Soy Sauce for Beginners (11 page)

Even if James had called right then to tell me what a wonderful time he’d had, even if he’d wanted to see me again, that very day, I would have declined. I already had plans—plans that could not be canceled. My mother would never say the words, but this time, I knew she needed me by her side.

That Saturday afternoon, while my friends lazed on the beach, I took my place on the bench before the Steinway baby grand that had been my fourteenth-birthday present. It was time for Ma’s first real piano lesson.

Twenty years had passed since we’d sat together on this bench. In those days, Ma’s role had been half companion, half taskmaster: repeating my teacher’s instructions; scolding or encouraging when I complained about aching wrists or general tiredness; fetching me water in a crystal highball glass to match her own.

Through graduate school I’d only ever worked with elementary school-aged kids, and now I wasn’t sure how to proceed. “Middle
C
,” I said finally, striking the key, deciding to start at the very beginning.

Ma scowled. “You can’t be serious.”

I knew she’d picked up the basics from eavesdropping on the lessons I’d started at the age of four. In the beginning, when she’d only worked part-time, she lingered in the dining room grading papers, close enough to absorb everything my teacher said. Together we learned to read notes and made our way through the first two Suzuki Books. Sometimes she put aside her work and joined me at the piano, one of us playing the right-hand line while the other played the left, after which we would switch places and play the piece all over again. But when I got older, she picked up a full course load at the university, and my pieces grew too challenging for her unpracticed fingers. Occasionally, I’d come home from school to find her at the piano, squinting at sheet music as she stumbled through a piece I’d mastered months or even years before. Embarrassed by her ineptitude, I found excuses to leave the room.

On weekends, Ma took me to the Victoria Concert Hall, even though back then the Singapore Symphony Orchestra was a bunch of amateurs—nothing, she said, like the concerts she’d attended in New York, or even Ithaca. Ba served as chauffeur, dropping us off and picking us up. Sometimes he found a parking spot close by and napped in the car—anything to avoid coming inside. Still, after I left for California, I’d expected him to step in and take my place. Instead, Ma went to the symphony by herself a couple of times, and now she didn’t go at all.

It struck me that I should buy us tickets while I was home.

Ma was still lamenting how little faith I had in her abilities, but I was determined to continue the lesson on my own terms. I moved on to scales, stressing the importance of learning the correct fingering, reminding her to strike the keys with conviction instead of tapping half-heartedly with her manicured, too-long nails.

She lasted about seven minutes before complaining of boredom, and when I gave an exasperated sigh, she said, “Come now, I’m fifty-eight years old. I don’t have time for basics.”

I threw up my hands. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what you want to learn?”

Ma chuckled and patted my back on that spot directly below the nape of my neck, as she had when I was a small child needing to be soothed. “I thought you’d never ask,” she said. “All I want is to play one piece. One beautiful piece. Not even perfectly—believe me, I know my limits—just well enough to be able to play it all the way through without hurting anyone’s ears.”

I didn’t respond right away. An unexpected welling in my throat spread up through the backs of my eyes. It was such a simple request, coming from a woman who had recently lost so much.

“Which piece?” I asked, bracing myself for her answer.

Ma’s smile split her face in half. It had been a while since I’d seen those two rows of small, charmingly crooked teeth.

Without hesitation she said,
“Gradus Ad Parnassum
,” and before I could pass judgment, she added, “And don’t tell me it’s too hard. I’ll practice as much as it takes. I have nothing but time.”

Her choice shouldn’t have surprised me. She loved Debussy, and when she heard me play that piece at my high school senior recital, she told me she’d been moved to tears—a confession that had mortified me. Now, however, twelve years later, I saw she’d meant what she’d said. I nudged Ma off the bench and searched the storage space beneath the bench cushion for the sheet music I hadn’t touched since that recital, the photocopied pages still taped together in a single row to minimize flipping.

In truth, it wasn’t a bad choice. She could have picked something truly impossible. Although the piece was technically challenging with a couple of crossed-hand passages and tricky key changes, we would start slow.

“Play for me,” Ma said.

I didn’t see how my performance would get her any closer to her goal, but suddenly my fingers ached to strike the keys. Selling my piano in San Francisco had been a foolish thing to do—an act driven not only by frustration with storage prices, but by my anger at the world for all the terrible, unjust things that had befallen me that month. I wondered if there was any chance Marie would take pity on me and sell me back my piano.

I played
Gradus Ad Parnassum
once through, more slowly than I would have liked, laboring to keep a steady tempo, stumbling a bit on the key change.

