by Mimi Kwa
We text back and forth, as usual getting nowhere. He says things like ‘old man knows best’, ‘you are young and stupid’ and ‘the real Boss has spoken’. He’s bamboozling me, and it works.
Dad’s last message for the day, Three blind monkey, refers to me, Adrian and Jerome.
Dad arrives in Manila. I text him again.
Hi Dad, I would just like to speak to Aunty. I was devastated you didn’t take me to hk to see or say goodbye to Aunty Mary before she died. I would like it very much if you could help me and not obstruct me getting in touch with Aunty Theresa now.
Dad: Miss Kwa is not allowed to talk to anyone. Re Mary Kwa. Please get your fact straight. If I had taken you there what could you have done anyway? I do not expect a medical problem with Miss Kwa. Water on duck’s back.
Dad gets the expression wrong as well as Aunty’s diagnosis, and after this he doesn’t call or answer calls, text or answer texts.
So I call my cousin David, wishing I had done so sooner. ‘David, what’s going on? Have you spoken to Brigit?’
‘No, she doesn’t answer. I got through to the hospital but got cut off, and your father doesn’t return my calls. He keeps sending me messages that Aunty is completely fine.’
David shares Brigit’s number with me, and she picks up first time.
‘Hello, Meeee-meeee.’ It’s wonderful to hear her voice. ‘I asked your father to get you to call me, Mimi.’
‘You did?’
‘Yes, your aunty, so, so sick, you must come. I don’t know what to do, Mimi. It is the cancer, Mimi. It is the cancer.’
All I can hear is sobbing over the phone now. I’m around the side of the house, away from the kids, and I sit down on the concrete and cry with her. ‘I am coming, Brigit. I will be there soon.’
The summer day is a scorcher, but I stay outside. I dial David again and pace up and down the driveway shared with our neighbours. Their autistic son sways by their washing line, watching me with interest. The other neighbour’s dogs bark through the fence at me, and I try to shush them.
‘I’m on the next plane already,’ David says. ‘I board in an hour.’
I am so relieved he’ll be there with Aunty, and I won’t be far behind. It will give Aunty such comfort having him there, her closest nephew.
It seems there’s nothing for me to do but wait until my flight departs in the morning. But in the middle of the bedtime drill, my phone pings with a text.
Dad: This is very expensive message to send you from Philippine. Your Aunty is pass away.
Mason, who is seven, thinks I have fallen over and hurt myself. ‘Are you okay, Mummy?’
I feel numb. My flight is at 7 am and already I’m too late for Aunty. The dragon plagues my nightmares.
Before the sun rises, I kiss the kids goodbye as they sleep. John wakes to ask if I’m sure he can’t take me to the airport; my mum could mind the kids. ‘No. I love you.’ I need to be alone in my grief.
The only thing that buoys me up is knowing David must have made it in time. His flight only took two hours, so he will have been by Aunty’s side – holding her hand, whispering funny memories, comforting her, telling her, ‘It’s going be alright.’
There’s been a light shower overnight, in the middle of summer. I look out the taxi window at a rainbow. It’s Aunty.
In the Qantas lounge, someone kind ushers me to a private partitioned room, and they also shuffle the seating arrangement on the plane to make sure I’m as far from other passengers as possible so my grief can be quarantined.
I emerge from the gate at Manila airport, but there’s no whiteboard sign with my name written on it. I scour the drivers’ faces, but none are looking for me. Outside, in the stinking hot blanket of humidity, I call Dad. No answer, so I text.
After I’ve waited over an hour, not sure whether to smoke, drink or both, a new driver of Aunty’s walks towards me. He is teary and introduces himself as Jay. We shake hands and walk to the car in silence, his shoulders slumped in exhaustion, presumably from ferrying everyone around. He opens the passenger side door.
‘Get in, get in,’ says Dad.
‘Dad, what happened? Aunty has died. Tell me about last night. What happened? Did she speak to you and David? Was she in pain? What happened? How did she die?’
‘I wasn’t with her. I was at Greenhills. It’s the shopping mall. I was getting my watch fixed.’
‘You were what?’
‘I had to get my watch fixed.’
‘Dad.’ I am in utter disbelief. ‘Okay, so David was with her, then. Please tell me she had David with her. ‘
‘No. David didn’t make it in time.’
