Last Tang Standing
I get my sense of humor from her, of course.
After wishing her thus, we waited for a few uncomfortable seconds before realizing, to our growing horror, that she had no intention of giving us elder singletons ang paos. And so, to the chorus of jeering children, we made our shamefaced way to the other end of the room, where a herd of our similarly luckless-in-love cousins were huddled together for safety. The swiftest path to them, however, brought us by some sober aunts who were stationed by the bar, simultaneously haranguing and groping a terrified waiter. There was no way we would be able to avoid them.
“Walk fast,” I hissed, gripping Linda’s right palm in mine so that she wouldn’t canter off in the direction of the bottles of Johnnie Walker Black lined up on the bar’s countertop. “And don’t look around.” We pretended to be deep in a discussion, laughing maniacally as we scurried by the aunts, but to no avail. One of the women, deep in her seventies and dressed in an ill-fitting burgundy cheongsam, detached herself from the gaggle of vultures, I mean, aunts, and lurched over, grinning at me. It took me a while to recognize her as she had slathered on a Beijing opera mask of makeup, and by then it was too late. Leering at me was none other than Auntie Kim, the tyrant who used to make me recite the times table in front of all the Tangs when I was a wee preschooler. I say “auntie,” but to be honest, even though I see her at every single Tang gathering, I have no idea if she’s really my aunt or if she is even related to me. In many parts of Asia, it is perfectly acceptable to call anyone above the age of forty, be they relative or not, “auntie” or “uncle” in lieu of ever learning their actual names—the grocer, the taxi driver, the retired accountant who does your taxes, the local pedophile—anyone. Unless, of course, you are about the same age or older. Then you’re just asking for a good old slap in the face.
I scanned the room, looking for an open window, a friendly face, or a hatchet, but there was none. I tried to catch the attention of my unmarried cousins, clustered a few steps away. Two of them waved before averting their eyes. Cowards.
“Andrea Tang Wei Ling,[fn1] why so late?” Auntie Kim shouted in Singlish to all and sundry as she scanned me from top to toe, ignoring Linda (Linda was right: she had effectively been forgotten by our family). “Why you here alone? No one want you issit?” She chuckled. “Aiyah, I just joke only, but maybe also true hor, hahaha!”
Everyone within earshot was smirking. Someone’s loser kid chimed in in a singsong voice, “Auntie Andrea doesn’t want to get married because she doesn’t want to give us ang pao because she’s stingy!” This outburst was greeted with laughter. The loudest laughs came from my feckless single cousins.
Normally Linda would have left me to die in the proverbial gutter by then, but Linda had KPIs[fn2] and she was not one to disappoint. Without hesitation, she shoved me aside and clasped the woman’s papery hands in her own. “Auntie Kim, don’t you worry about ol’ Wei Ling here. She’s doing very well. It took some time, but she’s finally found herself a man!”
I wished she wouldn’t say it with such gusto.
“Really, ah? Who?” Auntie Kim was incredulous.
“Henry Chong. Oh, he’s such a darling, way too good for Wei Ling, really. Very smart. Very handsome. Very big, er, shoulders.”
“Hen-Ree?” Auntie Kim mused, sucking on the vowels like they were her missing teeth. “Hen-Ree where right now?”
“Not here,” I said petulantly, my arms crossed to hide my sweating pits.
“Oh, he’s always flying here and there, that busy bee,” Linda said. “Henry’s a partner in a big law firm. Very big. Two, three hundred employees.” She leaned close to Auntie Kim and stagewhispered, “He’s very, very rich.”
“A lawyer?” Auntie Kim exclaimed. “Rich some more … good, good. And he is Chinese, right?”
“He can trace his Chinaman lineage all the way to the first caveman Chong to have carnal knowledge of a woman, Auntie,” Linda said, poker-faced.
“Wah?” Auntie Kim’s grasp of English was as strong as Britney Spears’s vocal range.
Linda tried again. “Henry is one hundred percent Chinese, pure as rice flour.”
