by Cathy Alter
“Yes.” She said this more as an order than as an affirmation, handing me what looked like a travel-sized tube of toothpaste. It was called Cleartune (did it play a song when you unscrewed the cap?), and I’m pretty sure it cost about seven American dollars. I would have gladly paid seven hundred if it would rid me of my pimple in time for the birthday party, which was only a few hours away.
The party was being held at a restaurant on the outskirts of Causeway Bay. The plan was to meet there at seven-thirty. We knew this because when we returned to our hotel after a bit more shopping, there were seven messages from Joy. Each one stressed, with mounting intensity, the importance of being on time.
Of course, Karl and I were the first to arrive. The party was on the second floor of a Trumped-out restaurant, all glass and chrome and pink marble. When we entered the banquet room, there was a group of six playing mah-jongg at a corner table. A small television set beamed down on them from the ceiling. The few in the room who weren’t clicking tiles around were gazing intently up at what appeared to be a soap opera. I noted that mostly everyone was dressed in a shade of burgundy and congratulated myself for my own attire. I didn’t think I’d need my navy cardigan, which I had brought just in case the green in my dress raised eyebrows.
“Hello,” Karl said to a plump woman with her arm around a smaller, older woman wearing owl-like glasses.
The woman with the owl glasses approached Karl and handed him a small red envelope, the size that usually contains spare buttons. He took it and bowed slightly.
Then the woman did the same thing to me. I took the envelope and nodded my head forward. “Thank you,” I said instinctively.
“Thank you,” she repeated.
Karl and I took a few steps back. I wasn’t sure what to make of my envelope.
“Why did we get envelopes?” I asked, palming mine.
“It’s called lai see,” he whispered, looking around the room. “There’s usually a few dollars inside. All the unmarried kids get them for good luck.”
“You mean I’m going to make money off this trip?” I joked. Karl was perspiring and swallowing a lot, clearly nervous. “Who was the lady who gave us the lai see?”
“My Pau Pau.”
“THAT was your grandmother?” I said, shocked. “Why didn’t you hug and kiss her? How long has it been since you last saw her?”
My grandmother had been dead for five years, and I would have given anything to hold her soft hand again.
Karl didn’t answer; he just continued to dart his eyes around. Eventually, a waiter came by with a tray of drinks. Karl grabbed something that looked like a Manhattan and took a long pull.
Finally, an hour later, Joy, Karl’s sister Val, and her boyfriend Jeff walked through the door. They were accompanied by a chicly dressed woman in four-inch heels and dramatic eye makeup. I knew immediately it was Auntie Gay, Joy’s older sister who lived in Australia. She was flanked by her two children, Ashlin and James, who were both at least six feet tall and gorgeous. Like Joy, Gay had married a Westerner, and her children had the same exotically unclassifiable ethnicity as Karl and Val.
“Congratulations,” said Ashlin in a sexy low Australian accent. She was the first to approach and hugged me warmly. “It’s so lovely to meet you. May I see your ring?”
Now that I was engaged to Karl, I had given Joy new status in her family. From what I understood, in the archaic titling of Chinese family members, being a mother was one thing, but being a mother-in-law was one thing better. As I showed Ashlin my ring, I realized that even though I was the cause of Joy’s promotion, Joy had never asked to see my hand.
“So this is Cathy,” said Auntie Gay, looking me up and down and handing me a red envelope. I had a glass of wine in one hand and took the envelope with the other.
Auntie Gay looked at me like I had just peeled a scab off of her hand and popped it into my mouth. I immediately felt like apologizing for my pimple. “Next time,” she cautioned, “be sure to take the lai see with both hands.”
I recalled Truth Number 3 from Marie Claire’s “How to Survive a Mortifying Moment.” For the third of her four listed truths, Celeste Perron wrote, “Often, you cringe inside because you think that you can read people’s minds and that they’re completely horrified by what you’ve done.” But in actuality, she proposed, the embarrassment is only one still in the movie of your life. “Remember that people use thousands of different bits of information to form an opinion of you,” Perron consoled. I hoped Auntie Gay wasn’t viewing me as The Towering Inferno.
