee Kin, to discuss the relative merits of yam pudding and red bean pancake for dessert.
Later, at the dinner, Angela saw him, this most detestable of her brothers-in-law, a true shifty-eyed grasping Chinaman, down to the absurd Chinaman haircut where the razor ran close to the skin at the back, but left comically sharp wedges of hair at the sides. He was whispering to his wife and both smiled their sardonic smile of criticism.
“I suppose,” she told Mee Kin later, “they were saying that we were showing off, that we had deliberately set up an impressive affair for the benefit of Minister. Whatever Boon does, he interprets as currying favour with Minister; he can’t accept the fact of his elder brother’s superior education and personality. I think when Boon becomes Member of Parliament he’ll die of envy, bite on his tongue in jealous hatred and swallow it. There are no brotherly feelings between them – they are worlds apart, you see, and it’s the fault, if you analyse things carefully, of my father and mother-in-law.”
Angela’s intense dislike had infected the
children; they did not like Second Uncle, they were cautious when he spoke to
them, for he spoke to them always with a laughing, goading contempt, his eyes
glinting
behind his glasses, his neck twisting. “Ah Mu-ck, Ah My-ker, Ah Mee-sae” he
called in imitation of the grandparents’ struggling efforts with English names,
and then he laughed a sharp, malicious laugh and shook his head.
“Those who follow Western ways are those who eat Western shit,” he once said, to nobody in particular. “Western followers, Western shit-eaters!”
His own four daughters were named ‘Chwee Kim’, ‘Chwee Sim’, ‘Chwee Lian’ and ‘Chwee Hwa’.
“Stingy Chinaman,” Angela said to her friends, “Counting every cent. Living in that miserable two-room HDB flat in Geylang so that he will always have the excuse not to be able to take in either of the old ones, when the time comes. But do you know he has a bungalow in Victoria Park, rented out to an American family for $3,000 a month, and an apartment in Wan Yu Heights, also rented out to foreigners? He gives $100 a month to the old couple – I believe he recently reduced it to $75, I must check with Boon – and the ang-pow for Chinese New Year, and his share of birthday dinners, and you can’t extract a cent more. Why the Shanghai, not the Kai Leong Restaurant? Why Peking Duck, not Spring Chicken? I’m sick of his calculating ways; my Mark calls him ‘Uncle Abacus’. I believe Mark wrote a humorous composition once on ‘My Relatives’ and then he suddenly decided to call his Second Uncle, Uncle Abacus! The teacher got him to read the essay to the class. I’m sick of his stinginess to the poor old couple and in the end, I always tell Boon, forget this sickening nonsense about your share and my share. We pay. We pay for everything. We can’t afford to lose face. You attend a dinner for a friend’s parent at the Shanghai or Imperial and then you call them for a return dinner at the Kai Leong or some dingy stupid place? No thank you. We pay, that’s all. Money’s no problem.”
That was evident from the diamond ear-studs – “1.02 carats per side,” Angela confided – the diamond and jade necklace, the diamond rings. They were brought out from the bank vault for special occasions like these. “Imagine wearing them at the Kai Leong! I would look out of place,” said Angela laughingly.
She bustled about, the hostess, diamonds sparkling, the silk dress and jacket splendid on the slim figure. She moved deftly from table to table, the consummate hostess, urging everyone to eat more, heaping spoonfuls of steaming food into the bowls of old men and women, friends and relatives of the old couple, amidst timid, laughing protestations that they had had so much to eat already. She spoke to Wee Tiong and Gek Choo for a brief while – for the sake of propriety, for the family must not be seen to be divided in a public place. She spoke amiably to them, exhorting them to try more of the jellied prawns, patting their daughters on the heads and cheeks, noting later to Mee Kin, “Even on an occasion like this, she was too stingy to get a decent dress – did you see that outmoded shift, and those ugly home-made shapeless dresses on her daughters? Such pretty little girls too. A pity.”
She spoke with greater amiability to Wee Nam and Gloria. Third Brother was less spiteful, Gloria did not have a quarter the malice of that Gek Choo with the shifty eyes and tight mouth – “husband and wife were looking more and more alike every day,” she laughed to her friends. Typical Chinaman and Chinawoman. Wee Nam and Gloria were less repulsive – “but one of these days,” said Angela with a sigh to Mee Kin, “one of these days, I shall tell you about this wastrel brother-in-law of mine, always stretching out his arm for loans from Boon. Loans, he calls them. I wish he could be honest and say ‘gifts’. He’s been owing Boon money since 1976, while my Mark was still in primary school. Flitting from job to job, business to business. His poor wife a nervous wreck. But that’s another story. You’ll hear endless stories about my in-laws,” she said with a sharp laugh.
She urged them to eat, heaping food on their plates and into bowls. Gloria’s people, Angela whispered to a friend as she moved on, were the lower class Eurasians in Singapore: her brother was a drummer in a seedy night-club, wanted by the police for drug-taking on a number of occasions, her two sisters had married common English or American sailors and gone abroad, her mother helped out in her church for a pittance.
She moved from the Eurasian table, jewels sparkling; she had noted how Gloria’s mother’s eyes had travelled, dilated in disbelief, over the necklace, ear-studs, bracelet, rings, in the brief while she was at their table.
She was glad to go to the children’s table. She surveyed her children proudly, dressed in their best. Mark was reading aloud to the other children the signs on pillars and walls in the restaurant and in the menu, in both English and Mandarin. He was on his way to being the best bilingual student in his school. The others listened, awe-stricken or giggling. She went up to Michael – Michael, the only child who gave pain; what wouldn’t she give to have him like Mark? She went up to him and asked, “Are you eating, Mikey? Would you like more soup? Here, let Mummy help you to more soup.” But the boy shook his head and looked, pained, into his empty bowl. My best-looking child, thought Angela sadly. Friends have remarked on his handsome features, his beautiful long eyelashes. Why is he so difficult? But now she only smiled at him and joined in the merriment of the other children.
