Eliza woke me the next morning, sitting on my bed and prodding me insistently in the side with her fingers until I opened my eyes. It was bright out, and the sun shone relentlessly in from the open window.
"Hey, sleepyhead," she teased. "Sleep well? I guess the answer is obvious, I've been trying to get you to wake up for ages."
"Uh huh," I said, groggily trying to raise my head and prop myself up on my elbows. "What time is it?" I tried squinting at my watch, which didn't help much. I'd kept it on Mountain Time on purpose to make sure Eliza knew when to take her medicine while we were on the plane, but my mind wasn't awake enough yet to do mental calisthenics on time zone differences, especially when we'd crossed the International Dateline to add to the confusion.
"No idea," said Eliza. "Breakfast time, from the looks of it. And time to be out and about, before the day slips away from us."
"Ooops!" Now that my mind was waking up, I started to panic. Hopefully, I hadn't slept in so late that we'd missed our appointment. Frantically counting the hours off on my fingers, I deduced that it was about 9 AM, which was a relief. Things were still on track. Doing this without risking mobile roaming charges was painful, it'd have been much easier for my phone to do the navigation and time zone math for me.
"Would you have some recommendations for breakfast, please?" I asked at the front desk, which was now staffed by a girl who looked about the same age as the boy we'd had the night before. She seemed lightly tanned, with big eyes and slightly curly hair. I couldn't quite figure out her nationality because she didn't seem Chinese but was too fair to be an Indian, and too Asian to be a Latina.
"You can try Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf," she suggested, in a smooth, melodious voice that had an accent similar to that of the boy last night, but less staccato. "It's at Chinatown Point. Just across the road only." With a pen, she marked the route on the Google Maps printout I showed her.
"Actually, we'd like to try something more local," said Eliza. "We kind of agreed we'd spend this trip doing stuff we can't do at home."
"Then maybe you can go Hong Lim Food Centre instead," said the girl. "Try nasi lemak, which is rice cooked in coconut milk, or carrot cake. It's very near also, just behind Chinatown Point." She helpfully marked the spot with an "x" and highlighted it.
Carrot cake… that was something which sounded familiar, all right. I'd been hoping to get something more exotic, but if that was what was recommended by the locals, we'd have to try it.
"Ni yao hei de hai shi bai de (你要黑的还是白的)?" asked the stallholder, before looking at us more closely and sensing our non-comprehension. "You want black or white?"
What kind of a question was that? Carrot cake was brown, wasn't it? But then, I saw no signs of cake or frosting either, only a dome-shaped black frying pan with two handles over an open flame.
"One of each, please," Eliza said decisively. Of course. She was determined to try all the things.
"And we'll be eating it here," I added, trying to be helpful. For emphasis, I pointed to one of the nearby tables, which was bolted to the slightly grimy-looking tiled floor and topped with brightly coloured plastic. All the backless stools, with flat round seats in the same material as the tabletops, were bolted down too. I vaguely wondered at this – in the vlogs, everyone said Singapore was extremely safe and had almost zero crime, so why would they need to protect the stools from being stolen? It was a question I'd probably never get the answer to.
They served our two carrot cakes up on oval plastic plates, just as brightly coloured as the tops of the tables and stools. There was a small mound of what I now had figured out was probably chili pepper paste at the side of each plate, and we were given matching plastic chopsticks and spoons to eat it with.
Mom and Dad had occasionally gotten the odd chow mein or sweet and sour chicken from Panda Express, so I kind of knew how chopsticks worked, but Eliza, with her dainty ways, was far more adept at using them than I was. The carrot cakes were hardly what I would call cake, they were blobby bite-size cubes of a jellylike, floury substance, stir-fried with egg and some funny translucent brown specks of stuff that were the saltiest of all. Whenever I tried picking them up with my chopsticks, I invariably squeezed too hard and smashed the cubes, so I ended up using the chopsticks to push them into my spoon instead.
"Here, try some of this," said Eliza, feeding me a piece of black carrot cake with her chopsticks. I'd been the wuss who took white, of course, which suited her fancy to play the role of intrepid traveller. Two meals in Singapore and the two Asian meals we'd had on the plane were enough for me to conclude that the main difference between the Asian palate and mine was salt content, but this was something else in a weird and wonderful way. It had this strange mix of salty and sweet in it. Pretty soon the two plates of carrot cake weren't mine or hers anymore; we helped ourselves freely from both plates and fed each other playfully. That was the best breakfast I'd had in quite a while, and the food itself wasn't exactly the main reason why.
