Summary:
"Ai stead mai?" in Singapore slang means, "will you go steady with me?" It's the first question that starts a committed, exclusive relationship that will hopefully result in marriage. However, Fang Wu and Nur Atiqah binti Eusoff's unique circumstances robbed them of the chance to start their relationship at that point, eight years ago when they fell in love during the summer of 2025.

Now it's 2033, and Wu still regrets practically proposing to the then-19-year-old Atiqah, especially when he's convinced himself that this was all an act of folly. But he has retired from professional football and needs something to do, which ends up with him moving from China to Singapore to switch from playing to coaching. This means he becomes her neighbour in her housing estate - what will happen?

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Dramatis Personae:
• 方武 Fang Wu (a.k.a. Frederick Wentworth) Note: “Wu” means “military”
• 方文 Fang Wen (a.k.a. Edward Wentworth) Note: “Wen” means “academic”
• 蔡盈Cai Ying (a.k.a. Sophia Croft) Note: “Ying” means “lacks nothing”
• Admiral Cai, nicknamed “Lao Cai 老蔡” i.e. “Old Cai” (a.k.a. Admiral Croft)
• 夏健 Xia Jian (a.k.a. Captain Harville) “Xia” is pronounced as “Har” in Cantonese
• 郑喜喜 Zheng Xixi (a.k.a. Henrietta Musgrove) Note: “Xixi” means “happy”
• 郑乐乐 Zheng Lele (a.k.a. Louisa Musgrove) Note: “Lele” also means “happy”
• 陈健明 Chen Jianming, also known as “小明 Xiao Ming” (a.k.a. Charles Hayter)
• Nur Atiqah binti Eusoff (a.k.a. Anne Elliot)

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Part I - Wu

They had just run an English-language article entitled “The Best Is Yet To Be” in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, when Fang Wu, who was a star forward on Team China and a multiple domestic league champion with his club Shanghai Port, and who had also been a factor in both sides of the Canton Derby during his early pro career, announced his retirement from professional football.

The article wasn’t wrong; he was, indeed, playing some of the best football of his career, and thus far, he had avoided being plagued by any major injuries. There really wasn’t any reason for him to declare at this moment that the best was not only not to be, but never to be again, when he was arguably at his peak, save for his personal ego. But, as with many of his life decisions, pride drove him, and he wanted his fans to remember him at his very best, rather than to witness the inevitable decline that would surely happen now that he was over the age of 30. And he said just about as much to the press, seemingly oblivious that such bold-faced words would surely disappoint the fans who wanted more, when he announced his retirement at age 31 after an illustrious 10-year career in club and international pro football.

Nobody understood his decision: not his fans, who now spanned half the eastern coast of China after his transfer to Shanghai Port six years ago, nor his manager, who suggested that if he was tired of Shanghai, he could consider pursuing a transfer back to the rebuilt Guangzhou F.C., the original springboard of his career. Little did Wu’s management team know that, for reasons which he kept strictly to himself, that was the last thing that he wanted.

Perhaps the only people who even came close to understanding him were his two elder siblings: his sister Cai Ying (nee Fang Ying), who served with her husband in the Navy off its base in Sanya, and his brother Fang Wen, who had moved back to rural Hunan and lived in a village very similar to the one where they had grown up in, where he now taught primary school. They were the ones who knew that the base of Fang Wu’s rootlessness had come not only when he switched clubs and moved north, but much earlier than that.

The sheer vastness of China meant that often, children were separated from their parents far too early in life for their own good. When he was barely 10, the Fang family had shipped Wu out on a bus to the next bigger town at the behest of his fourth-grade teacher so that he could get the level of training and competition that he needed to fully develop his talent in football. Since then, he had never truly had a home, nor any satisfactory means to communicate properly with their illiterate parents.

When he had effectively been thrown out to shift for himself since he was 10, was there any wonder that he kept his own counsel and stuck to his own choices, no matter how bizarre they might seem to anyone else? Possibly even his stubborn pride had been born from his forced early independence, for in his new team, 10-year-old Wu had been the runt of the litter, and the veneer of bravado was the only thing he had in his toolkit to deal with the inevitable bullying that came from the older boys.

But it was no use crying over spilt milk; whatever damage that had been done was water under the bridge long ago. If Wu regretted retiring too early when he woke up in his trendy Shanghai apartment with its panoramic view of Hangzhou Bay, well, he had already made his statement with the press, and it would be too embarrassing to recant it. Retirement, it seemed, was dastardly in its effectiveness at uncovering the emptiness of his life. It forced him to wonder what he, a son of southern China, was doing up here in Shanghai, a booming commercial metropolis with a football club that sat at the very top of the Chinese Super League (the top domestic pro tier in China), but where he didn’t know a single word of the local dialect.

When Wu sat in one of the ‘aesthetic’ and ‘Instagrammable’ cafés that dotted Shanghai’s downtown watching the bustling crowd pass him by, it sank into his very bones that a life devoid of activity and striving would leave him deeply dissatisfied. Disillusioned by the rat race, many of his generation had sunk into tangping 躺平 or “lying flat”, which meant giving up on career progression and earning the bare minimum that they needed to survive, but just one day of doing tangping convinced Wu that this would be no way for him to lead the rest of his life.

Ever restless and nomadic – for the places that he had lived in spanned two-thirds of the length and breadth of China – Wu’s solution for his sense of emptiness came in travel. He packed up his bags – and his apartment (for what business had he now in a city where he had no roots after the fame and money had dried up?) – and headed to the places where the three most important people in his life were. Since age10, Wu’s sense of being had never again been tied to a specific place, only to people. When even those people were now scattered far and wide, it simply meant that he had nowhere to seek refuge, no one physical place to call his home. He’d buried that, coming to roost in any place that could bring him career success, but in retirement, even that was taken away from him.

There was his best friend, Xia Jian, who had literally grown up with him as a footballer. Guangzhou, the biggest metropolis in southern China, was the hub for all the best talent from the south, and Wu had met Jian in the Under-16 league when he moved there for senior high school. After emerging from the youth leagues, Wu and Jian had embarked on their pro careers side by side, competing first for Guangzhou City and then Guangzhou F.C., the #2 and #1 teams in the area which made up the Canton Derby.

Perhaps it was unfair that Wu had played offense and Jian had played defence, because it meant that Wu took the lion’s share of the limelight even though they had been nearly equally responsible for the success of their club. Although Guangzhou F.C. had been relegated from the top-tier Super League to the second-tier China League One in 2022, it had flourished in its new league placing third in 2024, which was a very heady achievement for a pair of 22-year-olds who came from humble beginnings. Surely, they had been convinced, this would be the start of a bright future.

The role of team captain was not an immutable status for the season but passed from one team member to another depending on the makeup of the starting XI and the strategy for the day. During the years when they had competed together, the captain’s armband had been regularly traded between Wu and Jian, with Wu perhaps edging Jian out narrowly in the number of matches that he had captained. Indeed, the margin between their talent and their contributions had been only hair thin.

With that first taste of success, Wu and Jian had been hopeful that they might start drawing notice for bigger opportunities. While Wu had fervently aspired to get to the Chinese Super League and even to play internationally, Jian had shared his dream only to the extent that he could remain in Guangzhou, where he had lived all his life. Sadly, eight years ago in 2025, their Chinese Super League ambitions had been dashed through entirely no fault of their own when Guangzhou F.C. failed to pay up its debt and got expelled from professional football. From being third in their league, Wu and Jian had suddenly been thrown into a situation of not even having a season to look forward to.

They had dealt with that curveball in very different ways, driven by their different priorities. Then aged 23, Wu had moved west to join Yunnan Yukun, the 2024 China League One champions who were newly promoted to the Super League for 2025, while Jian had resolutely stayed in Guangzhou even though it meant demotion to China League Two.

For Wu, moving almost clear across the country from the south-easternmost coast to the south-westernmost province bordering Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam had mattered very little, because he had been displaced so many times already. However, being Cantonese was a huge part of Jian’s identity. The Cantonese dialect, known by the Chinese as yue yu 粤语, was so distinctive that it was nearly considered to be a language of its own. This was because even though Cantonese shared the same written script as standardised Mandarin (the national language across China), it had unique intonation and idioms that formed the backbone of its character. And except in Hong Kong, it was not taught in schools but passed down the generations through daily family immersion. Wu might have moved on, but Jian, a Cantonese born and bred, would never leave Canton, even though the unfortunate local club situation unjustly relegated him to football obscurity.

Wu and Jian’s paths had diverged even further when, a few years later, Jian suffered a debilitating knee injury that left him with a lifelong limp and ended his career in pro football. It hadn’t hurt their friendship one bit, but it did send them along very different life trajectories.

Jian now lived in Foshan, or “Fatt-san” as it was pronounced in Cantonese, together with his wife and children. Unlike the neighbouring Guangzhou, it didn’t have the shine of being one of the major world-class Chinese cities. Still, it was part of the thriving Pearl River Delta metro region on China’s southeastern coast, full of opportunities for the next generation. After quitting football, Jian had moved here because he wanted his children to grow up with the Cantonese dialect as the native language of their daily lives, rather than standardised Mandarin. That could never happen in Guangzhou, the capital of Canton, because too many non-Cantonese people had moved there for economic reasons.

Once upon a time, Cantonese had been the lingua franca for everyone in Canton. In recent decades, that had changed because of the use of standardised Mandarin (also known as guoyu 国语 i.e. the national language) in the national education system. It didn’t help that it was very difficult for non-native Cantonese (or even some of the younger natives) to learn the dialect, because it had seven tones whereas standardised Mandarin had only four. As a result, a whole generation of Cantonese people were slowly losing their roots.

Jian and his wife had grown up in Guangzhou, the biggest beating heart of Canton. Their families had been there for generations, so there were few people who could be considered more Cantonese than them. And yet, they had been taught in school with only standardised Mandarin, which was also the language that they used to communicate with their friends (including Wu), who came from all over China. They now considered themselves Chinese first and Cantonese second, despite their fervent loyalty to the Canton province. Adopting the common language of the country had been an imperative when it meant that they could network with people from other parts of China, which was essential for getting the best job opportunities.

Now, having gotten the economic leg up that came from plugging into the burgeoning Chinese national economy, Jian and his wife’s priorities had changed. They wished for their children to become Cantonese first and Chinese second, just as their parents and grandparents had been. If everybody went on speaking standardised Mandarin at the expense of Cantonese, their dialect would become extinct in less than two generations. Even if he hadn’t gotten injured, Jian would have wanted to quit football prematurely so that he could move wherever he wanted by the time his eldest daughter started school. Only a move to a more localised area of Canton, outside the city of Guangzhou, could ensure that Jian’s children picked up enough Cantonese to pass it on to future generations. It was Jian’s sole option to salvage a heritage that didn’t deserve to die off after having existed for centuries.

So, Jian and his family were happily situated in a flat near a metro station in Foshan. Despite his disability, Jian hadn’t subscribed to the concept of tangping either. While he had never been particularly good at academics, he was an extremely accomplished woodworker and earned more than a living wage selling his wood carvings online.

“小健，你是我的偶像, (Xiaojian, you’re my idol,)” Wu said, and while he was known for sometimes being outright facetious, this time he was dead serious. It might be true that unlike him, Jian had never tasted any international football glory (no matter how equally deserving he might have been), but he had an occupation that would last him a lifetime and a firm grasp on his roots. Both were #goals that Wu now belatedly found himself sadly lacking in.

“大哥，你在开玩笑吧? (Big Brother, you’re joking, aren’t you?)” was Jian’s incredulous reply. And, to his later shame, Wu didn’t disabuse him of that notion, didn’t admit to Jian just how much he truly envied Jian’s success in life outside football. It was his pride, all over again, that didn’t allow him to let go of the hierarchy that had ruled ever since Wu and Jian had started competing together. He, Wu, had been Da Ge 大哥, the “big brother”, and he had always addressed Jian by the affectionate diminutive of “Xiao Jian” 小健 or “Little Jian”. Even if the margin between their football prowess had been razor thin, their nicknames established and reinforced to everyone within earshot that they were nearly brothers, but Wu was clearly the elder and Jian the younger.

Visiting Foshan had been a simple metro ride from Guangzhou Baiyun Airport with a couple of line transfers. That was a testament to the rapid infrastructure development that spanned the 22,000 square mile Guangdong – Hong Kong – Macao Greater Bay Area. In contrast, getting to where Wu’s elder brother Wen lived was much more arduous, involving a flight to Changsha, the capital of Hunan, and many hours of bus rides deep into the countryside.

The village that Wen now called home was not much different from what Wu remembered of his earliest childhood. People lived in dilapidated little one-or two-room houses, and the children, who trudged to school wearing identical track suits with their little red scarves tied around their necks, relied on state-provided school breakfast and lunch for their main meals. Like his own younger self, most of them had neither father nor mother in their daily lives, with most of their parents having decamped to the cities to seek a living, leaving them here with their elderly grandparents.

Once a week, Wen would make a round of his pupils’ homes, speaking to the mostly illiterate grandparents in their native Hunan dialect, to update them on the children’s progress in school and convey important announcements. Now that Wu was here for a visit, Wen immediately dispatched him in the role of little brother by sending him off to the local market to buy enough fresh fish and prawns to distribute to all his students and their families as a treat. Seafood, always considered as a delicacy in China, was an extremely rare extravagance in that impoverished village in landlocked Hunan, but the return of a beloved brother after years of separation merited a huge celebration.

“恭喜，恭喜 (Congratulations, congratulations),” most of the elderly village folk wished Wen as he paraded Wu on his rounds, and while Wu felt the irony of being feted for his fade out to obscurity, he gladly obliged all the requests from the children for his autograph. After all, he had been like them once, and perhaps this might inspire some of them to aspire to better things in the future, just as he had.

After his stop in Hunan, Wu flew out from Changsha to Sanya, the naval city at the southern tip of Hainan Island that was home base for Ying and her husband, Admiral Cai, whenever they were on shore.

Back in their childhood days, Ying had skipped town just a few months after Wu did to enlist in the Chinese Navy after her gaokao 高考 (high school graduation / university entrance exam). She had been enamoured of the Navy since she was just a little child, and one of Wu’s first memories as an infant was the sound of his nine-year-old sister’s voice singing him to sleep with the age-old Chinese song Jun Gang Zhi Ye 军港之夜, or “A Night At The Naval Port”. When the song was re-popularized during the 2019 season of the variety show “Our Song” (我们的歌) by Na Ying, the biggest mainland Chinese international singer of the ‘90s, and Xiao Zhan, one of the biggest young contemporary acting heartthrobs of the time, people in the audience had said that the song was nostalgic to them because their grandparents had sung them to sleep with it. Well, the then-17-year-old Wu wouldn’t admit it, but he still sang himself to sleep with it every night in his mind, remembering the beloved sister who had been home and anchor to him when he was just a baby.

“你看，你现在给我们作榜样了, (You see, we’re now following your example,)” Ying quipped.

“你这句话是什么意思? (What do you mean?)” asked a confused Wu. His success might have swelled his head enough that he was constantly bossing Jian, but no matter how red-hot his career got, Ying had never allowed him to forget who was boss between them. In fact, everyone who knew both Wu and his big sister deduced that the reason why Wu was so stubborn had to be because he and Ying had likely inherited that common trait from an ancestor somewhere up the line.

“你退休，我们也退休! (You’re retiring and we’re retiring too!)” exclaimed Ying joyfully. “你说这样爽不爽? (Isn’t that a blast?)”

“无所事事的，你还说爽? (How could you say being idle all day is fun?)” remarked Wu dubiously. “你还是别让我诱惑你了，以免我误导你的下半辈子, (You’d better stop letting me be a negative influence on you, or else I’ll mislead you in the latter part of your life),” he warned.

“呸，你胡说八道些什么? (Fie! What kind of nonsense are you talking?) 我们都一大把年纪了；我也得接受，退休是天经地义、理所当然的事儿。(We are getting on in years, and I must accept that retirement is a natural and logical thing.) 更何况，我们还要环游世界呢! (Furthermore, we want to travel the world!)”

Wu facepalmed big-time when Ying announced that the first destination on the cards for her and her husband, Lao Cai 老蔡 (i.e. “Old Cai”), was Spain, where they would embark on a month-long hike called the Camino del Norte. If Canton had the honour of being the ground of the biggest joy and heartbreak in his professional life, Spain held that very same distinction for his personal life.

During the downtime that switching clubs last-minute had given him, Wu had gone there eight years ago to unlock the secret of how the major European nations stayed at the very top of football rather than to stay at home warming the bench. Instead, he had come out unleashing the biggest folly of his life. How could he have ever been naïve enough to be mesmerised and blinded by the spell of a 19-year-old football prodigy who was utterly beautiful, utterly talented, and utterly virtuous… but also utterly Muslim?

At twenty-three, he had been a full-grown adult, and he ought to have realised that it was a non-starter from the very beginning. Instead, he had nearly committed himself to exploring a possible conversion to Islam down the road, a thing that was nearly unheard of among the majority Han population in China, a huge shift in his own cultural paradigm, and a clear message that marriage was his long-term intention. He had done all that only to be told, just one day later, that it had all been a game.

Of course it was a game. Everybody knew that Malay people were Muslim by default. And Chinese people were, well, Chinese, with their eclectic blend of Buddhism and Taoism and agnosticism but all bound by the common teachings of Confucius. Yes, there were Muslims in China, but they were mainly from two minority ethnicities: Hui and Uighur, so it would be highly unnatural for either him or her to try assimilating into any of those communities. So, Wu maintained that everybody should consider it elementary knowledge that a relationship between a Chinese and a Muslim was impossible. Yet he had been caught in a fog of blindness, which he could only attribute to Chinese TV having influenced him into an over-romanticisation of his time in Europe.

If Ying and Lao Cai found his travel recommendations for Spain rather lacklustre, they politely chose not to mention it. Besides, Wu was highly supportive of their travels in all other ways. For a week, Wu helped them with shopping for their trip and packing their backpacks, and he even saw them off at Sanya Phoenix International Airport.

After Ying and Lao Cai left, Wu felt a now-familiar sinking feeling returning to his stomach. Jian, Wen, and Ying, the three people who held his roots and his sense of home, all had their own lives and a clear sense of purpose, while he had… nothing.

Bereft of house and home – for neither Shanghai, Guangzhou, Yuxi, nor Hunan had enough for him to truly feel as if he belonged in any of those places – Wu was at a loose end about what to do with the rest of his life. Shanghai, the place where his international and domestic football careers had seen their zenith, had ceased to be relevant. It was likewise for Guangzhou, which had been the birthplace of his professional football career and his friendship with Jian, but which held even less significance for him than it did for Jian now. At least Jian considered himself Chinese first and Cantonese second, but Wu, who had moved to Guangzhou solely for the sake of football, was solidly Chinese but by no means Cantonese. And Yuxi, his home for the two years when he had played with Yunnan Yukun, was several provinces away from all the people whom he cared about.

There was still Hunan, the place of his birth and early childhood, the province where he had lived until his middle teens or thereabouts. He scarcely remembered when he had left it behind nearly for good. But his old village could only be a place of memories, not a viable place to live a life, when he had gotten used to modern flats with all the amenities of the city. To go back to living in a one-room shingle-and-plaster house without even the benefit of central heating would be a privation to him, even if it wasn’t to his brother Wen.

What could he do with his life that would still give it meaning? While he had never admitted it outright, he admired Wen, impoverished though his brother’s life might still be. Wu and his siblings had once been children living in the deep heart of rural agrarian China, watching their parents practically break their backs through unending physical toil. Now, Wen had made his life’s mission to ensure that the next generation would have a better future than that, just as his teachers at school had once done for himself, Ying, and Wu. “师者, 人之模范也 Shi zhe, ren zhi mo fan ye (Teachers are the example of mankind)” was an established piece of wisdom in the Chinese language, and didn’t he still have his football skills, which he could impart to the next generation?

And yet, coaching gigs, like everything else in China, were immensely competitive. Wu didn’t know if he could adjust to becoming simply a digit in this vast country of 1.4 billion people where many stars burned bright and fizzled out just as quickly. After football, the only thing that remained of his identity was that he was a son of southern China, and as generations of southern Chinese people before him had done for centuries, one path remained: to seek his fortunes in Southeast Asia, also known to the Chinese community as 南洋 nan yang , ‘the South Sea’.

He had heard good things about Singapore: it was often the first overseas destination for middle-class Chinese when they could afford international holidays. When Jian expanded his business overseas, it was one of the first countries that he shipped his woodwork to. A plethora of Chinese businesses were setting up shop there to bring a taste of home to the hordes of people who migrated there from China, be it for a season or for years, to make a living. Furthermore, Chinese players and coaches were considered as a vaunted source of talent for almost every sport.

It also happened to be the place where she lived, to the best of his knowledge, but what could that matter? A population of six million was nothing compared to the nearly 25 million in Shanghai, or the nearly 100 million across the Greater Bay Area region. Still, it was big enough that running into her would be as unlikely as finding a needle in a haystack.

A major international move involved enough logistics to keep Wu busy for quite a while. Firstly, he needed to find work, and secondly, he also needed a place to stay. If he had to choose an estate (for that was what the government-built public housing communities where 80% of the people in Singapore lived were called), why shouldn’t he go for la crème de la crème ? 精益求精 Jing yi qiu jing , or ‘keep striving for the best’, was an established Chinese saying after all. After years of garnering accolades over accolades meant that only an award-winning place would do: Tampines, the public housing new town that had won the 1992 UN World Habitat Award. It was so excellent that it had even vaulted Singapore from the developing to the developed nation category! That she lived there, or at least she had when he last spoke to her – eight years ago – did not signify. At least, he had to convince himself that it didn’t.

There was a thing that years of living in Canton did to you – it made a body, every single body, inordinately obsessed with superstitions involving numbers. In the Cantonese dialect, the number four was pronounced as ‘sei’, which also was (albeit with slightly different intonation) the word for ‘death’; and the number eight, pronounced as ‘bahtt’, came close enough to the word for ‘prosperous’, or ‘fatt’, for the two to become synonymous. Eradicating all block and unit numbers with fours in them and going for the maximum number of eights and sixes (another number that denoted prosperity in Cantonese) landed Wu with Block 866, #08-188, and he immediately offered a rent for the unit that his would-be landlord could not refuse.

