by Tiffany Tsao
SURELY I HAVE the answer now. Why did my sister kill us? To avenge Leonard’s death. Acting purely out of self-interest, we slaughtered him for trying to do the right thing. I can stop delving now. I can leave my memories alone. Let me burrow backward, I beg myself. Let me return from the past. But I know I’m lying to myself about solving the mystery. There’s more to it, I can tell. The gaps are too glaring. Why the late-blooming obsession with redeeming the family if she was just planning to murder us? Why the seemingly genuine desire to find our aunt if she actually didn’t care about our redemption? And why take the lives of not just our family and her former in-laws, but also so many of our friends?
I don’t want to go any further; fear has sprung up alongside curiosity. I think I do know the answer deep down somewhere, and that I won’t like what I find. But here’s the problem: It’s like asking someone not to think about elephants. What else comes stomping through one’s head, especially if there’s nothing to serve as a distraction? Especially if the alternative is a silent hospital ward and a world that’s given you up for dead? Where do I have to go besides my memories? Even if I resist them, here they are, pulling me in like quicksand. How can I possibly stop now, on the cusp of discovering our long-lost aunt? The woman who was supposed to be the antidote to our evil, capable of saving us from what we had become?
Estella should have known better. Her quest for redemption was clearly doomed from the start. Our family was too far gone—Estella and me included. Nobody could salvage us, least of all Tante Sandra.
It was stupid of us to track her down. We dug up the body of someone we’d lost more than twenty years prior and expected to find her as fresh and whole as she had been in life. Everything was wrong from the moment the door swung open.
She was still lovely. That was the unnerving thing. She was lovelier in person than the desert photo unearthed by Estella had suggested, even though it hadn’t lied about the purple blotch that marred our aunt’s décolletage. She had aged more than her older sisters—our mother and two other aunts—but her weathered features gave her a natural beauty that surpassed their pale perfection. They were porcelain figurines never taken out of the box, but she—she was a mountain, a tree, made handsomer and more rugged by exposure to the elements.
At least, that’s how she appeared at first glance. The longer I stared, the more her loveliness began to resemble the molt shell of a cicada—a brittle, translucent sheath that should have been cast off a long time ago to make way for new growth. The seconds continued to pass, us staring at her, her staring back. And it seemed to me that the soul encased within her had moldered, and now the old skin was nothing more than a shroud.
It must have been my imagination—if everyone else saw what I was seeing, they would have run away screaming. I shook my head vigorously, and my vision resolved, consolidating the shell and its contents into a single coherence: the aunt of our memories, now in her midforties, nothing more.
Tante Sandra spoke first. “Rose said you came by on the weekend.”
We gathered that Rose was the pink neighbor’s name. She must have been too excited to keep our secret. Our aunt looked us up and down. “You’re all grown up,” she observed.
“Everyone thinks you’re dead,” Estella blurted.
“Yes,” our aunt replied coldly, “that was the idea.”
She eyed us again, as if trying to decide whether to slam the door in our faces or invite us in. Finally, wearily, she motioned for us to enter, turning her back on us before we had even stepped across the threshold.
The plastic shoe rack next to the front door was a jumble of sneakers, sandals, and practical low-heeled pumps. On the wall opposite was a rickety rattan console piled high with leaflets, sale catalogues, and ripped envelopes. In front of the hall closet stood a small rolling suitcase, black and durable, plastic handle still extended.
“Sorry I missed you the first time,” said Tante Sandra, not sounding very sorry at all. “I was away on business. I just got back.”
“What kind of business?” asked my sister.
“A conference. For people in the food and beverage industry. I own a restaurant and a convenience store.”
We tried to suppress our surprise, but our aunt seemed to detect it nonetheless. She glanced over at the suitcase, as if contemplating flight once more.
“I’ll get us some coffee,” she declared abruptly, stalking down a corridor leading into the heart of the house. We took off our shoes and followed.