To save Eliza some walking, I asked her to wait for me at Chinatown Point where there was air conditioning, while I went back to the hostel to pick up the other stuff I needed. Before bed the previous night, I'd unpacked and unrolled my Sunday best shirt and pants and ironed them in the laundry room. They now hung in a garment bag which I tied to the bungee cord on my school backpack to keep my hands free.
We'd been stumped with food for long enough; it was now time for me to act on the pro tip I'd picked up from my online research before we muddled through any more meals. Bugis was five subway stations away in the loop that was the Downtown Line, which was maybe a roundabout way of getting there, but I wanted our subway rides to be practically door-to-door for Eliza's sake. A block and a half down the main road, we got to our destination: a grey high-rise building with a large open-air atrium which housed local stores of all sizes, most of which sold books or stationery, furnished in bare-bones concrete and tile. We took the escalator up to the biggest store in that building, easily identifiable by its bright red logo.
"Who would name a bookstore Popular?" Eliza threw back her head and laughed. "That's like starting a restaurant and calling it Tasty's."
I laughed along with her, knowing I had one more card up my sleeve. Wait till she saw what book we were coming to buy!
"Look at this," I said, picking up a copy and showing it to her. "It isn't R-rated, no matter what the title says."
We both doubled up in laughter again, because apparently in this country, food was the source of the ultimate pleasure, and nothing made that more obvious than a book called the Makansutra. It was the complete, illustrated version (well, the only version), and we'd finally understand exactly what we were eating and where we should go for the best street food. Of course, it did occur to me that I might not mind finding its raunchier cousin and getting that too, but that thought did not make it from my brain to my mouth, nor my hands nor my wallet for that matter.
Zipping that book away in my backpack, we headed back into the subway. It was 11:30 AM, and we had to be at our next stop, the big one, at noon. We took the East-West Line for three stations to Tanjong Pagar and followed the signs to exit at Peck Seah Street.
The row of shops I was looking for was just one little street away, where there were several streets of two- and three- storey row houses, like the one our hostel was in. While some of the buildings in our street were tinged and streaked with black, and they were all a multitude of clashing colours, the houses on this street had impeccable paint jobs and some of them had swanky restaurants at street level. Up close, we could see the floor-to-ceiling louvred windows on the second and third floors, painted a different colour from the houses, hanging ajar to let out the heat, with painted wooden balustrades to keep people from falling out. I had no idea how old these houses were, but Dad really liked it that our house came from the 1890's and spent a week of his vacation time every year only on DIY projects. So, I understood exactly how much work it was to make these houses look nice and new. The restaurants weren't what I was looking for, though; instead, I was searching among the many bridal boutiques that dotted the area, trying to find the one I'd booked.
Eliza might never get a chance to be old enough for marriage, but the surprise I'd planned for her was a photo shoot, normally done for wedding couples some weeks before the big day, with an assortment of costumes for her to choose from. They'd found it a little strange when I asked to book a pre-wedding photo shoot without a wedding, but when I explained my age and our circumstances, they were more than happy to oblige. We wouldn't have the chance to do any fittings or alterations, so I'd given them Eliza's clothing sizes, happily supplied by her little sister Edith, and my measurements so they could figure out what we could wear off-the-rack.
"Sorry, Mr. Brandon," they'd said over Zoom. "We don't have any suits your size without tailoring."
"That's OK," I'd said. "I can bring something of my own." Hence, the Sunday church outfit, the best clothes I owned, had come with me in my backpack.
Pushing the glass door open, our arrival was announced by a chime going "ding-dong", and a petite Chinese lady in a dress, strappy heeled shoes and cardigan came out to greet us.
"Erm, we're here to see Ms. Jerilyn Low," I said, hoping I wasn't butchering the name. In my rounds of calling bridal studios, a surprising number of Singaporean people had standard English first names, but with a wider range of variations than I'd been used to, and of course, I couldn't make sense of any of the last names at all. "We booked a photo shoot for today."