A month in, everything was falling into place. He had a job teaching PE at a neighbourhood school in Singapore’s HDB (Housing and Development Board) heartland, and while that wasn’t exactly the same level of sacrifice that Wen had made to become a village teacher, he was using football to reach out to ordinary, even disadvantaged, children that the system might otherwise have overlooked. The weather was hot and humid, but not worse than it would have been in Shanghai or Guangzhou in July and August. It helped that his flat was large and airy, bigger than the one he had in Shanghai, and situated on a high enough floor for the breeze to blow through it.

There were lots of made-for-China food, too. To his surprise, he didn’t find large Western supermarkets like Sam’s Club, Costco, Carrefour and Aldi here, the way he had in Shanghai. But unexpectedly, there were neighbourhood supermarkets and minimarts stocked with imported snacks from China. Wu’s stint in Spain had taught him that pickled fish and fried crab flavoured Lay’s potato chips most likely weren’t available anywhere outside China, but he could find them here. Better still, he could actually indulge in junk food like this now, whereas he had needed to control his diet strictly while he was playing.

Wu’s needs were simple, really. While theoretically he liked big-city life because there were nice flats, good shopping, pop concerts from international stars, a vibrant sports scene, all the latest movies, and a slew of cafes and restaurants, the asceticism of his lifestyle as a professional athlete meant that the only one of those things that factored into his day-to-day life was the presence of high quality authentic Chinese food, a thing that Singapore had in abundance. He could – no, he had – convinced himself that he was contented and happy.

Every day, he fell into a stable, if unvarying, routine. Well before dawn, he would walk the five hundred metres from his block to the school where he worked, because in Singapore, school started at 7:30 AM and pupils often reported to school at 7:15 or earlier. His day might get broken up by a quick lunch at the school canteen, but overseeing co-curricular activities (CCAs) often meant that he stayed in school until 5 PM or later.

And then, he would drop by a neighbourhood hawker centre or coffeeshop to pick up a simple takeout meal before heading back to his flat to partake of it in front of the TV. CGTN (China Global Television Network), the international arm of China Central Television, aired news and documentaries on local cable, albeit in English rather than in Mandarin, and he was able to access episodes of mainland Chinese dramas and variety programmes through YouTube or streaming to supplement the local fare of Singapore-produced Mandarin-language content and a mix of Mandarin or Mandarin-dubbed dramas coming from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea. It wasn’t quite home, but he was in a fair way getting to making a life here.

He had fallen into this pattern for about two-and-a-half months when the September school holidays hit, which meant that he could work very light hours for a week and explore more of his neighbourhood. Being out and about at times when he was usually working meant that he discovered things which he normally wouldn’t, and one of them was the highly unusual sound he heard at the void deck of his block while coming home from lunch one day.

Void decks were another thing that existed here which were alien to him in China – some of the public housing flats, especially the ones that were closest to the town centre, had shops and community facilities on the ground floor, but the vast majority of them simply had open spaces occupied only by the bare foundation pillars and a vast floor of bare concrete, which created areas for residents to congregate and ensured that everyone had privacy because their homes were all above ground level. In fact, they were pretty good spaces for children to kick a football, except that the government had implicitly banned that through installing temporary barricades and imposing fines, which meant that mostly, they served as gathering places for local senior citizens.

Today, the lilting female voices that he heard speaking rapidly in the Hunanese dialect, which few in Singapore understood, were definitely not local, and neither did they sound like they belonged to senior citizens. Yes, Singapore was positively teeming with Chinese people. They made up more than 70% of the total population, in fact. However, they spoke Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hainanese, or Hakka, if they spoke any dialect at all. Disappointingly, many Chinese Singaporeans were even incapable of speaking coherent standardised Mandarin, because English was the medium of instruction in the local schools with Mandarin taught as a second language. Wu could only conclude that was the main reason why the ethnic Chinese people in Singapore conversed in creoles called Singlish and Singdarin that mixed highly ungrammatical English, Mandarin, Malay, and Hokkien in random proportions with accents that sounded outlandish to him. Indeed, the likelihood of him finding someone speaking in his native dialect was nil or next to nil most of the time.

“各位小姐，请问贵姓？我也是湖南人, (Ladies, what are your names? I’m also from Hunan,)” he said, approaching the two ladies and bearing his most charming smile. He wasn’t a player and seldom flirted, but the fact that he had met two other people from his province at the very block where he lived, indicated that it had indeed been an extremely auspicious choice. Here he was, quite ready to make a foolish match , and anybody from Hunan between the ages of twenty and thirty may have him for the asking .

“喂！姐，你看，他是方武呀! (Hey Sis, look! He’s Fang Wu!)” exclaimed the younger of the two women. They looked very close in age and nearly identical, with the same long straight jet-black hair, pale skin, and slender build that characterised hordes of Chinese women in their twenties. But who was Wu to be particular? The sticking point was that they were Chinese , and they had come from the same province as him, and they had serendipitously shown up in his neighbourhood, so what more of kismet could he wish for? It certainly didn’t hurt that in this place where everybody was crazy about the EPL (English Premier League) and none of the locals watched Chinese football, they still recognised him anyway (which was also because they were Chinese! From China!).

Wryly, it occurred to Wu that such tribalistic thoughts must mean that he was catching onto the local mindset, because the ethnic Chinese majority in Singapore called themselves 华人 hua ren (ethnic Chinese) in Mandarin and simply ‘Chinese’ in English, but they specifically referred to him and other Chinese people who had come straight from China, as opposed to being born in Singapore, as ‘China Chinese’, or ‘PRC Chinese’.

It was markedly different from his own worldview of Chinese people, where he would have called them 华裔 hua yi , or ethnic Chinese diaspora with non-Chinese citizenship, whereas he belonged to both the categories of 中国人 zhong guo ren (i.e. mainland Chinese nationals) and 中华民族 zhong hua min zu (i.e. ethnic Chinese, encompassing also the people of Taiwan and the diaspora). Strangely enough, although the people of Hong Kong were also ethnic Chinese who spoke the same Cantonese dialect as the Cantonese natives of Guangdong (Canton) province (albeit with some local variations), they called themselves 香港人 xiang gang ren (Hong Kongers) and refused to subsume themselves under the broader umbrella of the Chinese ethnicity.

Indeed, the notion of Chinese identity was fraught in many layers: language, ancestry, ethnicity, nationality, and politics. It was a whole plethora of nuance that got swept, rather simplistically, into the English concept of ‘Chinese people’. Back in China, Wu had never thought about unpacking the many facets of being Chinese. All his life, being Chinese and framing his entire existence around China had been as natural as breathing. Hence being in Singapore, where the ethnic majority identified themselves as Chinese but thought about the West more often than they thought about China, challenged Wu’s paradigm of being Chinese more than he liked.

In this country full of diaspora, it was inevitable that someone from his province was the closest to “his own people” that he could get. That was all it took for Zheng Xixi and Zheng Lele to become something of a standing fixture in his life. As luck would have it – didn’t he always say he was lucky? – they lived in his block, albeit on the fourth floor. “都是乡下人嘛 (We’re all from the same hometown anyway)” was as good an excuse as any for him to call on their flat with alarming regularity (after he had furnished them with autographs, of course).

Eagerly, Wu plied the sisters with an abundance of Chinese food. Practically at their doorstep, there already were outlets of the massively popular and highly international Taiwanese Din Tai Fung 鼎泰奉 and Sichuanese Haidilao 海底捞chain restaurants. These were situated at Tampines Central, their local town centre, which was a mere ten-minute feeder bus ride away from their block. If they took the MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) to the neighbouring towns of Bedok and Pasir Ris, they could even get a taste of their native food at Xiang Xiang Hunan Cuisine 湘香湖南菜. Distances in Singapore were much smaller than they were in sprawling Shanghai, so Wu didn’t mind a once-a-week metro ride to farther-flung parts of the island for good Chinese food, when such journeys out of Tampines to other parts of Singapore took a mere five to ten minutes at best and thirty to forty-five at worst.

Dinners out soon progressed to dinners in, where Wu, trained by two decades of living alone and fending for himself, whipped up traditional Hunan dishes that he couldn’t obtain easily outside his hometown. Xixi and Lele had grown up affluent in Changsha, and even though they had lived in Singapore for years now, ever since the start of their respective undergraduate studies at the National University of Singapore, they still didn’t cook much at home, preferring to pick up takeout instead. After all, street food was so ubiquitous, and so affordable!

Naturally, having a hot former national footballer cooking for them was insanely hard to resist. It was no wonder that Xixi and Lele promptly latched on to the habit of having weekly home-cooked dinners which alternated between Wu’s flat and theirs, the aroma of the stir-frying billowing out and tantalising the neighbours.

With the hot weather, they often left the front door open when Wu cooked, both to allow the breeze to pass through, and to let the inevitable fumes that came from the intense stir-frying escape the flat. Singapore was such a safe place, and there was still the metal outer gate to prevent anyone coming along the common corridor from entering the flat, even though everyone who walked past could see clear into the living room when they did that. But nobody cared, really - a Chinese man hanging out with two Chinese sisters was nothing unusual.

Initially it was just the three of them, until Xixi invited her longtime boyfriend, a nerdy local guy named Chen Jianming, to make these effectively double dates. Or at least, anyone looking in on them could construe them to be dates, regardless of what Wu considered these gatherings to be. Thus far, he hadn’t yet felt the wish to make any physical moves on Lele, but he certainly met up with her frequently enough that he knew he was creating the impression of being romantically interested in her. Well, what alternatives did he have, anyway? He wouldn’t be able to find a better cultural match than a fellow Hunan native, and her eyes told him that she was clearly attracted to him, so even if he wasn’t quite feeling that the attraction was fully mutual, he would by no means resist.

They were cooking up a storm and laughing, with Lele insisting that Wu hold her hand and teach her how to cook, when a voice called at the door. Dang, how could that voice be still so recognisable, when he hadn’t heard it for eight years?

“Xi Xi, Le Le, where are you? I got Old Chang Kee curry puffs for you, come!”

It was a very Malay voice, he reflected, and when there weren’t many Malay people in China, there was only one way he could have known that. Yet of course, just as surely as being Chinese wasn’t a monolith, being Malay shouldn’t be one either –

What was he kidding himself with? He would have recognised that voice from anywhere, Malay or not.

Nur Atiqah binti Eusoff, football prodigy and the former love of his life, stood just outside the metal gate holding two paper bags of greasy curry puffs. He hadn’t tasted Old Chang Kee before he came to this country, but like many things uniquely Singaporean, the widely beloved signature curry puffs were growing on him too. And he was certain that in the one bag that Atiqah intended for Xixi and Lele, there wouldn’t be enough to have one for him.

She looked different, too. Eight years ago, when she had been a Under-19 youth player and the Chinese Super League phase of his pro career had yet to blossom, T-shirts, Bermudas and flip-flops had been the order of the day when they weren’t training. While he’d never known if make-up had been strictly forbidden because of her Muslim faith, he had thought that for her, it would anyway have been superfluous.

This Atiqah wore slim-fit jeans, a pair of low-heeled strappy sandals, and on top – well, he couldn’t see her top at all, because her head and shoulders were covered under a mint-green head scarf that did double duty as a shawl, enveloping her body from the crown of her head almost to her waist. It was adorned by a cute little pin, and did she have on makeup? They called this scarf the tudung, a new piece of vocabulary that he had picked up in Singapore, and it was worn primarily by the most devout of Muslim women, although in Singapore, which was relatively liberal because it wasn’t an exclusively Islamic country, they often allowed it to do double duty as a fashion accessory. Which Atiqah was clearly doing now, as was plain to see. To him, seeing her in the tudung was like a slap in the face – a stark reminder of how, in the folly of his youth, he had once thought in impossibilities.

“Atiqah! Come, please come in, and we can eat together!” He knew Lele well enough to know that she could be effusive, but he hadn’t any idea that Lele and Atiqah were such fast friends. “Atiqah, this is my boyfriend, Xiao Wu 小武 (i.e. Little Wu).” It was also the first time he heard her using that diminutive with his name, which indicated extreme affection and familiarity.

Her boyfriend. That was not a thing that they had overtly discussed, not that he minded if it ended up happening somewhere along the way. But to be introduced as such – to frame the situation, as it were, as if he and Atiqah were strangers, even if to all intents and purposes they now were – that felt wrong, and he couldn’t let Lele continue in his vein.

“Atiqah and I already know each other,” he clarified. “We met while we were training in Spain.”

“Spain? I never knew you went to Spain,” gushed Lele. “How romantic!”

“It’s football training,” pointed out Wu grumpily. “Nothing romantic.”

“That’s still exciting,” insisted Lele, “Come, sit and tell me everything about it!” The gate was already unlocked and Lele slid it open, gesturing for Atiqah to come in.

“Sorry,” Atiqah apologised. “I need go home to my dad. And I didn’t know you were here, let me get one more curry puff for you.” Deftly she opened the other paper bag and pulled out a curry puff from it with her fingers, dropping it into the bag that she handed to Lele.

And in a whiff, she vanished, too quickly for Wu to realise that she had just given the curry puff that she had bought for herself to him. Even so, he did realise that he had uttered her name for the first time in eight years, but she hadn’t addressed him by his.

---

Here are the deliberate canon parallels between Wentworth's Navy career and Wu's pro football trajectory, linked to real-world Chinese club football events:
1. Young Wentworth joins the navy -- FW leaves his parents' home permanently at the age of 10 to train in football
2. Battle of San Domingo (Wentworth achieves initial success) -- Guangzhou F.C. achieves 3rd place in China League One, the #2 domestic league
3. Wentworth is temporarily thrown ashore despite having better prospects -- Guangzhou F.C. is expelled from pro football because of its debt
4. The Asp, Wentworth's first command -- FW transfers to Yunnan Yukun which was just promoted to the Chinese Super League from China League One
5. The Laconia, Wentworth's second command that brings him much success -- FW transfers to Shanghai Port (2023 and 2024 China Super League champions in the real world) - the coincidental nautical reference also helps as an Easter egg!

And Harville (Jian) is just as intricately paralleled as Wentworth (Wu):
1. He has attained the status of "Captain", which means that he was either a Captain or a Commander when he was active in the Navy. This is reflected in Jian's role as the next most important person on the team, sharing the captain's armband with Wu, when they played together on the same team.
2. He's a reflection of what Wentworth might have ended up like if he'd not been as lucky.
3. Despite his difficulties, he has built a full and happy life for himself and his family.
4. Just like in canon, he's not a reader but is great at woodworking.

Part II – Atiqah

Dramatis Personae:
• Atiqah (a.k.a. Anne Elliot) – Meaning: beautiful, charitable, loving
• Aisyah, Atiqah’s late mother (a.k.a. Lady Elliot) – Meaning: Life and prosperity
• Azlan, Atiqah’s younger brother (a.k.a. Mary Elliot) – Meaning: Lion
• Farah, Azlan’s wife (a.k.a. Charles Musgrove) – Meaning: Joy, happiness

---

“Ibu. (Mother.)”

It wasn’t Friday, nor was it Hari Raya Puasa, the date known in the wider Muslim world as Eid-al-Fitr, which marked the end of the month of Ramadan. In fact, Ramadan was just about to start in a couple of weeks.

There was no holy reason for Atiqah to visit her mother’s grave, only the wish to have someone in whom she could confide her jumbled emotions.

Had her mother, Aisyah, been alive, Atiqah wondered what advice she would have given her, both then and now. Though in all honesty, her feelings were so unmentionable that she wondered if she would have shared them with anyone at all – even her mother, who had been her closest confidante in the world.

Placing her hands on the concrete headstone, which felt comfortingly cool in the sweltering heat of the late morning, Atiqah rested her forehead on them. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying valiantly to stave off tears.

She was ridden with guilt.

She had met the person whom she least expected to ever see again in person, and yet to her deep regret – she couldn’t even manage the common civility of greeting him and addressing him by name. But of course, the last time that she had uttered the name of Fang Wu was when she banished him from her life for good. There was no way she could ever greet him as a common acquaintance without having flashbacks of that.

In all honesty, she didn’t blame Wu for not forgiving her. In fact, she expected him to have completely forgotten about her by now, except that his introduction of her to Lele provided evidence to the contrary. Eight years ago, at nineteen and still a few months away from turning pro, what had she known about marriage?

She had understood enough to appreciate what a tremendous gift he had offered her by asking her to wait for him to fulfil his ambition to represent China in football, at which point he would quit and convert to Islam for her sake. Nineteen wasn’t too young for her to fully grasp how gargantuan a sacrifice he was committing himself to in suggesting an early retirement for himself – which would be for her benefit alone, since they couldn’t play football for two different countries and have a life together – but he would also make a religious conversion that must feel like a change to the core of his very being.

And how had she received that gift? After less than twenty-four hours, she lied to him that it was all a game and that she didn’t love him. That she couldn’t love him. The latter might be the more accurate formulation of her feelings, but two things were certain: firstly, she wasn’t at liberty to love him, and secondly, she had forfeited his presence in her life forever.

The summer she turned nineteen, her life had pivoted so rapidly that it nearly gave her whiplash to think about it, even now.

She’d started 2025 in a dead heat to the ‘A’ Levels, and even though the British international school that she had attended while training in Spain wasn’t as much of a pressure cooker as Singapore schools were, old habits died hard. The edicts known very well to every teen in Singapore remained deeply ingrained in her: study hard, place her social life on the back burner, pass or die, and don’t even think about dating. It was FORBIDDEN in bold, caps and underline.

By that summer, the ‘A’ Levels had come and gone, and everybody in her year had turned eighteen and started drinking. Her classmates from school scattered to the four winds: gap years, extended backpacking adventures, exotic volunteer postings, and idyllic holidays on resort islands all over Europe.

The only people her age who didn’t have the freedom to roam far and wide were her fellow footballers in her Under-19 squad.

Atiqah had studied and trained in Barcelona all alone since she was fourteen, and never had she been so lonely. All around her were people her own age who had embraced their new freedoms. Apparently, even aging into legally drinking alcohol was addictive. It started with that first not-forbidden drink (as if her peers hadn’t been clandestinely sneaking sangria and beer for years), and then wine and beer became the highlight at every lunch or dinner gathering they had.

In a group of 18- and 19-year-old youths where she was the only Muslim and therefore the only person who couldn’t participate in the local wine culture, she had barely anyone to hang out with, which naturally led to having hardly anybody to love .

Fang Wu had already been a pro, spending the summer on loan with the football club that hosted an Under-16 boys’ squad where she spent 50% of her training time. Ever since she had started football at the age of five, she’d been such a strong player that she trained and competed among boys to increase the challenge. Spanish boys at 16 might not yet have filled out to their full physical build, but most of them had gone through their adolescent growth spurts and towered over her. That was something, when at 168 cm (5’6”) she already stood one head above many of the Asian ladies of her acquaintance.

She was determined to emphasise that playing football with boys didn’t make her a butch (sadly, too many people thought so). So, Atiqah always wore her hair long and sported a T-shirt that said, “Play Like a Girl”.

When even boys a few years younger than her already outweighed her, she couldn’t hope to beat them through sheer physicality. Instead, she focused on her ball skills and her speed, reminding herself that she was nearly as tall as Messi who had deployed those strengths to such advantage despite being one of the shortest players on the pitch.

It was at one of those training sessions that she first noticed Fang Wu sitting in the stands watching her. Perhaps it hadn’t been the first time he’d done that (and later he would confirm that he’d watched all her training sessions with the U16 boys since his arrival in Spain), but to her, the pros were so rarefied that she hardly dared to look at them, let alone single out any of them to talk to.

And yet this man of twenty-three, already a pro whom she later learned had already achieved a top three domestic league finish, had deigned to speak to her. After a training match where she had scored a hat-trick, she was walking back to her dorm alone (as usual) when she heard his footsteps catching up with hers.

“You shouldn’t need to always be alone,” he’d said. “Let me walk with you. My name is Fang Wu, by the way.”

What could she say? She never socialised with the Under-16 boys whom she trained with. They were simply in a different life stage than her (which was code-speak for saying that their behaviour was immature, let’s admit it). It was naturally the case, when they were still in secondary school whereas she’d finished her ‘A’ Levels. But she could hardly say that out loud. Surely, Fang Wu would think that she was being arrogant and anti-social.

“I’m Atiqah,” she finally replied. “And usually I’m more social than this, but now everyone my age is drinking alcohol, and I can’t.”

“Of course.”

From the instant that Atiqah first set eyes on him, she knew that Wu was Chinese. In Singapore where she’d lived until the age of fourteen, she’d been surrounded by Chinese people. They were her neighbours in her public housing estate, her classmates at school, and her teammates on the pitch.

To Atiqah, Chinese people were simply… people, who understood and respected her Muslim faith but weren’t part of it. They could be her friends, and many of them were.

“And I already know your name,” he added, “your reputation goes far and wide for being the only lady who plays at our club.”

“I… I’m not a butch, even if that’s what everybody thinks,” Atiqah blurted out. “When I go home and turn pro, I’ll only be playing women’s football.”

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean that.” If Wu had been offended by what she’d implied, he’d been very gracious not to show it. “What I meant was that you’re doing exactly what I hope to achieve – to play as equals in a great football nation despite a significant physical disadvantage.”

It was then that she dared to look at him and notice his height, among his other physical attributes. He was less than 10 cm (4 inches) taller than her, which was downright short in the European football world but above average among Chinese men. His weight would make him undersize in European football as well: he was lean and wiry, all compact sinew and no fat. The crew cut that he wore his hair in made him look even thinner than he was. But there was an air of relentless energy which befitted the spare ascetism of his physique.

“You… you flatter me too much.” Atiqah felt embarrassed that a pro, someone who had already established his career, could say that he was aspiring to follow in her footsteps. What had she done to earn that compliment? She was still merely a youth player, running around on the pitch with secondary school students. “I am not yet a pro like you.”

“But one day soon you will be. You might get your first international cap before I do, when you’ll certainly be on the Singapore national team.” He knew, then, that she came from Singapore! But naturally – at a men’s club where a girl playing with the U16 boys’ squad must be an oddity, her reputation must precede her in all respects.

“And let me guess – are you from the US, Australia, Hong Kong, or Taiwan?” Had he been from Singapore, she would already have known him, and his accent eliminated the possibility that he might be from Malaysia. She would say, in fact, that his accent sounded sort of Western, yet she couldn’t place whether it resembled more of an American or a British one. She didn’t yet know that people from mainland China spoke like this because they learned English as a second language from Westerners.

