Chapter Text
Marianne
Joy stomped her foot indignantly in a gesture that wouldn’t have been entirely uncharacteristic of me (yes, I still had the emotional capacity of a tween at times). “Daddy, you have to count me!” she protested. “That’s my piano!”
“I’m so sorry, honey,” crooned William, his usual veneer of perfect composure melting away in his attempt to appease his daughter. “I’m too used to thinking of it as Ye Ye’s piano, so I completely forgot he sent it here for you.”
“The piano originally came from my grandfather,” he explained to us. “Even though the British delivered the biggest insult to China in the form of the Opium Wars, there was still this lingering perception that anything British, or European for that matter, carried a certain amount of prestige with it. That’s why my grandfather read Flaubert and Maupassant, took pride in all the Western items he collected, and made it a point to send my father to Cambridge for his higher education. By the time my generation came, America was supposed to be the new frontier of Western modernity, and that was why my father sent me to Harvard instead. Last year, my parents shipped the piano down to us over here as a reward for Joy after she passed her ABRSM Grade 7 with distinction.”
ABRSM was the British music examination system; I knew that much because of the Tiger Parents whom I had encountered in my side gig teaching piano while I was in college. After all, Boston was full of money and class, which meant I’d had more than my fair share of dealing with parents’ outsize expectations for their offspring. Most of the parents who wanted their kids to take piano exams were doing it as an Ivy League college application boost, and I was glad Dad and Mom were more laissez-faire than that and had mostly let me pick the songs I wanted to learn when I was younger.
“I’m waiting until next year to do Grade 8,” Joy chirped up, her enthusiasm bubbling up as soon as she started talking about music. “But Ye Ye sent the piano just in time for me to make my portfolio for DSA. I want to go School of the Arts next year and learn music.”
“You really caught us all in celebration mode,” added Lizzy. “A week ago, Joy got shortlisted for the Talent Academy, which is a two-day audition program at the end of the month. We’ve been over the moon ever since we heard about it.”
“Mummy, Daddy, can I play something for Chris kor kor and Marianne jie jie?” asked Joy. “I liked doing my portfolio because I can learn different songs. Not only the ones I need to play for exams.”
“Just one piece, OK?” warned William, a hint of sternness creeping into his voice again. “Yati and Gloria have already cooked dinner, and we don’t want it to get cold.”
“Marianne, you need to play with more discipline.” Those words from my old piano teacher back in the Bay Area came rushing back to me as Joy filled the room with the crisp staccato notes of La Campanella. It was the spring recital piece I had been assigned the last year before we moved, when I was sixteen years old and a sophomore in high school. Metronomes did not agree with me, and the one my teacher insistently set on top of the upright practice piano to coax more precision into my timing only succeeded in annoying me exceedingly. But Joy did not need any such reminders; she hit the high notes with her nimble fingers so that they tinkled like little bells, exactly the way they should. How could a tween exhibit such levels of self-control, when at half a lifetime older than she was now, I had still been chastised regularly for letting all my notes run into each other? Admittedly, I was someone who played with more heart than mind, and that was probably one of the biggest reasons why I ended up doing contemporary music instead of classical. The innocence of Joy’s rendition came through even with the deep, low, somewhat masculine timbre conferred on the notes by the Broadwood Grand; it was still the sound, with its clean, bright edges, of someone who had never known a single day of pain or agony.
Joy finished the piece with the final chords, hitting them off with accuracy rather than high drama, and everyone, even Bennet, was polite enough to wait till she was done before showering her with applause. As with all the times when there was music, Chris remained silent; I knew now that the more he immersed himself in what he heard, the less he gushed about it. And I wondered if I might have done him a disservice by never introducing him to classical music. For so many years, it had been the bane of my existence, the thing I was forced to do once a year for my teacher’s year-end recitals. Classical music had been a thing I worked at to please the adults as a child, while contemporary songs were the language with which I expressed myself, the thing that flowed just as easily as I laughed and cried. It was no wonder that I stopped playing classical pieces after we moved and couldn’t afford a piano teacher, and I never picked them back up until I had to pander to the aspirations of the Tiger Parents who were my only salvation from complete financial dependence on Mom and Elinor. I knew all too well that most of these kids were going through the motions in the same way that I had when I was their age, spending just enough time at the piano to pass their exams or crank out the songs their parents wanted them to learn, which were always the famous and difficult ones, so they could earn more screen time or playtime afterward. But Joy was a cut above any one of them: not only did she play that insanely complex piece with unfailing technical accuracy, but she also infused it with… something, that was uniquely her and not necessarily at odds with how it was meant to be, for La Campanella meant “Little Bells”, and so the emotional innocence of her playing was somewhat appropriate.
