Aunty Lee's Delights

by Ovidia Yu

  “I don’t understand,” Anne Peters said. “We would never have sent Marianne for any kind of corrective therapy. Her health—”

  “Marianne had epilepsy,” Carla said. “She had to be very careful not to trigger . . . Do you mean she died during ex-gay therapy?”

  “But that would not explain what happened to Laura Kwee,” Aunty Lee said.

  15

  At the Hospital

  Aunty Lee always maintained that it was impossible to tell how a dish was going to turn out just by reading about how it was made in a recipe. You had to put all the ingredients side by side and prepare them before you could tell how they were going to react with one another. And, of course, there was always the chance that a new ingredient you were unfamiliar with would throw everything else off.

  This time the new “ingredient” showed up, not only in the form of a Joseph Cunningham, a tall, gangly, ginger-haired young man (whom Aunty Lee had been expecting and curious to meet), but also in the form of the person he brought with him.

  Joseph Cunningham’s Singaporean partner, Otto, had arrived at the hospital within an hour after getting Aunty Lee’s phone call.

  “Actually we were both in Singapore already, before you called, so it wasn’t a problem. We were planning our commitment ceremony. I was hoping my parents would fly in, of course, but I didn’t know they were already here.”

  So that was the Cunninghams’ big secret, Aunty Lee thought. “How are your parents?”

  “Very good considering how things might have turned out. The doctors said to watch out for local infections and cellulitis and it’s going to be painful for a while, but with luck they’ll be fine in three weeks.”

  They were talking in Lucy Cunningham’s room. Her natural warmth had already broken through her prejudice against gays, and while her son talked to Aunty Lee, Otto was sitting by her bedside listening to her stories about Joe as a child. Now and then she looked over to Joe and Aunty Lee with a big smile on her face. In spite of the angry-looking red-and-white burn blisters visible on her arms and legs (fortunately, she had instinctively blocked her face in time), Lucy Cunningham looked better than Aunty Lee had ever seen her.

  “And how is your father taking it?” Aunty Lee asked Joe.

  “Do you know why they came to Singapore without telling me? They—or rather my father—wanted to meet up with Otto’s parents to try to enlist their help in breaking us up. That was what Laura Kwee was helping them with. Actually she told them that since same-sex relationships are illegal in Singapore, they could threaten to have Otto arrested if I didn’t swear never to see him again. But my mother refused to go along with that. So Laura said she would link them up with Otto’s parents if they came out here. She told them that if both sets of parents confronted us together, we would have to give in and they could bring me home. But then she never showed up. Anyway, it wouldn’t have worked. Otto’s father is dead and his mother totally accepted me. It didn’t happen overnight, of course, but she was helping us plan the commitment ceremony. Or rather she’s organizing everything.”

  “Looks like she’s going to have some competition . . .”

  They both looked across the room as Lucy Cunningham laughed. “What does he mean there are no photographs—I have hundreds, thousands of photographs of my Joe. We can go through them and pick out what you’ll use for the montage . . .”

  Otto grinned at the others as Joe Cunningham made a wry grimace. This family would go on relatively unscarred, Aunty Lee thought. And she said precisely that.

  “I always thought they’d come round,” Joe responded. “People who really care find a way to deal with it. Even my dad will, given time. The people who get most upset are those crazies in LifeGifters—you know, the ones who want to save people from being gay? Laura Kwee was involved in it.”

  “You know Laura Kwee?”

  “Never met her. Knew of her. In uni, she had this big crush on Otto. They used to do stuff together. He told her he was gay and thought she was okay with it and supportive, but then she started saying how her father back home kept asking when he was going to marry her and he got scared. Then she started stalking him online and spamming all his friends. She even wrote to the pastor of his church saying he had AIDS after he blocked her on Facebook.”

  “Why?” Aunty Lee asked.

  Joe shrugged. “She thought she was saving him. That’s what that LifeGifters network is all about. It’s pretty brutal actually. There are stories of how they actually kidnap people to reprogram them for their own good. It’s called ‘reparative therapy’ to supposedly turn gay people straight.”

