Soy Sauce for Beginners (8 page)

When Frankie reached the end of the song, her final note hung suspended in the air. The entire room erupted. Someone cried for an encore. Others called out requests.

Frankie ducked her head, brushed off the compliments and disappeared into the kitchen.

“Your friend is so lovely,” said Cindy.

“So talented,” said Terrence.

“So pretty,” said Lakshmi.

All around me, everyone was talking about the beautiful
ang mo
girl with the enchanting voice.

Truthfully, I was proud to have Frankie by my side. Her performance had finally made me understand her affection for my homeland. Here, in Singapore, she was novel, exotic, something of a curiosity. But instead of increasing Frankie’s self-consciousness, the attention was liberating. Forced to engage and entertain, she could try on different personas; she could be confident, gregarious, relaxed—all the things she wasn’t back in America.

After a while, the pianist and the two identically dressed girls who had brought the balloons came around to rally the remaining guests to go out dancing.

“I have my car,” slurred one of the girls as she leaned on her twin to hold herself up.

I went to find Frankie.

From beyond the kitchen door, I heard her exuberant, honking laugh. “There she is, the star of the moment,” I said, pushing open the door.

She was sitting on the counter, her long legs dangling against a cabinet. “Hi, Gretch,” she called out.

“Hey, hi,” said James.

My gaze moved from one beaming face to another. I wondered how long they’d been hanging out here, alone. The pianist barged in to inform us that everyone was going to Zouk, and we had to come, too; the cabs were on their way.

“What’s Zouk?” Frankie asked.

“What’s Zouk?” the pianist repeated in exaggerated disbelief. “What’s Zouk?” He took her arm and led her out of the kitchen as he explained why Zouk was the greatest nightclub in all of Singapore—in the world, even—and he wasn’t kidding when he said he’d seen a lot of nightclubs.

James was still leaning against the kitchen table with his arms folded. “Are you going?” he asked.

“Are you?” I stifled a yawn.

The smile spread across his face in slow motion, like honey over bread. “Why not?”

“I guess someone needs to keep an eye on Frankie.”

Neither of us moved. I was close enough to smell his cologne—something velvety and expensive.

“Let’s go,” he said, straightening. He placed a hand on the back of my neck and gently steered me to the door. His palm was warm and smooth, the pressure reassuring. When we joined the others in the foyer, he let his hand fall, and I missed its weight.

At half past midnight, three taxis pulled up in front of a large converted warehouse on the Singapore River, and twelve revelers in flapper dresses and tail coats, tiaras and top hats, tumbled out. It was drizzling—a soft spattering of drops so different from the icy San Francisco rain that pricked like tiny needles on your skin. But it was Saturday night, and the line of people determined to dance until dawn snaked around the side of the building.

Frankie, James, and I followed our friends to the front of the line. At the club’s entrance, the pianist exchanged high fives with the bouncer, and the two identically dressed girls waved their VIP cards like winning lottery tickets. The bouncer unclipped the velvet rope and nodded us through, and three girls at the head of the line caught my eye. Barely eighteen, defiantly thin in mini skirts and tube tops, the girls watched our group with such raw envy that I saw us through their eyes: carefree and buoyant, old enough to do whatever we wanted, young enough to be responsible only for ourselves. Remembering how it felt to want so badly to be someone else, I had an almost maternal yearning to warn the girls against being fooled by appearances.

Inside the club, violet light rained onto the dance floor where hordes of people gyrated to a thumping base so loud every cell in my body pulsed in time. I resisted the urge to clamp my hands over my ears. Paul, the self-proclaimed dive-bar connoisseur, would have turned and walked out the door. James, however, looked unfazed. When he caught me watching, he closed his eyes and shimmied his shoulders and crooned along.

The thumping base gave way to a Zouk standard, an old Belinda Carlisle song, updated for the twenty-first century with wailing synthesizers and a frenetic beat. On the dance floor, the crowd sang and moved in unison, like the chorus line of a Broadway musical—a peculiar Zouk trademark that seemed to embody the mindset of an entire nation: even inebriated, at our most free, we all chose to mimic each other.

As we climbed the stairs to the VIP balcony, Frankie shouted over her shoulder, “How the hell does everyone know the same dance?”

“Repeat clientele,” James shouted back.