She whispered to Mooi Lan, “Keep an eye on Michael, see that he eats well. Make sure the idiotic one does not come to give trouble.” She trusted the girl whom she could never refer to as ‘servant girl’; Mooi Lan was the children’s ‘chae-chae’. Mooi Lan was the only one who had ever seen her weep over Michael; she would remain the only one.
The idiotic one, the imbecile foster-son, did come over to the children’s table but he did not make trouble. He merely stood there, grinned at the children while they stared back or giggled, and then he clapped his hands excitedly, as if he had discovered some wondrous thing. He stood beside Michael, his hand on the boy’s shoulder. Thirty years old, a brutish hulk of a man with a seven-year-old child’s mind and a child’s endless capacity to embarrass and irritate.
Mark shifted his chair, displeased. The idiot slobbered, saliva flying; Mark moved his chair further away with a snort of disgust. Mooi Lan got up and tried to direct the idiot back to his own table, the table of the inferior relatives. He resisted; he persisted in standing beside Michael, now two hands gripping the boy’s shoulders; he talked to the boy in his slobbering way, painful to see or hear. Michael was about to get up and be led by him to the inferior relatives’ table when Mooi Lan adroitly intervened, put the boy gently back in his place and led the idiot one back by the hand to his table. Then she returned, looked across several tables to Angela who was watching all this time, tense, and received a nod of approval.
Luckily I have Mooi Lan, sighed Angela. And for the hundredth time she wondered: Why did the foolish old one add to her already heavy burden by adopting this idiot? She had four sons herself; why adopt an imbecile, known to be an imbecile from birth?
“Another story,” she told Mee Kin. “I’ll tell it to you one of these days. How I wish my mother-in-law were like your mother, or even my own mother.”
She went back to the main table.
The 75-year-old celebrant looked wan and tired. Old Mother sitting beside him, stiff but smiling with a force of will each time somebody bent over to speak to her or put food in her bowl, looked sad and tired too.
A fine thing! – $5,000 for a 12-course dinner in the best restaurant in Singapore, to expose two sad-looking fools to the public, as if they had been ill-treated by their children and grandchildren all their lives! On Old Mother’s ear-lobes glittered the diamond studs that Boon and Angela had given her on her 70th birthday; on her finger the gold ring given by stingy Chinaman and his wife. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it were some inferior grade of gold, or silver washed in gold,” Angela had said to Mee Kin.
Old Mother’s eyes, heavy with bags, were downcast, moist.
“I know who she’s thinking of,” whispered Angela to Mee Kin. “That useless youngest son of hers who’s been in Australia these 10 years at least, studying, he claims. A law course, he says in his letter, and then I hear he’s switched to Interior Designing or something like that. A real parasite. Chinaman will not fork out a cent, so guess who’s supplying the cash? My poor husband, of course. Boon doesn’t tell me everything, I know that. He knows I’ll jump. And the old ones speak of him as their Hope, their Saviour, their Comfort in their old age. She never stops talking about him. It’s ‘my Ah Siong, my Ah Siong’ all the time. She keeps hoping for his return. Then all her troubles will be over, she says, as if right now, her other sons are ill-treating her. Do you know, my poor Boon spends at least a $1,000 a month on his family? I don’t mind really; money’s not the problem, but at least have the decency to show appreciation. That wastrel – I don’t know his latest escapade in Australia but somebody who’s just come back says he’s living with an Australian woman, a divorcee. I don’t care to know. I only pray he doesn’t kill his poor old mother, that’s all. She keeps waiting for him to come back, and weeps over the letters he sends her. Do you know he gets somebody to write the letters in Chinese? But he’ll never come back. Why should he? He’s being very clever. Money from kind Eldest Brother every month, so why come back and work? The old fool is going to come to grief, I tell you. But I shall not bother about that. I’ve got too much to bother about already.”
“Noodles mean long life for the Chinese people,” said the knowledgeable Mark, and he expertly lifted the birthday noodles with his chopsticks, showing their length. “I read about that in the Bilingual Page of The Straits Times. You’re not supposed to bite off the noodles, you’ve got to swallow them in their entire length, otherwise you’re biting off the long life.”
He proceeded to demonstrate, amidst an explosion of encouraging cries and giggles. “Mark, he’s the cleverest boy in his school,” said Michelle who adored her brother.
The signs of death were there, at the birthday dinner. The old man nearly slipped and fell on his way down the steps. A bad sign, somebody said. And worse – he began speaking about the dead brother again. He took to his bed a few weeks after that; and Old Mother’s time was completely taken up in nursing him. The sons and daughters-in-law visited regularly, sometimes with the grandchildren, usually on weekends; the illness dragged and became irksome to everybody.
“Why does Grandpa smell so?” asked Michelle, and her mother said, “Shh.”
A long illness of an aged parent – a most terrifying thing.
“Do you know,” said Angela, half laughing, half angry, to Mee Kin on the phone, “do you know my mother-in-law actually blames me for the illness of her husband? She said it was my white dress at the birthday dinner – white, colour of death, colour of mourning. Would you believe it, Mee Kin? Would you believe anything like it! I was in that off-white, pure silk suit that night – remember? Would you call something as expensive and modern as that, mourning? But I should have known. Everything is always blamed on Aun-jee-lah. Always the villainess. And guess who’s going to be the busiest now, to run around, pay medical bills, take the brunt, now that the old man’s bedridden? Aun-jee-lah.”