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Tuesday 9 February
Hope. That’s what the Spring Festival, the most important celebration in the traditional Chinese calendar, is supposed to commemorate, aside from signalling, well, the coming of spring. Renewal. A time for new beginnings, fresh starts. Green stuff grows out of the ground. Politicians fulfill their campaign promises, concert tickets for A-list pop stars never get scalped, babies get born and nobody gets urinary incontinence after. And Chinese families all over the world come together in honor of love, peace, and togetherness.
But this is not that kind of story. This is a story where bad things happen to good people. Especially single people. Because here’s the deal: for folks like me who find themselves single by February, Spring Festival is not a joyous occasion. It’s a time for conjuring up imaginary boyfriends with names like Pete Yang or Anderson Lin, hiring male escorts who look smart instead of hot, marrying the next warm body you find, and if all else fails, having plastic surgery and changing your name so your family can never find you. For desperate times call for desperate measures, and there is no period of time more desperate for single Chinese females over the age of thirty everywhere than the Annual Spinster-Shaming Festival, a.k.a. Chinese New Year.
God help us persecuted singletons; God help us all—spring is coming.
—
It was noon. Linda Mei Reyes and I were sitting in a car in front of our aunt’s house in matching updos, smoking kreteks and hunched over our smartphones as we crammed for the toughest interview that we would face this year, the “Why Are You Still Single in Your Thirties, You Disappointment to Your Ancestors” inquisition. Our interrogators lay in wait, and they were legion. The Tangs, our family, were very prolific breeders.
Each year, as was customary on the second day of Chinese New Year, Auntie Wei Wei would host a lavish luncheon for all the Singapore-based Tangs. These luncheons were mandatory Family Time: everyone had to show their faces if they were in town; the only acceptable escape clauses being death, disability, a job-related trip, or the loss of one’s job (in which case you might as well be dead). If you’re wondering why Auntie Wei Wei commanded such power, aside from the fact that she was housing our clan’s living deity (Grandma Tang), it’s because she was our clan’s Godfather, minus the snazzy horse head deliveries. Many of the older Tangs were in her debt: not only did she act as the family’s unofficial private bank for the favored few, she’d basically raised the lot of them after my grandfather passed away in the 1950s and left my grandmother destitute. As the eldest of a brood of nine siblings, Auntie Wei Wei had dropped out of secondary school and worked two jobs to help defray household expenses. That’s how her siblings all managed to finish their secondary schooling, and for some of the higher achievers, university, even as it came at her own expense.
At least karma had rewarded her sacrifice. After migrating to Singapore in her late twenties, she had married well, against the odds, to a successful businessman; when he died soon after (of entirely natural causes), she’d inherited several tracts of land, the sale of which had made her, and her only daughter, Helen, eye-wateringly wealthy. Hence her unassailable position as de facto matriarch of the Tang clan, since there is nothing that the Chinese respect more than wealth, especially the kind that might potentially trickle downstream. Posthumously.
Ever since I moved to Singapore from London about six years ago, as the sole representative of my father’s side of the family in Singapore I’d been obliged by my very persuasive mother to attend Auntie Wei Wei’s gatherings. Since my father was her favorite sibling, Auntie Wei Wei had paid off a lot of his debts when he passed and now she basically owns us, emotionally, which is how real power works. I used to enjoy these gatherings, but since Ivan, my long-term partner, and I broke up nine months and twenty-three days ago, way too late for me to find another schmuck to tote to this horror show, there was ample reason to dread today’s festivities. Why, you ask? Because Chinese New Year is the worst time to be unattached, bar none. Forget Valentine’s Day. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen then? Some man-child you’ve been obsessing over doesn’t send you chocolates? Boo-hoo. A frenemy humblebrags about the size of her ugly, overpriced bouquet (that she probably sent herself)? Please. Your fun blind date turns out to be the Zodiac Killer? Tough. Just wait till you have to deal with Older Chinese Relatives. These people understand mental and emotional torture. They will corner you and ask you questions designed to make you want to chug a bottle of antifreeze right after. Popular ones include: “Why are you still single?”; “How old are you again?”; “What’s more important than marriage?”; “Do you know you can’t wait forever to have babies, otherwise you are pretty much playing Russian roulette with whatever makes it out of your collapsing birth canal?”; “How much money do you make, after taxes?”
As we’ve been programmed since birth to kowtow to our elders, we force ourselves to Show (our Best) Face at these events, no matter how damaging they can be to our ego and psyche. So that is why, dear Diary, two successful women in their thirties, dressed in orange floral cheongsams they panic-bought the night before, were trying so hard to get their stories about each other’s imaginary boyfriend straight to placate an audience that they will not see again for another year.