“Chris kor kor, did you like it?” asked Joy, hopping off the piano stool and planting herself, arms akimbo, right in front of Chris. She probably was so used to open adulation that Chris’ silence was unfamiliar to her.
“I did,” replied Chris solemnly and reverently, raising his bowed head to meet her with his eyes, and gracing her with same smile I now found so familiar, for that was the look on his face whenever he got lost in my playing. “I liked it very much. Just like Marianne, you know how to make magic when you play.”
“Dinnertime!” bellowed Bennet, who’d gone off to lurk by the dining table as Yati and Gloria carried plate after plate of food to it. “I’m HUNGRY!”
The Dengs’ dining table and chairs were a shiny, smooth dark brown wood, with a raised round circle split into quarters, each twisting into a fancy maze, carved on the backs of each of the chairs and an ornate pattern of birds, flowers and leaves going all round the dining table in a little skirting hanging down from the edge. If everything else about their living space was modern and minimalist, this dining set and the Broadwood Grand were the two old-fashioned things that stood out.
Even though Bennet was clearly hungry and impatient, he was surprisingly patient while we worked out where everyone would sit and kept his hands in his lap even though he was getting bug-eyed staring at the food. Once everyone was seated, he rattled off something in Chinese to his father and mother, then just as rapidly, he wished us, “Chris kor kor, eat; Marianne jie jie, eat.”
“Ben-net!” scolded Joy. “You can’t say so fast, it’s rude!” She then went on to repeat the same wishes to each of us, carefully enunciating every word while Bennet pouted at her, his hands twitching in his lap.
“Come on, let’s eat,” said William, after the kids finished wishing everybody to eat. “They’re not supposed to start eating until all of us get something, so do help yourselves.”
All the food was arranged family style on a lazy Susan in the middle of the big round table which seated ten, leaving us all bunched in a crescent shape around a little more than half of it. All of us each had our own little bowl of rice, a small plate to put food on, and an empty bowl. Lizzy grabbed her bowl and ladled soup into it, passing it to Chris and motioning to him to hand her his bowl. She continued to fill the bowls with soup and pass them around until we each had our own, while William filled her plate with a little bit of each of the dishes. Upon seeing William serve Elizabeth, Chris immediately followed suit.
“Little guys first,” he said, handing the first plate of food he put together to Bennet. “Marianne, I’ll get to you, but Joy is next.”
Bennet put his right hand on the table and grabbed his chopsticks, gripping them tight but not picking them up to eat. “Hurry up!” he urged.
William quickly sipped a spoonful of soup and Lizzy took a bite of rice with her chopsticks. Realizing that poor Bennet wouldn’t get to eat until all of us helped ourselves, I said, “It’s OK, Bennet – your parents are eating already, so you won’t be breaking the rules if you start now.” Chris was still serving Joy, trying to make sure the kids got their food before we helped ourselves.
“You saw them earlier,” said William, “so you’ll know we don’t do this to them all the time. But when it’s Chinese night at home, we need to practice our Chinese manners, so we won’t get into trouble when we visit with extended family.”
Honestly, I was amazed. How could such a little boy, especially one as active as Bennet, possibly be capable of such self-denial? Once he got the go-ahead from his parents, he went at it like a whirlwind, shoving whatever he couldn’t pick up with his chopsticks into his spoon. He’d probably been hungry for quite a while, I realized.
“We have a schedule,” explained Lizzy, “where dinner is a different culture every day of the week. Of course, there’s Chinese night for William, and American night for me with steak or pizza or pasta or quesadillas, and we want to make sure Yati and Gloria’s cultures are respected, so we do Indonesian and Filipino nights too. Gloria makes the most amazing roast suckling pig, and Yati is wonderful with Malay and Indonesian dishes, including some specialities from her hometown. And then, we have Singapore night with our favourite local street food dishes. Sometimes I help with the cooking, just to expand my repertoire.”
“Wow, that’s really interesting,” I said. “You have so many kinds of food over here – at Jewel, I swear there must’ve been a hundred restaurants or something. We went to two different Chinese restaurants, and even though it was all Chinese food, they were not the same at all. The variety’s got to be, like, infinite.”
“Yeah,” chimed in Joy, helping herself to more fish. A long fish lay whole in an oval dish in a pool of soy sauce gravy with a delicate lattice of green onions and ginger sprinkled over it, and I was impressed how confidently she scooped at it, skilfully avoiding the bones. “We have a lot of Japanese and Korean food too. I like to eat Japanese food because it makes me remember the times when we go Japan for holiday.”
“Like omu rice,” added Bennet, chewing as he talked. “They give it to you on a spaceship plate. Kor kor, I think you will like that.”