“Empowered conformity,” my mother would have said in her postcolonial-scholar voice.

A knot formed deep in my abdomen. Ma had returned home from the hospital earlier in the day, and so far, I’d managed to avoid being alone with her. Tomorrow, I promised myself, I would stop hiding. Tomorrow, I would do all the things a good daughter would do.

My friends and I settled around a table far enough away from the speakers to be able to converse by shouting in each other’s ears. A waitress delivered pitchers of vodka and cranberry juice with a fistful of straws in lieu of individual glasses, and I filled my mouth with the syrupy stuff, hoping the additional alcohol would somehow fend off the ache spreading through my skull. Was this how my mother drank? Because she’d rather step off the edge into darkness than spend another second rooted to the same spot?

When a new song with a salsa beat came on, the pianist and the two girls leapt up. They danced their way to the edge of the balcony so they could lean over the railing and wave their arms in time. Across the table from me, Ming pulled Kat to her feet. Mark and Lakshmi followed, then Cindy and Terrence. I reached for the pitcher and drank.

The pianist turned back and beckoned for Frankie and James and me to join them. I shook my head, but wasn’t surprised when Frankie tossed back her hair and let out a piercing whoop.

James shot me a sidelong glance.

The throbbing had crept around to my temples. “You should go,” I said.

“I’m going to need a couple more drinks if we have to listen to this crap all night.” He tipped the pitcher toward him, took one sip and scrunched up his face. “I haven’t had anything this bad since I was a fourteen-year-old girl.”

In spite of myself I giggled. He winked at me and went to join the others.

Alone at the table, I looped my bag on my arm and mapped out my path to the staircase, trying to gauge whether I’d be able to slip away without anyone noticing.

A moment later, Frankie was by my side, dabbing a piece of Kleenex to her sweaty forehead. “But we just got here,” she said.

“Stay. You can catch a cab. Kat will make sure you get home.”

Her face tensed with concern. “I’m coming with you.” When I objected again, she said, “Gretchen, I’ve slept a total of seven hours in the last two days. I’m coming with you.”

While Frankie waited in line for the restroom, I waved hastily at my friends, hoping to escape without a fuss. Only Kat came over to say good-bye. “Don’t be a stranger,” she ordered. “And definitely bring Frankie out again. She’s the best.”

“Isn’t she?” I said. A remix of an eighties dance hit came on—another song I’d first heard at this club over a decade earlier. Suddenly I felt impossibly tired, impossibly old.

At the head of the stairs, James was leaning on the banister, swigging a beer. “Bedtime?” he said.

“Listen,” I heard myself say. “If you’re in town for a while, maybe we could grab a drink sometime?” The question reverberated in my head; I didn’t think I’d ever spoken those words. I was glad it was too crowded for any of my friends to observe this interaction.

Seconds ticked by. And then he hooked his thumb beneath my chin and waited until I met his gaze. “Okay,” he said. “I’d like that.”

I gave him my number, and then I hurried down the stairs to Frankie who was waiting by the door, bobbing her head to the beat, entirely oblivious to what I’d dared to do.

Outside, the rain had ceased and the air was a soggy sponge. Frankie and I slid into a taxi, a boxy royal-blue Toyota that reeked of synthetic floral air freshener. Chinese pop music blared on the stereo, drowning out the ringing in my ears but not my thumping heartbeat. I slumped back in my seat and tried to calm down.

Frankie reached her arms skyward and gave herself a good stretch.

“Did you have fun?” I asked.

“I had a blast.” She placed her fingertips on my forearm. “How about you?”

“A blast,” I agreed, though with each passing second, I could feel my mortification swell inside me

The taxi hurtled away from the river and down a side street lined with brightly lit twenty-four-hour eateries that catered to the ravenous post-clubbing crowd. I counted parked cars to make myself stop thinking about James.

Frankie rested her head on the windowpane, closed her eyes and let out a satisfied sigh. “This is going to be an amazing year,” she mumbled, barely audible over the radio. Her jet lag had finally caught up with her. “I’m really happy we’re together, in the same place.”

She didn’t appear to expect a response. In the moonlight her skin was ghostly pale, her face placid as a lake. I imagined my own face in sleep, my sullen mouth and creased brow.

When the taxi neared Frankie’s pink-tiled building, I nudged her awake. She yawned and thanked me for bringing her along and wrapped her thin arms around me in a big hug.

