and acquire another just by going for a stroll.
Uncle Lim drove me to Aunt Yu Mei’s home before taking the car to the workshop. I watched as he backed into the short driveway and drove off. He had been worried about his daughter and I felt sorry for him, but I knew his dislike of Endo-san, just because he was a Japanese, was wrong. If not, then he should have had nothing to do with my father either, for even I knew of the suffering the British trading houses had caused in China.
Aunt Yu Mei lived in Bangkok Lane, behind the Siamese Wat Chaiya Mangkalaram Temple, where my mother’s ashes were kept. Bangkok Lane had two rows of townhouses, the shaded porches reaching almost to the road’s edge. Many of the houses’ wooden blinds were rolled up, looking like huge sausage rolls hanging beneath the eaves. The houses were all built close together and groups of children played in the road. Cats sunned themselves on the balustrades, twisting their tails and licking their paws. They stopped when I neared them and eyed me with suspicion.
I rang the bell and called out through the wooden shutters, “Aunt Mei!” I heard her on her wooden clogs as she came to the door. It opened and she led me inside. In the front hall, the smell of incense came from an altar on which a bronze figurine of the Buddha sat looking down, eyes half closed, a single palm almost touching the ground to ask the Earth to be his witness.
Aunt Yu Mei had never told me her precise age, although I guessed she was about forty and running to that certain plumpness so common in Chinese women. She was the assistant headmistress at the Light Street Convent, the oldest girls’ school in the country. She had even, as a very young woman, taught English to my mother’s class there. Isabel, too, had been a pupil at that school and had told me that my aunt was strict, but well loved.
My aunt bore scarcely any resemblance to my mother, though she often liked to state that they were identical. Her hair was pulled tight into a shiny bun and a pair of glasses was constantly held between her fingers. As she talked, she would wave them in the air to punctuate her points. She led me to a chair, where she pushed aside a stack of examination papers she had been correcting.
“Did you do well this term?” she asked.
“Reasonably, I think. I wouldn’t know yet.”
“I hope you’ve done better than you did last term,” she said.
I made vague movements in the air with my hands, feeling uncomfortable with her questions about my academic life. I was at best an average student and she was always trying to change that.
“Did you buy the oranges like I told you to?” she asked.
I lifted the basket I had brought. She glanced at it and nodded in approval. “Your grandfather was wrong when he said you would forget your roots.”
I did not know what to reply. In truth I was only doing this to humor her. Every year, at the Festival of Cheng Beng, she would request that I pay my respects to my mother at the temple. My father never objected to her insistence that I light the joss sticks and pray to my mother. In fact, I often felt that he had a high regard for Aunt Mei. Despite her modern education, despite crossing worlds, she was still a woman of tradition—my grandfather had seen to that. Yet she was as strong-willed as he was and had been the only one from my mother’s family who had dared to attend her wedding to an ang-moh.
We walked to the temple near her house. The crowd was thin, as it was still a few days before the actual festival. We entered the grounds of the temple and walked past the stone statues of snarling, serpentine dragons and mythical birdmen, all painted in brilliant hues of turquoise, red, blue, and green.
The temple was constructed in 1845 by the Siamese community on an extensive piece of property granted by Queen Victoria. Built in the traditions of
Uncle Lim drove me to Aunt Yu Mei’s home before taking the car to the workshop. I watched as he backed into the short driveway and drove off. He had been worried about his daughter and I felt sorry for him, but I knew his dislike of Endo-san, just because he was a Japanese, was wrong. If not, then he should have had nothing to do with my father either, for even I knew of the suffering the British trading houses had caused in China.
Aunt Yu Mei lived in Bangkok Lane, behind the Siamese Wat Chaiya Mangkalaram Temple, where my mother’s ashes were kept. Bangkok Lane had two rows of townhouses, the shaded porches reaching almost to the road’s edge. Many of the houses’ wooden blinds were rolled up, looking like huge sausage rolls hanging beneath the eaves. The houses were all built close together and groups of children played in the road. Cats sunned themselves on the balustrades, twisting their tails and licking their paws. They stopped when I neared them and eyed me with suspicion.
I rang the bell and called out through the wooden shutters, “Aunt Mei!” I heard her on her wooden clogs as she came to the door. It opened and she led me inside. In the front hall, the smell of incense came from an altar on which a bronze figurine of the Buddha sat looking down, eyes half closed, a single palm almost touching the ground to ask the Earth to be his witness.
Aunt Yu Mei had never told me her precise age, although I guessed she was about forty and running to that certain plumpness so common in Chinese women. She was the assistant headmistress at the Light Street Convent, the oldest girls’ school in the country. She had even, as a very young woman, taught English to my mother’s class there. Isabel, too, had been a pupil at that school and had told me that my aunt was strict, but well loved.
My aunt bore scarcely any resemblance to my mother, though she often liked to state that they were identical. Her hair was pulled tight into a shiny bun and a pair of glasses was constantly held between her fingers. As she talked, she would wave them in the air to punctuate her points. She led me to a chair, where she pushed aside a stack of examination papers she had been correcting.
“Did you do well this term?” she asked.
“Reasonably, I think. I wouldn’t know yet.”
“I hope you’ve done better than you did last term,” she said.
I made vague movements in the air with my hands, feeling uncomfortable with her questions about my academic life. I was at best an average student and she was always trying to change that.
“Did you buy the oranges like I told you to?” she asked.
I lifted the basket I had brought. She glanced at it and nodded in approval. “Your grandfather was wrong when he said you would forget your roots.”
I did not know what to reply. In truth I was only doing this to humor her. Every year, at the Festival of Cheng Beng, she would request that I pay my respects to my mother at the temple. My father never objected to her insistence that I light the joss sticks and pray to my mother. In fact, I often felt that he had a high regard for Aunt Mei. Despite her modern education, despite crossing worlds, she was still a woman of tradition—my grandfather had seen to that. Yet she was as strong-willed as he was and had been the only one from my mother’s family who had dared to attend her wedding to an ang-moh.
We walked to the temple near her house. The crowd was thin, as it was still a few days before the actual festival. We entered the grounds of the temple and walked past the stone statues of snarling, serpentine dragons and mythical birdmen, all painted in brilliant hues of turquoise, red, blue, and green.
The temple was constructed in 1845 by the Siamese community on an extensive piece of property granted by Queen Victoria. Built in the traditions of
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