“Let’s make sure you get to sample some of those cuisines while you’re here,” offered Lizzy. “I thought Boston was a cultural melting pot, but after we got here, I realized how much more eclectic the selection of Asian food can be when you’re actually in Asia.”
“We should try the street food too,” added Chris. “That experience is something else.”
“Yup,” I said enthusiastically. “Rich-people street food is a really fascinating concept; I remember in Crazy Rich Asians when they all went to this place which had, I think they said a Michelin star or something?”
“That’s Newton Food Centre,” replied William. “It’s the number one place all the tourists go to when they want street food. Where we used to live, we went to Adam Road Food Centre all the time – maybe we could go there when we show you Joy and Bennet’s schools.”
“Sometimes Yati and Gloria still go back to shop at Empress Market too,” added Lizzy. “Down here, nothing beats the wet markets, which are kind of like farmer’s markets but on a bigger scale with more variety, for freshness.”
The fish was getting picked down to its bones, and William skilfully picked it up with two of the serving spoons and flipped it over to its other side.
“That’s a huge fish,” I remarked. “What kind of fish is it?”
“Its Western name is marble goby,” explained Lizzy, “but if you go to a Chinese restaurant, they call it Soon Hock on the menu. Usually, they either steam them like what we have here, or otherwise, they taste really great deep fried too.”
“Soon Hock is to the local Chinese what a premium cod fish might be to an American,” added William. I could see that; the meat was pull-apart soft, with the sauce adding an intricate layer of flavour to it. If only they didn’t have to serve them whole, though I tried not to look at the fish’s head while I was eating.
“I like Auntie Gloria’s lechon better,” commented Bennet, kneeling on his chair to grab a serving spoon to scoop a giant spoonful of sweet and sour pork onto his plate.
“You like anything that will fill you up,” pointed out Joy. “I don’t know where it all goes. Because you eat enough pork to turn you into a pig.”
“He’s referring to Filipino suckling pig,” explained Lizzy. “In general, roast pork is a big treat around here too.”
“Bennet only likes to think about food,” grumbled Joy. “At least I care about other things too, like music.”
“Speaking of music, what was your portfolio like?” I asked Joy. “A two-day audition program sounds really tough. Even worse than what I had to go through to get into Berklee.”
“We had to record two songs,” explained Joy, “and it must be one single take, so you cannot cheat by cutting out wrong notes and only putting the right ones together. Daddy helped me choose my songs, so I could show two contrasting styles.”
“That’s got to be pretty difficult,” observed Chris. “I mean, you do great with happy music like what you played just now, but to put the right kind of feeling into a sad song, you need to make yourself feel really sad. And that must be a hard thing to do.”
A hard thing for someone Joy’s age was probably what Chris meant but was too polite to say; for at some point, just about everybody would have their heart broken at least once in their lives. Back when I was a teenager, I might have had the illusion that life stored up all its miseries to heap onto me, but I’d long outgrown that age of delusionary self-importance. I was seriously impressed, though, at how Chris naturally loved and understood music even though he’d never been trained in any instrument and was too shy to sing. He’d said it all in just those few words: music was the outward manifestation of one’s innermost feelings, and the sharing of it was what formed a universal language, an affirmation of our common humanity.
“Daddy chose my songs,” replied Joy. “He played piano and violin since he was three years old, just like me.”
“There had to be Bach in there somewhere,” explained William, “because the Baroque period is all about the purity of music as an art form. We were given a hard limit of ten minutes total, so I picked the Little Fugue in G Minor for her first piece to keep it under five minutes.”
Ah, Bach, the kind of music Elinor would’ve loved if she’d been interested in playing the piano. It was all about dividing up measures into parts of eight and sixteen, and then putting melodies on top of each other and turning them upside down. My childhood piano teacher had made me play Bach a couple times for end-of-year recitals, but I could never get around how music could become a clinical academic exercise, almost completely devoid of emotion.
“Music is like Maths,” rhapsodized Joy. “Daddy explained it to me. He showed me how all the notes fit together. I have a lot of fun with Bach because I think both Maths and music are fun.”
“And Lizzy helped me pick the other piece,” William continued. “She wanted something with a distinct contemporary and popular feel. That’s how we ended up with Summertime by Gershwin.”
“In Singapore, it is always summertime,” Joy elaborated. “But that means we sweat a lot, and we get mosquito bites at night if we don’t on the air-con. And the government comes to check whether we have stag-nant water in our house because if we grow the bad type of mosquitoes, we can get very sick.”
“That’s dengue fever,” said Lizzy. “We always need to be careful about creating dengue hot spots, which is why we change the water in our potted plants all the time and keep the air conditioning on.”
