A Tiger in the Kitchen

by Cheryl Tan

  The meal flew by uneventfully, however. I was so antsy, carefully inspecting every move Mike made, steeling myself each time he reached into his pocket for something, that I barely remember anything I ate. (If I have no recollection of a beef Wellington that’s passed my plate, you know that something is up.) When the bill had come and gone and still no velvet box had surfaced, I felt relieved. And then worried. What if I had been too presumptuous? What if he didn’t actually want to marry me?

  We decided to take a walk along the water in Battery Park City. “The last time I was in this area, it was 9/11 and I was so scared,” I recalled as we strolled in the cool darkness, pausing to look out at the water and the Statue of Liberty glowing in the distance. “But you were there for me. It made me feel better.” Mike was silent. Slowly, he went down on one knee and pulled out a little black box. Nestled in the velvet pillow was a twinkling diamond ring. We hadn’t discussed rings at all before—yet somehow he had known that I was a solitaire (large, if you please) kind of girl. Of course, I said “Yes.”

  Sixteen months later, on a sunny Valentine’s Day in 2004, Mike and I had the first of our two weddings. Against the canvas of a brilliantly clear blue sky with Diamond Head in the background, we proceeded to have what Jim, one of Mike’s best friends from college, called “the gayest straight wedding” he’d ever been to. My dear friend Victor, who had been with his partner Charles for more than a decade, draped a long, regal garland of orchids around his neck and officiated. Smitty and Rachelle, two women who loved each other with a gentle ferocity that made anyone around them feel privileged just to be in the presence of such intense devotion, read at the ceremony. Mike’s friend Jim, a Hollywood screenwriter who had recently come out, stood by his side as he watched me come down the orchid-lined grassy aisle. On my side of the wedding, next to Daphne and a phalanx of bridesmaids, stood my bridesman, Greg, who had been one of my dearest friends and confidants since he happened to sit beside me at my very first fashion show. After that fateful day, we would spend way too many evenings over the following years sitting at the Oak Room bar in Manhattan’s posh Plaza Hotel, huddled over sauvignon blancs, whispering as we pointed out which men at the bar we might consider “going with”—a term Greg prefers because, as he always says, “I’m a lady.”

  My parents had flown to Honolulu from Singapore for the wedding—I wasn’t sure what they would make of the occasion. The modern Narciso Rodriguez dress I had chosen wasn’t a bridal gown—it just happened to be a white dress he had designed for his collection that season. And with its spaghetti-strapped halter top and revealing cut-out design that from the back made it look as if I might be wearing a bikini top paired with a long flowing skirt, the gown, though elegant, was a little racier than ones that most Singaporean brides wear. Mike and I had decided against a formal ceremony, choosing to write our own ceremony and vows—slipping in a line about believing in the basic right for everyone to marry, but also making it a brief affair that ended with Victor announcing, “I now present to you Mr. and Mrs. Cheryl Tan!” While there had been laughter all around, my parents’ faces had been grim. “How can you be so disrespectful?” my mother had quietly said, the first moment she could get me alone. “Mike is a man, you know. You must give him face.” And then there were our guests, a motley group of colleagues past and present and friends plucked from different stages of each of our lives. They had arrived from New York, Switzerland, Detroit, Phoenix. It was the first time my parents were meeting some of them, and I worried about how they would take to them. Although gay culture has become more mainstream in Singapore in recent years, it’s still not widely embraced, especially among those of my parents’ generation.

  I had taken great care to include my Singaporean identity in my American wedding, however. Even though the Moana Surfrider Hotel, a grand colonial building that is the oldest hotel on Waikiki Beach, didn’t do Chinese meals for weddings at the time, I had insisted that the chef specially create a nine-course Chinese banquet for us. Midway through our banquet, I disappeared into the bridal suite to change into a scarlet dress, a nod to the lucky red cheongsams that Chinese-Singaporean brides wear. After the first course, I had gathered my Singaporean friends together to deliver the traditional toast of Chinese weddings in our homeland. Forming a circle, we raised our glasses high as we bellowed “YUM SENG!” (which means “drink all” in Cantonese) as loud as we could, dragging out the yum bit so it extended well over a minute, with people occasionally pausing to take a quick breath before jumping right back into the yelling. And knowing that my mother loved to sing old Chinese ballads by the Taiwanese pop singer Teresa Teng, I had made sure to give our deejay a disc of her songs, instructing him to not only play them but also encourage any singing that might erupt. Sure enough, the moment my mother heard the first notes of “The Moon Represents My Heart,” a gently lilting Teresa Teng song that she and I used to sing in her little gold Mazda as she shuttled me around Singapore from ballet classes to after-school Chinese tuition, she grabbed my hand and made for the deejay, gesturing for the mike.

