Soy Sauce for Beginners Page 13

  Later, Cal and I left the dining room together, and as the glass door swung shut behind us, he took my wrist and pulled me aside. Not caring that there were other workers around, he leaned in so close I could smell the ginger on his breath. I backed up flat against the wall.

  “Stop sucking up to everyone, you hear me?” he said.

  I nodded automatically.

  “You’re just a kid. You don’t know anything.”

  Again I nodded.

  “Good. Let’s go.” He turned and marched across the courtyard, and I hurried behind him, glad the month was almost over.

  The following year, when I was fourteen, I begged to be exempted from factory work like my girl cousins—Lily because she had severe asthma, and Rose because she spent her holidays at ballet camp. Unlike them, I had no good excuse, but Ba relented after I formed an alliance with my mother by agreeing to double my practice time at the piano. Eventually, my father accepted my lack of interest in soy sauce, and turned his attention to Cal.

  Now my uncle was listing the many accolades our sauce had earned: Tasty Singapore Brand Ambassador, Asia Star Award, Golden Excellency Award, Singapore Heritage Award. Benji Rosenthal tented his fingertips and closed his eyes. He was either listening intently or not listening at all. My uncle kept going.

  I wondered where he’d been, those seventeen years earlier, on the afternoon of my grandfather’s test. I didn’t recall Uncle Robert sitting at the table, but I could picture him somewhere in the dining room, watching me in silence, plotting even then for his own son to get ahead. How could I reconcile this image of Uncle Robert with the man I knew? Of all my relatives, he was the one I felt closest to, the one I trusted most.

  The conference room lights blinked back on, and Benji Rosenthal opened his eyes. The assistant put aside his mobile device for the first time. My uncle grinned at the Americans, and Cal rolled his head in a languid circle, as if he’d just awaken from a nap.

  “Well, listen,” Benji Rosenthal said, gazing around the room to include each and every one of us. “This is impressive. Really impressive.”

  “Wait until you try our sauce,” Cal said, reaching for the tray I’d arranged on the table.

  With practiced ease, he served the sauce to the Americans. I sat back and watched as he instructed them to lean in and inhale its bouquet. “Like you’re sniffing a glass of your favorite wine.”

  Just as no one had pointed out that Lin’s awards and accolades had been earned by our premium sauces, no one pointed out that the predominant flavor of this new sauce was a harsh metallic tang.

  We watched as Benji Rosenthal dipped his rice cracker in the dish and tossed it in his mouth. At that moment, I wanted nothing more than for him to scrunch up his face, pull back and holler that it was like sucking on a rusty nail.

  “Great,” the American said before he finished chewing. “Perfect. This is exactly what we want for our stores.”

  “Great. Just great,” his assistant chimed in.

  My uncle’s jaw softened. He’d been right all along. Benji Rosenthal couldn’t tell the difference, and neither would the shoppers at Mama Poon’s. The sauce was good enough.

  Around the table, everyone stood, and I did too. Benji Rosenthal promised to be in touch once he’d completed his last factory visit. His eyes twinkled as he said to Uncle Robert, “But between you and me, my mind’s already made up.”

  We all shook hands and told each other how nice it was to have finally met.

  “Excellent work,” Uncle Robert said to Frankie. “Excellent work,” he repeated to me.

  I gave him a cold, probing regard, but he absently patted my shoulder and gazed past my ear.

  Cal and Uncle Robert escorted the Americans down the hallway, neither indicating that Frankie and I should come along. As the men disappeared down the stairs, Benji Rosenthal’s voice boomed above the others. “You know,” he said, “Mama Poon’s really is a family business. So it’s swell to have found another company so aligned with our values and ideals.”

  Cal’s response: “I grew up right here in this factory, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. It truly is home.”

  Inside the conference room, Frankie shut her laptop and collapsed back in her chair. I dropped my head in my hands, suddenly overcome by fatigue.

  After a while, Frankie asked, “What do we do now?”

  And then we heard voices hurtling back up the stairs—Uncle Robert’s and Cal’s and a third that belonged to Ba.

  I rushed to the door, Frankie close behind. Peering out of the conference room, we found all our co-workers similarly positioned.

