by Li, Veronica
I was living my life all over again. Just as I thought I had graduated from nightly feedings, another newborn was slumbering by my side. Joe was a hungry baby who wanted his milk every two hours without giving consideration to whether it was day or night. Unlike Patrick, who was all calcium, Joe was all fat—rolls and rolls of it spilling from under his chin and overlapping in layers on his arms and thighs. Everyone envied me. Chinese love fat babies, and my relatives were always asking me what I fed him. He eats whatever I eat, I told them. The women understood that I meant mother’s milk.
Joe was literally sucking me dry. In spite of all the nutritious food that Mother prepared for me, my weight was back down to prepregnancy level. Most people couldn’t believe that I’d just had a baby. I was always tired, nodding off in a chair like an old woman. When my other children wanted me, there was nothing left of me to give. I was short-tempered with them and said nasty things I didn’t mean. The truth was, I’d reached the limit of my endurance. Three children and one unfaithful husband was a huge load for any woman. I prayed to God not to put any more babies in me.
When Joe was five months old, I missed my period again. I told myself not to panic yet. All the experts had assured me that a nursing mother couldn’t conceive. Just to be on the safe side, I went to Dr. Chat’s for a rabbit test. When he called me back in for the result, I burst into tears.
Believe me, the news was like a life sentence. Already I had no life of my own. Every second of my waking and sleeping hours was dedicated to the little monsters. My university education had been a waste of time and money, my ambition to write all but forgotten. How I longed for my days as a single workingwoman! Then I worked only eight hours a day, six days a week, and got paid for my labors. The rest of the time I was free to do whatever I liked—visiting friends, window-shopping, eating out, and yes, sleeping through the night. Ah, how sweet it would be to lay my head on the pillow and keep it there until the sun came out.
No job could be as hard as tending to the needs of children, and no one could pay me enough to take it on. However, since they were my own children, I could only collapse into a chair and cry. Hok-Ching tried to console me, but he would have done better to keep his mouth shut. "Another child is just a matter of adding another pair of chopsticks to the table," he said.
Of course, that was what it was to him. All he ever had to do was play with the children, while I had to take care of them and discipline them when they were naughty. I was the one who did all the hard work, but he was the one who got all their affection.
"Do you know what I have to go through every day?" I said. "If we could only switch places for one day, you would know what I mean."
"You take my place in the office?" Hok-Ching said with a most irritating smirk.
I thought to myself: why not? The company belongs to my brother. But I didn’t say it to Hok-Ching, fearing he would go to other women for comfort.
*
How could I describe my typical day? Well, let me try.
First of all, where did my day begin? Was it the two-o’clock feeding, the four, or the six? Let’s just say it started at six. Like clockwork, the "huh, huh, huh" of a cranky motor woke me. I scooted down a little, rolled on my side toward my sleeping husband, and plugged a breast into the feeding machine between us. Unconsciousness claimed me again until Joe’s impatient whining resumed. My eyes half shut, I slipped both hands under the warm, moist bundle and shifted the big slobbering mouth to my other side.
Joe would be good for the next two hours, but it was too late for me to go back to sleep. I got out of the mosquito net and went into the room across the hallway. Agnes was still asleep, but Pat’s bed was empty. Oh no, I thought to myself, not again. I rushed out to the living room and found Pat pushing against the couch with the energy from every drop of milk he’d ever drunk.
"Stop it," I yelled, snatching his hand off the couch. "Look what you’ve done." I swung him around to face his handiwork. The living room was like a furniture warehouse. The chairs and tables were piled against the wall and streaks on the beautiful teak floor marked the path they’d traveled. "You do not move the furniture around. You hear me?" I shook him hard, but he only stared at me with his black marble eyes that seemed incapable of absorbing anything. How could I make this muscular three-year-old understand that he wasn’t supposed to rearrange the furniture? Perhaps words weren’t enough. I picked up a duster and brandished it.
"Don’t, Mommy, it hurts, it hurts," Pat whimpered.
My heart softened, but I was determined to make him understand.
"What are you doing?" It was Hok-Ching’s voice behind me.
"Teaching your son a lesson. Look what he’s done again."
