A Tiger in the Kitchen (13 page)

Once again, this pork was slimy. “You want something with some fat on it,” Auntie Khar Imm said, as she swiftly chopped the white-speckled pink meat into slender strips. (I noticed she was not offering to let me help with the slicing this time; perhaps she’d gotten the same complaints about the
bak-zhang
we’d made as I had.) As she mixed beaten eggs, tapioca flour, salt, pepper, plum sauce, ketchup, and sugar in with the pork, I asked her about Giselle, her grandchild. Her life had changed since Giselle was born. Although Royston and Kat didn’t live with his parents, they stopped by every morning before heading to work to drop off Giselle for Auntie Khar Imm to watch. This is a fairly common arrangement in Singapore. (My father has made it clear for years now that, if I have a child, he’ll happily babysit, as long as he can do it at his golf club.) My auntie Khar Imm’s arrangement was a little more traditional, however. She now spent mornings and afternoons looking after Giselle, who, she kept telling me, was an unceasing jumping bean who sang and chattered away nonstop and ate like a maniac. After work each day, Royston and Kat would come over for dinner and take Giselle home for the evening.

“Lu-Lien ah, you don’t want to give your mother a grandchild?” she gently asked. I wasn’t sure what to say. None of my earlier excuses had really mattered—family was family after all. Living all by myself in New York, I should want to have a child. For the firstborn in my family, who’d been married for five years by now, it really was time. And besides, who was going to take care of me when I was older? “Maybe later,” I finally said. It occurred to me that this was the first time I’d uttered those words. Fortunately, the conversation didn’t go much further. There were vegetables to be fried, there was rice to be made.

Auntie Khar Imm paused only to tell me quickly how my cousin Jessie had made the
gway neng gou
(egg cake) that she was sending home with me. “Just whisk six eggs with sugar, a bit of flour, and pour in three quarters of a can of Sprite,” she said. “Your sister likes it, right?” It was a detail that even I had forgotten, after many years of not having this steamed egg cake.

Soon enough, dinner was on the table. As I watched the tiny Giselle shovel down a bowl of rice swimming in salted vegetable soup with bits of steamed egg aloft in it and then chase that with jumping and singing, I found myself thinking for a moment,
Perhaps I could do this.
And then half an hour later, when the jumping and singing continued, I thought,
Hmm, maybe not.
I hadn’t done much that day besides watch Auntie Khar Imm cook, but I was exhausted. I had no idea how Auntie Khar Imm and generations of housewives before her had pulled this off without dropping dead from exhaustion. Suddenly, motherhood seemed like a very noble calling, one far nobler than anything I’d ever endeavored.

Calling it a night, I said my good-byes. It wasn’t until I was almost home that I realized what had been missing. I’d been in Auntie Khar Imm’s home for the better part of the day—and not once had she offered to get me water or tea. I’d been there enough times by now; I was family. Not a guest anymore.

Meanwhile, on my mother’s side of the family, there was hardly any cooking going on. Everyone was consumed with one thing: a big family wedding.

When a man loves a woman, in Singapore, the courtship ritual often ends something like this: the man and his entourage pounding on his loved one’s door, waving red packets of money as bribes, demanding to “buy the bride.” Once they’re inside, a number of the dishes are set out, ranging from the sickeningly sweet to the downright vile.

The groom and groomsmen’s task is to consume what’s set before them with as much gusto as they can muster. Only then have they earned the right to claim the bride for the wedding to proceed. While it sounds like a prank, the practice actually is a legitimate part of Singaporean Chinese wedding tradition. By eating items that are
suan, tian, ku, la
(sour, sweet, bitter, and spicy), the groom is symbolically acknowledging that he expects to go through these phases with his bride in the years ahead. (Think of it as something of a literal take on the “for better or for worse” contract of Western marriages.)

I could say that the women involved in these proceedings often feel sorry for the poor sods—but I’d be lying. Any bridesmaid helping out with the
suan, tian, ku, la
bit relishes the opportunity to really stick it to the boys.

