Aunty Lee's Delights

by Ovidia Yu

  Aunty Lee was happy again, Nina thought. Aunty Lee was usually happy when she cooked, but today, despite the frustration of having no details about the body found, she was even happier than usual. Aunty Lee was bored, Nina realized. It was to occupy her mind that she had thrown herself into Aunty Lee’s Delights after her husband died. Running the café and keeping the shop counter stocked up with Aunty Lee’s “specials” had succeeded in distracting her for a while, but now that routines were established and running smoothly, Aunty Lee was clearly getting bored. Boredom was all very well. Everyone felt bored at times. But a mind that worked with the speed of Aunty Lee’s meant boredom would be followed very soon by action and change.

  Nina sighed inwardly; she did not want things to change. She was very happy working for Aunty Lee. There were far worse employers to work for. Nina knew that very well, having worked for some of them herself. And it had been Aunty Lee who rescued her, offering to take over her employment contract. “I could report them for what they did to you, of course. But then such things take a long time to get to court and then you won’t be able to work or go home—why don’t you come and work for me?” It had worked out for both Aunty Lee and Nina . . . and for Nina’s former employers, who escaped being fined and blacklisted by maid agencies.

  The menu for that night’s wine dining gathering was chicken and pork satay, luak chye (mustard greens that had been pickling in vinegar, ginger, and sugar since yesterday—Nina had only to remember to mix in the mustard powder just before serving . . .), and the hee peow or fish maw soup made with prawn, fish, and meatballs. Of course the whole point of the wine dining dinners were for Aunty Lee’s stepson, Mark, to introduce people to wines that could “go” with local food, but Aunty Lee had gleefully seized the opportunity to fire up her favorite recipes. Most visitors who came to Aunty Lee’s Delights were there to shop for her sweet and savory kueh, fried delicacies, and, of course, the bottles of Aunty Lee’s Shiok Sambal and Aunty Lee’s Amazing Achar and Krunchy Kropok, which sold out as fast as Aunty Lee and Nina could produce them.

  Aunty Lee’s hand phone rang. It was on the counter and Nina, correctly interpreting Aunty Lee’s “On it for me—make it loud-loud!,” answered and switched it to speakerphone.

  “Rosie, ah—are you there? Busy or not—” Nina recognized the grainy voice of Mrs. AwYong, an old friend of Aunty Lee’s.

  “Jin, how are you? Cooking lah. What’s up?”

  “Rosie, you were right! I found my watch—some more I found an earring and a part of a necklace and a bangle I didn’t even know were missing!”

  “I told you I was right!” Aunty Lee smirked. Nina smiled to herself. Aunty Lee knew she was usually right but she never tired of hearing others admit it. She grumbled (at least on the surface) when her friends jokingly gave her their challenging little problems to solve to “keep her brain active,” but the truth was she adored them. These little problems were a legitimate way of putting what the late M. L. Lee described as his wife’s outstanding talent for being “kiasu, kaypoh, em zhai se!” Nina could remember the old man saying kaypoh, meaning minding the business of others with as much energy as kiasu devoted to their own. Em zhai se literally meant “not scared to die” and effectively described how Aunty Lee drove everyone around her to despair through frustration as she pursued some triviality no one else could see any point in.

  It was a good thing old Uncle Lee had been so fond of his little wife. Where any other man would probably have been irritated, M. L. Lee had been entertained. But then Aunty Lee, with her knack for understanding people (through the way they eat, she said), had probably known him better than anyone else. Nina guessed that Aunty Lee had seen he needed someone. That would go some way to explaining why she had chosen to marry a man so much older than she was. Because despite what people whispered, and what M. L. Lee’s daughter-in-law frequently said aloud, Aunty Lee had had money of her own when she married her widower. Not as much as he had, of course. Few people in Singapore belonged in his class. But after years of catering for special events, Aunty Lee had been comfortable financially and her prowess in the kitchen was unchallenged. What woman could ask for more? Watching Aunty Lee now, Nina wished she knew.