“Oof,” I said when I was done, shaking out my fingers.

But Ma regarded me fondly, murmuring, “That was lovely, ducky.”

I told her to fetch her reading glasses, and she wandered around the living room before declaring she must have left them on her nightstand. I followed her up the stairs, went to my room and came down with my metronome cupped in both hands.

Back at the piano bench, Ma peered at me over her glasses. “You still have that old thing? Surely they make pocket-sized ones these days.”

I smoothed my metronome’s russet, fine-grained wood. “I like this one,” I said. I set the metronome to sixty-six, less than half the tempo listed on the score, and the slow, steady ticking instantly relaxed me. To my mind, a metronome embodied simplicity: once the needle got going, all you had to do was keep time.

“Now it’s your turn,” I said.

Ma worked her way through the first page at half pace. Every couple of notes, she’d stumble and scowl at the metronome as if it were at fault. “That thing is driving me crazy. How can anyone concentrate over that awful ticking?”

Since it was her very first lesson, I turned off the metronome and let her start over. Already I was starting to reconsider my stance from the doctor’s office. Maybe Ba was right; maybe it was too early to consider rehab. Maybe Ma and I could sit here at this piano for a few minutes every day, and it would count for something.

When the lesson was over, Ma went to take a nap, and I settled in the den in front of the television. There again was the bubbly, blond talk show host, Melody.

On this episode, Melody’s studio guest was a plump woman with a weak chin and a shoulder-length perm who, in her mid-thirties, already looked like someone who’d once been pretty. The woman, a self-confessed shopaholic, was in the midst of detailing all the ways in which she’d blown through her children’s college fund and plunged her family into debt. And yet, despite this woman’s horrifying behavior, there was something so naive, so sweet about her confessing all this on television, and trusting that Melody would make things right. No Singaporean would have ever considered displaying her problems to the world, although, judging from the amount Melody was shown on local TV, we clearly enjoyed watching other people do it.

In a halting voice, the shopaholic was recounting how her uncontrolled spending had led her husband to divorce her. The studio audience gasped in horror and sympathy; Melody furrowed her brow and closed her eyes to indicate she was taking in each and every word. When the shopaholic paused to wipe away her tears, Melody enveloped her in a hug. “You are so brave,” she said to the now sobbing shopaholic. “You will get better because you are here.” The studio audience clapped with all their might.

Even as I dismissed the show, I was pulled in by Melody’s plush, sonorous voice, by those gleaming blue eyes that locked on to mine, by the fervor of her studio audience. I too wanted to believe that this shopaholic who had behaved so irresponsibly and hurt so many of her loved ones could be cured. I was so engrossed in the show I didn’t even think to change the channel when my mother walked in.

“Oh,” she said. “Melody.” With one elbow she nudged me over on the loveseat and took her place beside me.

7

M
Y MOTHER ALWAYS SAID HER BEST
years were spent as a graduate student at Cornell.

“There was so much going on,” she’d say, closing her eyes and tilting her head, as if toward some enchanting tune playing in the distance. “Readings, lectures, dinner parties, dances. I worked hard, though. I had to in order to finish my dissertation.”

Forgotten Discourse: Toward a Definition of Postcolonial German Literature
, a heavy volume contained in a navy-blue cloth binding, sits at the bottom of our bookcase, next to a large leather-bound photo album that holds pictures of my mother from the same period. Younger then than I am now, Ma had waist-length, stick-straight hair that she parted down the middle. She wore fitted cashmere turtlenecks and tweed knee-length skirts and polished high brown boots. She was quite lovely.

Even today, when age and illness have stripped the luster from her skin and the gloss from her hair, my mother’s slanting cheekbones and long cat eyes remain unchanged. In fact, without the distractions of youth, her features have become even more striking, like a piece of basswood whittled down to its perfect, essential core.

Stubborn and pragmatic, my mother was a gifted scholar. She carried these traits into her parenting, deciding early on that children should always be told the truth. As such, she never tricked me into believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy—things I read about in books by Russell Hoban and the Berenstains—though she did dig around in her purse for a shiny gold dollar each time I lost a tooth.

When I asked, at the age of five or six, where babies came from, she thought for a moment and said, “Well, babas have penises. Mamas have vaginas. Right there, where your wee-wee is.” She paused to make sure I understood before continuing. “The baba puts his penis in the mama’s vagina”—here she formed an O with the thumb and first two fingers on one hand, and inserted her other index finger into the O—“and then the baba shoots his sperm into the mama, which fertilizes her egg and makes a baby.”

