Soy Sauce for Beginners (6 page)

“Sumiko,” he said softly.

“What?”

“Her full name is Sumiko.”

I released that same crazed laugh. “Do her friends think you’re a creepy old man? With an Asian fetish?” As I said the words, I realized I’d never before thought of Paul in this way. I was the first Asian girl he’d ever dated—a fact I’d revealed to my Asian girlfriends with pride. All of us knew or had even gone out with the kind of white guy who spoke Japanese or Mandarin, majored in East Asian studies in college, trained in karate or jujitsu or kendo, and most of all, had a string of Asian lovers in his past. A guy with an Asian fetish was a red flag or a deal breaker, depending on whom you asked, akin to someone who talked with his mouth full, or had mild yet persistent BO.

“Gretchen,” Paul said. “Why are you here?”

The laughter emptied out of me. I felt as if I’d had too much to drink and had to sort through endless layers of my mind for the answer.

“Why am I here?” I said finally, throwing my hands in the air. “I guess I’m a glutton for punishment.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what else to say.”

“Did she know I was Asian?” I asked.

Paul sighed. “Come on, Gretch.”

I watched him standing there with that weary expression on his face and thought about what I would give to be able to feel the way he did: tired and irritated and ready to move on, instead of helpless, desperate, uncontrollably angry. I took a step forward, and for a split second imagined throwing my arms around him, pulling him close, inhaling his salty, masculine scent.

Instead I shoved him as hard as I could.

He fell back against one of the large potted palms, crying out as the base of his skull struck the lip of the pot, which groaned against the concrete walkway.

I stared in horror and wonder at what I’d done.

“Jesus,” he said, gasping to catch his breath. Slumped against that pot, he scowled up at me. “Don’t just stand there. Help me.”

I turned to go. He didn’t need my help.

4

T
HE FRANKIE SHEPHERD I
’
D KNOWN
for years was a plain, bookish girl who hid the soft folds of her body beneath shapeless sweatshirts and baggy jeans. Frankie’s best physical feature, a dimple-framed smile, was too often shielded by the curtain of dark blond hair that swung forward whenever she ducked her head—a gesture that could indicate both discomfort and pleasure. Awkward and earnest, she possessed a clamorous, almost honking laugh that never failed to set me at ease.

The first day of freshman year, in our cramped Stanford dorm room, she touched a warm, clammy hand to mine and aimed her words down the bib of her overalls. I could barely hear her over the noise of beds getting lofted in adjacent rooms and furniture being hauled up the stairs. “What was that?” I asked several times over the course of our conversation, trying to hide my impatience. “Come again?” Already I was thinking about how to introduce myself to the girls next door.

I soon found I’d misjudged Frankie. Once we warmed up to each other, I learned she had a wicked sense of humor and was a gifted mimic. Her impressions of professors were legendary on our hallway, as was her luminous singing voice. That fall, we spent many a Friday afternoon at the music building, working our way through Frankie’s impressive collection of musical theater anthologies. I was more than happy to put Chopin on hold so I could accompany her on the piano.

In the winter, Paul and I started dating. We grew used to sharing his extra-long twin bed. Although Frankie accused me of treating our room as storage space, she and I remained roommates the following year. Having been there from the start, she continued to serve as my chief relationship advisor, offering her opinion on such issues as whether Paul and I should stay together through our summer apart, or how to improve his relationship with my father, regardless of her own inexperience, and the fact that she’d never truly warmed to Paul.

Following graduation, Frankie and I both settled in the Bay Area. She later gained admission to Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and it was during this period that she spent a summer interning at the Singapore office of an American consulting firm.

Her first week on the job, she called me long-distance to marvel at the way the locals spoke, how their English took on a tonal, chantlike quality that confused her more than if they were speaking a different language altogether. Singlish, Singapore’s unofficial national tongue, combines a singular accent with an idiosyncratic syntax and the blithe incorporation of Chinese, Malay, and Tamil slang words. Frankie said it was as if the entire region conversed in opera libretti in place of regular speech, and given her talent for impressions, she was soon speaking Singlish herself.