“But Mummy said the Summertime song is not about Singapore,” continued Joy. “She said I need to think about the time we went Kensington Gardens, or the Boston Public Garden when we visit Gu Gu during the June school holiday. That type of summertime has grass and many different colours of flowers, and a blue, blue sky.”
“Didn’t you say you thought the song was like your Mummy too?” prompted William.
“Yes!” Joy declared ecstatically. “When I think about Mummy, it is very easy to play. Mummy is the happiest person in the world. Daddy says she fills his life with colour.”
“That sounds like something we could try when we get home,” suggested Chris. “After all, that description could also apply to you.”
“Can we sing my song after dinner?” begged Bennet. “I want to go first!”
“Daddy,” asked Joy, “if we are going to sing karaoke later, can Marianne jie jie come and play piano with me tomorrow?”
“No problem at all,” said William breezily. We’d moved on from dinner to a remarkably healthy dessert, with a plate of neatly sliced fresh pineapple, oranges, and watermelon in the middle of the table and a soup with yellow beans in it that William was dishing out for us in bowls. The only decadent thing about this spread was a bowl of narrow donut slices about half an inch thick, which Lizzy said was to put on top of the soup.
“What are those?” I asked before I could stop myself. “They look like sliced donut guts.” Of course, Chris swiftly stuck an elbow in my ribs before I could traumatize Joy and Bennet any further. “The kids might puke,” he warned me in grave whispered tones.
Thankfully, the kids had more mettle than Chris thought, which shouldn’t have surprised me since Lizzy was their mom after all. Lizzy laughed heartily, even as Joy pulled a face at me. Of course, Bennet was absolutely delighted. “Donut guts!” he exclaimed. “That’s a better story than what Daddy said. Daddy said there was a bad man called Qin Hui and people hated him so much they wanted to fry him and eat him, so they made him into youtiao(油条).”
“This is tau suan, or what I would call lüdougeng (绿豆羹) in standard Mandarin,” explained William. “Green bean soup is just one of the most common local desserts – practically all the Chinese food here originates from the southern provinces, so I had to develop a completely new palate. But there is one dessert dish that I find familiar from my childhood, which is the tang yuan (汤圆), a kind of glutinous rice ball. We have it every year at the winter solstice.”
Chris and I were so used to clearing up after dinner, it felt weird when Lizzy waved us away from the table as soon as we were done with dessert. Even when we visited with Jack Middleton and his family back home, we all helped Mrs. Jennings rinse off the dishes in the sink and load the dishwasher, while Mary Middleton cleaned up after her little darlings, who still left trails of candy wrappers and tortilla chip crumbs all over the house. The Middleton kids’ tween messes weren’t much better than their toddler ones, and Mary still cooed over them as if they were toddlers too.
If I thought the Dengs’ house was enormous before – it had to be about four or five times the size of Mom’s house, by the looks of it – I hadn’t realized there was still an entire level downstairs. There was nothing dingy at all about that basement – it was full of lighting and perfectly colour coordinated built-in furniture, all in the same neutral shades that had given the living room its ultra-modern look. Two game consoles were plugged into the flat screen TV, and the built-in shelves were stuffed full of books and DVDs of all kinds. An upright piano stood in a corner, with two violins in their cases tucked next to it accompanied by two metal music stands. For a space which was supposed to be the hub of Joy and Bennet’s after-school hours, it was surprisingly clean and neat, though perhaps that might be because of Yati and Gloria.
“Our karaoke system was probably the best pandemic investment ever,” remarked Lizzy. “Karaoke had to be the thing people missed most and one of the last things to open back up, but it was a sanity saver to have our karaoke fix right here with the kids.”
“Me first!” yelled Bennet, pulling up the MTV he wanted from YouTube in a few swipes. Planting himself in front of the TV with a swagger, he pounced around to the peppy, fast-paced intro, punching the air with a few fake kung fu moves.
“不是英雄 (bu shi ying xiong), 不读三国 (bu du san guo), 若是英雄怎么能不懂寂寞 (ruo shi ying xiong zen me neng bu dong ji mo),” he belted out with gusto, before losing his script and dancing all over the room.
“Bennet, when have you ever been lonely?” asked Joy. “That song said you need to be lonely to be a hero,” she explained to us. “So that means Bennet cannot be a hero because he is never lonely.”
“But I am not a hero yet,” retorted Bennet, still prancing around the room. “There are many years before I have to go army.”
“When you go army,” teased Joy, “you cannot ask Yaya to carry backpack for you anymore. Otherwise it will be so malu, everybody will laugh.”
“Yaya won’t need to carry my backpack,” replied Bennet, “because Encik will bring me all the way to the door. Just like how he brings me to school.”
