by Tiffany Tsao
A crazy woman. She did feel like she’d gone crazy. How could her father have done this to Jono? For that matter, how did her father even find out about their relationship? She’d never told any of the family about him; it had simply never come up.
“At least, that’s what I told myself then,” Tante Sandra confessed to my sister and me. “Once I found out the truth about him, I must have known on some level that the family would disapprove, even if we had just been friends.” She shook her head mournfully. “Friends. Not even that. It turned out I was his enemy. Worse. And I had no clue. That was the unforgivable part. I had no clue at all.”
That hadn’t been the end of it. Once she’d calmed herself down and wiped away most of the tears, our young aunt ran back to the car. Home, she ordered the driver with some urgency, and, startled, he put the car into reverse.
A crunch. A scream. Followed by more screams—of the shopkeeper on the corner and of children. Both the driver and Sandra sprang out of the car. They had backed into a young girl. Her calf lay at an awkward angle, but she was still conscious and shrieking in pain. A teenage boy was cradling her in his lap and screaming at the top of his lungs.
“My brother! Get my brother!” he told one of the other kids in the group, who raced off down the lane, crying, “Mas Jono! Mas Jono! Your sister’s been hit by a car!”
It was a nightmare. It had to be. She crouched by Jono’s brother and sister and tried to soothe the girl. Jono came sprinting up.
“The driver didn’t see her! It was an accident,” our aunt babbled. “Let me take her to the hospital—”
“You’ve done enough,” Jono snarled. “Just go!” And he raised his hand as if to strike.
An older man with a mustache grabbed his arm. “You’ll get in trouble,” he whispered to Jono. “Look at her. She’s rich. And Chinese too. Their kind won’t have mercy when it comes to people like us.”
Our aunt fled then. She had no alternative. But she thrust the envelope full of cash into Jono’s hands before she did. The driver, a nervous sort by nature, was in a high state of panic. He quickly shifted gears, stepped on the accelerator, and left the cluster of people in a cloud of dust.
The sense of it all being a bad dream refused to recede, even once she was safely home, the car gliding into the garage as smoothly as a boat sailing into port. As she entered the house she’d grown up in, she felt as if she were walking into someone else’s life. Was this really where she belonged—unchanged despite the horror of that other world she had wandered into and wrecked? Her parents had evidently turned in for the night; almost all the lights were off. The silhouettes of her mother’s beloved objects loomed menacing and numerous, walling her in on all sides.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of the maids dart up the stairs and back down—to tell her parents of her return, she suspected. Sure enough, her father appeared soon afterward at the top of the stairs, the hardness of his face unsoftened by his pajamas and slippers. He observed, simply, that she was back. She nodded. They stared at each other in silence. She should choose her friends carefully from now on, he added. There were a lot of bad men around. Then he said good night and returned to his room.
“How did he even find out about Jono?” I asked, breaking the story’s spell.
Our aunt snorted. “Turned out they’d known about him since we’d started dating. One of my Indonesian friends mentioned it to her mother during a phone call home. Her mother knew my mother. As if I should have been surprised. Rich Chinese-Indonesians. Everyone knows each other. They told the driver to spy on me when I came back.”
Estella frowned. “They told the driver to spy on you?”
Our aunt flashed us a chilling grin.
Maddeningly, instead of elaborating, Tante Sandra picked up her story from where she’d left off: with her younger self plagued with remorse over how she had smashed up Jono’s life; haunted by all that Jono had said, both outright and implied, about “her people” and “her kind,” the truth of it evinced by the ruins of his life. The ensuing months only made it worse, his way of seeing things slowly seeping into hers.
Our aunt had always been exceptionally conscious of our family’s dysfunction, not to mention the way we coped with it—by ignoring it, by gilding over it with gold. Our faults had roused in her sadness, compassion, sympathy, but never antipathy. The incident with Jono stirred in her, for the first time, alienation.
“I couldn’t identify with the family anymore,” she stated unapologetically. “The whole thing with Jono altered my perception entirely. Made me see the bigger picture.”
