Last Tang Standing

by Ho, Lauren

  “Er, no. Please enlighten me.”

  Genevieve’s voice trembled with emotion. “It’s the Excel spreadsheet containing years of painstaking research and distillation of data on the appropriate amount one should give at any special occasion in Singapore, depending on the venue, the setting, the status of the host, the guests, and whether you are going alone or with a plusone. I sent it out last year with a link to the shared drive, so the whole office could get educated! Never be caught unawares ever again! It’s foolproof!”

  “It really is very complete. She covers Chinese New Year, weddings, funerals, special occasions, and she updates the rates yearly,” Kai chimed in.

  Suresh gave her a blank look.

  “So you’ve not heard of my matrix?” Genevieve asked incredulously.

  “Er, no,” Suresh repeated. I could tell he thought we were all off our rockers, but he was a nice British boy with public school manners, so he asked the only open-ended question that one could ask given the aforementioned facts: “Special occasions? Such as?”

  “Chinese bar mitzvahs; second marriages; tooth fairy visitations. Everything.” Genevieve was smug.

  “Right,” Suresh said. “And, ah, what happens if you, ah, deviate from the market rate?”

  Genevieve patted his arm. “My friend, let me tell you a horror story of my own. Three years ago, my first child, Gwendolyn, lost her first milk tooth. She still believed in the tooth fairy then, so my husband and I put five dollars under her pillow.”

  “Wow, that’s a lot,” Suresh said. “All I got from the lousy English tooth fairy was fifty pence.”

  Genevieve tittered darkly. “Oh, Suresh, Suresh, Suresh. We both thought it was a good amount of money for a rotten bit of calcium, too, but we were wrong! Turns out that when Gwennie went to school the next day and told her friends what the tooth fairy had given her, she was laughed at by Aspen, the granddaughter of some Tan Sri[fn1] in Malaysia. It seems that the going rate for tooth fairy payouts in Gwennie’s private school is now twenty Sing dollars! And Aspen, that little brat, got three hundred American dollars for her piggy bank! What a way to spoil the market.[fn2] Gwennie was simply devastated. It took her weeks of therapy to get over the shame of being known as the poor kid in school.” She shuddered. “Anyway, Suresh, heed my words: respect the market rate, if you wish to be respected.”

  Later, safe in our office, Suresh turned to me and said, “I never thought I’d hear the word ‘payout’ being used in the context of a tooth fairy’s visit.”

  “Just wait till you see her full moon and baby shower tab and you’ll understand why more and more Singaporeans are not reproducing,” I said.

  “Decent people like us should be the ones reproducing instead of Genevieve,” he said offhandedly, but that throwaway comment was enough for my romance-starved imagination to start cranking out scenarios where we … never mind.

  God, I need a new distraction.

  3:45 p.m. Ask and the universe provides. Got a text from Valerie. Turns out the weird gathering she was hoping to bring me to has a spot for me, and I’ve been “preapproved to come as a guest of hers this one time.” She told me to keep this Saturday evening free and to “dress nice.”

  What kind of gathering is it? I asked her with trepidation.

  A book club.

  That’s it? A lousy book club?

  Look, you totally have to go to this one, she wrote. Even if you’re not into books.

  I made sure to read her text twice, in case my eyesight was failing. Then I replied: Even if you don’t like books? Isn’t that the whole point of a book club?

  She called me immediately.

  “Look, slowpoke, this is obviously no ordinary book club,” said Valerie. “It’s the people, the place. It’ll be my first time, too, and I had to be pre-screened, wait-listed—”

  Pre-screened? What?

  She was babbling on. “—and the only reason spots opened up is because someone died from cocaine overdose in Barbados, isn’t that great? I mean, not about the death obvs, but because I’m in! And someone else is out of town so I’m allowed to bring a guest, hurrah! Anyways, it’s hosted in this mad beautiful house on Jervois Hill. The owner is subletting it to an actress friend of mine who used to swing with a Malaysian prince, you know the one …” She named the prince nonchalantly. Just the sort of status-trumpeting factoid you would expect from Valerie.