  “They were all in the bushes!” The voice coming through the phone shrieked with laughter. “I was so sure the maid took my watch—I even scolded her already—and all along it was the stupid dog! He was taking all my things out to chew. Now all so dirty and smelly already! Hey, did you hear about the dead woman they found on Sentosa? Must be somebody murdered their maid and tried to hide the body, that’s why not reported missing!”

  “Jin, you imagine such crazy things! I hope it’s not your maid that they found there!”

  Aunty Lee said little more, ending the call soon after that. Nina knew her well enough to guess her boss was turning over Mrs. AwYong’s suggestion. And probably wishing she had thought of it herself.

  “That woman always blames the maid first,” she said to Nina. “Lost her things, blame the maid. Unidentified body found, must be the maid.”

  There was a note of apology in Aunty Lee’s voice for Mrs. AwYong. But Nina knew only too well that most employers in Singapore regarded their live-in domestic help with great suspicion. That was another reason Nina constantly reminded herself how lucky she was to work for Aunty Lee.

  “Did you taste the satay sauce yet?” Nina reminded her boss. Though Nina did most of the food preparation now, Aunty Lee still calibrated the final seasonings.

  Aunty Lee moved across to taste the peanut sauce again. It was in the sauces and seasonings, as she constantly reminded Nina, that the real art of cooking was to be found. And it was no use asking for exact measurements either. There were no exact measurements; it was more a matter of training your taste to recognize the perfect pitch so that you could always rely on yourself to adjust the ingredients to hit precisely the right note. What good were recipes that gave you pounds and ounces—or worse, grams and liters—when how much a dish required depended on the quality and age of your ingredients?

  Nina watched as Aunty Lee added a dash of coriander and a spoonful of tamarind pulp before giving the sauce a good stir. Selina had tried to suggest that Aunty Lee serve up more bland dishes, ones less likely to overwhelm the wines that were, after all, the whole point of the exercise. Aunty Lee had pointed out that true Peranakan food was always spicy—and suggested Selina phone in an order for delivery pizzas instead—with all the earnest, bland helpfulness of an old lady who was only trying to be helpful . . .

  “They should be here soon,” Nina said. “Shall I set the table first or wait for Sir Mark?”

  “Put out the plates but not the glasses. He’ll want to fuss with the glasses himself like he always does. I’m surprised he isn’t here already, to let his wine ‘settle and breathe’ and whatever nonsense.” Aunty Lee brightened. “Maybe he’s late because that Silly-Nah is missing.”

  Nina, laying out the heavy white plates, did not answer. She suspected Aunty Lee would lose interest once the poor dead woman’s identity was revealed. It would probably be in tomorrow morning’s newspapers, which was why Aunty Lee was milking the mystery for all it was worth now. Again she thought it was probably because she was bored.

  “Aunty, you should play mah-jongg,” Nina said. “Or go on a cruise.”

  “She may have been on a cruise!” Aunty Lee agreed. “And fell overboard. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t murder. We should take note of any of the women who registered for tonight’s dinner and don’t show up . . .”

  Going by the previous week’s wine dining event, Nina would not have been surprised if at least one of the guests did not return. This was no reflection on the food, which had been good. Selina had worried about how spicy the food was but Mark had not seemed to mind, and all their paying guests had enjoyed their dinner. It was only after dinner that things had got interesting, as Aunty Lee had put it. Laura Kwee, the friend whom Mark and Selina had brought in to help serve the wine, had
drunk enough to be embarrassingly chatty. Nina had been rather uncomfortable. But at least Aunty Lee was looking forward to today’s dinner with all the relish of a child getting ready for school after a long, dull vacation alone.

  And why shouldn’t she? Nina reflected, taking her feelings out on the flattened sticks of satay before putting them in the enormous fridge in the back storeroom to await their grilling. Aunty Lee had been very nice to Laura, even letting her leave her things in the storeroom of the café that night because she had clearly been in no shape to get them as well as herself home. Laura had not returned to collect her bag either. Nina would not be surprised if Laura Kwee did not show up that night.