For all my efforts to keep from offending the kids, I couldn’t help it – I was dying of laughter. But at least I wasn’t the only villain in the house, Lizzy was laughing heartily too. Bennet made one last jab at the air before launching himself into her lap and dissolving into giggles.
“My dad was a class act when he dropped me off at Basic Cadet Training,” said Chris. “I was eighteen, exactly the same age Bennet will be when he goes into the military. So, Dad said, ‘Remember, they’re going to break you down so they can build you back up in the way they want you to be. You have to keep that in mind, because that’s the only way you won’t give up. And that’s what they’re going to do because they’ve been trained on purpose to do it. They will do whatever it takes to break you down so comprehensively you’ll think your entire life before this was a cakewalk.’ He ended that spiel right at the spot where I had to get out, and I swear he rolled away even before the trunk was fully shut.”
Looking at William’s horrified expression, I was barely able to contain another peal of laughter. “I - I don’t think I’ll ever be ready for that,” he stammered, “even if eighteen is still far away.”
“You don’t need to be military dad extraordinaire,” I reassured him. “Chris’ dad used to be a fighter pilot, so he’s probably a hundred times harder on him than a normal dad would be. And besides, if you have mandatory conscription, it means every dad in Singapore has to become a military dad. You won’t be alone.”
“That’s right,” acknowledged William, “but still, he’s far from ready.” I didn’t disagree; in fact, with the life the Deng family led, I wondered if it would ever be possible for Bennet to become anywhere as resilient as Chris when he had such doting parents as William and Lizzy, and there were Yati and Gloria and Encik around to wait on him hand and foot. Moving from the Bay Area to Colorado Springs, learning to share a room with Elinor and getting used to public high school had been a bad enough shock for me, so going from the life he had now into the army would be many times worse for him.
“It’s my turn now,” declared Joy, who had navigated her way to her MTV. The video had a cartoon of two little cherubs sitting at the end of a dock in the moonlight over a glassy lake, with hundreds of paper lanterns glimmering like stars in the night sky. Her voice swelled loud and clear and innocent, spreading the feeling of heavenly peace with her tune.
“明月几时有 把酒问清天 (ming yue ji shi you ba jiu wen qing tian)
不知天上宫阙 今夕是何年 (bu zhi tian shang gong que jin xi shi he nian)
我欲乘风归去 唯恐琼楼玉宇 (wo yü cheng feng gui qü wei kong qiong lou yü yü)
高处不胜寒 起舞弄清影 (gao chu bu sheng han qi wu nong qing ying)
何似在人间 (he shi zai ren jian)”
“This is a song of reunion,” William explained. “It is based on an old saying, 但愿人长久，千里共蝉娟, (dan yuan ren chang jiu, qian li gong chan juan) which means that you want the people you care about to be in your lives for a long time, and to reunited with them even when they are thousands of miles away. We picked this song specially to represent our reunion with you.”
“It’s beautiful,” Chris and I said, at almost exactly the same time. “Thank you,” I said, and Chris tacked on, “it means a lot to both of us.”
Did Joy or her parents know just how talented she was? When I was her age, everyone knew I was the sister who liked to play the piano, just like how Elinor was the sister who liked to draw. Sometimes Dad and Mom told people I was the musical one in the family, but it wasn’t until Chris said I was a great singer that I ever thought of doing anything more with music than just entertaining my family. Had I even realized, until now, that he was the real catalyst that had propelled me to Berklee?
“I hope you get into that music school you applied for, Joy,” I said. “You deserve it twice over with your playing and singing.”
“It all comes from William’s side of the family,” said Lizzy. “I owe everything I know about music to him, and as you know, his sister is a professional musician.”
“Do you think Joy will become one too?” I asked.
“Hopefully not,” interjected William. “There’s probably a starving artist in every family, but one is enough.”
That made me think about Eliza’s younger sister Edith, even though she wasn’t technically a part of Chris’ family, just found family. This year, she graduated from Boston University at the same time when I graduated from Berklee, and now her parents were renting her the house which she had grown up in for whatever she could afford to pay, because rents in Boston and New York were both too expensive for her. Mostly, she earned a living from writing opinion articles on The Medium, while working on her first novel at the same time. Mr. and Mrs. Williams, who were still living in New York, had asked Chris and me to continue to keep an eye on her and make sure she was taking care of herself, even though we would have done that anyway, because they were pretty sure she didn’t make enough from her freelance writing gigs to afford any of the creature comforts she had as a teenager. I could see how that was true, when the Williams family home looked barren and empty with the rag-tag pieces of furniture she’d brought back from college. Not that I was much better anyway - I could perhaps predict a little more accurately how much I could earn in a month, but I was still hiding my inability to pay rent behind my love for Mom and Margaret.
