Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“They each felt his sorrows, and their own obligations, and Marianne, by general consent, was to be the reward of all.” – Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

Captain Brandon - 2025

“I require so much!” Marianne had said. “Chris, are you sure you want to hear my wish list? Tell me if this is too expensive, OK?”

“I don’t think you can bankrupt me so easily, dear,” I’d replied. “I have more home equity than the average twenty-five-year-old guy, and Peterson SFB doesn’t pay me that shabbily, especially with my recent promotion to Captain. This is your graduation trip, so I want to make it special.”

“Well then,” she said. “If you don’t mind going back to Singapore again, can you show it to me? And this time, can we do it Crazy Rich Asians style?”

Of course, this was my reward. Like so many other movies, I’d missed out on watching Crazy Rich Asians when it first aired in theatres because I was in Basic Cadet Training at the time, but especially after Eliza and that trip I’d made to Singapore with her, I was all for representation of any kind. And Marianne lapped it up for entirely different reasons. She was fascinated by the colours and the bling and the greenery and the over-the-topness of it all. We must’ve watched it a hundred times, and every time, she kept asking me if all of that was real.

I might have brought this upon myself, having made diverse romcoms our main guilty indulgence on date nights. When we started going out, it was in the middle of the pandemic, a time when nobody got any entertainment at all without streaming. But despite the vast increase in my purchasing power over the last eight years, I still was a non-crazy-rich non-Asian. This task was going to require more of my ingenuity than I was letting on.

“No problem,” I said calmly, almost breezily. “Singapore is a crazy rich country. We’ll do it on their dime, not ours.”

“You’re going on that Hooters flight again?” said my brother Al on FaceTime. “Man, I wish I had your luck.”

“The sarong kebaya is hardly the same as hot pants,” I retorted. “And you could always buy a ticket yourself if you want. They fly direct to Seattle.” I was comfortable where I was, but he was making a real pile over there. Recently, he’d left The E-Commerce Giant That Ruled the World to join Expedia, because they gave him a Senior Manager position that let him lord it over some hapless college graduates at the age of twenty-seven. My big brother could never resist an opportunity to exercise petty tyranny, and I was simply relieved for him not to be wielding his influence over me anymore. But at this job, it seemed, he had his comeuppance too.

“They’re Communist,” Al had grumbled after his first day at the campus. “You’re supposed to clear out your desk every day, so none of us can put pictures of our girlfriends out there. And there isn’t anything to eat that doesn’t come from a food truck for miles. Even worse, they make it so expensive to get there, you have to take their shuttle buses if you don’t want to be flat broke at the end of the month. Even the VP isn’t spared from communal food, communal space, and communal transportation, so unless you’re Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates around here, you might as well be an anonymous digit. Where has the American culture of individualism gone?”

“Sacrificed to capitalism, I think,” I’d said dryly. “It’s either your quality of life, or the bottom line. And at least the latter is coming back to your pocket. Suck it up, dude.” Even though military life wasn’t exactly easy either, to a large extent I felt that I’d chosen the former. In the Space Force, at least I could feel like I was part of something bigger than myself, and I loved the idea of tinkering with the latest in space technology. It was every bit of my boyhood Star Wars dreams brought to life.

Our adventure started right at the airport. The verdant greenery all over the terminal building captured Marianne’s imagination immediately. Ignoring the stream of baggage emerging on the belt, she made the rounds of every single carousel, giving every tree that grew out from the middle of the belts a name. Her colourful Tokidoki luggage showed up beside my plain black one, and I loaded up both bags onto a cart, figuring her grand tour of the baggage claim hall was probably for the best to use up some time before the shops and restaurants opened since it was barely 6:30 AM anyhow.

Even after wasting a ton of time in baggage claim, we still had more to while away over a leisurely breakfast at the Terminal 3 Basement 2 food court. This time around, I ordered like a pro, bringing us tall frothy milky cups of teh tarik, thick kaya butter toast sandwiches, and fluffy Japanese buns.

“I can’t wait!” exclaimed Marianne excitedly. “I want to see what’s out there.”

“You won’t believe it,” I said. “This airport is the beginning of ‘what’s out there’ and there’ll be enough to do here for a day and a night without getting bored.”

Pushing our baggage cart, we were able to get to the entry point of the link bridge before we were stopped by a row of shiny silvery bollards. Taking our bags out and pulling them, we crossed over to the giant glass dome lying in the middle of the airport complex, surrounded by three terminal buildings.

“This is part of the airport?” Marianne ran right up to the glass parapet, leaning over the edge in a way that made my heart skip a beat. “Chris, this is paradise!” she yelled.

I caught up with her, knowing exactly what she saw. This entire dome was a giant greenhouse with terraced layers of trees and ferns, and the airport people-mover system, the Skytrain, ran on tracks right down the middle of it. It was almost like Disney World, only even more fantastical because this was not supposed to be a make-believe world; of course, it was all created by humans, but the trees, the airport and the mall were all functioning and real. This early in the morning, the primary attraction of this space had not woken up yet, but if the vlogs I’d watched were anywhere near the real thing, in an hour or so it would get even more fantastical.

“It gets even better,” I told her, prying her gently away from the edge. “Let’s check in and dump our luggage, and then you’ll see.”

We had to go up a level or so in the glass elevators to get to the Yotelair lobby, named “Mission Control”. Did space puns have to follow me everywhere? What had I done to deserve being mocked with my work in the very first hours of my vacation? Quite aptly, Mission Control was futuristically equipped with iPads to make sure we could check in without (gasp) human intervention. Some things, it seemed, never came back in a post-COVID world.

“Ha, ha,” Marianne noticed the astronauts and rockets painted on the elevator door at about the same time as I did. “They sure knew how to roll out the red carpet to welcome you.”

“Yep,” I said with a laugh, “they knew they would be visited by a real-life US Space Force officer someday, and they painted the doors specially for me. Maybe someday when I become Colonel Brandon, we’ll come back to find they painted the walls for me too.”

Jokes aside, our room, or ‘cabin’ as they called it, could well have belonged in a real space shuttle. The sealed and soundproof space was barely big enough for us to stand side by side with our luggage by the bed.

“I’ll go check out the shower,” said Marianne, ducking into the bathroom so I could move around just enough to stash our suitcases in the space beneath the bed. Shedding her clothing one piece at a time, she tossed each garment to land in a perfect pile on the floor right by the sliding glass door which still stood ajar. Through the glass panel running the entire length of the bathroom behind the bed, I saw her drenched head and bare shoulders under the bright white light as she danced under the rain shower, aptly humming “Singin’ in the Rain”.

Hastily, I pulled out a fresh change of clothes for her and for myself before stowing our bags neatly away. It took quite a bit of digging to find anything in Marianne’s bag that wasn’t swimwear – did she think Singapore would be an endless jaunt by the beach? She emerged just as I finished my game of luggage Tetris, wrapped in one towel with another one knotted around her head like a turban.

Jumping like a cat onto the bed, she grabbed the remote and played around with all the buttons, turning the room dark and then bathing it in a purple glow. One of the buttons she pushed sent the bed from its 45-degree reclining position down flat, and I hopped out of the way just in time not to be squashed against the wall.

“Come join me,” she said, leaning out and wrapping her arms around my waist.

“No fair,” I said, extricating myself. “I need to shower first. I stink, and you don’t.”

I fumbled my way into the tiny glass-walled bathroom, thankful for the privacy afforded by the dark. Somehow, I managed to find the faucet, turning the rain shower on.  With Marianne’s penchant for running out into the rain and getting soaking wet, I should’ve expected that she’d turn the water to its very coldest setting, but I didn’t. After spending five years at the Air Force Academy, I might be no stranger to communal bathrooms, but hot water was one of the elements of civilization that the military hadn’t forced me to give up.

Somebody hit the light switch just as the ice-cold water poured over my head, suddenly revealing everything in glaring white light. The bathroom was so tiny that within my field of vision, I could both see a giggling Marianne, plainly feasting her eyes on everything through that glass window above the bed, and that there were no towels left because she’d used them all. For the first time in my life, I screamed. That was my reward for picking Yotelair, so much for my brilliant idea of having our very own crash pad in the middle of Jewel Changi Airport.

Chapter Text

Marianne

Could someone please tell me how any of this made any sense at all? They all said I had to shape up to deserve a guy as good as Chris, those self-same people who said he had suffered enough to warrant me as his reward.  I have to admit, I’m not the most logical person in the world, far from it, but this kind of thinking is sending me spinning around and around in an endless tizzy. If I’m not good enough to deserve him, how could being stuck with me be a coveted prize for his emotional labour?

Oh, I never doubted that Chris is a good person, one of the best right up there with my sisters, and Mom, and Ed of course. He’d fetch anything from the ends of the earth for me, metaphorically speaking. For any one of us, in fact. But even for me, even after being the butt of all those unkind remarks I made about him back when I was in high school. These days, it makes me cringe to think about what a little shit I was. How could he possibly have stood all that and still love me?

What is love, anyway? I used to think I knew all about love, when really, all I knew was that Prince Charming always sweeps the princess away to a life of happily ever after at the end of every fairy tale. Nobody, of course, told me what “happily ever after” meant, but I had my own version of it in my head: it was when Cinderella’s ball never ended, and she spent all of eternity swirling and whirling around in the arms of her prince, the smile on his impeccably handsome face and the heady, intoxicating scent of him swallowing up her entire universe.

Well, if even Disney wised up on all that BS, I suppose I deserved to learn my lesson too. John Willoughby might have been the one to literally sweep me off my feet, but he was the kind of Prince Charming who would pick up the princess and exit stage right. The End.  Having learned my lesson, I’d decided the smart thing would be to go for Prince-Not-Charming. Or Not-Prince-Charming. I’m not sure either of those came out right, but for all his lack of skill in charm, I know one fact: he’s the one who is the real prince.

And he deserves love, he deserves not to be lonely, to have someone to cheer him up especially in those dark days of the pandemic. That was one thing I could do, be the Rey to his Han Solo and shower him in heart hands and heart emojis and play all his favourite songs to him on the piano. Tease, or tickle, a smile and then a laugh, out of that serious, implacable face. We didn’t exactly meet cute, but everyone told us we were cute together.

While we were (or I was, at least) in college, cute was good. Cute was aspirational, in fact. Everybody at Berklee admired the replica class ring he’d given me, his class crest carved in minute perfection down to every last letter on my tiny finger. That was a labour of love, just like the backyard cottage he and his dad were building on their property next door, and now that I was living at home again, I could see them working on it, bit by bit on the weekends, in plain sight from my bedroom window.

Now that I saw all of his life, not just the sweet nothings we exchanged on FaceTime and WhatsApp while I was away at college, I knew just how far he’d moved on and grown up, leaving me hanging behind and flailing in the dust. He’d gotten two promotions in just three years, making him a leader of men. Whenever Elinor and Ed came over to visit Mom, he’d talk on and on with them about the longest, hardest, boringest things, like what the world might look like without a US hegemony, and whether NATO was treating Ukraine right, and how our education system was failing our next generation. What space was there for me, a Bachelor of Music teaching little kids how to play the piano? Even Jack Middleton and Mom had stopped trying to keep up with them, his parents were the only people who smiled and nodded and suggested more things for us young people to think about. But I’ve never been a deep thinker. I’ve never dreamed about solving the problems about the world, that sort of stuff was for the smart people. All I know how to do is to plunder the world, not fix it; to drink in all the sights and smells and tastes in the splendour of what is, without worrying about what might be.

And yet, stupid and shallow and selfish though I am, Chris always said yes to anything I asked for, with that indulgent little smile of his. Crazy Rich Asians? No problem. What was the problem? Well duh, we were far from crazy rich, and yet he would still promise to make magic for me. Unflappable, that was what he was. Only two people in the world, my sister Elinor and his almost-sister Edith Williams, knew I watched Alexandra Trusova’s gala skate to Unstoppable every time I got too fed up with how he was always the saint and me the sinner, singing along with the word “unflappable” instead. It was silly, I knew, just like all the other things I did; but at least it was better than yelling or screaming, or anything else I might do to break that impermeable wall of calm that always surrounded him. More than anything, I yearned for him to show some sign, any sign, that he was human and fallible just like me, so I could let myself believe that I deserved him.

Break down, only alone I will cry out loud

You’ll never see what’s hiding out

Hiding out deep down, yeah yeah

I know, I’ve heard that to let your feelings show

It’s the only way to make friendships grow

But I’m too afraid now, yeah yeah

I put my armour on, show you how strong I am

I put my armour on, I’ll show you that I a-a-am

I’m unflappable, I’m a Porsche with no brakes

I’m invincible, yeah, I win every single game

I’m so powerful, I don’t need batteries to play

I’m so confident, yeah, I’m unflappable today

“Marianne.” Was I the only person living on this earth who thought too much calm was ominous? His façade had barely opened a chink before it seamlessly closed up again, akin to the glassy surface of a lake with unreachable depths. “Can I have a towel, please?” Even being wrapped up in his T-shirt in place of a towel didn’t detract from his aura of impenetrable dignity. Honest, I swear, I hadn’t meant to embarrass him on purpose, and if it’d happened to me instead, I didn’t think I would be able to take it quite so well.

“Sorry,” I said, carefully unwinding the towel wrapped around my hair until I realized it was simply too damp to be of any use. I burrowed down under the duvet, a tangible manifestation of the shrinking sensation I felt, and pulled out the towel I’d rolled out of, handing it to him with an outstretched arm. “I thought they’d have at least two sets of everything.”

“This is a capsule hotel,” came his terse reply. Was he mad at me, then? If he was, I deserved it, I supposed. It’d been years since I last went on vacation, well before the start of the pandemic. To find the last time I’d stayed in a hotel, I’d have to rewind all the way back to the time when Dad was a part of the family, when we all still lived in California. Whenever we travelled to other cities, he’d pick the most avant-garde four- or five-star hotels and get two rooms with an adjoining door so we girls could have our own space and still be within sight of him and Mom. And when he took us to the mountains, he’d always get us a spacious family suite right by the slopes. Did it make me spoiled, if I thought going on vacation was synonymous with plush accommodations and never running out of anything?

“Thanks.” Acknowledging me with a nod, he took the towel. “I got your clothes for you,” he continued, indicating the hook on the wall where two clean outfits, his and mine, were laid out neatly on hangers. This was a strange place, with no closet space for clothes even. Briefly, I considered if it made me irredeemably bitchy to be wondering what made him think of taking us to this place. Surely, crazy rich Asians didn’t stay in hotel rooms so small that even the bed had to sit up like a sofa during the daytime. But then, that glass panel bathroom was something else, you could see everything that was going on in there, making it completely impossible to share this room with anyone you weren’t already coupled up with (or hoping to do so). Was it in any way surprising that I took full advantage of the view?

We came in so early, the day should be yawning ahead of us, waiting to be filled; but this was too early, there was so much time and nothing to do with it. Maybe there was a use for this capsule after all, at least we could curl up under the covers in the dark, bathed in purple mood lighting, and watch TV. The vibe was almost like our own little private club, only without the noise or the booze. It was getting to be kind of fun, actually.

Chris flipped on the light, killing the mood in an instant, to get us dressed and out of the room at precisely five minutes to ten. That was how he made a living, by making sure things got done just right and right on time. And if I wondered what the whole big fuss was about being in this particular hotel, I knew the minute we stepped into the lobby, a terrace that opened to the outside, where eye-popping green sprouted from the walls and everywhere. We were greeted by the constant rush of water, and in the distance, I spied a huge donut-shaped waterfall coming down from a dip in the domed glass ceiling of this bubble-shaped building.

“I want to touch it!” I exclaimed, rushing through the lobby, out of the hotel entryway and down the passage until I was stopped by the glass railing, peering over it to the bottom of that fountain deep down below. These were no Niagara Falls, not that I’d ever been to the actual ones, but yet that ring of water gushed and gushed, stronger and faster and harder than any indoor fountain had the right to.

“We could do better than that,” said Chris. “How would you like to see it all from above?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” came Chris’ cryptic reply. I followed him up the escalator, and then down winding paved paths amidst the impeccably landscaped trees and shrubs. Fairy craftsmen had been here, clearly, for every leaf, every branch, every flower all came together in harmony, not a thing out of place. A pair of colourful lovebirds grown from fresh flowers, each of them almost as big as I was, perched on a sturdy cut tree branch, leaning their heads together as if to share a secret.

“That’s us!” I squealed, throwing my free arm around Chris and leaning my head on his shoulder, while I held my phone up high with my other hand to grab a wefie. Immediately after I sent it into our families’ WhatsApp chat, the stream of “Aww’s” promptly came back; it was only about 8PM at home, so everyone was still awake. Over the four-and-a-half years we’d been dating, which spanned my entire college lifetime, I’d trained him how to pose for wefies. He’d perfected the gentle smile that advertised what few people used to know: that he really was everybody’s friend. And I always hammed it up, of course, with my silly fish faces and sultry pouts and a hundred different types of smiles. But those birds, it seemed, knew something we didn’t. They weren’t smiling, or preening, or doing anything to show off their love to the world; rather, their heads bowed together in an almost solemn way, in an intimate moment of mutual communion. In a flash of a moment, I wondered what the artist who created them had been thinking, what they had been trying to say about the meaning of love.

Yet how long could such thoughts dwell in one’s head when one was in such a veritable wonderland? Chris walked on, purposeful as always, and I followed him to where the solid ground gave way to a giant net of hemp rope beneath us, the edges curving upwards like the sides of a bowl until they touched the trees. Every twenty paces or so, the net was dimpled with circle-shaped wells where you could stand still and look down to the nothingness below your feet. It was so, so, so ridiculous, that someone, anyone, could even conceive of a hemp trampoline as a way for you to walk on air.

The nets swirled higher and higher, turning into square, black springy ones that practically invited you to bounce on them. Only Chris could remain solid and rooted, standing ramrod straight even with that smile of his, determined to watch but never to jump.

“I put fifty percent more pounds per square inch on this thing than any other human being around here,” he said, looking on me indulgently. “You can do all the jumping for me.”

And so, I leapt up into the air, the big springy net catching me gently and throwing me up again, sending me flying as I looked up at the blue sky through the clear glass ceiling, suspended as I was above all the emptiness.

“Whee!” I yelled, not caring if anybody around could hear, for in that moment, nobody and nothing else existed to me. How many times had I dreamed of floating through empty space? And yet, even a dreamer like me could scarcely comprehend how this sensation had transcended into corporeal reality.

Back on terra firma, the next wonder that awaited us was a throwback to the ages of the classics. No matter that I was growing up and should be paying more attention to the issues of the world around me, I still found the weight of international politics and current affairs too much for my little mind, preferring to escape into the distant worlds of kings and knights and ladies instead. What else could possibly scream “crazy rich” louder than a hedge maze, the stuff of palace gardens and stately European country estates? Now, it was the Asians who were crazy rich and showed it, with the 21^st century version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and a labyrinth of comma-shaped bushes. Which would have been perfect for a secret liaison with a knight of my very own, if it hadn’t been built for Asian proportions.

“You’re cheating!” I didn’t catch on immediately how Chris was making our way through the maze so efficiently, until I realized that the hedges ended exactly at his eye level. That meant they were a shade under six feet tall.

“Well, if you want, we can go into all the rabbit holes,” he teased, doing an about-turn into a blind alley where we tickled each other silly. I had no idea whether it was the sight of the top of his head above the bushes or the sound of our giggling that served as a warning signal to everyone else that where we were was where they shouldn’t be if they wanted to get out of that maze.

But the next maze was one where height didn’t give us any advantage at all. The Mirror Maze was exactly what it said on the tin, a space where we saw copies of ourselves into infinity, confounding mirages with reality. At the entrance, Chris promptly handed me the pool noodle they gave us.