  “No,” we heard my father say, his voice ricocheting from the stairwell. “You and I are going to settle this now.”

  I checked the time. He must have left Ma at the hospital and hurried over. Who had called to tell him about Cal? Perhaps it was Mr. Liu. A Lin’s employee for over fifty years, he surely had strong feelings about how the company was run. Perhaps Shuting had called, for once channeling her drama-vulture energy into something worthwhile. Perhaps Ba had figured it out himself as he sat with Ma in the dialysis room, going over previous conversations with my uncle, half-watching Melody on TV.

  The trio emerged from the stairwell. Uncle Robert’s forehead was creased with worry. Cal was sweating through the armpits of his pink shirt. Only Ba’s face was still as a mask.

  On the office floor, heads darted back into cubes, but I didn’t move. I didn’t care if they caught me watching; I wanted to be seen.

  “Please, Kor,” my uncle murmured to Ba. Elder brother.

  “We can explain everything,” said Cal.

  Ba stopped short. He looked straight at my cousin. “You will explain nothing.” He turned to Uncle Robert. “I’m sorry, but he cannot be here.” Ba swept past Cal, who staggered back against the wall. He turned the knob to my uncle’s office, but before he stepped in something made him pause. He looked up and, for the first time, noticed me.

  “Ba.” My lips formed the word, but no sound came out.

  My father’s face relaxed. He seemed to exhale. And then he and my uncle entered the office, shutting the door behind them, lowering the blinds.

  Inside that impenetrable room, voices rose and fell. Something landed on the floor with a weighty thud. Cal kept standing there staring at the door, feet rooted to the same exact spot, neck muscles straining from his shirt collar, hands clenched into fists.

  It took me a second to notice the tension in my own neck and shoulders, the way my fingers curled inwards, stabbing my nails into my palms. I thought of the deposit resting on my desk, waiting to be mailed to the conservatory. I felt lucky to have some place else to go.

  10

  WHEN MY MOTHER FIRST PROPOSED boarding school in Monterey, California, my father swiftly shot down the idea, which only piqued my interest. I pictured boys in hip-slung board shorts, with sandy hair and rippling abs. In reality, my future classmates were precocious and studious and obsessed with getting into top-tier universities—one of the reasons Ba eventually changed his mind.

  I’d been away at school for no more than two weeks when Ba sent my first care package: an entire case of sample-size bottles of Lin’s light soy sauce, which I hid under the bed. Times when I couldn’t eat another bite of cafeteria meatloaf, or chili, or casserole, I retreated to my room with a bowl of rice pilaf, or, when the situation was desperate, pasta, and broke into my stash.

  My mother sent lovely impractical things like letterpress birthday cards, or a pair of angora mittens I rarely needed through the mild Monterey winters. Once, around Thanksgiving, she sent a box of twelve perfectly ripe Comice pears.

  On Sundays, after I waited in line at one of two dorm pay phones, my parents and I talked for ten or fifteen minutes, never more. After all there were other students who needed the phone. I told my parents about the weather, my classes, my latest cross-country meet or piano recital. They passed on messages from my grandparents and updates on my cousins. Sometimes they
ended with “love you,” other times they forgot.

  By the end of my first semester, I’d shed my homesickness like a snake its skin. Throughout Christmas break in Singapore, I counted the days until my return to school, and my parents were proud of how well I’d adjusted.

  Only once did I catch a glimpse of my mother’s ambivalence. At the end of that first Christmas break, I awoke at five in the morning to make my flight. The entire drive to the airport I dozed in the backseat until an abrupt swerve of the car roused me. Eyes still closed, I heard a quiet sobbing noise so unfamiliar I wasn’t immediately sure what it was. Opening one eye, I saw my mother’s head pressed against the windowpane. With one hand on the steering wheel, my father reached his other hand to her. “All right?” he asked softly. “Of course,” she sobbed. I shut my eyes and pretended to be asleep. It was the one time I’d see her cry.

  Even now, with all she’d gone through, Ma continued to impress me with her strength and stoicism. She hadn’t had a drink in almost a week. She’d stood back and let me get rid of every bottle in the house. She was practicing the piano daily, though she continued to boycott my metronome, going so far as to return the wooden pyramid to its perch on my nightstand.