“It’s easy for mine,” Linda was saying. My cousin and best friend, Linda is only half-Chinese (the other half being Spanish-Filipino), so she had some wiggle room with the family, but even the normally cold-blooded litigator was sweating in the air-conditioned car. “Just remember that Alvin Chan, whom you’ve met before by the way, is not just my boss but my boyfriend, and just, you know, extrapolate from there. Make up the details.”
“What do you think I am, an amateur?” I snapped, holding up my iPhone to show her a photo of her and her “boyfriend” at a recent gala. I pulled up a screenshot of Korean actor and national treasure Won Bin—unlike Linda, I did not have a hot boss. “Now you remember that my boyfriend’s name is Henry Chong, he’s a Singaporean Chinese in his late thirties, he’s the only child of a real estate mogul and a brilliant brain surgeon, and he looks like this.” I held the phone in front of her face so she could be inspired by the perfection that is Won Bin.
“Too many details,” Linda said, not even looking at the screen. “It’s always the details that trip liars up. Keep it simple.”
“Not if you’re prepared, like I am. You, however, look wasted.”
“I’m prepared. And I’m dead sober,” she said emphatically before burping gin fumes in my face. Yet somehow her softly braided updo looked fresh while mine was already unspooling, like my life.
I muttered the Lord’s Prayer, or what I could recall of it, under my breath. It was going to be a long day. “Remember, Henry’s a partner in a midsize Singaporean law firm. He is currently meeting with a client in Dubai, and that’s why he can’t be here with us today. Oh, and he’s tall. And hot.”
“Got it,” Linda said, rolling her eyes. She took a deep drag from her third “cigarette” of the morning. “Anything else I should casually drop during the convo? Maybe the fact that he has a massive cock?”
“If you’re speaking to one of the older aunties, then yes. Go for it, with my blessings.”
Linda sighed, stubbing out her “cigarette” in an ashtray. “Got it. And if anyone asks, Alvin’s skiing in Val-d’Isère.”
“Val-de-Whut?”
“Val-dee-Zehr. It’s in the French Alps, you peasant.” She grinned. “Here’s another tip: peppering a convo with unpronounceable place names usually deters further lines of questioning. Most people don’t like looking unsophisticated.”
“Good point,” I said. “OK, in that case nix Dubai, make it Ashgabat.”
She flashed a thumbs-up. “Ashgabat it is. Anyway, there’s a chance that none of the relatives will remember who I am since I’ve not been back in Asia for over a decade, so I might be safe from attack.” Linda’s family was somewhat estranged from the clan, one of the reasons being that her mother had married an “outsider,” i.e., a non-Chinese; plus, having spent most of her formative years attending boarding school in England meant she was less involved, and less inclined to be so, in clan affairs. That was why she kept a low profile with the Tangs since her move to Singapore last Feburary as part of her firm’s new market expansion plan. “I could have skipped this whole do and just stayed home, so remind me why I’m putting myself through this shitshow again?”
“Because you love me?” I said brightly.
She snorted.
I narrowed my eyes. “You owe me, woman. Without the help of my excellent notes and last-minute tutorials you would have failed your final year of law school, since you hardly attended any of the lectures.”
“Keep telling yourself that. Anyway, I seem to recall being promised a champagne brunch at the St. Regis if I did well today.”
“Yes,” I grumbled. “I just hope you put as much effort into Henry’s history and character development as I did for Alvin’s.”
“Don’t worry. I didn’t graduate top of the class—”
“Second. I was first.”
“—top of the class for nothing. I’ve got the whole story down pat. Relax.” She punched me in the back. “Straighten your shoulders and try not to look so browbeaten. It’s no wonder you haven’t been made partner.”
It took all my self-control not to stab her in the eye with my cigarette.
Perhaps sensing she was in mortal danger if she didn’t change the subject, Linda took out a bottle of Febreze and proceeded to baptize us with it. “Anyway, I have one last piece of advice before we go in.”
“What?” I said, between coughs.
She pinched my arm, hard. “Whatever happens in there, do not cry in front of them. Don’t give those jerks the satisfaction.”
“You are hurting me,” I yelped, eyes welling with tears.
“I really hope no one gives us ang paos,” Linda said darkly, oblivious to the suffering of others as usual. “They get extra bitchy when they do. I’d rather they just insult us without feeling like they earned it.” She was referring to the red envelopes containing cash that married people traditionally give out to children and other unmarried kin regardless of age or sex during Chinese New Year. For kids it’s a great way to get extra pocket money, but getting ang paos as an adult in your thirties was a special kind of festive embarrassment, akin to getting caught making out with your first cousin by your grandmother. At least the adult recipient can comfort himself imagining the internal weeping and gnashing of teeth the married ang pao giver must undergo as he is forced to hand over his hard-earned cash to another able-bodied adult. In our experience, the intrusive questions and snide put-downs were definitely the giver’s way of alleviating the mental agony of this reluctant act.