“When you eventually get promoted to become Colonel Brandon, you’ll regret not taking up this chance to personally slay the Minotaur,” I quipped. “Are you sure you want to surrender your sabre to me?”

“If at that time I still remember it was pink, I think I’ll give myself a pat on the shoulder for making the right choice,” replied Chris. The pool noodle was, indeed, a bright shade of pink. Pink-Panther pink, to be exact. My favourite colour, and his most detested one.

That pool noodle was supposed to save us from smashing our faces, but in my hands, it was just as likely a tool for mayhem. I jabbed, flailed, and thrust it at an imaginary Minotaur, admiring how our reflections went on and on, cloning my craziness into a never-ending cycle.

“See this?” I said, lifting up my sleek little Olympus Pen camera, which I wore slung around my neck, to snap a photo of our endless reflections. “You’re stuck with me forever.”

“I don’t mind,” said Chris, levelly and congenially. And I wondered, not for the first time, how that could possibly not freak him out.

Chris had to be the only person who ever assigned required reading to his travel companions before a vacation. He liked to understand the history and culture of the places he visited, and to appreciate the significance of the places he was seeing. And with my penchant for music, when there were the two of us, we amplified our pre-trip research by digging into all the local songs too. I was the one who discovered Dick Lee the Mad Chinaman, an original Crazy Rich Asian who grew up as the eldest of five siblings in a big house in the middle of Singapore, not too different from how Nick Young in the movie had. The homework I assigned to Chris in the leadup to this trip was to listen to his entire discography on YouTube together, going through tracks that took us back in time with the ‘80s disco beat.

It's state of mind

It's peace of mind

If you don’t mind

Orientalism

It’s East and West

Forget the rest

So can you guess

Orientalism

It’s being near

You’re being clear

Of being here

Orientalism

It’s being strong

Your fears are gone

You’re turning onto

Orientalism

Suppose you are, you know, in some kind of limbo

Which tendency to follow, which way should you go

You have to perceive how you want yourself to be

This is no minority now, THIS IS ME!

Oriental Orientalism

Oriental Orientalism

Oriental (Paris, Tokyo)

Oriental (Dallas, Cairo)

Oriental Orientalism

Oriental Orientalism

Oriental (Zurich, Hong Kong)

Oriental (Munich, Saigon)

It’s quite all right

Be white inside

This is your right

Orientalism

It’s we anew

And feeling new

It’s being you

Orientalism

I think it’s time to show that all of us are no

Caricatures or stereotypes, no token yellows

We simply have to be assertive, make them see

This is a new Asia, READY FOR THE 21^st CENTURY!

“Crazy Rich Asians has a hyper-Oriental aesthetic,” Chris had said. “I hope you won’t be disappointed when you find Singapore to be much more Westernized than that. For starters, they all speak way more English than you’ll expect, just like the way all of Dick Lee’s songs are in English.”

Then, he’d reached up into the tall oak shelves in his family’s home office space to grab the Oxford English Dictionary, so we could look up the definition of the word “chinoiserie”.

“It’s really strange,” he’d said, an air of gravity and thoughtfulness descending upon him. “We’re supposed to feel guilty about appropriating and making a hash out of Asian culture. But they’re Asians, and they still have no reservations about turning Orientalism into a show or a parody sometimes. That previous time I was there, I saw a beautiful Chinese mansion, maybe a hundred years old or so. And of all things, they turned it into a bar, full of white expatriates drinking Tiger Beer and cocktails.  It was so sad.”

We’d worked up a healthy appetite from our adventures up in the Canopy Park and taken a glass elevator surrounded by plants down to the first floor. This restaurant before us, Shang Social, was perhaps the opposite of chinoiserie; its décor looked almost Scandinavian with the long, pale wooden tables and matching tall backless stools. But Chris led me right through that light, airy dining room, past the long grey marble wine bar, through a gap between a set of open screen doors into a sit-down dining area that had plush velvet chairs in grey and pink, and a gleaming marble mosaic floor.

Oh, that menu was such a work of art! If that was how our food would look, it would almost be a pity to eat it. The colours, the textures, even the single stalks of leafy greens that hugged the sides of the bowls of noodles, were all placed with so much thought and care. And the prices! We each had a set of three little bowls of noodles laid out on a little wooden tray, each of them with different sauces and toppings. This immaculately plated spread cost only $18.80 each. I found just about the cutest canapes in the world too – gluey bowl-shaped balls of golden fried rice flour coated with sesame seeds, filled with a savoury mix of meat and vegetables. They came on a stepped L-shaped wooden rack, sitting in the centre of our table like a decorative centrepiece. It cost $24, so with the exchange rate, we weren’t paying much more than we would have for an ordinary Chinese meal back home. And yet, we felt we were dining like royalty. This, then, was solid evidence of Chris’ sheer genius, that we could step right into the world of Crazy Rich Asians without spending crazy-rich money at all.

Chapter Text

Captain Brandon

What did I know about women’s designer brands? Next to nothing, to be honest. But I should absolutely have realized, with us being in this fancy upscale mall, that it was just a matter of time before we hit our first Crazy-Rich-Asians store. Furla was just a few paces down the promenade-like passageway from Shang Social, or so it felt.

“Oh my goodness,” Marianne gasped. “Chris, you just have to see this, it’s SO cute!”

The floor-to-ceiling window display danced with bright pops of colour, each bag so tiny that they could have fit into Marianne’s two delicate hands. Some of them were made to look like Hello Kitty heads, with round yellow noses painted above their gold buckles, and ears adorned with a bow tie on one side sticking out above the tops. Others needed a little closer scrutiny, but if I looked closely enough, I could see rows of little Hello Kitties superimposed on kimono-style prints. There was even one where she stood in a bright red dress amid the flowers, with a tiny replica of the exact same purse hanging on her arm.

Unable to rein in her curiosity, Marianne stepped into the store, staring transfixed at a display shelf that contained the exact same bags laid out at waist height, a miniscule black sign discreetly showing the price in thin white numerals. Each one of these, then, was… $750. Quickly doing the exchange rate math in my head, I figured out that meant they went for about $525 a pop, give or take, in US currency. Ouch.

Technically, it was still a sum of money I could afford, at this stage of my life. But every $500 I spent on frivolities took away from what I was putting aside for Marianne’s and my future. And after I learned, at the tender age of seventeen, what it was like to worry about money, spending anything over $100 on a single clothing item freaked me out.

Our financial burdens had really started back when Al decided to go to Penn, but everything came to a head in my seventeenth year, arguably the worst year of my entire life. That was the year I lost the one person who had inhabited my whole childhood – Eliza Williams – and even though I’d seen it coming for quite a while, no seventeen-year-old ever truly thinks death can claim someone of their own age until it actually happens. When Eliza succumbed to the cancer that she had bravely battled for more than a third of her life, Dad made the choice to retire from flying. I supposed that just as he’d made me bring my car to the Air Force Academy Prep School to trick myself into thinking I could get to Eliza anytime she needed me, he thought being in town all the time meant he’d be able to catch me if I fell and fill in the blanks that Eliza had left in my life. Though I felt ashamed of my ingratitude, I found my parents’ hovering to be a poor substitute for the camaraderie I used to share with Eliza and spent most of my breaks at home hanging around silently like a ghost rather than speaking to them. Life at the Prep School, where I scarcely was allowed to say much more than “Yes Sir”, “No Sir”, and “No excuse Sir” most of the time, left me feeling barely human, but with the situation, I couldn’t possibly impose the expense of a second college tuition on the family. Dad had set aside funds for each of us that would cover out-of-state tuition at top public colleges plus dorm accommodation and had told Al to take out a loan to cover the difference, but when he wasn’t taking any campus jobs or working paid internships in the summers to start paying off interest, I worried that Dad might end up having to pick up the slack in the end.

Over the years, we had our ups and downs; Dad opened a little hobby shop downtown within walking distance of our home, and I saved up my cadet pay from the Academy when I moved up into it. After I sold my car because fourth-class cadets weren’t allowed to have them, I never got one again until after I graduated. Yet things were rough with the COVID-19 pandemic, when business at the hobby shop got slow during the lockdown of spring 2020 and Al needed Dad to bail out his student loan payments for a year when he couldn’t get a job right after graduation. That year, I handed Dad everything I’d assiduously saved, whatever was left after that jaunt to Singapore I’d made with Eliza in her last summer, topped up with my first two years of cadet pay.

“I won’t be fulfilling my responsibility as a father if I let you pay for your brother’s education,” Dad had said. “Keep it, son.”

“Even if you don’t spend it on paying back Al’s loan, I want to leave it with you for emergencies,” I’d said. “What if the bathroom backs up, or we end up with any car trouble? Ten grand could really make a difference.”

Eventually, Al got a job that paid him enough for him to take over his student loan payments and cover his wants at the same time, while I graduated and became a 2nd Lieutenant. Thankfully nothing broke in our century-old house, which still stood in all its glory with Mom’s dovecote and fruit trees out front. I used my military housing allowance to pay Dad and Mom rent, which they put into the cost of building an accessible backyard cottage out back next to the yew arbour. Dad and I worked side by side on it on weekends, building all the structural bits while hiring pros to handle the plumbing and electricals, and when it was finished, the plan was for me to marry Marianne and live there with her until we had our first child, and then we’d switch places with Mom and Dad. Things were going good again, at last. Still, I couldn’t shake the thought that tossing away $500 on a teeny Hello Kitty purse, which probably couldn’t even fit a packet of Kleenex after putting Marianne’s cell phone in it, would be the stupidest expenditure of my entire life. And yet, contrary to all my better sense, I couldn’t bear to disappoint Marianne.

“Which one do you like best, dear?” I asked her.

For a moment, our eyes betrayed us; I realized, as I turned my gaze to her, that she was looking at the exact same bag that fascinated me the most, the one that was fashioned like Hello Kitty’s head with pointy ears and an indigo-blue ribbon bow cut and sewn exquisitely in leather. It was utterly nonsensical, yet irresistibly cute and creative.

Marianne turned away, just as quickly as I’d caught her line of sight. Swiftly, she grabbed a tall bag in solid indigo blue off a nearby shelf and handed it to me.

“I want this one,” she said. “Can you get it for me, please?”

Popping the bag open to take a look at the price tag, I saw that this bag was $200 cheaper than the Hello Kitty one. With its distinctive shade of blue suede and long fringes hanging down and fluttering in the air, it was still flamboyantly Marianne. And it would be more functional than Hello Kitty. I supposed I had to be sold.

“Thank you, Chris!” Marianne hugged me right in the store when I handed her the paper bag. After we left the store and strolled back out into the common passageway, she confessed, “That’s the first designer bag I ever had for my very own.”

“Really?” If Marianne had any deficiencies in her wardrobe, I never noticed. I was hardly one who’d keep count of how many purses she owned, but when she was a veritable rainbow, always in an endless swirl of bright new colours, I didn’t suppose it mattered.

“Yep,” said Marianne. “I was only fifteen when Dad and Mom split up, and at that age, everyone thought Converse and Squishmallows were the ultimate road to my happiness. I don’t think they even noticed when I started getting into dresses and makeup and shoes. Elinor did get some nice dresses and stuff from Dad when she graduated high school, and we just split it and switched every semester. But when she married Ed and moved out, I let her have it all, because I don’t think she’ll ever buy another fancy purse on her own.”

As teachers in elementary and middle school, Elinor and Edward’s combined pay still fell some way short of the six-figure mark, and I knew Ed earned barely half of what I did. It was hard to argue if any of that was even fair, when engineering paid well because it was hard, tedious work with scarcely any room for error, but teaching was a far nobler calling. Lively as she had always been, it had never occurred to me before that Marianne had to start worrying about money at an even younger age than I had, though none of us could really complain when we were better off than so many other people. We’d never had to think of giving up college to support our families, or doubt that we’d have three square meals a day, or even do without at least one car in the family. In the big scheme of things, designer purses weren’t at all essential, if only it wasn’t our one week in dreamland where I wanted to make all of Marianne’s wishes, no matter how frivolous or extravagant, magically come true.

Chapter Text

Marianne

No matter how enlightened Chris tried to be about Southeast Asia, a.k.a. the East Indies, there was one thing he never could quite get over.

“I was totally traumatised to see bright green worms in my dessert,” he’d said. “They were jelly worms, not real ones, but still.”

Just as history, politics and international relations were his thing, I was into all the flora and the fauna and the music; when he mentioned that there were freaky green cakes in the local bakeries and even at 7-Eleven, I absolutely had to dig in and figure out what that was about. Green, after all, was the colour of the grass and the leaves in spring and summer; it was the symbol of everlasting life and bloom, the bounty of our mother Earth. So how could green desserts and cakes possibly be so terrible?

“Those cakes were exactly the same shade of green as Yoda,” he’d pointed out. “Surely you’d be freaked out too if you had to eat Baby Yoda?”

“Just close your eyes and take a deep breath,” I told him as soon as we stepped into the Bengawan Solo store. Though most of the delicacies were packed in boxes, some in clear plastic containers and others in tin boxes that had pretty red, pink and white orchid patterns against pale pastel backgrounds, the fragrance of the cakes still filled the air around us. It had an ever so subtle floral hint, fresh and mysterious and tropical and sweet. “Can you smell the flowers?”

“Kind of,” he acknowledged. “It’s beautiful.”

“It comes from pandan leaves,” I explained. “They’re the thing that gives all these cakes their green colour. People use it here just the way we use vanilla extract, and it has a ton of antioxidants. All good stuff.”

I picked out two of the flowery boxes for Elinor and Mom, and he got two jars of deep-fried mini spring rolls for Jack Middleton and his family, and a flat round box of the most buttery-looking cookies in the store for his parents.

“These at least look something like what Mom might bake at home,” he said. “I don’t think they’ll go for anything that’s too strange.”

“They’re sugee biscuits,” explained the girl in the store. “Made from semolina flour. They look a little bit more grainy than Western biscuits but they will melt in your mouth.”

And as a little treat for us, I picked up a few packets of local confections from the glass refrigerator case holding all the freshly baked or steamed items. There were six green bite-sized, ball-shaped bonbons covered in fluffy white grated coconut called ondeh-ondeh, the local equivalent of tiny lava cakes with dark brown palm sugar syrup at their cores. And then there were kuih lapis, neat rectangular jelly slices made up of thin stacked layers of red, green and white creating stripes along their thickness.  Finally, there were red dome-shaped jellies called ang ku kueh, embossed with a turtle shell design, each one sitting on its own little square of pandan leaf.

“What are those?” asked Chris, carrying the huge flat-bottomed floral paper bag holding all the cookies we bought for our families, as the shop girl handed me a plastic bag with my selections neatly packed into transparent plastic packets.

“Oh, just desserts,” I said. “Let’s put all our stuff in the room and we can enjoy them there.”

This could have been one of the most opportune moments for the lack of windows in our room, but I wanted him to truly get over his phobia of green desserts, not to simply become oblivious to them. The first flimsy plastic box I opened was the one with the ondeh-ondeh, holding them up to my nose so I could savour their fragrance.

“Here,” I said, reaching out with the box and holding it out under his chin. “This is the smell of pandan and coconut. I promise, it’ll be delicious.”

“How would you know?” he asked, still a little skeptical. “You haven’t tried these either.”

“It’s my intuition,” I replied, feeling an odd sense of conviction. Normally, I wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, and my less-than-stellar SAT scores were perhaps the best proof of this. But there were things I just knew, from experiencing the world with each and every one of my senses in hyperdrive, and one of them was that smell was usually the best precursor of taste. “If you spend enough time around plants and flowers, you’ll have an idea of how things taste just by smelling them.”

“They do smell good,” Chris admitted. “What do you think they will taste like?”

“See these?” I pulled up the pictures from Google on my phone. “Think coconut, and maple syrup.” They’d given us toothpicks in the packet, and I stuck one of them into one of the balls and popped it into my mouth, a wide smile spreading on my face as I enjoyed the flowery, perfumed sweetness of that jumble of coconut and palm sugar syrup.  “That was so yummy, I think I could have them all,” I added coyly, poking another one with my toothpick.

“Y-you’re actually going to have them all?” Chris raised his eyebrows. “You mean, you won’t even save one for me?”

“Who said green desserts freak them out?” I countered, with a saucy tilt of my head. “If you want, you can have this one.”  I offered him the green flour ball on the end of my toothpick, and, surprisingly, he knew how to open his mouth at just the right time. I knew, just by watching him, when he got to that explosion of sweetness that burst out from the middle.

“Mmm, it actually tastes pretty good,” he conceded.  Win! Despite my newly-minted adult status by virtue of graduating college, in my mind, this was a V-sign selfie moment.

“This next dessert here,” I said, opening the second plastic packet, “is a layer jelly that represents longevity. The Chinese make it with nine layers because the word ‘nine’ in their language sounds like their word for ‘forever’. Like how I wish we all could be the way we are today, for a very long time and always.” Carefully, I peeled the first layer off one square of jelly and put it into my mouth.

Chris fumbled clumsily with the next jelly layer, breaking a corner off awkwardly. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve ruined it.”

“No biggie,” I handed him one whole nine-layer block of jelly for himself, then went on eating the first piece slowly savouring each layer as I went. Not having my patience nor my nimble fingers, Chris bit a whole chunk out of his slice.

“They all taste the same,” observed Chris, munching thoughtfully. “All the layers, I mean.”

“That’s true,” I admitted. “And after eating this, I can’t help thinking about how much sugar there is in our jellies back home. It makes all the desserts we enjoy feel positively sinful.”

“When I was a little kid, I used to put all my toys into my mouth,” said Chris, chuckling at the memory. “I wanted to prove that things with different colours would always taste different. But to my extreme disappointment, all the toys tasted the same. These jellies would have been yet another confounding factor to my great scientific hypothesis.”

Extreme disappointment? The time when I’d believed that a little boy who had hugged a life-size model of R2-D2 couldn’t possibly have any meaningful range of emotion was now a long-buried piece of my past, and a not-insignificant source of my shame. Yet never since the day when Elinor told me of Chris’ fight with John Willoughby, and that was third-hand information at best, had I ever seen him display or refer to extreme feelings of any kind.

“What did you do when the toys didn’t cooperate with your scientific discovery?” I asked. “Throw them against the wall?”

“I wish.” The same cool sense of restraint crept back into his voice now that he’d had his moment of mirth. “Actually, I hardly remember.”

Popping open the third packet of cakes, I admired the layers of shapes carved into the bright red jelly cakes, copying themselves over and over like our reflections in the mirror maze had. These cakes were supposed to be like tortoises, to bless us with long life when we ate them, because of course, tortoises lived hundreds of years.

“Just in time for your quarter-life crisis,” I joked. “These turtle cakes are meant to give you long life, so you need to eat two of them for me. That way if I eat just one, we’ll both leave this world at the same time. I don’t know what I’d do without you, it’d be terribly lonely.”

Chris shot me a dark look before grabbing one of the red turtle cakes and stuffing his face with it, wolfing it down in barely two bites. How could I possibly be such an idiot? I’d meant it all as a joke, to poke some fun at how he might need longevity, but of course, he would remember that once upon a time, I had the audacity to call him old. In truth, only two years separated us, but somehow that gap had always straddled different life stages. He’d been in college when I was in high school, and after I finally got my act together and matriculated, he graduated and started getting his promotions, until now, upon my graduation, I found that the gulf in our achievements yawned even wider than the chasm created by our respective places in life. The pale yellow mung bean paste that stuffed the turtle’s insides could well have been recycled paper pulp, the way my mouth went dry at the disaster I’d caused.

Methodically and mechanically, Chris made short work of all the remaining dessert portions in the three packets strewn all over the tiny pop-out table in our cubicle of a hotel room. If men’s moods were silent, certainly their stomachs never suffered for the want of good spirits. That was solid, pragmatic thinking, quite insusceptible to the vagaries of the romantic mind.  I didn’t know if I sighed out loud, but the teeny bit of selfish little me that had a conscience wished I hadn’t.

