Soy Sauce for Beginners Read online

  “I agree,” said Frankie. “Success is all about being nimble. Adapting to change.”

  The two of them exchanged satisfied smiles, and I resolved to keep my mouth shut for the rest of the meeting.

  Down below in the courtyard, beyond my uncle’s window, a worker in a wide-brimmed straw hat made his way up and down the rows of clay jars, a long wooden paddle in hand. At each jar, he lifted the lid, inserted the paddle and gave the mixture a few good stirs.

  As a child, I’d loved to traipse behind the worker on duty in my matching knee-length polo shirt, standing on my tiptoes to peek over the lip of each jar, offering advice and begging to help. If I begged hard enough, and the worker wasn’t too pressed for time, he let me wrap my fists around the paddle, and I gritted my teeth, squinted through the sweat and stirred as best I could. Even from up here, in Uncle Robert’s air-conditioned office, I could still conjure up the tart, briny smell of the fermenting beans; I could feel the jar’s contents shift around my paddle like a living thing.

  My uncle explained that Frankie and I would need to spend the rest of the afternoon putting together slides for the next day’s presentation. “We don’t have much time, so I appreciate your flexibility.”

  In the courtyard, down below, the worker finished stirring the last jar. He mopped the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his yellow polo shirt and hung the paddle from a hook on the wall.

  By six in the evening, Frankie and I were still hours away from completing our task. I didn’t mind having to stay late; it wasn’t as if I had anywhere else to be.

  On his way out, my uncle knocked on my door. He had a Styrofoam food container in one hand. “I told Mr. Liu to keep working on the sauce,” he said. “Of course there’s always room for improvement, lah. Sometimes we forget.” His words were jolly, but he looked haggard. His skin was gray and dull; his cheeks sagged with their own weight. For the first time I thought about how challenging it must be for him to take over this project from his son.

  I said, “I’m sorry if I was being difficult. From now on I’ll leave the strategizing to you and Frankie.”

  He gave me a sad smile. “You’re doing a great job. I know your father is proud of you.”

  I wondered how it felt to lose faith in one’s own child. Did Uncle Robert blame himself for Cal’s mistakes?

  For as long as I could remember, my cousin had been fearless. He had a way of intimidating everyone around him, even his own mother. In elementary school, I’d often played board games with Lily and Rose at their house. Cal never joined us. He was four years older and by then a moody teenager. But once when our round of Monopoly got a little out of hand, and our shrieking grew too loud, he stormed out of his dark cave of a room and swept his arm across the board. Tiny red and blue and green houses rained into my lap. I was too frightened to speak. If my uncle had been home, he would have reprimanded Cal, who would receive the scolding with his head lowered but his eyes hard as stone. Even when being told off, my cousin showed no fear.

  “Uncle Robert,” I said, “how is Cal handling the news?”

  My uncle recoiled. “He’s fine,” he said, too loudly. He looked down and seemed startled to find the Styrofoam container in his hands. He set the container on my desk. “Left over from lunch,” he said, not meeting my eyes. “Don’t stay too late, yah? Frankie too.” And then he was gone.

  Soon Frankie and I were the only ones left in the building.

  When we were too famished to keep working, she and I convened in the break room. Sitting on the counter by the sink, we passed my uncle’s leftovers back and forth, first attempting to eat the cold noodles with plastic knives we found in a mug on a shelf, then giving up and using our fingers.

  Without giving away that Cal had been fired, I tried to explain to Frankie why my exchange with my uncle had so affected me. “I feel sorry for him,” I said. “He may be the president of the company, but he can’t make a decision without everyone else getting involved.” I smiled, remembering my mother’s reaction to the office’s new pale-pistachio walls: she’d threatened to bring in her own team of painters in the middle of the night.

  “He watched your father go through the same thing,” Frankie said. “He certainly knew what he was getting into.”

  Her lack of sympathy surprised me. “Maybe so, but it’s still a tough situation to be in. And that’s not to say that I approve of this new sauce. No one would have dared mention the word ‘fiberglass’ in front of my grandfather.”