“See you on Monday,” I said brightly, even though the thought of facing Shuting and Fiona filled me with dread.

“First day of work,” she sang back. She got out of the cab, pushed open the glass doors to her building and disappeared into an elevator.

When I turned back, the cab driver was eyeing me in the rearview mirror, waiting to be told where to go.

“Queen Astrid Park, please,” I yelled over the bubblegum harmonies of a Mandopop girl band.

The driver shouted back, “Nice area. You just visiting? You not from Singapore?”

I switched to Singlish. “No,
lah,
uncle. I’m Singaporean. I just move back. From States.”

Perhaps not completely convinced, the driver switched from English to Chinese. “You still can speak Chinese?”

“
Hao jiu mei yong,
” I answered. It’s been a while.

“Good you haven’t forgotten,” he said. “My kids’ Chinese is very poor.”

“Young people,” I said.

“Young people,” he agreed.

Leaning back, I took in the lights streaming past my window, the tourists still drinking pitchers of sangria at sidewalk bars. I tried to picture myself with James at one of those tables, and the image made me cringe. He probably wouldn’t call anyway, and if he did, I could make up an excuse.

The taxi turned off the main road, and the stately, colonial-style houses of my parents’ neighborhood came into view. As we wound our way through silent streets, I let my eyelids shut, and this time I saw Paul.

We were sitting at his parents’ dinner table in Irvine, California. His father was telling this loud awful story, with lots of fist pounding and fork waving, and his mother and brother and sister all screamed with laughter. But I just sat there, smiling blankly, unable to concentrate, because Paul had my hand under the table, and with his index finger in my palm, he spelled out, “I love you,” over and over again.

The taxi approached the gate. My parents’ house loomed on the hill, with its Spanish red-tile roof and ornate wrought-iron balconies, and even in the darkness, its opulence embarrassed me. I rummaged through my purse before giving the driver a twenty-percent tip, which he, thinking I’d miscounted, tried to hand back as change.

5

A
FTER A DAY SPENT MOPING
around the house, pretending not to be waiting for my phone to ring, I awoke on Monday morning determined to put the events of Saturday night behind me. I told myself I needed to make the most of my remaining time here in Singapore. So, instead of lying in bed with the covers over my head, waiting for Ba’s car to pull out of the driveway, I showered, dressed, and hurried downstairs, stopping in front of my mother at the dining table.

She lowered her newspaper and looked up expectantly, revealing the stray breadcrumbs on her chin. I wanted to reach out and wipe them away. “I have to go to work now, but I’ll be home for dinner. I’ll see you then?”

She blinked rapidly and glanced over at my father who was standing by the front door. “Of course, ducky. Where else would I be?”

Ba was rifling through his briefcase, pretending not to observe my exchange with Ma.

I told him he was right; it didn’t make sense to drive separate cars to work.

He zipped shut the briefcase, cracked the knuckles of both hands, and said, “Come. Let’s go.” To Ma, he said, “We’ll see you tonight.”

On the Pan Island Expressway, as the Mercedes crawled along in rush-hour traffic, Ba and I listened to the morning news on the classical music station, delivered by a local newscaster in a fluty British accent. Headlines included the rise in bicycle theft on the island’s eastern side, the arrest of a Swedish couple who’d streaked down a main road on a Saturday night, and the launch of the government’s annual “Speak Good English” campaign to discourage the use of Singlish. The things that constituted news in this country always amused me, but today I was too preoccupied to make jokes.

Outside my window, the boxy bungalows gave way to modern condominiums like Frankie’s, then to towering public housing developments painted cheery shades of lemon, lavender, mint. I waited for the broadcast to end before turning down the volume. “Ba, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

His eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror and back to the road. “Yes?”

“Since I’m only going to be at Lin’s for a few months, I’d like to do more than just administrative stuff. Maybe I can work on something actually related to soy sauce?”

His face brightened. He gave the steering wheel a jaunty slap and wagged his index finger at me. “I told Ma you’d come around.”

I smiled back, determined to do whatever it took to avoid having to work with Fiona and Shuting, even if it meant assuming more responsibility at the company.

Ba took his eyes off the road for an instant and looked straight at me. “Xiao Xi, I’m proud of you.”