“Let’s not be too hasty,” I said, crossing myself in case she had jinxed us. “Last year I made almost six hundred bucks easy, three hundred from Auntie Wei Wei alone.”
Two breath mints and liberal spritzes of Annick Goutal later, we were red-eyed and ready to face all the orcs that our family tree could throw at us. Auntie Wei Wei lived in an imposing double-storied bungalow in a quiet, leafy neighborhood in Bukit Timah. The gate and double doors of her home were thrown wide open with no security guards stationed at the gate, no salivating rabid dogs on patrol, and no military booby traps set up on the grounds. You could literally just stroll in. Which we did.
In all honesty, the casual indifference of wealthy Singaporeans to what I would deem basic precautionary measures and, quite frankly, the sheer lack of initiative shown by local burglars never failed to amaze me as a Malaysian. Even I could have picked this place clean with no trouble or special training whatsoever. All I would need is a couple of duffel bags, maybe a sexy black leotard, a pair of sunglasses, Chanel thigh-high boots, a French accent . . .
“Are you daydreaming again?” Linda’s voice broke my reverie, in which I was back-flipping over a field of laser beams à la Catwoman (circa Michelle Pfeiffer).
“No. Why?”
“You’re just standing there, drooling. Get in.” She pushed open the front door, which had been left ajar.
I stifled a sigh of envy as we made our way to the reception room. Despite it being the umpteenth time I’d stepped into her home over the years, I was impressed. The mansion, with its black marble floors, high ceilings, and bespoke wallpaper, whispered of entitlement and the power to buy politicians. Auntie Wei Wei had had the place decorated in chinoiserie of the highest order. It was hard not to gawk at the fine detailing on the antique porcelain vases and lacquerware, the elegant scrolls of Chinese calligraphy and ink paintings, or to refrain from touching the dancer–shaped blooms of the rare slipper orchids flowering in their china bowls and the stuffed white peacock, with its diamond white train of tail feathers, perched on its ivory base in one corner of the room. All that was missing were some casually scattered gold bars.
It was apparent that every (official) member of our clan had made the effort to Show Face: man, woman, legitimate children, and domestic help; although it was almost 1:00 p.m., three hours after the gathering had officially begun, the place was still packed with close to fifty people. As per usual with such gatherings, everyone was dressed to the nines with their most impressive bling. You could hardly look around without a Rolex, Omega, or Panerai, real or fake, nearly putting your eye out. Key fobs of luxury cars faux-casually dangled or peeked out from pockets. Most donned red, an auspicious color for the Lunar New Year. Many Tangs were also red in the face from the premium wine and whiskey they were knocking back like there was no tomorrow, courtesy of their host. A free-flow bar can bring out the reluctant alcoholic in any Chinese, Asian flush and stomach ulcers be damned. But for me and Linda, boozing Tangs are not usually the problem: it’s the sober ones we had to be wary of, the ones drinking tea as black as their stony hearts, their beady eyes looking for fresh prey. I had vivid memories of being forced to recite the times table or some classical Chinese poem in front of these raptors, their breath bated as they waited for me to make a mistake so they could run and get my parents—that way, we could all be shamed together. That’s how they get off.
At least the food looked amazing; I would have expected nothing less from Auntie Wei Wei. In one corner of the hall was a long buffet table laden with drool-inducing Chinese New Year delicacies such as whole roasted suckling pig; at least four different types of cold noodles; steamed sea bass; beautifully crispy Peking duck; fried spring rolls; pomelo and plum chicken salad; and niangao. On a separate table, the desserts: a huge rose-and-lychee cake flanked by two different types of chocolate cake; assorted glazed mini-cupcakes; macarons the perfect red of cherries; trays of golden, buttery pineapple tarts; bowls of pistachios, cashew nuts, and peanuts; platters of cut tropical fruit; and bright pyramids of mandarin oranges and peaches. It was too much food, but by the end of the evening everything would be gone. Gluttony, after all, is a Chinese art form and we’ve had millennia to perfect it.
Over the din of Chinese New Year songs blaring from sleek Bang & Olufsen speakers and drunken chatter, Linda and I looked for Grandma Tang so we could pay our quick respects before joining our single, pariah peers. Linda, being a head taller than my five foot three, scanned the room and found a queue waiting to greet Grandma Tang, who was wearing a crimson batik cheongsam and all the imperial jade in the world. Someone had seated her in a thronelike high-backed chair in one corner of the hall on a makeshift pedestal, where she could peer imperiously (but blindly) down at the crowd. She was so old and wizened that when we got to her and wished her the standard Chinese New Year greeting of a long, prosperous (never forget the “prosperous”), and happy life, she grunted in derision, which is the old lady equivalent of “hah!”
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,* 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* 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 stage-whispered, “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.