A Tiger in the Kitchen (5 page)

My younger sister, Daphne, and I had led a somewhat sheltered childhood up until that point. I rarely ventured far from our apartment, except to play soccer or Ping-Pong with the boys in our neighborhood. Instead, I spent most of my time reading, thinking, and penning those Very Important Thoughts in a little journal. I had been shocked when my grandmother died. I had known she was ill but hadn’t understood exactly how dire it was. (My parents had thought it best to shield us from the details.)

From the moment we got the news, however, we went from fairly quiet lives centered on homework and boring piano practice to a vortex of nonstop activity pebbled with a motley crew of characters who were loud, boisterous, and filled with life. There was Jessie, my auntie Khar Imm’s daughter, who was just a year older than I was but already so commanding a presence that she was somehow able to boss around even those twice our age. There was her father, my uncle Soo Kiat, my father’s younger brother, a thinner, louder version of my dad, who always had a glint of mischief in his eyes that hinted at some probably inappropriate joke lingering behind them. Uncle Ah Tuang, a sturdy young man whom my grandmother had taken in as a baby and raised as her own, loved my grandmother and his older “brothers” fiercely and was quick to join in any conversation, peppering it with jovial jokes and laughs, big and deep.

My auntie Leng Eng, my father’s older sister, was the serious one who kept everyone in line. A vice principal at one of the most prestigious schools in Singapore, she watched over everything with an eagle eye, directing us in crisp English or Teochew to fetch porridge for a guest or make sure teacups were constantly filled.

And, of course, there was Jessie’s mum, my auntie Khar Imm, every bit her daughter’s mother in spirit and manner. Auntie Khar Imm had lived with my grandmother since she married into the household—she’d shepherded Tanglin Ah-Ma through her illness and guarded the wake and funeral with the care of a woman who seemed to feel the loss with a silent intensity that the rest of us could only imagine.

I had never spent much time with my father’s side of the family, because of a rift that began shortly after my mother married into the family. My parents had met soon after he’d ended a courtship of several years with a woman who would have made an ideal daughter-in-law: she came from a well-off family, she was a schoolteacher, and she was obedient and polite. My mother, on the other hand, was the mouthy nineteen-year-old—nine years younger than my father!—who had taken a job as a receptionist in the company where he worked. “Your mother was a Campari girl, you know,” Dad still proudly says of this time. The company they worked for distributed Campari in Singapore, and my mother’s job occasionally included holding trays of Campari drinks at events, flirtatiously pressing people to try them. My parents flirted and started dating. Shortly after she took a job as a flight attendant for Singapore Airlines, my mother married into the Tan family.

The Tan household was fraught with tension from the beginning, when my mother refused to quit her job after the wedding. It was something of a beauty contest to get a spot flying for Singapore Airlines at the time, and my pretty mother was at the pinnacle of glamour among her friends. For starters, what she wore to work had been designed for the airline by the French couturier Pierre Balmain: a beautifully regal dark blue batik uniform that was a sexy and form-fitting version of the
sarong kabaya,
a traditional Malay costume consisting of a three-quarter-sleeved blouse paired with a long, pencil-thin wrap skirt. Because the uniform has a scoop neck that dips about as low as it can while still being decent, there is a popular joke in Singapore that involves an SIA flight attendant leaning over to ask a male passenger as she serves the in-flight meal, presumably of spaghetti and meatballs, “Sir—would you like sauce on your balls tonight?” Building on that image, SIA’s advertisements from its inception, in 1972, blatantly touted its flight attendants as sex symbols. From the beginning, ads featured dazzling pictures of sarong-clad stewardesses in exotic locales next to the words “This girl’s in love with you.” The more famous and long-lasting slogan wasn’t any less evocative: “Singapore Girl, you’re a great way to fly.”