  Especially in the beginning, Ma’s doctor had informed us, most people actually found it easier to give up alcohol altogether. “‘No’ can be much less complicated than ‘maybe,’” Dr. Yeoh said with a meaningful look. I tried to discern the deeper message behind his words.

  I was thinking about “no’s” and “maybe’s” and the paradox of too much choice when I walked through the front door, hours after Cal’s surprise appearance.

  Ma was practicing her Debussy piece. She lifted her fingers off the keys. “Auntie Tina called,” she said, her gaze pointing to my father in the dining room.

  He and I had left work in separate cars, and now he sat at the table cracking his knuckles and muttering to himself.

  Ma told me that my aunt, Uncle Robert’s wife, had invited everyone to a family dinner that evening. She glanced over at Ba one last time, put aside her sheet music, and went to get dressed.

  As if the family were gathering to celebrate some joyous occasion, my aunt had reserved a private room at Imperial Treasure, the city’s best Shanghainese restaurant, and a longtime Lin’s client—hence their willingness to accommodate all eleven of us on such short notice. The restaurant was located on Orchard Road, on the top floor of a massive high-end shopping center surrounded by glossy office towers.

  Having neglected to take the elevator, my father, my mother, and I found ourselves on one escalator after another, from the third-basement car park up through seven brightly lit, over-air-conditioned, cloyingly fragrant floors, where offerings ranged from Belgian chocolates and gourmet versions of traditional local snacks in the ground-floor food hall to fine china and baby booties on the penultimate level. The three of us stood in single file, one per moving step. Eyes fixed straight ahead, we ignored the advertisements featuring light-skinned, fair-haired, long-limbed beauties. Around us, the post-work crowd brisk-walked and jostled, talked loudly into cell phones and called out to people they knew. But we remained silent, the frenetic energy sinking into us like light into a black hole.

  We’d been similarly laconic on the ride over. Ba opened his mouth only to warn us that this dinner was a big mistake, that involving more people—especially more Lins—would only complicate matters. In response, my mother, resplendent in a silk emerald-green blouse I hadn’t seen her wear in years, reached out and touched her fingertips to my father’s wrist, murmuring for him to stay calm. Maybe it was the color of her blouse, or the sumptuousness of the fabric, but her complexion had never looked so healthy, so bright. Despite all that had gone wrong earlier that day, and all that could go wrong still, prospects within my nuclear family, at least, seemed hopeful.

  We stepped off the last escalator, and as we walked to the restaurant, I said, “Why are we even doing this? They know how you feel about Cal, and we know how they feel.”

  My father took my hand, his grip firm and reassuring as always. “Because Chinese families believe all problems can be solved over food.”

  Imperial Treasure was a low-ceilinged space filled with round, white-clothed tables of varying sizes and wooden chairs with swirling dragons carved into their backs. This nondescript décor was customary among the city’s traditional Chinese restaurants, where ambience and service seemed intentionally halfhearted to highlight the care lavished upon the cuisine.

  The restaurant manager, a small thick woman in a boxy black suit, hurried over. “Mr. and Mrs. Lin,” she cried in Chinese. “Lin xiao jie,” she said, acknowledging me.

  I smiled back.

  “Xian shen mei lai?” the manager asked.

  I kept smiling as I shook my head. No, my husband would not be joining us.

  The manager led us to our private room, which was separated from the main dining area by a sliding door of fake mahogany panels. As we followed, she listed all the dishes Auntie Tina had ordered: crispy eel in sweet sauce, smoked duck two ways, hand-pulled noodles with crab roe—“luckily we had enough pregnant crabs on hand!”—and others I could not decipher from their poetic yet opaque Chinese names: squirrel-shaped Mandarin fish, eight treasure rice, four happiness pork.

  A muscle flickered in Ba’s jaw. Auntie Tina’s extravagance seemed to anger him more. Ma tried to diffuse the tension by changing the subject. She asked the manager if we were among the first to arrive.