After she turned to greet arriving guests, Joy sidled up to me. “So now you’ve met my sister,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. “Was I lying?” Joy had already prepared me for Gay’s bluntness, sourpuss countenance, and smug sense of authority. With her exaggerated height and expertly made-up face, Auntie Gay actually reminded me of my mother. She was a known quantity to me, but for Joy I could see having her sister just a few feet away, after being separated by multiple oceans, was triggering some old rivalries.
I watched Joy follow after Auntie Gay. They stood on either side of their stepmother, a hand on each of her shoulders. When one would bend down to speak to her, the other would bend down to listen in. The effect was similar to the movement of an oompah band.
Val held out her hand for me to hold. We stood there for a bit surveying the crowd. Seven years younger than Karl, she was born to parents on the verge of divorce. As a result, she and Karl had a bond that, forged under an unhappy roof, was beyond close. They were each other’s protectors and confidants, and at times Karl straddled the line between brother and father. If I was the other woman in Joy’s life, Val—smart, beautiful, and funny—was the other woman in mine.
“You’re doing great,” she said. “If you want to really impress them, say ‘Mmmgong’ the next time someone gives you lai see.” (At least, that’s what it sounded like she was saying.)
We sat down at a huge wagon wheel of a table filled with cousins, one of whom had gone to college in Canada. When I shook his hand, I noticed his eyes were cobalt blue.
“Muh gong,” said Val’s boyfriend Jeff when another plate of shrimp appeared before him. I was extremely worried about what I’d be able to eat, but after tray after tray of lobster, prawns, and crispy fish arrived at our table, I wasn’t sure I’d actually get a chance to eat.
“I’ll go talk to my mother,” said Karl, getting up and moving across the room to where Joy sat at a table next to Pau Pau. I watched him point to me and gesture wildly. Auntie Gay, who had been working the room like a don, noticed the commotion and got involved, brushing away Joy’s waving hand, flagging down a waiter herself, and gesturing over to me.
Joy accompanied Karl back to our table. “I’m sorry, Cathy,” she said. “Gay was in charge of the menu. I told her to make sure there was some chicken for you. But as usual, she never listens to me.”
“It’s fine,” I said, touching her forearm and giving it a little squeeze. “You’ve got enough to worry about tonight.”
“You can say that again.” She sighed and looked over at her sister, who was sitting next to their mother looking rather pleased with herself. She gave Joy the “come here” signal.
“Her Majesty calls,” she said, adopting a British accent.
Eventually, a plate of salted chicken appeared.
“That’s the house specialty,” said Karl’s blue-eyed cousin.
By then everyone at our table had finished eating and began to focus on the dinner theater of Cathy’s Spectacular Chopstick Revue. I had never learned how to correctly feed myself with chopsticks, whether due to my being left-handed in a right-handed world or just having extremely poor fine motor control. But there were no forks in sight, and I was hungry.
“Do you want help?” whispered Karl.
“Like this,” offered Val, resting one stick against the fleshy part of her hand and holding the other like a pencil.
I clamped onto a glistening piece of thigh and
attempted to one-two-three it into my mouth. I only could raise the chicken a few inches off the plate before it would slip from my grasp and fall back onto the plate. The more I tried to capture the chicken, the more it slid away from my grasp. It was like some bad Tom and Jerry cartoon.
I remembered Truth Number 2 from the mortification article. “People tend to feel vicarious embarrassment on your behalf when you make a public error.” I looked at my dining companions, who were regarding me as if I were a baby giraffe trying to take her first wobbly steps.
“It’s okay,” said Karl’s blue-eyed cousin. “I’m still trying to get the hang of them.”
“Is he wearing contacts?” I asked Karl when we stepped outside for a cigarette. ( Up until now, I had been below Didion’s five-a-day quotient, but this trip had reinvigorated my habit.)
“Somewhere back in the family,” explained Karl, “there was a little hanky-panky going on with the British colonists.”