  “I’m going to keep the TV on during tonight’s dinner,” Aunty Lee said. “Doesn’t matter what the show is. Sometimes they have those breaking news announcements.”

  “Sir Mark doesn’t like that.” Nina knew Mark planned the music that accompanied his wines as carefully as Aunty Lee planned the serving dishes that presented her food.

  “It’s still my shop,” Aunty Lee said firmly. “Besides, if we don’t pay attention to what’s happening, who is going to?”

  Selina Khaw-Lee, wife of Aunty Lee’s stepson, Mark, had not heard anything about the unidentified body found on Sentosa and would not have admitted it if she had. As Selina said disparagingly to anyone who invited her to their online networking sites, exercise classes, or volunteer work, “I have a life, you know!” After all, Selina had already started preparing to be a model mother. She had decided on names for her future children long before she had decided whom their father would be. And it was precisely for the sake of these future offspring that she took so much interest in her husband’s business and prospects. The Lees were old money. In a young nation like Singapore, old money was anything that had been in a family for more than twenty years. Their lifestyle was one that Selina, the daughter of two teachers comfortably anchored in the middle of Singapore’s respectable middle class, had always aspired to—she saw herself living the life of a Tai-Tai, wearing designer clothes and going for manicures and overseas holidays. Unfortunately her husband was also living a Tai-Tai lifestyle. Mark Lee had grown up with that comfortable nonchalance toward money that a financially privileged childhood confers. It didn’t seem to matter to him that all his father’s money had been stolen by his second wife. But it mattered to Selina.

  “I don’t think you should let Laura Kwee have any wine tonight. She’s obviously not used to it.”

  “It’s a wine-tasting dinner,” Mark Lee said mildly. Mark was generally mild, especially where his wife was concerned. “Besides, Laura is helping me with the serving, right?”

  “She didn’t say she isn’t coming. I texted her a reminder to give her a chance to back out if she wanted to—it would be just like her to back out at the last moment—but she just said ‘see you there.’ Not a word of apology. After carrying on like a drunken alcoholic!”

  “Laura already apologized, right?” Mark slowed down to join the queue of cars waiting to cross the Bukit Timah Canal. The younger Lees lived in a condominium across the canal from Binjai Park. It was not a great distance—if not for the trees, you could see Aunty Lee’s Delights from their ninth-floor apartment—but given the large canal and two main roads that separated them, only the servants walked in between. “Laura’s not used to wine, that’s all. If she was any kind of alcoholic, a few glasses of wine wouldn’t have had any kind of effect on her.”

  Mark seldom disagreed with his wife, but he knew Selina was only venting in advance because she was steeling herself to keep up her social persona for the rest of the evening. Selina worried so much about what people were thinking of her that she was always uncomfortable in public. Mark was looking forward to the evening as he waited for traffic to clear. He was a patient driver. Selina was not patient about anything.

  “Why did you let that car cut in like that? He has no right! Did you see what he did? If you didn’t stop he would have caused an accident!” No response from Mark. “Did you remember to bring over all the wine yesterday?”

  “All except the Albarino. I thought at first Chianti for the satay but then last night I thought about it, and I think the 2009 La Cana that just came in would do better. And I can talk a bit about Spanish wine. We’ve been having so much French and Australian lately.”

  “You want to open it because it just came,” Selina said sourly. “Is it expensive? I told you not to waste expensive stuff on these people. Anyway, that old woman’s food is going to drown out all your wine as usual. They won’t notice what they are drinking.”

  Mark did not answer.

  “There’s no point wasting that,” Selina said sharply. “You know Aunty Lee can’t tell the difference anyway. You could just get her some old bottle from the supermarket and she wouldn’t notice.”

  “She likes it that I bring her something special,” Mark said. “We’re partners in this, after all.”

  Selina snorted. “You can wrap up any old bottle. She won’t be able to tell the difference. If you ordered that specially, you should be able to sell it for more. Don’t waste it.”

  It would not be a waste, Mark thought. Selina thought that wrapping a bottle in brown paper or a coat of aluminum foil would be enough for Aunty Lee. But the wine would not be wasted because he was really doing it for himself, and he appreciated it.