I swallowed my guilt. It pained me that something this small could give him such joy.

Ba had kept quiet when I chose not to major in business or economics in college. He protested much less than my mother when I decided to go back to graduate school to study music education. Chinese parents typically inserted themselves into every aspect of their children’s lives, but not Ba. Having interpreted his silence to mean he just wanted me to be happy, I’d felt lucky to have him.

Now, taking in Ba’s gleeful expression, I realized that what I’d always read as contentedness was simply an indifference toward any choice I made that didn’t involve working at Lin’s. If I wasn’t going to join the family business, he really didn’t care how I spent my time.

My father grew serious. “Actually-
ah,
there is something Uncle Robert and I need help with. Something you’d be perfect for.” He paused as though to build suspense.

I asked what it was.

“We need someone to take over the US Expansion Project.”

The US Expansion Project was Lin’s largest growth opportunity and Cal’s pet cause. It dawned on me that at some point over the weekend, Ba and Uncle Robert had reached a resolution.

“What’s happening to Cal?” I asked.

This time, Ba kept his eyes on the road. “He’s gone.”

“What do you mean gone?” I said. “Is he back in the Maldives? When is he coming back?”

Ba squinted up at the roof of the car as if searching for answers. “Cal no longer works for Lin’s.”

I couldn’t believe his words, and the lack of emotion behind them. My cousin was the only one among us grandchildren who’d shown any interest in the company. And he was the oldest grandchild, the sole boy.

“And Uncle Robert agrees?” I asked.

“No choice,
lah
,” Ba said. “He has to agree.”

His cavalier attitude stunned me. I’d expected Ba and Uncle Robert to reprimand Cal one more time. I’d expected them to insist that he run all future decisions, big and small, by them before he made a move. I never thought firing my cousin was an option.

When I pressed Ba to explain his decision, his fingers tightened around the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. “What Cal did was unacceptable. I don’t care who he is, he cannot stay.”

No matter how I tried, I could not imagine Uncle Robert firing his own son. I couldn’t even imagine my stoic father going through with the plan. Ba and Cal had grown close during my early teens, around the time when I’d refused to sit through any more of my father’s tastings. Back in those days, he’d invite Cal to the house every time he wanted to test a new product or sample a competitor’s sauce. He and Cal spent hours debating the quality of sauces the way others discussed their favorite sports teams. They devised a complicated ranking system and recorded the results on hand-drawn charts that my father still had. If ever I felt the slightest tug of jealousy, I needed only to remind myself that as long as Ba had Cal, I was free to do whatever I pleased. As far as I could tell, Cal’s sisters, Rose and Lily had taken a similar approach; both of them had recently chosen full-time motherhood over careers.

My next question seemed so absurd I almost didn’t ask. “Who’s going to run Lin’s if not Cal?”

My father grew very still. “Xiao Xi, Cal does not understand why Ahkong founded this company. I would rather give up everything than leave Lin’s to him.”

The air around us seemed to thicken. I fumbled with the air-conditioning controls.

In the adjacent lane, a small pigtailed girl pressed her face to the car window and stuck out her tongue at me. I checked if Ba had noticed, but he stared straight ahead. He took the next exit, pulled into the factory parking lot and killed the ignition. For a while he was silent; then, as we walked up the stairs, he said, “Don’t worry,
lah
. I’ll take care of this. You only need to focus on two things: spending time with Ma, and learning what you can while you’re here at Lin’s.”

The enormity of the US Expansion Project dawned on me. Suddenly my increased responsibilities weren’t so appealing, after all. I followed Ba into his office. “Hang on,” I said, pausing to shut the door. “I’m not sure I can do this. I’m nowhere near qualified.”

A hint of a smile played in the corners of Ba’s mouth. “You know more than you think. You’ve been around soy sauce your whole life.”

When I continued to object, his patience thinned. “
Aiyah
, I’ll be here. Uncle Robert will be here.” He thought for a moment. “And if Frankie is as diligent as she was in college, she’ll help, too.”

“Put Frankie in charge,” I said. “I’ll be her assistant.” I pointed out that Frankie had a fancy business degree. She knew all about consumer research and emerging markets and product positioning. I paused, trying to come up with more business terms. “You remember she used to be a management consultant, right?”

