Travails of a Trailing Spouse

by Stephanie Suga Chen

  About an hour before they were set to leave, Carys messaged Sarah that she and Ian weren’t going to be able to make it after all. She said Sarah could take their tickets to invite someone else or sell them onsite, asking if she could come up and get the tickets from their unit. It was an odd request, as one would have thought that if you were cancelling on someone and offering up your tickets, you would hand-deliver the tickets to them personally, but Sarah went up anyway.

  Ian answered the door, bizarrely holding a bowl of cereal with a spoon in it, saying, “Oh hi, Sarah. Carys is out on the deck with Noah.”

  Sarah walked out to the balcony, where Carys was sitting with Noah, playing with a stack of nesting blocks. Sarah said hello to them both, and looked at Carys questioningly. Her friend’s expression revealed nothing; instead, she stood up and went to get the tickets from her purse, which was on the dining table, right next to where Ian was sitting, eating his cereal. She came back to the balcony and handed the tickets to Sarah, apologising again, but she didn’t explain why they were cancelling. She even offered to pay for Sarah and Jason’s tickets if they were unsuccessful at selling the extra ones and decided not to watch the show at all, but Sarah waved her off, said not to worry about it, and told her she would call her later.

  She gave Ian a quick goodbye without looking at him and left their unit, meeting Jason in the lobby, where he was waiting for her.

  She told him what had transpired, focusing on details she thought were important – Ian answering the door, the purse on the table, the lack of explanation. It was as if Carys had wanted her to come up, had wanted Ian to see her, or perhaps she had wanted Sarah to break the tension in the room, which had been palpable. Jason responded that she was reading into things too much; Carys and Ian were having a fight, and just didn’t want to go out – it was probably that simple.

  “Yes, but it’s very unlike her,” Sarah said. She could not conceive that Carys would have wanted her to see them in that state, although, she had to admit, there hadn’t really been anything obviously wrong. It wasn’t like Carys had had a black eye or anything. Jason shrugged, changing the subject by saying he had never been to an open-air movie before.

  At the entrance to Fort Canning, Sarah distanced herself from where the ticket takers were, nonchalantly asking the groups of people that were coming in if anyone needed an extra ticket. She was relieved to see that the event was sold out, as she wasn’t sure if what she was doing was technically legal. It wasn’t long before a Danish couple approached her gratefully – yes, they said, they needed tickets as they had expected to be able to buy them at the door. They completed the transaction quickly, the couple appearing even more relieved when Sarah asked for only the face value for the tickets, handing over the cash and disappearing through the entry gates.

  Jason and Sarah walked into the grassy area, where a crowd of people were sitting, quite densely, some on mats and a few on lawn chairs, in front of a large screen that had been set up at one end of the square park. They passed a group of food and drink stands that had been set up near the entrance, food truck style, with chalkboard menus propped up in front of each. The fare was more upscale than she expected – focaccia pizza with rocket and Parma ham, Swiss cheese burgers with truffle mayo, plenty of wine and beer options.

  They found a place to sit down, Sarah spreading the plastic mat she had brought out on the grass, and looking around at the other movie-goers. It was an expat crowd, overwhelmingly Caucasian with the odd Asian thrown in as a member of a large group or coupled with a fair-haired partner. She and Jason were the only Asian-Asian couple that she could see. It was an odd feeling, although not that uncommon in the bars that they had been frequenting with their condo crew. Without their “Western” friends, though, they felt alone and exposed, self-conscious about being taken for outsiders (did everyone else think they were locals, she wondered) in the sea of expats.

  She saw a woman she recognised, Debra Spokes-Morrison, who was a friend of Sarah’s friend Olivia, the one who had helped get Jason out of jail. Sarah and Olivia had been having lunch at Dempsey Hill one day and Debra happened to be there as well, dining with another group of women. Olivia had made introductions, the other woman nodding and giving her name, “Debra Spokes-Morrison”, and it had stuck in Sarah’s head.