Between the grandfather marrying his former housemaid and a history of mixing it up with their British overlords, Karl’s family had their own lineage of embarrassment to reconcile. After my recent display of chopstick ineptitude, I realized that mortification was relative.
By the time Joy and Gay brought out the birthday cake, each carrying one end of the serving tray with Gay a little out in the lead, I had relaxed into the evening. The blue-eyed cousin’s girlfriend, thrilled to practice her English, was even more thrilled to show me the Chloé knockoff bag she had just bought.
“You must go to Kowloon,” she enthused. “This is where every designer is under the sun.”
I watched Karl and his Pau Pau. With Joy around—as translator and familiar buffer—he had also relaxed into the evening. He posed his grandmother next to the cake and she smiled and he took her picture. Occasionally, he waved over to me like he was on a merry-go-round.
Jeff and I watched the action from our table, poking around at some almond cookies and lost in our own thoughts. Despite mishandling both the lai see and the chopsticks, and mangling the pronunciation of m’gong every time I wanted to thank someone, I wasn’t doing too badly. And when Jeff leaned over and remarked, “Have you ever seen so many Chinese people in one place?” I realized that he was way worse off than me.
Staying at another hotel spared Karl and me from the mismanagement of each day’s itinerary. By the time Auntie Gay, Joy, and their respective broods had gotten their acts together, Karl and I were long gone, either on a ferry to Lantau Island to see a Buddha the size of a skyscraper, on a tram up to the sadly overcommercialized Peak, or wandering into the fog of temple incense.
“I didn’t come all this way to sit around the hotel all day waiting for someone to make a decision,” I had told Karl.
Gay and Joy’s complete lack of planning worked to our advantage. Instead of accommodating the circus of six other people, I was thankful to be exploring the city with just Karl.
Other than the birthday party, there were two other mandated obligations: visiting the 101-year-old uncle, and paying our graveside respects to Joy’s mother. Rather than dreading these pilgrimages, I was looking forward to them. While other tourists were buying fake Prada on Nathan Lane, I’d be getting a glimpse at real life—and death—in Hong Kong.
To get to where the 101-year-old uncle lived, Karl and I had to take a wide assortment of trains, switching at underground stations that looked like gigantic morgues. The plan was to rendezvous at the other end and caravan in taxis to the uncle’s house, which was in a gated community about an hour outside Hong Kong. Karl and I arrived a bit early and wandered around a nearby shopping mall. The Chinese New Year was in full swing, and in recognition of the year of the dog, there were hyperbolic white puppies everywhere we turned.
At this point in the trip, everyone had bought fancy new cell phones from the countless electronics stores that lined Causeway Bay. Before long, my phone, which was engraved with gold lotus blossoms, started ringing something out of a Suzie Wong movie.
“Is this Cathy?” Auntie Gay asked in her clipped, high-society accent. “We are here and can’t find you.”
The next forty minutes was like a Shakespearean comedy. Karl and I would go to meet Gay and her kids at the ice cream stand only to find that she had wandered off to meet Joy, Val, and Jeff in front of the phone booths. So Karl would call his mother and attempt to get her to stay put at the phone booths, only to discover that she had wandered back to the ice cream stand to look for Gay.
Eventually, everyone got it together and we all piled into a van. “What did you do today?” I asked James.
“Well, after we missed the ferry a few times, we finally made it to see the Big Buddha,” he said, rolling his eyes at his mother. Despite his dig, it was obvious that both he and his sister were dutiful children and didn’t have a choice in how they spent their time in Hong Kong. And unlike Karl and Val, they spoke perfect Cantonese.
“We’re going to Macau tomorrow,” I bragged. Karl and I had purchased our tickets that morning, after first phoning Joy to make sure it wouldn’t conflict with visiting the cemetery. I was really excited about spending another whole day alone with Karl.
“What about having lunch with the eighty-nine-year-old aunt?” gasped Gay.
“What lunch?” said Karl.
“I told you,” said Joy. “You have four things to do in Hong Kong: the birthday, the uncle, the cemetery, and lunch with the eighty-nine-year-old aunt.”