“But why does he do that?”

She stared off into the distance, thinking. “Because it feels good.”

I was not a particularly inquisitive child, so I must have concluded that this was another of those situations in which the answer was significantly less interesting than the question itself, and left it at that.

In primary three, I, along with every other girl in my class, developed a crush on Mark de Souza. Even at age nine he had the wavy brown hair and dimpled chin that, in adulthood, would earn him a place on
Her World
magazine’s list of the fifty most eligible bachelors.

Swept away by my feelings for this boy, and newly obsessed with the idea of love, I asked my mother if she’d fallen for Ba at first sight, and she answered truthfully, “No.” She said she and Ba had gone out a few times at the end of junior college, but when he made plans to attend the local university, she didn’t think twice before accepting admission to Cornell.

Following college, she stayed on in Ithaca for graduate school. Near the end of her doctoral program, Ma began to apply for faculty positions all over the country, but when her parents discovered her plan to remain in America, they begged her to reconsider. Her mother left pleading messages on her answering machine; her father arranged for a dean at the National University of Singapore to interview her over the phone. Their actions only made Ma more determined to build a life away from Singapore.

By then, eight years had passed since my father and mother first dated. Nonetheless, with his future in-laws’ encouragement, Ba bought a plane ticket from Singapore to New York City, rented a car and drove the four hours north to Ithaca—all against his own parents’ wishes, who couldn’t understand why their son refused to forget this strange, willful girl.

Ba appeared at Ma’s door the same day her eighth and last job rejection arrived in the mail. The thought of waiting another year and starting the process all over again was too much for her to bear, especially in the face of continued pressure from her parents—and from Ba. By the end of the week, he’d convinced her to buy a plane ticket home to Singapore. She accepted a job at the National University of Singapore, where she was the only faculty member in the humanities department who held an American doctoral degree, not to mention one from the Ivy League. My parents married, and ten months later, I was born.

The tale of how Ba and Ma eventually came together charmed my nine-year-old self. I imagined my father, shivering in a brand-new wool coat, braving the February snow to rescue my mother and bring her home. Only later, after the American visiting professor had come and gone, did I stop to question Ma’s choices. If she hadn’t loved Ba, why did she come back to Singapore? Did she grow to love him? Did she love him still?

Over time, many of these answers would reveal themselves, and yet the original questions begot others, each more urgent than the one before, a never-ending chain of ever-rising stakes.

The American visiting professor was named Colin Clarke. He had come from the University of Chicago to give a seminar at my mother’s university. To welcome him and his wife, the humanities chair hosted a dinner at a seafood restaurant on the eastern coast of the island that was famous for its chili crab.

At first my father tried to get out of attending the dinner. It was no secret that he found Ma’s colleagues exhausting. They sat around discussing books he hadn’t read, and when he tried to bring up something he’d seen in the paper or on TV, they humored him for a minute or two before taking up the previous topic of conversation. But Ma insisted she could not show up alone. All the other spouses would be there. Eventually, Ba relented, but on the night of the dinner, he announced that I was coming, too. Ma was not pleased.

I had just turned ten, and my opinion of these gatherings fell inline with my father’s. If it hadn’t been for the chili crab—plump, succulent mud crabs served in a thick, luscious tomato-and-chili sauce—I would have refused to attend. In between lectures by various faculty members on the history of Singapore cuisine for the benefit of the foreign visitors, Ma and her colleagues discussed their research and their classes. Ba and the other spouses quickly ran out of ways to participate in the conversation, and spent the rest of the dinner nodding and smiling politely. Every once in a while, a grown-up asked me what my favorite subject was in school, or whether I was enjoying the food, but other than that I was left alone.

Colin Clarke’s face has faded from my memory, but I can still picture his wife, a frightfully thin woman with pouffy hair the color of pomegranates, who complained about the humidity and the spiciness of the food. She finally agreed to taste a single morsel of crab, then pointedly wiped off her sauce-stained fingers on a disposable towelette.

Only one other aspect of that dinner stuck with me. Near the end of the meal, I noticed Ma and Colin Clarke discussing some writer or philosopher they both admired. Something about the tilt of their shoulders or the angles of their heads caught my attention, and when I glanced back a while later, it was clear from the way they neglected their bowls of honeydew sago that their conversation was far from over. Before I could ponder the heaviness that settled in my limbs, Ba threw back the last of his beer and cleared his throat. He leaned over, looped an arm over Ma’s shoulder and questioned them in a loud strident voice about this philosopher of theirs. What startled me was neither his aggressive manner, nor the questions themselves, but the way he spoke. By peppering his speech with phrases like, “No kidding,” and “Sure thing,” and “You don’t say,” my father was mimicking an American accent. His eyes glittered feverishly; his face and neck burned bright red. Another colleague tried to engage him in a different discussion, but he would not turn his attention from Ma and the American.