It had been years since I’d thought of this ritual. I’d been married for five years, and my marrying friends in New York certainly didn’t indulge in anything this masochistic. In our courtship, however, Mike had been informed of these Chinese wedding proceedings should he pop the question. Bravely, he decided to take the plunge anyway. The night Mike had proposed, I’d had an inkling that something was up. Before my trip to New York for the weekend, he informed me that he had made a reservation at One If by Land, Two If by Sea, a starched-tablecloth, candlelit restaurant in lower Manhattan that I discovered through a quick Google search was noteworthy at one point for being the setting for an average of twenty-four marriage proposals a week, so the story goes. We hadn’t been dating long, and I wasn’t sure what my answer would be.

In our short time together, Mike had become my best friend, my first true love, and a trusty older brother to my sister, who lived in New York, working as a hotel industry consultant. With no family in Manhattan, Daphne was regularly calling or e-mailing Mike, leaning on him with an easy comfort that had been there from the very start. On 9/11, as I raced around lower Manhattan reporting my front-page story for the
Baltimore Sun
and, when I could get a signal on my cell phone, calling only the paper’s rewrite desk to file dispatches—or Mike to ask for directions to Saint Vincent’s Hospital or where I might find a store to buy sneakers so I could ditch my heels—my sister and family had been beside themselves. They had no idea if I was alive or hurt. Even though Mike had just met me, he took it upon himself to handle my family—calling my sister to let her know I was okay. I was simply working. From that day, Daphne treated him like a brother.

I thought about 9/11 as my Amtrak train raced up the Atlantic to New York. I thought about how I knew Mike had already asked my sister if she was free later that night for after-dinner drinks. And I thought about how he had always treated my friends, my family, and me with such intense love and care. By the time I was seated at One If by Land, Two If by Sea, sipping the flute of champagne Mike had ordered for me, I was nervous.

The meal flew by uneventfully, however. I was so antsy, carefully inspecting every move Mike made, steeling myself each time he reached into his pocket for something, that I barely remember anything I ate. (If I have no recollection of a beef Wellington that’s passed my plate, you know that something is up.) When the bill had come and gone and still no velvet box had surfaced, I felt relieved. And then worried. What if I had been too presumptuous? What if he didn’t actually want to marry me?

We decided to take a walk along the water in Battery Park City. “The last time I was in this area, it was 9/11 and I was so scared,” I recalled as we strolled in the cool darkness, pausing to look out at the water and the Statue of Liberty glowing in the distance. “But you were there for me. It made me feel better.” Mike was silent. Slowly, he went down on one knee and pulled out a little black box. Nestled in the velvet pillow was a twinkling diamond ring. We hadn’t discussed rings at all before—yet somehow he had known that I was a solitaire (large, if you please) kind of girl. Of course, I said “Yes.”

Sixteen months later, on a sunny Valentine’s Day in 2004, Mike and I had the first of our two weddings. Against the canvas of a brilliantly clear blue sky with Diamond Head in the background, we proceeded to have what Jim, one of Mike’s best friends from college, called “the gayest straight wedding” he’d ever been to. My dear friend Victor, who had been with his partner Charles for more than a decade, draped a long, regal garland of orchids around his neck and officiated. Smitty and Rachelle, two women who loved each other with a gentle ferocity that made anyone around them feel privileged just to be in the presence of such intense devotion, read at the ceremony. Mike’s friend Jim, a Hollywood screenwriter who had recently come out, stood by his side as he watched me come down the orchid-lined grassy aisle. On my side of the wedding, next to Daphne and a phalanx of bridesmaids, stood my bridesman, Greg, who had been one of my dearest friends and confidants since he happened to sit beside me at my very first fashion show. After that fateful day, we would spend way too many evenings over the following years sitting at the Oak Room bar in Manhattan’s posh Plaza Hotel, huddled over sauvignon blancs, whispering as we pointed out which men at the bar we might consider “going with”—a term Greg prefers because, as he always says, “I’m a lady.”