  Later, she had gone home and googled the name, as one often does in these types of situations, and found an interview with her in Living Abroad about giving birth to each of her three kids while sitting on top of a kitchen stool. “It was the ideal position to use gravity,” she was quoted as saying. Tonight, Sarah saw that Debra Spokes-Morrison was with a group of five or six other expats, sitting with her knees up on a plaid picnic blanket, holding a glass of white wine. Sarah didn’t make eye contact with the woman, nor did the woman appear to recognise her, which was just fine by Sarah.

  The organiser of the event gave a short introduction, kicking off the night with a short film, produced by a Singaporean, that had won a regional film festival award. It was set in Singapore, about a refined older gentleman and his godson, who enjoy eating at gourmet restaurants together. On the surface, it was well-done, a fine production with careful editing and close attention to detail; Sarah found it interesting that they subtitled the young boy whenever he spoke Singlish, translating “Aiyoh, I’m just lucky, lor” into “Hey, I’m just lucky, I guess”.

  But something was off; it was too obvious, the music too loud, the main character’s narration too explicit. She found the actor inauthentic, which she recognised as racism on her part – why shouldn’t an Asian man speaking with a British accent eat at a French restaurant, pronouncing dégustation in the French way, instead of Anglicising it like the Americans did?

  She tried to articulate her thoughts to Jason, who nodded, but she knew he didn’t really understand what she meant. He had lived his life in two very different worlds; when his family had moved to the US, he had spent his first year working hard to lose his “fresh-off-the-boat” accent. His identity was a complete mixture of two nationalities and cultures, nearly equal in mindshare, but he didn’t analyse it the way Sarah did.

  After the short film, they leaned back on their elbows as the main event started playing. Sarah found herself quite engaged, although there were no real surprises, except that she kept expecting Meg Ryan and Tom Cruise to hook up after Goose died. The rest of the crowd seemed to enjoy it as well, with some hearty cheers at the final air scene of Maverick shooting down the unnamed enemies. It was amazing to her how pervasive Hollywood films were across the world; how could this iconic, so American movie, with all its middle finger raising, anti-Communist shooting, and jukebox playing, be so popular among non-Americans?

  Boredom and crabbiness set in for Sarah after the other Sara started working. Not that they would have been doing particularly notable things, but not having her friend available for at least some part of every day was making Sarah very irritable, and she was taking it out on everyone around her.

  During the day, their helper, Patricia, bore the brunt of it. Sarah was annoyed at the timing of vacuuming (Did she have to do it right now, right here next to me while I’m sitting at my desk?), her grocery store purchases (Why didn’t she wait until the detergent was on sale before buying it?), her cleaning techniques (Why was it dusty under the couch? Shouldn’t it be clean, everywhere, all the time?); although she didn’t vocalise much of it, she was seething inside.

  When Jason got home, he became an easy target. Even though she consciously tried to avoid bringing up the arrest – they had fought enough over that already – she picked on everything else he said, taking offence at specific words and phrases he used, like when he copied, unthinkingly or deliberately, she couldn’t tell any more, the Singapore phrase that drove Sarah bananas: “is it?” It seemed to be the default ending, used incorrectly in most cases, to so many sentences: “Oh, you’re going now, is it?”, “You’re having the cake, is it?”

  And when Jason complained that his IT guy
was taking too long with his orders, requiring Jason to call up and remind him “who he was”, Sarah asked him, “And who do you think you are, exactly?” She was tired of him walking around, puffing his chest out like he had found a cure for cancer. She appreciated that after years of studying and training, he was finally in a well-deserved position, but at her worst moments, without a career of her own, she felt the need to cut him down, to remind him that he was nothing special and should act accordingly.

  Some nights she would stare at the ceiling and wonder if Jason had changed. He had always been her dependable partner, the humble scientist that her colleagues loved to chat with (or at least pretended to), allowing them the gratification of thinking they were good people, they were interested in learning about science, they supported his pursuit of knowledge while they themselves only slaved away for the next dollar. Now, however, it seemed to her that he had become almost as arrogant and detestable as they had been.