“OK,” said Chris with an offhand nod, dusting his hands off after he tossed the last empty packet into the trash. “Let’s go paint the town red.”  I trailed after him out of the room and back into the mall, with absolutely no idea whether he was mad at me or not.

Like a homing pigeon with built-in GPS, Chris shot right into the elevator going down to the first floor and marched towards the Onitsuka Tiger store that sat opposite the restaurant where we’d had our lunch.  I could only stand and gape as he examined each and every sneaker in the store, taking the display pieces into his palm one by one and fingering them. This was extremely aberrant for Chris, who never bought any sneakers for himself because the military kept him stocked with an endless supply of running shoes. He lingered the longest on the most flamboyant ones: the puffy tan high-tops with a giant Asics logo carved in foam on the sides; a psychedelic floral all-over print with pale yellow soles (he did glance at me even though he was holding the men’s version in his hand); a bright red suede boot with indigo bungee cord laces and a light tan sole. Finally, the pair he grabbed was bright orange in all-over tiger print, with orange laces, furry textured fabric in the uppers, and paper-thin black soles. Right after he paid for them, he changed into his new shoes at the store itself, even though the burst of orange and black clashed wildly with his faded jeans and light blue polo T-shirt.

Strutting out of Onitsuka Tiger, he made a beeline for The Spectacle Hut, stopping right in front of the Oakley shelf with spot-on precision. After scanning all the sunglasses up and down a couple times, he grabbed the pair with orange lenses and chunky black plastic frames and plonked them down at the checkout counter, ripping off his glasses and putting the sunglasses on as soon as he paid for them. By now, he’d spent way more than the $200 I saved him by not getting the Hello Kitty purse at Furla. I knew he couldn’t read any of the signs without his prescription lenses, but he pointedly paid no attention to me as he swaggered his way around the mall, trying to look as if he knew where he was going. And, it seemed, whatever shadowy shapes he could make out were enough to find the corridor that led us right to the heart of the building, to the bottom of that fountain where all that water gushed. In another day and another mood, I would have waxed poetic about the trees and the ferns, and how they’d built a forest so real I could almost hear the wild birds chirping, but all I cared about at that moment was that I was the cause of whatever was eating Chris, and since I couldn’t unsay what I’d already said, there was no way I could take it back.

Stopping dramatically at the edge of the fountain, Chris set down the shopping bags he carried, spread his arms, and asked, “What do you think? Have I finally discovered the fountain of youth?” He didn’t bellow, or demand, or beseech; in fact, I didn’t know if I was imagining it, or if I truly heard a hint of tiredness despite the evenness of his voice. He looked so ridiculous in the orange sneakers and orange sunglasses, which didn’t go at all with his military regulation buzz cut and conservative outfit, that I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Which meant, I was just about on the edge of doing both. Before I could keel over right there by that fountain, I scurried to the stone steps a few feet away, just in time to plonk my butt on the seat before I doubled over and let it all out. It wasn’t long before a familiar touch weighted down my shaking shoulders, steadying them. It was Chris’ arm, I knew, for he’d done this so many times before.

“I-I’m s-sorry,” I choked out. “You’re not old. P-please don’t be mad at me.”

“I’m not,” said Chris, kneading circles into my back. “You know, I could never be mad at you.”

I raised my head then, looking up at him. With his eyes still hidden behind those orange sunglasses, I couldn’t quite tell what he was really thinking. He probably had bought them, I realized, because he thought they’d make him look young and cool, when now he looked blind and lost instead.

“You should be,” I said, sitting up and straightening myself. “You should absolutely be mad at me. If I feel young and you feel old, it isn’t you, it’s me. I’m the one who can’t grow up. I went to music school and now I’ve graduated, but I’m still stuck in forever fairyland. I didn’t want to deal with all the hard stuff, the real stuff, and now I don’t even have a real job.”

“But you do have a real job,” he assured me, pulling me closer. “You’re using your gifts to benefit our community. You’re bringing the knowledge, and appreciation, of music to a whole new generation. Isn’t that a worthy thing to be doing?”

“Not anywhere as worthy as Elinor, or Ed, or you.” I leaned on him then, putting an arm around him too. “I’m still doing the same gig I had in college, paid hourly, and that’s the only thing I’ll ever be able to do, all my life. I’m not making the world better in any way. Without Mom giving me a home, I can’t even pay rent to live on my own.”

“You won’t have to,” he said, then paused as if he’d said too much. “I’m sure you’ll get enough students in our town to earn as much as Elinor does. She’s a teacher, and you’re a teacher too. How could you be any less worthy than her?”

“But she’s the one teaching all the useful stuff,” I explained. “Music is only there to feed our dreams. It doesn’t make any difference in the world if one less kid knows how to play the piano. I’m not essential, but she is.”

“I don’t know how to play the piano,” admitted Chris, though I knew that already, “but sometimes, I sure wish I did. There’s times when music might be the only thing a person has to keep them going. Without art and without music, we wouldn’t be humans. We’d be robots.”

I pondered that, how Chris loved everyone and everything, including R2-D2, and the simple fact that not all of them had loved him back. If love was measured in acts of kindness and consideration, nobody could possibly love him back as much as he loved them, nor as perfectly. But I tried. I was always trying.

“I still need to answer your question,” I finally said. “I told you what I think, which is, you never lost that fountain of youth in the first place. But now, I need to tell you what everyone else thinks too. And, if you’ll forgive me, they’ll think you’re as blind as a bat. And you don’t need to be. I need you to be able to see Pikachu with me, so please put your glasses back on.”

Chapter Text

Captain Brandon

I need you to be able to see Pikachu with me… Oh boy. Maybe there was some kind of truth in what William Price had said during our second-class year, four years ago.

Cadet Price – William – had been my best buddy at the Academy, and my roommate for a good number of the five years that I’d been there. Aside from my immediate family and the Middletons, he was perhaps the only person who had witnessed, even in part, a piece of both my chapters with Eliza and with Marianne.

“Brandon, dude,” he’d said one night in the darkness of our dorm room, after Taps had played. “I think I’ve figured out what your type is.”

“My type? Do I have a type?” Lounging on my spartan iron dorm bed, I plucked the Boba Fett figurine that Elinor had given me one Christmas off my desk beside the bed and played with it, turning it around with my fingers. Over winter break, I couldn’t quite believe my luck when Marianne had literally walked into my arms. She had been dressed as Rey, and that had been the complete undoing of me. By then, I was able to separate Eliza and Marianne in my head as the two very different people they were, both entering my consciousness in wildly contrasting ways. My kinship with Eliza had started as easy as breathing in air, with the kind of simple connection that only a child could be capable of. Her companionship was a part of all my formative experiences: we learned to read with my voice next to hers; I made my first steps away from home alone with her when we went trick-or-treating down the street, dressed as Han Solo and Princess Leia; she was the one who clapped the most when I earned my tae kwon do black belt; I felt strong when I pushed her on the swing and made her laugh. I had no reason to question her unconditional acceptance of me, until the rug of childhood innocence was pulled out from under us and threw our footsteps in life out of sync. She was the one who had to grow old before her time, leaving me incapable of catching up. And then, Marianne started as a derivative of Eliza. I would never know if I could have noticed her the way I did if I hadn’t met Eliza first, for it was her voice, so very like Eliza’s, that imprinted her deep into my consciousness. I wanted, needed Marianne to thrive where Eliza hadn’t, drawing vicarious satisfaction from seeing her lively, happy countenance even though she had absolutely no connection with me beyond that of a neighbour, a casual family acquaintance. Eliza had required no work from me until I had to learn to let her go, while Marianne made me work hard on healing my grief and managing my feelings. Both were intricately linked, part of the same circle. Where people saw circles, they didn’t see lines.

“Yeah, you do. You like girls who are into anime,” William observed. “All the girls you’ve ever liked are the ones who bring out your inner child. And maybe that’s not too bad for you, otherwise you’d be way too serious for your own good.”

“Eliza and I were children,” I remarked. Three and a half years removed from her demise, I had long gained enough acceptance to speak of her without feeling a sharp twinge of pain each time; there would always be a place where she’d belong, but that was safely locked away among the rest of the childhood memories I cherished. “And Marianne – if she’d remained the child she was when she first moved into my neighbourhood, we’d never have worked out. I really admire how she’s looking out for her sister.”

When we’d booked out that weekend, Marianne had brought William and I on a comprehensive tour of the Pokémon Go hotspots in Colorado Springs. She’d been training me to take her place after she went away to Berklee, so Margaret would still have someone to play with at home during the weekends. At sixteen, Margaret was starting to outgrow her Disney+ addiction, and while that brought a good deal of relief to Marianne (“I swear, I’ll die if I have to sit through another soppy princess flick again”), an Xbox wasn’t in the Dashwood family budget, and they didn’t want Margaret to spend all of her time gaming at her friends’ homes where they couldn’t keep an eye on her. The solution Marianne landed on was to rekindle their childhood passion for Pokémon Go, since they could play it on their phones for free, to make sure that at least some of Margaret’s gaming happened within the family. Ed was the worst gamer in the world and lost within literally seconds, so with him and Elinor being inseparable, I was the only viable candidate within range.

Without girls, I didn’t have any reason to go near Pokémon; the last time I’d seen Pikachu’s face before that was when I played that fateful last game of Pokémon pinball to win Eliza a Hello Kitty plush toy, just months before she passed on.  I didn’t mind if I never saw that critter again, but I could never say no to Marianne or Margaret. And over time, any associations I had between Pokémon and Eliza got papered over with happy memories of quality time with Margaret, hanging out with her when her big sister couldn’t. Captain Margaret, for that was the gaming name she chose, could beat me out at just about any video game of her choice, though with her pink kitty-ear headset, nobody would ever guess how much punch she packed. She’d saved up for that, and eventually her Xbox, all by herself, babysitting for the Middletons and working at the campus store while commuting to college from home.

“Can I come with you?” she’d asked when she got wind of our trip. “They’ve got so many interesting Japanese rhythm games I want to check out, and I could go to all the arcades while you guys romance each other. You won’t even notice I’m there.”

“Maggie, hon, are you going to follow them on their honeymoon?” admonished Mrs. Dashwood, making Marianne turn as beet red as I felt. “Of course, you can’t go along! How can they possibly get all lovey-dovey when you’re there?”

Regrettably for Margaret, her air ticket and hotel costs weren’t in our budget anyway, so we mollified her by promising to get her something from the Pokémon Centre store, since there were none of those in the US. But maybe that was also an excuse for us to check out that store for ourselves, even if we didn’t want to admit it. Marianne could never hide her true emotions, and she practically jumped for joy at the sight of the three-foot-high Spheal plush taking pride of place in the display area.

“Oooh, I’d love to squish it!” she exclaimed as she leaned forward and poked it gently with one fingertip. “But we can’t. Not after COVID.” I could’ve sworn she looked at that bubbly plush fanged seal with far more longing than she’d ever bestowed on me, and I might not be above getting a little jealous. By the time we became a couple, we’d been the boy and girl next door for so long that it felt comfortable and familiar right away. Too familiar, sometimes; she never gave me cause to doubt her love, proclaimed constantly in hugs and heart emojis, but I occasionally wondered if she thought of me more as a benign big brother figure than a passionate lover. Still, I tried to convince myself, it made no difference; I wanted to be there to look after her for life, and that was what I’d do. Nerds still had to get married to somebody, and we had wonderful rapport and companionship. My youth group at church had taught me that the strongest marriages were when you married your best friend, and neither of us would ever contradict that we were just that to each other.

If I thought $750 Hello Kitty purses were as bizarre as things could get, I was dead wrong. Who in the world could possibly imagine a Pokémon Bridal Fair? There was a diamond engagement ring, flanked by two tiny golden Pikachus at its sides, going for $3,599. And a pair of wedding rings, each bearing a golden flourish that looked like lobster claws. The little sign that explained what it was said that they were male and female Pikachu tails, which came together in a heart shape when you stacked the rings. When I looked closely enough, I saw the stripes on the boy Pikachu’s back – the two little critters clearly hadn’t been educated in drawing-room manners if they stuck their butts out and hid their heads round the corner. Scratch whatever I said about doing anything in the world for Marianne, if this was what she wanted, I was most definitely not going to sport Pikachu’s butt on my finger for life. 

“Hey Chris,” called Marianne, who hadn’t noticed the rings at all and was just around the corner. “Which one do you vote for?” She was holding a different model of Razer Pikachu gaming mouse in each hand, a wireless version sitting on a stand with a zig-zaggy plastic tail, and a wired version with a matching mouse pad.

“Wired,” I said, “It’ll probably last longer.” I expected our vote to be tied, but surprisingly, this time Marianne agreed with me.

“I think so too,” she said. “If we save the $40, we could go get an outfit for you to match those sneakers.”

“You would take $40 away from Captain Margaret because of me?” I looked down at those orange tiger print sneakers that I’d bought, entirely on a whim. They were perhaps rather garish (though still tastefully so, I believed), but I couldn’t completely say that I regretted my actions. Eight years of uniforms and standing at attention set me in a world apart, in ways that made me inordinately envy Edward and Elinor their freedom at times during our college years. I was one of the lucky ones, perhaps ironically because of my near-sightedness; I wasn’t a pilot and didn’t have to go on TDYs and deployments, and my vocation allowed me to live at home instead of being on base. But I’d been spending all these years in a cloistered, controlled environment where, on a day-to-day basis, I had no need for a sense of style, and there were strict rules around whom I could fraternize with. The Academy, for all its prestige, stripped me of whatever little individuality I had before I entered it; heaven knows, I was already the most vanilla kid in the world back when I was in high school. Even as I had pitied Edward at times for his predicament with his domineering mother, I knew I was scarcely better off.  For quite a long while, I’d been craving an opportunity to feel like a card-carrying member of Gen Z, and Marianne’s insinuation that I would certainly predecease her and needed an extra shot of longevity was the very last straw. I was tired of living all my youth vicariously through her and needed to have a taste of being young myself.

“Don’t you deserve it?” She held out the bag with Margaret’s Pokémon mouse and motioned for me to drop my sunglasses bag into it to free up one hand, which she promptly grabbed. “You’ve done so much for your family and for me, and the rest of my family too. It’s time we did something for you.”

Although Marianne could sometimes be high maintenance, most times it was surprising how she could be enchanted by the simplest things. Walking back down the main avenue on Level 1, it would be Marianne, only Marianne, who could find such a sense of wonder in the mere activity of strolling in a mall and people-watching.

“These two-storey stores look larger than life,” she commented. “It’s so easy to feel crazy rich shopping in a place like this.”

Suddenly, she stopped straight in her tracks, and I glanced in the direction that she was looking at with an incredulous expression. A longish line of people, who looked mainly like high school and college kids, snaked in front of a double-height outlet of The Shake Shack, waiting to place their orders and ascend to the tables in the second storey open terrace that looked down at us.

“So that’s where the crazy rich Asian kids go,” she said in absolute shock and awe. “I never thought – I mean, maybe we were rich when I was little. Probably not crazy rich, but rich enough that hanging out at the mall in Stanford wasn’t a big thing. And here, they’re all making a line just to get fast food.”

“Why do you think they’re crazy rich?” The kids were mostly in street clothes, with girls in short skirts and jeans, and boys in short sleeve T-shirts, mainly a concession to the weather. They reminded me vaguely of how Eliza and I had looked back when we were in high school, the last time we’d been here on this island.

“That girl has a Prada backpack, see?” Marianne almost raised her arm to point, before stopping cold in her tracks because she realized it might be rude. I turned my gaze towards the direction where her half-raised arm had been, to see a girl with long, silky hair in a high ponytail, who wore a light pink fluttery dress that ended above her knees and carried a little black backpack. On her feet, she had lace-up ankle boots with flowers printed all over them. Had Marianne not called it out, I would never have noticed the expensiveness of her attire, only that she could have practically been a clone of Marianne the way she had been in high school. But it was true – now that Marianne had drawn my attention to the labels on their backpacks, I saw Fjallraven Kanken and Kipling, and bright busy prints like the one on Marianne’s Tokidoki suitcase. Not all of them were stratospherically expensive, but none of them were cheap either. Certainly, they were posher than the simple Jansport and High Sierra packs that Eliza and I had carried when we were their age. It was so oddly ironic that these kids who were clearly affluent seemed to crave one of the most commonplace components of our culture, the humble hamburger and milkshake, while we gawked at the casualness with which they tossed around labels that cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Even Al, who was an absolute sucker for labels, still sneakily went to factory outlets to get more bang for his buck, but this place was an endless sea of swanky boutiques with not a discount store in sight.

“C’mon,” said Marianne, tugging at my hand. Like always, she flitted from one thing to another far quicker than I did. We, I realized, had just done a full tour of the first floor and were retracing our steps from where we’d been earlier. “Let’s check out this store, it has a nice hygge vibe.”

Muji was the mecca of understatement, so I supposed it should be no surprise for Marianne to associate that store with me. She browsed through the racks of men’s clothing out front, which all sported soft soothing colours, before pulling out a long sleeve collarless shirt in light creamy beige.

“Did you bring your chinos with you?” she asked, to which I nodded in reply.

“Let me find a pair here for you to try this on with,” she said, busying herself in locating a pair with the exact same shade of tan as the ones I owned. Before this, I had no inkling that she paid my clothing any attention at all, but then, neither did I most of the time.

As I looked at my reflection in the men’s fitting room mirror, the subtle yet powerful visual impact of the ensemble she had put together for me became tangible. I was drawn to that particular pair of sneakers because the paper-thin soles made them nearly as sleek as dress Oxfords, and the silky furry fabric evoked the image of real tiger fur.  If I was going to express myself, I might as well go the whole hog and be as eye-catching as I knew how. The sneakers added a bit of extra punch to that otherwise still-conservative outfit, and with the loose-fitting cotton shirt casually hanging open and untucked over a plain white T-shirt the way Marianne showed me, I actually looked like fashionable Gen Z for once.  Of all our lucky breaks, the shirt cost exactly $40, and I could supply the rest of the items from the clothing I’d brought with me.  Free from my usual constraints for this one fleeting week, I could start trying on a new identity.

“Where do you want to go for dinner?” I asked Marianne, finger-swiping through the life-size touch screen mall directory back outside.

“Um…” Marianne scrutinized the long list of restaurant names, most of which gave us no indication about what kind of food they had. After a long pause, she tapped on one of them. “Beauty in the Pot,” she declared. “That sounds interesting and mysterious.”

In our trek to Basement 2, we passed by the giant Plexiglas column that brought the fountain down to the subterranean levels, forming a magnificent walled curtain of water. The extravagance of this place, it seemed, knew no bounds; whenever I thought I’d seen everything that could happen when the human imagination was unbounded by capital constraints, I got surprised by something more.

“Look!” said Marianne, giving my hand a squeeze. “It’s Tiffany’s blue!” This restaurant had rows of little turquoise chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, and the same colour repeated itself on all the leather, or perhaps it was pleather, covering the chairs and booths.

Posh and grease did go together, if the thick, steamy, slightly musty atmosphere in the air was any indication. In the middle of every white-topped table amidst the Tiffany blue seats, there was a sunken metal trough, and the intermingled aromas of spices and herbs, coming from the broths that bubbled at the tables that were occupied, permeated the air as softly as a pastel portrait. They brought to my mind that long-ago night at the Lau Pa Sat food market, where all the smells of a hundred cuisines intermingled, except that if food was art, this was a Renoir where the street food had been Andy Warhol pop art.