The place had an undeniably retro feel, with its walls textured in wood and plaster and brick. A fluffy sienna shag blanketed the floors—in a soothing way, as if telling the house not to cry. Estella and I sat down on the cream-colored sofa that bordered the sunken fireplace of gray and brown stone. I noticed the complete absence of any photos, or any decorative item suggesting good taste. A crystal swan occupied the mantel, flanked by a statue of a big-eyed, snub-nosed boy fishing in a boat, and a framed cross-stitched cloth declaring desperately Home is where the heart is in valentine red and baby pink. Similar thrift-store-type items had been placed here and there: a snow globe gone dry, salt and pepper shakers doing the hula, a bunny figurine.
Our aunt eventually emerged from the kitchen with a tray of refreshments: mugs of instant coffee, a melamine plate of sand-colored sandwich cookies, and a heap of powdered creamer and sugar packets, the kind you sometimes saw people squirreling away in food courts and cafés.
“How did you find me?” she asked, sitting down heavily. I noticed, for the first time, the heft around her belly and thighs.
Estella took the letters and photographs out of her purse. She handed Tante Sandra the picture of her in the desert. “You disappeared in 1981, but the date in the corner reads 1984,” she explained. She gave our aunt the second letter. “And you gave Oma this address.”
Estella’s voice sounded how I felt—profoundly uncertain, but trying to pretend everything was okay. We knew we were supposed to be feeling happy, but Tante Sandra certainly didn’t seem thrilled we had come.
Our aunt smiled grimly as she examined the photo and letter, the way a chess player might when acknowledging the soundness of an opponent’s move. “How long have you had these?” she asked.
“I found them last week,” said Estella. “They were among Oma’s things.”
At that moment, the same thought occurred to my sister and me. Tante Sandra anticipated us before we could speak: “Don’t worry, I know she’s dead. She wrote me a letter. Said she didn’t have long to live. Cancer, right?”
We nodded.
“Was she in a lot of pain at the end?”
We nodded again. She nodded too—in a somber and respectful way. But there was also something perfunctory about the gesture, and she didn’t seem too distressed at this piece of information.
“Does the rest of the family know?” she asked. Seeing our confusion, she added, “About you finding me, I mean. Of course they know about your oma.”
“No,” I answered. “We weren’t sure ourselves whether we really had found you… until now.”
“Are you going to tell them?” she asked.
Estella and I were quiet. That had been the original plan, but now we weren’t so sure.
“Don’t,” our aunt said curtly. “Don’t tell them. It may not make a difference now, but what’s the point? I’m not going back. Life here suits me well.”
Is that what you think? was my ungracious thought.
Our aunt picked up a cookie and bit into it. Though she swiped at her lips with the back of her hand, crumbs clung stubbornly to the corners of her mouth.
There were so many questions Estella and I wanted to ask, about why she faked her own death, about her life since, about the mark on her neck. Now her hostility, unspoken but plain, made our words run dry. We sat there, fidgeting, uncomfortable, at a loss for what to say.
“It’s been a long time,” she remarked, breaking the silence for us. “You and your cousins were just kids when I left. Ho
w are you? Do you work? Are you married? Any children?”
As with her question about Oma dying a painful death, her curiosity about our lives had a distinctly cursory air.
“I work for the family,” said Estella, picking a question and answering it.
“I used to, but I have my own business now,” I was about to say. But our aunt cut me off with a laugh—a pretty, girlish giggle I remembered well. Unlike its owner, it hadn’t changed a bit. Drops of dew, I thought, suddenly overwhelmed by what our aunt once was, and was not anymore.
She extracted a little more information about us, then moved on to ask about the rest of the family, inquiring after everyone in turn in a grazing sort of way. We answered in the same fashion. No, we weren’t married. Estella’s husband was dead. (Food poisoning. Tragic.) No, no kids. All the cousins were fine. Our parents were okay. So were all our uncles and aunts.