“You never said anything about lunch with the aunt,” countered Karl. “We asked you yesterday if we could go to Macau, and you never said anything about lunch. It’s too late now, we already have our tickets.”
Gay let out a snippy “ahem” and looked at her sister.
“Jeff and I had planned to go shopping,” added Val. They were leaving the next day and, after spending a week across the hotel hall from Joy, I was guessing, wanted to have some time alone.
Joy was being shown up by her sister and her two obedient children. I imagined for her a lifetime of falling short of her haughty sister, of getting lost in her tall shadow, of always feeling second best. As I focused my anxieties on fitting in with a new family, I realized that Joy was probably experiencing the same feelings of alienation in her old one.
Still, I knew there was going to be hell to pay later for missing out on lunch with the aged aunt. Joy was used to running the show back home. But at the moment, I was more concerned with trying to figure out whose slippers I was about to put on. When our cab dropped us off at the 101-year-old uncle’s home, I watched everyone remove their shoes at the door and select from a pile of terry-cloth flip-flops. “Is this for religious purposes?” I asked Karl. “Or to keep his carpet clean?”
“I have no idea.”
The uncle was arranged on a couch next to a faux marble reproduction of The Birth of Venus. He looked right out of central casting, with snowy white hair and round glasses. After the kids lined up to receive his lai see (with both hands out, m’gong), Peggy, another aunt, took him by the elbow and escorted us all outside to see his swimming pool, which was a symbol of vast wealth.
“He is especially proud of his orchids,” said Auntie Peggy, leading us to a sunny spot in the yard.
While we were all admiring the garden, Peggy’s cell phone rang to the tune of the “Mexican Hat Dance.”
“Ah yah,” she answered.
There was something about hearing that music so far away from home and so completely out of context that cracked me up. I let out a stream of cackles before Karl could get close enough to clamp his hand over my mouth. Round Eye strikes again. Truth Number 1 said, “Apologizing profusely, covering your face, or otherwise overreacting will only make people superaware of your flub when they might have barely noticed it otherwise.” To save face, I needed to make a quick and casual apology.
“That was a surprising ring tone,” I said breezily. As the article also suggested, I fought the urge to hang my head and let my chest cave in, a submissive stance. Instea
d, I pretended to be newly fascinated by a kumquat tree.
“How beautiful!” I exclaimed, and smiled at the 101-year-old uncle, who beamed and waved at me.
After we said our good-byes, Auntie Peggy took the whole lot of us out to a fancy dinner in Kowloon. The restaurant was on top of a large shopping mall, and we followed Peggy on her shortcut through the children’s department of a Sears-like store. Whether Karl was annoyed with me for my cell phone outburst or just tiring of focusing a lot of his attention on me (was I eating enough, did I feel okay, was I tired, etc., etc.), he began to walk extra close to his sister, pointing to things we were passing in the store, laughing and whispering and putting her in a headlock. He continued his behavior once we sat down at the table, turning his back on me entirely and putting his head together with hers as they giggled mysteriously. For the first time since we had arrived in Hong Kong, I truly felt excluded. And jealous as hell.
After dinner, Peggy urged Karl and me to take a walk out onto the restaurant’s terrace, where we could see the lights of the city in panoramic glory.
There was a “blow his mind tip” in Cosmo’s Love and Lust column about using a sexy vacation moment for future beddings, minus the airfare. With the warm breeze off the bay and neon lighting up the sky like fireworks, this scenario would have been a good candidate. If only I hadn’t turned all Freudian analyst and said, “Sometimes you and Val behave more like lovers.”
To his credit, Karl did not blow a gasket. When I told him that it hurt my feelings when he turned his back to me at the restaurant or when he behaved as if he and Val were the sole members in a secret club, he said, “I will apologize for making you feel left out because that was never my intention, but”—he continued looking at me right in the eye—“I will not apologize for my relationship with my sister.”
That night, I had a dream that I caught Karl and Val in bed together. Her back was to me and she was topless, with a sheet draped across her hips. She was up on one elbow, blocking Karl from my view, but I knew it was him lying next to her because it was his laughter that caused me to open the door to our bedroom.