“You could hardly call Gianna a starving artist,” argued Lizzy. “Not when she’s a violinist with the Boston Philharmonic. Besides, she doesn’t need to live in a multimillion-dollar brownstone in Back Bay.”
“A second violinist,” William pointed out rather caustically. “That’s hardly going to make her rich or get her proper recognition. And that’s after she went to Harvard. True, she technically doesn’t need to be in Back Bay, but when that property’s already there, I might as well have her live in it.”
“Second violinists need to be every bit as talented as first violinists,” I chipped in. While at Berklee, I’d talked to enough classical musicians, Gianna herself included, to have an opinion on that. “Often they play the same notes but just an octave lower.”
“Well, I hope even if Joy gets into SOTA, she might still choose Nanyang Girls’ High School,” said William. “That’s the secondary school affiliated to Nanyang Primary, which is where she is now. Twelve is far too early to decide on a lifelong career as a musician.”
“Daddy,” said Joy, a little bit of petulance creeping into her voice, “I don’t have to decide now. Not until I pass Talent Academy. And you are not a starving artist, but you think you are Jay Chou.”
“Do I?” William laughed a little ruefully. “I would hope I am not arrogant enough to presume to be the king of Mandopop.”
“Yes, you do,” insisted Joy. “You sing all his songs, and you sing them very well. If I was a boy, my name would be Jay instead of Joy.”
“Haven’t you figured out the naming conventions of this family?” quipped William. “If you were a boy, you would have been the eldest son, and so your name would have been Bennet. And then, maybe your brother would have been named Jay.”
“I don’t want my name to be Jay,” protested Bennet. “I want to be JJ!”
“And you are,” pointed out William. “Your name was half inspired by JJ Lin.”
“That’s right!” exclaimed Bennet gleefully. “My name is Junchao, which means I am super handsome!”
“Oh no, what have we done?” said Lizzy. “William, do you see where your loyalties have taken you? You’re fanning his pride with that Chinese name you gave him.”
“Well, how was I to know it’d come to this?” replied William. “Jun was for Lin Junjie, of course, and Chao was for my best buddy Chase Lin Chao. It just so happens those two words put together have that meaning, and honestly speaking, there is some truth in it too. I guess I have sort of created a monster after all.”
“Daddy, now you have to sing a song,” said Joy. “You know every time I will ask you to sing a song by Jay, and Bennet will ask you to sing a song by JJ. I want the one with the cartoon MTV.”
With a resigned shrug, William picked up the microphone as Joy toggled the remote to pull up the MTV. The song started with the picture of a starry night and a wistful guitar intro, and then…
A young man, wearing a plaid button-down shirt like the ones Chris used to wear on the weekends he booked out of the Academy, sat alone in a park playing his guitar. The scene cut to a clueless-looking high school boy, holding a letter in his hand, standing speechless and stunned as a beautiful girl ran off holding the hand of someone else, just glancing back over her shoulder to wave him goodbye. Back to the solitary young man with his guitar slung over his shoulder – he held out a crepe he’d made at the food kiosk he worked at to the girl and played his guitar in the park and the streets, fading into the background as the girl walked past, completely oblivious to his presence. Alone, he lay flat on the grass outside her school, staring up into the starry sky as she studied in her classroom late into the night. On and on it went, the man keeping silent vigil over the girl, who never paid any attention to him except to turn her head just once when he serenaded in a busy street. It was as if someone had painted us into a cartoon – a caricature of Chris and me at the time when I was in high school, and he was at the Academy.
I had no idea how much of my shock and shame might have registered on my face, for Chris certainly was no mirror of me – he looked solemn as if deep in thought, transfixed at what he saw on the screen. It had to have awakened as much sadness in him as the shame in me, but he did a pretty good job of not quite showing it, even if he was rather more quiet than usual.
“Yay!” said Joy. If she could be so oblivious to the utter disaster that MTV had been for us, I supposed we must both have hidden our sentiments quite credibly. “Daddy, you are my rock star! And now if you must sing a JJ Lin song for Bennet, you need to sing the Taylor Swift one.”
“Since when did JJ Lin sing a Taylor Swift song?” asked Lizzy. “Am I behind the times, or have we created a cultural jumble in this house?”
“Mummy, don’t be silly,” replied Joy, “I meant the MTV is like that Taylor Swift one, you know, the one which is more than ten minutes long? And it also tells a story like all of Taylor Swift’s MTVs.”
