Last Tang Standing

by Ho, Lauren

  “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 y
ou 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.”[fn2]

  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.”

  A tremor entered her voice. “If I’d been born in Laos or North Korea, I’d be dead by now. Even now my body is breaking down from all the menial labor back in my youth.”

  Just to be clear: my mother worked as a clerk for a judge for two years. That’s the only job she had before she married my father and became a housewife.

  “Sometimes I wake up, my heart and bones aching, and I wonder—is this how the end looks like? Dying alone, in Kuala Lumpur—without a maid? And no grandchildren?”

  Quel emotional blackmail!

  Now she hardened her voice. “I’m a simple woman, with simple needs. All I ever wanted in return for the sacrifices I made for my children is their love, and grandchildren. But what do I get instead? A work-crazy elder daughter, who just so happens to be my favorite child, in Singapore that I never see and the other one living in sin with that … that”—she exhaled with force—“Malay boy.”

  Same thing again. She was referring to Kamarul Siddiq, my younger sister Melissa’s Muslim boyfriend, a brilliant conservation architect in Malaysia, whom my sister had never brought home for introductions because my mother categorically refused to accept him, which was a crying shame since Melissa was going to marry him anyway.

  “And here I thought we were talking about my ovaries,” I said, attempting to defuse the tension.

  “Don’t be blithe,” she said. “One Halle Berry success story and you think it’s fine to delay having children. Wait, wait, wait! And then one day you wake up and you’ll find that your womb has become a prune! And you’ll be all alone, you’ll regret—”

  I took a deep breath and ended the call before she could hear me dry heave. Luckily, I had my inhaler at hand. This was a new development in her approach to my singlehood; she never used to be so direct and so aggressive about it. It used to be gentle, the occasional earnest reminder: “Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if you’d come over for dinner with that nice young man of yours, Ivan? Do you spend enough time with him? Work is not everything in life.” (She can say that with a straight face because I’m senior enough in my career.) Then two years ago she began to get passive-aggressive—I can still see the texts she sent after I messaged her to wish her Happy Mother’s Day last year: Thanks, but I can’t wait till I start getting Happy Grandmother’s Day texts! followed by Auntie Ong’s daughter just gave birth. She’s younger than you, isn’t she?—but even that was still tolerable. Since my thirty-third birthday last December, however, the situation had devolved into outright badgering. For example, before she’d found out that I was single again, she used to demand that I drag Ivan down to the registry and just sign the papers first and plan the wedding later.

  Doesn’t she have anything better to do with her free time than fixate on her daughter’s lack of prospects? you ask. Wouldn’t she rather spend her golden years discovering exciting new prescription drugs or the cerebral delights of reality TV? No, Diary, she would not. My mother doesn’t have time for leisure, or retirement for that matter—that’s for rich white people. When she’s not hustling to sell some multilevel-marketing product of the day, she’s obsessing over how she will marry me off—the last item left unchecked on my mother’s checklist of Life Goals (for me). The rest of them, as established a long time ago (when I was an embryo, essentially), were as follows:

  Go to a Top School (kindergarten/primary school/high school must be appropriate feeder school for top university) (done)

  Go to a Top University (done)

  Become a doctor (specializing is very much encouraged), lawyer (attaining counsel or partner level), investment banker, or a millionaire (legit currencies only) businesswoman [this goal is within reach, since I’m a lawyer and am already on track for partnership—only a little ways to go to the top!]

  Own a piece of property by the time I turn thirty-five (done—well, almost: only twenty-eight more years of mortgage payments to go!)

  And the one my parents thought would be the easiest for me to achieve, but in reality was anything but:

  Get married by thirty, so I can reproduce, and the vicious cycle can begin once more

  Before she decided I was not making as much progress as she’d like on the marriage front, my mother used to harp on and on about how important career was, how I had to make as much money as I could and be the best. Then, as soon as I turned twenty-eight, her tune changed completely. Now it was all about the man and the wedding and the babies (in this order, of course). How if I wasn’t en route to getting sprogged up I was basically an ingrate, that I was displeasing my ancestors, even those I’d never met. Now my mother was all “focus on the family.” Not that I didn’t see her point, of course.

  You see, most Asian countries are not welfare states; we basically need the little moppets that come after us to be successful so they can in turn feed us. That’s why family is so important in most traditional Asian cultures.

  I am oversimplifying, of course.

  I know what you’re thinking: screw that, you don’t have to do this. You can just shake it off and do your own thing. Right?

  Problem is, you can’t just shake off centuries of cultural mind-fuckery that tell you that you are nothing but a sandworm without the benevolence and sacrificial love of your parents, who fed your worthless child self and molded you into the acceptable, if not exceptional, adult that you are, and that the only way you can ever hope to repay them is if you take the hopes and dreams your parents had for you and gently but surely stuff them down your brain hole, make them yours, and realize them, or betray your parents and burn in the special place in Chinese Hell for unfilial children while eager but inefficient Chinese demons disembowel you ad infinitum.

  And that, my friends, pretty much sums up the concept of Filial Piety.

  To be fair, it’s not as though following her Life Goals had caused me harm. In fact, so far, so good. I am disrupting a traditionally male-dominated industry. And I don’t hate the idea of marriage and kids (to Confucian guilt-trip into taking care of me in my old age, naturally). It
’s just—I need time to achieve the other goals first. If Sheryl Sandberg, unicorn woman, can have it all, so can I—albeit on a more modest scale.

  I just need a strategy to fend off my mom before I make partner. Aside from matricide.

  3

  Sunday 14 February

  2:35 p.m. Today is Day Which Must Not Be Named (it’s no coincidence it shares the same first letter with “vomit” and “Voldemort”). Urgh. Bought Linda her stupid champagne brunch today upon her insistence and paid Urgh Day primo rates for it. Hated every simpering couple in sight. Comforted myself with the thought that one out of every three marriages in Singapore will end in divorce. That’ll teach them to believe in love.

  As a gift Linda got me three boxes of Ladurée macarons and told me to go wild. I got her a card (hey, she was already getting a free alcoholic brunch).

  I didn’t receive any other V-day presents aside from Linda’s, unless you count a five-dollar e-coupon from my favorite patisserie. No cards, either, not even an anonymous one. The only V-day texts I got were from my sister and two of my female colleagues. The only way this day could get any sadder is if I get one from my mother.

  4:45 p.m. Got an email from my mom. She only sends me emails when she wants a paper trail for her records (she does not trust messaging apps). I opened it with trepidation.

  It said:

  Happy Valentine’s Day, darling. You remember Auntie Mavis, my friend from church, right? Her son went to Harvard Medical School and is still single. She would like very much if the both of you could get together over dinner next week. Should I give her your number?

  I broke out in hives and deleted the message.