  “Ni wen wo ai ni you duo shen, wo ai ni you ji fen,” she softly sang, firmly holding my hand and looking at me. “Wo de qing ye zhen, wo de ai ye zhen. Yue liang dai biao wo de xing.”

  You ask me how deeply I love you, how much I really love you.

  My feelings are true, my love is true.

  The moon represents my heart.

  I had had my concerns about the wedding in Honolulu—when my parents visited me in New York or Washington, D.C., they had met and spent time with my American friends. But they certainly hadn’t shared entire days and evenings with them as they were doing in Honolulu, where Mike and I had planned group trips to essential stops like Diamond Head or Lanikai Beach, a somewhat secluded tranquil spot that’s often largely devoid of tourists. Through these excursions and meals, my parents were learning about my life and how I interacted with my friends—the fact that I occasionally swore like a pirate; that I tend to use the word “like” a little too often. While I still spoke to my parents in the British-inflected English that I had grown up using, in the United States, my American accent was flawless—I had frequently been told I sounded like a California girl.

  How would my parents feel about the life I had chosen—who their daughter had turned into on this foreign shore? Holding my mother’s hand as she sang to me with my smiling father and sister looking on, however, my anxieties faded. They were happy—and they were happy for me. And that was all the reassurance I needed.

  You ask me how deep my love is for you, how much I really love you.

  My feelings will not waver, my love will not change.

  The moon represents my heart.

  The following Saturday, we were scheduled to do it all over again in Singapore—this time with a traditional Chinese tea ceremony at which I wore a red cheongsam. And a traditional Chinese banquet, albeit one that turned out to be not so traditional, since my father planned it. (The first indication of this was that he had taken a cue from our Hawaiian wedding and planned a first dance. When we sat down with the Grand Hyatt’s wedding planner to go over the schedule for the evening, she had asked which song Mike and I would like for our first dance. In Honolulu, it had been “Twilight Time” by The Platters, which had figured prominently in a rather romantic episode of The X-Files we had watched together over the phone one night while dating long-distance. Before we could say anything, however, my father jumped in. “ ‘Endless Love’! That’s one of my favorite songs,” he said. So “Endless Love” it was.)

  As Mike and I walked into the banquet hall, my father had arranged for dry ice to fog our pathway as the theme song from Hawaii Five-0 blared. After the meal, when dancing began, I noticed that my father and his secondary school mates had disappeared, one by one. In fact, some of my male childhood friends were out of sight, too. I heard strange screams and yells coming from the conference room next door, the one my father had insisted the hotel wedding planner provide free of charge be
cause “my daughter needs a place to change—come on.” I had thought it a strange request at the time, given that I had a room upstairs I could just as easily have used for quick changes. Once I followed the screams, however, all became clear. I opened the door to find the long conference table filled with playing cards. In the center was a large pool of money. And around this table were my father, his friends, my childhood friends, and a former editor of mine who had flown in from Tokyo—all of them drunk as sailors and louder than pirates. They were playing Polish (also known as In Between), a card game that my father’s friends and mine spend hours playing over the Chinese New Year holidays. We started playing the game as adolescents, choosing to see if we could double our lucky money from the New Year. Everyone gets two cards, and you bet against the pot of money on whether the third card you get will be between the numbers of the two cards you already have. If you are feeling lucky, you yell “polish!”, indicating that you think your cards are strong enough to polish off the whole pile of money.

