Death Duties

The other day, Amanda and I were walking to our local chai-beng stall for lunch. We took our usual shortcut from the condo through the neighbouring HDB block. We were chatting. Well, at least I was, rabbiting on about how I hoped my siblings and I never quarreled over our parents’ estate when they died.

            “Though history isn’t on our side,” I said, sidestepping a bra that had fallen to the ground from someone’s laundry above. “When my mother’s father died, they laid out his body in the living room where people came to pay their respects. Apparently, all the brothers and sisters were in the next room for the reading of the will.”

            “Wait, the body was in the living room?” Amanda said. She glanced up. “Who does that?”

            “Old-fashioned families. My grandparents were laid out at home.”

            “How could you ever sit in that room and watch TV again?” Amanda said. She glanced up again.

            “So anyway,” I went on, “my mother and all her siblings were fighting, accusing each other of getting too much money. My First Aunt said that because my grand-dad had given Mother a car for her graduation, the value of that car should be taken out of her share of the estate.”

“That’s harsh!” Amanda murmured. I caught her looking up again.

“Tell it. And then my First Uncle said, yeah, well, since Father sent you to Yale, should we take the cost of that education off your share too?”

“Good point!” Amanda said.

“They never spoke to one another again for, like, 20 years until the funeral of my Sixth Uncle Ben!”

            “Wow,” Amanda said, her neck craned upwards.

            This time, I looked up. Above me were neat parallel rows of laundry, the poles festooned with colourful sheets, tee-shirts and nighties. “Seriously, why are you always looking up? What is up there?”

            “I’m so scared something will come crashing down on me!”

            “Like what, a bra?” I giggled at the image of a Victoria’s Secret strapless braining Amanda and putting her into a coma.

            In response, Amanda steered me closer to the edge of the path, next to the parked cars. “You laugh, but did you not read about that guy who threw one of those rented bikes off his balcony? It’s a miracle it didn’t land on someone!”

            “That happened? Gawd,” I sighed. “That’s worse that those falling flower pots!”

Amanda tossed her luxuriant hair. “People always say I’m paranoid, but really, it’s just not safe to step out of the house, these days!”

            Later that weekend, somewhat coincidentally, we all found ourselves attending the wake of Amanda’s Aunt Pek Ching.

            “She’s in a happier place now,” someone whispered to her husband, Uncle Joo. He could only nod, his eyes red from crying.

            Next to me, Amanda sniffed. “Oh, please,” she murmured. “She had a house in Paris with a view of the Eiffel Tower!”

            I was nudged in the ribs. I looked down to find Saffy staring up at me. She swiveled her eyes to her right. “Guess who just walked in?”

            I looked around, and then nudged Amanda. “Your Uncle Mark just arrived!”

            Amanda sighed.

            Uncle Mark spent most of his youth in San Francisco where he did hard drugs the way Saffy does deep fried chicken. Which is to say, with a committed ferocity not seen since the days of the Vikings. Of course, it’s all taken a toll on his brain, causing him chronic paranoid delusions. Lately, he’s convinced that the people in his head are accusing him of sleeping with someone called Janet. 

            “Who’s Janet?” Saffy wondered once.

            “There is no Janet,” Amanda replied. “His mind is gone!”

            Uncle Mark pushed his way to the front of the condolence line where poor Uncle Joo stood, sobbing. “Ay, Joo!” Uncle Mark’s voice penetrated to the far corners of the room like a souped-up Bose speaker. “It’s not true, you know, what they’re saying!”

            Uncle Joo sniffled into his handkerchief. “What?” he managed.

            Uncle Mark drew himself up. “They’re saying I slept with Janet! I never did!”

            Uncle Joo gasped. “You slept with Janet?”

            Saffy nudged me again. “Who’s Janet?”
            “Uncle Joo’s wife!” I hissed.

            Saffy’s eyes widened. “Her name is Janet? I thought it was Pek-something?”

            “Please keep up! Janet’s her Christian name!”
            “No, no! I never slept with Janet!” Uncle Mark was saying. Uncle Joo looked faint. “They’re all lying! It’s Jane, I slept with!”

