A Chinese Wife: Conversations over a soy sauce dish

A CHINESE WIFE : Conversations over a soy sauce dish

Chapter 6
Confucius says: A Woman’s Virtue is to have Proper Speech

“S’il vous parlez, vous profitez.” said the dark stranger from Martinique. He said this to her when she was on the Caribbean island years ago, at a medical conference. Her husband was in his plenary session and she, against her shyness and lone wolf nature, had had no choice but to join the other wives on an excursion to town. A social programme for accompanying spouses was de rigeur for corporate jollying; but in reality it was a veiled vehicle for comparing academic spouse punditry. It sorts out the pecking order for the rest of the conference.

She was more than familiar with this kind of thing in her own country. At any cocktail do in Hong Kong when the glittering, chit-chattering elite would gather in their diamonds and furs – despite the fact that it was midsummer outside – she would be caught up in a web of fierce gossip and one upmanship. As a woman she had no merit beyond the weight of the carats or antique jade which she was displaying for that day. It mattered not that she has an education - though that sometimes helped - or that she had her own mind, her set of hobbies, charities and personal tastes. She was just the wife. So as such she was subject to the open scrutiny of smiling, painted faces that would hover really close to hers, and voices which would shriek above the background muzack and caviar canapés, “Hello dahhling! Isn’t this just fabulous?” before they go in for the jugular “So what is your husband sailing this season?” It was beyond the more juvenile “Where did he go to school? or “Which ivy league college?” or “Ox or Bridge?” – that comes typically from the latest arrivées. The most tasteless would be a blunt “Where does he work?”, code for “So how much do you actually earn then?” Anyone asking that direct question never survives beyond an hour at any do, and is not likely to be invited to the next occasion of frenzied kill. There is afterall an honour code amongst snobs.

“You never tell them anything, you hear me? Not a word. Or I will be a laughing stock, especially at the club; and end of the day, the tax man will get us.” Was how her husband had instructed her in conduct becoming at such parties. So she learned to smile enigmatically, and to quickly pass on the tray of crab croquettes or Californian sushi rolls before another thing was asked of her. She was always saved by the short attention span from enquirers anyway, and sometimes by another over eager dilettante wanting to establish her own husband’s credentials, who had jumped the queue to answer in her place. She learnt to wear her four inch Jimmy Choos with panache, and knew exactly how to walk briskly away in them from any barb wired social faux pas. Her calves never ached again after three months of constant and dreaded entertaining: she took herself to pilates conditioning just to target that bit of her anatomy.

Much as she hated this kind of thing thoroughly, as she stood in the sweltering tropical heat she surveyed her small group of assorted Americans in their pastel polyester, the couple of Europeans who didn’t have the sophistication to remain chain smoking at the hotel’s poolside bar, and that mousey-looking academic wife who sported a local map and city guide - keenie. Despite herself she decided that they were not a patch on the Hong Kong wives, and besides, she was curious about these women behind the great men. So she went along quietly after breakfast as the conference delegates drifted into their sessions, and clambered onto the special minibus with the wives to head for town.

The group’s modus operandi was to remain firmly Yankee in their ways since the Americans formed the majority at these high powered conferences, or at the very least, they were European in demeanour. Everything was spoken pointedly and exclusively in English, in loud, heightened local accents so you were left in no doubt of their origin and implied superiority, and with the usual arm’s length aloofness from any local engagement. Tourist traders did their best to ply their wares as the gaggle of women wove their noisy way through the little market square, avoiding eye contact at all times and chatting animatedly only amongst themselves. They were quite a contrast against the languidity of the dark natives. Tat was still tat to them also, and not always worth the bother to flaunt when the heat gets to be too much. Of course, no one got a bargain that morning with what was offered. But she, with her halting French, picked up a bit of trifle and offered a tentative “Ca fait combine, s’il vous plait?” Her punter-hunter did something of a double take, then grunted something as though he couldn’t care less for her money; but it was a reasonable quote and not the nonsense figure that her cohorts had endured and scoffed at. Noting her surprise and rising eyebrow, he threw that line at her about his conditional co-operation if anyone would but meet him half way.

***********

A life time and thousands of miles from that day, she sits alone in her new singleness, post divorce, and in her new apartment by the canal. She was settled amongst too many cushions on the small two-seater which once lived in the lounge of her previous marital home. The many cushions had other places to perch in the old days, but now they were an inherited excess and just took up too much room. Nevertheless each one was hand selected by her and had meant something, so she kept them. The small sofa fits well here, and it’s become her nightly perch as she staggered in late from work. It was a time of sanctuary, although she worried how she had become so predictable in her ways. Still, she had scant energy left to pick herself up to do something else besides sit in her evening habitude, and to remember.

