by Tiffany Tsao
Our aunt was looking as glamorous as ever. She was wearing a Pucci-print dress, and her hair was coiffed into a lion’s mane. You’d never have guessed in a million years that she was fifty-one. With her eyes rimmed in black liner, she looked almost like a Chinese Sophia Loren, which was perhaps what she was going for, since her current husband, Salvatore (her third), was an Italian count. How they’d met, we weren’t quite sure; the exact details surrounding this latest marriage were rather hazy, as were the details of her previous marriage, and her first marriage, and the divorces that had followed each one.
She certainly had a type: minor aristocrats from Europe, which wasn’t that surprising when one considered how much time she spent there liaising with Sulinado Group’s partners in textiles and agribusiness. The husbands were interchangeable: gray at the temples and blue in the eyes, with good looks, good manners, and expensive hobbies like polo playing and collecting seventeenth-century French cravats. I’m sure our aunt’s good looks had played a role in attracting them, but her more material charms had made them especially eager to tie the knot. Poor things. The wedding vows never benefitted them as much as they’d hoped. Our aunt was far too smart not to insist on ironclad prenuptial agreements.
Tante Margaret had just started ranting about the impossibility of finding “real” cheese in Jakarta when, out of nowhere, she asked, “And how are you doing these days, Stell? Is everything okay?”
The abrupt shift startled both my sister and me. On the surface, our aunt’s tone was earnest, as were her blinking eyes. The veneer of genuine concern irritated me nonetheless. As if Tante Margaret actually wanted to know. As if any of the family did. As if anyone desired an answer other than “Don’t worry, I’m fine.”
But as usual, Estella obliged. “Don’t worry, I’m fine,” she said.
I opened my mouth to say something, but Estella diverted the conversation back to the city’s dearth of Roquefort suppliers.
Opa eventually nodded off to sleep, and on Tante Margaret’s signal, New Oma rose and led us upstairs into a suite of empty bedrooms. They were meant for relatives or guests who wished to spend the night. No one ever did.
This corner of the house functioned as a storage area for what remained of Oma’s personal possessions—the clothes, magazines, toiletries, and assorted other items that no one could be bothered to sort through after her death. They had been tossed indiscriminately into cardboard boxes, sealed with tape, and left to gather dust. New Oma led us now to a sort of oversized dressing room, judging by the built-in closets and its adjacency to a bathroom. Green curtains of rough silk framed the window on the wall to our left, and against the wall to our right were Oma’s boxes, stacked in columns two meters high. In the center of the room stood an enormous lacquered armoire, decorated with peonies of gold and white. I was pleased to discover it had survived the cull; I remembered it from childhood, when it had lived in our grandparents’ bedroom. After dinner, Oma would open the armoire doors wide, flop back in the armchair by the bed, and turn us loose. Spreading open brocade-bound albums and scattering unhoused photos over the plush Oriental carpet, we would assemble the jigsaw puzzle of our family’s past.
“When was this, Oma? Who was this, Oma?” we would ask, our questions clamorous and insistent. Oma’s laughter came in merry peals like a bell, jingly and high and sweet as a grandmother’s should be.
“Let me see it,” she would say. We would carry the photo in question to her and climb into her lap to nestle in the billowy folds of her batik housedress and the soft, squishy body beneath; to inhale the rose-scented soap and talcum powder that evoked cakes and cleanliness and safety. Gently, she would take the photo from us and squint. Then the story would come: sometimes long, sometimes short, depending on the photo and the vividness of her memory. At first, we would bring her photos we’d never asked about before, but after satisfying our desire for novelty, we would fall back on our favorites—the ones we had brought to her innumerable times before and would bring to her innumerable times again so that we could hear from her the stories we loved best.
“Ah,” she would sigh, when Tante Betty’s oldest, Christopher, brought her the black-and-white portrait of Oma’s family. “This is such an old one! That’s me, still a girl. That’s my father and mother—your great-grandfather and great-grandmother. Those are my brothers, your great-uncles. And my sisters, your great-aunts. I was… fourteen, fifteen? It was before I met your opa.”