Somewhere in the crowd, someone gasped. “You slept with Mark?”

“Wow!” said Saffy. “Didn’t see that coming!”

            Sharyn says you never have to look very far to find crazy rich Asians.

Job Satisfaction

When we were growing up, Mother would always tell us that when she was growing up, there were only three career options for girls. “You could be a nurse, a teacher, or a nun! The good thing, according to my parents, was that they’re all recession proof!”

            My sister, aged seven at the time, frowned. “A nun? That’s a career?”

            “Well, the Church doesn’t call it a career as such,” Mother said, as she delicately adjusted the diamond earring on her right earlobe. “It’s something fancier. A vocation!”

            “Really? Already? Where are we going?” Jack piped up.

            “Vocation, Jack. Not vacation!” I told him. 

            “So, where are we going?” Jack repeated.

            Meanwhile, like a dog that’s got its jaw clamped over a beef bone, Michelle was still gnawing over her career options. “Well, I’m not sure I want to be a nurse, a teacher or a nun. What else can I be?”

            “You’d look so good in a nurse’s outfit,” Mother said as she looked at her only daughter. “You have the figure for it!”

            Years later, Michelle would say that if that kind of comment wasn’t a ready made recipe for a case of raging adult bulimia, she didn’t know what was. “What kind of thing is that to say to a nine-year-old? Maybe that’s why I ended up being an accountant. I was never able to aim higher.”

            “If you recall,” I told her, “at one stage, you wanted to be a homeless beggar. I think being an accountant counts as aiming higher.”

            “I only said it to spite Mother,” Michelle said. “And I’d just watched ‘Down and out in Beverly Hills’. I thought Nick Nolte was so hot!”

            Anyway, as it turned out, Mrs Hahn’s children all turned out to be something of a disappointment, career-wise. Telling your mahjong kakis that your children are respectively an unambitious accountant, a deadbeat journalist and an unemployed musician doesn’t quite have the same ring as announcing, as Auntie Soo-ling once did, that Marcus Junior is an astro-physicist with NASA while Joanne is a neurosurgeon at the Mayo Clinic.

            “You’re not deadbeat!” Michelle said the other day on SKYPE in a rare display of sisterly support.

            “Ugh, it sure feels that way. I was just on willrobotstakemyjob.com. Have you heard about it?”

            On my laptop, my sister took a spoonful of yoghurt. “Tell me?”

            “It’s this website where you tell it your job and then it tells you what the probability is that your job will be taken over by a robot. I have an 11% chance of being replaced by Siri!”

            Michelle’s fuzzy image frowned. If you squinted, she could have been nine again. “Eleven percent is really low, isn’t it?”

            “You wouldn’t say the same thing if you had an 11% chance of getting cancer,” I said.

            “I see your point,” Michelle conceded immediately. A thought occurred to her. “Did you see the odds for a nun?”

            “I did. It said ‘no jobs found’!”

            Michelle was triumphant. “I knew it! I can’t wait to tell that woman!”

            “You’d be totally safe if you were a teacher or a nurse! Mother was at least right on that front. Those jobs are recession and technology proof!”

            “Oh, Jack asked me to see what it said about his new job as a bank clerk,” I rememberd.

            “And?”

            “It said ‘You’re doomed’.”

            “Oh dear.”

            “He didn’t seem to care too much,” I told her.

            When I told the girls about willarobottakemyjob.com, Amanda barely managed to look interested. “I don’t need some dumb website to tell me that my job is totally secure,” she said. “There are only a dozen or so lawyers in this town that can do what I do, and I’m smarter, I’m prettier and I dress better than all of them!”

            “You get extra marks for self-confidence,” I told her with deep admiration.

            “It also helps to be rich,” she confided.

Saffy, meanwhile, had immediately whipped out her iPhone and begun typing in ‘human resources manager’. “Point five five percent?” she moaned. “Oh crap! It says my job is totally safe! That’s not the result I’m looking for! I want to be retrenched. I hate my job!”

            I looked over her shoulder. “Oh look, there’s a 9 percent growth in your industry!”

