Soy Sauce for Beginners Read online

  My parents’ argument stretched through the week. On day four, Ba peeked into my room after midnight, walked through the half-open door of the en suite bathroom and found me asleep in a tub of tepid water. He wrapped me in a large, fluffy towel and carried me to bed.

  The next morning, the two of us drove to Uncle Robert and Auntie Tina’s house, where I was to stay while he and Ma took care of “grown-up business.” I didn’t point out I was too old to be spoken to like that.

  The drive over was the first time we’d been alone together in days, and I was both furious at him and comforted by his presence. Unable to put my conflicting emotions into words, I simply asked, “When can I come home?”

  “Soon,” my father said. “In a few days, your ma or I will come get you.”

  Divorce was still rare in Singapore—I’d learned of its occurrence from books, the way I’d once learned of Santa Claus—but I worried all the same. What would it take to drive my mother back to her beloved America?

  In front of my uncle’s house, Ba stretched his lips into a tired smile, and I tried to smile back. As much as I longed to ask questions, I sensed this wasn’t the time, and that he might not even have the answers.

  In hindsight, it’s difficult to isolate how much or how little I knew about my parents’ conflict. At any rate, not long after my four-day stay at Uncle Robert’s, my dear friend Kat intervened.

  Kat is three months younger than me but has always seemed older, especially when we were kids. Thanks to the influence of her big sister, Kat was the first to start using eye shadow and the first to have a co-ed birthday party. She was also the first to educate me on the distinctly Singaporean, postcolonial phenomenon of “sarong party girls” or “SPGs.”

  That afternoon, Kat, our other best friend Cindy, and I were on our stomachs on Kat’s bed, watching the movie, Pretty Woman. This was the early nineties, and R-rated movies were censored before being permitted in the country. Nonetheless, Kat’s mum made us fast-forward through the beginning, which she deemed unsuitable for girls our age. Despite the missing scenes, I took in the way the posh shop girls glared down their long, thin noses, and understood there was something shameful about the lead actress, without fully grasping that she was a prostitute.

  We three watched in silence, captivated by the palm-tree-lined boulevards, the fancy cars, the swirling dresses and matching hats—none of which were anything like the America my mother had described. When the final scene faded to black, Kat rolled onto one side and propped herself up on an elbow. “You know,” she said casually, “there are women like that in Singapore.”

  Something in her tone signaled danger. I proceeded with caution. “What do you mean?”

  “Singaporean ladies who only date ang mos,” she said, using the Chinese slang word for “Caucasian.” She explained that her parents had taken the family to the beach at Sentosa, where her sister had pointed out the SPGs—local women in animal-print bikinis and short shorts, with fake ang mo highlights and fake ang mo accents, who flirted with all the rich, ang mo men.

  A pejorative term roughly antonymous to a man with an Asian fetish, an SPG is by no means a sex worker. But given that we were ten-year-olds sheltered by both government and parental censorship, Kat’s murky equating of prostitutes and SPGs was understandable.

  Unsure of where this conversation was heading, I glanced at Cindy to see if she had as many questions as I did, but she lowered her eyes, mesmerized by the tassels hanging off the bedspread. I suspected she’d heard this all before.

  Kat watched me carefully as she spoke. “My sister asked me if your mum was a sarong party girl, but of course I said no, lah! Those ladies dress like sluts. And they’re young.”

  This only confused me further. Again I looked for Cindy to affirm the ridiculousness of Kat’s assertion. She avoided my gaze and scrunched up her face like she’d eaten a Super Lemon hard candy. I thought back to my parents’ battle: something had happened between Ma and the American, something too grotesque to unravel.

  I wondered who else knew. Earlier that day, when Kat’s mum had picked us up from school, she had asked after my parents. I hadn’t thought much of it then, but now I wondered if she hadn’t perhaps seemed extra concerned, like she wasn’t just asking to be polite. How would she have found out about Ma and Ba’s battle? And what of my friends at school? Who else had Kat told?

  Forcing back tears, I asked to use the phone in the other room. My mother answered, and in a choked voice, I begged her to pick me up right away.