“Oh, like that, ah, good lor. Make sure you keep this one, Wei Ling, don’t let him fly away, can!” said Auntie Kim, mollified. Having received all the information she needed, she handed us each an ang pao and lurched away, her ropes of gold chains clanking, this time heading in the direction of my terrified twenty-nine-year-old cousin, Alison Tang, who’d just arrived and was about to slink into a corner. The trooper had worn pink lip gloss and styled her hair in pigtails to appear younger. Alas, Auntie Kim, despite her decrepit condition, was not so easily fooled. “Alee-son! Alee-son! Where are you going? Why nobody with you again? Why—”
“Let’s go,” I said, dragging Linda past a trio of red-faced men exchanging loud and drunken reminiscences till we reached the singles posse. Our presence was acknowledged, barely; nobody wanted or dared to break eye contact for too long with their phones. Most were legitimately working (Not even the most important holiday for the Chinese can stop me from slaving for you! was the subtext they were channeling to their bosses), while some were Facebooking or surfing mindlessly. The most brazen one of all, Gordon, was browsing Grindr profiles. I watched him text-flirt with one guy after another and wished I could do the same and put myself out there in all my mediocre glory.
To my horror I realized, when Gordon started laughing, that I had spoken out loud without meaning to, which tended to happen when I was under stress. “Andrea darling, just do it! It’s really easy. Want me to set up a profile for you? On Tinder, of course. Or that hot new location-based app everyone’s talking about, which is like Grindr but for straight people. You know the one: Sponk!”
I demurred; Tinder and Sponk heralded the death of romance to me. As if you could reduce the search for the all-important Someone Who Won’t Kill You in Your Sleep to a thumb-swiping exercise based (mostly) on photos. And since I had no Photoshop skills to speak of, I didn’t stand a chance—everyone knows that you had to have a hot profile photo or at least one where you looked like you hadn’t given up in order to get any matches. These days I resembled a slightly melted, sun-bleached garden gnome, no thanks to my punishing schedule at work. Maybe if—
“Why, look who it is, my favorite niece, Andrea!”
I turned and saw Auntie Wei Wei, resplendent in a sunset-orange silk baju kurung and dripping in diamonds, striding toward us. My stomach clenched; I knew why Auntie Wei Wei was coming over and it certainly wasn’t to praise my sartorial choices or make small talk. She always had an agenda when it came to members of the clan; she stuck her nose in everyone’s affairs and gave unsolicited advice or orders, but nobody dared to contradict or stop her.
“I’ll pay you five hundred bucks if you come out to Auntie Wei Wei right now,” I whispered in desperation to Gordon. When I didn’t receive a response, I swiveled my head and saw that Gordon and the gang of smartphone-wielding cravens had somehow migrated to the far side of the drawing room and were all texting as if their lives depended on it.
I turned back around and found myself face-to-face with the matriarch of the family. Behind me, I heard, rather than saw, Linda sidling away like the traitorous lowlife she was, but alas for her, the gin from earlier in the car was already working its dulling magic.
“Linda Mei Reyes!” Auntie Wei Wei said in her loud, commanding voice. “The prodigal niece herself. Now isn’t this a lovely surprise to have you grace us with your presence at long last.” She gave Linda a dismissive once-over. “Huh. Still as hipless as a snake. Where have you been hiding all this time? Did your father finally decide to cut the purse strings?”
Linda froze. This was the only chink in her armor—her financial dependence on her father, despite what she proclaimed to the world. “I’m the partner of a law firm and my boyfriend skis in Val-d’Isère,” she said weakly to no one.
“Well, good for you, working with Daddy’s pals. I’ll say this for José—he always took care of his children, which is more than I can say about my sister.” She shook her head and tsk-tsked. “As for you, Andrea”—Auntie Wei Wei turned her attention to me; the blood in my veins ran cold—“are you sick? You’ve lost a lot of weight. I can see right through you.” She waggled a finger at me. “You need to fatten up or you’ll lose what’s left of your figure. Men don’t want to marry scrawny women, you know.”
I gave her a rictus grin to match my loser, non-childbearing hips. Last year I was too fat, this year I was too thin: Auntie Wei Wei could give Goldilocks a lesson or two. “Gong xi fa cai, Auntie Wei Wei. You look well,” I said, lying. Auntie Wei Wei looked like she had crossed the Botox Rubicon in the dark.
“It’s the exercise and regular facials, you should try some—I can park a Bentley in one of your pores. Anyway, did you come with Linda? What happened to Ivan?”