William seemed to know the drill, because he had found the MTV and toggled to it with the remote. A pair of young men in dark navy suits and overcoats were hanging around drunk outside a gate. With their bangs hanging into their eyes, they looked like prep school students, or college age at best. Opening the metal gate, they went into the school and sneaked onto the stage of the auditorium, where one of them played a melancholy tune on the grand piano.
“That’s JJ!” said Bennet. “Do you think I look like him?”
“Yes,” replied Chris mechanically, though I knew he could not be speaking the truth. Bennet’s Caucasian genes showed in his big button eyes and the brownish tint in his hair, not in the least like the completely Chinese-looking JJ. “You look handsomer than him,” I said, for at least that way I could say something he wanted to hear without lying.
“Really?” Bennet seemed delighted. “I look like JJ, but handsomer?”
“Yes, you do,” said Joy exasperatedly. “And now can you keep quiet? Daddy is going to sing!”
The intro played on and on, its sad and yearning tone floating to a room with a beautiful lady in black, who was a music teacher in the school. Clutching her purse and violin almost protectively, she followed the sound in the hallways until she found its source, completely mesmerized until the piano player stopped abruptly.
I couldn’t understand their conversation, but I did see how JJ and the other guy surreptitiously switched places, and how the other guy stepped out of his shoes with a self-conscious titter. It seemed that the other guy probably liked that lady, even though I couldn’t figure out whether JJ did or not.
The scene switched to a highway tunnel tinged in sepia, and a guy in black sped past as the music teacher sat in a car, looking out the window. As they ground to a stop, the guy on the motorcycle lifted the visor of his helmet to reveal JJ’s eyes, the shot widening to show that she was sitting in the car with JJ’s classmate.
William’s tenor voice added all the pathos I was starting to see, as the camera cut back to JJ playing on the grand piano and then a scene of them in a bar, the classmate and the music teacher flirting around a solitary JJ nursing his beer. How many times had I seen that deadpan expression on Chris’ face and assumed it meant he was devoid of emotion? Oh, I already knew how stupid, selfish, and blinkered I’d been; there was no need for this MTV to play it all over again. And yet it continued, literally showing us the story of our lives.
JJ was in a billiards parlour, watching his classmate kiss another girl as the music teacher arranged the balls on the pool table. His classmate winked at him to tell him to keep the secret, but still he dithered at the doorway, shyly gazing at the music teacher and wondering if he should tell her the truth. But then that billiard hall girl whom his friend had been flirting with grabbed his lapel and pulled him away, leaving him to watch helplessly as his friend went on, using the game as an excuse to snuggle up to the music teacher and hold her hand to show her how to use the cue.
The story went on and on, showing how JJ actually liked the music teacher who was dating his friend, but was too shy – or perhaps too noble – to say it or tell her that his classmate was cheating on her. But things came to a head when they went on a double date and JJ tried to kiss the girl from the billiard room on purpose, provoking his friend to challenge him to a fight. As they both duked it out in the parking lot outside the diner, the sad face of the music teacher showed that she now knew the truth.
In the final scene, JJ, bruised and battered from the fist fight with his friend, was playing the piano again in the auditorium. Had this been the kind of hopelessness Chris felt after that fight with John Willoughby? In my head I’d known it to be true for years, but to watch it on the screen broke my heart all over again. And then for the music teacher to come to him and engage in their final quarrel –
I didn’t know how Chris could take it, when I was hardly able to hold myself together without bawling all over the place. And yet, I knew we would be prevailed upon to perform next.
“Wasn’t Daddy’s singing amazing?” demanded Joy. “Marianne jie jie, why do you look so unhappy? Don’t you think Daddy is a very good singer?”
“He is,” I said to her, “which is why his sad songs make us feel so powerfully. Even if I didn’t understand the words, the tune sounded sad.”
“Now it is your turn,” Joy ordered, as I had expected she might. “You have to perform a song with Chris kor kor.”
“I don’t know – ” I turned to Chris, pained by the sadness on his face that was so obvious to me. “Chris,” I said, gently tapping his shoulder, “they’re asking us to perform a song. Want to sneak off for a bit and strategize?”
“Wh-what?” Chris had been deep in his remembrances of the past, and I had just shaken him out of it. “Oh. Of course. I suppose that’s what we need to do.”
We walked a little way to the corner with the piano, and I hoped that would be far enough to keep us out of earshot. “How dare they sing about our lives,” I hissed to Chris.
“You know it wasn’t on purpose,” he whispered back. “I guess it’s supposed to be funny, isn’t it, that our lives would inspire hit songs in another language?”
“Well, I think I know how to get back at William,” I said. “You don’t want to sing, do you?”
“No.” Chris sighed. “But I know I have to.”