My parents had flown to Honolulu from Singapore for the wedding—I wasn’t sure what they would make of the occasion. The modern Narciso Rodriguez dress I had chosen wasn’t a bridal gown—it just happened to be a white dress he had designed for his collection that season. And with its spaghetti-strapped halter top and revealing cut-out design that from the back made it look as if I might be wearing a bikini top paired with a long flowing skirt, the gown, though elegant, was a little racier than ones that most Singaporean brides wear. Mike and I had decided against a formal ceremony, choosing to write our own ceremony and vows—slipping in a line about believing in the basic right for everyone to marry, but also making it a brief affair that ended with Victor announcing, “I now present to you Mr. and Mrs. Cheryl Tan!” While there had been laughter all around, my parents’ faces had been grim. “How can you be so disrespectful?” my mother had quietly said, the first moment she could get me alone. “Mike is a man, you know. You must give him face.” And then there were our guests, a motley group of colleagues past and present and friends plucked from different stages of each of our lives. They had arrived from New York, Switzerland, Detroit, Phoenix. It was the first time my parents were meeting some of them, and I worried about how they would take to them. Although gay culture has become more mainstream in Singapore in recent years, it’s still not widely embraced, especially among those of my parents’ generation.

I had taken great care to include my Singaporean identity in my American wedding, however. Even though the Moana Surfrider Hotel, a grand colonial building that is the oldest hotel on Waikiki Beach, didn’t do Chinese meals for weddings at the time, I had insisted that the chef specially create a nine-course Chinese banquet for us. Midway through our banquet, I disappeared into the bridal suite to change into a scarlet dress, a nod to the lucky red cheongsams that Chinese-Singaporean brides wear. After the first course, I had gathered my Singaporean friends together to deliver the traditional toast of Chinese weddings in our homeland. Forming a circle, we raised our glasses high as we bellowed “
YUM SENG!
” (which means “drink all” in Cantonese) as loud as we could, dragging out the
yum
bit so it extended well over a minute, with people occasionally pausing to take a quick breath before jumping right back into the yelling. And knowing that my mother loved to sing old Chinese ballads by the Taiwanese pop singer Teresa Teng, I had made sure to give our deejay a disc of her songs, instructing him to not only play them but also encourage any singing that might erupt. Sure enough, the moment my mother heard the first notes of “The Moon Represents My Heart,” a gently lilting Teresa Teng song that she and I used to sing in her little gold Mazda as she shuttled me around Singapore from ballet classes to after-school Chinese tuition, she grabbed my hand and made for the deejay, gesturing for the mike.

“
Ni wen wo ai ni you duo shen, wo ai ni you ji fen,
” she softly sang, firmly holding my hand and looking at me. “
Wo de qing ye zhen, wo de ai ye zhen. Yue liang dai biao wo de xing
.”

You ask me how deeply I love you, how much I really love you.

My feelings are true, my love is true.

The moon represents my heart.

I had had my concerns about the wedding in Honolulu—when my parents visited me in New York or Washington, D.C., they had met and spent time with my American friends. But they certainly hadn’t shared entire days and evenings with them as they were doing in Honolulu, where Mike and I had planned group trips to essential stops like Diamond Head or Lanikai Beach, a somewhat secluded tranquil spot that’s often largely devoid of tourists. Through these excursions and meals, my parents were learning about my life and how I interacted with my friends—the fact that I occasionally swore like a pirate; that I tend to use the word “like” a little too often. While I still spoke to my parents in the British-inflected English that I had grown up using, in the United States, my American accent was flawless—I had frequently been told I sounded like a California girl.

How would my parents feel about the life I had chosen—who their daughter had turned into on this foreign shore? Holding my mother’s hand as she sang to me with my smiling father and sister looking on, however, my anxieties faded. They were happy—and they were happy for me. And that was all the reassurance I needed.

You ask me how deep my love is for you, how much I really love you.

My feelings will not waver, my love will not change.

The moon represents my heart.

The following Saturday, we were scheduled to do it all over again in Singapore—this time with a traditional Chinese tea ceremony at which I wore a red cheongsam. And a traditional Chinese banquet, albeit one that turned out to be not so traditional, since my father planned it. (The first indication of this was that he had taken a cue from our Hawaiian wedding and planned a first dance. When we sat down with the Grand Hyatt’s wedding planner to go over the schedule for the evening, she had asked which song Mike and I would like for our first dance. In Honolulu, it had been “Twilight Time” by The Platters, which had figured prominently in a rather romantic episode of
The X-Files
we had watched together over the phone one night while dating long-distance. Before we could say anything, however, my father jumped in. “ ‘Endless Love’! That’s one of my favorite songs,” he said. So “Endless Love” it was.)