Five years passed. The longest I’d ever stayed away. And then my father called me and told me that Auntie was sick. She was stable, but I should visit. So, out of a sense of obligation, I went back with my dad. I hadn’t spent more than a couple of hours with him since he’d left and started his other family. Now, we were about to embark on a two-week trip. There were many awkward silences. At our layover in Hong Kong, he bought me a bowl of wonton mee and tried to talk to me: How were things? How was work? But this was the first time I’d had Wi-Fi in fifteen hours, things were chaotic at work, and I had five emails to respond to. I shushed him. He picked at his noodles, pouting as I typed away on my laptop. Well, well, I mused. When I used to sing “Cat’s in the Cradle” to get you to play with me, you told me to be quiet and let you watch the game.
But when we arrived in Ipoh, it was hard to hold on to my anger. Because when Auntie saw me, she was so excited she almost fell over. She grabbed the edge of the table next to her just in time and cried out, “Ho lang!” You’re so pretty.
My whole family told me how wonderful it was that I’d come back with my father. Because of this effort, all was forgiven. Auntie loved me again. She plied me with constant, enormous plates of meats. I turned her down again and again, and five minutes later she’d return with an even larger plate of fruit or a gigantic plate of pastries until I forced something down. She reached out for my hand as we watched TV, and I squeezed her tiny fingers gently, leaning my head on her shoulder.
I stayed with her a little over a week, and during that time, I recorded hours of our conversations. I wanted to preserve our family history—and her screwball antics.
I cuddled up to Auntie on the couch, just like when I was a little girl, and she retold the old stories. I asked more follow-ups than I had as a child, and now that I was an adult, she felt free to explain things in more graphic detail. She told me about my grandma flirting with boys for free sodas. She told me about how the local outhouses had only sheets covering each stall, and at night, somebody kept peeping around the corners of the sheets to watch people poop. When at last they caught the perv, the neighborhood beat the crap out of him.
And then, seemingly apropos of nothing, Auntie started talking about when I was a little kid. About how I’d been the favorite. She banged her fist on the table and said, “Everybody is kind to you because everyone knows that you suffer a lot.” She nodded, her toothless jaw jutting out defiantly, her eyes closed. “That’s why they’re so kind to you. Because when you’re young, they realized. You suffer a lot.”
I knew what she was talking about immediately. “Wow,” I can hear myself say on the tape. My voice sounds casual, but inside, my whole history with this place—a story of huge, lavish love—was warping.
“Did you see her beat me?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Auntie responded. “Everybody also seen.”
It was like all the flat memories I’d had of my past suddenly blossomed into three dimensions, with angles and corners I’d never been privy to. Suddenly, I remembered this one time I wasn’t allowed to eat dinner. Instead, my mom told me I had to cross my arms, pull on my earlobes, and do squats in front of my family while they ate their meal in silence. And then there was the time during a visit when I was six when I disagreed with my mom about what my homework assignment was. She beat me with a ruler for talking back. She beat me for hours.
At some point, I tried to hide under a table. As she pulled me out by the legs, I started to scream for mercy. I knew the house was full of family. I wondered why nobody was coming to help me. They must not be able to hear me, I thought. I felt totally alone. But now I knew.
A few feet away, my younger aunt, Sam Sam, must have stood with her ear to the wall, my cousin’s My Little Pony dolls in her hand, a gift to give me when it was all over. When my mother slapped me so hard I fell to my knees, Auntie was likely peering around the corner, mulling the kind words she’d share later about how I was a perfect, good little girl. When my mother screamed at me for spilling a glass of water, Tai Koo Ma must have been right there, pursing her lips. Plotting to take me out for ice cream that night.
There was no air in my lungs. “How come you never say anything when she beat me?” I asked in my pidgin English.
“You say anything, who suffer? Your father.”
“So what about me, suffer?”
“You, you suffer? If we say, don’t do that, she would done more. She would beat more. Cheh! Not to say it stop. You think it’s like that?”
In other words, “You think it’s that simple? That we’d just tell her to stop and it would end?” Then Auntie told me a story about how, when I was little, I once woke up scared in the middle of the night and walked into her room. She woke up and whispered reassurances and ushered me back into bed as quickly and quietly as she could. She was terrified the entire time. She believed if my mom found out that I had gotten up in the middle of the night, she’d hurt me. So Auntie did not dare wake her up or tell her what happened.
“It’s unfair. Life is like that,” Auntie said to me, and she shrugged. Sam Sam walked into the room. Auntie hollered at her in Cantonese. Sam Sam hollered at her small, fluffy dog. Then they both turned to me. “You want curry puff or not, ah girl?” they shouted. “Eat, lah!”
It was the first time I could recall that Auntie had said that something wasn’t fair. Life had not been kind or fair to Auntie. How could my pain compare?
* * *
—
According to Auntie, all the men in our family were losers, or as she put it, “hopeless fellows,” starting with my great-great-uncle. He was the origin of our history, the first of our clan to emigrate from China to Malaysia. But he didn’t start off a dumbass—Ipoh is a mining town, and my great-great-uncle owned three mines and some rubber plantations, amassing an enormous fortune.
Auntie’s mother married into this family. She was a sixteen-year-old girl in China when the matchmaker paired her with the entrepreneur’s nephew. She was ecstatic. This was a monumentally wealthy family! Her new husband was apparently a complete stud! She was set for life!
But when she finally met her husband, she discovered that his family had tricked her by showing her family a picture of her brother-in-law. Her new husband was born with his legs twisted—he could not walk—and his face left something to be desired. And when the new couple arrived in Malaysia to live on his rich uncle’s compound, they found out that his wealth was on the decline. World wars were complicating his business dealings and closing the mines. But, more importantly, he was spending a fair chunk of his fortune on women. “Got four wives and still go and get prostitute!” Auntie condemned. “WOMANIZER!” Within a few years of her mother’s arrival, the wealthy uncle was broke, and Auntie and her family were out on the streets with nothing.