I look in the rear-view mirror at Jay. He is crying and shaking.
We’re on our way to the chapel. Manila traffic, excruciating at the best of times, seems to slow even more during this personal crisis. How anyone gets anything done here is beyond me. We pass shantytowns where babies are being bathed in ice-cream tubs on the side of the road. I continue to stare out the window while Dad spends the hour-long ride trying to butter me up by telling me Aunty Theresa has left me everything. I should have twigged by now that he is up to something, but I’m too distraught that Aunty died without family around her.
At the Roman Catholic ‘chapel of rest’, I go straight to the mourning room where Aunty must lie in an open casket – in state – for five days while friends and family keep up a twenty-four hour vigil by her side. The room is filled with more than a dozen people I don’t know. Then I see Brigit. Embracing, we sob inconsolably for what seems like years but in reality is only a minute. I stand by the elaborate coffin, almost too scared to look in.
People sidle up to me and offer, ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ and ‘Doesn’t she look peaceful?’ And I feel like retorting, ‘No. She looks dead and nothing like herself at all. I would like to grieve alone.’ Then I want to shout, ‘She wasn’t your aunty. She was mine. I loved her more than you did. I don’t want to share her with you. Go away.’ Instead, I smile and nod politely. The strangers are staying whether Aunty and I want them there or not.
She really doesn’t look at all like herself – she would never do her hair and make-up like that. What would BOAC say about this Imelda Marcos look? She does seem younger, I’ll admit that, but that dress and those white stockings . . . and why are her shoes off? I stare at her feet, and a stranger interrupts my inner voice to jovially tell me, ‘She must not wear shoes in the casket because her spirit may need to wear the shoes so we can hear it walk around in the night.’
Oh, of course. That makes sense. ‘Thank you.’ I smile and nod. Why is everyone so goddamned happy?
I catch sight of David, and for a moment we stare at each other, needing no words; she meant just as much to both of us.
As he fills me in on Aunty’s last hours, how he left Sam in Hong Kong tied up with work and rushed here on the first flight only to wait more than an hour to be collected from the airport, I have another slow-motion, surreal moment of disbelief. Like me, David was left waiting at the arrivals terminal for Jay the driver, only at that stage Aunty was still alive. ‘Uncle Francis was getting his watch fixed at Greenhills, and he insisted Jay wait for him.’
The pain of not being there with Aunty in her last hours rips through me, repeatedly. I’m flooded with memories of me, a little girl, following Aunty along the beach, copying her dainty swagger, both of us in bikinis, Aunty attracting admiring looks wherever she went, the club, the club sandwiches, the shop and the hotel. The woman who showed me the world through her eyes and who never stopped having dreams for her niece.
Dad and I take food from the wake back to Aunty’s condo, where Dad has been staying for days. In the lift, a well-meaning stranger gives some cheery advice. ‘It’s bad luck to bring food home from the open-casket room. A pit stop en route is absolutely necessary to shake off any spirits you may have picked up from the coffin. I hope your driver told you.’ Too late now. In Aunty’s bathroom I roll my eyes at myself in
the mirror. How will I get through this? I shower to get rid of the bad luck and spirits, then go straight to sleep.
Brigit is the most dedicated of us all, staying with Aunty’s body around the clock, twenty-four seven, for five days. Members of Brigit’s family, here from her village to lend support, take over from her whenever she comes home briefly to wash and change into fresh clothes. No one is allowed to brush their hair in the room with Aunty – if they do, they will die – so obviously Brigit must come home to brush her hair too. I don’t tell her I brought food back without making a pit stop; that might well and truly tip her over the edge, she’s so fragile. I’m bound to break another rule and end up dead or plagued with coffin spirits for eternity.
Dad’s wife, Karen, will arrive tomorrow. They’re checking in to a hotel, at my insistence, which is a huge relief. I want the whole funeral, and Aunty, to myself – to grieve alone in her house, surrounded by everything that reminds me of her.
Dad is hung up on that ‘one per cent more’ for Brigit in Aunty’s will.