  “They shouldn’t notice what they are drinking. They shouldn’t notice what they are eating. They shouldn’t even notice how good they feel. Then we’ll have got the pairing right.”

  Perhaps Mark could be a food critic—or a poet—if this latest venture of his failed like all the previous ones, Selina thought. Not for the first time she wondered whether she could still make it as a derivatives trader or real estate agent. If she made her own fortune, she could forget about pushing her husband into succeeding. But she wanted Mark to stay with this, she reminded herself. The Lee fortune was there for the taking even if Mark did not make a profit. And this latest brainwave gave her a chance to keep an eye on Aunty Lee’s Delights. Even if Aunty Lee claimed she only ran the café as a hobby, it was clearly raking in cash. And since it had been set up by the late M. L. Lee with money that should have been Mark’s, clearly Mark should be benefiting from the profits as well.

  Selina conveniently forgot Mark’s sister, who seemed quite happy with how things were. Anyway, Mathilda had never shown much interest in what was happening in Singapore.

  “I hope Laura pulls herself together today.” Selina returned to her current peeve. “Even before she turned into a lush, she was getting all the glasses mixed up.”

  “Maybe she won’t turn up.” Mark turned into Binjai Park. The row of shophouses, which housed a pizzeria and several antiques shops as well as Aunty Lee’s Delights, stood on a side street to their left, separated from the main estate road by a decorative grass verge with the usual trees, shrubbery, and a metal prayer bin. “How many people signed up for tonight, anyway?”

  “Why do you say that?” Selina asked, ignoring his question. “Do you think Laura won’t be here tonight? She’s supposed to come and help with every session. That’s why we gave her a discount. What did she tell you?”

  “Nothing. I can set up everything myself, that’s all I meant.” Mark concentrated on parking. He stopped the CD player to concentrate, and the system switched automatically to radio.

  Even if it wasn’t a murder case, so gruesome to think of all those people enjoying themselves in the holiday resort while there’s someone lying dead on the beach, don’t you think?

  Maybe it’s a publicity stunt by the resort. Next they’ll announce there’s a murder mystery competition—dead body washed up on Sentosa, did the ghosts of murdered dolphins do it?

  “I hate those radio commentators, they’re so stupid!” Selina said. “Mark, what are you waiting for?”

  Mark kept the engine on. He wanted to hear what else they had to say. But there was nothing more.

  Harry Sullivan h
ad arrived early, as he always did. He liked being on time. “Singapore time”—which could run up to thirty minutes behind any set appointment—was one of the things he disliked most about Singapore, and so, while he expected local people to be late for appointments, he himself refused to be late. Harry had never been particular about punctuality before; but here in Singapore, he was an expat, an ang moh and a man to be noticed.

  Back in Oz, he had been stepped on and pushed aside by the greedy, grabbing new immigrants invited in by a soft government, but over here the tables were turned. He was aware that people looked at Mr. Harry Sullivan differently here and the change in him had come naturally in response to that. Harry liked what he had become in Singapore. He was full of new project ideas, his conversation sparkled and impressed even himself, and he was a hit with local women, who loved being seen with a white man. It almost made up for the humid, equatorial heat.

  This evening he was wearing a red batik shirt (considered formal wear in the tropics) unbuttoned over a white T-shirt and Bermuda-length cargo pants. It was the third wine dining he was attending. Not that he didn’t prefer beer to wine, but he was expected to maintain certain standards here in Singapore and he tried to live up to those expectations. He guessed the old Caucasian couple coming slowly along the five-foot way peering into shop windows and squinting at shop numbers had signed on for the same event at Aunty Lee’s Delights as he had. They looked like retirees who were traveling to see the world and had chosen Singapore as their first stop because of its clean, safe, English-speaking reputation. Both with fuzzy-ginger-turning-gray hair and in matching Merlion T-shirts, they also looked new to Singapore and Southeast Asia. Harry Sullivan, with six months’ residence behind him, could afford to be generous to these newcomers.