Last Tang Standing

by Lauren Ho

  5:40 p.m. Wait, these guys were all Linda’s friends first. Would they want to hang out with me if they had to choose between the more glamorous, moneyed, interesting, and beautiful Linda and me?

  5:55 p.m. How did it get to this? I thought I’d have more friends at this stage of my life, even if you take away those who’d gone off to have families, because how can I compete with Montessori enrichment classes, PTA, and Club Med?

  It’s quite shocking. Maybe I should build that platform. One day.

  6:10 p.m. Googled “how to build an app.” Seems easy enough. Just need to learn how to code. How hard can it be?

  6:30 p.m. Tried to teach myself some code, surreptitiously, via an online course, but very nearly stabbed myself with a pair of scissors in desperation. Was too diffic— I mean, it’s very, erm, not my cup of tea. Thank God my mother never knew that programmers would be the next big thing, otherwise this would have been my life.

  6:33 p.m. Could still hire people to build the platform though.

  6:40 p.m. Shook myself out of a daydream where I had built the next unicorn platform, something something techy, and was now a sexy billionaire with a direct line to designers Roland Mouret and Joseph Altuzarra.

  6:45 p.m. Mmm. Joseph Altuzarra.

  6:48 p.m. Shit!! Realized I’ve sent an email to a client literally with words “Mmm. Joseph Altuzarra.”

  6:50 p.m. It’s OK. Have recalled the message.

  6:56 p.m. Shit, Joseph Altuzarra is gay. Not that there had been any chance of us getting together in the first place. Still, a girl can dream.

  6:59 p.m. Mmm. Joseph Altuzarra.

  * * *

  —

  I came home and found the door unlocked. Now I live in a pretty safe area, with security and key card. It was unlikely that someone could have gotten past the security unless they lived on my floor itself. Yet there was my door, ajar.

  “Hello?” I said, my voice shaking. When I heard nothing, I plucked up my courage and walked in, holding my keys in my hand as a weapon. The living room was dark except for a sliver of light from the guest room (where I keep all my designer bags, the smart fucker!). I tiptoed in, grabbing blindly in the darkness for my umbrella. I planned to jab the housebreaking sucker in the eyes, and when the guy was on his knees screaming as he contemplated his costly mistake, I would stand over him and laugh in his face, and—

  “Hey!” a voice said behind me. I screamed and jumped three feet in the air.

  “It’s me, you silly billy.” It was my mother, slithering out of the shadows to join the living in jeans and a white kurta top, her unnaturally black hair in a severe bob.

  “What,” I gasped, gripping the edge of the bar counter for support, “the effing eff are you doing here today? Could you not have made a sign . . . for that matter, have you not heard of the courtesy call? The call you make to your daughter to warn her that you’re coming a few days ahead of schedule so she doesn’t scare herself shitless?”

  Ma tooted and wagged her finger at me. “Language, darling. Do you think you will trap a bee with vinegar, as the French say?” She did a volte-face and walked toward the kitchen, motioning me to follow her. “Besides, if I warned you, do you think I would be seeing you in your natural habitat?”

  “And miss an opportunity to criticize your own daughter?” I muttered.

  “Drink this, your breath stinks,” she said, thrusting a glass of cold orange juice in my face. “You have an obvious vitamin deficiency, among other things, judging by the crepey texture of your facial skin.” My mother, ever the encouraging soul.

  I downed it and made a face. “Is this juice expired? It tastes like a rat drowned in it.”

  “You’re probably not used to drinking something non-alcoholic.” She waved her arms at the kitchen countertop, where nine empty wine bottles stood. “Looks like someone’s been celebrating or stressing a little too often lately.”

  “That’s my recycling stash,” I said. (It was not.) “Urgh, why the heck am I defending myself? I’m a godda— freaking adult, for fu— cripes’ sake!” I reached around her to open the fridge door and grabbed for the half-empty bottle of rosé I had stuck into the juice compartment two days ago—only to find it stocked with innocent boxes of cold-pressed juice.

  “I got rid of all the liquid poison,” my mother said nonchalantly as I swore.