The dragon circles, trouble brews, and I pace with anxiety. Aunty was trying to send a message from the grave to her siblings about Brigit. The one per cent more is a sign of Aunty’s love – a cryptic Kwa show of respect – but to Francis it’s a ticking time bomb. If Theresa was using her Last Will and Testament to give Brigit the last word, it is not working out how Aunty planned.
The executors swoop in: two trusted friends appointed by Theresa to manage her Philippines estate. Letty, is the dean of a prestigious ladies’ college, while Tessie heads a corporation employing tens of thousands of staff. They are highly respected, super-accomplished women, undoubtedly Aunty’s link to the diocese archbishop who blessed her before she died. Yet however well connected these executors are, they are not well versed in House of Kwa.
Aunty was neurotic about her things ending up in the right hands. Not only did she rewrite her will repeatedly, she has three of them: one for her Hong Kong estate, one for her estate in the Philippines, and one for an apartment in Perth. Three wills like her father’s three wives. I am her executor in Australia, and David is her trusted overseer in Hong Kong. She changed her wills so frequently in the two decades before she died, she would have been an estate lawyer’s dream but for the free legal advice available within the family. David and his brother Steven, both lawyers, would roll their eyes as they opened each new revision – another of dear Aunty’s wills to proof. After my cousins were done, she would send me copies to put in my safe.
Brigit takes me through the condo, room by room, outlining Aunty’s wishes for various items. The painting above her bed is to go to a particular nun in Italy, a small Ming Dynasty urn is for a professor in Thailand, a doctor in Hong Kong was promised the antique jade lion, and so on. Aunty wanted David to have her monogrammed silver cutlery, and promised that Brigit could keep the sewing machine and Jay the stereo.
Letty and Tessie agree that Theresa had indeed told them Brigit would know which decorative items should go to whom. But the will refers to a list of wishes no one can find: photographs of furniture, ornaments and jewellery with names of intended recipients written on the back. I search all the rooms and then revisit them, opening cupboards and draws, fossicking through the same things again and again like a madwoman.
I find photo albums, old negatives and newspaper clippings: marvellous windows to Aunty’s life, and to Dad’s, Mary’s and Clara’s. Theresa looks so glamorous in these black-and-white shots, and I hadn’t known about the magazine and newspaper articles in which she features. There’s even a six-page spread on Hong Kong with Theresa as the travel guide. And it’s in the May 1965 British Woman’s Weekly, the Western world’s most widely read magazine at the time – with all the articles written by men.
I sip on a glass of bad wine that teetotaller Aunty had hidden in a glass case: Break in case of emergency. Well, Aunty, this is an emergency.
I marvel at the breadth of her career. She never walked me through her life the way I’m walking through it now.
The more awful wine I consume, the more self-indulgent this exercise becomes. I recall how Aunty would kick me under the table if I wasn’t sitting straight, only needing to look at me sharply for a nanosecond to let me know I’d said too much or spoken too emotively. ‘Don’t smile too much – you want to stay smooth, smooth,’ she would coach, rubbing my forehead with her thumb. Expression lines were a big no-no of Aunty’s. She tried her very best to help me to behave in a dignified manner: kind, patient, smart and well turned out. Poor Aunty, hoping the hopes she had for us all. What disappointments we must have been.
I chuckle again.
‘You can be a diplomat or a politician,’ she would tell me. Only last year, she reassured me my career in journalism could still lead to something ‘more respectable’. From her study in Manila, Aunty would watch me read the world news out of Melbourne. ‘That lipstick really is too red,’ she once called to tell me, just as I came off air from anchoring the live international bulletin that reached forty countries, including the Philippines; she added that ‘this trunk call is very expensive, very expensive’, but that it was certainly ‘very important’. A gross lipstick misdemeanour would have cost Theresa her job at BOAC. ‘How can it be you will be invited back to read the news with lipstick so bright?’ I laugh out loud again at the memory. She sent me jewellery and scarves to wear on air, our secret sign as I presented to audiences across the globe, though I only ever felt I was talking to her.
It’s getting late, and the wine remains terrible no matter how much I drink. The funeral is tomorrow. I need to write Aunty’s eulogy.
Francis Tak Lau Kwa and Clara Wai Mui Kwa, Ng Yuk’s last remaining of thirty-two brothers and sisters, are about to be reunited over their beloved sister Theresa’s dead body.