Wu laughed. “None of the above, I’m from China. We call ourselves descendants of the dragon, 龙的传人 long de chuan ren .”

That was not how any of the Chinese people Atiqah knew described themselves, and for some reason she found it incredibly poetic. Her Chinese friends knew that their yellow skin, black hair, and the fact that they had to learn Mandarin as a second language in school (in Singapore, English was everybody’s first language) marked their race. Just as the things which made her Malay were her brown skin, her facial features, her language, and her religion.

What gave them pride was not a mystical sense of ancestral heritage like what Wu alluded to, but that they were Singaporean, and Singapore would be celebrating its 60th birthday this year. All year, the festivities for SG60 had been kicking into high gear.

“Compared to China, Singapore has a very short history,” she replied. “I’m so proud to have the same birthday as my country, which will be turning 60 years old on National Day. That’s coming up on the 9th of August, not very long from now.” Then she realised that she had changed the subject and wanted to redirect the conversation to its original point.

“Is it very hard to get international caps in China?”

Inwardly, Atiqah kicked herself for asking such a stupid question – there were more than a billion people in China, of course it must be! But she wasn’t used to thinking of China as a major football nation, when all the greats that the global football community idolised were from Brazil, Argentina, Spain, England, Germany, and Italy. Asia could be football-crazy, Singapore most certainly so, but most Asian footballers knew that they weren’t even footnotes in the beautiful game.

“It can be,” Wu said. “Last season, my club placed third in China League One. That’s the equivalent of the English Football League Championship, you know, the league just under the EPL. This year I transferred to a new club, Yunnan Yukun, which was newly promoted to the Chinese Super League. That’s like the EPL of China. And then I have to make my name in the Super League to get on the international team.”

“China must be able to support many more leagues than Singapore,” Atiqah mused. “But then, playing football isn’t the type of career that most Singaporeans dream about. Typically, our parents push us to be doctors, lawyers, or top civil servants.”

“I didn’t end up playing football because I dreamed of it,” said Wu matter-of-factly. “I’m playing because I want to fulfil my country’s dream. Even before I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up, I was sent out of my hometown to play football. It’s the only thing I know how to do, and it’s my duty to try my best to get China into the World Cup.”

Everybody in Asia who watched football watched the World Cup. Qualifying for it, though, was a hope that bore reality only for the likes of Japan, South Korea, and Australia. With Singapore’s population of only six million, Atiqah knew that the World Cup was not a stage that she would see in her lifetime.

As for Wu’s prospects, China was making its mark in so many arenas that nobody would doubt their determination to get into the World Cup. However, currently they were far from being a superpower in football. The only time they’d gotten in was 2002, which she would later learn was coincidentally the year of Wu’s birth. And in that outing, they’d bowed out ignominiously at the bottom of their group with 3 losses and a goal difference of 0-9.

“That’s a big dream,” said Atiqah. “I would be happy just to be on the national team. That’s what my mother always wanted for me.”

“It might not happen in my lifetime.” Wu shrugged. “But that is the nature of Chinese history, we make whatever progress we can and then pass it on to the next generation. The Yellow River has been around many centuries more than any of us have.”

That felt like impressively big thinking to Atiqah. She was a 19-year-old living in a 60-year-old country: an independent Singapore (which was the only Singapore she knew) hadn’t existed for even three generations yet.

“How long will you be here?” asked Atiqah. “I’m going back after I age out of U-19 in December, because the Singapore season starts and ends in May.”

“My next season starts in February,” said Wu, “so I hope to be here for the summer, but not much longer. I am already sitting out most of this season because I just changed clubs, and I don’t like to waste time.”

“Is this your first time in Europe?” Atiqah asked. “Before I came here, I never travelled out of Singapore before. If you’re here for only one summer, I can imagine there’s a lot of things you want to experience.”

“To be honest, I never thought I would ever go to Europe,” admitted Wu. “At least, not until I start playing internationally. But since this is your last summer here and my only one, will it be too much for me to ask you to show me Barcelona in your free time?”

They had reached Atiqah’s dorm, and she found this conversation interesting enough that she wanted to pick it up again if there was another chance. So, without thinking about how she was agreeing to a whole bunch of one-on-one time with a man several years older than herself, she said, “Yah sure, I think that will be fun.”

It wasn’t hard for Wu to become Atiqah’s favourite person when he treated her like the pro she would become, rather than the youth player she was. Her coaching team back in Singapore ensured that she had her eyes trained on her future pro career already, but her peers in Spain didn’t think that way. Most of them were still in student mode because they would be going on to uni.

Only Wu, who had turned pro when he was 18, was aware or even conscious that she wasn’t too young for international glory.

And when Wu made the inevitable blunder of saying that her mother must be looking forward to her return, he didn’t make it awkward when she explained that her mother had passed away when she was thirteen. Instead, he had simply said, “At least you still have your father.”

Neither did he make a big deal out of having lost both his parents when he was between twelve and sixteen. He never looked for sympathy because he was an orphan, focusing instead on his good fortune to have two supportive elder siblings, and trying to live his life to the fullest.

She didn’t read any romantic intent into his request for her to show him the sights in Barcelona, either. Part of that was because she knew that he was unattainable – he wasn’t Muslim, and she had no reason to believe that he would ever become one. As a pro already, she was certain he must feel the difference in their age and status, and so he couldn’t possibly think of her that way.

And it was perfectly natural when neither his family nor hers had the money for overseas leisure travel, that they would both consider this their last chance to enjoy and experience summer in Barcelona and therefore tour the city together.

He lived up to what she would expect of a perfect gentleman, though it never occurred to her that he might behave otherwise. They deeply enjoyed talking to each other and did so often, but never did he try to initiate physical contact of any kind. She liked that; in school she’d had male classmates who told her that she was a prude because all physical contact between opposite genders, even a platonic side-hug, was forbidden in Islam. But Wu never needed to be reminded of her boundaries.

Neither did he ever attempt to bring her to bars or nightclubs (again, unlike said classmates). While she appreciated very much that he respected her abstinence from alcohol, what took him to a different level of special was how he accommodated her preference for halal food to a fault.

At the minimum, she never ate pork (which was difficult enough to accomplish in Spain when Iberico pork was everywhere) but to be truly halal , meat had to be prepared in a certain way. Not even all vegetarian food was necessarily halal , because it might contain something else forbidden, like alcohol. The rules around food were so stringent that she had to relax them to a degree when going out in groups with her school or football friends. No pork, no lard, and no alcohol usually sufficed. There were enough Muslims in Barcelona that halal restaurants existed, but Wu was her first friend here who Googled for them and planned ahead before inviting her out to dinner.

Not that Atiqah usually had many occasions to eat at restaurants – back in Singapore, all the mainstream fast-food chains, namely McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC, were halal -certified, and every food court and hawker centre had at least one halal stall. Sit-down full-service restaurants were beyond her family’s budget, and when delicious Malay food was easily available at hawker centres, that constraint didn’t matter one whit. In contrast, the halal establishments in Spain were much more upscale because they were patronised by well-heeled Arabs who lived in or frequented Europe.

Atiqah felt uneasy going out to nice places for dinner when the dressiest outfits she owned were knee-length skirts, short sleeve blouses, and flat leatherette sandals, and she owned no makeup. Remembering it now made her shake her head at her innocence then, but her 19-year-old self didn’t have any reservations in telling Wu that they should eat at fast food places and not restaurants because she had no money to buy nice clothes to wear and didn’t wear makeup. Any man, her 27-year-old self now realised, would consider this as an attempt to fish for compliments, if not a direct hint to take her out shopping on his dime.

But Wu had taken it very literally. In a matter-of-fact way, he’d told her that she looked nice enough in what she had, and that when he was in China, he never ate at restaurants either. Here it was different – it was like the word “carpe diem” that they used in Dead Poets Society , and so he didn’t mind spending more to do things that were special which they’d never have a chance to do again back home. And after that, he’d stuck to casual falafel joints, anywhere that made her feel comfortable.

How had she not realised that they had been, in effect, dating, even if they hadn’t called it that or thought of it that way? In the present day, Atiqah facepalmed and rolled her eyes at her former obliviousness, but at 19, she had been so perfectly conditioned to compartmentalise all thoughts about romantic relationships that she had never faltered in the belief that she and Wu would never be anything more than merely friends. Nor, unprovoked, would she ever have wished for more.

Halal dating was done within the auspices of the Muslim community, often chaperoned, and carried the intention of marriage. Atiqah was too young to marry anytime soon, and Wu wasn’t Muslim. Besides, they would soon part ways to (hopefully) represent different countries in football. So, all the time they spent together that summer could not be dating.

Besides, Atiqah had been, and still was, sure that if there had been any fellow Malay or Chinese people in their immediate circle, she and Wu would have included them in these outings. She believed that the only reason why they were one-on-one all the time was because they were the only two individuals in this place who weren’t as free about wining, dining, partying, and – in all honesty, physical intimacy – as people living in Spain might be generally wont to do.

This paradigm skewed Atiqah’s perception of all the things they did together, including everything that, if considered in a different light, might be deemed romantic.

For example: Barcelona was full of art, and as with any place where art was plentiful, much of it was highly suggestive. One of the major attractions of the city was a mural made of 4,000 photos, formed in a mosaic called “The World Begins with Every Kiss”. Each of the photos were collected from a local family in Barcelona and meant to depict the concept of freedom, but when put together, they formed a picture of two giant lips beginning a romantic kiss.

Of course, Atiqah had seen films where people, mostly Westerners, kissed with their lips. When she couldn’t possibly have gone through adolescence without a steady diet of Hollywood movies, she certainly was aware that there were couples who did even more than only kissing, and without necessarily being married.

Yet when she stood in front of that mural with Wu and took a wefie with him and it, the only thought that passed through her head was, “What a pretty picture – and of course, these things are for them and not for us.”

Looking back, the 27-year-old Atiqah might wonder whether Wu had indeed thought about kissing her in that way and held back. But her 19-year-old self never considered that Wu might see the mural differently than she had – that the Spanish could do what they liked, but these things weren’t for them.

The most insane thing about that summer, Atiqah realised, was that they had gone swimming so many times at the beach, yet she never let herself think of any physical temptation regarding Wu, not even once. Of course she found him handsome – a remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit, and brilliancy – and when he wore board shorts with no T-shirt on, of course she thought he was attractive, in the way she might say a film star was. But her belief in his unattainability made it unthinkable for her to consider any course of action. And perhaps it was her conviction that he found her equally out of the question romantically that drove her unwavering certainty that he would never make a move on her.

On her birthday, Wu had orchestrated the most magical 24 hours for her.

The night before, August 8th, he had stayed overnight at her dorm, sleeping on the floor. There, they watched delayed broadcasts of the National Day Message and all the pre-parade programming. The next morning, they both skipped training to tune into the Channel News Asia livestream of the National Day Parade, which aired from 5:30 to about 9 PM Singapore time, which was between 10:30 AM to 2 PM in Barcelona. After that, he went out during siesta hours and came back in the evening with halal meat from the butcher shop to make her dinner.

“Have you ever tried Chinese food?” he asked.

“Maybe a few times, but not very often.” Atiqah wasn’t prejudiced against trying non-Malay cuisines, but Chinese food was very tricky. Even if she avoided pork dishes, she couldn’t always tell when the food might contain the invisible pork, i.e. lard. It was only at catered group functions in Singapore where a halal international buffet was served that she sampled a few Chinese dishes.

“I hope you will like it,” said Wu, “because this is the only thing I know how to cook. One thing I can assure you is that all the meat and all the sauces are halal .” He had made a point to use her pots too, so that she could be certain that no non- halal food had touched what he was cooking.

Malay food was spicy, but this kind of food was a different kind of spicy, sour-hot rather than spice-hot was perhaps the best way she could describe it. Wu’s stir-frying sent the aroma of the garlic and the sauce wafting through her dorm kitchen, and Atiqah realised now that the source of the cooking smell that had emanated from Lele’s flat the past few weeks must have been Wu cooking for her.

(It was highly ironic that Lele conducted a home-based French baking business out of her kitchen but had no interest whatsoever in day-to-day home cooking.)

Well, what was it to her if Fang Wu was only in the flat next door, making himself agreeable to others ? The sour grapes she felt about Wu cooking the same dish that he had made for her as a special birthday treat, only now it was for her next-door neighbour, made Atiqah appalled at her own selfishness.

Yes, once upon a time he had promised to come and look for her, and to try converting to Islam for her. There was no reason for him to do so now, but seeing him show up almost at her doorstep, unconverted and most decidedly not there for her , felt outright painful.

And yet what could she expect? He was Chinese, and if he found a Chinese woman to marry, that could only be the most natural course of things. She just wished she didn’t have to witness it.

How could she have been so blind? If she still felt so possessive about Wu cooking a dinner especially for her on her birthday, eight years after the event, it could only mean one thing. Even then, she had already fallen rapidly and deeply in love , only she hadn’t been allowed to admit it, not even to herself.

She might never have needed to admit it, if he hadn’t done so first.

After her birthday, they had had one more month of carpe diem , of beautiful sunny afternoons at the beach, visits to La Sagrada Familia and the cat sculpture by Botero at the end of the Rambla del Raval, even a La Liga game watched live at the newly renovated Camp Nou stadium, home of the revered Barcelona F.C.

True to the spirit of treasuring every day in Barcelona which they wouldn’t have again, Wu hadn’t hesitated to splurge on things like wakeboarding, which he said was a rare treat that he seldom got to enjoy except during his infrequent visits to his sister in Sanya. But beaches in China were overcrowded, and even though Spain overflowed with tourists in the summer, he still felt as if he had more breathing space here. Coming from an island that barely made a dot on the globe but still packed six million people, Atiqah agreed.

The urgency of packing everything they could into that single summer, soaking in the city that appeared to burst into a thousand colours for just those few months, made them feel as if they’d known each other for years. And finally, the penultimate day arrived before Wu’s inevitable return to China.

His going back was a good thing, Atiqah had reminded herself. It meant that he didn’t have to waste an entire season, and the more time he got on the pitch now, the greater his chances would be to get noticed in the Super League. Salvaging this season would set him up for greater glory in next year’s season, which would then give him a chance to make an impact in the qualifiers for the 2030 World Cup. 2026 was a lost cause already, so it would be a long haul to his dream.

Nonetheless, she had known that she would miss him bitterly, certainly the most in the remaining months of her stay in Barcelona. After she went home, she would have her family around her, and when she turned pro there would be plenty to occupy her time and her mind. But for now, she was losing the one person in her world who cherished and understood her best, second only to her late mother.

And even if they both achieved their goals to play internationally, they might still not get to meet again in person, not when men’s and women’s football tournaments were rarely held together.

Back then, she scarcely allowed herself to wonder what Wu might be thinking, too. He was a pro, and he had his career in China. Surely, she could be forgiven for believing that the summer must have meant less to him than it had to her, all the way up to their last day out in town, the day when they went to Park Guell.

If Barcelona was a city of a thousand colours, Park Guell was the place where they all came together in a riotous celebration. It was the ultimate canvas for the ineffable imagination of Antoni Gaudi, the man whose architecture painted the entire city with its unique flair of expressiveness.

A teal blue-green mosaic dragon, flecked with blue and brown and yellow, guarded the principal staircase at the entrance of the park. More salamander than dragon, it showed its friendly face to all and sundry, the streaks and dots of colour on its body glinting in the sunlight. Hadn’t Wu called himself a descendant of the dragon? Atiqah had seen enough pictures of dragons (and dragon dances) in Singapore to know that Chinese dragons did not look like this, but nonetheless, she was overtaken by sentiment anyway.

He had apparently been so too, because he remained silent as well. For several minutes, the two of them stood transfixed and speechless, each buried in their own thoughts and reflections. Then Wu broke the silence.

“我是龙的传人，我的目标就是龙之队, (I am a descendant of the dragon, and my goal is the Dragon Team,)” he declared. To translate for her, he continued, “I need this, I need to chase my dream. There are those who sent China into space, the men who bravely fought the Japanese, and before them our ancestors who built the Great Wall. I might be just a poor country boy, but I want to send China to the World Cup.”

Only an Asian would know the audaciousness of that ambition. Just getting to the group games (not even talking about the knockout rounds) would be a modest goal for the Europeans who played the game to lift the trophy, but it would be a massive achievement for China, never mind that it was the country with one of the deepest talent pools in the world for just about everything. It was the most ambitious goal that remained anywhere within the realm of reality.

Despite the loftiness of that goal, such confidence, powerful in its own warmth, and bewitching in the wit which often expressed it, was enough for Atiqah.

Perhaps it was crazy to think about the World Cup when he had just got out of China League One and hadn’t even yet seen any action in the Super League. But somehow, Atiqah felt certain that even by sheer force of determination (backed by skill, of course, and she had watched him play and knew that he had skill in spades), he would achieve that dream.

And impossibly, irrationally, she wanted to be there with him when he did it.

Never in her wildest dreams had Atiqah imagined that he might wish that too.

“I don’t want this to end,” he had said, breaking the silence. All that summer, the city of Barcelona had burst out in a thousand colours, teasing, tantalising them to drop the veneer of restraint that they had desperately clung to. At least, this was how Atiqah saw it now, that all along she did not know what might truly have been in his mind, so fixed she had been in the notion that he saw things exactly as she had.

“Me too,” she had replied. “I’ll miss you, but it’s all for the best. 加油 Jia you (i.e. Chinese slang similar to ‘Break a leg’), OK?” The meagre scraps of Mandarin (and Hokkien) that she had picked up just by virtue of living in Singapore had never been more useful than now, when she could at least say something to him in his language.

“I’ll try my best.”

Clearly, from the restless look in his eyes, he didn’t think this was enough. Neither did Atiqah, but she didn’t dare to suggest that they could keep in touch via emails and texts.

It was different when they were both here, when their common status as voyagers away from home kept them together. Corresponding, by contrast, sounded too much as if they were seeking each other out by design.

Specifically – though 19-year-old Atiqah had scarcely dared to think the word – it would seem too much like dating, which was impossible.

Forbidden.

Unmentionable.

Taking a deep breath, he reached out and grabbed both her hands. “You’ll wait for me, right? I love you.” Love was a word that Atiqah could barely contemplate. Love meant marriage, and marriage was the remotest thing from her mind when it would be years before she could save up the hundreds of thousands of dollars it took to buy a public housing flat.

And yet, was this love? The feeling that all your world was wrapped up in one person to whom you hoped and wished you’d never have to say goodbye?

“Wait… for…?” She hardly dared to say what was next, not when all this was alien territory. Furthermore, there was one more problem – “But you aren’t Muslim, and you won’t -” she blurted out. “It’s not possible.”

“Not in China,” Wu acknowledged, giving Atiqah at least the cold comfort of knowing that he’d thought this through to some extent. “In China, the Muslims mostly come from the minority ethnic groups, so it would be very strange for me to become a Muslim there. But there’s always Singapore, or even Malaysia. I have my goal for the World Cup 2030, and just one chance – either I get it, or I pass it on to the next generation. Five years, and I can come to wherever you are.”

“You’re saying…?”

It was too much to be believed, if that was indeed what Wu was implying. That he wasn’t only thinking of marrying her, but that he would be willing to convert to Islam to do so.

“I know it will be a big change. I’m not going to lie to you, it won’t be easy for me. But I also know it’s the only way to keep you in my life, and I don’t want this to be the last day of you and me.

“You’re still so young, and I’m sorry to do this to you now. Honestly, I was going to be the one to wait, instead of making you wait. But if you go home without me saying anything, you might marry someone else, and I’ll lose you forever. That’s why I can’t afford to remain in silence.”

Such a speech was not to be soon recovered from . It was a lot of information, a deluge of feelings for Atiqah to process. He loved her, and it dawned on her that she had no idea what love was really like. To think that he was willing to convert to Islam, if that was what it took to clear the way for their marriage!

That was a concrete demonstration of what she meant to him, and it was too precious to throw away.

“Yes, I will,” she choked out. “I’ll wait.”

If love was desperation, then perhaps she felt it too. Her mother, the only person who might have talked to her about dating and love, was long gone. Speaking of love without marriage was forbidden, and marriage was a distant, future idea to her.

But five years – that felt reasonable, when she would be 24 and he would be 28. If he came back and converted for her, it was a thing that she could do. Especially when the alternative would be losing him from her life.

“Really?” Stoic as he usually was, the delight on Wu’s face was almost painful to see. Could it be possible that he had thought her just as unattainable as she found him?

“Yes,” Atiqah replied with the conviction that only desperation could bring. “I don’t want anything else.” Mustering up her courage to say what she really felt, even though she was skirting on dangerous forbidden territory, she added, “I don’t want to lose you.”

Their lips had barely brushed, not even the hint of a kiss if one were to ask any of the Spaniards around them, but as the Kiss Wall knew, sometimes the suggestion of something could convey a million feelings. In that brief period of exquisite felicity stood an ironclad promise of forever, a key into each other’s future even if for now, they had to part.

Those few hours where they roamed the city of Barcelona for the last time were the happiest memory in Atiqah’s life, not just for the 19 years that had come before, but also for the eight years that followed.

But when she went back to her dorm that night and closed the door behind her, she could feel the reality literally crashing around her.

What had she done?

Touching between a man and a woman who were not married and not related, with perhaps the exception of a business handshake, was strictly prohibited by syariah law. And yet, she had allowed a boy – in fact, a man (how scary that word was) – to hold her hands and practically kiss her. That their pact contained a de facto engagement did not change the fact that she had committed the Islamic crime of khalwat .

In fact, she had been committing it for the entire summer, because merely being an unmarried and unrelated man and woman alone together was already enough. Physical intimacy was not required. Just last year, the papers had reported about a man in the eastern Malaysian state of Terengganu getting publicly caned for it.

Upon later reflection, Atiqah realised that this could perhaps be why the law was made that way. Her younger self had been too inexperienced to see the signs that an attraction could develop between herself and Wu, too confident that their mutual unavailability would guarantee their innocence. But surely, in a city as romantic as Barcelona, half the sum of attraction, on either side, might have been enough . There was no guarantee that they would not fall for each other, quite the opposite in fact.