Having beaten dozens of hopefuls to win this job that had become a powerful emblem of the new modern and sophisticated Singaporean woman, my mother refused to quit just to cook and be a dutiful daughter-in-law. My grandparents had hoped for an obedient daughter-in-law but instead got my headstrong mother—who had a (in the minds of traditionalists) slutty job, no less. One night, when my dad was out of town, the SIA van arrived at my grandparents’ home to pick up Mum for a flight. My grandparents bitterly protested, forbidding her to leave. To pry herself free, my mother slapped my grandfather and ran out the door, so the story goes. When my father returned, he and my mother moved out immediately. For years after that, my sister and I peered at this side of our family over a chasm, politely sipping soda and eating pineapple tarts whenever we visited my Tanglin ah-ma. Undiscussed disagreements from years past had congealed and become impenetrable. Whenever we sat around the coffee table at Chinese New Year or the few other times we visited, the heavy air simply was too difficult to pierce. Small talk about school, health, and business was usually all we could muster.

Tanglin Ah-Ma’s funeral, however, brought us all together.

Now, I’m just going to say this. Chinese funerals in Singapore are pretty fun—if you’re eleven. And, well, if you’re not the deceased.

They’re generally drawn-out affairs, grand and long. For my grandmother, the wake took place over seven days. Each morning, my sister and I pinned black squares of fabric onto our right sleeves, the mark that we were mourning for a paternal family member, and headed over to my Tanglin ah-ma’s apartment building. In the void deck—the ground floor—of the complex, an imposing display had been set up. A series of large, colorful blankets, which the Chinese in Singapore sometimes send in lieu of flowers to grieving families, cordoned off a space that was filled with dozens of tables for visitors and family. And at the head of the display was a massive altar bearing offerings of food and tea and my grandmother’s picture. Behind the picture, my grandmother lay.

My cousins and I had a few tasks, which we attacked with great enthusiasm when we weren’t playing gin rummy or poring over issues of
Beano
and
Dandy,
British comic books about a group of rather naughty boys. We had to help with the burning of incense and paper money for my grandmother—until we were permanently relieved of the duty on the second day, when Royston, Jessie’s brother, almost set the funeral tent on fire. Our main job, however, was to help Auntie Khar Imm make sure that guests were properly fed when they arrived. By day, we ferried
guay zhee
(dried melon seeds), tea, and bowls of piping hot porridge to the tables on command. But when night fell, our duties changed—we had one task, and it was a significant one.

The Chinese in Singapore believe that if a cat jumps over a coffin, the body inside will awaken as a zombie, rising up to hop around stiffly, as if both feet were tied firmly together. With their arms stretched out washboard straight, these zombies will keep hopping along until they encounter a human. When that happens in Chinese horror movies, death by washboard arms is inevitable.

Naturally, the task of chasing stray cats away from the coffin fell upon us. And boy, did we take it seriously—around and around the void deck we went, keeping our eyes peeled for those little zombie-making buggers, running at them at full speed when we spied one. At the end of each night, when my Tanglin ah-ma’s coffin was intact and she remained not a zombie, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of accomplishment. It had been a good night’s work.

Emboldened by all I was learning, I decided to try picking up some Teochew. I’d learned some Hokkien (or Fukienese), a dialect similar to Teochew that’s spoken by my mother’s side of the family. The Teochews and Hokkiens are generally proud folks who like to keep their identities separate, even though they hail from the same region of China. I was confident that, since I knew some Hokkien, Teochew couldn’t possibly be that hard.

For days, I listened hard to Jessie and my aunts. Little by little, my confidence grew. One day, as I was about to ask Jessie to take a look at something, I paused and then proudly said, “
Le kua!
” thinking I was saying “You look!” Her reaction was instantaneous. “
Aiyoh! Mm see kua, see
toi!” Jessie exclaimed. Of course, I had used the Hokkien word for “look,”
kua,
instead of the Teochew
toi.
The ultimate insult.

By the time the seventh day rolled around, I was starting to feel sad that I’d be going back to my regular life, with no older Teochew cousins to school me on the mores and choice words of my people. Before my grandmother’s cremation, however, we had to escort her to Heaven.