Weekends she spent diving in Tioman and trekking in northern Vietnam and suntanning on the white-sand beaches of Bali and Phuket. But it was Singapore she fell for, with all of its paradoxes: its riotous language and spicy colorful cuisine, coupled with its button-downed Confucian values; its pulsing nightclubs and endless government-sponsored self-improvement campaigns. Frankie loved the island’s shiny cosmopolitan veneer, as well as its deeply conservative core. At the end of the summer, when the consulting firm offered her a permanent position in Singapore, she accepted at once, only to have her offer rescinded months later due to downsizing. As a last resort, I put her in touch with my uncle, who hired her based on my glowing recommendation and a single phone conversation.

And now, due to the chain of unfortunate events that had played out on my side, here we both were in Singapore. Given my co-workers’ continued animosity toward me, I was glad I’d have an ally in Frankie.

The day after her plane touched down, Frankie called to ask how we’d be celebrating her first Saturday night in town. Although she’d spent close to twenty-four hours in transit, she sounded cheerful and energetic and not at all jet-lagged. In contrast, my own voice was thin and hoarse from disuse. I’d been lying awake on top of my old pink floral bedspread for the better part of the last hour, too restless to fall asleep, too weary to get up.

“You sound tired,” Frankie said. She lowered her voice. “Is everything all right?”

The tension drained from me like water from a sieve. If she’d been standing before me, I would have thrown my arms around her. For once there was no need to pretend. I told her that aside from work, I’d spent the last week in virtual solitude, ignoring emails and phone calls from friends who’d heard I was back. These were people I’d known all my life, the children of my parents’ friends who, like me, had gone abroad to England and the US for college and graduate school. Unlike me, however, they’d returned home to become lawyers, investment bankers, and entrepreneurs, to marry secondary-school sweethearts and live in downtown condos purchased by parents as wedding gifts. By now they all knew about my separation, my mother’s kidney failure, my cousin’s disaster. If ever my loneliness got the better of me, imagining their solemn faces and voices thick with concern reminded me to keep my distance. It felt good to be able to say all this. Even though seven months had passed since Frankie and I had last seen each other—I’d been busy trying to save my marriage, she’d been busy searching for a new job—I knew she understood.

“You have me now, so you can stop moping around,” she said, laughing to show she meant well. “You’re going to be so sick of me by the time you go back to school.”

Frankie suggested a quieter activity, something just the two of us. “Maybe we could go to the movies,” she offered, but her disappointment was palpable.

“Absolutely not,” I said. I told her I was taking her to a party, and not just any party, but Kat Tan’s thirtieth birthday party, held at her parents’ District 10 mansion, despite the fact that she and her husband had long since moved out. I’d never replied to Kat’s email—I hadn’t even spoken to my old friend since my return—and up until the moment I extended the invitation to Frankie, I’d gone back and forth on whether to attend.

Frankie was talking so loudly I had to hold the phone away from my ear. As always, her energy was infectious. Soon I was digging through the suitcase I hadn’t bothered to unpack for my makeup bag, scanning my closet, now partly filled with Ma’s unused cocktail dresses, for something to wear. I told Frankie I’d come by to pick her up.

That evening, I flagged a taxi and headed to Frankie’s new apartment on Coronation Road, a mid-rise, avant-garde monstrosity of rose-colored tiles that resembled a 1970s-style bathroom. The taxi idled at the curb. I was inspecting my lipstick in a pocket-sized mirror when a fist rapped on the window.

The mirror flew into my lap. I pushed open the door with such force I almost knocked her over. Frankie had mentioned she’d lost some weight over the past couple of months, but she had to be a good fifty pounds lighter.

“How could you not tell me?” I asked.

Frankie ducked her head but she was smiling. “It’s not like it happened all at once.”

I could not stop staring. Undulating curves and soft, rounded edges had given way to sharp angles, steep planes. Frankie’s hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail that highlighted the diagonal slope of her cheekbones, the long unbroken line of her clavicles. Most surprising of all were the child-sized wrists I held in each hand. Prior to this moment, I would never have believed that someone who had been so large could have such tiny bones.

The taxi driver honked the horn. “’Scue me, miss,” he called. “This loading zone,
hor.
Cannot just wait here.”

Frankie elbowed me in the ribs. “Escue me,” she whispered in Singlish.

“Don’t,” I warned, but I was already cracking up.

In the backseat of the taxi, Frankie told me about her flight and her new sublet. Each time I glanced over, her appearance shocked me once again.