  Frankie wiped off her fingers with a paper towel, patted the concave space where her belly used to be and said she was done eating. Even though I was still hungry, I felt compelled to stop, too.

  She said, “From everything I’ve heard, your grandfather was a risk taker. You never know. He might have backed this particular risk.”

  All day long she’d disagreed with everything I’d said, and now, eleven hours into the workday, I was annoyed. I said. “Lin’s makes soy sauce. Mouthwatering, handmade soy sauce. That fiberglass crap isn’t up to standard.”

  She held up her hands in surrender, which only annoyed me further. She said, “Okay, you’re right, what do I know?” She filled a glass with water from the faucet, drained it and refilled it. “Want some?” she asked, holding out the glass to me.

  I shook my head. In an effort to smooth things over, I said, “Tell me about your weekend.”

  Her face lit up. “You’ll never believe what your crazy friend Kat talked me into doing.”

  “What?” I asked amiably.

  “I bought a bikini. My very first.”

  “You went shopping with Kat?” I tried to keep my tone neutral.

  “Yeah, on Friday, after work,” she said, and went on to tell me about the trip to the beach, and about the impromptu beach volleyball tournament they’d gotten roped into. “Co-ed teams,” she said. “Thankfully, Pierre and James showed up.”

  My entire body froze. “James?”

  “Yeah, he came with Pierre,” she said, then stopped when she saw my face. “Oh, I thought you knew.”

  I said nothing.

  “But you already had plans,” she said. “To stay home with your mom.”

  “I did.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Much better, thank you for asking,” I said.

  Frankie leaned in close. “And what’s going on with you and James?”

  I wanted to share everything, truly I did. Would Frankie think I’d committed a fatal error by going home with James on the first date? I loathed myself for letting that thought cross my mind, and then I loathed myself for obsessing about this man who was so clearly not interested in me. Determined not to waste another second on him, I said, “It was only one date. I don’t even think I’m going to see him again.”

  She didn’t back down. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  I glanced at the clock on the microwave. Eight-thirty. “We should get back to work.”

  She studied me for another beat or two, then yawned and stretched out her arms. “How much longer can they expect us to go on without Cal?” she asked.

  It was a rhetorical question, but I seized the opportunity to shift the balance of power back in my favor. Uncle Robert would make his announcement soon, and I saw no harm in telling her the truth. “Frankie,” I said, “Cal’s gone.” I went on to repeat what my father had told me, the stunned expression on her face a minor consolation.

  At nine o’clock, we agreed to come in early the next morning, and then I gave her a ride home.

  Back in my parents’ house, someone, probably Cora, had left an official-looking envelope on my desk. The return address was in San Francisco, and immediately I knew the letter had come from a lawyer writing on behalf of Paul. A familiar panic rushed through me: the feeling that no matter how much air I gulped down, suffocation was imminent.

  Somehow I steadied my hands and tore open the envelope, only to find myself staring at a letter from the conservatory, requesting a deposit t
o hold my place for the upcoming semester.

  I closed my eyes. My breathing slowed. And then I was standing on the corner of Franklin and Oak, the strains of a lone trumpet drifting from the window of a practice room, the breeze swirling a pile of yellow leaves about my feet, the sunlight so bright I could barely open my eyes.

  I signed the form without reading it, found a stamp for the envelope, and placed it in the very center of my desk, as though without the reminder I would forget to ask my father for a check.

  9

  FRANKIE AND I HAD JUST COMPLETED the final edits on the slides for my uncle’s presentation when the door to the conference room swung open. Someone hit the light switch and the recessed bulbs blinked on one at a time.

  My uncle came in first. He’d dressed up for the occasion in a long-sleeved button-up shirt, instead of the threadbare short-sleeved shirts he favored. I gave him an encouraging smile, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  Entering close behind him was the legendary Benji Rosenthal: middle-aged, tall, narrow and sinewy as a modern dancer, and clad in his trademark Hawaiian shirt. He apparently dressed up for no one. He was accompanied by his assistant, a lanky boy in a matching shirt who looked barely old enough to have graduated college.