“I have a new boyfriend,” I said, after I’d successfully fought the impulse to pluck out Auntie Wei Wei’s eyeballs. “His name is, ah, is—”
Auntie Wei Wei cut me off. “If he’s a no-show, he’s not serious. You youngsters these days.” She sighed. “You know you’re wasting your best years being a career woman, right? The Tang women tend not to age well, I must say, speaking from a personal standpoint only, of course.” She gave me a pointed look.
Don’t cry! Distract her! Distract her! “What about Helen, then?” I blurted before I could stop myself. I felt kind of low bringing up her still-single daughter, who was turning thirty-eight this year.
“Oh, haven’t you heard?” Auntie Wei Wei’s frozen eyebrows gave a heroic spasm of joy. “That’s our big announcement this Chinese New Year: Helen’s engaged! She’s marrying a banker, Magnus Svendsen—isn’t that a lovely name? Mag-nus! So regal!”
“What?” I squeaked, most eloquently. Helen Tang-Chen, who I knew for a fact to be openly gay to all her contemporaries, was getting married—to a man? What sorcery was this?
Auntie Wei Wei couldn’t have looked more self-satisfied. “It’s a little bit of a whirlwind romance, I must admit, but who am I to stand in the path of true love? We’re having the Singaporean reception at Capella in May of next year, just after my big sixtieth birthday bash. That’s more than enough time for you, and Linda, to find a date, I’m sure. And maybe”—she gave me another pointed look—“both of you could get a more flattering outfit this time, something less … off-the-rack?”
I tried to find my voice but my throat was closing up.
Auntie Wei Wei’s tone conveyed the pity her eyes couldn’t. “You know, I always thought my daughter would be the last to marry among all the Tang women of your generation, but it looks like that’s no longer the case.”
A wave of nausea overwhelmed me as the realization broke: for the first time in my life, I would indeed be last at something.
“You traitor,” I said for the umpteenth time.
We were sprawled on the couch in Linda’s penthouse apartment in River Valley, performing the postmortem on Auntie Wei Wei’s party with a little help from a bottle of tequila and a bag of Doritos.
“I had to, Andrea, I had to. You saw what she was like!”
“You betrayed me. Just left me alone in hostile territory!”
Linda yawned and stretched. “Oh, quit your histrionics. You would have done the same. Besides, she got her claws in me anyway. I’m still smarting.”
“Can you believe she only gave us fifty dollars each as ang pao,” I said feelingly, “when she was way, way more vicious this time?”
Linda shrugged. Money talk bored her—what excited her was winning. At everything and anything. And status. And designer bags. “I don’t get it. When I saw Helen in Mambo last December, she swore to me that she was never, ever getting married until gay marriage was legalized in Singapore. And now she’s marrying a man? What gives?”
I was stalking Magnus Svendsen on my smartphone. “Have you seen how hot this Magnus looks in his photo? And it’s, like, a photo from an annual report. Nobody is supposed to look hot in those—you can’t even openly use filters on LinkedIn.” I squinted at the photo. “Look at that face! He’s so … so … symmetrical.”
Linda glanced at the offensive photo in question and made a face. “Urgh! How unfair. The very least she could have done was take one of the wonky-looking ones off the market. Maybe he’s also gay?”
“Does Auntie Wei Wei know that Helen is gay?” I asked hopefully. Not that I was planning to throw her under the bus, of course.
Linda rolled her large hazel eyes. “Of course she knows. Don’t you know that she once caught Helen messing around with her tutor in their house? But Auntie Wei Wei just pretended like it never happened.”
My stomach growled; I had barely eaten at the gathering from all the pretend-texting and one bag of crisps was not enough. “I’m hungry. Pass me the Doritos?”
“We’re out of Doritos.”
I fell to my knees in mock despair. “Dear God! Can anything else go wrong today?”
“My Netflix is down,” Linda added. She checked the bottle. “And we’re finally out of tequila.”
I curled into a fetal position on the carpet. Clearly this day could get worse.
“Wait.” She disappeared and came back with an opened bottle in her hand and a glass. “Here. Have some of this cooking wine. Not sure if it’s still good, it’s been sitting in the fridge for about three days since Susan made spag bog for me”—Susan was Linda’s part-time help—“but you have plebian taste, so.”
