Love and Vertigo Read online

  First published in 2000

  Copyright © Hsu-Ming Teo 2000

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

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  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Teo Hsu-Ming

  Love and vertigo.

  ISBN 1865082783

  eISBN 9781952534829

  I. Title.

  A823.4

  Typeset by DOCUPRO, Sydney

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank Annette Barlow and Christa Munns from Allen & Unwin, who made the publishing experience such an interesting and enjoyable one.

  I would also like to thank my editors, Meredith Rose and Jo Jarrah, for their enthusiastic engagement with Love and Vertigo. Through their efforts, they taught me much about the craft of writing.

  Finally, I would like to thank my parents for their support over the years.

  For my late aunt, Siew-Choo Lai,

  who succumbed to vertigo in 1978

  ‘. . . vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves . . . vertigo, the insuperable longing to fall.’

  Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

  CONTENTS

  PRELUDE

  SONNY, THE COD GOD KILLER

  PANDORA OUT OF THE BOX

  SYONAN, LIGHT OF THE SOUTH

  THE MELODRAMA OF LIFE AND LIMS

  THE BUSINESS ACUMEN OF DONALD DUCK

  QUEEN OF THE KITCHEN

  DOGFISH AND GOOD DEEDS

  PRIVILEGED SON

  LOVE AND VERTIGO

  THE GENESIS OF CHRONIC CONSTIPATION

  BOUNDARIES AND BLACK HOLES

  DURIAN SEASON

  INTERLUDE TO A NEW LIFE

  FAMILY BONDING

  A CURE FOR INSOMNIA

  ELASTICS

  TWILIGHT TIME

  ADVANCE AUSTRALIA FAIR

  SOFT-BOILED EGGS

  THE MERRY-GO-ROUND OF LOVE

  THE SPITE OF LIFE

  GLOSSOLALIA

  DELIVERING US FROM EVIL

  FALLING

  LOVE IN A HOTEL ROOM

  THE COMPULSION TO CLEAN

  THE INSUPERABLE LONGING TO FALL

  THE HUNGRY GHOSTS

  PRELUDE

  These are the myths I tell about my family and, like all myths, they are both truths and lies, simultaneous buffers of love and betrayals of trust.

  I begin on the eve of my mother’s wake, four days after she jumped. I cross a continent and two time zones to land in Changi Airport, Singapore. I dump my bag in a hotel room, take a quick lukewarm shower and step out into the sweating night. I catch the MRT train to Raffles Place, walk to Collyer Quay and wander along the waterside, glancing into the nightclubs, restaurants, bars and karaoke clubs in the restored colonial shophouses that line the waterfront.

  I enter a pulsating karaoke bar where, on gigantic video screens, pouting Hong Kong singers with full fringes of red-streaked hair and huge kohl-lined eyes toss their heads and wail out slow, sentimental Cantopop ballads about love and loss. Men in striped short-sleeved shirts or brightly coloured polo shirts and black trousers croon into hand-held microphones, eyes squeezed shut, sweat running down the bridges of their noses and pooling at the lower metal rim of their spectacles, fogging up the glass in the soupy humidity. Lost in sentiment, lost in the sound of their own voices. Women decked in heavy gold chains and garishly patterned dresses hold tumblers of whisky or flutes of champagne, their diamond-flashing watches snuggled close to elegant wristbones. Mobile phones ring and people reach automatically for their pockets. The microphones do the rounds from person to person. Everyone has come in impregnable groups.

  This is not the Singapore my mother told me about. Her stories are a world apart from this; no longer reality but history. Just like my mother herself.

  I think of the one and only time, when I was fourteen, Sonny and I had been forced to come to Singapore with Mum. To pay our respects to the relatives, she said. She brought us to visit the relatives and they took us to the Rasa Singapura hawker centre so that we could have satay, Hainanese chicken rice, Singaporean Hokkien noodles, tah mee, laksa, gado gado, rojak. This was my mother’s comfort food. She wanted to share it with me, but I complained about the noise, the smells, the disgusting charnel-house of the table where the previous diners had spat out pork ribs and spewed chewed chicken bones all over the surface.