  “Sounds tempting,” I said. “Will I be expected to participate in any ritual sacrifices after reading aloud from the Satanic Bible? Or am I the ritual sacrifice? I have to warn you, I’m not a virgin.”

  “Hardy-har-har,” she said dryly. “Well, I can’t promise there won’t be any devil-worship, considering that crowd. Listen, jokes aside, you have to come. It’s like a Who’s Who of the Singaporean elite. You’ll be hobnobbing with career deciders. Who knows, maybe you’ll even meet your future husband.” A singles mixer in a sect, nothing fancy.

  “Must I?” I said. It was rhetorical though—she had me at “prince’s swinging buddy.” I could pull a Magnus and marry wealthy.

  “I’ll pick you up at seven o’clock. Start with some champers in the car.”

  “Sounds extravagant.”

  “Oh yeah? Wait till you get there. DeeDee told me they serve vintage champagne and oysters before starting.”

  I hooted. “Wow! Is this a black-tie event or a book club?”

  “This is how they roll, so try not to embarrass me, OK?” she huffed. “Oh, by the way, you’re expected to have read A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara.”

  “Sure, how long is it? I’ll Kindle it.”

  “Eight hundred pages.”

  “I’ll just read the synopsis.”

  Tuesday 1 March

  8:20 a.m. Was distracted at work today by a very loud conversation that Suresh was having with his fiancée, Anousha, the hotshot ob-gyn.

  I put in my earphones and turned up the volume to give him some privacy, but I couldn’t help overhearing him say, “Five bedrooms? What are we going to do with a five-bedroom house in Chiswick … no dogs, Noushie, I can’t … you said you would move to Singapore … No, we talked about this. What do your parents mean by … well, I told you many times that I don’t care that you’re not Brahmin.”

  This hushed, agitated conversation went on for another ten minutes before I heard him slam down the phone.

  “What’s up?” I asked innocently. “How’s Nou—I mean, Anousha doing?”

  Suresh gave a snort of frustration and started pacing the room. “Anousha’s just dropped a bombshell on me. It’s her parents. She says that they want to buy us a house in London as ‘dowry.’” He used air quotes, quite charmingly I must say.

  “Wow. A house as a dowry?” I whistled. “That’s a bit much, isn’t it? Not that I’d have a problem saying no to a house. And forgive me for being rude, why are your parents still asking for dowry? I mean, you’re acceptable-looking and all …” I trailed off.

  He stopped pacing to throw a pencil at me. “We didn’t ask for a dowry; we specifically said we didn’t want one. Both my and Anousha’s parents are relatively nontraditional, so I thought we were past that. Anyway, as for getting a house as a ‘dowry,’ if you knew what it meant you’d reject it like I plan to ask my parents to. As a gift, it’s way too much, especially since they aren’t giving us an investment property but a marital home!”

  “What’s the reason for such a crazy generous dow—I mean, gift?” I couldn’t understand his displeasure. I wouldn’t mind me a five-bedder in Chiswick: I hear it’s quite gentrified.

  He made an impatient noise and continued pacing. “The excuse is, she’s not Brahmin and I am, so they are ‘making up for it.’”

  “Pardon my ignorance, but why does this matter in this day and age?”

  “It doesn’t, not to me, but for many Indians, even those who have migrated overseas, the caste system still matters when determining the suitability of a romantic partner. And the Brahmin are the highest of the four
castes.”

  “I don’t get it. Your parents are fine about her not being Brahmin, right? I mean, they accepted the match after all.”

  “It doesn’t matter too much to my parents, or they would have said something when we started dating. Maybe it mattered to my mother, but as soon as she found out that Noushie was an ob-gyn, she basically said, it’s fine, we’re just one caste level apart anyway. This is the twenty-first century.” He smiled wryly. “I know and she knows what they are really after, which is for me to move back to the UK. Her parents are using this as leverage to keep their precious daughter in England.” His voice was rough with suppressed anger and I could see a large vein throbbing in his neck. It was a little unsettling to see Suresh display any negative emotion—he was so nice.

  “At least you get a house out of this,” I said soothingly. “The last time I was engaged all I got was the emotional scars to show for it. Big whoop.”