In other words, she began to see us through his eyes: the decadent world we had cocooned ourselves in, we filthy rich Chinese, and the heartlessness with which we built it up and defended it from “outsiders” like him. On one level, she knew perfectly well how simplistic his assessment of the situation was. And yet she couldn’t help but see it mirrored in the life our family led.
Shortly after the visit to Jono’s house, the whole family took a trip to Monte Carlo (Tante Sandra in a hotel bathrobe weeping—I hadn’t misremembered the scene). There was nothing unusual about any of it: the well-appointed suites, the hotel limousines at our disposal, the shopping sprees, the eight-course dinners, the wines, and, at night, the baccarat table (the family’s game of choice). But for the first time, our aunt found herself sickened by the matter-of-course extravagance. Your people do well for themselves, she heard Jono’s voice say, and she couldn’t deny it.
A month after the family’s return, Tante Sandra started work—as junior director of the clove and tobacco subsidiary of the family conglomerate. Even though she felt her eyes had been opened wide, the inherent shadiness of business as usual in Indonesia peeled her eyelids back further than she’d imagined possible. All the proper authorities had to be well-oiled to get permits renewed and misdemeanors overlooked. Ironically, squeaky wheels received a different sort of treatment: In her second month on the job she was tasked by her sister Sarah with firing the organizers of a laborers’ strike before the protests had even begun.
“It’s no big deal,” our mother assured her, which only served to horrify Sandra even more. Though she knew everyone got their hands dirty doing business in Indonesia, not just “her people,” as Jono had alleged, it was nonetheless undeniable that her family did it without blinking an eye. And now she was helping them.
“With each passing day,” Tante Sandra told us, “I could feel myself becoming more and more what Jono despised.”
Obviously, Estella and I had always known how different Tante Sandra had been from the rest of the family—pure and guileless, vulnerable and honest—and we had idolized her. But up to that point, I don’t think either Estella or I had ever realized just how innocent our young aunt had been—how at twenty-two she could have been so ignorant about what it took to get rich and stay rich in our country. Knowing the extent of this innocence made its loss all the more tragic to me—as if something sacred had been violated.
“So that’s why you ran away?” Estella asked. “You didn’t want to become—” The absent word materialized despite the words trailing off: us.
Our aunt contemplated this, then shook her head. “I might not have run away. Even then.” She chewed her lip and hesitated before speaking again. “If you must know, your oma was the real reason I did it.”
“You mean, she helped you disappear,” I said by way of clarification, but our aunt shook her head again. Her gaze was heavy as it rested on us, perching, then pressing down.
“You have no idea who she was, do you?” she declared finally.
She took our puzzled silence, correctly, as assent.
After a year or so, our aunt told us, her loathing of family and self had ripened to unbearable proportions. It demanded excision; she needed to unburden herself, but to whom? Who among her family and friends, the very objects of her contempt, would ever understand? Out of desperation, Tante Sandra turned to her mother, and it made perfect sense
to me why she would—our sweet, gentle oma with her billowy housedresses and rose-and-butter scent, the soft matriarchal yin to Opa’s stern patriarch yang. Tante Sandra didn’t expect Oma to comprehend fully, any more than one might expect, say, a kitten to comprehend grief. But she also wasn’t prepared for the revelation that came next; nor were Estella and I when we heard it from our aunt more than twenty years later.
Tante Sandra had finally poured out her heart on a Saturday, in the kitchen, while Oma had been baking for a family tea. (Fond memories of those afternoons sprang to mind, mingling with my aunt’s words: of Estella and me and our cousins playing tag in the garden between bouts of gorging on Oma’s treats.) Tante Sandra waited until the cakes were cooking in the steamer before she launched into her tearful account—of the friendship with Jono and its souring, of the beating ordered by Opa, of the door slammed in her face and the girl’s crushed leg. Enfolding her in her arms, Oma hushed her sobs away (a remedy I remembered well—the pillowy bosom, the comforting sensation of having one’s hair stroked).