The menu here was like a novella, compared to the pictures printed on the street stall fronts and the plasticky laminated cards I’d been used to ordering food from the last time around. I could have spent ages perusing all the information about the nutritional benefits and symbolism around the various soups, but I wanted to know how to make this into a meal for Marianne and me. Well, honestly, how could anyone have expected what I saw – a pictorial ode to raw meat? My capacity to appreciate art was sorely tested by the fact that no matter how you sliced, stacked or arranged it, this was still just meat – and animal organs. Cow stomach, pig’s intestines, pig aortas, and rows of fresh shrimp with their beady little eyes. I remembered, then, Eliza’s distress and my disgust at seeing eyes on all the seafood we were served, that time long ago. Though now, nearly a decade later, such things no longer had the power to bother me, I worried for Marianne, and whether she might find this place a total mistake.

“Chris? Earth to Chris!” I felt a jab in my shoulder; it was Marianne, who’d stood up and leaned over to poke me. “You’re frowning,” she said, a worried expression on her face. “What’s the matter?”

“Don’t look at page…” I glanced down at the open menu on my lap, where the page I was on had a picture of a fish lying in a bowl of ice with its head turned up at an unnatural angle, its eyes glistening almost as if it was still alive, “24. Or page 19, or 15, or…” There were too many of them, and I’d lost count of all the possible images that could potentially distress Marianne.

“And why not?” Marianne’s eyes glinted at me with playful defiance. “I’m over 21 now, I can see anything.” Flipping her menu pointedly and deliberately, I could tell when she’d reached that forbidden page 24. She closed her eyes and froze in her seat, a slightly sick look on her face.

“Give me a little while,” she muttered, slowly closing the open menu book lying on the table in front of her. “I need some time to unsee this.”

I had no idea how many minutes transpired before Marianne reopened her eyes, because in my worry, I couldn’t take my eyes off her to look at the clock. But finally, with a watery smile, she opened the menu back to page one, and said, “Let’s get some food, shall we? If it’s OK with you, I’d like to try the Beauty Collagen Broth. After all, I could sure use some help in that department.”

“No, you don’t,” I countered swiftly, almost by reflex. “You’re beautiful, and you always have been.” The words rolled so easily out of my mouth that I could almost forget I’d never said that to her before. I thought them, constantly, but I knew those were the words of a player, they were the kind of lines you fed a girl when you wanted to get something out of her. And I didn’t want Marianne to think I was that kind of guy. So, I sought for sincere, specific compliments to give her, things that showed I appreciated her substance rather than her looks. And now, I realized, that also felt wrong. It felt lacking.

“Really? You think so?” Was that a hint of elation I saw? Just as quickly, Marianne’s face fell again. “But Jonny…”

“Jonny is stupid and childish,” I blurted out, before I could remember my manners. Ever since Marianne stopped wearing miniskirts and started to cover up her cleavage, after that disastrous encounter with John Willoughby, Marianne’s stepbrother Jonny had been telling her that she’d grown old before her time. But I had no inkling that his comments affected her that much. He and his girlfriend Frances had a ton of followers on their vlog, but pretty much all of them were teenagers, and nobody except his mom, and perhaps Mr. Dashwood when he wanted to please his second wife, took them seriously in any way.  “He thinks anyone who doesn’t act like an overgrown high school kid is old. Would you want me to have long hair and piercings at the age of twenty-seven?”

Finally, Marianne giggled again, the smile returning to her face. “I would never want you to have long hair and piercings, ever,” she said. “Please stay just the way you are.”

Chapter Text

Marianne

If the fountain was bombastic by day, it was majestic by night. The top of that glass dome roof, up above where I had bounced until I thought I could touch the sky, was now the deepest black, casting a shadow upon this giant enclave surrounded by all things green, where trees and ferns and creepers and shrubs intermingled with terraces of stone steps overflowing with humanity, bathed in sepia light that added a sense of mystery to it all. Practically everyone still in this mall at this late hour was gathered at this place, waiting for the fountain to come alive. There were courting couples of every conceivable nationality, it seemed, not only the locals, but plenty of foreigners like us. This was an airport, after all, and everyone who wanted to visit Singapore would have to pass through here. Families, with little kids rushing up trying to touch the water that splashed down from that great height, almost as if it came down from the heavens. Teenagers in groups, snapping selfies with their phones and chatting in a mix of rapid-fire sing-song English, the way Chris had described to me before, and what sounded like a thousand other languages.

Suddenly, the crowd fell silent, the parents pulling their offspring away from the big glassy pool of water and seating them on their laps. Everybody was waiting, watching, in eager anticipation of the drama that would descend upon us. Surrounded by all our shopping bags, Chris and I had found a seat midway up that giant bowl of green and people, sandwiched between two planter boxes with tiny trees in them, finding a space of our very own even amidst that ocean of human beings.

The first trumpet notes blared out, bursting forth into the open space to herald a series of dancing lights. Violins, synth, a whirlwind of different sounds cascaded in, just as a million different colours danced upon that column of water which transfixed us all. And through this psychedelic universe, the cute little trains still ran along their tracks, silently doing their job to carry people from one terminal to another, watching but never stopping, never flinching from the drama going on around them.

Scarcely after it began, it was over, the tempest withdrawing and leaving the column of water still splashing down, making the sound of the rain in the forest. The crowd began to hum again, swarming like ants as they busied themselves about going home, or perhaps a late-night supper, or maybe back to the terminals to fly to who knew where.  But I didn’t want to go, I only wanted to stay and sniff the fresh green scent from all the plants, to pretend I was a nymph in this magical forest world. I sat rooted there, slowly soaking it in, trying to savour every minute before Chris would inevitably pull me up and tell me it was time to go back to our room.  And yet, he didn’t. He just sat beside me, in a companionship that didn’t need words, each of us perhaps immersed in our own private reveries, I didn’t know. All I knew was that I needed the magic of that space and that moment, and no matter whether he needed it or not, he still wanted to give it to me.

And he knew when it was time, when I was finally ready to peel myself away and retire for the night. When I began to yawn and stretch and stir, his hand was already right there waiting for me to take it, all ready to help me back up to my feet.

“Marianne,” he said, “let’s go home.” And hand in hand, we made our way back up to our hotel room.

How long had it been since I’d last let myself truly believe in magic? Yet, this single day had been nothing short of extraordinary.  And what did it mean when Chris was the one who had made all this possible? Why had I once said that he had no brilliancy of understanding, when all the places he took me to today were evidence of his creativity and imagination?

Of course, Berklee had been a world of hyper-creatives; even if the concept of a starving artist was something of a trope, you didn’t go to college to pursue a career in music without expecting to become one, for the first few years after at least. And though it might be a trope again to say that art flourished where pain lived, I knew at the bottom of my heart that there was plenty of truth in it. The school year of 2019-2020, the one where my life was picked apart bit by bit with John Willoughby, the SAT, my grades, and cheer, and finally the COVID-19 pandemic, was possibly the one where my musical ability reached its pinnacle. Without all the pain and all the feelings behind me fuelling my expression, I didn’t know if I could make a performance worthy of getting into Berklee.

And of all people, my roommate ended up being Adele Varens, who had come all the way from Paris to try to get her foot into Broadway. Eventually, I figured out she probably also wanted to get as far away as possible from her mom, a small-time opera singer back in France who seldom called and never visited, though she never admitted it.  Adele didn’t play, she never had the discipline to learn the piano or any other instrument, but she sang like an angel, or perhaps it might be more accurate to say, a sultry fallen angel. The boys in our class fell over her left and right, and every weekend I’d spend an hour or two curling, pinning and spraying her waist-length golden hair while she did her makeup, to ready her for date night.  She constantly rotated through a carousel of different boys, never quite getting serious enough with any one of them, though she loved all the attention anyway.

“I’ve learned my lesson from mama,” she said, “and I know how to protect my heart. You are protecting yours too, no?”

“Of course not,” I’d said, with all the indignation I could possibly muster. “I love Chris, with all my heart and soul.”

“But you are choosing the safe option, no? Dating the boy next door from home? Marianne, you are such a good pianist, you were made for bigger dreams than this. This Chris, he is not an artist, he cannot give you the inspiration to put true feeling into your music. It is your chance now to live a little bit a la boheme.”

Even if she hadn’t planted that seed in my mind, I wouldn’t have ever thought of Chris as a genuine co-inhabitant of my creative world, though he certainly was a pillar of my family circle, a person who rooted me just like Elinor and Margaret and Mom and Jack. And one evening on FaceTime, Elinor saw Adele sashay out of our dorm room in my background, wearing a skinny, skimpy rose-pink bodycon dress with matching rosebuds in her hair, scattered if they’d casually tumbled onto her head. It had taken over half an hour of my effort, and heaven knew how much hair product, to create that illusion.

“Mari, dearest, I wonder what they were thinking to pair you up with her?” Elinor had said.  “She’s hardly going to be a stabilizing influence on you.”

“I’m a stabilizing influence on her, more like,” I said, bursting into laughter at the thought that I could ever be a stabilizing influence on anyone. “But honestly, I don’t think any of us artists are intrinsically stable at all. That’s why I need you and Mom and Chris and Margaret, and Ed of course, to be my rock.”

But that was how it was – Chris grounded me, and I grounded Adele, as best as I could. With my piano accompaniment as a foundation, her voice could soar, probably sending the heart of every single boy on campus into palpitations with her rendition of La Vie En Rose; everybody hailed her as the second coming of Edith Piaf. While she gallivanted with all the boys in town, spreading her wings beyond the confines of Berklee to date boys from all the other college campuses in Boston too, I spent all my Saturday nights practicing, propping my iPad up on a little table beside the piano so Chris could see and hear me playing over FaceTime. Those were the hours I could have my pick of any practice room in my dorm because everyone else was out partying, but I had all the company I wanted right there with me, alone with just Chris and the piano.  If my classmates thought I was a little stolid because of that, I tried my best to ignore it. I’d played with fire once, and I wouldn’t do it again.

At home, everybody had pushed me towards Chris, telling me how much he adored me and was therefore perfect for me. At Berklee, everyone told me I’d sold out on my art and was hiding in safe harbour by promising myself to a life as a music teacher and sticking with a hometown boy, instead of venturing into the wilds of New York, or LA, or even London or Paris, to make my mark performing. Perhaps the truth was somewhere in the middle. After all, I couldn’t deny that guilt, mixed in a large part with gratitude, were the first things that melted my heart towards Chris. It all started with knowing that John Willoughby had hurt him far more than he’d hurt me, capping off the five years of living hell that Eliza, then I, then Edith had created for him with a month of disciplinary probation at the Academy for going AWOL and fighting. In name, that had been for the honour of Edith Williams, but Elinor had hinted that a part of it might also have been because of me. Then, when I was lying in a New York hospital with COVID spreading everywhere, waiting for them to operate on my broken leg, he’d driven three hours straight to drop Mom and Elinor off at Denver International Airport then head back home to Colorado Springs, so they could catch their flight out to me. And when I wanted out of New York and to come home, he did it all over again just to bring me back.  How could I possibly be any deeper in his debt?

Yet, gratitude and pressure did not make relationships. But friendships did. The first thing that made me smile, when I couldn’t move with my leg in traction, was that geeky note written in block letters with Sharpie on white letter size paper, reading, “Start with Anakin”. Droids in battle could never speak to me, but a cute little boy, so smart and innocent and yet saddled with burdens that no one his age should have, could. Anakin was Chris, in my mind, and yet despite everything he’d gone through, he (Chris, not Anakin) never went over to the Dark Side. It was then that I realized how Chris deserved the utmost respect, for it was so easy to behave badly when you were hurting (I sure did), but when life had thrown you a curveball since you were five (because honestly, even if he hadn’t quite understood it then, his situation with Eliza had been a ticking time bomb) and you still had it in you to do good for the other people in your life, that had to be the hardest thing on earth. Even then, he still did it with so much dignity and grace. And I knew I owed it to him to get to know him better.

If COVID-19 hadn’t been part of the confederacy to push us together, things might have been different still. But as it was, all our lives were going through yet another round of the tumbler cycle. Our homes were overflowing with boomeranging siblings, with the lockdown shutting us all out of college and jobs. Sometimes I wondered how Chris could possibly not regret his generous offer to rent his room out to Edward, after it backfired on him when he had to share with his brother because the pandemic threw them both back home in each other’s faces 24-7.  Those were the days when he spent several hours every day on our front stoop, unable to come in because we weren’t supposed to hang around indoors with people not in our household.  He was Elinor’s friend before he became mine, actually; but Elinor had been busier with her college classes than he was because most of his training couldn’t be done online, leaving him at a looser end than pretty much anyone except me, who had nowhere else to go either. Those three months of hanging out together every day while the world was at a standstill, and perhaps the fact that Chris had crushed on me for quite a while already before that, were what shaped me into Chris’ best friend, closer than Edith or William Price or Elinor. After all, he was the only one who had the time to accompany me on every step of my journey toward getting into Berklee and passing the SAT, enjoying my piano and voice practice from where he sat on our stoop. In return, I listened when he spoke about how life had turned upside down at the Academy before he got sent back, giving him a space to grieve openly at the two suicides in the senior class, which had been made to stay on campus in strict solitary confinement after all the underclassmen emptied out so they could finish the work they needed to graduate. And then, when the Academy called him back in July and wouldn’t let him out again till winter break, I felt like something in my world was missing. I’d relied on Chris, and his stories of Star Wars and the Academy, to bring extra colour to my life, and now I was only able to FaceTime him for maybe five or ten minutes a day.  It wasn’t difficult, then, for me to make the first move on him; I knew how lonely it felt to be apart, and I couldn’t bear for him to be feeling the same loneliness too. That was what brought me to his doorstep that Christmas dressed as Rey, offering him the cheesiest Reylo pickup line I could come up with. And the rest was history; I never ever thought of looking back, not even when I was told he didn’t belong in my artistic world and couldn’t possibly be enough for my creative soul.

But how could I have missed this, that even though he was an engineer, not a creative, it was his imagination that transformed a mere nodding acquaintance into a lively friendship? Without a taste for the romantic, could he possibly have curated his Star Wars anthology to send me straight to the bits that hit me right in the feels, sparing me from all the droid action that would have made my eyes glaze over? Without an inventive spirit, could he have drawn that little map on my cast in Sharpie, making tiny arrows darting between the flowers from Elinor and the anime doodles from Margaret to link together his annotations of all the songs I mastered during my convalescence? Even from the very beginning, he had been my magician, and I had never realized any of it. Not until now.

I wondered, then, if Adele had been right after all; if really, I only loved Chris because he was my safety net. All the years I’d been at Berklee, I’d told myself and everybody else I loved Chris with all my heart, because I knew that was what he deserved. It was what I wanted to give him. Yet how could I have gone so long without getting something about him that was so simple? Desperately, I needed to make it up, to create some magic for him tonight in return for all that he had done today.

After we’d taken our showers and changed, I flipped off all the lights and turned on the purple mood lighting for us to snuggle down to. Reaching for my phone, I pulled up my Dick Lee playlist on Spotify, looking for just the right song to set the tone.  What could I do to make him feel loved, but with enough playfulness to steer clear of maudlin territory? Years ago, I had believed in romance, but now I knew where all the soppy stuff belonged: on the chick-lit shelves in bookstores and old rom-com movies. Those kinds of lines were what John Willoughby might say, which at the end of the day meant nothing at all. I did not want empty nothings, but rather, something sincere, something I could live up to. We were friends and we were lovers, and we were happy enough for me to feel I could live my life with him this way.  Just like Dick Lee and Jacintha had once been when they had performed this song.  Yes, that was it, Mustapha was perfect!

Cherie je t’aime, cherie je t’adore

My darling, I love you a lot more than you know

Cherie je t’aime, cherie je t’adore

My darling, I love you a lot more than you know

Oh Mustapha, oh Mustapha

Yen kathalan my Mr. Mustapha

Sayang sayang 那就是我爱你 (na jiu shi wo ai ni)

Will you, will you fall in love with me

…..

Oh your lovely eyes, I feel I know them well

Let me look into them and fall right under their spell

Oh my sweetheart what a beauty

You are such a pretty cutie

I can’t tell you tutti frutti

All the things you’re doing to me

Chris sat up as abruptly as a marionette pulled by a string, reaching up diagonally to the tiny shelf by the headboard where I’d left my phone. Grabbing it, he jabbed at the buttons on the side to lower the volume until it was barely audible before flopping back down with a sigh.

“Sorry,” he said, “but that was completely the wrong vibe. Brownface just doesn’t cut it.”

“Brownface?” I was puzzled for a while, before I figured out what he was talking about. It was Dick Lee’s voice putting on that thick Indian accent for his role that had snapped Chris out of the mood. I loved this song for the irony, how it went over-the-top on all the Bollywood tropes while poking light fun at it, reminding me of all the silly endearments that would have made seventeen-year-old me swoon, with just enough tongue-in-cheek to not take them too seriously. And Chris? Apparently, he thought a little deeper than I did, and the cultural undertones didn’t wash over his head the way they had sailed completely over mine. I felt, not for the first time, how thick-headed I was.

“Yeah. You know, where a white person pretends to have a fake Indian accent? It doesn’t have to be a white person doing it to still not be funny. Or to kill the romantic mood.”

Romantic. That was a complicated word for me. Between the two of us, I was the one who was the artist, the one who was, by type, supposed to let my feelings run away. But there was nothing runaway in how I felt when I was with Chris: he felt clean and safe and comfortable, and I had long convinced myself that this was my ultimate state of happiness.  I needed someone who would be there, and Chris delivered that on every score, even despite how I’d initially rejected him.  Still, none of those feelings were in any way what people wrote poetry about.  There were legends and sonnets and songs that told of all-consuming, everlasting love, so powerful that people died for it.  Or at the very least, go weak in the knees when spirited away by an insanely handsome stranger. That feeling had happened to me once, but it turned out to be the infatuation of a season, not the love of a lifetime.  Chris was neither handsome nor a stranger, and we had all four feet firmly on the ground (metaphorically speaking, not literally at this moment). I had never thought of whether he might crave romance, or how I might give it to him. But that wasn’t really the only question I needed to address.

“Sorry too,” I said, deciding I’d tackle the easy stuff first. “It never occurred to me to think it wasn’t OK. He’s singing this song with an Indian lady who was one of his best friends and eventually became his wife, so even if it was brownface, she approved of it.” One of his best friends, and eventually became his wife. Was that what I wanted this song to portend? Could that be what I had unconsciously sought out?

“Can you please unlock your phone?” he asked. “I’d like to pick another song.  After all, this is the first real night we have all to ourselves.”

That was true, too. We had both started out as broke students, and then even after he graduated, I was still a broke student on my own, more than five and a half hours away from where he was. When I came back on breaks, our parents’ homes were as good as it got, which meant privacy was non-existent since Elinor had shared a bedroom with me until she married Edward in the middle of my junior year, his parents insisted we keep the door open in his room whenever we were there, and Margaret was still underfoot as a commuter college student. It hadn’t stopped us from enjoying each other’s company, but we never had a space to be together, even a capsule like this.

I took the phone from Chris, keyed in my passcode and handed it back. After a few swipes down the playlist, he found what he wanted, and the room filled with the mellow tune of Bengawan Solo.

Bengawan Solo

The river of my dreams

Drifting through my secret life

To places where I haven’t been

No one needs to know

Where you may carry me

You can take me down your stream

And show me what my wishes mean

Why had I never properly heard the lyrics before?  This was supposed to be an Indonesian folk song, a patriotic tribute to the longest river in Java, or so I’d read. But Dick Lee had also turned it into a love song, and a romantic one at that.  I didn’t know, and didn’t dare to ask, if the words of that song might mean what Chris was thinking.