Traumatic as it had been for the 19-year-old Atiqah to realise that she had committed an Islamic crime, she had still felt (the bravado of youth!) that she could make it right if she stopped doing anything untoward with Wu and waited out the five years patiently. He would get China into the World Cup – or not – and he would come to Singapore, and if he converted, they could marry in Islam. She would not have breached anything.

But then, could she bear to see the suffering that the conversion would bring him? Even 19-year-old Atiqah had known that pork and lard were practically staples of the Chinese diet, and that making any Chinese person go cold turkey on those two things would be brutal. She had even thought of how never being able to drink alcohol again – not just to abstain for a summer, but for life – would have to be hard on Wu.

And 27-year-old Atiqah could add one more layer to that argument: that for Wu, turning Muslim would mean replacing Confucius with Allah. What sort of a life was that?

Flipping the argument – if she were to see that converting was so painful that she wanted to spare Wu from that, could she see herself leaving Islam? It would feel like an immense betrayal of the heritage that she had been born into. She didn’t choose Islam, but she had come into it by default just like all the Malay people she knew among her family and friends. There must be Malays who gave up Islam among those who moved to the West and married foreigners, but 19-year-old Atiqah had never met any. That hadn’t changed in the eight years since.

At 27, Atiqah could now see the asymmetry of syariah law where 19-year-old Atiqah couldn’t. A Muslim man could have a non-Muslim wife and still have his marriage recognised in Islam, but a Muslim woman could not have an Islamic marriage with a non-Muslim man. With the insight that came with age, she saw that this was a necessary corollary to the fact that a Muslim father would beget Muslim children, so to marry a non-Muslim man would effectively mean terminating the line of Islam in the family.

In any case, had she not imagined herself consulting his good, even more than her own, she could hardly have given him up . Singapore would not flog her for committing khalwat , and nobody would need to know when they could hold this secret between them until they married. He had always been so upright and considerate, so she had no doubts that his intention to convert was utterly sincere.

What he had offered her was essentially an engagement. But what persuaded her to believe the engagement a wrong thing was her doubt in her own ability to reciprocate the immense gift that he had offered her. If for any reason he were to find it difficult for himself to convert when the time came, she could not bring herself to leave Islam for him.

How could she tell him this? If she said that he meant as much to her as she might mean to him – and if that was called love – it meant that she had fallen in love with a non-Muslim man. That was such a flagrant breach of her religion that it was inadmissible, even if it wasn’t impossible.

The next closest thing to the truth that she might say was that she appreciated him as a friend and wanted to keep in touch. But that would end up with them corresponding, with her knowledge that he was in love with her. That was still dating, which was haram (forbidden by Islamic law).

What alternatives did she have? Her only way out was to convince him that she had never loved him. She knew that it was cruel and that it would cost her any chance of friendship with him. However, she reasoned, this was better than committing them to a path of wrongdoing which they both might regret.

The next day, she had still gone to Barcelona El Prat Airport to see him off. Yes, there would be the misery of a parting, a final parting , to deal with, but it was the right thing to give him closure and to not mislead him into having hopes that she might not be able to fulfil.

“Wu, I’m sorry,” she had told him, clasping her hands behind her back so that he wouldn’t try to take them. “Yesterday, I lied to you. I only wanted to know what it was like to date a boy, but I don’t – I can’t – love you.” That had only been half a lie; at that time, she still wasn’t sure if what she felt was love. (It was only in the eight years that ensued that she became certain it was.)

“不仁不义 Bu ren bu yi ([You] have no morals and no integrity),” Wu had spat. She hadn’t understood the words, only that he was extremely angry. Whipping around and walking through immigration without a backward glance, he had left the country in consequence .

Atiqah knew that she didn’t deserve to be forgiven. Sometimes, she even blamed herself for agreeing to spend so much time with him. He understood enough of Islam to know that halal food, abstinence from alcohol and absolute chastity were important to her. But he couldn’t possibly have known the rules around khalwat and why they existed.

She did not blame the syariah law, nor did she blame herself for being guided by it. But late at night, far too often, she wondered what advice she might have received from her mother, or even what she might have told her younger self if she could go back in time.

Kneeling in front of her mother’s grave, Atiqah imagined what she might say if she had a daughter in that situation. Such a thought exercise could only be painful when it dredged up regrets that she might already have a son or daughter if she had married Wu.

Firstly, she would be shocked. She knew that such a reaction was prejudicial, but she would wonder why her daughter didn’t consider other Muslim men before falling for a non-Muslim one.

Secondly, she would need to get involved immediately. Her 19-year-old self hadn’t known about provocative texts but now she did, even though she’d never seen one. She would have to ensure that all correspondence between the pair went through her, so that she could vet the content. That was such an invasion of privacy that she found it shocking. And yet chaperoning was an integral part of Muslim dating. It ensured that no physical intimacy happened before marriage.

Thirdly, she now recognised the uncertainty in the arrangement that Wu had proposed. Many things could happen in five years. While back in China, he might meet a Chinese woman more suitable for him than she was, and would he have a change of feelings? If he got injured and couldn’t play football anymore, how else could he earn a living? He had left school at 18, so neither desk jobs nor manual ones would be possible for him in that scenario. Only with 20/20 hindsight could she know that all that he had told her would follow in his career had indeed taken place.

Lastly, she would have told her daughter not to blame herself, no matter what the outcome turned out to be. At twenty-seven, Atiqah thought very differently about the matter from what she had been made to think at nineteen . She had seen her friends dating and getting married. Furthermore, her younger brother, Azlan, had a Muslim girlfriend while still in secondary school and married her when they were eighteen.

She now felt that were any young person, in similar circumstances, to apply to her for counsel, they would never receive of such certain immediate wretchedness, such uncertain future good. She was now persuaded that despite the possible disapprobation at home, all their probable fears, delays and disappointments, she should yet have been a happier woman in maintaining the engagement than she had been in the sacrifice of it.

Instead, she was now stuck in a situation even more irreparable than she had believed it to be at the age of nineteen. There had been a time, when there could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers, no, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.

The midday sun reminded Atiqah that it was lunch time, and she was almost clear across the island from where she needed to be. Her father would be needing lunch, and she would still need to take a Grab (the equivalent of Uber in Singapore) from the graveyard in Choa Chu Kang to the nearest MRT station, then ride almost the entire length of the East-West line to get home. Drying her tears with a tissue, Atiqah squared her shoulders and prepared herself to face the reality that she would have no choice but to be a witness to.

---

Notes:
Here's the thinking behind the names of Atiqah and her family members:
- Atiqah (a.k.a. Anne Elliot) – Meaning: beautiful, charitable, loving -- i.e. the very nature of Anne herself
- Eusoff (a.k.a. Sir Walter Elliot) -- Meaning: God increases -- The name "Walter" means "commander of the army". Since Muslims don't have surnames, but have the names of their fathers after their given names, Atiqah's initials resolve to A.E. while her father's name is as grandiose as Sir Walter's in meaning.
- Aisyah, Atiqah’s late mother (a.k.a. Lady Elliot) – Meaning: Life and prosperity -- because these are the two things Lady Elliot gave to Sir Walter in her lifetime.
- Aizah, Atiqah’s elder sister (a.k.a. Elizabeth Elliot) – Meaning: Noble -- Elizabeth is a royal name, also Aizah and Aisyah are different names but so similar in spelling to mimic how the mother and eldest daughter had the same name in canon.
- Azlan, Atiqah’s younger brother (a.k.a. Mary Elliot) – Meaning: Lion -- Mary is named after the Virgin Mary, the lion is also a religious symbol.
- Farah, Azlan’s wife (a.k.a. Charles Musgrove) – Meaning: Joy, happiness -- Because Charles is a happy character
- Aziz, Azlan's elder son (a.k.a. Charles Musgrove III) -- Meaning: Powerful, respected, beloved -- The over-indulged child of Charles & Mary
- Yusuf, Azlan's younger son (a.k.a. Walter Musgrove) -- Meaning: God Increases -- A variant of "Eusoff", so he's named after his grandfather.
You'll get to meet all of them in the next chapter.

Meanwhile, Wentworth's career carries on in parallel to canon:
- FW turned pro at 18, the same age that Captain Wentworth would have become a Lieutenant (with his ability, he would have passed the exam as soon as he was allowed to take it)
- FW's past track record, while promising, still needs a long way to get to his goal, which is highly ambitious but still within the realm of attainability.
- FW was spending freely what he has earned freely in Barcelona.
- Pro football, like the Navy, is a risky and uncertain profession.
- FW has to leave in order to advance his career.

And here are the parallels between Atiqah and Anne:
- Anne in canon had not yet reached the age of majority (age 21), but she was still within a socially acceptable age to get married. Similarly, Atiqah has finished her education and will turn pro in less than 6 months, so she's closer to being a young adult than a child at age 19.
- The Baronetage states that Anne Elliot's birthday is the 9th of August (coincidentally, Singapore's National Day).

Part IV – The Miserable Quagmire of Non-Communication

IV.i – Lele

“郑欣乐，接下来我该做什么? (Zheng Xinle, what should I do next?)” Fang Wu called to Lele from the kitchen.

On the one hand, Lele could welcome this as a new era of domesticity. On the other, she wished they had dates with more romance in them. How had their situation devolved into this?

During the long school holidays, Lele was inducting Fang Wu into her home baking business. She fervently hoped that were he to marry her in the (preferably near) future, they could spend their days working side by side, just the way that they were now.

Well, maybe not quite the way they were now. It grated on her that whenever they were alone together, Fang Wu addressed her with her full name, in the manner that one might speak to a school classmate or a colleague.

“你干嘛这样叫我？我是你同学吗？(Why are you addressing me like this? Am I your classmate?)” Lele nearly berated him. She was supposed to be always a sunny personality – her very name demanded it! Since when had she ever sulked the way she did now?

“乐乐公主，臣奉令承教, (Princess Lele, your subject shall obey all your commands,)” replied Fang Wu in falsetto. When he teased her in this way, Lele had no idea whether he was doing it because of their growing familiarity or if he might be mocking her.

Was it so hard for him to simply adore her the way everyone else did?

While they were growing up, their father had called Xixi and Lele “两个小娃娃 (the two little dolls)”. He’d doted on them as if they were his favourite dolls too, never denying them the dresses and toys they asked for. Between braiding their hair, sewing sequins on their dance costumes, and doing their makeup when they had recitals or competitions, their mother had made them feel like little princesses. And the trophies that Xixi and Lele had won for dance throughout their childhood adorned their parents’ upscale flat in the Tianxin district of Changsha.

Neither Xixi nor Lele had needed to do a lick of housework while living with their parents, before they came out here for university. Like many upper-middle-class urban families in China, the Zheng family hired an “ ayi 阿姨”, which translated literally to “auntie” but really meant a servant.

Even now, their parents still paid their rent in Singapore and gave them the money to call in a part-time helper to clean up their flat twice a week. In fact, the Zhengs could afford to rent their daughters a private condo unit, but Xixi and Lele preferred this flat because it was 300 sq ft bigger than the average 3-bedroom new private apartment. That was why the sisters never cared to do something as mundane as everyday home cooking, though they found it sweet to have boyfriends who were willing to cook and clean for them!

Oh, if cooking really was a love language in Asian culture like people said, Lele could be certain that Fang Wu was in love with her! His cooking was truly divine, even though he seemed impervious to the most basic instructions in baking.

But why was his manner towards her so difficult to read? Couldn’t he see that their union was meant to be?

A princess was nothing without her prince. And Lele was vastly overdue to have her first knight on a white steed come – and stay – in her life. She’d taken five years at uni to pursue a double Honours degree in Mathematics and Chemistry. That was plenty of time for her to find a boyfriend to graduate with, but she hadn’t.

What had she done wrong? Was this a punishment for her dynamism?

After all, Xixi (who was her senior by two years) had found Xiaoming before the third year of uni. By the time Xixi was 21 and Xiaoming was 23, they’d become as inseparable as if they were joined by glue.

Singaporean men were two years older than the women in their year at uni because of their obligation to serve in the army before they embarked on their tertiary education. By right, Lele believed that should make the National University of Singapore the most fertile matchmaking ground. It would ensure she was surrounded by real men, instead of immature boys.

Lele was used to turning heads. Indeed, many men had asked her out on dates during her years at university. Disappointingly, none had progressed to long-term relationships.

It was her unconventional approach to life that was intimidating to most men, Lele decided. After graduating, she continued to be bold in forging her career. Baking, unlike cooking, was interesting because it served not only to provide food but also to create a form of art. Furthermore, baking was all about chemistry, which came naturally to her thanks to her scientific talent.

On top of her home-based bakery business, Lele worked three days a week at a Chinese medicine shop in Chinatown. To her, it was exciting to be able to straddle multiple identities across the Eastern and Western influences in her life.

She’d been out of university for more than a year now. More men had come, but all of them had gone. Repeatedly, Xixi hinted that perhaps Lele’s standards might be a notch too high.

Though Xixi wasn’t in a much better position either. Her progress with Xiaoming was still frustratingly slow. Although Xixi and Xiaoming had dated for more than six years, he had yet to propose. Despite Lele’s fervent hints on behalf of her sister, he stubbornly shied away from the topic of buying a flat.

Unromantic as it sounded, the offer to buy a new Housing and Development Board (HD flat was the way in which most Singaporean men proposed. But Xiaoming didn’t see any need to acquire a new flat when he was guaranteed to inherit his parents’ one.

Well, in the coming year of 2034, Xiaoming would turn thirty. Lele was certain that if the prospect of a government-subsidized flat hadn’t served as sufficient impetus for him to propose to Xixi, this significant birthday would. So, she felt mounting pressure to find a partner. When Xixi and Xiaoming inevitably got married, her parents would surely redouble their nagging on her if she didn’t.

Miraculously, Fang Wu walked right into her life.

He was the ultimate man among men – handsome, sociable and polite to a fault. After he approached her, Lele decided there was a reason behind all those years of romantic frustration after all. She had merely been waiting for the right man to appear. Someone who wouldn’t be fazed by her two jobs, her two degrees, or her strident personality.

And who else could Fate have intended for her, but a man who would be intimidated by no one because he had been to the World Cup?

Driven and competitive since birth, Lele was determined that if her sister was on the cusp of matrimony, she would not be long to follow suit. Thus, there was no way she would allow her budding relationship with Fang Wu to fail.

Even if she didn’t know what was in his mind when he teased her. Well, if it made her live up to her reputation for cheerfulness, she would assume that the teasing was his way of showing love.

~~~⚽~~~

IV.ii – Xixi

Zheng Xixi didn’t ask for much in life.

Truth to tell, there wasn’t much she needed that she and her sister Lele didn’t already have. Their dress had every advantage, their faces were rather pretty, their spirits extremely good, their manner unembarrassed and pleasant; they were of consequence at home, and favourites abroad.

And yet – just for Xiaoming to pop the question, was that too much to ask?

In their school days, Xixi and Lele had been among the prettiest girls in their class. Their parents had enrolled them in ballet and modern dance lessons during their spare time, which made them more adept at makeup than most students their age. But as in many other Chinese families, dating had been as forbidden as housework when they were in high school. Every minute of their attention that wasn’t taken by their studies was supposed to be focused on their dancing.

High school in China was extremely competitive, too! During the third year of senior high, the teacher would count down the days to the university entrance exams, known as the gaokao 高考, on the classroom blackboard. On a weekly basis, the academic ranking of every student in the class was updated on a notice board visible to everyone in the school.

Xixi hadn’t disappointed her parents. She had scored very respectably on the gaokao and ranked among the top five students in her class. And her parents had sent her and her younger sister to Singapore so that they could attend university classes taught in English. This would be their key to the rest of the world.

Boyfriends were the one thing that had been forbidden in high school but not in university, and Xixi had wasted no time in making her choice. Chen Jianming was in her year, studying engineering while she was pursuing her degree in Business Administration. His parents were both civil servants. Therefore, everything checked off in his pedigree.

Yes, he was socially awkward and nerdy, but Xixi could overlook that when engineering was a prestigious degree, second only to medicine or law. Most importantly, he was a very amiable, pleasing young man who might prefer books to people, but treated everyone with courtesy and respect.

Jianming, or “Xiaoming” (‘Little Ming’) as Xixi and Lele called him because he was as skinny as a teenager, was so adorably filial, too! An only child and a mother’s boy, he invited her home to dinner with his parents on a weekly basis. He was often late for their dates, but Xixi always forgave him because his tardiness invariably stemmed from something he was doing for his mother.

“我的乖儿子, (My good son,)” Xiaoming’s mother often praised him, patting him on the head as if he was still a little boy. And she’d started calling Xixi “我的乖媳妇 (My good daughter-in-law)” ever since they graduated, too!

Xiaoming’s reaction to his parents’ praise was irresistibly cute. Xixi loved seeing his face light up behind his square-rimmed glasses. But he stubbornly refused to heed his parents’ hints to make her part of the family.

Of course, when they had been fresh graduates, money had been a problem. But now, a solution was within reach. Their jobs were stable and well paying, with Xiaoming in the Civil Service and Xixi at the local office of a large tech company. After working for four years, this year they finally had enough socked away for the downpayment on a flat if they wished for it.

The problem was that Xiaoming didn’t wish for it, despite all the well-meaning hints that Lele (embarrassingly) piled on him for Xixi’s sake. Xixi could understand that the independent Lele would never marry a man who didn’t have a place of his own. But she understood Xiaoming best, and she knew he would never be able to do without his parents.

Xixi didn’t know how to tell Xiaoming that she liked him without having to change the way he was. That she liked him enough, in fact, to move into his nearly-60-year-old flat and live with him and his parents, if only he would ask her to marry him. In fact, Xixi was sure that the only reason why he hadn’t proposed yet was because he didn’t know that she wouldn’t require the offer of a new flat of their own to say yes.

Only rarely did Xixi feel any misgivings about Xiaoming’s divided priorities between herself and his parents. While Xiaoming was always frugal with his own spending, there was one thing he never spared any expense on: his yearly overseas holiday with his parents. This year, the Chen family had been on a three-week tour of the US when Fang Wu had walked into Xixi and Lele’s lives.

She barely admitted it to herself, even though she knew her feelings must have been transparent to her sister. For a fleeting two weeks, Zheng Xixi had dared to compare Xiaoming to Fang Wu and found that the tally wasn’t necessarily in Xiaoming’s favour.

The concept of 男子汉大丈夫 nan zi han da zhang fu (a masculine man) was a thing. A thing that was surprisingly attractive to her despite her long-attached status. And it was a thing that Xiaoming would never quite be.

For those few weeks that Fang Wu had traipsed all over Singapore with her and her sister to check out the local Chinese food scene, Xixi had allowed herself to fantasise that perhaps Fang Wu might just choose her.

Of course, that had been merely a passing fancy. Xiaoming had come back from his US trip with the discounted Coach handbag that she’d asked him to buy for her from the premium factory outlets. The first weekend after he returned, he’d come by specially to present it to her. But he’d also seemed aware of being slighted . After all, Saturday night usually was when she went to his flat to dine with his parents. This time, she’d told him to come to her flat for dinner with Lele and Fang Wu instead.

Xiaoming had stalked off before dessert. Of all the excuses, he said that his parents had purchased a fresh durian that morning and were waiting for him to open it up for them to eat after dinner!

“Surely you can have one of Lele’s choux eclairs before you go?” Xixi had nearly pleaded.

“ No ,” Xiaoming had replied, impressive in his resolution for once, “ there is nothing worth my staying for;” and he was gone directly .

Upon self-examination, Xixi had the guilty conscience that all through dinner, she had sometimes the air of being divided between Xiaoming and Fang Wu. She’d waxed too lyrical in her praises of the man who had cooked their dinner. (She hadn’t meant to offend Xiaoming, but a man who cooked – especially one who cooked well to boot – was so sexy!) Hence, this was her fault, and she’d patch it up. Xiaoming had brought her the Coach bag as he’d promised, after all.

She’d gone to Xiaoming’s flat the next day with enough Bee Cheng Hiang 美珍香brand bak kwa (barbequed pork jerky) to feed Xiaoming and his parents for a month.

“Xiaoming, I’m sorry,” she’d said. “I wasn’t trying to compare you with Fang Wu. Even if you never learn to cook, you’re still mine and I love you.”

“Do you like the bag?” Upon seeing that Xixi was carrying it, Xiaoming’s face had broken into a smile.

They had made up over a long stroll along the beach that was a stone’s throw away from Xiaoming’s family home. There had even been two leftover seeds of Mao Shan Wang 猫山王durian from the evening before that he’d saved for her despite his anger and jealousy.

And after that, Xiaoming had ensured that they spent one evening every weekend dining at her flat with Lele and Fang Wu, and the other evening at his flat with his parents.

Xixi was sure that Xiaoming must know how badly she wished to marry him. She had made the first move to reconcile, after all. She’d even agreed to let his mother teach her how to make tang yuan 汤圆 dumplings for the upcoming Winter Solstice. She, who never went into the kitchen!

It didn’t mean that Xixi stopped appreciating Fang Wu. To the contrary, the more time she spent with her sister and him, the more she felt that Fang Wu was more masculine, more independent, deeper-thinking, and more adventurous than Xiaoming might ever become.

But Xixi also accepted the reality that Lele, with all her dynamism, would be more matched in personality to Fang Wu than she ever would. And she wasn’t going to throw away what she had with Xiaoming. Not when the sweet little things he’d done for her, even while he had been ridden with jealousy, showed that he cared deeply for her in his own way.

Thus, even though Zheng Xixi was certain that Xiaoming’s proposal was guaranteed not to be romantic, she decided that all she wanted now was simply the chance to hear it.

~~~⚽~~~

IV.iii – Fang Wu

Fang Wu had believed that finding two women who spoke his native dialect would make him feel at home in a foreign land. Ironically, it was turning out to be quite the opposite.

In his world, dialects were for family. Standardised Mandarin was for friends and colleagues. And English was only for people who didn’t understand Mandarin.

There had been one time in his life when love had transcended that hierarchy of language, but surely it couldn’t count when it had lacked the power to endure.

Fang Wu had initially gravitated towards Xixi and Lele because they could speak the Hunanese dialect, but he barely used it with them now. In fact, he hardly even spoke Mandarin at the Zheng residence most of the time.