We told her about Opa’s Alzheimer’s, mentioning that New Oma was taking good care of him. Then, because she looked puzzled, we told her about Opa remarrying. She assimilated this information quickly, then sighed.
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” she said in a flat voice. “Nothing should surprise me anymore.”
There was a brief pause.
“Has your uncle Peter come out?” she asked.
“He lives with a ‘good friend,’ ” I answered.
“How’s your aunt Margaret?”
“On her third aristocrat,” said Estella.
Estella chiming in like that startled me a little. She usually left the snide quips to me, but she’d grown more assertive over the course of this trip. My sister followed this remark with a question of her own.
“Why did you leave?” she asked our aunt.
“It’s a long story,” came the reply.
“We have time,” my sister assured her, resting her mug of lukewarm coffee in her lap.
Our aunt scrutinized us, deliberating.
“How much do you know?” she asked finally.
“Nothing,” said Estella.
Our aunt chuckled. “At least your oma could be trusted with that,” she murmured. “Well, you have come a long way,” she continued in a louder voice. “And I suppose finding me deserves some sort of reward.”
“Reward” wasn’t the right word, but Estella and I had no way of realizing that until after.
* * *
He’d said his name was John, and our aunt had taken him at his word. It was what he’d chosen to call himself in Australia because he’d liked having a fresh identity to go with that new stage of his life. And it was almost the truth; all the Aussies called him “Johnno” anyway, which bore a striking resemblance to his real name. But looking back on it, she might have been spared a great deal of heartache if she’d known he was actually Jono.
They were both students at the University of Melbourne—and Asian, which had been enough reason for her to ask if the seat next to him was taken. When, upon the conclusion of the lecture, she discovered they were both from Indonesia, Jakarta no less, the name “John” made everything fall pleasingly into place—especially when coupled with his appearance, so deceptively Chinese it bordered on racial caricature (slanted eyes, yellowish skin, even a bit of buck about the teeth). She wasn’t on the lookout for potential differences between them, not in that foreign land, so close to home geographically but populated with Caucasians and sheep. And so her assumption was that he was like her: of the same ethnicity, most likely of Protestant or Catholic background, and from a family either Westernized or with aspirations thereto. If he’d used his real name, “Jono,” it might have raised a red flag—that he was likely Javanese (i.e., pribumi ), thus probably Muslim, and therefore from a wholly different world. But instead he’d claimed he was John. He was shy and sweet, and they got along right from the start.
The tone in which Tante Sandra related these events had a sandpapery texture to it, almost as if she were trying, in the telling, to smooth the splinters and sharp edges of the past. Yet it also laid bare the rawness of the wounds, giving us a glimpse of the Tante Sandra of our memories, vulnerable and tender, beneath the scars.
“Oh, there were warning signs,” she said, shaking her head. “He barely spoke around my friends. And once he tagged along for a dinner at a Chinese restaurant and didn’t eat anything but soy sauce and white rice. I used to invite him to join us for all sorts of activities: bowling, picnics, parties, visits to the beach, the zoo. He always said he had to study, or sometimes he said he was sick.”
It was only when he finally told her about his true identity that the strange behavior made sense: He was afraid her friends would sniff him out if he said too much; every dish they’d ordered at the restaurant had pork in it; he worked part-time to make ends meet and rarely had the cash or the time for the kinds of excursions she and her friends liked to take.
He had been right to worry that her friends would expose him, though really they had merely created the conditions for him to expose himself. It had been someone’s surprise birthday party and she’d persuaded him to come along. The majority of guests had gone home, but the remainder chatted idly in the host’s living room as someone strummed a guitar. Her friends were various nationalities of ethnic Chinese: two others from Indonesia, but the rest from English-speaking Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. They started talking about exams—one of the Malaysians had boasted that he had better things to do than study, like sleep.