  ‘Come, Grace. Eat,’ Uncle Winston ordered as he belched and dropped prawn shells onto the table top, adding to the carnage. ‘Don’t be shy.’

  I was baffled that my mother could belong to these people. For the first time in my life I saw my mother in relation to her family and I did not recognise her anymore. Her carefully maintained English disintegrated and she lapsed into the local Singlish patois, her vocabulary a melange of English, Malay and Chinese; her syntax abbreviated, chopped and wrenched into disconcerting unfamiliarity. These Singaporean roots of hers, this side of her—and possibly of me too—were unacceptable. I looked for difference and sought superior disgust as an automatic response. I realise now that I had gone to Singapore with the attitude of a nineteenth-century memsahib. I was determined not to belong, not to fit in, because I was Australian, and Mum ought to be Australian too. The tug of her roots, the blurring of her role from wife and mother to sister and aunt, angered and frightened me. Years later, Sonny and I returned to visit the relatives by ourselves, to pay our respects to grandmothers and grandfathers and great aunts and uncles before they died. But Mum never returned to Singapore after that one visit. Not until she went back to die.

  When she returned, did she gaze uncomprehendingly around her and realise that this was no longer her home?

  I walk out of the club, back into the muggy night. I walk as if I have a purpose. In and out of neon-signed pubs, bars, restaurants, jazz nightclubs, milling night markets clustered under red and white striped awnings. I don’t even know what or who I’m looking for. It’s the eve of my mother’s wake and I feel no pain, no grief, no guilt. Nothing.

  I just want to live without ghosts, sleep without dreams. I want to blur the boundaries of my body in a mechanical and mindless fuck. Instead, I walk back to the hotel, strip, shower, then dry myself off and climb into bed. Alone in the dark, with the motor of the air conditioning humming away, I hug myself for comfort, turn my face into the pillow and begin to masturbate.

  My mother’s wake begins the following morning. It is being held in the concourse under Uncle Winston’s apartment block. It should have been at Donald Duck’s house since he is Mum’s eldest brother and the head of the Lim family. But Mum had died at Uncle Winston’s, and there was more room in the void deck—the concrete-pilla
red open space under the apartment block—than there would have been at Donald Duck’s house along Upper Thomson Road. Permission to hold the wake had been sought from and granted by the Housing Development Board. This is quite a common practice in Singapore. Someone from Singapore Telecom had even come to drop a line down from the apartment to the concourse below so that the phone could be taken downstairs.

  The closed coffin hulks on a table, a garden of funeral wreaths growing around the base and rearing up over it, green tendrils strangling the polished wood. Auntie Percy-phone sits alone beside the coffin. A plaid-patterned plastic thermos of tea nestles comfortably among snarling orchids. The other relatives are up in Uncle Winston’s apartment, admiring his latest acquisitions before the wake starts. A self-made millionaire, Uncle Winston can easily afford to move into a newer, more luxurious apartment or even a house. Instead, he tunes out the constant reproaches of Auntie Shufen and spends his money ripping up the floor tiles to replace them with marble, furnishing his home in the grandest old Chinese style, equipped with the latest new Japanese entertainment toys.

  I go in search of my father and find him in the kitchen washing dishes left over from the previous night’s dinner. Resolutely he ignores his wife’s relatives, blocking them out with a fierce concentration as he stands at the kitchen sink, preoccupied with cups. ‘Jonah, leave them, lah,’ one of the women had called out half-heartedly. ‘The maid will do them when she comes.’ But he prefers silent activity to the strain of making conversation. Already, on the two-tiered aluminium drying rack, plates and saucers of all sizes are ranged precisely. He is such a neat man, my father. His lips are pursed into a familiar, prissy grimace of disapproval directed towards the world as his square, capable dentist’s hands deftly pluck up cups, tumblers and mugs from the black granite benchtop and plunge them into steaming water. A brisk hospital scrub with the scouring sponge to remove the dun-coloured rings of tea and coffee stains, a quick whisk under the running tap, and the cups squat in orderly rows on the drying rack. There is a beautiful economy and a certain sort of poetry to his practised motions. He is inhuman in his smooth efficiency.