That was primarily for the sake of Xiaoming, who spoke only English with everyone who knew it, even though he understood a fair amount of Mandarin. (This was the modus operandi of almost every ethnic Chinese Singaporean Fang Wu had come across thus far, so he couldn’t complain.)

But Fang Wu couldn’t deny that his lack of desire to flaunt his linguistic commonality with Lele also came from his deep-seated unwillingness to build more intimacy with her than he was ready for.

He didn’t find this sliver of self-awareness helpful. How could he allow himself to be distracted by what was unavailable to him, when it was so much more pragmatic to focus on what was?

Focus , he kept telling himself. Focus and accept.

What was wrong with finding a nice Chinese woman to settle down with, just like so many other Chinese men did? Anyone of decent character should be good enough. Hadn’t he accepted long ago that his youthful attempt to transcend the divide of race and religion had been mere folly and ignorance?

He considered it such an embarrassing instance of weakness that he had never confided in anyone – not even his siblings nor Xia Jian – about the events that had transpired in Barcelona. He could not succumb again to that weakness now.

Before he set eyes on Atiqah again, he’d had no problem sticking to his resolution. Now, there was no reason why he should waver.

“不仁不义 Bu ren bu yi .” Four pithy words, indelibly seared into his consciousness for the past eight years. Words that he’d uttered in that moment of the deepest betrayal he’d ever experienced.

If Atiqah had rejected him from the beginning instead of a bait-and-switch, he wouldn’t have felt so horribly played out. He’d known that he was going out on a limb in asking her to wait for him to advance his career and convert to Islam to marry her. There were so many reasons for her to say ‘no’ that he hadn’t truly expected her to say ‘yes’.

She could’ve said that she was too young for love. Or she might’ve made it clear that she would only marry another Malay Muslim. Or she could simply have told him that she didn’t feel the same way about him; that to her, this was friendship rather than love. He would have believed that when he hadn’t detected any deliberate attempts at flirting from her, only straightforwardness.

It was that straightforwardness which he had found so piercingly disarming. He’d believed her to be entirely without artifice, a refreshing breath of fresh air from the jaded young ladies he so often met while living in the city.

For those few short months that they’d spent hanging out in Barcelona, he never had cause to believe she did so to get something out of him. She hadn’t been after his money, and certainly she hadn’t been in it for sex. They had simply been two human beings of like mind, enjoying each other’s conversation and company. Naively, he’d thought that this – being of like mind – meant they ought to be together for the rest of their lives.

Her telling him that she didn’t and couldn’t love him, less than 24 hours after she had implied the contrary, caused him to doubt the veracity of all that he had seen in her. In that single moment of emotional whiplash, the first phrase that had come reflexively to his mind carried the understanding of betrayal that transcended centuries.

The Confucian concept of ren 仁, which was shorthand for “ ren de 仁德”, meant to show benevolence and principle in one’s dealings with others. And yi 义 stood for “ dao yi 道义”, which meant loyalty. Both were supremely important to him both on and off the football pitch.

And by bait-and-switching him, she’d violated the very precepts he lived by. Bu 不meant “not”, so “ bu ren bu yi 不仁不义” meant that she lacked any sense of loyalty, integrity, or principle. Since the Chinese had seen fit to codify this into a four-word chengyu 成语 within the canon of traditional sayings, he was evidently far from being the first human to be played out in this fashion.

It hadn’t taken long for Fang Wu’s initial contempt for Atiqah to soften slightly at the edges. Even before his flight from Barcelona to Shenzhen had taken off, taking him away from Atiqah for what he believed to be forever, he’d realised that she might not be capable of the malice it took to mislead him deliberately.

But he did think she was childish, that she had mistaken curiosity for love and found out too late, which was why she had changed her mind.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter whether Atiqah had been intentionally playing with his feelings or been merely misguided. It still spoke of a frivolity in her attitude towards him that didn’t match the seriousness with which he’d considered his future with her.

All those years ago, Fang Wu had merely been trying to do the right thing. In fact, finding a solution had cost him many sleepless nights.

At 23, he’d been on several casual dates. But because he had prioritized his career over dating, he’d never had a long-term relationship.

Still, Atiqah had been much less experienced than him in matters of the heart, and he’d known it. She had just finished school, after all. And her religion wouldn’t have allowed her to experiment the way most teenagers in Spain would.

He hadn’t wanted to take advantage of Atiqah’s youth, truly he hadn’t. That was why he had tried to keep their relationship strictly platonic throughout that fateful summer. Even when he knew he wanted more, he’d denied himself. Sometimes, he had felt that he’d needed nearly superhuman levels of self-control.

Still, their unique situation had forced his hand too far, too soon. By the rules of Islam, any openly declared romantic interest would need to lead to marriage. And as far as he’d known then, any marriage would have to be between two Muslims.

If they’d had the luxury of time to stay in touch within a shared community, the way most Muslim couples did, he would have been able to wait for Atiqah to be ready before he broached the subject. The problem was, they hadn’t.

Destined to part ways at the end of the summer to play football for two different countries, it had been now or never for him to make his intentions known. As it was, he’d waited until the last possible minute before doing so.

What he had to offer had been a raw deal for them both, and he’d been aware of it. But a long engagement had been the only option that wouldn’t compromise their goals to bring football glory to their respective countries. They’d sacrificed years of childhood and adolescence, spending considerable time away from family, to get to where they were.

And in the case of Atiqah, every cent for her training had come from her national football association. At that juncture, making a major international move would have been not only impulsive, but irresponsibly risky for either of them.

Thus, with or without an engagement, the stakes for Fang Wu and Atiqah to remain a part of each other’s lives had been insanely high. While technology could have enabled a long-distance relationship, Islam wouldn’t allow that to happen without an engagement and his stated intention to convert. Fang Wu might have pursued that path half out of desperation, but it had been the only honourable course of action available to him.

Converting to Islam would involve drastic lifestyle changes: no pork, no alcohol, and one month every year when no food nor drink could be consumed between sunup and sundown. Those who were born into Islam took it all in their stride, but he was keenly aware of the suffering he would endure in choosing it.

Yet he had convinced himself that this was what he would do if he truly loved her. She wasn’t at liberty to choose her religion, but he could choose his. He’d grown up offering incense at the altar honouring his ancestors and occasionally at Buddhist temples, but by and large his life had been secular. He wouldn’t be betraying any long-held religious beliefs by converting to Islam.

That had been a lot of philosophising for a 23-year-old man. But it had all come to naught anyway.

And when the barriers were this high, Atiqah’s rejection had been the ultimate deterrent for him to ever make any attempts to rekindle their relationship. Their shared memories – whether genuine or fake on her end – could remain firmly rooted in the past.

It was baggage that he’d rather not confront. If he wouldn’t even discuss this with the three most important people in his life, there was no way in hell he’d ever mention it to Lele.

So, when Lele had asked him why he didn’t greet Atiqah as an old friend when he first saw her again, he’d grasped at the nearest cop-out that wouldn’t spill all the dirty laundry of their history.

“I’m not used to seeing her in the tudung ,” he’d said. “For a minute, I wasn’t sure whether it really was her. I’ve never seen her in person since I was in Barcelona.”

Fang Wu would have been very content to let this fleeting meeting come and go, to never bring up the subject of Atiqah again. But his conscience gnawed at him after he belatedly realised that she had given him a curry puff that was most likely intended for herself or her family members. If she extended that kindness to him as a neighbour, it was his due to reciprocate it.

The Confucian principle of 道之以德齐之以礼 dao zhi yi de qi zhi yi li , which meant that it was more effective to influence people to do the right things through their sense of morality and courtesy than through laws and punishments, apparently applied all too well to him. He’d wished for nothing more than to walk away and had perfect freedom to do so, yet moral obligation forced him to beard the lion in its den one last time.

Eight years of memory hadn’t failed him. He knew exactly how he ought to address Atiqah’s father Eusoff. And Lele had given him Atiqah’s unit number and the latest updates about how her family situation had evolved.

What he hadn’t expected was that the sight of Atiqah’s flat invoked neither contempt nor indifference in him, but a deep sense of pity.

Dilapidated though their flat was, Eusoff and Atiqah still lived in more comfort than Fang Wu had in his childhood. Yet it was painful to see that Atiqah’s future, brimming with so much promise when he had last known her, had been annihilated through no fault of her own.

When her burdens were laid out in plain sight before him - an overcrowded flat with seven people in it, a father plagued with mobility issues, and the general squalor left behind by family members who didn’t bother to pick up after themselves – he couldn’t bear to cut Atiqah’s family outright.

His conscience, telling him to treat Eusoff with respect and offer him neighbourly assistance, was the only reason why Fang Wu had accepted Atiqah’s number. The principle of 仁德 ren de told him that the knowledge of Eusoff and his family’s plight meant that he should continue to befriend and help them to the best of his ability.

Yet it was so hard to move on to his future when his past came back to haunt him at every turn!

Had that evening, when his – their – past and present had collided in a single room, affected Atiqah as much as it had affected him? Rather than to face an answer that could only bring him more hurt than he had already suffered, Fang Wu had convinced himself that it didn’t matter at all.

Hence, here he was at the residence of Zheng Xinle, obediently rolling out pastry and yawning through episodes of The Great British Bake-Off when he didn’t care in the least about the right folding technique to make good Kouign-Amann. (Before this, he hadn’t even known that French pastry had multiple variations.)

He was literally allowing her to lead him around by the apron strings.

But no matter how tepid and emasculating he found his relationship with Lele and how reluctant he was to accelerate it, the thing that kept him coming back was that Lele shared his origins. Therefore, she was safe. Unlike with Atiqah, there wouldn’t be any cultural pitfalls to trip him up again.

That safety might be the enemy of true felicity was a precept that Fang Wu had once not only owned but rocked. In fact, him embracing it had brought much glory to his country and his career.

Tragically, Fang Wu’s consciousness screamed the opposite of that now, while his subconscious blocked it out to protect his dignity and prevent him from falling victim to yet another broken heart.

~~~⚽~~~

IV.iv – Atiqah

If it was exquisite irony to find out that her father had given Fang Wu her handphone number, that paled against the agony Atiqah felt every time Fang Wu addressed her father as “ Pakcik ”.

She was living a grotesque parody of the life she would have had if she had waited for Fang Wu to come to Singapore and convert to Islam for her sake. They would have had each other’s numbers and used them to message each other by the day, if not by the hour.

Now, she was fully aware that her father had given Fang Wu her number not because he was encouraging them to date, but because he didn’t see the remotest possibility of any romantic interest blossoming between them.

She’d overheard her father asking Fang Wu which school he taught at while she was hiding in the kitchen. The answer put paid to any notions that Eusoff could possibly have about the potential of them building deeper ties than friendly neighbourliness, because it accentuated the language divide between them.

If they had been engaged, Fang Wu would have called Eusoff “ Pakcik ” before marriage and switched to “ Bapa Mertua ” or “ Ayah Mertua ” (both of which meant ‘father-in-law’ in Malay) after they married.

Azlan calling Fang Wu ‘Brother’ had no such associations. Had Fang Wu and Atiqah been engaged or married, Azlan would have used the Malay term of Abang instead.

Well, of all the ironies, it seemed like Fang Wu was well on track to marrying Lele. Atiqah still clung to the firm belief that Fang Wu didn’t date women to play games. And Fang Wu and Lele living in different flats within the same block as Atiqah and her family meant that she would be entrenched in this neighbourly relationship with them after they married, regardless of which flat they eventually selected for their matrimonial residence.

Atiqah had never imagined a situation where Fang Wu would be calling her father “ Pakcik ” while married to somebody else . It was horrific.

Castigating herself for her selfishness only made Atiqah feel worse. They had broken off for so long by now. In fact, strictly speaking, they’d never truly had an official relationship.

They couldn’t have, in fact. Had they allowed their relationship to turn romantic without the prospect of conversion and marriage, that would have been such an outrageous breach of Islam that Atiqah would have risked being disowned by her family and shunned by the Malay Muslim community, particularly the elder generation.

When revisiting their past was so taboo and so fraught with heartache, Atiqah knew it was as much Fang Wu’s prerogative to move on with another woman (of any race or religion) as it was hers to marry a Muslim man. The fact that neither had happened in eight years didn’t take away their right to proceed with their separate lives now, with no regard whatsoever to the other.

And Atiqah noticed how Fang Wu defaulted to Mandarin every time he felt the need to express his feelings. That was natural when it was the only language he had required while living in China.

Eight years ago, Atiqah had broken her pact with Fang Wu because she believed that relieving him from the pressure to change his cultural identity would be to his benefit. So why was she now begrudging the fact that Lele could converse with him in Mandarin while she couldn’t?

The worst of it was that when he talked, she heard the same voice, and discerned the same mind . He should be allowed some credit for the self-command with which he attended to her father, giving him the respect due to an elder. That showed a rare sense of virtue when many people saw Eusoff as a senior citizen with insufficient education, no income, and only one foot, and treated him accordingly. And Fang Wu’s eight years of GoPro footage displayed the unwavering pride he’d always harboured for his native land, as well as his adventurous spirit.

Even though they had now both retired from their football careers, time had bestowed widely differing levels of kindness to them. Fang Wu still rode on his recent glory of being a national star. Meanwhile, Atiqah considered herself a has-been, or perhaps more accurately, a “has-never-been”.

The first time she’d run into Fang Wu by accident at Lele’s door, at least she had sported more presentable attire than usual because she had come from an errand at the town centre and stopped by the mosque. Now that he’d seen her toiling around at home wearing tired old T-shirts and shorts, she wouldn’t be surprised if he might think she looked more like an Indonesian maid than a daughter of the family.

Worse still, the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look, in no respect lessening his personal advantages . If anything, he’d filled out enough that his relative lack of height no longer made him appear as undersized on the pitch when compared to the Caucasians. His stance exuded enough raw power to make his opponents know that he was a force to be reckoned with.

She knew he noticed their differences, too.

Lele was a blabbermouth, and two days after Atiqah had run into Fang Wu at her flat, she’d dropped by with two mini cakes for the boys and said, “Why didn’t you tell me you know Fang Wu? I thought you’d be so proud of being personally acquainted with a football star!”

“Barcelona was a very long time ago, Le Le,” Atiqah had demurred. “Back then, I was in a completely different stage of my life.”

“You must not have known each other very well, then,” Lele had continued. “Do you know, he said he couldn’t recognise you in your tudung ?”

The Fang Wu whom she knew and loved would be too respectful and considerate of others to mock at anyone’s religion. But even if she gave him the benefit of the doubt, that his words should not be taken exactly the way they had been conveyed, she couldn’t escape his meaning. He couldn’t recognise what he had once seen in her.

“ Altered beyond his knowledge .” Atiqah had fully submitted, in silent, deep mortification. Doubtless it was so, and she could take no revenge, for he was not altered, or not for the worse. She had already acknowledged it to herself, and she could not think differently, let him think of her as he would.

~~~⚽~~~

IV.v – Fang Wu

“你看，好可爱喔！(Look, [that’s] so cute!)” came Lele’s squeal from the living room. For an instant, Fang Wu wondered when he’d become so subservient to Lele’s wishes that he was willing to putter away in the kitchen while she lounged around like a princess in front of the TV.

(He didn’t want to be reminded that conflict avoidance was the easiest way to skirt around his emotional turmoil, nor that this was his tactic for maintaining some space between Lele and himself.)

The sight of a buck-naked toddler running at a full clip down the common corridor inspired a very different reaction in him than it had in Lele. For heaven’s sake, didn’t Lele know that this was dangerous ? If the child tumbled down the stairs or ran into the lift, who knew what peril might meet him?

Tearing out of the flat, Fang Wu sprinted off in pursuit of the child. It wasn’t until he picked up the little boy that he registered that this was the nephew of Atiqah.

Well, regardless of whose family this boy belonged to, Fang Wu had a duty. The indignity of the squirming, giggling toddler urinating down the front of his shirt made that reality even grimmer.

Marching back up the corridor with the child in his arms – what a relief that he’d caught little Yusuf just before he got to the top of the stairs! – Fang Wu saw that the door was already wide open when he arrived at Eusoff’s flat.

In the doorway stood a very frazzled – and soaking wet – Atiqah. And beside her stood Aziz, wrapped up in a bright green dinosaur hooded towel with a row of plush spikes that ran from the top of his head down his spine.

Fang Wu suppressed a laugh at the thought that the spiky towel made it visible to all and sundry just how diabolical that child could be. By this time, he’d seen enough of Aziz and Yusuf’s antics to feel indignation at the tyranny they wreaked upon their aunt.

He ought not to think about how every inch of her outline stood in even sharper relief than when they’d gone swimming during their days in Barcelona. (She’d always swum in long sleeved rash guards to protect her modesty.)

Further to that, he ought not to be conscious that even more of their anatomy came into contact when he handed the child to her than when he’d made his de facto marriage proposal.

His mind told him that the civil thing to do was to apologise for smearing her with pee, even though that was more Yusuf’s fault than his and it couldn’t be avoided.

For all the other reasons stated above, he simply couldn’t form the words. His line of thinking was verboten when he had firmly resolved to stick to concrete possibilities and abandon vain flights of fancy.