  After everyone had been introduced, we took our seats around the table—us in our freshly pressed business casual, them in their beachwear—and Frankie dimmed the lights.

  But instead of signaling me to cue up the slides, Uncle Robert pushed back his shirt cuff and squinted at his watch. A frown settled on his face and he shifted in his chair. I’d never seen him so edgy. Now he squared his shoulders, sat back and asked Benji Rosenthal about his flight, and whether he would have a chance to do a bit of sightseeing while he was here.

  Frankie and I shot each other looks.

  “Unfortunately we have to head straight to the airport after this meeting,” said Benji Rosenthal. He had a booming, resonant voice and twinkling eyes that made him look like he was about to tell a joke.

  Apparently uninterested in the conversation, the assistant studied the mobile device in his palm.

  “Yes, of course,” said Uncle Robert. “But what a pity to come all this way and not have time to see anything.” He gave his watch another peek and began to list the various tourist attractions the Americans would miss: Jurong Bird Park, the night safari at the Mandai Zoo, Chinatown, of course, where preparations for the upcoming Hungry Ghost Festival were well underway.

  Across the table, Frankie tilted her head toward the light switch on the back wall, questioning if she should turn the lights back on, or if we should all continue chatting in the dim glow of the overhead projector. I shook my head almost imperceptibly.

  That’s when the door swung open.

  “Sure, definitely,” someone was saying to an unknown listener. “Catch up later, yah?”

  I immediately recognized the voice.

  A polished brown loafer stepped through the doorway, followed by a gray pant leg, a pink shirtsleeve. “I’m so sorry I’m late,” said Cal. His expansive smile assured us he had a perfectly good explanation for his delay—so perfect that there was no need to actually explain.

  Frankie’s mouth hung open. When I met her gaze, she sealed her lips and looked away. I couldn’t tell if she was upset with me, or simply flabbergasted. I wanted to clarify that I hadn’t lied to her, that I was as taken aback as she was.

  Uncle Robert was shaking his head in disapproval but could not mask his pleasure. “Meet my son,” he said to Benji Rosenthal. “My oldest. Do you have children?”

  “Not that I know of,” the American said with a wink, then, more soberly, “Just my company.”

  Only the assistant gave a short bark of a laugh.

  “Calvin Lin,” Cal said, extending a hand to Benji Rosenthal. “A pleasure and an honor to meet you.” My cousin’s large, even teeth gleamed bright white against his broad face. His skin was deeply bronzed from the time he’d spent in the Maldives, waiting for news of his future at Lin’s. He introduced himself to the assistant and then to Frankie, patting the back of her hand and telling her he’d heard only good things. She blushed and ducked her head.

  When he came around to my side of the table, he thumped me between my shoulder blades, hard, and said, “Welcome back, Gretch.”

  “Same to you,” I said, looking straight at my uncle.

  Uncle Robert’s gaze flickered over to the projector screen and up at the ceiling and down at his hands, but never landed on me. “Let’s get started, shall we?” he said.

  Index finger poised over my laptop keyboard, I imagined pushing back my chair, leaping up and sprinting down the hallway to call Ba.

  At breakfast that morning, my father had been invisible behind his newspaper as I shoveled cereal in my mouth and tried to gulp down coffee without scalding my tongue. I was running to the door with a half-eaten piece of toast when it occurred to me to ask if he planned to stop by the office. “Don’t you want to at least shake hands with the famous Benji Rosenthal?”

  Ba lowered the paper so we were face to face. A fold of puffy skin sagged beneath each eye. He’d had trouble sleeping ever since our meeting with Ma’s doctor. He said, “Your uncle doesn’t need my help. He’s made that clear.”

  In my haste to get to work, I didn’t register that Uncle Robert had claimed the opposite, that Ba was the one who wanted nothing to do with the Mama Poon deal.

