“Choose a partner that you can go to war with.” Ancient proverb. Part 1/5

"It was in the 70s. You follow where your husband goes."

The kitchen is getting darker as the afternoon draws on. Ah Ling's eyes have started to swell up now. Tears are about to fall and she pulls excessively the skin of the corners of her mouth to smile showing her slightly yellow and crooked teeth. She is in her 70s after all. Dental health was not such a priority back in those days. Yes, those days. Those days wives follow where their husbands go. She smiles hard with sad wrinkled eyes. Behind those eyes are years of tears, hardships, and extreme tolerance. They forged a will made of steel and a scarred heart, hardened and half dead. It was the betrayal that killed it. It twisted her mind – how could he? She reminds me of Joker, without the streaky white face smeared with tears and without the big fat red lips, a peculiar expression nonetheless.  It has been fifty years but it still hurts she says. Her eery imprint of smiling without smiling. She has been on this foreign soil for over half a century now. She came as the bride of Kam.  No one knows how Joker got his extended freakish smile, some say from his abusive father, and some say he did it himself after his wife has been carved by loan sharks. With Ah Ling, we are sure. It was Kam. He still has the knife dripping with blood gripped firmly in his hand.

Let go. Susan laments.

We are sitting around a small dining table in the kitchen of some council housing. The table is squeezed between the wall and the fridge. A towering grey two-door fridge dominates the kitchen.   The only new electrical appliance there. Other white goods, the washer, the dryer and the stand-alone oven, the extractor fan, turn yellow over time, like Ah Ling's teeth. The kitchen surface, the vinyl floor, and the dining table all feel a bit sticky. The same stickiness you would expect in the student accommodation's kitchen or on the student bar floor. So many people have walked on it before, used and abused it. No one scrubs. Everybody discards something behind, like snakes shredding their jaded skin. It accumulates over time, the dirt, the grease, the history, so ingrained, almost impossible to get rid of now. Every step you take, you just stomp it harder into the core reinforcing the legitimacy of being there. People eventually leave, just to be forgotten. I can feel the stickiness through my socks when walking in the kitchen, miss my shoes that I have left by the front door miserably and said to myself, I should have taken up the offer of a pair of hotel slippers. I am the last one to arrive. Mona brings a chair with a pink cushion out of her bedroom. Sit sit. Chinese like to repeat the words. Okay okay. Eat eat. Sure sure. Thank you thank you. The pink cushion is as old as time.

Ah Ling nods to the white tiles on the wall, “I use a steamer to clean the kitchen wall tiles around three times a year. The stainless-steel splashback I clean it every day. It is easy. The tiles?  Nothing beats a good old steamer.  Costed me 200 pounds but it is worth it. That is why my tiles are still white as new after all these years.”

“Steamer?  How does it work?” said a confused looking Mona.

Susan chimes in, “water…steam.”

This is the third time I have come to Mona's place. Mona lives there with her daughter and her granddaughter, Anna. What a pleasant and polite little girl, eight years old, one tenth of Mona’s age. Small framed. Shy. Running between the kitchen and her bedroom telling PoPo* she does not want the Hainanese chicken rice, the lotus leaf rice or the Vietnamese spring rolls. Anna is waiting for her dad to take her out for dinner. Mona whispers to us, he made the same promise last Saturday. But he did not turn up. He did not even call. Anna got changed into her best dress and her favourite cardigan and sat by the door all day, dozing off, only to be woken up by the noise of opening and closing of doors along the corridor. She went to bed in the same dress and cardigan.  "Just in case Dada comes late and I am ready to go." Some Dada huh? And this Saturday, Anna has learnt.  She is in her tracksuit. Disappointment is a stern teacher whose lessons no one forgets.

Mona knows too well about disappointment. Disappointment is the cruellest killer of her spirit and soul.

Mona, the Ex Mrs Wong.

*Grandma in Cantonese

To be continued.

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