  When she hounded him about doing more with the kids, like speaking Mandarin with them more often, or starting Ruby on tennis, he balked, comparing himself favourably to other fathers, like John, saying that he was always home for dinner, every single night, didn’t have to travel for work, didn’t sleep with prostitutes (low blow, even he admitted).

  “Great, go ahead and compare yourself to the worst examples,” she shouted back, derisively. “You want to pat yourself on the back for being present? You know what you get for being present? A check mark. So here you go – CHECK,” she said mockingly, drawing the sign in the air with her pointer finger.

  She refused to let him be content in mediocrity.

  “Why don’t you compare yourself to someone better?” Sarah challenged.

  “Who?” he asked, looking up from his phone, which he had been fiddling with, trying to avoid his wife’s glaring eyes.

  “I don’t know, Lee Hsien Loong?” Sarah said, the only name she could think of at that moment.

  “Lee Hsien Loong, the President of Singapore?” Jason repeated in disbelief.

  Sarah knew it sounded preposterous, but having already uttered the name, she was committed to the argument.

  “He’s the Prime Minister, not the President, of Singapore,” she snapped. “And yes, why don’t you compare yourself to him? He speaks three languages fluently.”

  chapter 15

  LANGUAGE LESSONS

  THE HONEYMOON PERIOD was definitely over for Sarah, particularly considering Jason’s arrest. Things went from being touristy fun – figuring out the basics, like how to get from Point A to Point B using public transportation, or where to find American breakfast sausage – to more than a little frustrating. The cab drivers didn’t understand when she asked to be dropped off at the crosswalk, as they said “zebra crossing” here (she acknowledged that this was her own fault for not remembering the damn term). She couldn’t say “The Manchester” in her normal American accent as her destination, she had to say “Mahn-chest-AH” in an exaggerated, drawn-out, butchered British accent.

  Ruby, as much as Sarah tried to correct her, still started many sentences with “Teach-ah say…” Sarah explained to Ruby that while they might speak differently at school, she would still need to speak “regular” English at home, expecting her to say, “The teacher says.”

  Ruby always nodded agreeably, but traces of the accent would still creep into her speech, particularly with words that she did not say often or new words that she had learned here, like the Singapore national pledge, which all the students recited together every morning. It contained phrases like “democratic society” and “progress for our nation”, which Ruby had dutifully memorised by repeating it along with her classmates, not learning the individual words, so that when she recited it, she sounded wholly like a Singaporean child.

  Putting aside the accent issues, the written English in Singapore – in contrast to Taiwan, which Sarah had visited as a child and where it was common to see English letters used randomly to form non-words, or full words used randomly to form non-sentences – was generally grammatically correct, but still, at times, used quite strangely. The park Sarah and Eric frequented had a directional sign saying “play sculptures” when surely the intent was to have said “play structures”, but then again, maybe they did mean “sculptures”, who really knew?

  Slogans she came across were often cheesy or clichéd, sometimes using lyrics of pop songs, like in the case of Wolf Kids, a Singaporean children’s clothing retailer, which ran a series of print advertisements with glossy photos of kids with the slogan “Live While We’re Young” splashed across each ad. Sarah wasn’t sure if they knew that the line was also the name of a One Direction hit song, but it was hard not to make the connection. Further, it seemed to Sarah somewhat ill-fitting for an ad campaign for children’s clothing, as she recalled that the beginning of the lyric was, “Tonight let’s get some…”

  The government’s campaign to encourage Singaporeans to improve their English was also eyebrow-raising – not quite wrong, but not quite right, either. The campaign’s official name was the “Speak Good English Movement”. Wouldn’t “Speak Better English” have been more appropriate? She was being harsh, she knew, to this remarkable country, just a couple of years past 50, where three-quarters of its people were bilingual, to pick on the subtleties of English usage; it was the only country in Asia she could have moved to without having to learn a new language.