And then those words: “Don’t cry, my darling. I asked your father to take care of it. That boy won’t bother you again.”
At first, what Oma said made little sense to our aunt, groggy with the grief of revisiting the traumatic events. But gradually, the fog lifted. What did she mean? she asked, pulling herself out of her mother’s embrace. Who’d taken care of what? The ominousness of that last sentence hit home. What had been done?
The kitchen timer rang and Oma bustled over to the stove, explaining almost absentmindedly as she went: There’d been no choice, the driver had told her all about the accident with the sister. The risk of the boy taking revenge was far too high, and she’d acted fast in order to prevent retaliation.
Tante Sandra’s head spun, even as the tone in which her mother delivered this information remained the same as the one she’d been using to soothe her just moments before—as if that terrible piece of news was meant to comfort her too. Oma kept speaking as she transferred the cakes onto a platter, testing with the tip of her tongs the spring in each chocolate-marbled creation: She and Opa had acted without their daughter’s knowledge because they hadn’t wanted to cause her any further distress. That boy had made her so unhappy. It was their fault as parents, in a way—they’d let the relationship go on for far too long. But they’d wanted to give her room to be an adult, to make her own mistakes. At least, such had been Opa’s line of reasoning; if it had been up to Oma, she would have nipped it in the bud—paid off the boy earlier, before things had gotten so bad. Before he began trying to get money out of her, before they’d had to have him thrashed, before they’d had to do worse. Oma shook her head. She felt terrible for the fellow’s family. In any case, Sandra had nothing to fear. That awful boy was gone for good. Sandra was lucky to come from a family with enough money to protect her. My, look at how beautifully the cakes had turned out. She should eat one while they were warm.
“You came running in then,” our aunt told us. “Do you remember? You and your uncle Benny’s youngest two: Theresa and… Richie?”
My sister corrected her. “Ricky,” she said, her voice as faint as I felt.
First our aunt, now our oma. The last of our idols had been felled. Oma’s scent as I remembered it seemed to sour into rot. Those pearls of wisdom she used to utter, passed down to her from her father, took on a sinister sheen: Feelings, ideas… they’re reliable as the wind. Gold, on the other hand, and land… keep you and your loved ones healthy and alive.
My memories of our grandmother reconfigured themselves immediately, exposing her virtues as vice. Her penchant for ornate furniture and knickknacks—a weakness for extravagance and excess. Her innocent housewifely simplicity—an unreflecting and dangerous obliviousness.
How ironic. We had embarked on this mission to save the family from darkness, only to discover that we ourselves were darkness through and through.
“That’s when I knew I had to leave,” said Tante Sandra. “I wanted nothing to do with the family anymore. I hated them.”
“And Oma helped you run away?” my sister asked, dull-eyed, ash-voiced. I knew how she felt. The hope had bled out of me too.
“Yes and no,” our aunt replied. “I started making plans myself, but then your oma found out. At first she tried to talk me out of it, but I threatened to tell people what they did to Jono if she didn’t let me leave.”
“And that worked?” asked Estella.
A strange smile crossed Tante Sandra’s face. “It did. But you know something? I don’t think your oma understood why I was so upset. She seemed hurt, if you’d believe it—they had only been trying to protect me, she said.” Our aunt shrugged. “It worked out for the best. I wouldn’t have been able to pull it off without her help. If I’d done it alone, there would have been search parties, police, private investigators, the works.”
The plan had been astonishingly simple. She and Oma had taken a trip to Bali for the weekend. The other siblings, busy with their own lives and dimly aware that “something” had gone on with their kid sister—boy trouble of some sort, it was assumed—figured it was an attempt at recuperation from a broken heart. Opa drew the same conclusion about the trip’s purpose, knowing what he did about the “trouble” with the boy, and gave his consent without giving it a second thought.
Oma had chartered a boat to take them out to sea. In the middle of the ocean, they met another boat and Tante Sandra hopped on. Mother and daughter said good-bye. It was as easy as that.