  “How does it work?”

  Joe looked at Aunty Lee suspiciously but saw only earnest curiosity. “You’re locked up and told to pray and read the Bible, particularly verses that cast homosexuality as an abomination. The only people you get to see are those who have given up the ‘gay lifestyle.’ If you resist, you get tied up and only released to read the Bible and attend church.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Didn’t work on me. That’s when I told my parents I never wanted to see them again.”

  “But you invited them to your commitment ceremony.”

  “I knew they only wanted what was right for me. I wanted to show them I’d found what was right for me.”

  Frank Cunningham was alone in his room when Aunty Lee went in. She had brought him some of her brightly colored little cakes, but he only stared at them glumly. Like his wife, his arms and legs were bandaged, and in addition he had a black eye.

  “Don’t you find it hard to accept people like them?” Frank asked Aunty Lee. “Don’t you people have any decency here? It’s supposed to be against the law. It’s unnatural.” But perhaps due to painkillers, he wasn’t as vehement as before.

  “I believe God gave us brains and logic because He wanted us to learn to use them.” Aunty Lee smiled. “We all live by standards that some other people find ridiculous. Laura Kwee was e-mailing you about your son, wasn’t she?”

  “It was supposed to be confidential. It was for his own good.”

  “Knock knock!” Harry Sullivan called out, ushering Selina in ahead of him.

  “Purely business,” Selina said. “Harry says we should come to visit and see how our friends are doing so they don’t try to press charges—ha ha! Unless you’re already seeing to that, Aunty Lee?”

  “Oh no.” Aunty Lee waved her hands dismissively. “All over to you. I just came to talk.”

  “Good. We were just thinking—the shop’s been closed for some time now. Customers are going to stop coming. Maybe it would be better to think about closing shop for good and moving on. You’re not getting any younger, you know.”

  Selina was just not very good at the soft approach, Aunty Lee decided. Everything she suggested made Aunty Lee want to head in the opposite direction.

  Harry Sullivan stepped in. “Hey, this is not the time, Sel. We just wanted to make sure you folks were okay—you too, Aunty Lee. Not too stressed out from all the traumatic events.”

  “That’s what I said, isn’t it?” Selina pointed out.

  Harry Sullivan might be balding, paunchy, sweaty, and with damp palms, but these were all physical and therefore superficial details. Still, Aunty Lee wondered whether Selina, in trying to overlook these details, was overlooking too much.

  “I just looked in on your wife,” Aunty Lee said to Frank. “She’s doing well, very well. You know your son’s here, don’t you?”

  “They are sick people. We should be helping them change, not helping them give in to this perversion,” Frank said from his bed. “I need more painkillers. Where are the nurses? Where’s my wife? She’s not as badly hurt as I am. Why can’t they send her in to look after me?”

  Aunty Lee promised to send a nurse but said no more. This was something Frank Cunningham would have to work out for himself.

  As far as Aunty Lee was concerned, people ought to go through the ideas they carried around in their heads as regul
arly as they turned out their store cupboards. No matter how wisely you shopped, there would be things in the depths that were past their expiration dates or gone damp and moldy—or that had been picked up on impulse and were no longer relevant. Aunty Lee believed everything inside a head or cupboard could affect everything else in it by going bad or just taking up more space than it was worth.

  Harry Sullivan and Selina followed her out of the room. They were talking about claims and insurance. Surely the fire damage hadn’t been that extensive?

  “I remember it was old Harry Sullivan after all,” Lucy Cunningham said when she saw Harry come in. “It’s coming back to me now. That’s what was on my mind. Harry Sullivan is the name of that old man who had a shop along that row opposite St. Leonards Junction, remember? Across from the old cemetery we went to for your great-granny’s hundredth—what would have been her hundredth if she’d made it, and for a while it looked like she was going to. We brought you with us, don’t you remember?”

  Joe Cunningham did not.