Instead of reprimand, I heard a chuckle. "Stop that," I said. "He’s going to think this is funny." Indeed, an uncertain grin had replaced the fear on Patrick’s face.
"Don’t beat the children when you’re angry," Hok-Ching said. "You can hurt them. Besides, what’s the big deal? So he moved the furniture around. Just get the servants to move it back."
"You try telling them. The other day I asked Agnes’s nanny to clean up a puddle of pee on the floor. She refused, saying it was Patrick’s pee. You think they’ll do anything as strenuous as moving furniture? The last few times, I was the one who straightened the place out."
"All right, I’ll help you. It will only take a few minutes." He looked down at Pat and hiked his shoulders in mock fear of the wicked witch. Patrick snorted with glee.
By the time I sat down to breakfast with Agnes and Pat, plus Joe attached to my breast, I felt I’d already done a whole day’s chores. The servants were just trickling in. They lived in a separate house in the back. While Hong Kong amahs were avowed spinsters, Thai maids had husbands, or boyfriends, or both. I never knew who was sleeping next door.
One by one, they came in, bowing and pressing their palms together in Thai greeting. A shadow slipped past the window; somebody was trying to slip into the house through the back door.
"Sumlan, come here," I called out in my basic Thai. "I want to talk to you."
Sumlan, the cook, almost crawled in.
"Where were you yesterday?" I said. She had disappeared after pocketing the grocery money for our dinner. The children and I had made do with omelets.
The cook got down on her knees and flattened herself on the floor. Pity filled my heart at the humiliation of the disheveled woman. She’d once been the wife of the Thai ambassador to France, a woman of class and wealth who ran her own household. Alas, she had one fatal weakness—an incurable addiction to gambling. After she’d lost a chunk of her husband’s estate, he kicked her out to save himself from total ruin. With no means for a living, she turned to the cooking skills she’d acquired in Paris. She’d been my cook for six months, during which time we’d been walking a tightrope between feast and famine. When she won at the gambling table, our dinner table would be garnished with the most elegant French dishes. When she lost, our table would be bare. She would disappear for a day or two, depending on how long it took her to recover from her hangover.
Sumlan jabbered away in Thai. I picked out words such as "sick" and "doctor," the same excuse for her last vanishing act.
In my broken Thai, I tried to make her understand that I couldn’t tolerate such behavior. Apparently I succeeded, for she started crying and knocking her head on the floor. Sympathy got the better of me.
"Mai ben rai," I mouthed the popular Thai idiom which means "it doesn’t matter." With those three little words, the nation can reduce any disaster to a minor inconvenience.
Sumlan kowtowed some more and retreated into the kitchen. In the meantime, Pat and Agnes had gotten into a fight over a piece of toast. Always protective of the younger one, I demanded that Agnes give in to her brother.
Agnes took off with the toast. I shoved Joe over to a nanny and ran after Agnes, collecting the duster on my way. She climbed onto my bed and bounced up and down. I tried to whack her on the leg, but she wa
s jumping too fast. My duster kept whipping the air. Suddenly she leaped off the bed and scurried into her room. I was in close pursuit, and this time I made sure to close the door behind me. Agnes was cornered.
She glared up at me, her little arm thrust out. "Go ahead, beat me! It doesn’t hurt!"
I raised my duster. A scene flashed before me: Mother lashing in blind fury at Brother Yung, whipping him on the face, the neck, the body. Hok-Ching’s words rang in my ears: don’t beat the children when you’re angry. And angry I was. If Agnes had cried, if she’d shown any sign of fear, I would have let her go with a scolding. But she was staring at me with insolence, pitting the strength of her will against mine. It was to be a duel to the finish.
I dragged her into the bathroom. "You’ve been a very bad girl. I have to punish you. Otherwise you’ll grow up into a person that everybody hates. I’m going to lock you in here so you can think about what you’ve done."
When I got back to the dining room, Pat was riding his scooter and Joe had fallen asleep. It was time to change and get ready for my Thai lesson. I stopped in front of the bathroom and pressed my ear to the door. Not a sound. Through the keyhole I could see Agnes sitting on the edge of the bathtub, her lips pressed together with defiance. No sign of contrition yet, but at least she would be out of sight while I exercised what little was left of my brain.