River of desire

When you are calm, you only soothe me

But when you overflow with fire

You spark my wildest dreams

Bengawan Solo

Take me away to where

I don’t have to be myself

Like you, I flow without a care

The song continued, mellow and chill and calm, yet it tingled all my senses with romance, filling in for the cologne that Chris didn’t wear. I knew, then, that it was possible for someone to both be there and sweep you off your feet, and that this would be the most ecstatic night of both our lives.

Chapter Text

Captain Brandon

William Deng’s BMW X7 pulled up to the Terminal 1 curb side at 7:30 AM sharp, with Marianne hopping up and down and waving as soon as we could discern the licence plate number of the vehicle. I had met William and his family on a flight eight years ago when I came here for the first time with Eliza, and surprisingly, he had wanted to stay in touch with me.

“You’re the most impressive young person I’ve ever met,” he’d said, leaving me speechless.  Mom and Dad loved us, I knew, but never in our lives had they ever called Al or me special in any way. And to be fair to them, they probably were correct. Certainly, we weren’t world-class prodigies, even though Al got a ton of validation at school from his success with student body government, Little League, football, and girls. I, on the other hand, faded into the woodwork.

“Really?” If there was any proof needed of my ordinariness, my lack of eloquence at receiving such praise should be it.

“I’ve learned long ago that it makes me Public Enemy No. 1 to ask to switch seats on planes for better access to my family,” replied William. “And you offered to switch without me asking, putting yourself in the dreaded middle seat. Besides,” he continued in a lower voice, eyeing Eliza who was asleep on my shoulder, “you are taking on a lot of risk and responsibility with this trip of yours. I can see it.” I never outed Eliza’s condition to anyone if I could help it, knowing she didn’t want to be treated differently, but he must have noticed her lack of appetite and the medicines she needed to take.

Since then, William and I kept up on email, WhatsApp and FaceTime, and after Marianne and Edith started going to college in Boston, the Dengs would see them every time they went up there to visit William’s sister Gianna. I met them a couple times up there too, after I graduated from the Academy and had the ability to take leave. But mostly it was Gianna, now a second violinist with the Boston Philharmonic, who hung out with Marianne.

When we started planning our trip to Singapore, I knew William would be the first person I wanted to see, and I also had a rather strange favour to ask of him.

“William, I need your help please,” I’d said on FaceTime. “Marianne wants a Crazy Rich Asians trip, so can you be our Nick Young?”

William threw back his head and laughed. “I’m just about as fresh off the boat as they come,” he quipped. “Of course. It’ll be a good way to celebrate us finally getting our Singapore citizenship.” He’d been living in Singapore for about twelve or thirteen years by now, but he told me the way to get permanent residency and citizenship was to try again and again no matter how many times they rejected you. The opposite of what it would take to obtain Marianne’s favour, apparently; you could stalk public authorities, but not people.

“That’d make me Rachel,” piped up his wife Lizzy. “A whitewashed Rachel, that is. That isn’t too far from the truth, right down to the whole family-disapproval thing. William, your aunt Cao Jing still hasn’t lifted her ban on your yearly pilgrimage to her house in Beijing, and it’s been five years since the pandemic first started.”

“Well, there is a grain of sense in that,” replied William. “You’ve got to admit she’s done a great job; all these years, Xiaoling – that’s my cousin – hasn’t been exposed to COVID, not even once. My cousin’s had severe asthma all her life,” he explained to me, “so my aunt’s got to be super careful with her. She keeps all the windows shut and the air purifier on all the time.  I used to hate it when I visited as a child.”

“I can’t imagine how your folks deal over there,” said Lizzy. “I’d get whiplash going in and out of local lockdowns like that. But we’re digressing. Back to the point, Chris, we would be more than happy to have you come with Marianne. And William apparently was The Chinese Bachelor before he saddled himself with me. Honestly, I can’t imagine how or why.” To that piece of banter, William gave her a playful whack. “So, you have your Nick Young and Rachel right here. All we ask of you is to make your trip during the school holidays.”

Marianne’s commencement had been in May and the Deng kids got out of school in June, so here we were. They’d even remembered to get a bunch of pink and blue translucent balloons to nail the airport scene, which eleven-year-old Joy and almost-seven-year-old Bennet handed to Marianne while William grabbed her suitcase. After William and I got everything into the trunk, I climbed into the third row with Marianne so Bennet could keep his booster seat in the same spot.

“Did you have fun at Jewel yesterday?” asked Lizzy from the front passenger seat.

“Absolutely!” Marianne’s ebullient voice had no problem carrying across three rows of seats in that massive vehicle. “It’s an entire dreamland in an airport, I have no idea how you guys do it. And Chris here says this is just the beginning, there’s a ton of other magic to come.”

“I like Jewel,” declared Joy. “It’s better than the shopping centres in Orchard Road. It’s like Ion but I think Jewel is more fun.”

“That, by the way, is the ultimate compliment,” remarked William. “Ion is one of the most upmarket shopping malls on this island.” Yes, and Eliza and I had been there. I could still remember how intimidated I felt, walking through the sliding glass doors into that silent, sparkling world of Tiffany’s, Cartier, and Gucci. Even now, that kind of posh still felt a little too big for my britches.  As it probably would for ninety percent of the world population, I reminded myself.

“It’s a pity we don’t live closer to here,” acknowledged Lizzy. “Otherwise, we’d be coming to Jewel a lot more often. But we had to find an address within a two-kilometre radius to get Joy into Nanyang Primary School. With Joy, William was terribly particular about getting her into the top local primary school – that’s elementary school for you – for Chinese cultural education. He’s loosened up a lot with Bennet.”

“Hey!” protested William. “There’s a reason why Joy is ten times quieter and more obedient than Bennet is. And learning the teachings of Confucius at a young age probably has something to do with it.”

“Maybe being a girl has something to do with it too,” pointed out Joy.

“You don’t need to be quiet to be good,” sulked Bennet. “Superheroes are never quiet.”

“Another of my mantras,” stated Lizzy. “See, Chris? We don’t even need to act to be Nick and Rachel.”

I chuckled, probably not loud enough for anyone but Marianne to notice. If superheroes were never quiet, that disqualified me from yet another path out of my ordinariness. Though why should I need to be extraordinary? I had never hungered for grandeur, I only wanted to be interesting enough for Marianne.

And Marianne was the one who settled the score. “Not all superheroes announce their arrival with a bolt of lightning, Bennet,” she said. “And not all superheroes wear capes either. In fact, when you grow up, you’ll find there’s more superheroes who don’t wear capes than those who do.”

They left you with no doubts about how to get to the city; that word was emblazoned everywhere, from the emerald-green signages that hung some eight feet above the roadway to the enormous block letters in white paint on the traffic lanes. All roads, apparently, led to Rome from the airport.  This was the freeway that, as a cash-strapped seventeen-year-old, I had heard but never seen, since I didn’t have the means to rent cars or take too many taxi rides back then.  On one side, a line of trees formed the horizon, and on the other, skyscrapers, each an endless phalanx of windows, started popping up after about five to eight minutes or so. These had to be fancy apartment buildings, some of which had their own little private decks, and if I remembered what the sea looked like from East Coast Park, I could imagine what the view from their windows might be. Except that between them and the sea, there was this gigantic speedway, long and straight like an aircraft runway, with eight lanes of road full of vehicles roaring at sixty miles per hour. The noise pollution would have to be staggering if they opened their windows.

Those apartment buildings continued for miles: private, then public, then private again. After having visited the Ang Mo Kio public housing community, I could tell which was which, because the concrete slab designs and somewhat random paint colours gave the public housing away, while the private apartments came in different shapes (there was even a bunch of buildings that were round), had a lot of glass, and were painted in much more neutral and cohesive tones.  Eventually, that long straight road came to an end, and we achieved take-off, going up a massive viaduct that rose to meet the higher floors of the apartments that sat beside it. Beneath us, we could see water for the very first time, showing us where the bay became the sea.

“Wow,” I said, slicing through the companionable silence in the car. iPads, especially when they didn’t have to be shared, were immensely effective, perhaps more so than Confucian values, in keeping Joy and Bennet quietly engaged, and Marianne was gazing out the window at the skyline, deep in her own rapture. “Where are we? I remember that - there’s Gardens by the Bay and Marina Bay Sands.”

“This is the Benjamin Sheares Bridge,” explained Lizzy. “It’s beautiful at sunrise. Me and William, we did the Stanchart Marathon one year, and they closed off the entire road for the route. The uphill run was no piece of cake, but the view was entirely worth it.”

“I’m kind of taking the scenic route here,” explained William. “We would’ve stopped at Marina Bay Sands for breakfast if Joy and Bennet hadn’t insisted on going to Fratelli’s.  Well, what can you do, we’re that age only once in our lives when a theme park is all it takes to make magic for us.  Resorts World Sentosa might not quite be Disney World, but it certainly is more convenient. Before Joy started primary school, we used to go there almost every weekend.”

“Every weekend? That’s crazy!” Realizing her frankness might have gotten ahead of her, Marianne clammed up and shrank visibly in her seat. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to criticize. But my dad lives in LA, and after I got old enough to look at prices, I realized how expensive it really is to hang out at Disneyland.”

I could relate, for the one and only time my house went to visit The Mouse, during winter break of my third-class year, I’d had to cough up $250 to create a custom “hand-built” lightsabre with Margaret.  It was terribly expensive, but the entire Dashwood family had been so depressed, I figured young Margaret needed that pick-me-up.  By then, I was under no illusions about theme parks and magic; I couldn’t be, when Eliza had shown me that going to Disney World was standard boilerplate Make-A-Wish material, and none of the joy stuck after she came back. But I could appreciate stellar engineering, design and logistics, and throwing in a couple of good roller coaster rides certainly didn’t hurt.

“It doesn’t have to be that expensive,” explained Lizzy. “Before the pandemic, we used to be able to buy annual passes for less than $200. I heard ladies of leisure in Tokyo hang out at Disneyland the way regular people hang out at malls. If I was a lady of leisure, I might try that.”

“You could be one anytime,” said William. “But you won’t. You’ll be bored out of your skin.”

“That’s true,” acknowledged Lizzy, “but I feel I have the best of both worlds right now. If I had to go full-on into the start-up life, I’d have to be on 24-7, but since there’s no real pressure for me to sell my apps at volume, I can take time to focus on the kids whenever I need to.” They’d told me their story before – Lizzy and William had met while they were working at the Google Cambridge campus, and she continued working as a software engineer for a couple years after they moved to Singapore, but eventually started building and marketing mobile apps on her own. Although William continued to work his way up at Google, where he was now a Head of Industry, they both knew he would take over the reins of his family business before long, whenever his Beijing-based parents decided to retire.

We had been weaving our way among the tall buildings in the financial centre, past Lau Pa Sat which sat squat and incongruous in the middle of the concrete jungle. Feeling some satisfaction at seeing something familiar, I pointed it out to Marianne, but before long we were trundling again into places I hadn’t seen before. Even with the amazing subway and bus network, the lack of a car and Eliza’s limited physical tolerance had severely curtailed my ability to explore the last time around.

“That used to be the Treasury Building,” said William, pointing out a massive construction site to our right. “It housed the headquarters of Temasek Holdings, Singapore’s government investment firm, and at one time, the Ministry of Finance. Quite the design marvel it was - they built it, on purpose, to look like a stack of coins because it was the Treasury. Very clever. But the building got bought over by Alibaba, and now they’re redeveloping it to become the tallest skyscraper on the island when it’s done in a couple years. These days, the Chinese are buying up everything.”

“Just like you,” teased Lizzy. “When you start taking over the family business, you’ll be adding on to all the Chinese investment in Singapore.”

William made a right turn into a road that lay in the shadow of a concrete viaduct, with stacks of metal shipping containers visible above the top of the prison-style barbed wire fence that bordered the other side.

“This is Keppel Port,” he explained, as a gigantic trailer truck pulling one of those containers turned out from a side road right in front of us. “It’s the birthplace of all the commerce in Singapore, right from the days of Sir Stamford Raffles. But in five or ten years, all this will become flats and condos. They’ll be consolidating all the ports in Tuas, which is at the very western tip of the island.”

“You won’t be looking forward to that commute,” added Lizzy. “If all goes well with your plan to set up a plant in Singapore, your future will probably involve going to Tuas every day.”

“Compared to the ring roads in Beijing, gridlock in Singapore is nothing,” remarked William airily. “They did pretty good with limiting the number of vehicles through the COE system. That’s an auction where you pay as much as a car itself – or maybe more – to get a piece of paper to let you buy a car. Nobody gets to buy more cars than the number of papers the government makes. Can you guess how much this car cost?”

“Maybe, um, $100,000?” suggested Marianne. “I don’t know. Anything more than ten thousand dollars still feels like a ton of money to me.”

“Not even close,” said Lizzy. “It was half a million dollars, which is about the same as William’s Mercedes S-Class sedan.  I won’t even say we own the cars, because we need to pay again to renew the COEs after they expire. So, it’s more like the cost of renting the cars for ten years.”

That meant they had a million dollars’ worth of cars sitting right there in their driveway; if I tried that stunt back home, we’d probably get broken into in record time. Not to mention that Dad had taught me how cars were the worst investment in the world because their value took a nosedive the minute you drove them off the lot, and they’d continue to be a money pit all the way down from there.

“Daddy, can we get a Lamborghini?” Like any self-respecting boy, Bennet perked up when the conversation turned to cars. “If you start saving now, it will be there when I learn how to drive.”

“N-no,” sputtered William, before falling silent. I’d be completely discombobulated if I were in his shoes, so I understood perfectly.

“They cost a million dollars apiece, at least,” remarked Lizzy. “Some of them might even be closer to two. But before you think we’re completely spoiled in this household, I ought to clarify that he doesn’t have any idea at all how much they cost. He only knows some of his classmates’ dads have them.”

“Oh, look!” For Marianne, bless her, magic still held more sway than Lamborghinis. And we were headed on a bridge across the water toward a land mass with the giant letters “Sentosa” and a peach-coloured version of the Disneyland castle looming in the distance. “It’s the bridge into the Magic Kingdom!”

“That’s where we live,” said Joy matter-of-factly. “We go on this bridge every day.”

“Sentosa Cove used to be our weekend and holiday home,” explained Lizzy. “But when the ‘circuit breaker’ happened during the pandemic – that’s Singapore-speak for lockdown – it was a sanity saver to escape here, where we can see the sea from our house. Bennet had to get out of preschool for quite a while, and Joy was in and out of HBL – that’s Home-Based Learning – so we were all on top of each other, with nowhere to head out to for fresh air. And since then, we haven’t wanted to go back to the city.”

“I remember those times,” I said. “We all pretty much went crazy too. Everyone except Marianne, whose sense of purpose was indomitable. That was when she was practicing for her Berklee auditions, so she got the most out of lockdown among any of us.”

William merged into one of the left-hand lanes that had “RESORTS WORLD” painted on them and wove through endless coloured zones of parking spaces before finding his spot. Huge buses, Greyhound size or even bigger, were parked in long bays by a row of sliding glass doors, not terribly different from the public bus depot I’d seen at Ang Mo Kio.

“Are those the public buses?” I asked.

“They’re tour buses,” Lizzy replied. “They’re coming back after the pandemic, but things were slow for quite a while. Mostly, they bring people in from Malaysia to visit the casino. The whole idea behind these integrated resorts, you see, was to make Singapore a little more exciting and bring in entertainment of the same standard as what you could get in LA or Las Vegas. But to appease the local community and make sure people didn’t go bankrupt with gambling addictions, they charge $150 per person for Singaporeans and Permanent Residents to get in. That’s one of the ways William and I got punished for becoming local,” she quipped. “Not that we’ve ever wanted or needed to go.”

We emerged from underground to a massive concrete mosaic courtyard with fiberglass awnings shielding us from the sun and fountains every few paces or so. To one side, the entrance to Universal Studios sat, its signature globe bathed in jets of water sprinkling up from the base.

“Will it get hotter later?” asked Marianne. “It doesn’t feel so bad now, but I suppose that’s why they have so much water around here?”

“The answer is yes to your first question,” said William, “but the abundance of water features isn’t necessarily about beating the heat. In Chinese culture, feng shui is very important, and we consult geomancers when we build koi ponds and water features in our homes, to make sure we put them in the right spot to bring us luck. Almost every private condo here has a swimming pool and a water feature, mostly because water symbolizes wealth. But it also represents energy and wisdom.”

So that was why they had those crazy fountains in the shopping malls, and there were streams of koi swimming in the airport. Everything was starting to make so much more sense when we had William here to explain it to us. The landscaping was every bit as impeccable as that in the Magic Kingdom, and the variety of shops and restaurants was mind-boggling, considering that this area was still accessible to the public without paying any park admission fees.  William led us up to a tall hotel building that looked a little less grand in scale than the Grand Californian where the Middleton family had stayed at Disneyland – this island just didn’t have that much real estate – but which totally blew my mind when we stepped into the lobby. For gold seemed to bounce off the walls of the Hotel Michael, glinting off the feature wall at the check-in counter, implicit in the deep amber accents of the chandelier, and seemingly bouncing off every pillar and archway. And yet, the geometric design on the carpet, the screen doors and the floor-to-ceiling window screens seemed to scream “Oriental”, with infinite rows of long rectangles that curved at the edges and joined to each other in a never-ending maze. Within this space, the entrance to Fratelli was framed in light matte gold paint, the words “Pizzeria. Trattoria” feeling incongruously Western, even American, amidst this decidedly un-American gilded space.

“Yay!” Joy and Bennet skipped ahead before their parents could catch up with them at the maître d’s podium.  This place had contemporary décor with olive green chairs and walls to hint that it was Italian, and was as cleaned up as any of the toniest restaurants I’d been to in New York, Boston, or LA. The menu was written in both English and what I believed to be Chinese, but Joy and Bennet scarcely had to read it before they declared they wanted the pancakes.

“Thanks to McDonald’s,” remarked William, “every kid thinks hot cakes for breakfast are a treat.” I grinned at the irony; just like how all those rich teenagers had stood in line for the Shake Shack at Jewel, the plebeian influence of American fast food seemed to dictate the tastes of young people everywhere regardless of social status. If that was the essence of our soft power over the world, it was perhaps a dubious honour.

“And I think I’ve lived outside Asia for too long,” he continued, “because my idea of a special breakfast is eggs Benedict.” He shot a conspiratorial look at Lizzy, as if they shared a secret joke of some kind.

“Talk about role reversal,” said Lizzy, right on cue. “It seems like it falls to me to introduce you to the wonders of Singapore food. I’m going for the nasi lemak, or coconut rice. Chris, did you try that the last time you were here?”

“I think I did,” I said, grimacing at the memory. “I can’t not remember it, when everyone said it was the must-try breakfast dish of the country. It has those fish with the heads and the tails still on them, right?”

Lizzy actually laughed, though I couldn’t say I was fully de-sensitized towards putting fish heads and tails into my mouth, never mind that seeing them didn’t freak me out that much anymore. And I noticed Marianne shuddering beside me; she probably still remembered that horrible fish picture she’d insisted on seeing despite my warnings not to look.

“They aren’t that big,” I told her. “These fish are small enough for you to put the whole thing in your mouth in one gulp. And they’re deep fried and crispy like tortilla chips.” That did not seem to help her recover her composure, not that I expected it to.

“Deep fried anchovies and deep-fried shallots are some of the most common garnishes you’ll find in the local cuisine,” said Lizzy. “You’ll want to start getting used to them.”

Local Singapore food, it did turn out, had extra mystique when plated on fine china.  At $24, the humble nasi lemak (which would have cost less than $5 at a food centre) was the most expensive item on the menu, in a strange twist of irony. That was one of the reasons why Marianne and I decided to share a bowl of wok-fried noodles and a plate of dim sum buns instead. Thankfully, the shrimp had lost their heads, though the tails were still on.