  “It’s OK, Ma.” I opened the freezer compartment, rooted around under the bags of frozen peas and whatnots, and reached my emergency stock of miniature vodka bottles. I grabbed a mug and sloshed a generous helping of vodka, neat, before gulping it down, much to my mother’s disgust.

  “Hah!” I said between gulps of burning vodka. “Hah!” I felt like the most childish thirty-three-year-old on the face of Earth. Who got one up on their mother now? Alcoholic Andrea, that’s who!

  She said, with perfect nonchalance, “By the way, I just dewormed you. You might want to slow down on the alcohol.”

  I spat out my vodka.

  “Silly billy. Not in your vodka. In your juice!”

  The earth tilted beneath my feet. “What . . . what did you put in me?”

  She gave a “What, me?” shrug of innocence. “Oh, just an eensy weensy tab of Zentel.”*

  “Oh God,” I whispered. The woman was crazy. It was lucky that she was well into her sixties and a woman with little patience for pharmaceuticals; I could picture her as a predatory millennial hipster with a stash of roofies, meth, and Mexican Viagra. She would have been a very successful drug dealer.

  She smiled slyly at me. “You know it was my birthday last week, right?”

  I gathered myself. “Yes, Ma, I sent you that card and those messages.”

  “Yes, that cheap Hallmark card. How lovely. But I don’t care that my children are too cheap or too heartless to buy me gifts anymore. I don’t care about the material things. Sadly, the one thing I really want, that is, to be a grandmother . . .”

  “Oh my God!” I exclaimed. “I’ve only been home for ten fucking minutes. Ten!”

  “All my friends’ daughters are married with good prospects, with kids. And me? When will it be my turn? Both my daughters have no interest in doing the same. Zero.” She pointed a finger accusingly at me. “How come even an unattractive older woman like Helen can find a gweilo* to marry, but you can’t?”

  I grabbed my hair; there was a soft thrumming sound in my left ear. My vision swam and my face throbbed.

  “All right, all right. I can see you’re going to make a big deal out of nothing. I’ll stop.” She sighed. “It doesn’t make a difference anyway. My children don’t listen to me. I might as well not exist.”

  Don’t lash out. Don’t lash out. Take deep breaths and think happy thoughts.

  I imagined myself strangling my mother. “I’m going to my room,” I said, when I could finally feel my face again. “I’m going to change into shorts, so if you feel like moving on to physical abuse, it’ll show better.”

  “You’re being overdramatic,” said the woman who had just drugged me.

  I opened the door to my room to change out of my work clothes and received the second shock of my life when I opened my drawer.

  I screamed. I thought I would never stop screaming. I was sure I would die from a brain aneurysm mid-scream.

  Drawn by my pain, my mother clattered into the room.

  “What. The. Fuck. Is. The. Meaning. Of. This?” I said in a deadly calm voice, pointing to my empty underwear drawer. Empty, except for my gym underwear, i.e., stretched-out gray cotton undies.

  She couldn’t have stopped there; I walked to my bedside and yanked open my nightstand drawer. All the condoms were gone.

  “Where. Are. The. Condoms?” I said, in the same voice.

  “In the bin with your black lace panties, where they belong,” my mother said matter-of-factly. She gave me a look of disapproval. “
By the way, you really should lose some weight. I noticed you have gone up two sizes. Who’s going to want you if you’re fat?”

  It took all the willpower I had to stay planted on the same spot. “Please leave. Now. Before I explode.”

  “Don’t be silly. I can’t leave now. I’ll leave tomorrow, when I can travel safely in a cab and not get raped.” She clapped her hands. “Besides, I made dinner for the two of us. So come, eat with me. I made you your favorite drunken mushroom chicken with garlic bok choy.”

  My stomach rumbled; I hadn’t eaten since lunch, and I was so hungry. But my principles . . .

  In the end, my stomach made the decision for me. I would deal with my mother next time, like when she was old and immobile. Let’s see how she would like staying in the local Methodist-run nursing home.

  After we had eaten, I tried to uncover the reason why she was in town a week early.