My teacher, a male student at the university, greeted me. I returned the pleasantries, mindful of the declension I should use on him. Although he was many years younger than I, he was my teacher and therefore deserving of respect. This part of the Thai language, the hierarchical declensions, was the most difficult for me. An aunt had given me a tongue-lashing for using lower-class grammar on her, while others had laughed at me for addressing a maid as if she were an aristocrat.
Halfway through the lesson, the nanny ran in yelling something about the hong nam. I suddenly remembered who was locked up in it. I dashed up the staircase. Water was streaming from under the bathroom door. I fumbled for the key in my pocket. The door flew open and there was Agnes, standing on the toilet seat and scooping water out of the overflowing sink with both hands. Water was gushing out of the tap, onto the floor, into the corridor. I lunged to shut it off. Agnes stabbed me with a hateful glare. The next moment, I was running into my bedroom and locking the door. My daughter would not have the satisfaction of seeing me cry.
We ate lunch in silence. At the end of the meal, while we were spearing pineapple cubes with toothpicks, Agnes looked me straight in the eye and said, "When I grow up, I’m going to cut you up into tiny little pieces. Then I’ll stick a toothpick into each piece and put it in my mouth."
"When you grow up, I hope you can find a husband who can tame you." I definitely couldn’t.
Nap time was the highlight of my day. I lay in a stupor on a straw mat while the scorching sun baked our house and us in it. This was the best sleep, a delicious suspension in a trance-like state where I was aware of being asleep and savored every minute of it. This was better than my night sleep, which was often rankled with images of Hok-Ching in the arms of a nightclub hostess. In the daytime I knew he was in the office, doing whatever businessmen did.
A child’s wail woke me. It seemed to be coming from outside. I got up and looked into the yard. Pat was lying flat on his back. I dashed downstairs.
"What happened?" I shouted at the nanny.
She yammered and gestured at the window that stood a tall man’s height from the ground. Apparently, Pat had climbed up the windowsill and backflipped out the other side. I wanted to ask the maid: where were you when this was happening? But tending to Pat’s injury was more important. I checked him over for broken bones. Everything seemed intact. The bushes below the window must have cushioned the fall. As I debated whether or not to take him to the doctor’s, the top of my scalp tightened, and I knew what was coming next—a headache.
I collected the bawling child into my arms. His dense bones and sinews jabbed against my chest. At three, his shape was already that of a little man. Physically, he was mature beyond his age, but mentally, I was beginning to worry that he’d banged his head once too often. A few screws might have been jostled loose. How else could I explain the frequent scrapes he got into?
I wiped the tears off his face and combed my hand through the sweaty, ragged hair. If he’d only sat still, I could have done a better job of cropping it. "I told you not to climb high. You see how dangerous it is? You can fall and break your head. Don’t do that again, all right?" I peered into his eyes to catch a glimmer of understanding, but all I got was a pair of impenetrable doors. The entrance to his brain was tightly shut.
I led Pat into the house and gave him a drink. He gulped the juice with such vigor that a visit to the doctor seemed unnecessary. I would keep him under observation the next hour or two. If he showed no signs of internal injury, I would take him to Mother’s. At her age, she shouldn’t be deprived of the pleasure of sleeping with her beloved grandson.
His accident forgotten, Pat ran into his grandmother’s house as if it were his own home. Sister-in-law came out to greet us. We each had a baby astride our hips, but the thigh clamped around my waist was three times bigger than the one clinging to hers. I was carrying Joe and she the male child that Pat had brought about by peeing on the wedding bed. In honor of his origin, the baby was called Little Pat, and my Pat was Big Pat.
Patrick hurled himself into his aunt’s belly and wrapped his arms around her. "How is my big boy?" Sister-in-law said, splitting her sarong as she squatted to Pat’s level. "What mischief did you get into this time?"
"He almost broke his head," I said. "Fortunately, it’s harder than concrete. This child is so naughty, I really don’t know what to do with him."
"Boys will be boys," Sister-in-law said. Bending down to Pat, she cooed, "You want some eye-deem?"