“Wine is wine.” I sat up, ignored the proffered glass, and took a giant swig from the bottle before passing it to Linda, who guzzled half of it after a sniff and a wince. That’s what I liked about her: she might look like Harrods on the outside, but on the inside Linda was straight-up T.J.Maxx—hobo without the chic.
She sat cross-legged on the floor next to me. “You know, I heard what that witch said to you. I’m sorry.”
“No biggie,” I said. “It didn’t hurt at all.”
She hugged me. “Shh. It’s just me here. You don’t have to lie.”
My lower lip trembled. “It should have been Helen,” I said. “She was supposed to be my fail-safe, the Last Tang Standing.” Now there would be no one else (older) to share the burden of deflecting criticism on being single from my relatives.
“There, there.” She kissed me and let go. “I really don’t know why you still go to these things just because they’re hosted by family. I wouldn’t have.”
I had often debated this, too. Linda didn’t understand because culturally she was more Westernized than I was. And she really wasn’t part of the clan and never had been; having lived most of her life in the Philippines, she had never grown up within this support system. Auntie Wei Wei and the rest had seen my mother and me through when everything had come crashing down on our family, when we found out about my father’s cancer and the bills, and when my mother had her own health issues. They were interfering, they were nasty, but they were still family. For all that they had done for me, I had a duty to show up and humor them, at the very least.
You don’t run away from family.
“Anyway, you let your family dictate what you should or should not do way too often. Is this how you want to live your life? What about what you want?”
“What are you talking about? I make my own choices.”
“So you say. You’ve been incepted so hard you can’t even tell, or rather you don’t want to, what’s your decision and what’s theirs anymore.” Linda began ticking off a laundry list of items. “Let’s talk about how you live in Singapore instead of London, like you’ve always wanted to, just so you can be close to your family.”
“It’s called sacrificial love, thank you very much.”
“Sure, but you don’t see your mother more often than when you were living in London, do you? And let’s not forget how you’re an M&A lawyer when you never gravitated to that during law school. Or how every man you’ve dated since you moved back home has been the male version of your Ideal Self According to Ma.”
“I don’t have a type,” I protested weakly.
“Whatever you say.” Linda yawned and began doing yoga stretches. “Anyway, I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but since they’re harassing you to settle down and you have no willpower to defy them, why don’t you start dating again?”
I glared at her. “I make my own decisions, not my family. Anyhow, the way things are going at work, I don’t have time to date, not if I’m going to be the youngest equity partner of Singh, Lowe & Davidson.”
“An admirable quest! Hear, hear!” Linda said. She swigged from the bottle of wine. “Here’s to us, sexy, independent working women!”
“Well, you’re independent until your salary runs out. Then you go running to Daddy.”
“Shut up.”
I gave her a big kiss on her right cheek. “You know I love you. Thanks for coming today, really. It meant a lot to me.”
She shrugged. “You’re welcome. Oh, and FYI, I booked us our table at St. Regis for the champagne brunch you owe me.” She laughed at my sour expression. “What, did you think La Linda would forget?”
I stared glumly at my lap and shook my head. When it came to collecting debt, the Chinese never forget.
2
Saturday 13 February
Received a call on my mobile phone at the butt crack of dawn (10:35 a.m. on a Saturday), waking me up from a terrifying nightmare where I had dropped my work mobile into the toilet just before an important call, thus losing all the progress I had made on Candy Crush.
I stared at the caller ID, which flashed “Unknown.” That could only mean one thing: it was my mother. Even pervert-stalkers and telemarketers know better than to mask their caller ID if they wanted the call picked up.
Knowing she would just hit redial until she got through, I answered the call. “Hello?”
“Where are my grandchildren?” she said without preamble.
I groaned, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “And hello to you, too, Ma.”
“Don’t ‘hello’ me. I don’t want ‘hello.’ I want grandchildren, Andrea,” she admonished. Really, who needs a biological clock when you have a Chinese mother?
“Well, Mom, if we are to follow the cultural and religious norms that you hold dear, then first, I need to find a man, then we need to date for a sufficient amount of time to ensure that he’s not a serial child molester or a substance abuser, then I need to manipulate him into marrying me since there are so many younger, hotter women out there, then—”
“Then why did you and Ivan break up?” she cried dramatically. I could almost hear the Arm Fling. “Auntie Eunice called me after Auntie Wei Wei’s gathering to tell me that you came with Linda, no boyfriend in sight. I had to find out from my least favorite sister-in-law that my own flesh and blood had broken up with her best prospect? How could you?”