  My father had transformed my wedding into an illegal casino. Watching his friends and my friends, sharing cigarettes and slapping one another on the back and occasionally breaking out in the anthem of Saint Joseph’s Institution, the all-boys school most of them had attended, Mike and I smiled. This had somehow turned into the coolest wedding we’d ever been to—and it was our own!

  Just then, the wife of one of my father’s schoolmates came over, feeling sorry for the bride. “This is what happens after you get married lah,” she said, sighing and shaking her head. “Boys will always be boys.” “Well,” I said immediately, “I certainly hope so.”

  The only thing I feel sorry about when I think of our wedding is that when Mike had to buy his bride, the worst thing that he and his Singaporean groomsman, Eudon, had to do was down a large spoonful of wasabi (spicy) and immediately chase it with a pint of Guinness (bitter). What made me even more bitter was the fact that, as the bride, I was locked in a bedroom and unable to watch how green they got. So, when we found out that my dear cousin Valerie, my auntie Jane’s daughter, was getting married in Singapore, I knew we had to pull out all the stops. Valerie and I had played together often as children, after all—she was practically a sister to Daphne and me. In the years since I’d left Singapore, we had written each other regular letters and postcards to keep in touch. I knew that before we let her dashing French fiancé whisk her away into his family, we had to make him earn his bride.

  As soon as morning broke on her wedding day, Valerie’s gaggle of bridesmaids—also known as hens or aunties—descended on her father’s apartment in the Pasir Ris neighborhood of Singapore, near the country’s East Coast. There was Gen, the chief hen, who supervised the proceedings with the calm cruise director air of a recent mother; Nat, the sophisticated traveler who spoke fluent French and had a weakness for Chanel; a second Gen, the effervescent journalist who spoke a mile a minute, a verbal force of nature; and my sister, Daphne, and me, representing the family. We’d not spent much time with Valerie’s friends before that day, but intimacy was of little importance. We were united in our crucial mission—to make the boys suffer.

  We got to work as soon as we arrived, divvying up items we’d each purchased as Gen the Number One Hen gave out orders. For starters, we created a suan concoction of freshly squeezed lemon juice and dropped in preserved plums, which are generally so sour they induce wincing all on their own. For ku, we sliced up a big bitter gourd, whose name is pretty much self-explanatory. It’s widely regarded as the most bitter of vegetables. Next, we prepared a real la treat for the boys: white bread generously buttered with wasabi on one half and superspicy sambal belacan (a Singaporean shrimp-chili sauce) on the other and then folded over to form a sandwich. (Because we did feel slightly bad for the boys as we were preparing these, we decided to slice them up into finger sandwiches for easier consumption and sharing.)

  Now, you might think that the “sweet” part would be a welcome respite. Not so in Chinese weddings, where bridesmaids never let up—unless the groom wants to fork over more money in bribes, of course. Although, all things considered, gobs of pancake syrup and honey stirred into soda probably weren’t too hard to down after wasabi sandwiches and bitter gourd.

  Once all the dishes were prepared, we carefully set them out on the table and waited for the knocking.

  A gleaming black car arrived; well-scrubbed young men in dark suits emerged. And soon enough, there was a rattling at the metal gate. Gen the journalist sprang into action, racing to the gate, immediately barking out demands for lucky money. Cramming ourselves around Gen and pressing our faces against the gate, we screamed, “At least three zeros!” knowing full well that most modern brides in Singapore command well below that. (When Mike bought me in 2004, he got away with forking over just $288, a lucky number since the word for the number eight sounds like “prosperity” in Mandarin and Cantonese.) After a short huddle, David, the groom, approached the gate, handing over a fat red packet—which was promising. Gen quickly opened it—it was filled with Vietnamese currency. More screaming, one more huddle, one more red packet—this one filled with Thai baht. We’d gotten many zeros all right, but not in the right currency.

  After much back-and-forth, they finally produced a red packet that was somewhat satisfactory—a well-rounded $500—and the gate was opened.