After that, someone—probably the humanities chair—signaled for the check. The academics and their spouses reached for their purses and rose from the table.

In the parking lot, Ma walked briskly to the car, ignoring Ba’s comments about the evening. All the way home, Ba continued to speak in that strange voice, and when Ma told him to drop it, he widened his eyes and said he had no idea what she was talking about.

One evening, about a month after Colin Clarke’s arrival, Ba didn’t come home for dinner. The following evening, it happened again. Hours later, when he finally returned, Ma hurried down the stairs. The door to the study swung shut and the arguing started. I lay awake in bed, listening; I was old enough to know something was seriously wrong.

At first my parents’ voices were too soft for me to hear, but then I heard the American’s name, spoken by Ba in that hideous accent, and my mother’s voice rose in a shriek. Images from that night came back to me: the way Ma had laughed wildly at Colin Clarke’s jokes, how at the end of the night, his wife had refrained from taking Ma’s hand, instead raising her palm in a half-hearted wave. My parents’ voices grew steadily louder, and when I could listen no longer, I got out of bed and ran the faucet in the tub at full blast. There in the warm bath I lay, watching my fingers and toes shrivel as if from old age.

My parents’ argument stretched through the week. On day four, Ba peeked into my room after midnight, walked through the half-open door of the en suite bathroom and found me asleep in a tub of tepid water. He wrapped me in a large, fluffy towel and carried me to bed.

The next morning, the two of us drove to Uncle Robert and Auntie Tina’s house, where I was to stay while he and Ma took care of “grown-up business.” I didn’t point out I was too old to be spoken to like that.

The drive over was the first time we’d been alone together in days, and I was both furious at him and comforted by his presence. Unable to put my conflicting emotions into words, I simply asked, “When can I come home?”

“Soon,” my father said. “In a few days, your ma or I will come get you.”

Divorce was still rare in Singapore—I’d learned of its occurrence from books, the way I’d once learned of Santa Claus—but I worried all the same. What would it take to drive my mother back to her beloved America?

In front of my uncle’s house, Ba stretched his lips into a tired smile, and I tried to smile back. As much as I longed to ask questions, I sensed this wasn’t the time, and that he might not even have the answers.

In hindsight, it’s difficult to isolate how much or how little I knew about my parents’ conflict. At any rate, not long after my four-day stay at Uncle Robert’s, my dear friend Kat intervened.

Kat is three months younger than me but has always seemed older, especially when we were kids. Thanks to the influence of her big sister, Kat was the first to start using eye shadow and the first to have a co-ed birthday party. She was also the first to educate me on the distinctly Singaporean, postcolonial phenomenon of “sarong party girls” or “SPGs.”

That afternoon, Kat, our other best friend Cindy, and I were on our stomachs on Kat’s bed, watching the movie,
Pretty Woman
. This was the early nineties, and R-rated movies were censored before being permitted in the country. Nonetheless, Kat’s mum made us fast-forward through the beginning, which she deemed unsuitable for girls our age. Despite the missing scenes, I took in the way the posh shop girls glared down their long, thin noses, and understood there was something shameful about the lead actress, without fully grasping that she was a prostitute.

We three watched in silence, captivated by the palm-tree-lined boulevards, the fancy cars, the swirling dresses and matching hats—none of which were anything like the America my mother had described. When the final scene faded to black, Kat rolled onto one side and propped herself up on an elbow. “You know,” she said casually, “there are women like that in Singapore.”

Something in her tone signaled danger. I proceeded with caution. “What do you mean?”

“Singaporean ladies who only date
ang mos
,” she said, using the Chinese slang word for “Caucasian.” She explained that her parents had taken the family to the beach at Sentosa, where her sister had pointed out the SPGs—local women in animal-print bikinis and short shorts, with fake
ang mo
highlights and fake
ang mo
accents, who flirted with all the rich,
ang mo
men.

A pejorative term roughly antonymous to a man with an Asian fetish, an SPG is by no means a sex worker. But given that we were ten-year-olds sheltered by both government and parental censorship, Kat’s murky equating of prostitutes and SPGs was understandable.