  I join him and Sonny in the kitchen. They are not speaking to each other. My brother and I take it in turns to reach as unobtrusively as possible around him to grab a cup. Eventually, instinctively, we work out an intricate cotillion whereby we step, shuffle and sidle past each other, damp tea towels dangling like delicate eighteenth-century reticules from one hand, the other hand outstretched to grasp the slippery surfaces of wet cups.

  ‘You’re late. There are so many cups,’ he complains. The Patriarch has had a closed cupboard policy on cups for as long as anyone can remember. Now he counts them off accusingly, peering into glass and ceramic depths to discover their erstwhile contents. ‘A mug for coffee and another for tea. A shot glass for whisky and a tumbler for orange juice and another tall glass for Coke.’

  ‘Why don’t you leave this, Dad?’ I say. ‘Sonny and I will finish it. Go inside and sit down.’

  But his martyr complex has floated to the surface and hardened into a crisp crust. He has loudly sacrificed for us all his life and sees no reason to stop now. It’s a habit he enjoys immensely. He ignores me and only scrubs the cups more vigorously.

  ‘Nothing would ever get done if I didn’t do it myself. Grace, you’re so late this morning. And Sonny, I saw you using one cup for Chinese tea last night, and then another glass for Coke!’

  Convicted, condemned, Sonny dries in silence.

  The Patriarch continues to wash cups to the accompaniment of his own low grumbling. There is no doubt that he is dismayed by his wife’s relatives’ prodigal use of drinking vessels. He had previously considered such extravagances limited to the circle of his own insufficiently disciplined and uneconomical family. Now he is alarmed at the thought that it might be a genetically inherited trait, passed down through his passed-away wife’s errant chromosomes.

  Mum had been the real cup culprit of our family. Her unstinting and incorrigible use of cups, tumblers and mugs knew no bounds. She used a new one every time she wanted a drink, and she wanted many drinks during the course of a day. This resulted in her attachment to the toilet and accounted for her many anxious visits there before stepping out of the house—whether she was just going to the corner store to buy a carton of low-fat milk, or leaving for a weekend trip to the Blue Mountains. Having relieved herself, she would then imagine herself dehydrated or feel the need to flush her kidneys with fluid to remove toxins from her body, hence the next glass of water. Her incontinence with cups was directly proportional to her incontinence of the bladder. And with each vessel, she left behind her telltale signature: reddish-brown lipstick marks on the rim.

  ‘It’s a filthy habit,’ the Patriarch used to say. He would pull out the upper tray of the dishwasher and be unbearably irritated to find it crammed and creaking with cups.

  Her improvidence with cups bothered him greatly, for it was symbolic of her wasteful extravagance in all other aspects of life. His wife loved expensive things. She shopped for clothes in Double Bay, haunted the designer halls of David Jones, hunted down Hermès handbags with the zeal of a big game hunter, and regularly popped into pricey boutiques all over Sydney, where she was on a first-name basis with most of the salespeople. The use of first names in expensive stores thrilled her; she felt that she belonged in Sydney. Her credit card paid for small talk, service with a smile, acceptance.