  The manager gave a laugh that revealed the fillings in her back teeth. As a matter of fact, she said, we were the last to arrive. She pulled back the door with a flourish, and sure enough, the rest of the family was already seated around the large table.

  Auntie Tina looked thinner and more anxious than she had a week earlier at the last family gathering, back when Uncle Robert was still pretending to support Ba’s decision. Clearly the three of us had missed something important because my aunt was wringing her hands and shaking her head. Uncle Robert mopped his forehead with a handkerchief as Cal implored him to please, for once, just listen. Lily looked ready to burst into tears despite Rose’s efforts to comfort her.

  On the other side of the table, my cousins’ spouses huddled together, relishing their noninvolvement. Rose’s husband regarded the cell phone in his lap as he worked its buttons with both thumbs, no doubt playing some kind of computer game. Only Cal’s wife, the kindest, most soft-spoken woman I knew, was by her husband’s side. She sat all the way back in her chair, eyes ping-ponging from one family member to another and back again.

  When we stepped through the doorway, the talking stopped. My father, my mother, and I took the three remaining seats. We unfurled our napkins from stiff white fans.

  Seemingly oblivious to the tension in the room, the manager clapped her hands twice. “Now that everyone’s here,” she said cheerfully, “I’ll have the kitchen send out the food.” When no one said anything, she gave a quick nod and left.

  The door shut firmly behind her, sealing out the noise from the main dining area. Inside our room, the silence was thick enough to wade through. Lily’s husband contorted his face in slow motion, sneezed into his cupped hands and mumbled, “Scue me,” and somehow, we all exhaled.

  Cal’s wife picked up her chopsticks, spun the lazy Susan, and began thrusting boiled peanuts—soaked in Lin’s light soy sauce—at any plate within reach. Auntie Tina turned to my mother and asked how she was feeling. I combed through my aunt’s words for any hint of judgment, and when I concluded she was sincere, I turned my attention to Rose, who’d launched into a story about her recent visit with the obstetrician: she’d actually seen her unborn baby girl stick out her tongue on the ultrasound monitor.

  “It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” Rose said. “Wasn’t it amazing, Da-ling?” She swatted her husband, who was still staring down at his phone.

  “What’s that, Da-ling?” he asked, and then caught himself. “Yes, yes it was.”

/>   “I’ll email you a picture,” she said to me.

  I tried to match my cousin’s enthusiasm, though in truth, the blurry black-and-white ultrasound photographs my friends posted online always left me underwhelmed. Until he grew impatient with my indecisiveness, Paul and I had kept an ongoing list detailing the kind of parents we vowed never to become. I’d pitched boarding school as the key to healthy parent-child relations, to which he’d replied, “We’ll see.”

  Two waiters glided into the room with trays of red wine glasses, prompting Cal to jump up to supervise the aerating of the Bordeaux he had selected from his personal collection—something he did to mark special occasions.

  He instructed one waiter to distribute the glasses around the table, and handed the other a pair of handsome crystal decanters. “Yes,” he said to the second waiter, who was clearly confused. “First, pour it in here, then later, we pour it in there.”

  As Cal leaned in to take a deep whiff of the wine, my shoulders shifted involuntarily toward my mother. In the midst of the chaos, I hadn’t stopped to consider how Ma would react to being at a table of freely imbibing individuals.

  Cal returned to his seat looking pleased. “’99 Lafite,” he announced, shrugging in faux modesty.

  Even I knew to be impressed.

  My cousin couldn’t resist looking straight at Ba and adding, “Uncle Xiong, I know it’s your favorite.”

  Ba thanked him stiffly. Either he was in no mood to be charmed by Cal, or he too was worried about Ma.

  Meanwhile, the waiters worked their way around the table in opposite directions, serving the decanted wine, getting closer and closer to my mother. My breath moved high up in my chest; I could not slow it down. Should I abstain in a gesture of solidarity? Would it only call more attention to Ma?

  At last a waiter arrived at my side, and I signaled for a very small pour.

  Beside me, Ma waved a palm over her glass. “None for me,” she said softly.

  Auntie Tina raised her eyebrows, but I didn’t care. I had to fight the urge to throw my arms around my mother, to tell her how very proud I was.