  “Can’t I visit my favorite daughter without reason?” she said.

  I narrowed my eyes. “I know you. You never visit without reason. Spill, Mom.”

  She hesitated. “Well, if you must know, I got a text from your sister. She wanted me to know that Kamarul proposed. And she accepted.”

  I whooped. At long last! I couldn’t believe that Melissa and Kamarul were finally getting hitched—they had been waiting for so long for the right time (i.e., my mother’s blessing), but clearly they’d had an epiphany and decided to stop waiting and go for it. I couldn’t be prouder of them.

  “Well. They can go ahead and get married without me, because I may not be stopping it, but I’m certainly not going to the wedding. I need you to tell her that because I’m still not speaking to her,” my mother said.

  “Why not?” I demanded. “Aren’t you tired of this foolishness by now?”

  “You don’t understand where I’m coming from, but trust me, I know better,” she said angrily. “Melissa is going to regret this. She’s going to give up everything for a man—her culture, her potential inheritance from Auntie Wei Wei—everything. It’s a stupid move.”

  I piled more of the food on my plate and stood up. “I’m going to bed, and you can tell her yourself,” I said curtly.

  “I’m not talking to her until she breaks up with him!” my mother called to my retreating back.

  I slammed the door behind me to give vent to my feelings. My mother was so stubborn and narrow-minded. It’s a good thing I’m nothing like her.

  Friday 15 April

  7:40 a.m. Ushered my mom into a cab. She looked contrite, but I wasn’t falling for it. She can bitch about her children with Auntie Zhang, another Singapore-based sibling of hers; two of the latter’s children were struggling actors and the youngest was a “social media influencer” with less than one thousand followers. The two of them could happily debate which of their children had disappointed them most.

  12:30 p.m. Had a lovely video chat with my sister and Kamarul, who are in Bukit Larut on some hipster rustic treehouse retreat to celebrate their engagement. Was a little miffed that Melissa didn’t call me to tell me immediately (it had happened last Friday), but she said it’s because she was worried that if she told me, I’d blab all over town before she gathered the nerve to tell our mother. As if!

  When she asked me if our mother was attending, I said, “At the moment, it seems like she’s undecided, but let’s see.”

  Silence.

  “All right,” she said softly.

  “Tell me about the proposal!” I almost shouted to compensate for the downward turn in mood.

  He had asked her one night after dinner, in their home on one knee, after presenting her with a cake he had baked himself (a terrible fail, but she was touched by the effort even though the whole house now smelled like burned caramel, hence the retreat). She did confide in me, when Kamarul excused himself to give us some space to dissect the proposal (and the ring, duh—around one carat Asscher-cut, platinum band), that she was struggling with having to convert to Islam in order to marry Kamarul under Malaysian law.

  “You don’t want to?”

  “Well, there’s no other way,” she said. “Not if we want to get married in Malaysia. In any case, we can’t go on living in this limbo. Even if a choice was possible, if I don’t convert, his family will be very disappointed. His parents won’t cut him off, but his community will. It’s a lot of societal pressure.”

  Families—wherever you stood, there they were, poison-dipped pitchforks to your back.

  “Would you ever consider leaving?”

  “Malaysia?” A sigh. “No. No matter what, it’s still home. And then there’s Ma . . .”

  We both fell silent.

  “Look, wherever you are in the world, you can still send me Ma’s allowance and I’ll remit it to her from my account, as per usual.” For some time now, Melissa had been sending me money for our mother’s living expenses, and I would wire that sum, along with my contribution, to our mother every month. It’s a token sum, of course, as our mother had a small but decent income from two rental properties in Kuala Lumpur, but it’s the way many of us Chinese kids repay the debt that we owe our parents for them sacrificing the best years of their lives by working so hard to send us to the best schools, etc. Told you: we’re the best pension plan.

  “That’s not it,” she said heavily.

  “She’ll come around,” I said, with as much conviction as I could fake.

  In any case, we ended the conversation on a positive note: I will not be required to wear any Grecian-inspired maid-of-honor gowns. There will be sleeves, yards and yards of them. Thank God.