"Mr. Brandon and Ms. Williams, is it? Come in, I'm Jerilyn," she said. "You said you want one studio shoot with Asian costume and one Western shoot on location, right?"
I nodded. "Yeah, I think that's about right." Turning to Eliza, I said, "This is the first item on your checklist. Nabobs, remember? A nabob is supposed to mean a Mogul chief, whatever that is, and it also could mean a European person who got rich in the East. Either way, we get a chance today to pretend we're rich Asian people and rich Europeans." I hesitated. "Erm, that sounded worse than I thought it would. Ooops."
"That was my bad, I guess," Eliza replied. "I shouldn't have made a wish list out of a book that was written way before the word 'woke' became a thing."
"Maybe we could think about this differently," I suggested. "Take today as a stand-in for my promposal instead. You said I'll never become prom king, so I've gotta find a way to do a one-up on prom some way or another."
"I'm sorry," said Eliza, bowing her head in contrition. "I didn't really mean it. Or rather, I never thought you'd remember I said that after so many years."
"It's the truth," I said, trying to erase as much of the hurt from my voice as I could. "You were just stating a fact. There's no prom at the Air Force Academy Prep School, so I can't be prom king when I won't have a prom to go to."
"You could go with me," faltered Eliza hesitantly. "I'd ask you."
Prom would be almost a whole year away, and we both knew it was highly unlikely Eliza would be there, barring a miracle of the highest proportions. Nonetheless, we both needed that fantasy, if we didn't want to fall apart right there and then.
"So, you'll give me a promposal, then," I said. "Absolutely no pressure at all. If it helps, I'm saying yes, one thousand percent."
"No pressure," said Eliza, giggling. "Yeah, right. This is stressing me out already. So much for feminism, now I know what you poor guys have to go through."
"Well, you don't have to think about it today," I said. "You just need to pick out which costume you want for our photo shoot."
"This is Korean hanbok," said Jerilyn helpfully. "And this one is Japanese yukata. And then Chinese cheongsam and Nyonya kebaya."
"I think I'll do this one," said Eliza, picking the long sleeve jacket which was embroidered with flowers and decorated with little beads. "It feels a little less like appropriation if it looks like actual clothing. Er, I guess that didn't exactly come out right either."
That, Jerilyn explained, was the kebaya, a traditional outfit for Peranakan women, also known as Nyonyas. They were the Chinese people who lived in Southeast Asia for many generations, unlike most Chinese Singaporeans who had come only three or four generations ago. To match with Eliza, she thought I'd be fine wearing the clothing I'd brought, since she considered the Peranakans more Westernized than the Chinese who migrated to Singapore after them, and so she didn't think a man in Western clothing accompanying a Nyonya would look incongruous.
I thought the studio photo shoot would be something like taking school pictures. How dumb could I possibly have been? Of course, there were all kinds of creative poses where we were supposed to show just how besotted we were with each other, and the photographer, Mr. Tan, kept barking at me.
"Mr. Brandon, don't be so wooden can or not? Relax, leh! Look at her, smile, and be natural, OK? You're supposed to be in love!"
Maybe I was out of practice; the yearly picture days at school were the only times I'd posed for photos of any kind in the past three years, and I'd never been in the mood to smile at the camera. What was the point of pictures, when all the memories I wanted to share with Eliza had dried up? After she started going out with Al, she had no reason to take any photos with me, and by the time they broke off, she said she'd sworn off pictures because she looked awful. It wasn't until now, when her hair had grown back enough to fully cover her head again, that my spidey-sense told me she might be ready; and besides, she was the one who'd asked for this trip, and no trip could possibly be complete without pictures. Mr. Tan's accent did it for me, though, the word "relax" sounded more like "leelak", and it took a couple minutes for me to figure it out, by which time I cracked up a little.
"What about Eliza?" I complained. "Why are you only picking on me?"
"Miss Williams is perfect," said Mr. Tan, earning a petulant look from me. "See her smile? So natural. She is smiling for you, and that is what I want."
I faced Eliza full-on, and that was when I realized I'd been averting my eyes to the camera, the floor, a spot on the wall past her face – anywhere but her. A part of me was still afraid of what I might see, be it indifference or, worse still, the determined pout of the fifteen-year-old femme fatale who'd been dead set on turning the heads of every boy in our high school before she lost all her hair again and shrank into a gaunt, tiny shadow of herself. The one who'd insisted she'd outgrown me.