The other Chinese-Indonesian girl laughed and called him as lazy as a bumiputra—the Malaysian equivalent of Indonesia’s pribumi and Singapore’s ethnic Malays. The Chinese-Malaysian guy scowled. “That’s not funny,” he said with a glower, which only made one of the Chinese-Singaporeans tease him even more: “Be careful, if your face gets any blacker, you’ll really look like one of them.”
Meanwhile, Jono turned red and went very still. Sandra laughed along with the rest of them and only noticed something amiss when he stood up abruptly and stammered that he should get home. He ran out and Sandra followed, catching up only after he’d made it a good way down the street.
“That’s when it came out,” our aunt told us, “that he wasn’t actually Chinese.”
They ducked into someone’s garden and sat on the grass behind a tall hedge to talk about it. In their earnest, youthful minds the matter seemed far too important to leave for another time. She learned that he was Javanese and Muslim, and he was poor. By her standards, at least. His father worked as a low-level manager at a margarine factory. The fact that John was attending university in another country was beyond anything his family had imagined possible, but the death of a moderately well-to-do relative had resulted in a windfall for his father. John had convinced his father that sending him to Australia to get an engineering degree would be a good investment. Australia wasn’t charging university fees at the time, not even for international students. He worked like mad on his English-language skills, then enrolled in a program that placed him in a public high school in Melbourne so he could take the qualifying exams to gain entrance into one of the universities. The money was enough to pay for English lessons, various fees, and a one-way plane ticket, with a little left for initial living expenses, but once he was on the ground, he would have to find some sort of part-time work. And that was how he came to be there, he concluded, defensively. Then she asked the burning question she’d been saving for when he was done: So he really didn’t have any Chinese blood at all in him?
He admitted it then: A great-great-grandmother from his mother’s side was reportedly Chinese. The looks had skipped everyone in his extended family except him, where they’d banded together to make his childhood a living hell. How they’d teased him about it—everyone, from his classmates to his cousins. His nickname was Cina—China—and the jokes never got old:
Hey, Cina, don’t be stingy. Lend me some cash.
Hey, Cina, watch where you’re going. Or can’t you see with those slitty eyes?
Go back home, Cina. Indonesia’
s through with communism.
John laughed bitterly as he spat out the remarks, each one evidently seared into his memory like a cattle brand. He’d never told anyone before, but the jokes were why he’d made such an effort to leave.
“That’s when I should have walked away,” muttered our aunt. “That’s when I should have figured out that something wasn’t right.”
But she hadn’t. She was stupid and young and idealistic back then. And there was something magic about the setting that dazzled her, made her heedless of the danger of their situation. There they were, in a stranger’s garden, a little after midnight, whispering together about profound things like racism, poverty, and childhood trauma. The cool dark was redolent with the scent of eucalyptus, and the low hoots of the tawny frogmouths overhead lent the moment a wild and wondrous touch. Instead of walking away, she kissed him. Just a hasty peck on the lips. He looked stunned for a few seconds, but then he broke into a bashful smile.
They were an unlikely pair, the rich Chinese girl and the misunderstood pribumi boy from the other side of the tracks, but they’d connected with each other, and wasn’t that what mattered? If only she’d known she’d misread him, that experiencing discrimination hadn’t given him empathy for her race, but the exact opposite—a budding resentment toward her kind for causing him trouble through no fault of his own.
Still, as long as they stayed in Melbourne, everything was fine. She stopped expecting him to spend time with her other pals, and they hung out alone instead, studying together in the library, strolling along the Yarra River, treating themselves (in keeping with his budget) to shakes and sandwiches at their favorite milk bar.
“Fantasy land,” remarked our aunt. Estella and I nodded, recalling our own college days—or our freshman year, at least. Entomology, each other, and solitude. The enchantment cast by university life apparently transcended time and space.
John’s summons back to reality was unnecessarily cruel. His father was hit by a bus. The news came by telegram. He borrowed money from Sandra to pay for the plane ticket, and he never came back.