  “Your dad got to talking with him. Your old dad can go on forever about his gardening, and the two of them got along wonderfully. We went back to his house to see his precious garden. It was one of the last houses along Park Road where it joins River Road. A dead-end road and terribly steep, ending in a drop with nothing but a footpath from there down to where they were fixing up River Road. The road was so steep they had frames set into concrete to hold the cars in place. But the garden was spectacular. It must have been under a hundred and fifty square meters, but he had pots and trellises with runner beans and cucumbers. And I saw what I thought were some kind of pumpkin, but they turned out to be the largest tomatoes we ever saw in our lives. He said it was all about the seeds. He insisted on giving Frank some of them, even though Frank said he didn’t have the patience to sit around and wait for things to grow. The best seeds from his bull’s-heart tomatoes. And they weren’t just large. They tasted good!

  “He was talking about turning his house into a community garden when he died,” she continued. “But then I heard he went so suddenly there was no time. His nephew took care of everything and sold the house.”

  “How did he die?”

  “In his car, strangely enough. One night he got into it and—well, he was an old man and not familiar with driving. He just went straight down and crashed through the barrier at the bottom.”

  “Why do you say it’s strange?” Aunty Lee asked.

  “Did I?” Lucy thought about it. “Not strange at all. Just unexpected because he hadn’t driven that car for years. He said he didn’t even think it still worked, but it cost too much to tow away.”

  “What’s wrong?” Selina asked Harry Sullivan. “Aren’t you going to ask her how she is?”

  “I think she looks fine,” Harry said. He left the room.

  “We just need to hear you say you’re feeling all right,” Selina explained to Lucy before following him. “So that later you can’t turn around and sue the café.”

  “We won’t sue you, anyway,” Lucy Cunningham said to Aunty Lee. “Not when you’ve been so kind.”

  Selina and Harry Sullivan were still in the lobby when Aunty Lee joined them to wait for Nina, who was bringing mushroom barley soup for the invalids.

  “Aunty Lee, Harry just told me Laura Kwee was the one writing all those nasty reviews of the café!”

  “How did you find out?” Aunty Lee asked him.

  “I have contacts,” Harry said with an air of mystery. “Of course, I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but I always suspected something there. Laura could come across a bit strong sometimes. She was either living in her own fantasy dreamworld or she was putting it on to hide something on that computer of hers! Do you know where it is, by the way? I heard it wasn’t found at her apartment.”

  “She probably had it with her. She took it everywhere with her. Laura kept records of everything. She used her phone but backed up everything on her laptop as though she was some kind of secret agent,” Selina said, already bored with the talk about Laura. “Laura was the sort to have complicated passwords for the files and then have a list with her passwords because she was also afraid of forgetting. But she kept them in her address book as addresses. That was clever. What was maybe not so clever was her telling people she did it!”

  “She didn’t have the laptop with her the night she disappeared—I mean the police didn’t find it. At least they never said they did,” Harry Sullivan persisted. He looked at Aunty Lee. “She didn’t leave it at your shop, did she?”

  “Nina would know,” Aunty Lee said, making a note to warn Nina.

  Just then Joe and Otto came out of the room and grabbed Aunty Lee. “We wanted to thank you.”

  “We’re putting together a big family album—digitally,” Otto announced. “Joe’s going to play it back at the ceremony to show his parents that he did value them and family and everything. He told his mum about his project and she’s sending for her huge albums that have been in storage for years.”

  “It was Otto’s idea,” Joe said quietly. “I wish I’d thought of it. It made my mum really happy that someone wants to go through all her old photos. If Ots knew all the baggage that came with me . . .” He shook his head.

  “Young man, you look at me,” Aunty Lee said sternly. “You have so many good men coming after you that you can afford to throw them away?”

  “What? No. Of course not.”

  “Then don’t be so stupid. If a Chinese man doesn’t want you, you will know. Otherwise the fastest way to drive him away is keep telling him that he should not want to be with you. Chinese men don’t like fighting at home. At home they are always very agreeable. One day Otto will agree with you just to get you to stop. Is that what you really want, Joe?”