Principle dictated that Fang Wu stayed long enough to ensure that little Yusuf was grasped firmly and safely in Atiqah’s arms before he wordlessly headed to the lift that would take him to his eighth-floor flat. After all, he couldn’t possibly go back to Xixi and Lele’s place covered in pee.

~~~⚽~~~

IV.vi – Atiqah

Bath time had just started to get easier before Aziz got injured. Now that he was four, Atiqah was finally able to trust that when she handed a soapy washcloth to Aziz, he would use it to the effect that he exited the shower in a cleaner state than when he entered it. Unfortunately, all that progress evaporated after he dislocated his shoulder.

The most efficient way to get the boys clean had always been for them to shower together. On the irregular occasions when Azlan was the one to help them, he used the ensuite attached to his room. Atiqah always used the common bathroom, which was the shared property of Eusoff, Aizah and herself.

Like most public housing flats in Singapore that hadn’t been worked over by an interior designer, the common bathroom off the kitchen featured a pedestal toilet, a wash basin and a wall-mounted shower head and water heater. There was no bathtub or shower stall, the water simply flowed into a drain hole in the floor covered by a metal grate.

Atiqah didn’t relish this phase when she had to go back to soaping and rinsing both boys off again. It was worse than it had been before, with Yusuf now in his terrible twos. Furthermore, she had to take twice as much time with Aziz so as not to put too much pressure on his injured shoulder and back.

Patience was never the strong suit of toddler boys, and while Atiqah was soaping Aziz, Yusuf often had a field day spraying her all over with water.

Still, getting wet wasn’t half as bad as having to handle the flight risk that Yusuf posed now that he’d figured out how to undo the flimsy lock on the plastic accordion-style bathroom door. The day he twisted it open and bolted out while she was still soaping Aziz was the most nightmarish one in her recent existence.

“Yusuf,” she yelled, “come back! If you don’t come, Makcik (Aunt) will be very angry with you!”

Unfortunately, Yusuf thought this was more funny than scary. He did a cheeky dance and slipped away when she hastily reached out to catch him. When Azlan was out at work (he always deigned to work at the most inopportune times!) and Eusoff couldn’t move, there was nobody to halt the child’s progress out the door that they kept ajar to combat the stuffy tropical heat.

“Yusuf, listen to your makcik , OK? She told you to come back, come, come to Datuk .”

As Atiqah threw Aziz’s hooded towel over him and patted him dry as hastily as she could without hurting him, she took some meagre relief from hearing her father back her up.

Not that it mattered – by the time she got Aziz reasonably dry and went to the door, Yusuf was already out of her sight. She wondered if Aziz would also try to run out if she left him with his grandfather while she went in pursuit of Yusuf.

Thankfully, her deliverance from that dilemma came before she could propose that arrangement. Her gratitude at seeing Fang Wu carry Yusuf down the corridor towards her flat was only matched by her embarrassment at the wet stain on his shirt that she saw when he drew near.

When Fang Wu had sort-of proposed to her, he’d only held her hands. Now they practically bumped bodies when he handed Yusuf over to her. It was again a parody of the romance they could have had. The fact that Yusuf had peed all over him felt like an added layer of mockery.

Her sensations on the discovery made her perfectly speechless. She could not even thank him . Certainly, if she did, she would have to apologise, in the same breath, for the outrageousness of letting her nephew urinate on him. That was far too shameful to put into words.

His kindness in stepping forward to her relief, the manner, the silence in which it passed, the little particulars of the circumstance – this was no occasion to reflect upon it. She had Yusuf to clean up all over again, as well as to clean herself.

No doubt Fang Wu had slunk off in silence because he was offended not only at her gross negligence, but her nephew’s sheer impudence to soil him.

While she carried Yusuf towards the bathroom, Eusoff limped to the front door and shut it to prevent Aziz from running out too.

“Yusuf,” her father said in his strictest voice, “what did I say about obeying Datuk and Makcik ?”

Atiqah knew her father deeply appreciated the respect and courtesy that Fang Wu always extended to him. She could comprehend his regretting that Fang Wu should have done what Atiqah ought to have done herself .

But neither Eusoff’s feelings, nor anybody’s feelings, could interest her, until she had a little better arranged her own. She was ashamed of herself, quite ashamed of being so nervous, so overcome by such a trifle; but so it was, and it required a long period of solitude and reflection to recover her.

Still, what use were such feelings when they could only end in futility? The only thing that could unlock their current impasse was for Fang Wu to consider converting to Islam again. When Atiqah couldn’t see that happening – certainly she didn’t have a right to ask it of him, not anymore – there was no option but to remain mired in silence.

---

This chapter is all about motivations and stakes:
- If we translate Wentworth's actions into the 21st century deed-for-deed without translating the context, he looks like a douchebag to the nth degree.
- Similarly, Anne's actions in our times without context make her look like a wet dishrag (or a doormat).

But let's take a look at all the constraints that applied in Regency times which most of us are thankfully liberated from:
- Eight years past, they couldn't write to each other when Wentworth went back to sea without being engaged.
- In the present time, they couldn't talk freely about many things (most of all their failed relationship) without a renewal of the engagement.
- Wentworth didn't have many ladies to choose from when he thought he could move on from Anne. The Musgroves were the most pre-eminent family in the area, and in the country there weren't many other families (if at all) of the appropriate social strata to socialize with. So, he was simply doing what was expected in polite society (call upon the neighbours) and accepting the attentions of the most appropriate women for his standing (Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove), and he'd started doing so before he saw Anne again.

Part IV – The Miserable Quagmire of Non-Communication

IV.i – Lele

“郑欣乐，接下来我该做什么? (Zheng Xinle, what should I do next?)” Fang Wu called to Lele from the kitchen.

On the one hand, Lele could welcome this as a new era of domesticity. On the other, she wished they had dates with more romance in them. How had their situation devolved into this?

During the long school holidays, Lele was inducting Fang Wu into her home baking business. She fervently hoped that were he to marry her in the (preferably near) future, they could spend their days working side by side, just the way that they were now.

Well, maybe not quite the way they were now. It grated on her that whenever they were alone together, Fang Wu addressed her with her full name, in the manner that one might speak to a school classmate or a colleague.

“你干嘛这样叫我？我是你同学吗？(Why are you addressing me like this? Am I your classmate?)” Lele nearly berated him. She was supposed to be always a sunny personality – her very name demanded it! Since when had she ever sulked the way she did now?

“乐乐公主，臣奉令承教, (Princess Lele, your subject shall obey all your commands,)” replied Fang Wu in falsetto. When he teased her in this way, Lele had no idea whether he was doing it because of their growing familiarity or if he might be mocking her.

Was it so hard for him to simply adore her the way everyone else did?

While they were growing up, their father had called Xixi and Lele “两个小娃娃 (the two little dolls)”. He’d doted on them as if they were his favourite dolls too, never denying them the dresses and toys they asked for. Between braiding their hair, sewing sequins on their dance costumes, and doing their makeup when they had recitals or competitions, their mother had made them feel like little princesses. And the trophies that Xixi and Lele had won for dance throughout their childhood adorned their parents’ upscale flat in the Tianxin district of Changsha.

Neither Xixi nor Lele had needed to do a lick of housework while living with their parents, before they came out here for university. Like many upper-middle-class urban families in China, the Zheng family hired an “ ayi 阿姨”, which translated literally to “auntie” but really meant a servant.

Even now, their parents still paid their rent in Singapore and gave them the money to call in a part-time helper to clean up their flat twice a week. In fact, the Zhengs could afford to rent their daughters a private condo unit, but Xixi and Lele preferred this flat because it was 300 sq ft bigger than the average 3-bedroom new private apartment. That was why the sisters never cared to do something as mundane as everyday home cooking, though they found it sweet to have boyfriends who were willing to cook and clean for them!

Oh, if cooking really was a love language in Asian culture like people said, Lele could be certain that Fang Wu was in love with her! His cooking was truly divine, even though he seemed impervious to the most basic instructions in baking.

But why was his manner towards her so difficult to read? Couldn’t he see that their union was meant to be?

A princess was nothing without her prince. And Lele was vastly overdue to have her first knight on a white steed come – and stay – in her life. She’d taken five years at uni to pursue a double Honours degree in Mathematics and Chemistry. That was plenty of time for her to find a boyfriend to graduate with, but she hadn’t.

What had she done wrong? Was this a punishment for her dynamism?

After all, Xixi (who was her senior by two years) had found Xiaoming before the third year of uni. By the time Xixi was 21 and Xiaoming was 23, they’d become as inseparable as if they were joined by glue.

Singaporean men were two years older than the women in their year at uni because of their obligation to serve in the army before they embarked on their tertiary education. By right, Lele believed that should make the National University of Singapore the most fertile matchmaking ground. It would ensure she was surrounded by real men, instead of immature boys.

Lele was used to turning heads. Indeed, many men had asked her out on dates during her years at university. Disappointingly, none had progressed to long-term relationships.

It was her unconventional approach to life that was intimidating to most men, Lele decided. After graduating, she continued to be bold in forging her career. Baking, unlike cooking, was interesting because it served not only to provide food but also to create a form of art. Furthermore, baking was all about chemistry, which came naturally to her thanks to her scientific talent.

On top of her home-based bakery business, Lele worked three days a week at a Chinese medicine shop in Chinatown. To her, it was exciting to be able to straddle multiple identities across the Eastern and Western influences in her life.

She’d been out of university for more than a year now. More men had come, but all of them had gone. Repeatedly, Xixi hinted that perhaps Lele’s standards might be a notch too high.

Though Xixi wasn’t in a much better position either. Her progress with Xiaoming was still frustratingly slow. Although Xixi and Xiaoming had dated for more than six years, he had yet to propose. Despite Lele’s fervent hints on behalf of her sister, he stubbornly shied away from the topic of buying a flat.

Unromantic as it sounded, the offer to buy a new Housing and Development Board (HD flat was the way in which most Singaporean men proposed. But Xiaoming didn’t see any need to acquire a new flat when he was guaranteed to inherit his parents’ one.

Well, in the coming year of 2034, Xiaoming would turn thirty. Lele was certain that if the prospect of a government-subsidized flat hadn’t served as sufficient impetus for him to propose to Xixi, this significant birthday would. So, she felt mounting pressure to find a partner. When Xixi and Xiaoming inevitably got married, her parents would surely redouble their nagging on her if she didn’t.

Miraculously, Fang Wu walked right into her life.

He was the ultimate man among men – handsome, sociable and polite to a fault. After he approached her, Lele decided there was a reason behind all those years of romantic frustration after all. She had merely been waiting for the right man to appear. Someone who wouldn’t be fazed by her two jobs, her two degrees, or her strident personality.

And who else could Fate have intended for her, but a man who would be intimidated by no one because he had been to the World Cup?

Driven and competitive since birth, Lele was determined that if her sister was on the cusp of matrimony, she would not be long to follow suit. Thus, there was no way she would allow her budding relationship with Fang Wu to fail.

Even if she didn’t know what was in his mind when he teased her. Well, if it made her live up to her reputation for cheerfulness, she would assume that the teasing was his way of showing love.

~~~⚽~~~

IV.ii – Xixi

Zheng Xixi didn’t ask for much in life.

Truth to tell, there wasn’t much she needed that she and her sister Lele didn’t already have. Their dress had every advantage, their faces were rather pretty, their spirits extremely good, their manner unembarrassed and pleasant; they were of consequence at home, and favourites abroad.

And yet – just for Xiaoming to pop the question, was that too much to ask?

In their school days, Xixi and Lele had been among the prettiest girls in their class. Their parents had enrolled them in ballet and modern dance lessons during their spare time, which made them more adept at makeup than most students their age. But as in many other Chinese families, dating had been as forbidden as housework when they were in high school. Every minute of their attention that wasn’t taken by their studies was supposed to be focused on their dancing.

High school in China was extremely competitive, too! During the third year of senior high, the teacher would count down the days to the university entrance exams, known as the gaokao 高考, on the classroom blackboard. On a weekly basis, the academic ranking of every student in the class was updated on a notice board visible to everyone in the school.

Xixi hadn’t disappointed her parents. She had scored very respectably on the gaokao and ranked among the top five students in her class. And her parents had sent her and her younger sister to Singapore so that they could attend university classes taught in English. This would be their key to the rest of the world.

Boyfriends were the one thing that had been forbidden in high school but not in university, and Xixi had wasted no time in making her choice. Chen Jianming was in her year, studying engineering while she was pursuing her degree in Business Administration. His parents were both civil servants. Therefore, everything checked off in his pedigree.

Yes, he was socially awkward and nerdy, but Xixi could overlook that when engineering was a prestigious degree, second only to medicine or law. Most importantly, he was a very amiable, pleasing young man who might prefer books to people, but treated everyone with courtesy and respect.

Jianming, or “Xiaoming” (‘Little Ming’) as Xixi and Lele called him because he was as skinny as a teenager, was so adorably filial, too! An only child and a mother’s boy, he invited her home to dinner with his parents on a weekly basis. He was often late for their dates, but Xixi always forgave him because his tardiness invariably stemmed from something he was doing for his mother.

“我的乖儿子, (My good son,)” Xiaoming’s mother often praised him, patting him on the head as if he was still a little boy. And she’d started calling Xixi “我的乖媳妇 (My good daughter-in-law)” ever since they graduated, too!

Xiaoming’s reaction to his parents’ praise was irresistibly cute. Xixi loved seeing his face light up behind his square-rimmed glasses. But he stubbornly refused to heed his parents’ hints to make her part of the family.

Of course, when they had been fresh graduates, money had been a problem. But now, a solution was within reach. Their jobs were stable and well paying, with Xiaoming in the Civil Service and Xixi at the local office of a large tech company. After working for four years, this year they finally had enough socked away for the downpayment on a flat if they wished for it.

The problem was that Xiaoming didn’t wish for it, despite all the well-meaning hints that Lele (embarrassingly) piled on him for Xixi’s sake. Xixi could understand that the independent Lele would never marry a man who didn’t have a place of his own. But she understood Xiaoming best, and she knew he would never be able to do without his parents.

Xixi didn’t know how to tell Xiaoming that she liked him without having to change the way he was. That she liked him enough, in fact, to move into his nearly-60-year-old flat and live with him and his parents, if only he would ask her to marry him. In fact, Xixi was sure that the only reason why he hadn’t proposed yet was because he didn’t know that she wouldn’t require the offer of a new flat of their own to say yes.

Only rarely did Xixi feel any misgivings about Xiaoming’s divided priorities between herself and his parents. While Xiaoming was always frugal with his own spending, there was one thing he never spared any expense on: his yearly overseas holiday with his parents. This year, the Chen family had been on a three-week tour of the US when Fang Wu had walked into Xixi and Lele’s lives.

She barely admitted it to herself, even though she knew her feelings must have been transparent to her sister. For a fleeting two weeks, Zheng Xixi had dared to compare Xiaoming to Fang Wu and found that the tally wasn’t necessarily in Xiaoming’s favour.

The concept of 男子汉大丈夫 nan zi han da zhang fu (a masculine man) was a thing. A thing that was surprisingly attractive to her despite her long-attached status. And it was a thing that Xiaoming would never quite be.

For those few weeks that Fang Wu had traipsed all over Singapore with her and her sister to check out the local Chinese food scene, Xixi had allowed herself to fantasise that perhaps Fang Wu might just choose her.

Of course, that had been merely a passing fancy. Xiaoming had come back from his US trip with the discounted Coach handbag that she’d asked him to buy for her from the premium factory outlets. The first weekend after he returned, he’d come by specially to present it to her. But he’d also seemed aware of being slighted . After all, Saturday night usually was when she went to his flat to dine with his parents. This time, she’d told him to come to her flat for dinner with Lele and Fang Wu instead.

Xiaoming had stalked off before dessert. Of all the excuses, he said that his parents had purchased a fresh durian that morning and were waiting for him to open it up for them to eat after dinner!

“Surely you can have one of Lele’s choux eclairs before you go?” Xixi had nearly pleaded.

“ No ,” Xiaoming had replied, impressive in his resolution for once, “ there is nothing worth my staying for;” and he was gone directly .

Upon self-examination, Xixi had the guilty conscience that all through dinner, she had sometimes the air of being divided between Xiaoming and Fang Wu. She’d waxed too lyrical in her praises of the man who had cooked their dinner. (She hadn’t meant to offend Xiaoming, but a man who cooked – especially one who cooked well to boot – was so sexy!) Hence, this was her fault, and she’d patch it up. Xiaoming had brought her the Coach bag as he’d promised, after all.

She’d gone to Xiaoming’s flat the next day with enough Bee Cheng Hiang 美珍香brand bak kwa (barbequed pork jerky) to feed Xiaoming and his parents for a month.

“Xiaoming, I’m sorry,” she’d said. “I wasn’t trying to compare you with Fang Wu. Even if you never learn to cook, you’re still mine and I love you.”

“Do you like the bag?” Upon seeing that Xixi was carrying it, Xiaoming’s face had broken into a smile.

They had made up over a long stroll along the beach that was a stone’s throw away from Xiaoming’s family home. There had even been two leftover seeds of Mao Shan Wang 猫山王durian from the evening before that he’d saved for her despite his anger and jealousy.

And after that, Xiaoming had ensured that they spent one evening every weekend dining at her flat with Lele and Fang Wu, and the other evening at his flat with his parents.

Xixi was sure that Xiaoming must know how badly she wished to marry him. She had made the first move to reconcile, after all. She’d even agreed to let his mother teach her how to make tang yuan 汤圆 dumplings for the upcoming Winter Solstice. She, who never went into the kitchen!

It didn’t mean that Xixi stopped appreciating Fang Wu. To the contrary, the more time she spent with her sister and him, the more she felt that Fang Wu was more masculine, more independent, deeper-thinking, and more adventurous than Xiaoming might ever become.

But Xixi also accepted the reality that Lele, with all her dynamism, would be more matched in personality to Fang Wu than she ever would. And she wasn’t going to throw away what she had with Xiaoming. Not when the sweet little things he’d done for her, even while he had been ridden with jealousy, showed that he cared deeply for her in his own way.

Thus, even though Zheng Xixi was certain that Xiaoming’s proposal was guaranteed not to be romantic, she decided that all she wanted now was simply the chance to hear it.

~~~⚽~~~

IV.iii – Fang Wu

Fang Wu had believed that finding two women who spoke his native dialect would make him feel at home in a foreign land. Ironically, it was turning out to be quite the opposite.

In his world, dialects were for family. Standardised Mandarin was for friends and colleagues. And English was only for people who didn’t understand Mandarin.

There had been one time in his life when love had transcended that hierarchy of language, but surely it couldn’t count when it had lacked the power to endure.

Fang Wu had initially gravitated towards Xixi and Lele because they could speak the Hunanese dialect, but he barely used it with them now. In fact, he hardly even spoke Mandarin at the Zheng residence most of the time.

That was primarily for the sake of Xiaoming, who spoke only English with everyone who knew it, even though he understood a fair amount of Mandarin. (This was the modus operandi of almost every ethnic Chinese Singaporean Fang Wu had come across thus far, so he couldn’t complain.)

But Fang Wu couldn’t deny that his lack of desire to flaunt his linguistic commonality with Lele also came from his deep-seated unwillingness to build more intimacy with her than he was ready for.

He didn’t find this sliver of self-awareness helpful. How could he allow himself to be distracted by what was unavailable to him, when it was so much more pragmatic to focus on what was?

Focus , he kept telling himself. Focus and accept.

What was wrong with finding a nice Chinese woman to settle down with, just like so many other Chinese men did? Anyone of decent character should be good enough. Hadn’t he accepted long ago that his youthful attempt to transcend the divide of race and religion had been mere folly and ignorance?

He considered it such an embarrassing instance of weakness that he had never confided in anyone – not even his siblings nor Xia Jian – about the events that had transpired in Barcelona. He could not succumb again to that weakness now.

Before he set eyes on Atiqah again, he’d had no problem sticking to his resolution. Now, there was no reason why he should waver.

“不仁不义 Bu ren bu yi .” Four pithy words, indelibly seared into his consciousness for the past eight years. Words that he’d uttered in that moment of the deepest betrayal he’d ever experienced.

If Atiqah had rejected him from the beginning instead of a bait-and-switch, he wouldn’t have felt so horribly played out. He’d known that he was going out on a limb in asking her to wait for him to advance his career and convert to Islam to marry her. There were so many reasons for her to say ‘no’ that he hadn’t truly expected her to say ‘yes’.

She could’ve said that she was too young for love. Or she might’ve made it clear that she would only marry another Malay Muslim. Or she could simply have told him that she didn’t feel the same way about him; that to her, this was friendship rather than love. He would have believed that when he hadn’t detected any deliberate attempts at flirting from her, only straightforwardness.

It was that straightforwardness which he had found so piercingly disarming. He’d believed her to be entirely without artifice, a refreshing breath of fresh air from the jaded young ladies he so often met while living in the city.

For those few short months that they’d spent hanging out in Barcelona, he never had cause to believe she did so to get something out of him. She hadn’t been after his money, and certainly she hadn’t been in it for sex. They had simply been two human beings of like mind, enjoying each other’s conversation and company. Naively, he’d thought that this – being of like mind – meant they ought to be together for the rest of their lives.

Her telling him that she didn’t and couldn’t love him, less than 24 hours after she had implied the contrary, caused him to doubt the veracity of all that he had seen in her. In that single moment of emotional whiplash, the first phrase that had come reflexively to his mind carried the understanding of betrayal that transcended centuries.

The Confucian concept of ren 仁, which was shorthand for “ ren de 仁德”, meant to show benevolence and principle in one’s dealings with others. And yi 义 stood for “ dao yi 道义”, which meant loyalty. Both were supremely important to him both on and off the football pitch.

And by bait-and-switching him, she’d violated the very precepts he lived by. Bu 不meant “not”, so “ bu ren bu yi 不仁不义” meant that she lacked any sense of loyalty, integrity, or principle. Since the Chinese had seen fit to codify this into a four-word chengyu 成语 within the canon of traditional sayings, he was evidently far from being the first human to be played out in this fashion.

It hadn’t taken long for Fang Wu’s initial contempt for Atiqah to soften slightly at the edges. Even before his flight from Barcelona to Shenzhen had taken off, taking him away from Atiqah for what he believed to be forever, he’d realised that she might not be capable of the malice it took to mislead him deliberately.

But he did think she was childish, that she had mistaken curiosity for love and found out too late, which was why she had changed her mind.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter whether Atiqah had been intentionally playing with his feelings or been merely misguided. It still spoke of a frivolity in her attitude towards him that didn’t match the seriousness with which he’d considered his future with her.

All those years ago, Fang Wu had merely been trying to do the right thing. In fact, finding a solution had cost him many sleepless nights.

At 23, he’d been on several casual dates. But because he had prioritized his career over dating, he’d never had a long-term relationship.

Still, Atiqah had been much less experienced than him in matters of the heart, and he’d known it. She had just finished school, after all. And her religion wouldn’t have allowed her to experiment the way most teenagers in Spain would.

He hadn’t wanted to take advantage of Atiqah’s youth, truly he hadn’t. That was why he had tried to keep their relationship strictly platonic throughout that fateful summer. Even when he knew he wanted more, he’d denied himself. Sometimes, he had felt that he’d needed nearly superhuman levels of self-control.

Still, their unique situation had forced his hand too far, too soon. By the rules of Islam, any openly declared romantic interest would need to lead to marriage. And as far as he’d known then, any marriage would have to be between two Muslims.

If they’d had the luxury of time to stay in touch within a shared community, the way most Muslim couples did, he would have been able to wait for Atiqah to be ready before he broached the subject. The problem was, they hadn’t.

Destined to part ways at the end of the summer to play football for two different countries, it had been now or never for him to make his intentions known. As it was, he’d waited until the last possible minute before doing so.

What he had to offer had been a raw deal for them both, and he’d been aware of it. But a long engagement had been the only option that wouldn’t compromise their goals to bring football glory to their respective countries. They’d sacrificed years of childhood and adolescence, spending considerable time away from family, to get to where they were.

And in the case of Atiqah, every cent for her training had come from her national football association. At that juncture, making a major international move would have been not only impulsive, but irresponsibly risky for either of them.

Thus, with or without an engagement, the stakes for Fang Wu and Atiqah to remain a part of each other’s lives had been insanely high. While technology could have enabled a long-distance relationship, Islam wouldn’t allow that to happen without an engagement and his stated intention to convert. Fang Wu might have pursued that path half out of desperation, but it had been the only honourable course of action available to him.

Converting to Islam would involve drastic lifestyle changes: no pork, no alcohol, and one month every year when no food nor drink could be consumed between sunup and sundown. Those who were born into Islam took it all in their stride, but he was keenly aware of the suffering he would endure in choosing it.

Yet he had convinced himself that this was what he would do if he truly loved her. She wasn’t at liberty to choose her religion, but he could choose his. He’d grown up offering incense at the altar honouring his ancestors and occasionally at Buddhist temples, but by and large his life had been secular. He wouldn’t be betraying any long-held religious beliefs by converting to Islam.

That had been a lot of philosophising for a 23-year-old man. But it had all come to naught anyway.

And when the barriers were this high, Atiqah’s rejection had been the ultimate deterrent for him to ever make any attempts to rekindle their relationship. Their shared memories – whether genuine or fake on her end – could remain firmly rooted in the past.

It was baggage that he’d rather not confront. If he wouldn’t even discuss this with the three most important people in his life, there was no way in hell he’d ever mention it to Lele.

So, when Lele had asked him why he didn’t greet Atiqah as an old friend when he first saw her again, he’d grasped at the nearest cop-out that wouldn’t spill all the dirty laundry of their history.

“I’m not used to seeing her in the tudung ,” he’d said. “For a minute, I wasn’t sure whether it really was her. I’ve never seen her in person since I was in Barcelona.”

Fang Wu would have been very content to let this fleeting meeting come and go, to never bring up the subject of Atiqah again. But his conscience gnawed at him after he belatedly realised that she had given him a curry puff that was most likely intended for herself or her family members. If she extended that kindness to him as a neighbour, it was his due to reciprocate it.

The Confucian principle of 道之以德齐之以礼 dao zhi yi de qi zhi yi li , which meant that it was more effective to influence people to do the right things through their sense of morality and courtesy than through laws and punishments, apparently applied all too well to him. He’d wished for nothing more than to walk away and had perfect freedom to do so, yet moral obligation forced him to beard the lion in its den one last time.

Eight years of memory hadn’t failed him. He knew exactly how he ought to address Atiqah’s father Eusoff. And Lele had given him Atiqah’s unit number and the latest updates about how her family situation had evolved.

What he hadn’t expected was that the sight of Atiqah’s flat invoked neither contempt nor indifference in him, but a deep sense of pity.

Dilapidated though their flat was, Eusoff and Atiqah still lived in more comfort than Fang Wu had in his childhood. Yet it was painful to see that Atiqah’s future, brimming with so much promise when he had last known her, had been annihilated through no fault of her own.

When her burdens were laid out in plain sight before him - an overcrowded flat with seven people in it, a father plagued with mobility issues, and the general squalor left behind by family members who didn’t bother to pick up after themselves – he couldn’t bear to cut Atiqah’s family outright.

His conscience, telling him to treat Eusoff with respect and offer him neighbourly assistance, was the only reason why Fang Wu had accepted Atiqah’s number. The principle of 仁德 ren de told him that the knowledge of Eusoff and his family’s plight meant that he should continue to befriend and help them to the best of his ability.

Yet it was so hard to move on to his future when his past came back to haunt him at every turn!

Had that evening, when his – their – past and present had collided in a single room, affected Atiqah as much as it had affected him? Rather than to face an answer that could only bring him more hurt than he had already suffered, Fang Wu had convinced himself that it didn’t matter at all.

Hence, here he was at the residence of Zheng Xinle, obediently rolling out pastry and yawning through episodes of The Great British Bake-Off when he didn’t care in the least about the right folding technique to make good Kouign-Amann. (Before this, he hadn’t even known that French pastry had multiple variations.)

He was literally allowing her to lead him around by the apron strings.

But no matter how tepid and emasculating he found his relationship with Lele and how reluctant he was to accelerate it, the thing that kept him coming back was that Lele shared his origins. Therefore, she was safe. Unlike with Atiqah, there wouldn’t be any cultural pitfalls to trip him up again.

That safety might be the enemy of true felicity was a precept that Fang Wu had once not only owned but rocked. In fact, him embracing it had brought much glory to his country and his career.

Tragically, Fang Wu’s consciousness screamed the opposite of that now, while his subconscious blocked it out to protect his dignity and prevent him from falling victim to yet another broken heart.