  Her extravagance was not confined to her wardrobe. Furnishing the house had been a contest of wills between her and the Patriarch; a contest that had ended in an unsatisfactory compromise for all concerned. She wanted reproduction Provençal country furniture in walnut and mahogany. He agreed grudgingly, then went off to order some chunky mid-priced Keith Lord furniture and the requisite Asian leather sofa in peach tones to appease her because she was female and had pastel-loving DNA in her genetic makeup. She nagged the Patriarch into buying genuine Persian carpets, which he then hung on the walls because, at nearly eight thousand dollars each, they were too expensive to bear the sweaty footprints of family and friends. Instead, he got the whole house carpeted, wall to wall, in synthetic beige pile. Beige was a good neutral colour; it didn’t show the ordinary day-to-day stains, and it formed a bland and soothing background to the emotional turbulence of his life.

  She had also tried to buy elegant new crockery from the fourth floor of David Jones’ city store, but the Patriarch stored it in the fluorescent-lit Parker display cabinet, together with the EIIR soup bowls he had purchased in London, and the Charles and Diana teaspoons he had collected in 1981. We used ugly gilt-edged floral plates that he had picked up at a garage sale. He did not permit the use of saucers in his household. Saucers were an unnecessary item in the kitchen and took up space in the dishwasher or the drying rack. Instead, he brought home free mugs from dental supply companies such as Oral-B, Regional or Kavo: white mugs screenprinted with heavy sans-serif typeface slogans announcing the names of the proud makers of drill bits, fluoride products, toothbrushes, toothpastes, dental floss and mouth rinses.

  ‘Each person at the wake will be allowed only one cup,’ the Patriarch now announces, turning off the tap and shaking dry his hands before patting them fastidiously on a hand towel. He opens the cupboard and, with a smug air of triumph, brings out several plastic-wrapped columns of white styrofoam cups. ‘I have a list of the people who are definitely attending today. Sonny, you can start marking their names on these cups. We’ll have some spare cups and black markers by the drinks table, which Sonny can man. And look, I’ve made a sign.’

  Proudly, he holds up a white A4 sheet of paper with a black laser-printed message reading: PLEASE WRITE YOUR NAME ON YOUR CUP AND RE-USE IT. He is so pleased with this.

  I look at his face for signs of grieving. I want to be angry with him for obsessing with cups when he should have been thinking about my mother and how miserable he made her for most of her life. I want to whip up my resentment against him, to rem
ember the scoldings he gave her over her consumption of cups, the way he treated her like an errant child in front of everyone. I want to think that his concern with cups demonstrates his callousness towards his wife, to be convinced that he never really loved her.

  I want somebody to blame for my mother’s death. I want to blame him, the way Sonny does.

  ‘You fucking bastard,’ says Sonny. He drops the tea towel to the floor and walks out.

  The Patriarch stares after his son, who hasn’t spoken to him since Mum died. And slowly, he slides down the sky-blue wooden cupboard door. He melts vertically along its surface, sucked down by grief and gravity, until he slumps into a squatting position. His face crumples, tears seep from his eyes and his black-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses fog over.

  I want to blame him, but I can’t now. I can’t make him the scapegoat because lately, sometimes when I look at him, I don’t see the Patriarch anymore. I just see Jonah Tay. Jonah Tay, who had been attracted to Pandora Lim because she was everything that he was not. Who married her and then tried to force her into becoming everything that he was. Who loved his wife but didn’t know her. Who gave her everything she didn’t want and couldn’t get along with the son she adored.

  He is a good husband and father, she used to tell us, as if we all needed convincing—herself included. He tried his best and was even heroic in that attempt, for the very act of immigration had terrified a man afraid of change. To have crossed the boundary of the familiar into the foreign had been no easy feat for this reluctant Chinese Odysseus. He took a deep breath and did it—then he never stopped complaining about it for the rest of his life, reminding his family of the sacrifices made and the opportunities lost. Migration had exhausted him; after his initial euphoria, he made no attempt to root himself into his new country, content instead to burrow and hide himself in the home he was certain he would share with his wife long after the kids were gone. Now, perhaps for the first time, he faces his life alone, without her taken-for-granted presence, and he washes the multitude of cups he had so begrudged her using when she was alive.