  There was no way my father knew Cal was back.

  Uncle Robert cleared his throat. This time he glared right at me.

  I jabbed the return key. The cheerful red script of the first slide, “How We Got Here,” filled the screen.

  My uncle launched into the history of Lin’s Soy Sauce, and I turned my attention to Cal. How dare he saunter in like this, as if he had nothing to apologize for, as if he hadn’t failed his father, my father, the entire family.

  I pulled up the next slide. Uncle Robert, now fully in his element, veered from his notes to deliver an anecdote about Ahkong’s failed early attempts to sell his beloved sauce. In the beginning, he explained, shopkeepers were skittish about taking on a new product, especially one that was priced so much higher than the brands they already stocked. Determined to demonstrate that his sauce was worth the extra money, Ahkong refused to offer a discount. In his first week, he visited over twenty provision shops across the island, and each time he was turned away. Driven by desperation, he hit on the idea of lugging a very heavy clay jar on a dolly from store to store to illustrate his special fermentation process. Perhaps out of pity, the first shopkeeper he dropped in on with his jar agreed to a taste, which led to Ahkong’s very first sale.

  Benji Rosenthal asked, “How much does one of those things weigh anyway?”

  “Almost twenty-five kilograms,” Uncle Robert said. “You see, he truly was desperate.”

  Benji Rosenthal slapped the table and fairly guffawed, and my uncle beamed.

  I cringed, thinking about how my grandfather would have reacted to this scene: stories about his hard work being used to peddle Lin’s first fiberglass-aged sauce. How Ahkong would have dealt with Cal’s misdeeds, I couldn’t say for sure, but I did know my uncle would never have dared go behind his own father’s back to reinstate his son.

  Even though I’d been around for barely a month, Uncle Robert’s betrayal felt as personal as Paul’s lies about Sue.

  Seventeen years earlier, during my first stint at Lin’s, I’d spent the school holidays alongside Cal who was back on the bottling line for the third year in a row. My cousin didn’t bother to warn me about the grueling nature of the work. Even with the ceiling fans whirring at full-blast, the factory floor was suffocatingly hot. Three hours into my first eight-hour shift, my quads began to ache—an ache that wouldn’t entirely subside until two days after I’d left the factory. But while I tried to elicit sympathy for my sore legs and sweat-soaked clothes, Cal worked diligently, never complaining, breaking his silence only to tell me, with a Zen Buddhist’s
calm, that fixating on my discomfort would make things worse.

  After those early days at the factory, I gave up trying to connect with Cal. Instead I got to know other workers on the line—middle-aged women who were kind and friendly and never made me sweep the floors. They told me about the old days at Lin’s, and about their children, some of whom were around my age. At half past noon, when we all gathered for lunch, the workers patted me on the head and told my grandfather I was doing a fine job.

  One particularly humid day near the end of my month-long tenure, when Cal and I and the other workers filed in the dining room, Ahkong beckoned for me to sit between him and Ba. He filled my bowl with clear winter melon soup and tipped in some soy sauce. “Jiak,” he urged.

  The soup was hot and I blew on my soupspoon before sipping with care. “Weird,” was the word that left my mouth. I kept eating.

  “Weird how?” Ba set down his own spoon.

  Ahkong leaned in.

  I wasn’t sure why they were behaving so strangely. “Just weird,” I said in between bites. My grandfather had poured less than a teaspoon of soy sauce in my bowl, but that small amount had made the soup too salty. I pointed to the plastic dispenser. “That isn’t our sauce.”

  Ahkong threw back his head and laughed. The rest of the table applauded, and I felt pleased but also sheepish. After all, it was Ba who had taught me, years earlier, to isolate and identify the different layers of flavor in our own light sauce.

  Ahkong pulled out a bright red ten-dollar bill and handed it to me. He turned to Ba and said in Chinese, “This little gourd is going to be a success.”

  “She got lucky,” Ba said, though his smile was full and warm.