  Fifteen minutes later, she pulled up at the gate, waving breezily from the driver’s seat.

  Even now, I can still recall the smirk on Kat’s face—the narrowed eyes and half smile that belonged to someone twice her age.

  Later, after I’d left for boarding school and stopped thinking of my parents’ house as home, I summoned the courage to question my mother, and of course, she told the truth.

  In the years since, I’ve replayed her words, filling in blanks, adding detail—so much so that the scenes unspool in my mind like a film reel, like something I’ve witnessed with my own eyes.

  The day after the disastrous welcome dinner, the vivacious lecturer finds herself at the door of the distinguished visitor’s office. There, she hesitates, quaking, already struggling with the pretense that she has come to apologize. But then she takes a deep breath and raps firmly on the door. He tells her to come in. He is tall and imposing, trim for a man of his age. He invites her to take a seat and brushes off her apology with a hearty American laugh. They continue their discussion from the night before; then, he inquires about her research on Dualla Misipo, or maybe Kum’a Ndumbe III, both Cameroonian writers who wrote in German.

  Before long, half an hour has passed, and then another, and then one of them suggests they leave campus to carry on their conversation over a drink. One, or maybe both, glances at a wristwatch; neither points out that it is only three o’clock.

  The boozy afternoon stretches late into evening—and then into other evenings spent at corner tables in quiet, dimly lit restaurants, or at the symphony, or in one of their offices, the door ajar, talking about books.

  Try as I may, I can’t recall seeing my mother drunk back then. Maybe she was careful to sober up first. Maybe I didn’t know what to look for. Or maybe she only came home after my father had tucked me into bed.

  It seems irrelevant—the fact that no matter how late she stayed out, she always came home. Or that although the American told her she was too brilliant to remain at this second-rate institution, although he begged her to come to Chicago, promised to find her work, and vowed to leave his pouffy-haired wife, theirs was a purely platonic affair. Here, on our tiny, insular island, that Ma and the American were seen together at all was scandal enough.

  My mother had distanced herself from her own parents ever since they’d pressured her to return home, so I can only imagine their distress. Ahkong and Amah, on the other hand, made their outrage known. They’d never approved of my parents’ marriage in the first place, and now they planted themselves at our dining table and urged their son to cut his losses and start over, as I listened, stricken, from upstairs. This was the moment when I first understood that my parents and I made up a single, precarious unit. Everyone else, no matter how well-intentioned, would always be a potential threat.

  Thankfully, once again, Ba defied his parents. My father and mother remained together, and in time, from my perspective at least, life returned to normal.

  In the months following their reconciliation, Ba rarely missed dinner at home. Ma instructed the maid to prepare boeuf bourguignon and pork tenderloin with apples and rack of lamb—all the foods Ba loved that Ma thought were too heavy for every day. When my parents walked down the street, they held hands, their fingers loosely interlocked. For Ma’s fortieth birthday, they flew to San Sebastian and returned with sunglass tans and handwritten menus from Michelin-starred restaurants. Ma even stopped reminiscing about her years in America. Over a decad
e into their marriage, she finally seemed ready to embrace her life in Singapore.

  As much as it thrilled me to see my parents happy, I came to understand that even within our little family of three, the two of them were a single unit all to themselves. How else to explain why, when Ma started drinking more, opening a bottle of wine at dinner, sipping glass after glass late into the night, Ba devoted his energy to hiding her behavior from me?

  And yet, since my return, there were times when it was easy to overlook the stress that Ma’s illness and drinking had placed on their marriage. Over the past weeks, I’d walked in on my parents sitting on the loveseat in front of the television with their forearms intertwined—a position that seemed almost unconscious. Times like these, I wanted to believe that no matter how deep Ma’s betrayal, Ba had found a way to forgive; that despite all Ma had given up, she had arrived at contentment.

  8

  NOW THAT THE SITUATION with Cal had been resolved, and Uncle Robert had assured my father that he had everything under control, Ba was easing back into retirement. He aimed to spend no more than two days a week at Lin’s, and so, on Monday, I drove to work without him.