"Chris," Eliza said, putting a hand on either side of my face and turning me to face her. "Remember our first dance in middle school, back in seventh grade?"
Ironically, Eliza looked healthier now that she wasn't on chemo anymore, with her hair coming back and even gaining a little more weight because there weren't medicines literally eating at her. She was still about the same height and build as she'd been in eighth grade, and as soon as I closed my eyes, shutting out the reality around me, the memories flooded back as if it had only been yesterday. To everybody else, middle school dances were the most awkward thing in the world. Everyone, it seemed, complained about the rules being dumb – you had to face your partner; no moshing, freaking, or grinding; no hanging out in the parking lot outside. To me though, none of those rules really interfered with my connection with Eliza, and so long as we didn't have someone doing something stupid to get the lights turned on, the times I slow-danced with Eliza were when I felt like everything was perfect with the world. We'd just fit naturally around each other, the result of years of togetherness since we were five, with no awkwardness or embarrassment at all. It was so easy to imagine we could be that way year after year, all the way till we grew up and got old.
We grabbed each other just the way we had at that first dance, her hands on my shoulders, and mine around her waist. It was simple, chaste, and not exactly screaming boyfriend-girlfriend at our ages now, but when I opened my eyes again and saw her smile, I believed I was twelve years old again, and it must have showed on my face. Mr. Tan did not try to break our moment, and instead I barely heard the clicking of the camera in the background as he opportunistically captured the best shots while we retraced the motions of what felt like countless times we'd danced in middle school (which probably numbered only about three or four), the easy chemistry of those days returning like old muscle memory.
After about forty-five minutes to an hour, it was time for us to break for lunch before we went to our shoot on location. Not wanting to get chili sauce on my Sunday best shirt, I changed back into my T-shirt and jeans and Eliza into her street clothes. An unspoken understanding seemed to exist between all of our party that the restaurants along our street weren't for us; not all of them were open for lunchtime, and the ones that were hid behind discreet closed doors, probably because of the need for air conditioning. For a country that wasn't Japan or Korea, there were a surprising number of restaurants that said they were Japanese or Korean, and despite the heat, many of the people we saw on our short trek to the Maxwell Road Food Centre were dressed almost for Wall Street (I had to admit, whatever I knew of Wall Street came from what Al told me and The Wolf of Wall Street), with ladies in smart skirt suits and heels, and men in the kind of long sleeve shirts Al had made Mom take us to Neiman Marcus to shop for, saying he needed them to look the part for his presentations at business school. The only thing missing were ties and jackets for the men, which I figured had to be a concession for the weather.
Jerilyn and Mr. Tan ordered Hainanese chicken rice for all of us to share, and we were served two plates of half a chicken in the middle of the table family style, chopped into about ten to fifteen pieces apiece, one with medium brown roasted skin and the other one pale white (which gave me the creeps). The chicken came with two dipping sauces, a thick, dark one which was almost black and had the same salty-sweet taste as the black carrot cake, and a bright red chili sauce with bits of mashed garlic mixed into it. Our rice was a special kind of rice too, it glistened with a translucent yellowish sheen and tasted oily, sort of like rice fried in butter but not quite. We also had small bowls of clear soup, with visible blobs of oil on the surface.
"That's chicken rice," explained Jerilyn when Eliza asked her what it was. "They cook the rice with chicken fat, ginger, garlic and pandan leaf."
"Wow, you guys cook all that stuff at home, like, every day?" Even in the times when Dad was out of town, which was a lot of times because he worked as a Captain with United Airlines flying out of Denver, Mom had somehow managed to schlep us to all our after-school programs and still pull dinner out from the slow cooker or the oven as if by magic. But our food didn't have the same mix of weird flavours and exotic spices the way the food here did. They served it up really fast, too – every time we ordered something at a food stall, it came to us in a matter of minutes.
"Many families in Singapore have helpers, especially if they have kids or elderly at home," said Jerilyn. "Last time when I was a kid, our helper was Filipino, but now they are mostly from Indonesia or Myanmar."
"Where is Myanmar?" asked Eliza.