  Getting through the gate was only the first step, however. There was the battalion of humiliating tasks we’d dreamt up: making the groomsmen bend over and spell out “Valerie” using their butts; requiring David to sniff a bunch of perfumed cotton balls and identify the scent that his bride regularly used. And when all that was done, there was the tasting. The relief on David’s face rapidly disappeared as he spotted the trays of glasses and bowls containing mysterious liquids and solids that we’d carefully arranged on the dining table. He may have grown up in France, but after years of dating Valerie and attending numerous Singaporean weddings, he knew the drill. Rallying his groomsmen, David unflinchingly went through the bitter gourd, the honey and pancake syrup cocktail, the lemony sour plum drink, and even the wasabi-chili finger sandwiches as Valerie’s increasingly impressed elderly aunts looked on.

  Having breezed through the four rounds of food, David thought he was done. Not so, however. Before he was allowed to open the bedroom door to claim his bride, he had one more hurdle—a particularly potent finale.

  The hens had been having so much fun planning the menu that we didn’t want it to end. Weeks before, as we were discussing our plan of action, Daphne had visited a traditional Chinese medicine shop in Hong Kong—the kind that reeks so much of earth and fungus that you carry that smell in your hair for a long time after. My mother and grandmother adore these shops, often stopping in to pick up wizened bits and bobs to brew in Chinese soups and drinks; it was never clear what exactly was in these soups. They said only “Drink it—it’s good for you.” As a result, I’d generally avoided these shops as an adult, quickly walking by as soon as I caught a whiff of them in New York’s Chinatown.

  This was a special occasion, however. And once Daphne had perused the stock and explained to the owner what she was doing, he immediately began plucking items out of jars with tweezers and carefully wrapping them in crisp white paper. The sight, when we unwrapped the packages, was unforgettable. Our treasure trove included starfish; dried sea horses; a long, dried, black object that was a dead ringer for a calcified horse dropping . . . and a package of salted bugs.

  We boiled them all together in water for an hour, as per the medicine man’s instructions. When the soup was done and the pot was uncovered, the name of the concoction was obvious: smelly.

  As we ladled the yellowish soup into shallow bowls, we made sure each dish came with a sea horse and a couple of bugs for garnish. And the look on David’s face when we unveiled the bowl was priceless. “No!” “No!” “You are kidding!” came the wails.

  Unfortunately for these suddenly green groomsmen, we were most definitely not.

>   “It’s good for virility!” we volunteered. They, of course, looked skeptical. “It might even be good for sore throats!” we coaxed. (Which may not have been too far from the truth. These items are actually used in soups to cure sore throats—or enhance virility—the medicine man had said. At least this was what my sister gleaned with her limited grasp of Cantonese.)

  When it became clear that we were not budging—except on the point of actually making them eat the sea horses and bugs—David rallied his men for the final push. Steeling themselves, one by one, they quickly downed the soup, letting out a chorus of giant Ughs at the end.

  And then the groom’s battle was over—he had earned his prize. Stepping aside, the hens cleared a path. David strode to the bedroom door and opened it. Inside, Valerie sat, big-eyed and demure in a bright red cheongsam, her hair swept back and piled high on her head, looking every bit the lady in a Wong Kar-wai movie. (In fact, she had flown to Hong Kong to have her dress made at a tailor who had supposedly done work for In the Mood for Love, but that’s another story.) There was a hug, and a kiss. And a small bowl of soup was brought out—this one made with sweet dates, a blessing for the sugary life we all wished for them in the long years ahead. In the bowl were two tangyuan, plump, round balls made with glutinous rice flour—a symbol of their new family unit. David clutched the bowl and took a moment to gaze at his bride. The ever-impatient Valerie pouted and started pointing toward her mouth. Knowingly, patiently, David grabbed a spoon, scooping out one tangyuan and gently feeding his bride. The deal was complete.

  The ritual of eating the sour, the sweet, the bitter, the spicy, and even the smelly had served its purpose. All those steps make the reward at the end all the more prized.

  That day, there had been much laughter and merriment. (And only one groomsman had suffered a close encounter with the wasabi coming right back up.) I’d like to think that David, having faced a wall of bridesmaids and survived the food, burst through the bedroom door that day to claim his bride feeling triumphant and exhilarated. After the sour plums, the chili sandwiches, and the salted insect soup, perhaps, just perhaps, it was true that there was little out there they couldn’t face together.