~~~⚽~~~

IV.iv – Atiqah

If it was exquisite irony to find out that her father had given Fang Wu her handphone number, that paled against the agony Atiqah felt every time Fang Wu addressed her father as “ Pakcik ”.

She was living a grotesque parody of the life she would have had if she had waited for Fang Wu to come to Singapore and convert to Islam for her sake. They would have had each other’s numbers and used them to message each other by the day, if not by the hour.

Now, she was fully aware that her father had given Fang Wu her number not because he was encouraging them to date, but because he didn’t see the remotest possibility of any romantic interest blossoming between them.

She’d overheard her father asking Fang Wu which school he taught at while she was hiding in the kitchen. The answer put paid to any notions that Eusoff could possibly have about the potential of them building deeper ties than friendly neighbourliness, because it accentuated the language divide between them.

If they had been engaged, Fang Wu would have called Eusoff “ Pakcik ” before marriage and switched to “ Bapa Mertua ” or “ Ayah Mertua ” (both of which meant ‘father-in-law’ in Malay) after they married.

Azlan calling Fang Wu ‘Brother’ had no such associations. Had Fang Wu and Atiqah been engaged or married, Azlan would have used the Malay term of Abang instead.

Well, of all the ironies, it seemed like Fang Wu was well on track to marrying Lele. Atiqah still clung to the firm belief that Fang Wu didn’t date women to play games. And Fang Wu and Lele living in different flats within the same block as Atiqah and her family meant that she would be entrenched in this neighbourly relationship with them after they married, regardless of which flat they eventually selected for their matrimonial residence.

Atiqah had never imagined a situation where Fang Wu would be calling her father “ Pakcik ” while married to somebody else . It was horrific.

Castigating herself for her selfishness only made Atiqah feel worse. They had broken off for so long by now. In fact, strictly speaking, they’d never truly had an official relationship.

They couldn’t have, in fact. Had they allowed their relationship to turn romantic without the prospect of conversion and marriage, that would have been such an outrageous breach of Islam that Atiqah would have risked being disowned by her family and shunned by the Malay Muslim community, particularly the elder generation.

When revisiting their past was so taboo and so fraught with heartache, Atiqah knew it was as much Fang Wu’s prerogative to move on with another woman (of any race or religion) as it was hers to marry a Muslim man. The fact that neither had happened in eight years didn’t take away their right to proceed with their separate lives now, with no regard whatsoever to the other.

And Atiqah noticed how Fang Wu defaulted to Mandarin every time he felt the need to express his feelings. That was natural when it was the only language he had required while living in China.

Eight years ago, Atiqah had broken her pact with Fang Wu because she believed that relieving him from the pressure to change his cultural identity would be to his benefit. So why was she now begrudging the fact that Lele could converse with him in Mandarin while she couldn’t?

The worst of it was that when he talked, she heard the same voice, and discerned the same mind . He should be allowed some credit for the self-command with which he attended to her father, giving him the respect due to an elder. That showed a rare sense of virtue when many people saw Eusoff as a senior citizen with insufficient education, no income, and only one foot, and treated him accordingly. And Fang Wu’s eight years of GoPro footage displayed the unwavering pride he’d always harboured for his native land, as well as his adventurous spirit.

Even though they had now both retired from their football careers, time had bestowed widely differing levels of kindness to them. Fang Wu still rode on his recent glory of being a national star. Meanwhile, Atiqah considered herself a has-been, or perhaps more accurately, a “has-never-been”.

The first time she’d run into Fang Wu by accident at Lele’s door, at least she had sported more presentable attire than usual because she had come from an errand at the town centre and stopped by the mosque. Now that he’d seen her toiling around at home wearing tired old T-shirts and shorts, she wouldn’t be surprised if he might think she looked more like an Indonesian maid than a daughter of the family.

Worse still, the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look, in no respect lessening his personal advantages . If anything, he’d filled out enough that his relative lack of height no longer made him appear as undersized on the pitch when compared to the Caucasians. His stance exuded enough raw power to make his opponents know that he was a force to be reckoned with.

She knew he noticed their differences, too.

Lele was a blabbermouth, and two days after Atiqah had run into Fang Wu at her flat, she’d dropped by with two mini cakes for the boys and said, “Why didn’t you tell me you know Fang Wu? I thought you’d be so proud of being personally acquainted with a football star!”

“Barcelona was a very long time ago, Le Le,” Atiqah had demurred. “Back then, I was in a completely different stage of my life.”

“You must not have known each other very well, then,” Lele had continued. “Do you know, he said he couldn’t recognise you in your tudung ?”

The Fang Wu whom she knew and loved would be too respectful and considerate of others to mock at anyone’s religion. But even if she gave him the benefit of the doubt, that his words should not be taken exactly the way they had been conveyed, she couldn’t escape his meaning. He couldn’t recognise what he had once seen in her.

“ Altered beyond his knowledge .” Atiqah had fully submitted, in silent, deep mortification. Doubtless it was so, and she could take no revenge, for he was not altered, or not for the worse. She had already acknowledged it to herself, and she could not think differently, let him think of her as he would.

~~~⚽~~~

IV.v – Fang Wu

“你看，好可爱喔！(Look, [that’s] so cute!)” came Lele’s squeal from the living room. For an instant, Fang Wu wondered when he’d become so subservient to Lele’s wishes that he was willing to putter away in the kitchen while she lounged around like a princess in front of the TV.

(He didn’t want to be reminded that conflict avoidance was the easiest way to skirt around his emotional turmoil, nor that this was his tactic for maintaining some space between Lele and himself.)

The sight of a buck-naked toddler running at a full clip down the common corridor inspired a very different reaction in him than it had in Lele. For heaven’s sake, didn’t Lele know that this was dangerous ? If the child tumbled down the stairs or ran into the lift, who knew what peril might meet him?

Tearing out of the flat, Fang Wu sprinted off in pursuit of the child. It wasn’t until he picked up the little boy that he registered that this was the nephew of Atiqah.

Well, regardless of whose family this boy belonged to, Fang Wu had a duty. The indignity of the squirming, giggling toddler urinating down the front of his shirt made that reality even grimmer.

Marching back up the corridor with the child in his arms – what a relief that he’d caught little Yusuf just before he got to the top of the stairs! – Fang Wu saw that the door was already wide open when he arrived at Eusoff’s flat.

In the doorway stood a very frazzled – and soaking wet – Atiqah. And beside her stood Aziz, wrapped up in a bright green dinosaur hooded towel with a row of plush spikes that ran from the top of his head down his spine.

Fang Wu suppressed a laugh at the thought that the spiky towel made it visible to all and sundry just how diabolical that child could be. By this time, he’d seen enough of Aziz and Yusuf’s antics to feel indignation at the tyranny they wreaked upon their aunt.

He ought not to think about how every inch of her outline stood in even sharper relief than when they’d gone swimming during their days in Barcelona. (She’d always swum in long sleeved rash guards to protect her modesty.)

Further to that, he ought not to be conscious that even more of their anatomy came into contact when he handed the child to her than when he’d made his de facto marriage proposal.

His mind told him that the civil thing to do was to apologise for smearing her with pee, even though that was more Yusuf’s fault than his and it couldn’t be avoided.

For all the other reasons stated above, he simply couldn’t form the words. His line of thinking was verboten when he had firmly resolved to stick to concrete possibilities and abandon vain flights of fancy.

Principle dictated that Fang Wu stayed long enough to ensure that little Yusuf was grasped firmly and safely in Atiqah’s arms before he wordlessly headed to the lift that would take him to his eighth-floor flat. After all, he couldn’t possibly go back to Xixi and Lele’s place covered in pee.

~~~⚽~~~

IV.vi – Atiqah

Bath time had just started to get easier before Aziz got injured. Now that he was four, Atiqah was finally able to trust that when she handed a soapy washcloth to Aziz, he would use it to the effect that he exited the shower in a cleaner state than when he entered it. Unfortunately, all that progress evaporated after he dislocated his shoulder.

The most efficient way to get the boys clean had always been for them to shower together. On the irregular occasions when Azlan was the one to help them, he used the ensuite attached to his room. Atiqah always used the common bathroom, which was the shared property of Eusoff, Aizah and herself.

Like most public housing flats in Singapore that hadn’t been worked over by an interior designer, the common bathroom off the kitchen featured a pedestal toilet, a wash basin and a wall-mounted shower head and water heater. There was no bathtub or shower stall, the water simply flowed into a drain hole in the floor covered by a metal grate.

Atiqah didn’t relish this phase when she had to go back to soaping and rinsing both boys off again. It was worse than it had been before, with Yusuf now in his terrible twos. Furthermore, she had to take twice as much time with Aziz so as not to put too much pressure on his injured shoulder and back.

Patience was never the strong suit of toddler boys, and while Atiqah was soaping Aziz, Yusuf often had a field day spraying her all over with water.

Still, getting wet wasn’t half as bad as having to handle the flight risk that Yusuf posed now that he’d figured out how to undo the flimsy lock on the plastic accordion-style bathroom door. The day he twisted it open and bolted out while she was still soaping Aziz was the most nightmarish one in her recent existence.

“Yusuf,” she yelled, “come back! If you don’t come, Makcik (Aunt) will be very angry with you!”

Unfortunately, Yusuf thought this was more funny than scary. He did a cheeky dance and slipped away when she hastily reached out to catch him. When Azlan was out at work (he always deigned to work at the most inopportune times!) and Eusoff couldn’t move, there was nobody to halt the child’s progress out the door that they kept ajar to combat the stuffy tropical heat.

“Yusuf, listen to your makcik , OK? She told you to come back, come, come to Datuk .”

As Atiqah threw Aziz’s hooded towel over him and patted him dry as hastily as she could without hurting him, she took some meagre relief from hearing her father back her up.

Not that it mattered – by the time she got Aziz reasonably dry and went to the door, Yusuf was already out of her sight. She wondered if Aziz would also try to run out if she left him with his grandfather while she went in pursuit of Yusuf.

Thankfully, her deliverance from that dilemma came before she could propose that arrangement. Her gratitude at seeing Fang Wu carry Yusuf down the corridor towards her flat was only matched by her embarrassment at the wet stain on his shirt that she saw when he drew near.

When Fang Wu had sort-of proposed to her, he’d only held her hands. Now they practically bumped bodies when he handed Yusuf over to her. It was again a parody of the romance they could have had. The fact that Yusuf had peed all over him felt like an added layer of mockery.

Her sensations on the discovery made her perfectly speechless. She could not even thank him . Certainly, if she did, she would have to apologise, in the same breath, for the outrageousness of letting her nephew urinate on him. That was far too shameful to put into words.

His kindness in stepping forward to her relief, the manner, the silence in which it passed, the little particulars of the circumstance – this was no occasion to reflect upon it. She had Yusuf to clean up all over again, as well as to clean herself.

No doubt Fang Wu had slunk off in silence because he was offended not only at her gross negligence, but her nephew’s sheer impudence to soil him.

While she carried Yusuf towards the bathroom, Eusoff limped to the front door and shut it to prevent Aziz from running out too.

“Yusuf,” her father said in his strictest voice, “what did I say about obeying Datuk and Makcik ?”

Atiqah knew her father deeply appreciated the respect and courtesy that Fang Wu always extended to him. She could comprehend his regretting that Fang Wu should have done what Atiqah ought to have done herself .

But neither Eusoff’s feelings, nor anybody’s feelings, could interest her, until she had a little better arranged her own. She was ashamed of herself, quite ashamed of being so nervous, so overcome by such a trifle; but so it was, and it required a long period of solitude and reflection to recover her.

Still, what use were such feelings when they could only end in futility? The only thing that could unlock their current impasse was for Fang Wu to consider converting to Islam again. When Atiqah couldn’t see that happening – certainly she didn’t have a right to ask it of him, not anymore – there was no option but to remain mired in silence.

---

This chapter is all about motivations and stakes:
- If we translate Wentworth's actions into the 21st century deed-for-deed without translating the context, he looks like a douchebag to the nth degree.
- Similarly, Anne's actions in our times without context make her look like a wet dishrag (or a doormat).

But let's take a look at all the constraints that applied in Regency times which most of us are thankfully liberated from:
- Eight years past, they couldn't write to each other when Wentworth went back to sea without being engaged.
- In the present time, they couldn't talk freely about many things (most of all their failed relationship) without a renewal of the engagement.
- Wentworth didn't have many ladies to choose from when he thought he could move on from Anne. The Musgroves were the most pre-eminent family in the area, and in the country there weren't many other families (if at all) of the appropriate social strata to socialize with. So, he was simply doing what was expected in polite society (call upon the neighbours) and accepting the attentions of the most appropriate women for his standing (Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove), and he'd started doing so before he saw Anne again.

Part V – The Mortifying Night of Own Goals

Once they had been so much to each other! Now nothing! Just neighbours, tied together by the rules of social etiquette. What could be so difficult about that when Fang Wu and Nur Atiqah binti Eusoff were grown adults of about thirty (give or take a couple of years)?

Nothing could be more innocuous than a multi-generational hot pot and movie night. Fang Wu had chosen the film My Country, My Parents 《我和我的父辈》to show Eusoff the drastic development of Shanghai within a single generation. It was a family movie, not a love story at all: a cultural and historical anthology about the relationships between fathers and their children in 20th and 21st century China.

That ought to have been the safest territory on earth, with no pastel-hued romance tropes to invoke the ghost of that long-gone-and-buried summer in Barcelona.

But if mortification was the name of the game, and its balance tracked by the goals conceded, the mental score that Fang Wu and Atiqah privately kept went right through the roof. It soundly beat even the most prolific matches in World Cup history.

Worse still, many of the goals were own goals, meaning that both parties were nearly equally guilty of putting their foot in it.

The technicality that this evening lasted much longer than the regulation 90 minutes for a football match was only significant in that it prolonged their agony.

Wasn’t it stupid and petty to keep score anyway? Not that anyone asked them, nor did they know what was going through each other’s heads.

If they had known how much the other cared about making a good impression on them, or just how similar their mental scores of the evening turned out (albeit perceived from different angles), it might have made a difference to their suffering in the moment. But they didn’t.

Here was the score of the night (approximately), in the minds of Fang Wu and Atiqah:

FangWuLeLe (1) – (0) The House of Eusoff
House of Eusoff own goal: Aizah crashes the party
Fang Wu’s interpretation: FangWuLeLe score to accommodate one more guest

“Sorry, is it OK if we bring one more person?” For how long, Atiqah wondered, had her life revolved around thanking and apologising? She had never been so conscious of it until Fang Wu became the object of both her thanks and her apologies.

Neither of them had breathed a word about the brave rescue of little Yusuf after that mortifying day. And now, Atiqah’s family members were taking turns to send her into the hall of shame with their obliviousness to imposing on their kindly neighbours.

Most weekends when Aizah was in Singapore, she met her former uni classmates at Orchard Road, Singapore’s high-end shopping street, for movies and dinner. Dining in with their next-door neighbours could hardly match that level of chic, but Xixi and Lele were firm friends with both sisters, and Aizah was eager to see what Lele’s new boyfriend was like.

Atiqah didn’t know how much more effort preparing hot pot for 11 people versus 10 would take, but she hoped it wouldn’t be too much trouble for their hosts. Thankfully, Lele took the last-minute request with as good grace as she could expect.

“np,” Lele texted. “fw is cooking”

To make sure Fang Wu and Lele felt appreciated for being so accommodating, Atiqah went to Bengawan Solo and bought enough kueh to serve two pieces to everyone for dessert.

With their arrangement where Aizah contributed the money for the household while she contributed the labour, Atiqah usually tried to spend as little as possible. But one instance of splurging to return a courtesy wouldn’t hurt. Besides, she knew her sister wouldn’t begrudge her the money. Bankrolling the household was how Aizah dealt with the guilt of her work taking her away from home so often.

It was more important that Fang Wu should know that her family had no intention to sponge off his and Lele’s hospitality with impunity. After all, she decided, he had enough reasons to be disgusted at her without her family adding more.

FangWuLeLe (1) – (1) The House of Eusoff
Azlan scores: Historical comment hits home
Atiqah’s interpretation: No score or a House of Eusoff own goal

“How come they had no cars in 1942?” Azlan wondered aloud as the film’s opening scenes showed a troop of Chinese mounted cavalry in a vast swath of countryside. “I mean, nowadays you guys are leading the world in electric vehicles. How can it be that the Japanese had planes, and the Chinese had… horses?”

“1942 was almost a hundred years ago,” huffed Lele. “Weren’t the Ford Model T and the Wright Brothers’ first flight also about a hundred years ago? Before cars came about, of course they used horses!”

Fang Wu regretted popping out of the kitchen at just the right time to hear that last snatch of conversation. He kept the sliding kitchen door shut so that the aroma of the simmering broth wouldn’t tantalise Eusoff and his family before they could break their fast.

Was it his imagination, or did Fang Wu see Atiqah raising an eyebrow just a smidge? Could it be possible that he might have divined the direction of her thoughts?

No, it couldn’t be telepathy, just mere coincidence. He saw the irony: although Lele had been to university and he hadn’t, he knew she was more than thirty years off in her estimation of history. If he were to guess, that was probably what Atiqah was thinking too.

To avoid letting his mind stray in that direction, Fang Wu chose to focus on the painful truth that Azlan had brought up instead.

World War II had been horribly close to the era when the British had coined the nickname “Sick Man of the East” for China. Before rising strong and proud, his country had endured decades, no, a century, of humiliation since the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century.

The near decade that he’d hid the shame of his unrequited love was nothing in comparison to that.

Fang Wu knew he came from very humble beginnings and that he was part of the first generation growing up with China in an age of prosperity. He usually celebrated being able to ride the coattails of the past two decades of meteoric growth.

But Azlan voicing his incredulity at the under-developed state of Chinese World War II military technology didn’t help his fragile self-esteem. Not with his life’s greatest humiliation right in front of him.

Slipping back into the kitchen seemed to be the best option; no one needed to know there wasn’t much to do besides passively watching the two pots of broth simmering on the stove. Just for the illusion of busyness, he lifted one pot lid and stirred the bubbling liquid with a pair of long chopsticks.

FangWuLeLe (2) – (1) The House of Eusoff
Fang Wu scores: His chosen film educates everyone

“The US put a man on the moon in 1969, and the Chinese sent a satellite into space in 1970! Do you think one day Singapore will send a rocket to space?”

That was Aizah, dandling her little nephew on her lap and pointing to the scene on the TV screen. It was a re-enactment of the release of China’s first satellite, Dong Fang Hong #1 东方红一号. Of course, Miss International Trade would be able to spout all these fun facts off the top of her head.

“ Mak Long (eldest aunt), I don’t think Singapore is big enough to launch a rocket,” declared Aziz matter-of-factly with a cherubic grin. Clearly, the child expected to be applauded for how smart he was, though Fang Wu thought smart-alecky was a more appropriate description.

At least, thought Fang Wu, Azlan’s sons were equitable in the way they antagonised their aunts. They seemed to know how to hit where it hurt most, too. With Aizah, they challenged her intelligence, and with Atiqah, they made a mockery of her manners.

He wasn’t quite ready to forgive little Yusuf for peeing on him. But neither would he be ashamed of his relief that Yusuf had chosen him for a target instead of Atiqah. There could be nothing undignified in having a sense of human decency. One did not have to be in love with another human being to have the wish to see them treated with fairness.

Besides, he could feel vindicated that Aizah had highlighted something which lots of people missed. In all the hubbub about China taking over the world by storm, few remembered that China’s space program was every bit as old and established as the United States’.

FangWuLeLe (2) – (2) The House of Eusoff
Atiqah equalises with a soul-piercing comment

Fang Wu had resumed eavesdropping listening to the conversation because it was futile to pretend there was anything left to do in the kitchen. They were merely whiling away the time until the sun set, when the fasting members of Eusoff’s household would be allowed to eat and drink.

Usually, Fang Wu was the life of every party. Playing forward necessitated some boldness of character, so he was used to being the centre of attention. This was even more so when he almost always wore the captain’s armband in the latter years of his career.

But to avoid being blindsided by any more of Atiqah’s expressions, tonight he hid in the shadows, letting Xixi and Lele vie with Azlan and Aizah to dominate the room. He positioned himself such that he couldn’t see her face. Still, when Atiqah spoke, steady but never strident, he could distinguish the tone of that voice when it would be lost on others .

“Aziz,” she said, “not every country has to go to space to become great. Not all achievements need to come with a big bang to be worthy of honour.”

When showing up at the World Cup had meant everything to him, even if crashing out in the group stage meant nobody in the world but the Chinese cared, that statement was straight on the mark. Whether he cared to acknowledge it or not, she still grasped the essence of him more than any other woman had in the eight years since.

FangWuLele(3) – (2) The House of Eusoff
FangWuLeLe score: Halal Hunanese hot pot!

“Let me unveil…” Lele announced with a trill, “ta da, the world’s first halal Hunanese hot pot!”

Pulling open the kitchen door at the stroke of sundown, Lele gestured to the kitchen, signalling to Fang Wu and Xiaoming to parade out with the jugs of broth.

They’d gone to Best Denki to buy two new electric steamboat pots for the occasion. Yuan yang huo guo 鸳鸯火锅, which was hot pot served in a divided cauldron with spicy soup on one side and non-spicy on the other, was tremendously popular in China.

