Steeped in Blood | TO BE REWRITTEN

VI. ELIZABETH LEE

SHINY GLASS CASES OF DESSERTS SURROUNDED US IN THE bakery. My mother was speaking to the baker while I looked around for my favourite ones: hup toh soh. (1) Dan taat was a close one as well but I really preferred the flaky walnut biscuits while my mother would rather have the hung yun beng. (2) However, none of the boxes of pastries that we were buying would be consumed by us. They were for the wedding, for that age-old tradition of gah luey beng (3).

When a woman was engaged, her future husband would need to send her and her family a case of pastries in order to prove that he was worthy of her hand and took the betrothal seriously. I knew my future husband wouldn't understand or even be aware of the custom and all the ones he had would be utterly foreign to me. Which was why we were here, picking out the pastries that I was going to give to myself. Well, they would be going to me, my parents, and our extended family, but... still. It felt wrong. Yet I did not want to cede this tradition—did not want to lose any more of myself with this marriage than I already had.

At least my mother had already consulted the lunar calendar to determine an auspicious date for the wedding. Well, she had yet to choose one—it was the most notoriously difficult part of a wedding according to my friends and cousins who had married earlier than I had. One had to consider the two partners' birthdays, avoid conflicts with other people's weddings, not schedule the wedding at times near to funerals or holidays, and there were so many other factors to regard that I wondered how anyone ever got married, to begin with.

"How many do you think we need?" My mother asked me in Cantonese.

It felt like the first time anyone had asked me how I felt about this wedding, this marriage, so much so that I clung to the question like a lifeline. "It depends..." My father had three sisters and two brothers, all with children of their own, and so packets of biscuits would need to be sent to them. Should we also send them to my mother's relatives as well? "Have you picked a date for the wedding yet?"

She rattled off an order to the baker before turning back to me. "No, I have not. We need to inquire after your fiance's birthday before we can do so."

I sighed at the news and selected a sponge cake from the food on display, to be eaten on the journey back home, while my mother decided to buy a butjai gou from one of the hawkers on the street, the pudding dotted with red beans skewered on two wooden sticks. (4) The Mui Tsai walked behind us, holding the purchases we had already made today: bolts of red silk to be fashioned into my wedding dress, and some of the traditional accoutrements for customs such as the tea ceremony and sheets for the matrimonial bed that wouldn't be made until a few days before the wedding. 

We flagged down a rickshaw driver and rode back to the house in relative ease even as dread pooled in the pit of my stomach at having to face all of my relatives tonight as well as seeing my future husband. The mere notion of having to appear before him after all the words that had been exchanged between us, well... it was nauseating and almost enough to make me put down my paper-wrapped sponge cake.

"We're here," my mother noted all too soon, paying the rickshaw driver. 

The house loomed into view, its familiar angles suddenly being blown out of proportion into something frightening and monstrous. I swallowed with some difficulty before I held my head high, tilted my chin back, and walked into the house. After instructing the maid on where to put our purchases for the day, I followed the sound of laughter and conversation into the sitting room. Quietly, my mother excused herself to go oversee the dinner preparations in the kitchen.

My eyes zeroed in on my husband, who was nursing a glass of wine in the corner. From its shockingly red colour, I could tell that it wasn't the baijiu that Chinese people drunk but the red grape wine of foreigners. (5) His distinctive blond hair combined with the stiff suit and tie that he wore drew my eye to him, but there was something else that caught my attention.