  Joe Cunningham looked blankly at Aunty Lee, almost as though she had been speaking in Mandarin. Then he glanced at Otto.

  “I agree,” Otto said with a straight face. Aunty Lee found herself liking this young man more and more—she liked both of them in fact, which was nice. Too often, when it came to couples, there would be one she could not stand.

  “What?” Now Joe was looking at Otto as though he could not understand him either.

  “Look. Would I be marrying you if I didn’t want to be with you?”

  “I thought I kind of forced you into it. Because I’m insecure and you’re nice.”

  “I’m not that nice. And I love you even though you’re not that smart. So just listen to the nice aunty, okay?”

  “Thank you, nice Aunty,” Joe said obediently. They were all laughing now, Aunty Lee with a touch of exasperation. How could anyone believe in all those theories of evolution if young people today were just as goondu as the young people of fifty years ago had been?

  “Thank you, Otto,” Aunty Lee said. “Now I want to ask you a favor. Will you stay in the hospital for the rest of today at least? You can work here in the waiting room. Show the Cunninghams your photo album. Just stay around here?”

  Otto hesitated. “It’s not ready. We were going to put in borders and backgrounds and dates and comments and everything.”

  “Never mind. You can do the fancy work later. I just want you to hang around here for now. Remember, what happened to Frank and Lucy wasn’t an accident. The person who attacked them so clumsily this time may do a better job next time.”

  Nina still had not arrived with the soup. On her way to the ladies’, Aunty Lee saw Nina talking to Harry Sullivan in one of the side passages. He was holding her hand—or rather her arm, Aunty Lee saw. He left before Aunty Lee reached them.

  “He was not trying to make love to me,” Nina said. “He just want me to think so. I can see at once he is acting. I know how to see because I learn from you. Ma’am, he is very angry and very scared.”

  Nina didn’t need to tell Aunty Lee that angry, scared people could be dangerous.

  16

  Cover and Simmer Over Low Heat

  There are times when things need
to be done fast. When you are making deep-fried potato curry puffs, for example. You may take your time making your filling—indeed, you have to allow it time to cool before you fold it into its pastry. But once the savory mix of chicken and potato is tucked and folded into its pastry pocket, you have to move quick-quick-quick! The precious pale pastry packages cannot stay in the hot oil a moment longer than it takes to puff them up into all their golden-brown glory. And then again there is no time to waste, because if they are not eaten immediately, the moment of perfection will pass and all you will be left with is a good curry puff. Of course this is not the end of the world. Think of it as falling in love with the most beautiful girl you have ever seen . . . but you cannot have her and you end up with her sister. You would have been happy with your wife if you had not fallen in love with her sister first, but now you will never forget. It is the same thing with curry puffs. Once you have tasted one of Aunty Lee’s deep-fried chicken-potato curry puffs freshly fished out of hot oil, no other curry puff will ever satisfy you again.

  But then there are also times when moving fast does you no good at all. When making tamarind Assam sauce for instance. You have to let the tamarind paste steep for as long as it takes, moving the mixture around with your fingers to loosen the fibers and seeds . . . so that when you are finally ready to pour the mixture through your metal strainer, you can be sure that all the distractions and irrelevances have been removed while you collect as much of the sauce as possible.

  Right now, Aunty Lee thought, she was making tamarind sauce. And she was ready to stick her fingers in to stir.

  However, someone else stuck a finger in first . . .

  Senior Staff Sergeant Salim turned up at the hospital ward in response to a report that homosexuals were using it as an illegal assembly area to promote the gay lifestyle and that one Nina Balignasay presently there was violating her domestic work contract by working in a shop. SSS Salim thought it strange that the report had come in now, since the shop in question had been closed for a week. Still, all complaints had to be followed up, and since these violations had occurred under his watch, he decided to follow them up personally—that is, unofficially.