“What about this one, Oma?” Jennifer, Om Benny’s second child, would ask. She favored the faded group shot of our youthful parents at a beach. You could glimpse the sea in the gaps between their heads—that is, if you weren’t too distracted by Om Peter’s sideburns.
“Oh, this one!” Oma would exclaim, pulling Jennifer toward her. “It was taken in Amsterdam. Your father had just started attending university there.”
Oma’s index finger traced our parents’ faces from left to right, starting with the squarish young man in tiny swim briefs and ending with the stunning wavy-haired woman in a floral one-piece. “Benny, Peter, Betty, Margaret, Sandra, and Sarah. Oh, that was a beautiful day. We even brought a picnic lunch. See?” She pointed to the large cooler in the far-left corner. “But do you know what happened?”
“What happened? What happened?” we would chorus on cue.
“We spread out mats and laid out all the food. There were three roast chickens. And boiled eggs. And fresh bread to make sandwiches. And acar. And sliced ham. And butter cake for dessert. Yes, we spread it all out and were about to eat. And then? Whoosh! A seagull came and took a piece of cake!”
We broke into wild laughter and made whooshing sounds ourselves.
“And then?” she would continue. “Whoosh! Another seagull took some bread!”
“Whoosh! Whoosh!” we cried excitedly in between shrieks and hiccups.
“And whoosh! They kept attacking us and all us girls ran away. And the boys and your opa tried to fight them off. Your opa got so mad he threw a whole roast chicken at a seagull and smacked it in the face.”
At this climactic moment, we practically collapsed into hysterics, our cheeks aching and our sides bursting. Ricky would pretend to be a seagull and Benedict would pretend to whack him in the face with a roast chicken and everyone would cackle in delight. Once our laughter had subsided, we would all congregate around the photo again, seeing in our parents’ static faces the full extent of the comedy about to unfold.
The most beloved photos were of the whole family or the very old ones of Opa and Oma. The second most beloved photos were of our own parents, followed by ones of Tante Sandra, our youngest aunt, who in life had behaved more like a big sister to us than a grown-up. She died in her early twenties when I was around nine or ten. The least popular photos were of Om Peter, who taught us all how to play poker but rarely spoke to us otherwise. We didn’t know back then that he wasn’t Oma and Opa’s biological child—that Opa’s sister, already the mother of eight others, had begged her brother to take him and raise him as his own. There was a lot we didn’t know back then. Even more than we didn’t know later.
Estella’s favorite photo was one from our parents’ wedding: Ma wearing a form-fitting velvet gown of sky blue studded with sparkly stones, Ba in a white tuxedo with a black bow tie, our parents dancing together.
“We bought the dress in Paris,” Oma would tell Estella. “It was our last day there and we’d already bought the wedding gown, but we couldn’t find anything nice for the evening reception. We saw this one at last, in the window of a small shop, just off the main boulevard. It fit your mother perfectly.”
I remember the photo even now: our mother, her hair styled in ringlets swept into a loose updo, her dainty face porcelain in its perfection, smiling up at our father, whose expression is barely visible from the angle at which the photo was shot. But we could see that he too was smiling—a happier and slimmer version of the father we knew back when we sat at our oma’s feet, and decades later on that Sunday afterno
on at Opa’s house, as we watched New Oma stand in front of the armoire and fling open its doors. I wondered if New Oma had ever looked through all the photos—the documentation of our family’s history before Opa had tacked her on as a postscript. If she had, it must have been overwhelming: like a child learning for the first time about the size of the world’s population and the depths of its history, an accumulation of countless individuals and countless years towering over her like a tidal wave, ready to sweep her away.
“So many!” New Oma cried. “I’ll tell Tati to get some bags.” She pulled an album from its slot, sending the shelf’s contents sliding to the floor in a series of loud, echoing thuds. The lid of an old shoebox fell off, scattering photos in a fan around our feet.