SOMBREROS AND BELLHOP
EVERYONE IS ON THEIR BEST BEHAVIOUR BEFORE AUNTY IS put to rest, even Dad. The coffin-side circus continues as more random people show up – distant relatives of Brigit, friends of friends – the wake room a revolving door of well-wishers keen to honour Theresa’s departure for the next life. It’s the festival of Theresa with a packed audience and standing room only. The lucky eight rows of plastic chairs are all taken. Garlands and posies line the walls, while ribboned boxes of cumbersome and constrained flower arrangements adorn a number of trestle tables.
Theresa looks out from her portrait beside her coffin. She’s on a yacht, wearing a white windcheater and a smile. Through her lightly tinted sunglasses her eyes are visible, crinkled in the corners. In this moment she is free.
Some visitors have been paying their respects by camping out with the vigil stalwarts as per local custom, inhabiting an annex off the main room with its bleak brown wallpaper. Maroon vinyl cushions stick to the bare thighs of visitors in shorts. Brigit and her family have set up beds here too, their sleeping-bags and pillows strewn about for round-the-clock shifts.
Dad arrives with Karen. In the lead-up to the funeral, he came to Aunty’s condo a couple of times in order to lord it over me. Now he sidles up to a man and, for the benefit of the whole room, tells him, ‘It’s all mine.’ And ignoring my glare, Dad moves down the line to ensure no one misses out on his news. ‘Everything, she leaves everything to me.’
I’ve had numerous meetings with funeral directors and Aunty’s local executors, and I’ve pointed repeatedly to the clause in Aunty’s will saying that she wants ‘no service’ and ‘no fanfare’ at all. ‘No, nooooo,’ the Filipinas say. ‘Mimi, you muuuust give her a big send-off. She would loooove that. With music and a parade and a proper ceremony. Mimi, you cannot doooo that to your aunty. To ignore her like that and not do the proper send-off. Oh, Mimi, it is so wrong.’
In the end I agree to follow local custom and, in doing so, watch the bills stack up – an invoice for everything from entertainment and audiovisual equipment, to the urn for Aunty’s ashes, not to mention commemorative programs and funeral DVDs for the hundreds of people who, I am as
sured, will demand a copy. The Filipina executors have made me the ‘honorary decision-maker’, so I can consent to all the choices they have already made. They are persuasive, and I am worn down. ‘Mimiiii, we must have more flowers. More, more – of course we must.’ And, ‘Oooooooh, this urn is sooooo much nicer, don’t you think?’
David provides me some solace in this upside-down place, and now Sam has arrived in Manila too, these days a cherished son-in-law to Clara after years of gentle petitioning succeeded in turning her homophobia around. Between sneaking off with me for cigarettes and emptying his hipflask into my orange juice, my cousin counsels me to stay calm and on track – which is good advice, given funeral proceedings are about to commence. I look over at David to see him watching his mum prattle on in a similar way to a stranger, and I remind myself he has his own Kwa to deal with.
Clara arrived from London last night after a long flight. She and her son walking arm in arm was a sight to behold; David is tall and handsome, six foot six, like his brother and father, and Clara is refined, beautiful and diminutive beside him. Thin yet strong, she’s all in black with a single thick gold chain around her neck, her hair styled in a chic pixie cut straight from the ’60s. She’s a gorgeous, frail and elegant eighty-one-year-old beauty, and anyone uninitiated with Kwa would find it impossible to imagine what a both harsh and blessed life she has lived. Clara gestures to Sam, who is walking behind them, and he steps in to take her other arm. I think about how handsome Clara and Dad look, and how lost without Theresa they must feel.
A priest stands in front of Aunty’s coffin, reciting a few words about God and about this lady he has never met.
I’m the only person wearing colour. First of all, in my hurry I forgot to pack anything black. Second, I’m not ready to raid Aunty’s wardrobe just yet. And third, Aunty is wearing bright pink, and I always follow her lead. I don’t want her to feel out of place or alone. If only we could be back tossing sand with our flip-flops on the Repulse Bay beach, making our way over to the club for its famed sandwiches, while Aunty graciously acknowledges cheeky wolf-whistles from old friends, me stumbling in her shadow to keep up.