  It worked. He stopped pacing. “You were engaged?” he said, in the tone of someone who had just discovered that a rat he had run over with his bike was, in fact, still alive and was now snacking on his bike tires, despite half its intestines lying on the road.

  “Yes.” It didn’t hurt anymore, but thinking about Ivan still rankled.

  “What happened?” Suresh asked. “I mean, if it’s not too personal a question to ask.”

  “I need to be drunk to tell the story, so you’re going to have to buy me a few drinks first.”

  Suresh grinned. “It’s a date. Anyway, I’m sure it’s his loss.”

  I thought about this. Ivan was definitely doing better than my voodoo doll version of him was. He’d been promoted (according to his latest LinkedIn update) and profiled by a couple of publications as being some hotshot investment guru. No reason to let Suresh know the truth though, since I didn’t trust him. I decided to change the subject. “It sure is. But let’s concentrate on your problems for now.”

  “It’s a conundrum that shouldn’t be, you know? We’d always said that after our engagement, Anousha would move to Singapore and join me. It makes the most sense for both our careers. So here’s the thing that worries me: I don’t think it’s just her parents wanting her to stay in London instead of moving to Singapore—it’s her as well. It feels like it’s coming from her.”

  “It’s your own fault, you know. You should have married a non-Indian woman. That would have solved the dowry problem altogether,” I blurted.

  Silence. Suresh was now looking at me like I was the rat he had run over, which had now given birth to a litter of rat babies on his Tod’s suede shoes, despite its spilled entrails hardening in the midday sun.

  “Er, joking,” I said, flushing and dropping my eyes. I began to peck blindly at my keyboard, pretending to be engrossed in an email. Here I go again, becoming too familiar with the enemy.

  Just when I thought he’d really taken offense at my comment, he spoke up.

  “You know what? It seems strange to hear this, but I’ve never even given seriously dating a non-Indian real thought,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, I love Anousha, but she’s quite literally the epitome of a good Indian girl from a good family, and that’s what I’d always assumed … no, know my parents would want for me. I’m sure that if I ever dated anyone that didn’t fit this mold, especially if it’s someone from another race …” He shrugged. “Well, I don’t think my parents would be too pleased about that prospect, to put it very mildly.”

  “My parents would flip out if I dated someone from another race,” I admitted. “It’s strange, isn’t it, how this form of racism is still accepted under the guise of ensuring that the new addition to your family has a ‘similar cultural background and value system’? I have very little in common with an ethnic Chinese who’s spent all his life in Vietnam, for example. Yet somehow …”

  “We’re expected to understand each other just because we have the same skin tone and features,” he finished. “Look, I don’t know you very well, but I think we definitely have more in common than you would with that Vietnamese man.”

  “True,” I said, thinking of Kamarul and my sister.

  “She doesn’t find my comic strip any good,” he said, out of the blue. “Anousha. She thinks it’s juvenile.”

  “Hmm,” I replied, storing this tidbit away for further (nefarious) use.

  Suresh appeared lost in thought. I looked at my desktop digital counter—I couldn’t reasonably bill this last fifteen minutes of conversation to my client, but I could mark it down in my timesheet as “knowledge management” (non-billable but a respectable code). Happy with my genius, I went back to kicking Suresh’s ass. Metaphorically.

  10

  Wednesday 2 March

  7:10 a.m. Woke up this morning to a text from Orson. It said:

  Hope I din anythin wrong cz I hvnt heard bak abt tat lunch/diner date tmw, iz on?

  Linda’s right. I can’t date him; he can barely spell.

  9:05 a.m. Texted him back on WhatsApp to confirm our lunch date, which he confirmed enthusiastically (meaning he has absolutely no game, which is awesome). Thank God for instant messaging, which has done away with the whole waiting-by-the-phone nonsense. Nowadays even a delay of thirty minutes in answering an email is enough to set your colleagues’ teeth on edge, and not IMing back someone who fancies you when you have your Last Seen time-stamp mode on can be tantamount to mental harm.