            I had thought to be supportive, but Saffy’s magnificent bosom deflated to its lowest possible volume. “That’s even more depressing! Jack is so lucky! He’s totally doomed!”

            Amanda said that sometimes, it worries her that Saffy is actually allowed to speak in public.

            

Temperature Control

It may have escaped your attention, but the past couple of days have been really hot. Like, really hot. The kind of hot that if you were a girl, your make-up would melt and run down your face.

            “That doesn’t really happen, does it?” I asked Amanda the other day.

            “It might if you use really cheap make-up,” she said in the same tone Kim Kardashian might use when she’s giving shade to someone she really hates. Like Taylor Swift. “But then again, I don’t really sweat, so I don’t know. It’s never happened to me.”

            “It happened to me the other day when I was walking from City Hall to the library,” Saffy piped up. Her impressive bosom trembled at the indignity of the memory. “It was so hot, I literally started sweating the minute I came out of Raffles City. And the thing is, I was wondering why people kept staring at me funny and when I went to the loo to tidy up, I got a fright in the mirror. My mascara had literally run down the side of my face. I mean, I looked like that hot chick in ‘The Mummy!’”

            “What hot chick?” Amanda asked.

            Saffy gave Amanda a look. “The mummy!” she said eventually. “I looked like the mummy!”

            “Why are you wearing cheap make-up?” Amanda replied.

            Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Because I work in HR and I don’t earn a hundred thousand dollars a month like you do!” she began, but you could tell her heart wasn’t really into the argument because she sighed and collapsed back into the chair.

            That’s the other thing about this heat. The air-con unit in our living room decided to call it a day over the weekend and just died. Which means we’ve all been forced to live most of our time in our respective bedrooms, but as Amanda pointed out, after a while, there’s really only so much one can do in the bedroom without going stir-crazy with claustrophobia. “Especially if you’re single,” she added darkly.

            So, we’ve had to congregate in the living room for company. The worst thing is that we only have one fan and it’s one of those round Dyson doughnut table fans – the one without any blades and air just blows out of the round hole. And the reason why that’s the worst thing is because while the fan looked really good when we were shopping in Courts, in the midst of all that cold air-con, it doesn’t cool all that much in real life heat-wave conditions.

            “I’m just not getting any air!” Saffy moaned as she simultaneously tried to lie supine on the couch but without letting any part of her body have any contact with the warm fabric. “It’s so hot!”

            “It’s already cranked all the way to the max!” Amanda snapped as she stabbed the remote control in the vague hope that the fan could blow harder.

            “God, I can’t believe we paid five hundred bucks for this fan and it’s still hotter than a hooker’s armpit in here!” Saffy sighed. She noticed our looks and shrugged. “What! It’s a phrase! Barney Chen used it the other day, so I’m stealing it!”

            Leave it to Sharyn to come to our rescue. Later that night, she arrived at our apartment with an old-fashioned stand-up rotary blade fan, and an entire pot of chilled longan soup. She lightly wrung out a cloth that had, on her instructions half an hour before she arrived, been chilling in a sink full of ice cubes, and draped it over the head of the fan. As one, we sank in front of and moaned at the effect of the cool air.

            “Oh my God, you are a genius!” Amanda said, her eyes closed in bliss.

            “Aiyoh, you all, ah, why you neh-ber call your air-con man come and fix your air-con? Weather this hot, how to tahan without air-con?”

            “Apparently, he’s super-busy!” Saffy said. “Everyone has been calling him. He’s coming tomorrow!”

            “I offered to pay him double his rate and he still couldn’t come!” said Amanda in the perplexed tone of someone for whom that tactic has always worked in her experience.

            “Wah, today, so hot, when I walk from my bus to my block, all my make-up run down my face!”

            “Why do people keep buying cheap make-up?” Amanda demanded.

            “Because I work in HR and don’t earn tree hun-drer tao-sun dollar a month like you, mah!”

            Saffy nudged Sharyn. “That’s exactly what I said!” she told her.

            Amanda says sometimes it feels like we’re living with Donald Trump.