New Oma, Tante Margaret, and Estella crouched down to pick them up. I was about to do the same when Estella spoke.
“Doll, you should get going. You have a lot to do. I’ll manage from here.”
“Are you sure?”
She nodded and resumed shuffling the photos together into a neat stack. Secretly relieved, I promptly said my good-byes and left. Tante Margaret and New Oma barely looked up, but I didn’t care.
On the way home, my driver inching the car through the molasses of Jakarta traffic, I found myself haunted by the image of my sister kneeling amid the photographs, gathering up scattered fragments of the past, eyes fixed on false evidence of an idyllic family life that never actually was. It was a foreshadowing of the events that would follow soon after, with one difference: Instead of shooing me away, she would insist I accompany her on her mission, her quest—whatever you wanted to call it. And despite my better judgment, I didn’t refuse her. I never could.
WHEN I FOUNDED Bagatelle, I knew full well it would affect my relationship with the family. That’s partly why I started it. The events I’ve recounted so far—that brunch with Estella and our visit to Opa’s house—paint a certain portrait of me as independent, aloof, and strong; an individualist, cunning and bold. But I wasn’t always this way. It took me a long time to find myself.
For the first part of my life it didn’t occur to me to try. Estella and I were so close. We did everything together, even though she was slightly older. Individualism was made even more impossible by the tightly knit family environment in which we were raised—the dinner gatherings at Opa and Oma’s house at least twice a week; the get-togethers on weekends; the birthday, anniversary, and holiday celebrations; my mother and her siblings mixing in the same social circles, us cousins attending the same schools. Thinking of one’s self in isolation from everyone else was very difficult to do. “I” wasn’t a forbidden concept—I just never gave it much thought.
Only when Estella began dating Leonard did it become apparent how much I’d failed to cultivate an identity of my own, which is why, I think, their marriage crushed me so. For the first two and a half years after their wedding, I was reduced to being a phantom limb, sawed off from the source of my animation. I managed to finish my last year at Berkeley—what would have been our last year if circumstances had been otherwise. Then I came home to Jakarta and moved back in with my parents. I worked for the family as a director at PolyWangi, Sulinado Group’s synthetic textiles mainstay. Now that I think more about it, I must have been severely depressed, but no one else seemed to notice, so it escaped my attention too. My recollections of that period are hazy: I went to the office every day, ate at regular intervals, slept for long stretches at a time. I don’t remember what I did on weekends. I was a shadow of my future self.
Being kept out of my sister’s life by my brother-in-law (how he loathed me!) meant not really having a life of my own at all, at least not until that fateful and glorious trip when she and I ran away together to see the monarchs overwintering in Monterey County. It was then that I at last began to stir. The core idea of Bagatelle came up during the drive—as a joke. It bypassed my sister, but clung to me, like a windborne dandelion seed snagging on a twig. It fell to earth. It grew. And on its strength, so did I.
The monetary crisis struck the very next year, and I had enough sense not to act until the worst of the disaster had passed—a period of about four years. It helped that Leonard’s decline occurred around the same time. His weakening hold over Estella, over everything, meant that she and I could again spend time together, even if it was never to the same extent as when we were younger. And it was Estella who kept nudging me to realize my ambitions. I’d never had any before, and though she refused to get roped in, her enthusiasm fanned Bagatelle—and me—into flame. Gradually, the outlines of Bagatelle took more definite shape, until at last I was ready to approach the family about it.
A lot of coaxing was required to get the family to provide the start-up capital. It wasn’t that they were against me building my own business. God, no—that was the stuff Chinese tycoon families were made of. Rather, they took issue with the project’s extreme impracticality. It was defiant of odds, reeking of overcreativity and amateur DIY spirit. It exhibited all the telltale symptoms of a shortsighted entrepreneurship that our upbringing had taught us to avoid, if not despise. “The heart is stupid. Don’t follow it.” That was what Opa used to say all the time before he deteriorated.