  When I texted Linda to tell her, she exploded into a screen confetti of disapproving and red-faced emojis in our WhatsApp chat, followed by angry animated feral cat stickers in our Line app. Then she broadcasted her barely coded disapproval to our chat group by captioning a picture of a durian with “It’s gonna fucking hurt when it lands on your thick head, Andrea!” just in case I didn’t catch her drift. I wished she would pick up the phone and tell me off directly like she used to in the good old days. Whatever happened to direct gladiatorial confrontation, mano a mano, the way we used to do in the noughties?

  Anyway, I’m insulted that Linda thinks I’m no match for the crafty wiles of a millennial hipster munchkin. After all, we’ve survived dial-up internet, ’90s television, and the days when shoulder pads were acceptable. We can overcome anything.

  11:40 p.m. Have been working nonstop since 6:00 p.m., after a client sent us a panicked email asking us to handle an urgent matter (nothing is ever non-urgent with clients—nothing). Can feel low-level hysteria enveloping me as I contemplate the flood of snippy emails from the London firm representing the other party to the deal—there is probably no chance of seeing my own bed till 3:00 a.m. How am I supposed to plan my outfit?

  Thursday 3 March

  1:55 a.m. OMG I’M FINALLY HOME WHY THE HELL DID I BECOME AN M&A LAWYER #fmltothemax

  5:50 a.m. Woke up in a blind panic thinking I had overslept. No such luck. I’m due back in the office for a conference call at 8:00 a.m. FML!

  7:50 a.m. The clients just canceled the conference call even though I’d been preparing for the call for hours.

  8:15 a.m. Woke up with a start when Suresh gently patted my arm, smirking. Turned out I’d been drooling on my keyboard. Great, sleeping in front of the enemy, how very alpha of you, Andrea. And now I have keyboard face. FML!

  10:05 a.m. Can still see faint outline of keyboard on my face. Damn my flagging collagen production!

  10:20 a.m. Read online that the most foolproof way to younger-looking skin is to drink at least two liters of water a day.

  10:25 a.m. Bought two large bottles of sparkling water and started to chug water like wine.

  10:45 a.m. Finished second bottle of sparkling water. Might have overdone it, as now I need to pee badly but am restraining myself as constantly needing the loo—I mean, toilet is a sign of weakness, or at the very least a weak bladder. In any case, the water appears to have filled out my skin cells. Now I can have my date with Orson without looking like SpongeBob SquarePants.

  11:07 a.m. It’s no use. I need the washroom. The alternative involves a change of clothi
ng I do not have.

  11:15 a.m. Peed like a racehorse, or how I imagine racehorses to pee.

  11:35 a.m. Peed again.

  11:50 a.m. And again. That’ll show me to drink water.

  12:10 p.m. Lunchtime. Panicked dash out of office. We’re supposed to meet for lunch at Quinn’s, a (real) salad bar (not my Vietnamese deli) close by. It was a deliberate choice on my part to do lunch. Orson had to see me in daylight sooner or later, and there is nothing less flattering to an older woman’s face and neck than harsh noon daylight, aside from maybe the fluorescent lighting in prisons and the restrooms in petrol stations. All the Crème de la Meh will not make a bulldog look like a Chihuahua, is what Linda likes to say (but not in Valerie’s hearing, because Valerie does believe that she can indeed freeze time with her potions, if not turn it back half a dial at the very least).

  2:15 p.m. Just back from fun lunch. As usual I was running late, thanks to work. When I arrived, panting and disheveled, I saw that he was already seated in a booth. I took a steadying breath and walked in with the confidence of a woman with a thigh gap. Orson grinned when he saw me and we exchanged air kisses.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  “No worries,” he said, waving my protests away. “I just got here. What would you like for lunch?”

  I remembered that he had bought me drinks at LGA. “No, it’s my treat today,” I said firmly, waving my purse in the air.

  “But—”

  “Let me.” I repeated, narrowing my eyes before I could stop myself. Dear God, I was scary. He held up his hands in mock surrender and gave me his order.

  Anyway. Soon I was seated in front of Orson and his sleek black hair.

  “So …,” he began. “Er, you look nice. I like your watch and shirt. Very chic.”