"Er, it's part of ASEAN." Jerilyn struggled for words to explain. "ASEAN was Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia and Brunei, and then they added on Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar. It's in between Thailand and Vietnam, I think. Some of the Myanmese helpers can speak Chinese, so that is why the families with elderly at home like them."
Ah ha, that rang a bell. Siam and Burma, from those old British classics, were now Thailand and Myanmar. I wondered what they were like, and if changing their names gave them a new identity, just like the way Singapore had become a place where people's lives seemed to be not terribly different from what I knew at home, and yet at every turn, something was strange, whether it was the way they talked, the food they ate, or even the subway they had for getting around town. Strange didn't have to mean worse; in fact, I envied the number of shops and restaurants they packed within one city block, if I could live here for good, I felt like it'd literally take years to visit them all.
"But even with helpers, Singaporeans also like to eat out a lot," Jerilyn continued. "It's very convenient to buy food from neighbourhood coffee shops, and all the air-con shopping malls have food courts."
Coffee shops to me meant Starbucks, and I imagined lines of people picking up sandwiches and frappuccinos for lunch, but that didn't ring true to what I saw around me. We hadn't been to any proper malls yet, because most of the shops at Chinatown Point were still closed when I'd made Eliza wait there for me in the morning, but I could see how malls at home were for people with cars, sprawling low and wide around huge parking lots, while everything in Singapore was built upwards instead of outwards, except for those quaint, compact rows of old houses that dotted our area in Chinatown.
Back at the studio after lunch, Jerilyn took out the dress she'd picked out for our outdoor location shoot. It ticked all the boxes I'd given to her: no white, no trains, something that was for prom rather than a wedding. Eliza needed to get her makeup touched up and the pins in her hair changed out to match, but since her hair wasn't really long enough yet for a fancy hairdo, that got done quickly enough.
We went out in two taxi cabs which Jerilyn booked over the phone, sedans painted in an un-sparkly shade of cobalt blue with the word "Comfort" on their sides, along with the phone number.
"This is the country of self-promotion," whispered Eliza in my ear. "First Popular bookstore, and now Comfort taxis. What's next?"
"There's The Majestic," I quipped, chuckling. "Right next to our subway station. With skyscrapers towering above it to the left and right."
"Uncle, qu (去 = go to) Botanic Garden," instructed Jerilyn in the front seat.
"Getting married, ah?" asked the taxi driver, looking curiously at the two of us in the back of the taxi. Comfort, I had to say, had kind of lived up to its name in the form of a plush bench seat covered in plasticky black imitation leather.
"Er, no," I said. I didn't think Eliza wanted her personal business to be bandied around, so I fished quickly for another truth. "We want to get some photos taken together before I join the military."
"Wah, ang mo kia (红毛仔 = Caucasian kid) also do NS ah? Good. Very good. Your father PR, right? You here how long already?"
I didn't understand all of that, of course, but I managed to piece together the gist of it. It seemed like he approved of people going into the military, and he thought my father was an expat living here. That would make me the son of a nabob, or as close to a nabob as you could get in the 21st century.
"Since I was, erm, five, I think," I said. Playing along was easier than explaining our entire story, and it fit in with the theme of nabobs, my checklist item for the day.
"Ah, this song, I think you and your girlfriend will like." Deftly, the taxi driver turned down the radio and called up a song on his phone paired to the car. "Local song from 1993, when I was in secondary school. It's about a boy who went army and lost his girlfriend."
We walked across the city, and I am with you
I've only just begun
It sure was fun
But then you left
We telephoned, and you hit the tone
When you said you wanna see me
I thought it cool
But I'm no fool
…
So I flew up, and you flew down
And we painted the town
I fell in love
It wasn't enough
…
Look at me, look at you
Can you hear me calling to you
My love for you is so, so true
Can you hear me see me crying to you
Then I got conscripted
And I trained hard for you
Tried to keep you at bay
But little did I know that you'd go astray
And there was him, and there was you
And there was absolutely nothing I could do
Baby girl, my lady Jane
You know I'll never ever feel the same
…
Of your face, of your touch
You know I'll never love someone as much
…
"Miss," said the driver, addressing Eliza after the song had finished, "going army is a good thing. Your boyfriend is protecting our country. Don't be like that and forget him, ah."
Eliza shook her head, stupefied. We both were, that song had hit a little too close to home. "I won't," she promised, in a shaky voice.