“They’re like that in fancy canapes too, remember?” I tried to reassure Marianne. “I hope you won’t be too grossed out by this.”

“Prawns are always fresher with the shells on,” William declared. “I was told one of the ultimate tests of devotion for a Singaporean boyfriend is whether he’ll peel your prawns for you. That, and whether he’ll carry your handbag.”  Not quite the thing I wanted to hear, for it brought back that time when I’d peeled an entire plateful of shrimp for Eliza’s sake, a sign, perhaps, of my hopeless devotion then.

But I could scarcely brood for long with Lizzy’s infectious sense of humour present at the table. “Well, William was the opposite of the perfect Singapore boyfriend,” she shared. “He dumped a bunch of – er, offal – into the soup the first time he asked me out for hot pot.”

“You made that sound like a date,” said William, picking up the story, “when it was anything but. I was just taking all of you out to dinner as a reward because you met a major feature milestone. As a program manager,” he explained to me, “I was beholden to software engineers like Lizzy to make sure things got done on time. And she never failed to deliver with excellence.”

“That’s not what you said back then,” retorted Lizzy. “You were picking on my bugs since day one. But anyways. Long story short, you still haven’t peeled a prawn for me yet, after so many years.”

“I don’t have a problem with that,” came William’s calm reply. “I know you think it’s a bigger compliment for me to recognize you can peel them on your own.”

We lingered a long while over breakfast, partly for William and Lizzy’s sake; during school time, family breakfasts did not exist in the Deng household. Joy and Bennet’s schedule resembled what we would have called year-round school, with one-week breaks in March and September, and a month or so apiece in June and December. The rest of the year, Lizzy and her two helpers scrambled both kids out of bed by 6 AM; even with the help of the family chauffeur, it was still an uphill task to get Joy and Bennet into their respective school gates in time for their flag-raising ceremonies at 7:30 AM or earlier.  It made Mom’s old routine of leaving Al and me a bowl of oatmeal and a banana each on the table before we walked ourselves to school seem positively chill. Mom wasn’t negligent, but as a school principal, she needed to be at her school before we got to ours.

“Do you want to check out the theme park?” asked William after we’d had our fill and then some, plus our nth refills of coffee. “We can do that instead of the luge, if you’d like.”

“It’s Bennet’s choice,” I said, “because the luge was what we promised him. What do you want to do, buddy?”

“I want the luge,” said Bennet. “Chris kor kor, you promised to ride with me. If you are ‘Captain’ now, does that mean you drive a spaceship?”

“’Captain’ is just a rank,” I explained. “I’m not a pilot, so I don’t drive anything. I do logistics, which means I make sure everything is there so the rockets and space shuttles can fly.”

“Oh,” The disappointment in Bennet’s face was obvious, even though he didn’t exactly voice his thoughts about how boring my job was. “But I still want you to drive the luge. Then I don’t have to stay on the easy slope only.”

We got on the Sentosa Express monorail, which looked like a mini subway train painted in neon colours, to get to the starting point for the luge rides. The train took us out of the Resorts World theme park area, past a bunch of hotel buildings, and down a tree-lined slope to the beach.

“Multiply the size of this train by a factor of ten and the people density by a factor of five, and you’ll get the Singapore subway,” I told Marianne, who was barely listening to these factoids because she wanted to catch selfies of us inside the train. Though there were only a handful of seats at the very end of the train car, some kind folks had given up theirs to Joy and Bennet, who weren’t tall enough to comfortably reach the grab loops. That was very thoughtful of them, when the regular subway generally had much more people than seats on it, so standing on trains was a pretty normal occurrence for a non-crazy-rich Singaporean kid.  Taking a train was something of a special occasion for Joy and Bennet (and William too), if Lizzy’s enthusiastic photo-taking was any indication.

“Everybody, remember to get your helmet, ah,” nagged Bennet, skipping excitedly in front of us on the short walk from the Beach monorail station to the luge ticket line.

“We know, lah,” said Joy. “We not stupid, OK?”  Even classic eleven-year-old sass lost its edge when Joy delivered it with a sweet smile and a toss of her braids, instead of the snarkiness I’d gotten so used to in middle and high school.

“Oh look, a chairlift! Ellie said moving to Colorado meant we could go skiing as a family whenever we want,” observed Marianne plaintively, “but it’s been so many years, and it still hasn’t happened yet.” That was, unfortunately, a harsh reality of life when there was college to pay for, and Elinor had confided in me that she thought twenty years of stay-at-home mom-hood in the Bay Area had set Mrs. Dashwood up for nothing but a hand-to-mouth existence after her parents’ divorce. Certainly, the combination of the family’s Bay Area habits and tastes with Mrs. Dashwood’s modest salary as Jack Middleton’s admin had done nothing to relieve Elinor’s stress, and when Mrs. Dashwood struggled more with staying on top of work than most other people because she was so unused to it, Elinor had often felt the pressure to practically play mom to her sisters too. With Elinor and Marianne now graduated, things were finally starting to look up, though Elinor would never consider them fully in the clear until Margaret’s graduation came.

“This is the Skyride,” explained Bennet. “Chairlift is different. We took it when we went Hokkaido to ski during the December holiday last year.” He was riding between us because he wanted to ride the luge with me, leaving Joy to ride ahead of us on a separate chair between her parents.

As we picked up speed and sailed above the treetops, I could see the sea, calm and glassy in the distance, with a haphazard smattering of anchored ships floating on it. Up above, an aerial tramway headed in from mainland Singapore, coming in at a diagonal angle to our path.

“That’s a peacock!” squealed Marianne. “It’s kind of scary looking down, but see? They’re pretty smart to ride like that. Look, there’s two of them!” On the row of chairlifts running next to ours, two peacocks were perched on separate seats with their tails demurely folded, grabbing the top rails of the backrests with their claws to ride the chairs in the downhill direction where there were no humans. Clearly, they’d figured out the best way to conserve their energy while making full use of the technology available to them. And to make sure the chairlift was just as useful going down as well as up, too.

Bennet settled himself on the luge between my knees, grabbing the metal crossbar between the handlebars. He was all eager and raring to go, making monkey faces at Joy who settled herself demurely on her luge while showing Marianne how to work the controls. Everybody else had a luge of their own, but because children under eight were only recommended to do the Jungle Trail (the easiest one) on their own, he’d opportunistically decided to double up with me so he wouldn’t need to curtail his horizons. I only hoped I wouldn’t disappoint him with my level of derring-do, or lack thereof.  After all, unlike Dad, I was no fighter pilot.

I started cautiously, feathering the brakes by pulling lightly backward on the handlebars as we coasted downhill. Joy shot past us in an instant, yelling, “Na-nanny-boo-boo!” in a sing-song voice when she executed a perfect slingshot on the straight to zing into the lead.

“Kor kor, why are you so slow?” whined Bennet. “Can you please go faster?”

“OK,” I replied, letting the brakes out a little. We were coming up to a wide hairpin chicane, curving around like a half moon, and I sailed through it with as little braking action as I dared.

“Fast-err! Faster faster faster faster faster,” yelled Bennet. “I want to overtake Joy!”

While I knew that wasn’t physically feasible, I tried my best to rev up a little and gain some ground. There were several stretches where “Slow Down” was painted in yellow lines around the bends, but since most of them were gentler than that first hairpin, I got through them fine at the speed I was at. It still wasn’t enough for us to fully catch up to Joy, and all too soon we got to a bunch of speed strips with black foam blocks creating a narrow zigzag in the track.

“We’re going to knock into it,” wailed a terrified Bennet. “Slower can or not?”

“No, we won’t,” I said, pulling on the brakes and weaving the luge in between the blocks that alternated left, then right. We’d slowed down a little too late for the speed strips, so the ride was still somewhat bumpier than what it should be, but I got us into the metal tracks that pulled us into line and ended the course without a hitch.

Bennet was shaking when I lifted him out of the stationary luge, and he promptly buried his head in my shoulder and bawled like a four-year-old.  It had been ages, perhaps forever, since I had the capacity to terrify anybody, and I felt terrible for what I’d inadvertently done, even though Bennet had been the one to insist I must go faster. When had I ever inspired such fear? It was exquisitely ironic that I never did, even though I was a military man by profession.

And then, it all came back to me. The time when I had John Willoughby firmly in a headlock, when the threat he bleated out to call the police was the only thing bringing me back to my senses. We’d had to be pulled apart by passers-by to prevent me from inflicting any more damage.  If I believed I wasn’t dangerous, then how had I ended up initiating a street corner brawl in a very public part of downtown Manhattan?  It only meant a single thing: I had greater physical power than I believed, and with that also came a great responsibility to use it wisely.

I walked slowly back and forth, letting Bennet cry out all his fear. He hiccoughed, then asked me to put him down. As gently as I could, I set him back onto his feet and was rewarded by a smile.

“Kor kor,” he said, “can we go down again? This time, we don’t need to go so fast.”

“Of course, buddy,” I said, holding out my little finger to make a pinky promise.

Chapter Text

Marianne

“Why aren’t any of you taking your shoes off?” I asked, slipping my feet out of my coral pink espadrilles. “Surely you can’t resist the feeling of all that beautiful white sand between your toes… it looks so clean out there.” Siloso Beach could not compare at all in size to the beaches I used to go to off the California coast, but that was part of what made it so charming. It was almost like a toy beach, with several teeny islands the shape of almond crescent cookies floating several yards away from the shore.

“There were a bunch of jellyfish incidents out here a couple years ago,” warned William. “They haven’t been back lately, but it’s still better to play it safe. Joy and Bennet are still a little young for the zipline, so we’ll find a shady place to hang out in the meantime.”

“Actually, it’s William who isn’t quite ready for the zipline,” said Lizzy, and the lack of contradiction from the party concerned probably meant she was right. “We’ll see you at Coastes at lunchtime like we said, and Chris, I can take your glasses for you, so you won’t crush them by accident.”

Venice Beach and Santa Monica Beach were swarms of humanity when school was out in June, but it seemed like the crazy rich Asians were all in hiding here. Maybe it might have something to do with the 90-degree midday sun, which hammered down even through my wide-brimmed cloth hat, or maybe they all had private islands like what the movie showed. In any case, nobody was at the volleyball nets planted in the sand, and only a few intrepid Caucasian tourists were wading in the non-existent surf. I wondered how Chris dealt, when he had hardly any hair on his head to begin with.  Lazily, I drew a line in the sand with my big toe before dusting my feet off and stepping back into my shoes.

Where were all the people, anyway? There were plenty of coconut trees, to be sure, but the restaurants that hugged the sandy coast had rows and rows of empty sun loungers and wide beach umbrellas. School might be out, but this didn’t seem to be the place where the kids went.  Perhaps it might be the heat, but it seemed like the people flooded places like that shopping mall at the airport and the Resorts World theme park; nature, it seemed, held no charm for them unless it was planted and pruned, integrated into air-conditioned, man-made perfection.

And yet, the rustic (probably fake rustic, actually) wooden shack that housed the zipline check-in facilities drew quite a decent crowd – mostly people in their late teens or twenties, not too different from us, most of whom were probably tourists. I couldn’t always tell who was a local or not when I looked at them, but Chris had taught me enough about Singlish for me to catch their accents when they opened their mouths. And rare were the times, if ever, that Chris needed to depend on me, but now I found myself having to enter all our information in the electronic indemnity forms on the iPads mounted on a high table at one side of the hut. I kind of surprised myself when I knew exactly what to fill in for him without really having to ask at all; it was almost as if we were family already.

“You’ll be flying like an eagle,” Chris had said to talk me up about this experience. “The maximum speed you’re going to hit is about forty miles per hour, but don’t worry, once you reach your terminal velocity, it won’t be all that scary. You’ll just be coasting.”

Even though I still soaked in the world with all my senses, it had been ages since I’d ever had the sensation of flying, until yesterday.  I hadn’t forgotten the days of cheer and pyramids, when I used to stand right at the top and felt as if I was the mistress of the whole world.  But that time was my time of ignorance (for what was innocence, but a lack of knowledge of the evil in the world?), and after I had my eyes opened wide, I knew I could come tumbling down at any moment. After that, I lived with the awareness that I could shatter like a porcelain doll and was afraid to soar too high.

Yet here we were, climbing up three storeys of stairs, up to the top of another fake-rustic wooden tower where they led us through little gates to stand above a deep well of nothingness like the way Marie Antoinette must have stood above the hangman’s trapdoor, or maybe I had it wrong, it was the guillotine – I might have gotten too fanciful here –

“You’re not going anywhere until you say you’re ready,” reassured the boy who held the rope from which I hung, hooked up to a full-body harness.  Like all the rest of the kids who were manning the zipline operations, he looked baby-faced and young, with black plastic framed square glasses and scarcely a hint of stubble on his cheeks.  But then, William was a dad with a tween, so he had to be more than forty or at least thirty-five, and he still had no wrinkles and a full head of thick black hair. There was certainly nothing infirm about him, to be sure. Well, Chris had told me that here I could expect everyone to look much younger than their real ages. If he hadn’t, I might not have trusted our very lives into the hands of a bunch of people who appeared like high school kids.

Even though we said “Yes” at the very same time, Chris was definitely ready to take the plunge before I was. He must have kicked off the metal platform that we launched from, because he shot down the line much faster than I did, clinging on tightly to his rope with both arms and letting his long legs dangle. Watching him, I wondered if hurtling down a quarter mile of rope from the top of a hill was scarier or not if you only saw what was below in soft focus.

“Back in Boy Scouts, we had this thing called the trust fall,” he’d told me. “You fold your arms and lean backwards until you lose your balance, knowing your troop is there to catch you.  If you get scared on the zipline, think of it as a kind of trust fall too. Just look upwards, spread your arms and legs, and enjoy the ride. And think about how there’ll be a safety net to catch you at the end.”

He wasn’t exactly following his own advice, the way he practically swung himself down like a gangly version of Tarzan. But I did. I opened my arms and let myself sail, not looking down again until I could see the beach and felt myself coasting above it, slowing down to a crawl over that tiny strip of water that separated the beach from one of those little islands, on which a platform with a bunch of long, round-bottomed nets stood. Smoothly and confidently, the zipline staff reeled me in, until I crawled into a net beside the one where Chris already stood, unhooking his rope from his harness.

Elinor had never been anything but the picture of reservedness, so it shocked me to the core to realize how she had fallen for Ed as madly and deeply, and certainly much more truly, than I had fallen for John Willoughby. And so, when they were finally together, making it safe to ask that question, I did.

“Ellie, when did you start to know you were in love with Ed?”

“It was the first time he checked out a board for me at the surf shop we were working at,” replied Elinor. “He got me out there riding the biggest wave I ever took. And when I landed safely at the shore, with him right there next to me, I knew.  Oh, and when the feeling stuck even months afterward, that’s when I was certain it wasn’t just the adrenaline.”

I’d giggled then, thinking how typically Elinor that answer was. And yet, cradled in that long white net, I felt headier than I ever had in literally years. Perhaps now, I was finally getting to know the feeling which Elinor had described. Certainly, Chris had a thrill-seeking edge that I’d never seen, like Ed apparently did, since Elinor’s word was gold. And I hoped I wouldn’t have to wait months to see if it would stay.

We found William and his family gathered under a big umbrella by the beach. Joy and Bennet squatted in the sand, drawing pictures in it with sticks, while Lizzy and William looked on, sharing a wide sunbed that was clearly built for two. I was amazed at how clean the Deng kids managed to stay even when playing at the beach; for all their usual rectitude, Elinor and Ed’s faces and limbs were always smudged carelessly with sand in those selfies they took that summer in LA, the one when they first fell in love. 

“How was the zipline?” asked Lizzy, handing Chris’ glasses back to him.

“Pretty good,” replied Chris. “It’ll probably be the closest I’ll get to skydiving for quite a bit.”

“We have a skydiving team in the army,” said William. “They’re called the Red Lions, and they perform every year at the National Day Parade. The kids are crazy about them, and our Black Knights aerobatics team too. Every two years, we see them performing at the Singapore Airshow.”

“Joy, Bennet,” called Lizzy, “can you wipe your hands before we go get lunch?” She whipped out a tiny packet of wet wipes, handing one to each kid to clean themselves off.

Lunch was at the brightly painted blue-and-white wooden bench seating they placed directly on the beach, with a selection of burgers, pastas and pizzas that all cost more than $20 each. Joy and Bennet blithely asked for fish and chips, pizza and a side of chicken wings with their favourite sodas, hardly thinking about the fact that the bill they were racking up was over $70. Chris, on the other hand, was acutely conscious of how much everything cost the Dengs and was adamant that we would pay our own way for lunch, since William and Lizzy had already bought us breakfast. In addition to our own main courses, he got enough helpings of deep-fried buns with chili crab dip for the whole table to share.

“We’ll be taking the kids for Kumon lessons after lunch,” said Lizzy, “so you will have some time to yourselves in the afternoon, and we will pick you up here at Siloso Beach later.”

“What is Kumon?” I asked. “Isn’t school out right now?”

“It’s a way to get kids to do maths and reading ahead of their grade level,” William explained. “If you put your kid on it, you’ll want to start them as young as the age of three. All the kids in Joy and Bennet’s schools have after-school tuition to boost their exam scores, but Lizzy was dead against academic hothousing. She said it would take away their love of learning. So, Kumon was the middle ground we agreed on, because it’s supposed to help develop the kids to become independent learners.”

“The two words you need to know to get Singapore citizenship,” quipped Lizzy, “are kia-su, and kia-si. These are the two common afflictions that all Singaporeans, unfortunately, suffer from. Kiasu means ‘afraid to lose’, and essentially, it’s the same thing as FOMO. And kiasi means ‘afraid to die’, which is basically about the risk-averse nature of Singaporean culture. For most people, the definition of a good life is to do well in school, get a degree and get a steady high-paying job – and the government offers plenty of those. Your quality of life, let’s just say, is inversely proportional to the amount of drama in it.”

“You know,” picked up William, “I decided we’d move here so we could be closer to my family and be more in touch with Chinese culture. But I never expected to get more culture shock here than I had living in the US.”

“Why was that?” I asked. “Just about everybody here is Chinese, from what I can see. And everybody in Crazy Rich Asians is Chinese, too.”

“Not quite,” said William. “It’s true that ethnic Chinese are the majority, and they make up about seventy percent of the population. But Chris, you probably know – did you get a culture shock when you landed here the first time?”

“Well, yeah,” replied Chris. “I was wondering if my IQ had suddenly been cut in half for quite a while. In the beginning, I never fully knew whether what I was hearing was English or not.”

“That was the same case with me,” affirmed William. “Only I, a native Chinese, was wondering whether people were speaking Chinese or not. Or rather, what kind of Chinese they were speaking. I grew up in Beijing, so to me, the Chinese language is Putonghua, or standardized Mandarin.  But most of the Chinese people in Singapore come from the southern provinces and speak their own regional dialects. All of them stem from the same basic language and have some degree of mutual intelligibility, but it still gives me linguistic whiplash when the local vernacular borrows different words from different dialects. For example, kiasu and kiasi come from the Hokkien dialect, but when Joy and Bennet call you kor kor and jie jie, that’s Cantonese for ‘big brother’ and ‘big sister’.

“And please don’t repeat this in polite company, but to me, the dialects are a little… coarse. Let’s just say I’m dreading the day Bennet gets conscripted to the army, not least because he’ll learn all the Hokkien words I don’t want him to know.”

“Well, mandatory military conscription was what we signed up for when we got our citizenship,” added Lizzy. “We all know Singapore wouldn’t have enough soldiers otherwise. And it’s just so strange how North-South snobbery is a thing no matter where in the world you go. The Yankees believed themselves to be more progressive than the Confederates, and they were probably right. There used to be a line dividing the ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ which was quite accurate at the time. And England has its North-South divide, except in these days, it’s not so clear the North has to be better.”