As she sat there sifting her thoughts, which were inevitably the jumble of still throbbing remembrances of the divorce she'd been dragged through, that line from the Caribbean came unbidden, piercing through her propped up security amongst cushions in the late evening sun. She paused, and wondered at how those words were still tangy with the sourness in the voice that delivered it, and with a barely suppressed rage. Hearing its echo now in retrospect, she suddenly discovered a whole new interpretation to what was but a simple remonstrance from a souvenir salesman: that the Great White Tourist looked down their noses at his comparative poverty in both pocket and soul. At that very moment she came alive in that acrimony: this was exactly how she felt about the husband of nearly thirty years, who had always treated her as not quite good enough on every count. And she had said nothing to defend herself.

If you speak, you stand to gain. Speaking the local language, the language of the heart - words that mean something to someone, which would draw you into their circles and their confidences. As quickly as she raged, she returned to picking her favourite mental scab: if only she'd been better - cleverer, more charming, more deferential and even more self effacing - in the way she had spoken to her husband, he would still be husband to her today, perhaps. Even if they had been hollow, untruthful words, but something that he would have liked to have heard.

How long has it been though, that she and her husband spoke to each other in any language but silence? In their early married days they used to laugh at couples in Chinese restaurants off the Bayswater Road, taking bets on who was newly in love, who had had a lovers’ quarrel, and which two were long spent in their mutual fascination and passion for each other. This third category stared inevitably into their respective soy sauce dishes before them. Towards the end her husband no longer bothered to peer into the dark salty liquid shimmering gently in its small china pool. He’d merely chew on his food, eyes fixed past her left cheek into the middle distance beyond. Any other distraction in the restaurant – a dropped plate, a customer’s arrival, a newborn’s mewing – was of more interest to him than her, the small wife sitting quietly opposite him. This wounded her infinitely more than he would ever realise – the way she no longer existed for him in the tender recesses of his heart.

She’d persevered with her soy sauce dish for more years than she’d care to count, keeping in abeyance the precise depth of hurt in so doing, because they had laughed at this kind of pain in another. She’d deftly pick up small morsels of food with a downward gaze and nibble delicately at them, all the while pushing the better pieces under her husband’s gaze to facilitate his access to them. Of course he never noticed these tiny acts of grace. She always did the food ordering now, he couldn’t be bothered to think or to choose any more. She remembered the exotic places he had taken her in the early days of their courtship – it was a different international cuisine each week, and he would order for them both in the target language of the restaurant. When they hit the obligatory Indian curry house friends had laughingly cautioned that the romance had plateaued. But she had thought him wonderfully sophisticated and worldly wise: a Chinese living overseas who could rub shoulders with swarthy publicans and smooth restaurateurs with equal ease. She loved the way he would put his hand in the small of her back and guide her into any room. She was so young and fresh then, a real Oriental beauty with flawless skin and a bright air – so eyes would look up as she entered and track her journey to their table. She realized now that she was merely fulfilling a cultural norm – she was being groomed to become his trophy wife in days to come.

Their conversations at the beginning were also vastly different: varied, intellectually challenging, and fun. He was sometimes taken by surprise at her range of local knowledge, and always stunned at her opinions about various things. Later on she would recognise that instead of respect he was displaying the early tell tale signs of annoyance – a Chinese woman who knew too much her own mind was not an asset in his world, but could potentially derail him and his own standing amongst peers. But as he was in the chase with her in those days, he allowed them and merely smiled a tight little smile, changing the subject quickly to something more inane. And being young in love and in worldly perspectives, she missed these hints and clues that their future together was going to be less than the smooth voyage that she had imagined.

So it would be entirely fair to say that as they moved swiftly from courtship to marriage and parenthood, that less was said one to the other which amounted to more than the daily prerequisite for life to function. Most days both of them were dog tired from fulfilling their respective roles: he climbing his career ladder, and she flatlining as a housewife and mother to two young children. She’d forgotten that she once had a verbal repertory which included the politics of the day, the cultural influences of her heritage, and even the oddball humour descended from her very western upbringing at home and from her English education. She and her generation were the high flyers, movers and shakers who would form the core of Hong Kong’s female executive elite. Indeed her peers who never left the ex-colony became exactly that. No wonder when such blasts from the pasts paid a quick business visit to London and had ferreted her out for their power lunches, they would register barely veiled shock at her quiet existence and lack of apparent worldly success. And she would lose sleep for nights feeling smaller than lesser classmates who had now become career giants. Big fish in a small pond, her husband would counter. Possibly, but she felt nevertheless a minnow in a vast and foreign ocean.

Anything they did say to one another these days was purely functional: when the plumber was coming to fix the boiler; had she paid that Visa bill; was her father planning to visit again this summer and did they have to allow that so often? For all the answers which were a yes, and she was careful to engineer that always, they could not build up a reservoir of his approval when she couldn’t answer that last rhetorical question in a way that would satisfy him. As usual, she remained silent.

It is in such quiet minutiae that a marriage begins to die.