Ba cupped one hand in the other and cracked his knuckles extra loud, causing me to cringe. “But what does she know about soy sauce?”

I opened my mouth, unwilling to admit defeat, and when nothing came out, Ba pounded his desk in triumph. “
Han-ah.
Get to work.”

On my way out, he stopped me. “Your uncle will make the announcement. Until then, please-
ah
, not a word.”

I assured him I could keep a secret.

Before I closed the door, I turned. “What will you do if Cal won’t leave?”

He looked baffled. “This is a family business, not the WWF.”

His joke made me laugh, but I wasn’t so sure.

I left Ba’s office just in time to catch Frankie emerging from the stairwell for her first day of work. Clad in a knee-length shift dress and patent leather peep-toe pumps, her damp hair slicked back in a bun, Frankie gleamed like a showroom car. All activity on the office floor came to a halt. Shuting stopped feeding paper into the shredder despite the machine’s insistent whine. Fiona’s voice trailed off in midconversation with Jason, who spun around to see what he was missing. In those heels, Frankie towered over the women and most of the men.

“Gretch, hi,” she said, oblivious to the stir she’d caused.

I showed Frankie to her office, a room formerly used as a storage closet. In preparation for her arrival, the other admins and I had piled the boxes of documents in one corner, but the closet and shelves still overflowed with stacks of printer paper, spare staplers, and six different models of ballpoint pens.

Frankie insisted she didn’t mind. “Interesting choice of paint,” she said, taking in the pale-pistachio walls. “Very calming.”

“Sorry about all the gawking. You’d think they’d never seen a white person before.”

“Oh, it’s not so bad,” she said.

After I gave her a brief overview of everyone on the office floor—“Avoid the drama vultures in marketing; be nice to Fiona, she has more power than you’d expect”—Frankie and I hunkered down to evaluate the work Cal had already done on the US Expansion Project. Given my cousin’s love of shortcuts, his tendency to keep crucial information to himself, and his questionable vision of a more modern Lin’s, we were skeptical about whether his recommendations could be trusted.

From the start, I told Frankie she was in charge, and the arrangement seemed to please her. She got to work at once, methodically making her way through Cal’s files, hunting down marketing and sales people—and even my father—when I was of no help. If she noticed the way her new colleagues whispered about her American assertiveness, she didn’t let it bother her.

In contrast, I treated the work like a college class: doing the minimum it took to get by. I tried to coerce Frankie into taking breaks by showing her hilarious pictures I’d found on the Internet and bombarding her computer with inane instant messages. She’d indulge me for a minute or two before returning to work, but after I emailed her a third cat picture, she spun around to face me and said, “Look, I realize your uncle hired me mostly as a favor to you, but I really think I can make a difference around here.”

Duly chastised, I began to read the files she deemed most relevant, and the more I learned, the more I had to admit that some of this stuff was actually interesting. Who knew that specialty food producers from bastions of Americana as Gainesville, Florida, and Louisville, Kentucky, had begun to experiment with artisanal soy sauce? According to a prominent food magazine, the Kentucky producer even aged its sauce in old bourbon barrels for an added whiff of smoke and local color. Top chefs all over America were raving about the depth of flavor the smoky sauce brought to dry-aged filet mignon and buttery black cod. An avant-garde chef in Chicago had infused the soy sauce into butter. The resulting concoction was spread on bite-sized brioche, topped with tobiko caviar, and served as the
amuse bouche
to his seventeen-course tasting menu.

One didn’t need to pore over these files to discern the burgeoning excitement for all things natural and handmade—after all, Frankie and I both hailed from San Francisco, the epicenter of the artisanal food movement. And yet Lin’s was edging away from its traditional brewing methods.

I filled Frankie in: several months earlier, Uncle Robert’s first move as president had been to purchase the factory’s first industrial fiberglass tanks, a decision my father had opposed. To avoid further angering Ba, the tanks had been housed in a shed, away from Ahkong’s jars and out of sight. The new additions were large gray-green vats, as different from one of our jars as a Yamaha violin from a Stradivarius. But Uncle Robert argued that each fiberglass tank had five times the capacity of a single jar. Furthermore, the workers would no longer have to hand-stir the fermenting soybeans since a simple twist of a valve would agitate the contents of each tank. As a result, fermentation would be reduced from six months to four, shortening production time and lowering costs.