Auntie was my great-aunt, and even though she was less than five feet tall and shuffled through the house blindly, she was a fiery old gal. Often, she’d bang her fist on the table and disappear into a rant about how hard it was to find a good rambutan these days (Auntie’s main passion in her old age was good fruit). And she’d mastered the art of casually extreme theatrics. Once, she was calmly telling me stories from her childhood and mentioned that when she was a kid, if you got a zero on a test, your family had to pay a fine to the school. I was surprised for a moment—really? Had I heard her right? “Pay a fine?” I asked.
She startled, her whole body snapping upright as if she were possessed, eyes wide behind her Coke-bottle glasses, jaw slack, hands trembling. “WHAT LAH, YOU!” she shouted at me, with a passion generally reserved for cussing out murderers. “YEAH, LAH! PAY FINE!” Then, just as quickly as it began, her body settled and she went back to her story, giggling.
She was like that: a total wack job, but her whole self, even her anger, even her sadness, was infused with mischievous glee. Once, she farted loudly during a mah-jongg game and then laughed so hard about it she peed her pants, then hobbled to the bathroom, leaking pee everywhere and screaming with laughter.
Auntie was the caretaker of our whole family. When my father was growing up, his mother (Auntie’s sister—my grandmother) got a job as the foreman of a glass factory in Kuala Lumpur, a couple of hours from their home in Ipoh. So my grandmother rented an apartment in KL and stayed there during the week, seeing her kids on the weekends. While she was gone, Auntie took on the responsibility of raising her sister’s children. She worked as a secretary and bounced babies on her hip and even had a money-lending business on the side. Eventually, she saved enough money to buy two houses for her nieces. My father and his siblings all considered Auntie to be a second mother, so after my grandmother died when I was seven, Auntie ascended to the powerful role of matriarch. And she used that power to spoil me.
Every time I walked into a room, Auntie would reach for me and coo, “Ho gwaai, ho gwaai.” So well-behaved. So good. She dug the fish balls out of her bowl of soup and fed them to me. She taught me mah-jongg and stroked my hands.
The other adults fell in line to say something nice about my eyes, my dimples. My aunts traveled to the market just to buy me my favorite treats—soft pork jerky, curry puffs, butter pineapple tarts, a dozen different kinds of kueh. I had one cousin who wanted to be an artist when she grew up. She had filled an entire bookshelf with her sketches. I showed up and started doodling, and everyone flocked around me, praising my natural talent. My cousin stormed off and didn’t talk to me for days.
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Once, my mother and I went to our safe-deposit box at the bank and I watched her delicately pick through the bounty in red velvet boxes. “Your grandmother gave you the best of the family jade, and one day, you’ll inherit all of this because you’re the favorite,” she whispered, and she clasped a gold chain around my neck. Dangling from it was a solid gold rabbit pendant with ruby eyes. “She gave this to you when you were just a baby. A bunny for the year of the bunny!”
“But why am I the favorite?” I asked. “What did I do?”
“It’s simple,” she said. “Your dad is the eldest son in the family. And you are his firstborn child. So naturally, you are the favorite.” This sounded enough like something out of an Amy Tan novel for me to believe it.
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I felt most special during my one-on-one time with Auntie. In the late afternoons, when everyone else was napping, I followed the sound of green bean stems breaking juicily between Auntie’s fingers, my bare feet slapping gently on the marble floor, and sat on a rattan chair, the kind that imprinted elaborate patterns into my lower butt. I snapped the green beans, too. “Ho gwaai, girl, ho gwaai,” Auntie said to me in her gentlest voice. “You are such a sweet girl, being the only one to help your Auntie.” She’d tell me stories about growing up in Ipoh, of faceless great-grandmothers and tussling with her sisters over mangos. And then she would dispense some Chinese wisdom, the same sayings her mother had told her a million years ago. Optimism, Auntie stressed, was of utmost importance in this life.
“When the sky falls, use it as a blanket,” Auntie repeated to me. “Big things, make small. Small things, make nothing. When someone wrongs you, never keep it in your heart. Let it go. Smile through your tears. Swallow your pain.”
I nodded absentmindedly, but when my cousins woke up and I ran back to play, the black-and-white memories of old, pajama-wearing ancestors and their funny sayings faded into the back of my memory. All that time, I thought Auntie was trying to give me some sense of where I came from. To make sure my McDonald’seating American self stayed a little bit Chinese. Back then, I never suspected an ulterior motive: to give me what I needed to survive.
CHAPTER 4
When I was thirteen, my mother took me out for a bowl of my favorite shrimp dumpling noodles and told me, “I’m sorry, but I can’t take it anymore. I’m divorcing your father.” This time, no amount of crying or pleading worked—she had made up her mind. “You should think hard about who you want to live with afterward,” she said. Then she took me home, packed a duffel bag, and drove away.
I called her cellphone for days, trying from the moment I woke up until three in the morning. She only picked up once, a weekday at midnight. “I’m fine. Stop calling me,” she said. Her voice sounded dangerously free. It was loud in the background; I heard music. A bar? Then she hung up. I called again. No answer. After a week, I stopped calling.
She returned for the first time two months later to pick up some clothes. I rushed downstairs when I heard her car pull into the garage. I wanted to hear her say, “How’ve you been holding up?” or “I missed you” or maybe even “Hello,” but instead she walked in and looked down at the cat’s litter box, which we kept near the door. “You didn’t scoop the litter while I was gone?” she yelled. “Look at this, it’s full of shit! Do I have to do everything? What’s wrong with you?” She dragged me into the kitchen, grabbed a pair of chopsticks, and hit me. As she lifted her arm again, I said, “Stop hitting me, or I won’t live with you.” She froze. For the first time, the power balance between me and my mother had shifted. I had suddenly gotten off the seesaw, slamming her down on the tanbark. She stormed off, and I knew then that I’d already made up my mind. Something inside me closed toward her that would never open again. My father was a mess, but he needed me. He swore he wouldn’t hit me again, and I believed him. Meanwhile, she was just fine without us. The choice was obvious.
A couple of weeks later, she returned again and called me into the kitchen. “Stephie,” she proclaimed, “I have found a new husband. He has a big house, and if you move in with me, we can have a good life. So. Who do you want to live with? Me or your father?”
My face was blank. “I want to live with my dad.”
“You’ll regret this,” she replied, and those were the last words my mother said to me.
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