Despite their suspicions, the family decided Bagatelle would be a good learning experience for me. Om Benny, in particular, approved of the way I was carrying out my duties at PolyWangi. Once Om Benny gave his consent, the other siblings went along with it. But you can imagine their fury when, once it became clear that Bagatelle was going to be a runaway success, I refused to link it up with the family conglomerate.
Once upon a time, their displeasure would have rattled me. But since my trip to Monterey with Estella, I’d grown thicker skin. I shrugged off Ma’s wrath. The same with Om Benny, whom I informed of my decision via email. He sent a reply and it wasn’t a nice one. They took issue mainly on principle—because I withheld from the communal pot, so to speak. (You’d think we were all still fresh off the boat from China, crammed in a single compound, banding together for survival.)
Word must have spread from there. Everyone except Estella settled for ignoring Bagatelle—my aunts and uncles out of indignation, and my father and cousins because of the awkwardness generated by their censure. But none of them cut me off cold or anything. Family is family, after all. As long as the same blood flowed through my veins, I was irrevocably one of their own. And who knows? Perhaps they unconsciously respected my audacity in forging ahead with an endeavor that wasn’t just harebrained, but downright weird.
“Insect.” The word should have wider appeal than it actually does. It’s barely removed from “incense”—that sickly sweet fragrance of the spirit realm. Its near homonym “incest” has unsavory connotations, and possesses an aura of taboo. The word’s plural form even sounds like “sex.” And yet it remains a profoundly unsexy word. Think “insects” and a Pandora’s box of ugliness opens. Disease and pestilence. Mandibles, feelers, stingers. Compound eyes. You imagine their cold multilegged bodies creepy-crawling all over you, gnawing at you or piercing your skin, dripping whatever fluids they excrete. And you shudder. That’s why Bagatelle could have nothing to do with insects.
I forbade the utterance of the word in conjunction with our projects. Anyone who said it more than twice, accidentally or otherwise, was immediately dismissed. Even scientific names—Danaus plexippus, Hymenopus coronatus, Trypoxylus dichotomus—were off-limit utterances unless you were one of our scientists. For Bagatelle to work, it couldn’t be about changing minds. We couldn’t say: “Look at these disgusting creatures. They’re not so bad. Actually, they’re sort of charming!” We had to transform the playing field completely, move the prospective customer into an entirely different space. “I am going to show you an exquisite object you have never seen before,” we had to tell them, before stepping back and letting our product speak for itself. We weren’t revolutionizing the way people saw insects. Rather, we were introducing them for the first time to the wonder of the bagatelle.
“Bagatelle”: a French word. A short, sweet piece of music. Also the name of a kind of game. But more generally, something pleasant and trifling. A pretty bauble or trinket. An elegant brooch, say. A string of iridescent jewels to be worn in the hair. Fiery earrings filigreed in delicate gold-and-black filament. Imagine all of them trembling with vitality, radiating life from every joint. These were our bagatelles.
I still recall the debut of our first, our signature line—Majesty—during Paris Fashion Week. Majesty was all about bold brilliance and soft folds—the tropical jungle paired with the English countryside. And, by happy chance, it complemented Prada’s autumn/winter line to a T. Miuccia graciously offered to share the runway with us, and the first bagatelles sailed forth into the world, perched atop felt fascinators and braided coils of hair, encircling tiny tartan-girded waists and breasts, adorning wrists, fingers, earlobes. The climax was superb: a pale girl with wild red hair wearing a plum-colored huntress-style ball gown. And draped around her collarbones and down her back in a jaunty yet stately half-cape was Bagatelle’s most magnificent piece: a feathery necklace of burnt amber and shimmering blue punctuated with doe spots of black and white. Just when the eye had thought the feast was over, the majesties took flight, sailing up into the air and fluttering back down into their original position like a piece of fabric rippling in the wind. The applause lasted for ten minutes straight.