“Not necessarily. All you need to do is count along with Wyclef, and I’ll do all the singing. You know which one we have to do – Killing Me Softly. That’ll tell William just what he’s been doing all night.”
“You guys ready?” called Lizzy. “Or do you want a little more time to decide what you want to sing?”
“We’re good,” I said, giving her a thumbs-up. Then, linking my arm in Chris’, I sashayed up to William and struck a pose.
“Just for you,” I announced, “we’re going to have… The Fugees!”
It didn’t matter that I wasn’t able to find an MTV without the vocals, for if I turned the volume down till it was just enough to hear the accompaniment and the beat, I could drown out Lauryn Hill’s voice quite easily. Defiantly, I took up my place in front of the TV, pulling Chris in next to me by the hand. As the intro started, I pointed straight at William and fixed him in the eye, making it obvious that this song was directed at him.
“Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
I heard he sang a good song
I heard he had a style
And so, I came to see him and listen for a while
And there he was this young boy
A stranger to my eyes
Strumming my pain with his fingers (one time, one time)
Singing my life with his words (two times)
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly with his song”
A couple stanzas in, Chris was starting to get into it; he started swaying to the beat beside me and managed to make a passable impression of enjoying himself. As I sang, “I felt he’d found my letters and read each one out loud,” I pointed at William again, and the entire family laughed as if I’d made a very good joke.
We disco danced through the long interlude, facing each other and managing to just enjoy the music, and with the final repeat of the chorus, instead of fading out like the song did, I ended with a dramatic flourish and struck a pose with one hand on my hip and the other one pointing at William. Then I high-fived Chris to congratulate him on the successful conclusion of our inside joke.
“We did good, didn’t we?” I said to him, earning a smile in return.
“That number was dedicated to you, William,” I declared. “Thanks for killing us softly with your songs.”
William smiled sheepishly – he seemed embarrassed, but also very pleased. “Nobody’s ever complimented my singing with a serenade the way you did,” he finally said. “That’s the biggest boost I’ve had for my ego in quite a while.”
“Is my flattering not enough for you anymore?” quipped Lizzy. “I thought you said I wasn’t helping to keep your pride in check because I give you too many compliments.”
“Well, that’s because I’ve been fanning your ego too,” William pointed out playfully. “Speaking of which, Joy and I are not the only singers in this household. Wait and see, you’ll find Elizabeth is a very capable singer in her own right."
“I don’t think I ought to be classed with people who went to music school and performed in orchestra,” said Lizzy modestly. “But since everybody’s taken a turn, I guess it’s time for me to sing something. This is a song by Dick Lee which brought the whole island together during the pandemic – it’s called Home.”
Joy joined her mother with the second microphone, and together they began to sing. Though William and Bennet started chiming in a couple lines into the song, Lizzy’s voice still rang out loud and melodious:
Whenever I am feeling low
I look around me and I know
There’s a place that will stay within me
Wherever I may choose to go
I will always recall the city
Know every street and shore
Sail down the river that brings us life
Winding through my Singapore
This is home, truly
Where I know I must be
Where my dreams wait for me
Where that river always flows
This is home, surely
As my senses tell me
This is where I won’t be alone
For this is where I know it’s home
William was definitely right; even if Lizzy had never taken any formal voice lessons, her singing was pleasing for all its sincerity. I nodded at Chris, and we both rose to give her a standing ovation.
“There was a night during the circuit breaker when they got the whole of Singapore together to sing this song,” said Lizzy. “Do you want to see our video?”
“Sure,” said Chris. “That sounds really impressive.”
“It is indeed,” replied Lizzy, handing her phone to us with the video. It panned across all the members of the Deng family standing on a rooftop terrace with a mini lap pool, taking turns to wave at the camera. Lizzy, who had been the one holding the camera, then went on to pan to the neighbours’ houses, where they could see people standing out in their yards from their vantage point on the roof.
“Just imagine,” said Lizzy, “in all the apartments, everyone was standing out on their balconies, singing this song at the very same time, just like how the people on our street all went out to their rooftops and yards. Even though we couldn’t visit with friends and family and all the schools were closed, this was how they made people feel connected, and show that everybody in Singapore was all in it together.”
“We’ve heard this song before,” I said, “because we went through all of Dick Lee’s songs before we came. It was my idea because I wanted to get into the theme by researching the life of one Crazy Rich Asian who was born and bred in Singapore. And I think it’s very special, how someone who grew up rich could still end up writing songs for everybody.”
“I didn’t know,” admitted Lizzy. “You’ve taught me something new right there. But you’re right, I couldn’t imagine that happening in any of the other places I’ve lived in. I guess Singapore is such a small island, people have no choice but to stay connected with society no matter how rich they are.”