The taxi turned down a narrow, tree-lined street flanked by overgrown houses that strained the limits of their respective plots. In a country so dense that eighty percent of the population lived in government-built high-rises, no amount of money could buy space that simply didn’t exist.

Kat’s house was different. Even with its high steel gate and phalanx of imported palm trees, its elegance was evident from the street. The Tan family had flown in a famous Beverly Hills architect to design the sleek, two-story, all-white cube, which had been profiled in two local society magazines. The other side of the house, I told Frankie, was even more impressive, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows overlooking a vanishing-edge swimming pool, surrounded by fragrant frangipani trees and hedges of fuchsia bougainvilleas.

I was still groping in my purse for my wallet when Frankie reached over me to hand the driver a ten-dollar bill. “Thanks, uncle. Keep the change,” she said. When she caught the incredulous look on my face, she shrugged and said, “What? I spent three whole months here, you know?”

Standing at the gate, Frankie gazed up at the house and let out a low whistle, but I was too nervous to respond. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d come to a party like this without Paul. During our short trips back to Singapore, he and I had always embraced our outsider status. We gawked like tourists at my childhood friends, marveling at the insularity of their lives, taking comfort in the knowledge that we were different. In contrast, Frankie was ready to dive into her new life. Her eyes were alert, her posture erect. Even the air around her seemed to shimmer.

In front of the door, I lay a hand on Frankie’s shoulder, hoping to coax some of her positive energy up through my palm.

“Ready?” she asked.

I turned the doorknob and watched the door swing open.

Inside, the house was filled with people dressed in varying interpretations of the party’s “Roaring Twenties” theme—chosen to commemorate the end of Kat’s own roaring twenties. There were a couple of flapper dresses and Louise Brooks wigs, but the majority of the crowd was simply dressed up: girls in sequins, guys in blazers and jeans. They spilled out of the living room and onto the patio and garden surrounding the swimming pool; they clustered around the outdoor bar and the long table laden with finger foods: dumplings in bamboo steamer baskets, assorted sushi rolls, chicken satay made onsite by a hired cook—a wizened Malay man who’d brought his own mini grill and pandan-leaf fan. All around us, people laughed and hugged and talked in frenzied voices over the ambient trance music streaming from surround-sound speakers.

“I’m way underdressed,” Frankie said, anxiety shading her face for the first time. She smoothed her black tank top over the waistband of her jeans and undid her ponytail.

“You look fine,” I said, pleased that at the last minute I’d abandoned trying to look like I didn’t care, and changed into a silk top that hung from the thinnest of spaghetti straps.

Frankie didn’t need to be told to kick off her sandals and nudge them next to the other pairs lined up by the door, as I did with my heels. Stalling for time, I paused before the hallway mirror to check for mascara smudges. Frankie joined me, combing her fingers through her hair, and the sight of our reflections gave me another jolt. All at once, my cheeks seemed too full, my jaw-line too prominent, everything about me too short and squat.

I turned away from the mirror. “Shall we?”

“I guess,” she said, tugging again at the hem of her top.

My envy faded. “You look great,” I said.

She nodded but seemed unconvinced.

At the far end of the living room, the birthday girl stood by the bar in a sparkly tiara and a dress made from tiers of silver fringe. In one opera-gloved hand she carried a long cigarette holder with an unlit cigarette; in the other, an enormous bouquet of orange tulips. I’d been so focused on myself, I’d forgotten to bring a gift.

“
Zar boh,
” Kat cried when she spotted me. She thrust the tulips at her husband Ming and hurried over. “Where the hell have you been? Why haven’t you returned my calls? My own mother had to tell me you were back in town.” She scanned the length of Frankie’s new body before refocusing on me. “You’re lucky there are too many people around for me to wring your neck.”

I tried to laugh away her words. “It’s great to see you,” I said. I didn’t blame Kat for being upset. She was the only Singaporean friend I’d kept in touch with through my years abroad, and I’d done a lousy job of it these past months. When Paul moved out, I’d emailed her the news, and then had failed to respond to her increasingly frantic messages.

Kat wrapped a satin-encased arm around Frankie. They’d met once before during Frankie’s first visit to Singapore. “Welcome back,” Kat said evenly.