  I’d taken one day off to accompany my parents to the hospital, but when I arrived at the office, it felt like I’d been gone for weeks. Although it was barely eight thirty, the whole floor bustled with activity. The sales and marketing people were holed up in the conference room with binders as thick as unabridged dictionaries. The two finance guys hurried back and forth between their cubes. Even Shuting was too busy to look up when I walked past.

  I dropped my purse on my desk and went straight to Frankie’s office, where I found her with Jason from sales.

  “Thanks for getting me these numbers on such short notice,” she said with a dazzling smile.

  Jason slid his hands in his pockets and raised his shoulders to his ears. “Any time you need something, just let me know.” He nodded at me as he walked out, pausing to grab a fistful of pens off the shelf that still held the office’s spare supplies.

  “What time did everyone get here?” I asked.

  Frankie looked tanned and even blonder from her trip to the beach with my friends. When she turned her head, the tip of her ear was pink with sunburn. “Haven’t you heard? The Mama Poon people are coming to visit.”

  I was familiar with Mama Poon’s, the trendy California-based grocery store chain that experts proclaimed was revolutionizing the food retail sector. One had opened up down the street from my San Francisco apartment right before I moved back to Singapore. I’d spent an hour wandering the aisles, filling my cart with Japanese crackers wrapped in cherry blossom–patterned rice paper and red foil tubes of chocolate-covered marzipan, in addition to my regular staples. Like all the other branches, the store was set up to resemble a seaside shack, complete with upbeat staff clad in bright Hawaiian shirts.

  I tried to imagine those same workers traipsing through our office. “What are they doing here?”

  Frankie gestured for me to take a seat. She explained that the grocery store chain was expanding their private-label line—products sourced from factories all over the world to be sold under the Mama Poon name. One of those products was to be soy sauce, and Mama Poon’s legendary founder, Benji Rosenthal himself, had narrowed down the contending factories to one in Kuala Lumpur, one in Tainan, and us.

  “He’ll be here tomorrow. To sample our fiberglass sauce,” Frankie said.

  When I looked unimpressed, she tried again. “Benji Rosenthal is coming to Lin’s. The Benji Rosenthal.”

  Benji Rosenthal was an aging hippie with a waist-length, graying ponytail, whose path to capitalistic success had been mythologized in business school case studies across America. He’d spent the eighties surfing and sampling weed all over Southeast Asia. Along the way, he befriended Mama Pun, an elderly Thai woman. In exchange for manual labor and household chores, Mama Pun gave him the spare bedroom that had belonged to her recently deceased son. When her arthritis all but paralyzed her, Benji Rosenthal took over the cooking for their household of two. Under her strict supervision, he learned to prepare coconut milk–based curries, spicy, tangy salads and the hearty meat- or oyster-filled omelets that are the staples of central Thai cuisine. He went on to care for the old woman until the day she died.

  When he returned to California, Benji Rosenthal discovered how difficult it was to recreate his favorite dishes without cardamom, Thai coriander, galangal root. Nostalgia coupled with frustration drove him to open a small market in Santa Barbara, named Mama Poon’s in honor of his old friend, whose name he anglicized for branding purposes. In the years since, that single market had become a chain of full-fledged grocery stores offering exotic produce at superior value. Eighteen locations had sprung up across California, Oregon, and Washington; three more would open on the East Coast in the coming year.

  “I get it,” I said. “This visit is a big deal. But we just started experimenting with fiberglass tanks. We don’t know if this new sauce is going to be any good.” After the debacle with Cal’s ready-to-cook sauces, I would have expected my uncle to proceed with caution. I myself had never tasted the new product, but Ba had assured me it would be gao sai—a description that struck me as more humorous and less disgusting than if it’d been spoken in English: dog shit.

  Frankie shrugged. “That’s for Benji Rosenthal to decide. What do you expect us to do? Turn him away?”

  “Point taken,” I said.

  She nodded firmly and scratched the sunburned tip of her ear.