  She was acting like an annoying, entitled expat, but on her worst days, Sarah became positively enraged when the air-conditioning service company couldn’t understand that she was trying to make an appointment, even after she tried English, (admittedly poor) Mandarin, and Taiwanese, which was very similar to the local Hokkien dialect that many Singaporeans spoke. In general, Singaporeans spoke very short sentences; with her American accent, if she used too many words, they simply didn’t understand her.

  Meanwhile, at work, Jason was facing similar frustrations, but he had a lab to run, and therefore was able to take the nuisance in his stride, while Sarah, at home without a clear purpose, got trapped in the thick of it, unable to move forward.

  More than anything, Sarah was irritated at herself, that she was not using her time efficiently. The pockets of time that she did have free, when Eric was napping or after both kids went to bed, seemed to just disappear, into a wasteland that was primarily, if she was being honest, social media browsing. She had joined an online group called “Expat Wives in Singapore”, a group of over 10,000 members, where posts ranged from the inane (“Can anyone tell me the weather in Vietnam this time of year?”) to the unbelievable (“Can anyone recommend an event planner who can put together a dinner for 40 at Angkor Wat next Saturday – like at the actual temple?”). One night, she spent nearly half an hour reading all 200 replies to the question, “How much supplemental food money should I give to my helper?”

  She had a long list of books that she wanted to read, non-profit organisations that she wanted to learn more about, other projects that she had thought she would do once she quit working, but somehow, she just could not seem to get the impetus to even get started. It took her an entire week to research and finally book a weekend trip to Phuket, something that, back when she was working, would have taken her 15 minutes to plan while simultaneously doing a conference call and eating a sandwich. She had been used to measuring her time in six-minute increments; now, with no meter running, she felt utterly aimless.

  When she was with the kids, she was often distracted, thinking about other things, like what other activities they should be doing, math they should be learning, museums they should be visiting, rather than being focused on being there, in that moment, with them. The condo playgroup continued, but as the younger children grew bigger and more mobile, requiring more supervision, it correspondingly became more difficult to hold a real conversation with the other mums.

  Eric was two and a half, transforming from a chubby-cheeked toddler into an active little boy who could hold his own in a wrestling ma
tch with his sister Ruby, the three-year age gap notwithstanding; as a result, Sarah’s afternoons, after picking up Ruby from school, were usually spent keeping the two of them from killing each other, sending them to frequent time-outs at opposite ends of the living room. On many evenings, when Jason arrived home, Sarah would throw her hands out, saying, “Your witnesses, counsellor,” and retreat into the bedroom, adding, “Mommy’s giving herself a time-out.”

  After a couple of months of this anguish, Sarah decided to enrol Eric at the nursery school located on the third level of the mall across the street. The school had a half-day Chinese-immersion programme for his age group; Sarah rationalised it was so Eric could learn to socialise with other kids and improve his Chinese, but it was just as much for her own sanity.

  Sarah herself didn’t speak Mandarin that well, and it was one of her biggest insecurities. In their home growing up, Sarah’s parents had spoken Mandarin only when they hadn’t wanted Sarah or her brother to understand what they were saying, preferring to speak Taiwanese or English to them; as a result, while Sarah could distinguish when Mandarin was being spoken, she had an almost instinctive reaction to just tune it out.

  In college, she had taken a few introductory courses and when she started dating Jason, who was born in Taiwan and had lived there through the fifth grade, she was forced to pick up more, as his parents spoke almost exclusively Mandarin with him. Sarah knew she was missing out on a big learning opportunity by not asking Jason to just speak in Mandarin to her more often, “sleeping with the dictionary”, as the saying goes, but they had always spoken in English to each other; somehow, speaking in Mandarin threw the balance off in a way that Sarah simply did not like. Stemming from her own insecurity, it seemed like Jason was being condescending when he spoke to her in Mandarin, like he was speaking to her in the same tone that he used with their children. She knew he wasn’t doing this deliberately, but it was as if she had lost the upper hand in a relationship in which she had always been the better wielder of words.