The men Oma had hired were top-of-the-line: Tante Sandra was well on her way to the Philippines by the time the Indonesian coast guard started their search. No one had much confidence that she would be found alive, not after hearing Oma’s account. She had been flipping through a magazine as her daughter snorkeled near the boat. She’d waved at her daughter, then looked down. By the time she’d looked up again, the girl had disappeared. The crew corroborated Oma’s account: One second she was there and the next she was gone.
The authorities continued to comb the waters over the course of several days as a Sandra Lee (née Sulinado), brand-new passport in hand, left the Philippines, changed planes in Tokyo and again in Hawaii, before finally arriving in Los Angeles. She’d wandered around California for a few weeks before settling on Bakersfield—no chance there of running into anyone she knew.
She used the money Oma had wired to her new US bank account to set up house, most of it going to the purchase of a studio apartment and a convenience store.
“I never used family money to do anything else ever again,” she declared with some pride.
I can see that, I thought, her shabbiness and that of her furnishings striking me afresh.
It was an immigrant-makes-good-in-America story straight out of the movies from that point on: She worked hard and the store did well; she bought a house and leased the apartment to tenants; ten years later, she took over a Chinese takeout place in the downtown district.
“The food is awful,” she stated baldly. “Still, our customers don’t seem to care.”
Night had fallen, but in the course of telling her story, Tante Sandra had neglected to turn on any lights. The darkened house depressed me, but I also found it consoling to be spared the burden of sight. I wanted to deny any of it existed—our ruined family, our ruined aunt, our ruined grandmother. Swathed in the soft folds of darkness, I could forget these ruins and finally deceive myself, as most of our family seemed to do with little effort.
It was too good to last. Our aunt turned the knob on the lamp next to the sofa and the low-watt lighting cast her and everything else in a seedy jack-o’-lantern glow.
“I won’t go back,” she said as if we’d asked her to. “Over there you have no choice about what you become. It’s all laid out for you, by family, by race, by money and status. There’s a set role you have to play, and if you go off script it all comes falling down. It’s different in the West. I don’t have to be a monster here. I’m free to be whatever I w
ant. I like it this way.”
Our aunt’s satisfaction with the life she’d built was both touching and terrifying—a doll sitting in a doll’s house, boasting about the vastness of her domain. It might have been inspiring if she’d escaped to pursue a truly virtuous life, but she appeared to have achieved nothing more than insipid moral neutrality. And as for her claim about being free—I recognized (thanks to Ray Chan) that she’d merely traded one costume for another. If she’d been forced back home to conform to a stereotype—coldhearted and clannish, haughty and rich—here, she’d merely become typically “Chinese” on American terms: pragmatic, industrious, well-to-do, and thrifty. She hadn’t shown us much of her life, but we’d seen more than enough: her frumpy blouse and ill-fitting jeans, the cheap refreshments and tacky curios, the off-brand suitcase and the plastic bags from Payless and Bargains-R-Us near the front door. The woman ran a convenience store and a takeout place, for crying out loud.
“So, you live alone?” I found myself asking, which was the politest way I knew of confirming the apparent.
Tante Sandra nodded. “I prefer it,” she said with a practiced defensiveness. “I’m freer this way. Besides, with two businesses I don’t have time for that sort of thing.”
My immediate reaction was one of pity, but I quickly suppressed it: Who was I to judge in such matters? Me, thirty-three and also alone, also professing to be happily married to my career.
Fear gripped me: To what extent was I merely a rendition of our aunt as she now was? Come to think of it, to what extent was Estella merely a reprise of our aunt’s younger, naive self? Were these the limited options open to us: Tante Sandra as she once was or Tante Sandra middle-aged? Hopeful ignorance or detached contempt? Not so much options as different stages of a single life: caterpillar and butterfly, silkworm and silkmoth?
“What happened to your neck?” I asked abruptly, as if by changing the subject I could steer myself away from such unpleasant thoughts.