Eye-deem, Thai for ice cream, was the key to any child’s heart. Pat’s face lit up and he went off with his aunt. Mother was saying her prayers at the family altar. Seeing me, the movement of her lips hastened. She bowed thrice to her late husband’s portrait—forever a handsome thirty-three-year-old with jet black hair—and stuck the incense into the pot of ashes.
Mother reached out for the heavy bundle in my arms. She was a glutton for her grandsons. "And how is my big fat tiger?" She sniffed the milk curd in Joe’s triple chin and sighed with satisfaction. "I always say Little Pat doesn’t eat enough. Why can’t he be as cute as my tiger?" She called Joe tiger because he was born in the year of the tiger. Also, his time of birth was midnight, which, according to Mother, was the hour the tiger emerged from its lair.
Sister-in-law brought ice cream for everyone. We laughed as Mother brought a spoonful to Joe’s mouth and he tried to suckle it greedily. After chatting for a while, I took leave. Mother was ecstatic that Patrick was staying, and so was I.
The house was much calmer when I got back. It was amazing how one child could make that much difference. Even the house heaved a sigh of relief. Soon my other two children would be asleep, the servants would retire to their quarters, and I would have some quiet time to myself.
From 8 pm on, the hours were mine. I took out the little dress I’d been sewing for Agnes and started stitching up the hems. As my fingers worked, my mind wandered. Where was Hok-Ching now? Probably dancing with his favorite hostess at Hoi Tin Restaurant. Or he could be at a party at Sun-Tong’s home, entertained by any number of call girls…or a massage parlor, getting a back rub from a woman astride his hips…or a bar, drinking with a bar girl on his lap. In fact, he could be in any of the thousands of vice dens in Bangkok. Unless he keeled over in one of them, I would never know which. Sometimes I wished he would!
I threw down the unfinished dress and went to the desk. A letter from my best friend, Anna, stared at me, begging for a reply. I sat down to write, but after a few opening sentences the ink stopped flowing. She was a single woman, a teacher in a government school, steadily climbing the civil service ladder. I was a
mindless baby machine. Aside from telling her that another was in the making, what news was there to give her?
Absentmindedly, I picked up a picture frame on the desk. It was a picture of Ngai in his graduation regalia—a black gown and a giant mushroom hat drooping over his ears. The last four years had passed as quickly as one day. It seemed that I’d gone to sleep, and when I opened my eyes, my baby brother had been transformed into a Doctor of Economics. Soon he would be home from Oxford, armed with his diploma and raring to conquer the world.
A question slapped me across the face: what have I achieved in the last four years? Less than nothing, for I’d given back everything I’d learned. If I’d gone to England with Ngai, I would have gotten a PhD by now. I would have written treatises and published research papers. Scholars in my field would know my name. Instead, I got married and produced babies.
I paced the floor like a prisoner planning his escape. I wanted to get out, go places, live. How could my life have gone so wrong? I’d done everything I was supposed to: get a good education, marry into a good family, be a good wife and mother. Yet I’d never felt as miserable. This home was a cage, and the person who’d trapped me was romping around Bangkok like a wild stallion. If I ever caught him in the arms of another woman, I would…I would…what could I do?
I swung around and was startled by a pair of lantern eyes. Joe had awakened and was following my movements. His wet lips mashed with anticipation. A smile erupted from my heart. Joe reflected my expression by baring his toothless gums. His plump cheeks pushed against his eyes and squeezed them into a pair of crescent moons. Teasingly, I gave him my finger to suck on. His mouth twisted with distress when he discovered the trick. The sight was funny and heartrending all at once. I quickly gave him what he wanted. His eyeballs rolled up with the contentment of an opium addict getting his fix.
By the time Joe had eaten his fill, my turmoil had subsided. I took stock of my situation. The wind had blown me on an irreversible course. Abandoning it meant abandoning my children, my flesh and blood, which I could never do. I also knew that I needed help, and there was only one person who could give it to me. Sam-Koo was my only savior. In a few months, there would be another little one in my bed, draining out what was left of me. I couldn’t do this alone anymore. My husband was no help, and the Thai maids were more trouble than help. If Sam-Koo could take Joe off my hands, even for just a few months, I might be able to brave one more baby.