  “How was the beach?”

  “It was fantastic,” she said.

  “I had a good weekend, too.” I waited for Frankie to ask about my mother and to tell me I’d been missed.

  “Oh, good. I’m glad,” she said, and went on to outline all the tasks we needed to tackle that day.

  I didn’t have to wait long to taste Lin’s new fiberglass sauce. I was sitting at my desk, staring at my cell phone and willing James to call, when Uncle Robert summoned Frankie and me to his office.

  My uncle was standing by the window with his back to us, holding a small bottle to the light. When he heard us enter, he turned. “Welcome to the future,” he said. “Lin’s soy sauce 2.0.” Mr. Liu, Lin’s head scientist, had sent up a prototype of the sauce we would present to the team from Mama Poon’s.

  I took the bottle from my uncle’s extended hand. It was still warm from his palm. Holding the bottle at eye level, I saw that the sauce was dark and murky, almost opaque—so different from the tawny translucence of our clay-aged brew.

  “Now, Gretchen, you know it’s not going to taste like our premium sauce,” Uncle Robert warned as he slid a white porcelain dish across his desk. He turned to Frankie. “She has a palate like her father’s.”

  “Lucky for you, I’m out of practice,” I said. I poured out the sauce and took a few short sniffs, searching for the citrus top notes and round caramel base that distinguished our trademark brew.

  But this sauce smelled thick and meaty, as flat and dull as an old coin. I dipped the tip of my pinkie finger in the sauce and dabbed it on my tongue. A burst of salty-sweet assaulted my palate, and then vanished almost instantly, leaving a watery, metallic aftertaste.

  Suddenly I was relieved the sauce hadn’t exceeded my expectations. “Is this the best Mr. Liu can do?” I asked.

  My uncle sighed. He dipped his pinkie finger in the dish of sauce, then placed the finger in his mouth and sucked audibly. He closed his eyes for an instant and said, “It’s not ideal.”

  “You can say that again,” I said with a laugh. I had yet to grasp the gravity of the situation, how a partnership with Mama Poon’s could shape the company for years to come.

  Ignoring my comment, my uncle pushed the dish across the table to Frankie. She stuck her finger in the dish, just as my uncle and I had, and tasted the sauce. For someone who had only been through one soy sauce tasting, she certainly projected confidence.

  Uncle Robert said, “Keep in mind
-ah, this sauce is cheaper and has a longer shelf life than our premium sauce. Exactly what Mama Poon’s is looking for.”

  Frankie ran her tongue over her front teeth and said, “Honestly, it tastes pretty good to me.”

  My head snapped toward her, and she added, “I mean, given the circumstances.”

  “Precisely,” my uncle said. “We must be realistic.”

  “Robert’s right,” she said, looking straight at me as though I’d disagreed. She didn’t seem to notice that everyone else called my uncle “Mr. Lin.” She went on, “This fiberglass sauce is for a different consumer base. Will Mama Poon’s customers really be able to tell the difference?”

  I stopped myself from pointing out that naysayers had told Ahkong exactly the same thing over fifty years earlier. Uncle Robert had asked me to try the sauce, and I’d told him what I thought. All this other stuff—the fiberglass tanks, the Mama Poon deal, the US Expansion Project—was their concern. They didn’t need to justify anything to me.

  But even as I fought to establish how little I cared, I couldn’t help but wonder what my grandfather would have thought of Mama Poon’s. Especially since just last week Frankie and I had concluded that Lin’s needed to embrace its traditional brewing methods, expanding the reach of its premium sauces as opposed to pursuing commercial ventures.

  “Has my father tasted this?” I asked.

  My uncle planted his elbows on his desk and rested his chin in his palms. His fingers cupped his full cheeks, and for an instant I caught a glimpse of the boy he must have been, Ah Xiong’s younger brother. “Let’s just say, he’d rather not get involved,” he said. He sat up in his chair and stretched out his arms like an opera singer about to burst into an aria. “But that’s the thing about business, lah. You can’t pick a path and blindly follow it.”