“Lizzy? Are you calling your husband a snob? How does he stand it?” Before I could say more, Chris nudged me with an elbow in my ribs, his usual signal that I was getting into socially risky territory.

“Nothing new there,” William replied breezily, “she’s been calling me out on my snobbery since time immemorial. But on this one, I’m not going to be the only Chinese who thinks Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese swearing are the worst.”

I glanced over at Bennet, who was obliviously chomping on a pizza slice with tomato sauce smeared around his mouth. Joy, in the meantime, had finished eating and was swiping around on a smartphone with her greasy fingers. Neither of them raised their heads to look at us, even when swearing was mentioned, so I could only conclude that we weren’t in danger of corrupting them with this conversation, at least not just yet.

“Are there tracks to get Bennet on the path to become an officer when he joins the army?” asked Chris.

“In the Singapore military, vocations are assigned based on a soldier’s medical fitness and their performance in BMT,” Lizzy explained. “That’s Basic Military Training – you’ve got to get used to alphabet soup, living in Singapore – and lasts for two months in the year after a boy turns eighteen. The top performers, based on how their commanding officers and peers rate them, go to Officer Cadet School. I guess that’s the closest you can get to a completely egalitarian system.”

“That’s a pretty good system,” said Chris, “if a guy can become an officer without having to go to college. I’ve had friends at the Academy for whom it was a huge sacrifice to spend four years as a cadet instead of enlisting right after high school, even though it paid off big time for them after they got commissioned.” I knew Lieutenant William Price was one of the people he was talking about; with his dad a disabled vet, his mom doing cleaning for a living and four younger siblings to support, he had not travelled to see his family even once during his stay at the Academy, spending all his breaks at his dorm.  He’d steadily turned down all of Chris’ and my invitations to spend holidays with us, saying he needed the privacy of his dorm to Skype with his siblings, but possibly also because he knew he could never reciprocate our hospitality.

“I guess however we strive to achieve true meritocracy, there isn’t always a way to level out all the differences,” acknowledged William. “For instance, if we want Bennet to become an officer, we could give him a leg up by training him for leadership positions in school, putting him in uniformed groups and coaching him in the types of behaviours that’ll get him appointed as a prefect. And no matter whether we like it or not, grades count towards the perception of leadership potential, so anyone with access to tutoring has that advantage as well.”

“At least there’s one thing we don’t have to worry about,” said Lizzy, a playful glint in her eyes. “With all the Korean actors and singers going to mandatory military service too, it normalizes the whole notion of conscription for our boys over here. That might be one of the best by-products of our addiction to K-pop and K-drama.”

“Bennet, you should start a boy band,” cut in Joy, who perked up the second K-pop came into the conversation. “Maybe they will let you get out of camp to do concerts. Just like BTS.”

“I can be better than BTS,” boasted Bennet. “They got seven boys, and I have twenty friends in school.”

“Wow,” I said, “That’s, like, practically the whole class.” And that was just counting the number of kids in my class at public school; when we still lived in the Bay Area and went to private school, there weren’t even twenty kids in my whole grade.

“Almost,” corrected Lizzy. “There are about thirty kids in his class, so I’m starting to worry about how he made that cut. Hopefully it isn’t on arbitrary criteria like who has an Apple watch or who looks the most like Jungkook.”

“Does everybody go to public school, then?” asked Chris. “Thirty kids in a class sounds like a recipe for pandemonium, unless they’re all clones of my kid self, which probably isn’t exactly a healthy thing.”

“That’s pretty much what they are,” stated William. “And it’s meant to be a compliment to you, by the way. One of the first things they’re taught even in preschool is to respect and obey their elders, and good manners with no disruptive behaviour is non-negotiable.”

“And to your other question,” added Lizzy, “all the local schools fall under the jurisdiction of the government. Right now, Bennet is going to ACS – that stands for Anglo Chinese School - Primary, which costs us nothing for tuition, though there are some small miscellaneous fees and of course, the cost of books and uniforms. If we send him to ACS Independent for secondary school, his fees would be around $500 a month at most, still a fraction of what we’d pay for private school if we’d stayed in the US. There are international schools which charge comparable fees to private schools, but those are mostly for the expatriates, all Singaporean kids need to go through the local education system. And even before we became citizens, we didn’t want anything else – this system provides just about the best college preparation in the world.”

“Not paying tuition doesn’t make getting into a top school cheap,” William pointed out. “Primary school admissions give priority to children of alumni, and kids living near the school. That’s why Joy’s school is surrounded by multi-million-dollar properties. You’ll see for yourself soon enough; we’ll find a time to swing by there with you in a couple days.”

“We need to get going,” said Lizzy, whipping out her packets of wet wipes and tissues to give Bennet’s face a thorough once-over. “William, if you go get the car, we’ll meet you at the Siloso Point station.”

Though the walk along the beach had taken me and Chris less than ten minutes when we went to the zipline, Lizzy led all of us to a tram stop just steps away from Coastes. In minutes, a light purple tram with two open-sided carriages pulled up to the stop, and Lizzy motioned for us all to get on, though the kids hardly needed direction and seemed perfectly familiar with the drill.

“Why aren’t there more people hanging out at the beach?” I asked. “When school’s out in LA, there’s hardly any room to get a good spot.”

“Most of the beach clubs come to life after dark, especially on weekends,” explained Lizzy. “That’s when they bring in DJs with all the bars opened up. Before the pandemic, there also used to be New Year’s foam parties here at Siloso Beach. Joy and Bennet are still way too young for all of that, so we prefer to come here at lunch time.”

“Besides,” Chris chipped in, “Sentosa was one of the places where they filmed the bachelor party in Crazy Rich Asians. Of course, this is far from being a private island, but don’t you think we picked a time when you can kind of see Nick and Colin hanging out alone on the beach?”

I probably giggled too much, thinking about the two crazy rich Chinese bachelors (well, soon-to-be-ex-bachelors, at that point in the movie) swigging beer in their topless seaside moment of bromance.  Maybe Chris and I could snag one of those teeny crescent-shaped, sand-topped islands, like the one we’d landed on from the zipline, to be our very own private island for a grand total of five minutes; that’d be the extent to which we could pretend to that lifestyle in our current state.

“Rawa Island, which was supposed to be the private island for the bachelor party, actually belongs to the Johor Sultanate,” observed Lizzy. We’d spent barely any time on the tram at all, and it was already time to hop off. While she chivvied the kids back onto their feet, she explained, “In real life, it’s a resort where you can rent a family villa for about a grand a night in Singapore dollars.  Singapore might have one of the highest per capita incomes in the world, but we don’t really have the richest individuals in the region; for example, the richest billionaire in Southeast Asia comes from Indonesia.”

We stood in the shade at the entrance to the gondola station, a giant avant-garde structure shaped like a boat, waiting for William’s car to swing by. It’d been several hours since I’d last been in a spot with air-conditioning, and I could feel the thin layer of stickiness creeping all over my skin, making me itch. I wished I had something to fan myself with, or even to have one of Lizzy’s tissues so I could dab on my face a little, though I also worried about smearing my makeup. Bennet’s hair was starting to stand up in little tufts, and Joy had parted and swept her bangs to the sides a while ago to avoid having them uncomfortably plastered to her forehead. Lizzy still looked remarkably unflustered, but now I understood why she and William moved as little as possible when they were out here, and probably why she’d cropped her beautiful brown curls into a chin-length bob.

The car swooped in a few minutes later, whisking Lizzy and the kids away. But we had no such respite; our next stop, Chris told me, was to take the Fort Siloso Skywalk out to where we could catch the views at the very tip of the island. We walked a little way out from where William had picked his family up, making our way upslope on a concrete sidewalk. It was crazy how this place gave a whole new meaning to the words “concrete jungle” – there were sidewalks and signs and paved roads everywhere, even on this path with nothing but trees on one side and a stretch of empty grassland on the other, with the constant sound of chirping in the background.

In a matter of steps, we got to a concrete clearing with a tall, skinny tower, a glinting structure of concrete and metal that rose far above the tops of the trees.  Upon stepping into its shade, I saw that it housed a flight of stairs and two elevators. We stepped into the next one that came down and opened its doors, peering out the full-length glass panel at the back to watch the mainland come into view as we shot up above the treetops. A group of shapely curved skyscrapers, all shining bright silver in the sunlight, stood out against all the other buildings that melted into the skyline.

The elevator let us out to a little deck, the frosted glass and metal mesh panels at the edges reminding us just how far up we were from the ground. I could see Siloso Beach in the distance, a shimmering triangle of golden yellow sand; and closer by us, the bow and decks of the ship which the gondola station was styled as. A long, skinny footbridge ran into the trees, before disappearing into nowhere.

On the beach side of the bridge to our left, I spied a sprawling white building with the letter “S” in blue on the side of its chimney; it might be six or seven storeys high, with rows of square black windows peeking out in our direction and the vast expanse of sea on its other side. Ships dotted the horizon for as far as I could see, their bows pointed in helter-skelter directions. If the container bachelor party were real, this would have been where it happened, but not all the ships looked big enough to put a container on them, and if Chris didn’t know better, I would have thought this looked more like a place for work, not play.

“That’s the Shangri-La Rasa Sentosa Resort,” explained Chris, pointing to the white building. “It’s one of the first resort hotels built on Sentosa, and I would’ve booked us in there if it hadn’t been beyond our budget. With the pool and the beach right there, it would’ve been fun.”

“It hardly looks like a hotel,” I observed. “If you hadn’t told me, I would’ve thought it was, I don’t know, a factory, or an office, or maybe a warehouse. Something boring.”

“It doesn’t look very pretty on this side, huh? I guess I ought to show you the pictures of the other side of it facing the beach, but I hope you’ll enjoy the place I booked just as well as if we’d been here.”

From the right side of the bridge, a sign told us that the sparkly skyscrapers we could still see across the water were a luxury residential condo named Reflections by the Bay. Next to the condo sat a marina with a pair of big yachts, which I imagined had to be the property of the crazy rich Asians living there. Farther in the distance, a vast but squat white building sat next to the giant yellow cranes of the port, with a couple of motorboats only a little bigger than the sailing yachts moored alongside the shore next to it. This was a tiny little strip of coast, scarcely bigger, if at all, than the stretch of the Venice and Santa Monica beaches that Elinor and I visited with Edward whenever we went to see Dad. And yet, they packed so much into such a tiny space. For all their riches, people seemed to work hard here, just like the way the Dengs worked their kids.

The bridge went on into the treetops, and soon we were surrounded on both sides by only a sea of green. I could have forgotten that just minutes ago, I could see the busy activity of the port and the piers, with the never-ending motion of the gondolas connecting this island with the mainland.  All around us, the chirping noises got louder, making me feel like we were in an enchanted forest, if not for the rising humidity that threatened to consume me alive.

Our walk ended in a shady little grove, where the trees offered shade to break the constant flow of sunlight that beat relentlessly on our heads. A black iron cannon and a wide curved stone sign proclaimed that we had reached the entrance of Fort Siloso. Relieved to finally get a rest from the heat, I headed straight for a wooden gazebo by the trees, sinking onto the bench under its shelter.

“Let’s hang out here for a bit,” I said to Chris. “It’s so hot, I don’t think I want to do anything from now till dinnertime except maybe grab a pina colada by the beach.”

“But we just got here,” protested Chris. “Are you sure you don’t want to see the Surrender Chambers? We could take a fifteen-minute breather, just cool down for a bit, and then maybe we could at least explore a little bit of the fort together. The history of this place is phenomenal, and it’d be such a waste not to see it when we’ve made all this effort to come here.”

“Dang history!” I knew I was sounding like a spoiled child, and maybe I still was one after all. But when the heat was so stifling, almost like a pressure cooker, it made me feel cranky enough that all my ugliest emotions were bubbling up and threatening to spill out of the top of my head onto the paved walkway. “You know I don’t care about wars and politics and any of that boring, serious stuff. It doesn’t matter to me how long you hang out in there; I’ll be perfectly fine chilling out here to wait for you. Just don’t spook me out with the ghosts of dead soldiers, when all I want to do here is see how crazy rich Asians live. I’m shallow like that, OK?”

“Well,” Chris shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other, “we’ve been together so long, I thought you understood that I have… unfinished business. It’s been a long time coming, this chance to set foot in this place.”

“You mean Eliza, don’t you?” Oh, I knew, in my head, that Eliza was no danger to Chris and me; she was frozen forever in time at age seventeen, a long-ago relic of Chris’ childhood. But still, a wave of irritation surged up at the reminder of my inability to reach a part of Chris that she so easily had. “I’m not her, OK? I can’t geek out with you on all that history stuff, and I’m never going to, not even if I live to be a hundred. I’m not smart like her and I can’t score 1300 on the SAT. To make things worse, I don’t even have the excuse of being sick.” I didn’t even know what her SAT scores really were, for Chris had judiciously avoided talking too much about her to me, so I was taking a wild swing in the dark. But since Chris did not say a word otherwise, I couldn’t have been that far from the truth. “At least, she wouldn’t pretend, like you did, that scoring 1170 on my second try was an achievement.”

“I never… Everybody has different aptitudes,” stammered Chris. “And academic smarts don’t measure the worthiness of a person to be loved.”

That did it for me, though I knew Chris would be lying if he said I was smart, and invariably he had to insult me if he acknowledged that I wasn’t. Flying to my feet, I stamped hard on the concrete and balled up my hands into fists. “OK then,” I said hotly. “Geek out here as much as you want. And then you can go find me at the beach when you’re done.” Without looking back, I tore back across the bridge to the elevator, bursting right out of it the minute it hit the ground floor. I didn’t stop running until I reached the water’s edge, slipping off my shoes and wading as far out as I could without soaking the hem of my capris. So much for William’s warnings about jellyfish, I thought, but in my desperation to cool down, I’d take my chances. Splashing my hands in the water, I wet my arms and my neck, carefully avoiding my face so I wouldn’t break out or ruin my makeup.

The saltwater drying off on my skin washed away my sense of irritation; as I trudged back up onto the sand, I couldn’t help but wish I had the self-control to keep my thoughts to myself. This was far from the first time I’d lashed out in the heat of the moment, but at twenty-three, nobody would forgive me the way they had when I was a teenager. They shouldn’t.  Chris was still up there, where I had no idea whether he was communing with the ghost of Eliza or reflecting upon those long-gone events of World War II. He had every right to do both, I reminded myself.

At mid-afternoon, it was sweltering and still far away from party time, but I could hardly help myself. This was who I was, after all – a shallow, materialistic party girl, and I might as well own it. The beach clubs were open, no matter that they didn’t look like it, and I headed to the nearest one to grab myself a sunbed and a pina colada, though all that sugar did nothing to hide the bitterness with which I sipped at it. As deeply as I regretted saying those hurtful words to Chris, I couldn’t avoid the facts – if Eliza had been alive, there would have been no him and me, and even though I had professed many times that I wouldn’t attempt to replace Eliza, I was still petty enough to mind that she’d been there first. And I hated it every time I was reminded of how I could never match up to her brains, even though Chris hadn’t mentioned it even once in all these years. Take it or leave it, I was just me – and for all my efforts to live productively and unselfishly, I still could not completely gain mastery over my most horrible instincts. It was a complete miracle how Chris ever put up with me.

Even now, after my inexcusable behaviour, beyond the scope of my understanding, he still did. As I stared stonily at the horizon, looking for nothing in particular while I took sip after sip of my pina colada, suddenly he materialized on it, almost as if he’d come out of nowhere.

“Marianne, I’m sorry,” he said, swiftly kneeling down in the sand beside my sunbed.

“So am I,” I said, wrapping my arms around his neck as I burst into tears. “You bet I’m sorry, too.”

Chapter Text

Captain Brandon

How had I been so incredibly dumb? Reaching up to scratch my head, I could feel the sticky sweat on it even though I was nearly bald. Marianne had to have it far worse than I did, and she wouldn’t be used to it at all. Yesterday we never stepped out of the air-conditioned Jewel mall, so this was her first time out here in the open. Plus, I did PT in all kinds of weather, so I’d been conditioned to function amidst conditions far more inhospitable than this, but I could hardly expect the same of Marianne.

When I’d last been here with Eliza, I’d taken pains to stock up on bottled water to carry around and planned our itinerary to minimize the amount of walking she did, especially if it was outside. But I’d taken Marianne’s physical robustness for granted, and perhaps also become a little too vain. Now that we were both no longer in school, we deemed backpacks to be juvenile, so everything we had would need to fit in either my pockets or her purse, hardly suitable places to hold a mineral water bottle. She hadn’t known what to expect, and I hadn’t done enough to prepare her for it. This was, by and large, primarily my fault.

Still, as I stood at the entrance to Fort Siloso watching her stomp back down the bridge, I felt as if I was being pulled in two directions. A part of me thought about going after her, yet I could not bring myself to leave. This was the one historical landmark I had wanted to see the last time around but hadn’t wanted to risk bringing Eliza out here in the heat. It was too far away from everything else, anyway, and I’d needed to buffer in plenty of rest time in my best efforts to avoid making her sicker. She’d understood and made me promise to come here someday, not only for myself, but because she would be there in spirit. I’d promised myself, too, when I watched Sandcastle on the plane, that no matter how long it might take, I would come back and find a vantage point to look upon the sea, just like that boy in the movie. The fates that had befallen him in the year between seventeen and eighteen were not terribly different from what was in store for me at the time, and I had a strong need to come full circle, to show I’d survived and was still all right.

Much as I wished to take care of Marianne, I could not deny myself this opportunity for closure. Shutting my eyes and trying to focus on thinking rationally, I reminded myself that we were now adults; I didn’t have to watch over her every move and cushion every blow the way I had with Eliza, because she was not a frail seventeen-year-old with a terminal illness.  If she needed a drink to cool down, she knew where and how to get one. And temperamental though she might be, she was remarkably straightforward in many ways: what you saw was usually what you got. So, if she said she wanted a pina colada by the beach, I knew exactly where I would find her.

I set the timer on my phone for exactly fifteen minutes to remind myself to be disciplined and not linger excessively. Although I was determined to find the Surrender Chambers and have my moment of reflection, I also felt the need to make my way to Marianne quickly and hopefully give her some comfort. As with all her instincts, she was spot on about one thing: a part of my connection with Eliza had been intellectual. How could it not, when reading had been one of the few ways available to her to experience and engage with the world? Even after she became my brother’s girlfriend, making it extremely awkward for me to approach her socially in any way outside of school, I still walked the hallways with her between whichever classes we happened to have in common, carrying her books and hoping to squeeze in a fragment of conversation or two.

We’d first spoken of coming out here back in sophomore year when we’d taken an AP English class in Austen. Eliza had loved the abolitionist subtext of Mansfield Park, gleefully pointing out how she thought Fanny Price might be a metaphor for a slave who eventually got liberated when she married Edmund. By the same token, she’d struggled with Sense and Sensibility’s lack of a clear stand on British colonialism.

“How could they possibly make Colonel Brandon out to be a hero?” she’d protested. “He went and fought in the East Indies, at a time when the British were going out there taking land and oppressing people. That’s not a hero, but a tyrant.”

“Well…” What could I say, when Dad had been a military man and I was already thinking of following suit? Once you signed up to serve, you had to trust that whatever you did in service of your country would also be in service of righteousness. But also, I could understand how sheer need drove men into the military more often than not; if I did decide to go in, my main motivation would be to avoid making Dad pay for my college tuition. “I guess not everybody has a choice, you know? Sometimes, it’s what pays for college. Or what pays the bills.”

“If they made you do something you didn’t believe was right, would you get out?” she asked.