On the last night, we donned beige hooded robes made of rough gunnysack material—so scratchy that we would be feeling external in addition to internal pain over my grandmother’s death. With a great deal of pomp, we set a multistoried paper house, filled with servants, a car, and a driver, aflame; this was an offering for my grandmother, to ensure a good life for her on the Other Side. Then I knelt next to my father, the firstborn son, in the front, trying to follow along as a priest from a Taoist temple chanted.

When my father started crying, I was surprised to discover that my own eyes were wet. I hadn’t felt close to my grandmother at all. I’d known her largely through her food. And I wasn’t sure why I was crying, except that, over the last week, I had finally felt a sense of connection to her, to my father’s side of the family. And as stressful as it had been to be on zombie-fighting duty, I was grateful for that.

As the chanting drew to a close, the priest signaled us to get up. The time had come. My grandmother’s spirit was ready to enter Heaven. And we were to escort her. Slowly, he led my Tanglin ah-ma’s hooded flock around the void deck, walking in single file in a large circle before we got to a five-foot-long aluminum “bridge” that had been installed earlier that day. Gingerly, we crossed the bridge, having tossed coins into basins of water by its side before stepping on—even heavenly bridges have their tolls, it seems. We circled and crossed the bridge three times, wailing as we went, until finally we reached the gate of Heaven. Outside of this gate we stood, weeping and whispering our private good-byes.

My grandmother entered. Our job was done.

Memories of grandmother’s funeral came back to me as I looked out at the flickering lights of Singapore from my descending airplane from New York. The funeral had been the last chunk of time that I’d spent with my father’s side of the family. In the sixteen years that I’d lived in the United States, I had had hardly any contact with them, in fact, beyond a handful of Chinese New Year visits and my wedding, of course. And I often came away from those visits with the feeling that I was seen as too wayward, too different, for pouring my energies into my career and the never-ending climb instead of cooking or bearing children.

Yet here I was, the prodigal niece, heading home to spend two days making cookies and pineapple tarts with my auntie Khar Imm and her sisters, who now assumed my Tanglin ah-ma’s baking mantle every Chinese New Year. While I have close relationships with the aunties on my mother’s side, I couldn’t remember having a one-on-one conversation that lasted longer than a minute with my auntie Khar Imm. An uncertainty started setting in. How would I survive two days? What on earth would we talk about?

But I had asked, and they’d generously invited me over.

I had been too late to learn before. I wasn’t going to let that happen again.

CHAPTER THREE

I knew I was in for it when I walked into the room and there were not one, not two, but
seventy
pineapples jammed into tubs.

Stunned, I quickly looked around my auntie Khar Imm’s mother’s kitchen—there were just five of us there. Exactly how many tarts were we making that weekend?

I started to panic.

I was nervously fumbling for the oranges that I’d bought at the market as a gift, and Auntie Khar Imm stepped forward to welcome me. I hadn’t seen her since a visit to her home during Chinese New Year a year or two before. The visit then had been very brief, as all our visits to her home had been since my Tanglin ah-ma died. Somehow, I had always been a little afraid of my auntie Khar Imm—not for any justifiable reason. I’d just always gotten the sense that Khar Imm wasn’t the biggest fan of our relatively irresponsible branch of the family. Our visits were often a little stilted and perfunctory.

Now, years later, in her mother’s kitchen, where we were to make the pineapple tarts, she stepped forward, kind and warm.
“Ah Lien ah, chi bao le mei you?”
she gently said, asking in Mandarin if I’d eaten.

It took me a while to respond—it had been a long time since anyone had called me Ah Lien, my Chinese name. The name sounds so much like Ah Lian, which is a derogatory Singaporean nickname for women who are gauche in both manners and style, that I was relieved when my parents started calling me Cheryl instead as I got older. I get the Ah Lien treatment only from my maternal grandmother and my friends—when they want to embarrass me in public.