I sighed. So the cat’s corpse was out of the bag. “I’m dating someone new,” I lied halfheartedly.
She snorted. “I know what ‘dating’ means to your generation. It means no-strings-attached sex. If you’re giving it away for free, which man will want to marry you?”
I rolled my eyes. If only my mom knew how little action I was getting down south, where a secondary forest was on its way to becoming a primary one. “OK, Mom, I get that I need to meet a man, make him fall in love with me, marry me, and impregnate me. I’ll get on it right away. Can I go now?”
“I can’t believe that even Helen is getting married,” my mother said huffily. “It’s … it’s … so—unexpected.”
“Why not?” I asked, with interest. I wondered how much my mother actually knew about Helen’s orientation.
“She’s so flighty,” was all my mom would say. “But at least she got her act together in the end, unlike you. Just last week at Auntie Loh’s Mahjong Friday—you remember Auntie Loh, my hairdresser from the nineties, the one whose servant ran away with a Bangladeshi man?”
“No.” Why did mothers always think that if they recited random details about a person you’d never met in your life, you’d somehow magically know what they were talking about?
“No? Well, anyway, did you know that her youngest daughter, Jo, who’s your age, is expecting twins again?” Her accusatory tone suggested that getting pregnant with twins was just as easy as walking into a supermarket and picking them off the shelf, if I would just get down to it.
I made a suitably noncommittal sound.
A loud sigh on the phone. “Wei Ling,[fn1] ah, you have a nice face, nice body, unless you’ve grown fat like when you were studying in England, a good career—so tell me, why are you still single? Are you too busy at work?” She paused before saying, “Do you need me to help you in that department, maybe set up another blind date with someone’s son? What was wrong with the last one, that nice boy, Simon?”
I shuddered at the recollection of the one blind date my mother had set up for me with the son of a “good friend” (by which she meant some rando she had met, once, at church), just before I met Ivan. Simon was a limp rice noodle of a man who made white noise seem exciting. “Please do no such thing unless you want me to light myself on fire,” I said. To myself. Out loud, I said, “I don’t need help meeting men, thanks.”
“I’ll start asking around,” she replied, ignoring me completely, as usual.
“Ma! I told you I have options.”
“So what’s the problem? Why haven’t you gotten serious with anyone after Ivan? Are you being too picky? You modern girls want too much, that’s the problem with this generation. You don’t know how to compromise!” said the woman who once told me to drop a boyfriend in college because he was “only a biology undergrad.” She ranted on in this vein with great vigor. I grunted occasionally as I let my mind drift. Counterarguments were counterproductive—it was better to just sit back, take a chill pill (sometimes literally), and tune out. I set my personal phone down on the bed, pulled my down comforter over it to muffle her voice, took one of my work mobiles out, crunched a Valium, and launched Candy Crush.
“… I was already married and pushing out your sister when I was half your age. If you followed my advice and locked down Ivan years ago, you’d be married by now!”
I grunted. It was rich of my mother to talk about marriage or give me any relationship advice at all. They had divorced with decided acrimony when I was twenty-two. Even though my mother had deigned to care for my father when he was sick with cancer, they had done so bickering till the (well, my father’s) bitter end. That’s what happens when you marry at twenty (the peak of my mother’s physical attractiveness); they swiftly found out that aside from being from the same sub-ethnic group and having gone to the same university, they had little else in common. Ironically, my friends’ parents who had met through arranged marriages were still happily married, voluntarily going on cruise vacations together, where they partook in cooking classes, senior orgies, etc.
“You really should take my advice and find a man. Every time you disobey or ignore me and do your own thing, you always end up regretting it. There’s just no substitute for life experience.
This, dear Diary, is her answer to everything: she’s eaten more salt in her life than I’ve eaten rice, i.e., she has more life experience than me by virtue of being older, hence I should defer to her judgment in all matters, at all times.
“Time is running out, not just for you. I’m in my sixties, as you know. I’m not getting any younger.”