Truthfully, I hadn’t thought about that at all; to me, the military was just something Dad had done when he was younger, and his father before him. It was a way to get college paid for, and being a soldier was supposed to be patriotic and respectable. “I hope it won’t have to happen,” I finally replied.

That hadn’t been enough for Eliza; robbed of the right to have a full and happy life as she was, she crusaded militantly, albeit ineffectually, for the rights of every oppressed being. “I want to go there,” she’d said on another rushed conversation in the hallways of our high school. “The East Indies, I mean. I wanna see how they kicked colonialism’s butt, just like we did.”

“We did, and yet… You remember Lilo and Stitch?” I asked.

“Yeah, why?”

“You know the bit where Nani sings this song to Lilo, the night before they were supposed to take Lilo away from her? The queen of Hawaii wrote that song for her people, and she sang it to them when the US took over Hawaii. That scene in the movie was supposed to be an allegory, so we won’t forget.”

By the time we reached Mrs. Norris’ calculus class, we were tardy as usual. Most of the teachers knew why Eliza took longer than most people to move from class to class and tolerated our lateness as long as we slipped in from the back and didn’t disrupt anybody. And Eliza always defended me, saying she was making me late because I helped her carry her books, but I wondered if we hadn’t made ourselves even tardier than she would have been on her own with those conversations. Everybody was sympathetic, though. At least, everybody but Mrs. Norris, the one teacher who insisted on marking us tardy even if we were just one minute late, though her attempts at punishing us missed the mark when I turned in a perfect score at the end of it all, securing myself a satisfying revenge.

Eventually, I’d managed to bring Eliza here, and that was when I learned how it didn’t matter who you were or where you came from; when people went from being weak to being strong, the opportunity would always come to benefit from someone who was weaker than you. We’d borne witness to that fact when we saw all the foreign household helpers in Ang Mo Kio, the public housing town we went to. That trip to Singapore and Indonesia had opened my eyes like nothing else before: I was awed by the multitudes of rich cultures living on these tiny islands, civilizations that had flourished before the days of the British and the Dutch, and which now continued to do so. Yet at the same time, it had taken away my last shreds of childhood innocence, not only because it spelt a big step towards facing my future without Eliza, but also because it really sunk in how living the good life made nabobs out of all of us: the European colonists who had been in and out; the seemingly ordinary families with their helpers in their teeny apartments; the institution which I was a part of, and which I now represented. Maybe there were different degrees of nabob-ness, but still, once doing the right thing became not a default but a conscious choice because you were on that precipice where power could become exploitation, you had to think about every single move you made. It was sobering, knowing that even though I considered myself to be just a regular guy, I was still part of a small minority of people, like the middle-class locals in Singapore, who enjoyed our relatively comfortable lives because we held a disproportionate amount of wealth on this earth, at the possible expense of others who weren’t far away at all, who might perhaps even be right under our very noses. The stark contrast between Singapore and Indonesia, and the families and their helpers, made that extremely clear. We – I and my community – had more layers cushioning us from the people who made our lifestyles possible, such as migrant agricultural workers and offshore factories, but nonetheless, we were collectively nabobs in our own way. And so long as I was aware of such, I’d never have a perfectly clear conscience again.

This place, the Surrender Chambers, wasn’t where those two transfers of power in World War II had actually happened, but the fort it was in was where the British had once pointed their guns to the sea, ready to defend Singapore against anyone who might try to come and conquer it. And yet they still were no match for the Japanese when they came storming down from Malaya in the north. This moment, the ultimate humiliation for the British, was immortalized in a wax display, as was the occasion when the Japanese surrendered, giving Singapore back to British colonial rule. Back then with Eliza, I had set foot in the former Municipal Building where the second surrender had taken place, which had become the National Gallery filled with local and regional art. It was now full of light, having long dispelled the ghosts of those turbulent times.

But over here, standing by the old cannons that overlooked the sea, I could feel how real those distant times had been. World War II had seemed black and white only because of the extremeness in that sliding scale of tyranny; the horrific oppression that had been visited upon the Jews by the Nazis, and Singapore in the years when it was Syonan-to, made the British look like saviours. And yet, there was no doubt that in the ensuing years, the local people had taken what the British had given them and made it many times better. That dismantling of colonization repeated itself many times over throughout the world in the decades that followed, creating an unprecedented wave of social mobility. It was easy to believe, when those times were long relegated into history books, that the peace and prosperity we lived in would go on forever, that nothing could spoil it ever again.

And yet – three years ago, Margaret had fallen sick over the summer, and once we’d established that whatever she had wasn’t catching, she’d made us all read the Anne of Green Gables series to her to alleviate her loneliness and boredom. Ed and Elinor and Marianne were all home, so they went through most of it, leaving me to round things up with Rilla of Ingleside when I got off work on the weekend. When I read, I immersed myself into the lives of the characters, feeling their emotions as if I inhabited them. And while I knew the facts of World War I and World War II through history books, seeing them from the eyes of Anne and Gilbert and their sons made the destruction of war into a real, living thing. At seventeen then, Margaret had still been young enough to find romance in the urgency of a war story, but I only saw a reflection of the fragility of the peace and security we lived in. The fabric of communities and neighbourhoods was familiar to me, which made their utter and irreversible destruction by war so devastating and dreadful.

Standing out there staring at the sea, I wanted to shout out to its empty depths, to proclaim my triumph at finally being here, to tell Eliza I’d made it and survived and not to worry, to implore the world to remember how precious and tenuous our equilibrium was when so many things seemed to sit upon a knife’s edge these days. There were so many things I wished to say and shout and scream, out here where I could be alone and talk to the sea, and yet I kept them all within me, for fear of being seen or heard by some stray passer-by. That was how I’d lived all these years, carefully containing my wilder emotions, and, if I were to be truly honest, perhaps I was hiding behind first Eliza and then Marianne, getting my catharsis from how stridently they voiced their convictions, even if their teenage opinions had been somewhat simplistic or naïve.

My phone timer vibrated, jolting me out of my reverie. It was time for me to go to Marianne. As I jogged back across the bridge and made my way as efficiently as I could to Siloso Beach, eating up the distance easily with my strides, I only hoped I’d be able to give her closure on Eliza now that I’d finally fulfilled that last request, the only one remaining undone after all these years.  We’d already started to look towards the future, and now I needed to devote myself to burying the past for good.

Marianne, I had to say, cleaned up really well; despite the oppressively sweltering heat, she had all the magnificence of Grace Kelly, albeit a rather more tanned version, when she lounged like that on a sunbed by the beach. Thankfully, she had the foresight to pick the nearest beach club to Siloso Point Station, so I didn’t have to scour the entire beach to find her.

I certainly expected sobs, but Marianne’s apology caught me unawares. Until this point, I’d always seen to her needs and comfort before my own; it was perfectly rational, if not exactly fair, for her to presume that it would always be that way.

“I… I guess, I’m not a good substitute for Eliza,” choked out Marianne, still clinging tightly on to me. “I’m sorry I can’t be smart like her, or half as good and kind as you deserve. I’m just… me, you know? God knows I’ve tried, but no matter what I do, I don’t have the patience of you or Elinor.”

“Marianne,” I said, “look at me. That’s how you’ll know I’m not lying to you. I can’t say there never was a time when I thought of you as a version of Eliza, because I did, but now I’ve had the chance to know you through and through as your own person, and you’ve become so much more to me than Eliza ever was.”

“H-how can that be possible?” faltered Marianne. “She was your entire childhood, and if she were still alive, she’d be the one here with you now, not me. P-perhaps, you might even be married to her already. You know that was what you wanted, once upon a time.”

“That was the naïve dream of a high school kid,” I stated. “I’ll never really know if she would still be with me now if she was around, simply because she isn’t. But you stuck with me. You had plenty of options when you were in Berklee, and yet you chose to remain in a long-distance relationship with me. That’s huge, you know. And four years of college is a very long time.

“Would Eliza have done the same? To be completely honest, I have no idea. I gave her a lot of slack for her choices because she was sick, and I wasn’t. I told myself I didn’t know what it was like to have a life-threatening disease, and so I could never be sure which of my principles I’d throw away if I did.  But sick or not, I can’t escape the fact that she cheated on my brother. That when she realized she had little to look forward to or aim for, dating multiple jocks was the one thing she chose to put on her bucket list. If that was what she thought would make her feel good, isn’t it entirely possible she might have dumped or cheated on me by now, even if she’d lived?”

“Or she might not,” said Marianne. “You’re not your brother. Nobody could ever think of cheating on you when you’re so kind to everyone. You’d be so good to her she’d never want to cheat.”

“For some women, that might be precisely the reason to cheat,” I pointed out. It was not poetic justice, but five years of living cheek by jowl with hordes of guys and hearing about all their girlfriend drama had taught me that such justice was seldom served in our world. “I’m self-aware enough to know I’m easy to take advantage of.”

“And I did,” said Marianne. “I’m still taking advantage of you, when you spoil me silly all the time, and I can’t even pay it back. I try, but all that talk about history and politics and world news simply bores me to death.”

“I never thought of it as a one-for-one equation, but even on that basis, you’re more than paying it back by engaging my imagination,” I replied. “Elinor lives for adult conversation on the weekends after spending all week teaching grade school. She says the only thing saving her brains from degenerating to fifth grade level is having me as a geek-out partner. I don’t know how I ever survived without her, when all the things she and I discuss would bore everybody else to death. Yes, even Ed; he’s told me a couple times he doesn’t know how long more he can try to keep up with us. But could you see Elinor thinking up an idea like a Crazy Rich Asians trip? Or even if she did, can you imagine her executing on it?”

“Absolutely not!” Marianne giggled again at last. I lived for her laughs; they were what brought sunshine into my life. “When I told her about this trip, she called me frivolous.”

“Well, I need someone to bring out my frivolous side,” I said, smiling at her. “That’s important, you know. Makes a human being out of me.”

“I hope I never said you were not a human being,” said Marianne worriedly, furrowing her brows. “Even at my worst, I don’t remember ever thinking that.”

“I haven’t always felt like a human being,” I admitted. “Not a full one, at least. It’s kind of hard, you know, especially in the times when you’re called a Basic and expected to have the independent thought capacity of an amoeba.” I was trying to add some levity into things, but the reality was that mixing military training with grief was a very bad idea. It gave you something to do and masqueraded for a sense of purpose, but when you were numbed out of all your feelings, you never got a chance to properly heal.

Marianne reached out a hand to cup my cheek, caressing it gently. “You’re definitely a human being,” she reassured me. “In fact, it takes a very civilized human being to apologize to me after I threw a hissy fit at you. You don’t have anything to be sorry for, you know.”

“Well, in fact, I do,” I said, matter-of-factly. “I should’ve known this heat would drive you crazy, but I completely blanked out on that. And that’s why I’m sorry.”

My apology was accepted in a way that paid no mind to the ruthless tropical sun; it would be safe to say that in that moment, we were both blissfully oblivious to the unpleasantness of the weather. But after our very visible reconciliation, for once it was Marianne who remembered our practical needs first.

“You must be feeling the heat too,” said Marianne gently. “Can I get another pina colada for you?”

I pulled my phone out of my jeans pocket to check the time. That was when I saw the texts from Lizzy counting down to their arrival at Siloso Point Station.

“Lizzy said they were fifteen minutes away five minutes ago,” I said rather urgently. “Can we grab a can of soda for me before we get going?”

It didn’t seem like there was space at that curb for cars to wait long, so I was in a rush to make sure we got there before Lizzy and William did, swigging at the cold soda and welcoming the relief it brought from the heat as we shuffled back up from the beach. They would bring us to our hotel and wait for us while we checked in and dropped off our luggage, and then we’d all head over to their house for dinner.

“Kor kor, jie jie, are you going to stay in the tree house?” asked Bennet the minute he saw us.

“Is there a tree house down here?” asked Marianne. “We didn’t know about it, but maybe you can show us.”

“Don’t pay him any mind,” said William casually. “There are these treetop villas in Resorts World Sentosa, and we went to one of them during the times when everyone was having local staycations instead of overseas vacations due to pandemic travel restrictions. They’re terribly hard to book because there’s only two of them.”

“A tree house with a butler was a pretty novel experience,” remarked Lizzy. “That had to be the first time nobody wanted to get out of the room and go for rides.”

“Of course not,” stated Joy indignantly. “We can go for rides anytime. But living in a tree house is magic, it’s like being in a storybook.”

Oh, so the Equarius Treetop Lofts were what they were talking about. During my research for this trip, I’d come across a few blog articles about them, but they couldn’t be booked online, and people said they cost between two and three thousand Singapore dollars a night. Most certainly, they were out of the question for Marianne and me; but hopefully, the accommodation I’d picked wouldn’t feel too shabby to her. Certainly, the constraints of our respective circumstances over the past seven years made any variation from our usual routines feel like magic to me.

William dropped us off in front of the Amara Sanctuary Resort, the one place I’d found which combined my love of old architecture with my budget of $200 a night. That price wouldn’t get us a room in the heritage buildings, but we would still be able to admire them from the pool whenever we had a chance to go there. But being mindful of not making the kids wait too long, we found our room, shed our luggage, and went straight back to the car. There’d be plenty of time left to explore our hotel later.

Artillery Avenue, the main thoroughfare down the backbone of this little island, had a somewhat overly martial name considering our rather hedonistic surroundings. All these little traces that this island used to be a place from which the British defended Singapore were now layered over with various tourist amusements; a crazy roller coaster peeked out from behind the rows of verdant trees lining the road to guard the privacy of the hotels and resorts behind them. Even the narrow road divider was all green, covered perfectly with neatly cultivated trees, shrubs, and little flowering plants.

We drove through a roundabout with the word “Sentosa” planted in shrubs along one edge and a landscaped pattern in the middle. For such a tiny island, the road felt rather long, punctuated by a series of roundabouts that each bore fancier landscaping than the last. The gate into Sentosa Cove Village resembled the entry to a posh country club, with the roundabout at the entry adorned with a fountain where eight stone dolphins danced, surrounded by flowers and bushes trimmed into fancy curvy patterns, almost like a microcosm of what you might see at the Palace of Versailles.

“These trees look like the palm trees at Stanford,” said Marianne, as William turned down Cove Drive which was flanked by two rows of coconut trees. Though the round heads on their tall, skinny trunks reminded me a little of lollipops, I could tell that they had a cultivated look, unlike the ones growing willy-nilly by the beach.

“You know, I never thought of it, but they do, don’t they?” said William. “It’s been ages since I was in the Bay Area, back when I was working with Google in Mountain View. In a way, I kind of miss the simplicity of those times when I was just an ordinary software engineer.”

“The simplicity of not having me to plague your life, you mean,” cut in Lizzy playfully.

“That too,” acknowledged William with a playful chuckle, “but more so, just being free from all these trappings of wealth. In those days, I was just one of the guys hanging out in Cupertino for Chinese food and grocery shopping at Ranch 99 on the weekends and practically living on the Google campus in the weekdays. It was a culture where people didn’t care about your money, only the quality of your ideas. After all, your family’s net worth is not one of the things that makes it onto the whiteboard.”

“My family used to live in the Bay Area too,” remarked Marianne wistfully. “And maybe I was too young to understand much, but I didn’t know we had money until Dad left and we didn’t have it anymore. I only thought we were happy but couldn’t care less if we were rich.”

“We’re not rich,” declared Bennet. “We don’t have a Ferrari or a Bentley like our neighbours. But we are happy anyway.”

“Yes, we are,” said Lizzy, glancing back to catch my gaze and exchange an eyeroll. “We are one happy family for sure.”

“Except when there’s the PSLE,” cut in Joy a little sulkily. “I am so tired of all the mock exam papers Daddy makes me do, and there’s still half a year more to go.”

We’d passed by a couple of gated low-rise apartment buildings, and now reached a security barrier manned by a guard in a little brick and concrete booth with a red shingle roof. It was a gated community within a gated community, the interminably long road ensuring nobody could get to this place unless they had a car. I couldn’t tell which buildings were public or private, when a wide, perfectly whitewashed colonial-looking two-storey house with double Roman columns sat in clear view of the road, followed in clear succession by a series of modernist row houses and condos. With the red-brick sidewalks gleaming on either side, everything looked a little too good to be true, as if we were on a Hollywood TV set. The road narrowed until it was just one lane on either side, flanked by houses sitting on land lots that hardly looked bigger than what I had at home. But unlike the higgledy-piggledy line-up of wooden Victorian houses that made up my street, haphazard in their sizes and states of maintenance and bursting with a rainbow of colours, each of these houses was so relentlessly modern that they looked sterile. Where my front yard was bursting with life from our dove cote and fruit trees, these people had hardly anything out front at all; a short piece of paved driveway, perhaps a little strip of landscaping, and then the rest of their land was filled with a monstrous amount of house, three-storey grey and brown and black geometric structures that loomed at us with curtained or screened windows jealously guarding any signs of activity inside. Luxury cars of every imaginable make were parked on the tiny squares of asphalt and tile out front, including the flat form like a giant cockroach hidden under a black tarp cover.

“That’s the Lamborghini Bennet wants Daddy to buy,” Joy confirmed. “We saw it driving around a few times, it’s pink.”

The Deng family home was nearly at the end of this street, on the side of the road that faced the sea; I’d caught a peek of the coastline from a little stretch of park sitting between two of the houses. William parked neatly in that postage-stamp square of concrete tile in front of his house, pulling up next to the gleaming black Mercedes S-Class sedan which took up the other half million dollars in his driveway. Joy and Bennet scrambled out of the car in an instant, eager to stretch their little legs after being cooped up all afternoon in Kumon class, and a pair of brown-skinned women came to whisk away the shoes they kicked off helter-skelter on the narrow marble stoop.

“William!” called Marianne from where she lingered outside, crouching on one knee by a shallow recessed pool of water nestled beside the front door. “Your fish are really beautiful,” she observed, her voice laced with awe. “Do you have names for all of them?”

The red and silver fish swished around like long, plump commas, glistening brightly against the black tile that lined the pool. Their tails, I thought, were particularly majestic, flapping about gracefully like fans in the crystal-clear water.

“That’s our koi pond,” explained William. “The koi are a species of carp, and they represent good luck and abundance.”

“We had a fish tank at home when I was in middle school,” said Marianne. “Elinor was really great at cleaning the tank out, but I kept forgetting when it was my turn to feed them. In the end, after they all died three times over, Mom said she was tired of being heartbroken and wouldn’t let Dad buy any more of them.”

“Bennet still thinks they live forever,” said Lizzy confidentially. “And Joy knows they don’t, but she counts them all the time and still hasn’t noticed when we miss any. Yati and Gloria – that’s our helpers – deserve extra credit for taking care of them.”

Yati and Gloria certainly deserved credit for a ton of things, I realized, as I stepped into the Dengs’ cavernous living room. Even if their lot was scarcely bigger than mine, their house had to be about two or three times bigger because all of their lot was house, and they had an extra level too. Every cubic inch of that gigantic marble parlour was light and space and lines; to match the block-shaped exterior, the interior was all minimalist and modern. Long, wide, flat sectional couches upholstered in smooth cream leather sat on sparkly chrome legs around a low table that nearly vanished into space with the clever use of glass. A massive movie screen sat flush on the wall with all its connections hidden away in the row of flat built-in cabinets below it. Instead of fancy chandeliers, the room was entirely illuminated by recessed lighting buried in the ceiling, and off-white floor to ceiling curtains swished along the glass panelled exterior walls.

And in the midst of this clinical space of beige and tan and white, a dark brown grand piano with ornate designs carved into its sides stood imposingly in an alcove that stuck out to the side. Marianne flew to its side, sticking her hand out to stroke the wood but catching herself just as her hand hovered over it.

“That’s a Broadwood Grand,” said William almost nonchalantly. “It’s been a family heirloom for three generations. Or rather, four if you count Joy.”

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.”