  23

  Sunday 17 April

  Linda and her mystery man have finally been outed by the press. They’d been photographed on a yacht with their naughty bits hanging in the breeze in Cannes at some after-party. Well, actually they were in the periphery of a picture with someone from One Direction or similar, and that naturally caught the attention of the news-starved Singaporean press. “Billionaire Playboy Brings Mystery Woman Onboard Tech Superstar’s Mega Yacht!”

  There, in the blurry enlarged pic, was Linda in the world’s smallest white string bikini, one that a toddler could have crushed in its fist. Barefoot, she stood almost half a head taller than Massimo.

  “She’s really with him?” Valerie said disapprovingly when we met up for a drink session that evening with Jason and Ben at a new Mexican fusion cocktail-and-tapas bar. Valerie knew about Massimo’s unsavory reputation.

  “Unfortunately, yes.” I noticed that Jason was also in some kind of funk, staring stonily at a spot behind my head and downing beers. He’d been acting weird in the last group hangs. Then again, the chemistry of the group hang had been off without Linda. Clearly, she found “Poots” a much more fascinating specimen to spend her time with. My spies in her office told me that she was billing the bare minimum to get by and was always out for three-hour-long “lunches.” But now that she and Massimo were having all kinds of unnatural nocturnal dealings on top of his being her client, the bosses were never going to fire her—they needed her to keep the law firm’s Ponzi-like billing model going.

  If only they knew the means she was using to hook him, I thought sourly. Then I thought of all the cleavage-baring client-relationship managers I knew in private banking, and I sighed. Singapore, though conservative, understands that sex sells (even if they weren’t necessarily having it themselves). Linda’s bosses might have stiff upper lips, but even they weren’t going to thumb their noses at Linda’s questionable merger-and-acquisition tactics.

  Urgh. Linda always came out on top.

  “She’ll come around,” Ben said. “She’ll find herself a winner.” He meant himself, clearly.

  “I don’t know about that. She likes her men vapid and rich, preferably with a few STDs,” I said cattily.

  “Excuse me,” Jason said, pushing his chair back loudly and walking awa
y.

  “What’s wrong with Jason?” Valerie asked, uncharacteristically observant.

  “Bad nachos?” I said.

  I gave Jason a quick once-over when he returned. He was definitely not taking any drugs in the toilet because he looked even more dejected than he had before. Dude was so miserable he ordered three rounds of drinks for everyone. What is going on with my friends?

  Saturday 23 April

  Spent the evening with Ralph Kang, Valerie, and Eric Deng at one of the old-school fine-dining Shanghainese restaurants I can never remember the name of.

  Even though she was less than thrilled about seeing Ralph, who she found lackluster and coarse in appearance, it didn’t stop Valerie from dolling up. She wore a triple-strand Mikimoto pearl necklace and a delicate, long-sleeved, body-hugging black velvet-and-lace dress, paired with spectacular black Charlotte Olympia Paloma heels and an Alexander McQueen Small De Manta clutch of mine (well, Linda’s). As for me, I played it low-key and wore one of my wrap dresses in navy blue and low kitten heels. I was nervous about the double date. I hadn’t seen Ralph since the fateful Sexless Book Club or Eric since he ambushed me at work, so I was a little nervous about how the chemistry between the four of us would turn out. Plus if things didn’t go well tonight, Eric and I would have awkwardness to smooth over when we went on our date next weekend.

  Dinner did not start well. When Valerie and I arrived, the two men were deep in heated conversation and Ralph was red with displeasure. He acknowledged us with a curt greeting before storming off.

  Eric leaned over and whispered, “Sorry, we just saw his ex-wife a few tables away. She’s here with her Chilean salsa instructor, who apparently was the one she was cheating on Ralph with, hence the stroppy mood.”

  Ah. The ex. Eric told us that Ralph had left to see his friend, the chef, about kicking them out of the restaurant.

  “I should go with him, just in case he tries to create a scene with her. He’s not one to shy away from confrontation, and I know he’s been dying to beat up Vicente.” Eric excused himself and hurried after Ralph.