In their version of it, one of the pots had spicy soup and the other had herbal chicken soup. They would seat the children with Azlan, Farah and Eusoff at the end of the table with the non-spicy soup base, while the rest of the young people had the spicy soup.

To get dinner on the table, Xixi and Lele had worked the men hard all day. It had been Fang Wu who discovered Hao Halal Hub, a Singapore Chinese-owned speciality convenience store stocking only halal -certified food. He’d taken a bus to the outlet in the neighbouring town of Pasir Ris to get the ingredients.

Xixi and Lele had done their share of chopping and slicing, more than they would have done in three months if left to their own devices. But they did want to impress the men with their domesticity.

They left it to the men, though, to slice the meat, carving paper-thin slices off frozen-solid blocks of chicken and beef with cleavers. Fang Wu had to show Xiaoming how to do it, but Xiaoming caught on well enough to impress Xixi thoroughly.

Lele noted, with simultaneous dread and glee, the enchantment on Xixi’s face while she watched Xiaoming carving. She was happy for her sister, but she could also sense that they were inching towards the moment when she would become the last singleton in the house if she didn’t hurry things up with Fang Wu.

And of course, Fang Wu was solely responsible for making the soup base in exactly the way his parents had when he was a child. He hadn’t been old enough to learn it directly from them, but after he left home, his sister had texted him the recipe and talked him through the process on the phone the first few times he’d done it. Two decades later, he had everything memorised.

It was only fair, Lele acknowledged, to give Fang Wu the bulk of the credit for this meal. But she, Lele, could claim to have contributed a good deal as well. After all, she knew the layout of her fridge best, and it was only because she was used to stuffing crazy amounts of French pastry in it that they managed to fit enough hot pot ingredients to feed 11 people into that narrow space. Unlike those fantastic Western kitchens she saw on TV, Asian urban living spaces weren’t big enough to accommodate anything more than a single-door fridge.

Therefore, she decided, this dinner ought to be considered a Fang Wu – Lele win.

FangWuLele(3) – (3) The House of Eusoff
Fang Wu’s own goal: Forgetting that Atiqah’s family has never been to Haidilao

Pouring the jug of spicy broth into the electric pot, Fang Wu took a moment to savour the aroma coming up from the steaming soup. That smell had the ability to transport him back to home in a way nothing else could. It was the part of his parents that followed him no matter how far away he went.

“You’ll find this soup a little bit different from the spicy soup at Haidilao,” he explained to Eusoff and his family. “What you usually encounter at hot pot restaurants is Sichuanese hot pot, which takes its special character from the Sichuan peppercorn. But in Hunan, we use plain dried chilli pepper.”

The soup was ruthlessly blunt in its spiciness, but Fang Wu knew enough about Malay food to determine that Atiqah and her family could take it. No, his blunder wasn’t in making this spicy dish for them, but in the assumptions evident in how he’d just introduced it.

More than ninety-five percent of the people Fang Wu knew were intimately familiar with Haidilao 海底捞, a massively popular hot pot restaurant chain. The story of Haidilao was an even bigger rags-to-riches tale than his own.

Its founder, Zhang Yong 张勇, came from Jianyang, a county-level city in rural Sichuan. He hadn’t even completed high school when he began his working life as a welder earning an hourly salary below what some US states would consider as minimum wage.

Haidilao had started as a simple four-table restaurant in 1994, a go-for-broke gamble taken by a poor man. Though he had a wife to support, he still quit his job and threw all he had into his hot pot business without any formal culinary training. Decades later, Haidilao was now known and loved not only all over China, but across East and Southeast Asia, the UK and North America too. Practically every housing estate in Singapore had a Haidilao outlet at its town centre.

The company was now listed in Hong Kong, and Zhang Yong and his wife were naturalised Singapore citizens, appearing consistently in the top 10 on the local billionaire list. But it was the food and the communal experience, not the glamour of its founders, that made Haidilao a special place in the eyes of millions of Chinese and overseas Chinese diasporas.

All the blood drained from his face when it struck Fang Wu that while Atiqah and her family very likely knew about Haidilao because it was everywhere, they might never have dined there.

Of course, Haidilao was the antithesis of halal . Pork and pig innards were popular ingredients for Chinese hot pot. Theoretically, there was nothing stopping a Muslim family from trying hot pot without the pork or the alcohol. In fact, halal hot pot restaurants were popping up here in Singapore, just as they did in China, to cater to the Muslim crowd.

Still, Fang Wu cursed himself for the stupidity of his unthinking words that assumed hot pot played as central a role in Atiqah’s family’s life as it did in his.

“But of course,” he corrected himself, “I’m sorry, I got ahead of myself. I forgot you might not have tried Haidilao. Well, I can’t presume to be world-class in my cooking quality, but I hope you will enjoy the dinner anyway.”

FangWuLeLe (6) – (3) The House of Eusoff
Fang Wu scores a hat-trick by serving Atiqah first
Fang Wu’s interpretation: Conceded a hat-trick in the obviousness of his preference

Azlan and Farah were ravenous. Not eating for more than twelve hours straight was enough to knock out even the youngest, most vigorous man in the house.

At least, that was the excuse Azlan used to fob off his father’s attempts to chide him for leaning Cleopatra-style on their hosts’ sectional tonight. Of course, it was just like him to forget that his wife Farah had suffered more for being on her feet during her entire fast today.

Even on nights when they weren’t breaking a fast, Atiqah was often the one who put food on Aziz’s and Yusuf’s plates at dinnertime. While Farah felt guilty that her sister-in-law was taking over things that were essentially a mother’s duty, their hand-to-mouth existence left her little space to develop the habits of motherhood – though that was technically her responsibility.

Besides, Farah was scarcely the only Asian woman to be forced into tough choices between survival and family. More than one quarter of Singapore’s population, or about 1.5 million people, was made up of foreign workers. In fact, nearly 40% of the workforce was foreign. And nearly one-fifth of these were foreign domestic maids originating from the Philippines, Indonesia, or Myanmar.

In turns, Farah felt guilty and sad about how she was missing out on the experience of being a mother. If Azlan had been willing to take on shifts with her at her parents’ stall, she wouldn’t need to miss out on so much of her sons’ childhood. But no, all he cared about was his video gaming, and his only sense of responsibility was to earn just enough money to support it.

Thus, Farah was bankrolling the boys’ preschool fees, which at S$4,000 per month practically wiped out all her savings. As the designated sibling to take over the stall, Farah had a profession for life, but for now, to keep her livelihood she had to put all her time in it.

During this fasting month, she worked longer hours than usual to give her parents a rest. They were well into their sixties, and she could very well imagine that fasting would only get harder when one got older. Nonetheless, they adhered strongly to their religious responsibilities. Hale and hearty for their age, they saw no reason to refrain from participating in Ramadan even though Farah intimated that they should feel no guilt about taking it easy.

It was her good fortune, Farah decided, that she could still sleep next to her sons at night and cuddle them, even if she barely saw them in their waking hours. If she framed her situation against that of those foreign domestic maids who spent years, even decades, living a sea away from their children to provide for their families, she hadn’t the right to complain nor to wish for more.

Besides, Farah was sure that with time it would get better. She and Azlan had gotten married when they were barely more than children, straight out of secondary school. When the boys transitioned from preschool to primary, they would attend government-run national schools which charged almost nothing. Surely, Azlan would grow up someday and decide to get a proper job. And as they got older, the boys wouldn’t go to bed quite as early, which would mean she would get some time to bond with them every night.

For now, Farah eagerly helped herself to the water and soup – how horribly draining it was to spend twelve hours a day operating a food stall while consuming nil by mouth! Only after she had quenched her first wave of thirst did it occur to her to feel guilt that Atiqah was the one putting meat and vegetables into the pot for her boys. Atiqah had fasted all day, too, but she had abandoned her own place at the table to come to the boys’ side and help them.

“Lele, can you help Pakcik , I mean Uncle Eusoff, while I help this side of the table?”

If Fang Wu’s authoritative voice was enough to make Farah swoon, she wasn’t surprised that Xixi and Lele were in a little fever of admiration over him. She was married and a Muslim besides, but she could still appreciate the charisma and the quality of leadership in that man.

Apparently, he was even more perspicacious than she was. Farah had practically lived at Eusoff’s flat ever since she started dating Azlan at the age of sixteen. But she had never truly reflected on how challenging it must be for Atiqah to assist both her father and the boys at almost every mealtime.

And how was it that Fang Wu knew that Atiqah preferred chicken to beef and cabbage to taro yam? For a Chinese man, his understanding of the Muslim palate was astounding. Possibly, Farah realised, he must have a Muslim in his circle of close acquaintance.

But then, some of Atiqah’s tastes weren’t necessarily about her being a Muslim, but about her being Atiqah . In this family, they all had the same restriction of only being able to eat halal food, but that wasn’t sufficient to explain their individual preferences.

Like Farah, Atiqah noticed Fang Wu’s act of kindness. How could she not? The chopsticks she held as she dipped a slice of beef into the soup for one of the boys clattered onto the table as they dropped from her trembling hands.

In an instant, Fang Wu picked up the fallen chopsticks and came back from the kitchen with a new pair that he handed to Atiqah. How he’d noticed this while still halfway through arranging the food on Atiqah’s plate was something Farah couldn’t fathom.

Farah knew that Atiqah was never rude, so she was shocked that her sister-in-law would be so shaken by this that she was barely capable of even whispering her thanks.

Had the family really treated Atiqah so badly that a simple act of kindness could so thoroughly discombobulate her? Farah was under no illusions that Atiqah worked any fewer hours than she did, even though Atiqah’s labour was unpaid.

Yet Farah had always fancied herself the less fortunate of the two. Atiqah spent practically all her time at home, so (theoretically) she could sit down or nap anytime she needed a rest. And Eusoff and the boys were her family. Atiqah knew they loved her even when they were at their most demanding. Farah’s customers, who ran the whole gamut from pleasant and friendly to downright rude and abusive, didn’t.

How had it taken a new neighbour, a near-stranger to the family, to show Farah how beaten down her sister-in-law was?

But keenly as she felt the guilt, Farah was also helpless. She had no way of changing how long it would take for the situation to get better.

Farah had been only nineteen when her first child was born. Naturally, she’d known nothing about infant care at the time. Neither had Aizah nor Atiqah, who had been twenty-five and twenty-three respectively. Yet, as the women of the family, Farah’s new sisters had stepped up alongside her to take on the financial and physical burden of caring for a newborn baby round-the-clock.

Though Atiqah was only Farah’s sister by marriage, she had become as vital to Farah as a sister by birth. And Farah knew that she would have done the same for Atiqah, if Atiqah had been in her position.

Perhaps it was fortunate, though, that they hadn’t both married young. Otherwise, the mayhem in the flat would be unbearable with four or five children living with them instead of just two. Aziz and Yusuf squared made a monster that gave Farah a migraine simply to imagine.

Four more years, and Farah would be able to relieve some of the burdens on her sister-in-law. There were two more years before Aziz would start primary school, and in two more Yusuf would follow suit. If she squinted, Farah could see some light at the end of this tunnel.

In the meantime, Farah owed it to Fang Wu’s perception of her sister-in-law’s fatigue, and his resolution to give her rest , to give her the wake-up call that she had needed.

She didn’t regret that she had married Azlan too young. In fact, if either of their families had been aware of everything that she and Azlan had been up to while still in secondary school, they would have pushed for, rather than merely condoned, the pair getting married at the stroke of eighteen.

Indeed, they were struggling and would be for several years yet, but Farah knew she was lucky to be part of a family that struggled together. And with this stark reminder of the magnitude of the burdens that her family bore for her, she would stick in her oar and try to help out more.

FangWuLeLe (6) – (6) The House of Eusoff
Atiqah decides that Fang Wu’s kindness to her must be a hat-trick in her favour too

Yes; he had done it . And Atiqah could only feel regret at her inability to extend Fang Wu the thanks that he deserved. Unconsciously, she made all the noises needed to sustain polite small talk at the table. But in front of Xixi and Lele, who knew her and her family so well through their friendship of four years, she could not help but feel exposed.

With respect to Fang Wu, she was very much affected by the view of his disposition towards her, which his every action made apparent. This little circumstance seemed the completion of all that had gone before.

She understood him. He could not forgive her, but he could not be unfeeling. Though condemning her for the past, and considering it with high (but not necessarily unjust) r esentment, though perfectly careless of her, and though becoming attached to another, still he could not see her suffer, without the desire of giving her relief.

It was a remainder of former sentiment; it was an impulse of pure, though unacknowledged friendship; it was proof of his own warm and amiable heart, which Atiqah could not contemplate without emotions so compounded of pleasure and pain, that she knew not which prevailed.

Sometimes in her moments of wry humour, Atiqah had joked to herself that the reason why no one would ever live up to Fang Wu in her mind was because he’d been the first and only man to bring her to Camp Nou. That was the hallowed ground of football that her family and most of her friends could only dream of visiting in person.

But deep down inside, she knew that the perfect unrivalled hold Fang Wu had on her heart was far more profound than that. Ever since her mother had passed on, he’d been the only person to put her needs above his own. She might have rejected his offer to convert to Islam for her sake, but she’d never forgotten it.

He might be capable of turning the sentiment of a lover into that of a brother, looking out for her while courting and marrying her friend and neighbour. But Atiqah wasn’t sure how long she could carry on before betraying that she couldn’t do the same.

It was her lack of society, Atiqah decided, that was to blame for their current imbalance of feeling. Fang Wu could move on because he had perfect freedom to choose any woman – inside or outside of Asia – to be with.

Even at 23, without any Super League appearances or international caps to his name, Atiqah had considered Fang Wu irresistible to any woman with the freedom to have him. He’d perfected the appearance of the handsome bad boy with his slick wakeboarding tricks, while being nothing but kind and considerate at heart. Sure, he had no parents and hardly any money, but with such a personality, how could a woman see anything but the highest perfection in him?

Now, with a successful career and a modest fortune to his name, Atiqah would be shocked if she found any woman who wouldn’t be willing to date and marry him. If they cared nothing for his character, they’d still find his looks, fame and money to be extremely attractive.

She’d walked back into his life at a point when he was developing a relationship with Lele. Yet she fancied that as far as she might dare to judge from memory and experience , Fang Wu was not quite yet in love with her neighbour .

Lele was more in love with him; yet there it was not love . Atiqah had seen Lele in love with the idea of love enough times to know that this was how she behaved with all the men whom she had dated.

Still, Atiqah was convinced that it might, probably must, end in love with one or the other at least. They were a logical pair when they’d come from the same province in China. Lele would be good for him, being lively and cheerful instead of downtrodden and morose. He could be good for her too, giving her the grounding and maturity that she still sorely lacked.

Unlike Fang Wu and Lele, Atiqah didn’t have the freedom to expand her world. Ever since Eusoff had his foot amputated, her life had been lived between Changi General Hospital, Tampines Central Community Club, the Al-Masyhur halal butcher at Tampines Mart, and her nephews’ preschool.

When Muslims were only about 15% of the Singapore population and she was no longer young but still known to so few , Atiqah suffered from a serious lack of options. Even if being in love – still in love – with Fang Wu hadn’t been haram (which it most certainly was), it was pathetic because it showed how narrow her life had been and still was.

Before seeing him again, time may have softened down much, perhaps nearly all, of her peculiar attachment to him, but she had been too dependent on time alone . No aid had been given in change of place (except in her return from Barcelona to Singapore), or in any novelty or enlargement of society.

Therefore, was it any surprise that no one had ever come within Atiqah’s circle, who could bear a comparison with Fang Wu as he stood in her memory ? She had never met a Muslim man whom she could fall for, which would have been the only thoroughly natural, happy, and sufficient cure, at her time of life, for her heartbreak.

Atiqah considered it undoubtedly a score, in fact a hat-trick, in her favour to discover that Fang Wu’s sense of kindness superseded his resentment of her. But at the same time, she was miserably aware that it now trapped her into living a lie – one that she could barely conceal – forever.

FangWuLele (9) – (6) The House of Eusoff
House of Eusoff shame: Hat-trick to Lele, who wins the gig war

“Can you tell me what’s wrong with the young people these days?” Having eaten his fill, Eusoff fell into his usual complaint about the instability of gig work in Singapore. “None of them want to do proper jobs anymore. Fang Wu, of course you know I’m not talking about you.”

This was scarcely a surprise to Atiqah, who had heard her father grouse about his baby boy not having a stable job innumerable times in the past six years. She only wished he wouldn’t expose more of their pathetic family situation to Fang Wu.

“ Ayah ,” protested Aizah, “are you trying to imply I’m not young? Because you know I’m in a proper job. And that statement isn’t fair to Xi Xi too.”

“OK, OK, I know, lah ,” Eusoff qualified, “I’m not talking about any of the girls. In fact, all the girls in this family are very responsible. But Azlan spends more time at his Playstation than working. So how can you call gig work, work?”

“Uncle Eusoff, not all gigs are the same,” Lele staunchly defended herself. “I might be self-employed, but I call myself a slasher rather than a gig worker.”

“What’s a slasher?” Eusoff tutted, “All of you young people make up so many crazy names, I cannot keep up already! Gig, slasher, all it means is that young people don’t have the humility to work for someone else.”

Atiqah knew that working for oneself sometimes required the most humility of all. Farah and her parents served every customer at their stall with courtesy, even the ones who ordered them around like servants. But she was also used to Eusoff’s rants. This wasn’t about them, but about his perennial worry for Azlan.

“I think having more than one job requires fortitude and strength of mind ,” Fang Wu spoke up. “Every skill has an expiration date. Look at me: I played football, but I must accept that it’s a career that won’t last me beyond the age of thirty. Having the character of decision and firmness to find your many strengths and pursue them, and to know when to quit from one thing and take up another, is the only way we won’t end up unemployed and at a loose end by the age of forty. Zheng Xinle, if you would still be this productive in your November of life, it can only be because you cherish ed all your present powers of mind .”

He had done, and was unanswered. It would have surprised Atiqah if Lele could have readily answered such a speech: words of such interest, spoken with such serious warmth!

Atiqah could imagine what Lele was feeling . After all, this was high praise of Lele to the detriment of everyone else in the room.

Azlan would be impervious to their father’s hints about his lack of stable employment, he always was.

Farah tried her best to be enterprising, but in inheriting her parents’ stall, her career had practically been chosen for her at birth. She had never needed to assess her strengths, nor to pursue anything that hadn’t been laid out in front of her.

Aizah earned the highest salary of them all, but Eusoff sometimes took this for granted because she was the only university graduate in the family, so of course being a career woman was the best use of her time.

Xixi had a stable and comfortable career too but was now overshadowed by her livelier sister. In a good month, Lele’s earnings outpaced Xixi’s, although with a stable salary, Xixi could get through her day-to-day budgeting with less accounting skill than her sister.

Perhaps the fact that Lele needed to plan her life on a highly variable income fully merited her that high praise. Atiqah knew that such flexibility was beyond her own capacity, even though she was also aware that the expenses Lele’s parents bore on her behalf cushioned the blow of her career instability.

And in this value system, Atiqah sat on the lowest rung of the ladder. By now, she’d done almost as much unpaid as paid work in her eight years of adult life.

If it had hurt to think that Fang Wu would be swayed towards Lele because of their common heritage, to know that he valued Lele’s career choices more than Atiqah’s was purgatory.

Of course, she knew that had he ever wished to see her again, he need not have waited till this time; he would have done what she could not but believe that in his place she should have done long ago. But even facing the reality that Fang Wu had long ceased to love her, Atiqah could not deny that his indirect disparagement of her life choices through his praise of Lele’s left a sting.

FangWuLeLe (9) – (8) The House of Eusoff
Fang Wu scores his second successive own goal and his third of the night
Atiqah’s interpretation: Score for the FangWuLeLe ship

It truly wasn’t Fang Wu’s intention to be mean. He had been speaking about his own life when he had praised Lele for her career dynamism. Having made enough money to tide him comfortably through a lifetime, not six months ago he’d faced down the existential question of whether he could consign himself to decades of idleness. To be self-employed and never have to ask that question again was a quality he envied not only in Lele but also in Xia Jian.

Only when he saw Atiqah shrink in her seat did he realise that his words could easily have also been about her. What could he say, this was the most treacherous own goal he’d scored in the entire night.

Not all worthwhile work was paid, and he knew that. Besides, there was something to be said about well-earned leisure after a lifetime of hard work. His sister and brother-in-law were perfect examples of that.

“I’ll be welcoming my sister and brother-in-law to Singapore in late January,” he said, to change the subject. “If they follow their original plan they’ll be flying in from the Maldives, but as you know, backpackers can change their schedule anytime. I’m happy to see them doing something they never had the chance to when they were young, but even happier to hear that they want to spend the Lunar New Year in Asia with family.”

“Oh, is this the same trip where they were kissing in front of the Eiffel Tower?” asked Lele. “Backpacking sounds so romantic and exciting – it must be like a second honeymoon!”

Fang Wu nodded. “Yes, their first stop was in Paris,” he confirmed. “But their trip hasn’t been all roses and sunshine. They did get some pretty bad blisters walking through Spain.”

“As a military man, my brother-in-law thinks trekking for 50 kilometres in a day is fun,” he continued. “And although I don’t understand it at all, my sister makes nothing of such torture. She’d rather send her backpack on with the mail and join him than take a taxi.”

“If I were in that situation, I would do the same thing too,” said Lele. “ If I loved a man, like the way your sister loves her husband, I would always be with him. Nothing should ever separate us, not blisters or even anything worse.”

It was spoken with enthusiasm , and undoubtedly moony eyes gazing right at him.

That wasn’t the first hint Lele had made to drive their relationship forward. She’d referred to Fang Wu as her boyfriend without even a conversation with him to confirm their status. She’d suggested several times that they should travel together. There had been that thinly veiled request for him to take her shopping in Shanghai which he’d ignored.

But all of that had been about what he could do for her . This was the first time Lele had ever alluded to doing anything for him .

Every time they went for karaoke, Xia Jian sang the Richie Jen song Xin Tai Ruan 心太软 (Too Soft-hearted) in honour of him. Fang Wu knew exactly what Xia Jian thought about his love life – that the women who could interest him invariably had standards that were too high, and so he always got bullied by them.

This was not fully accurate, but close enough to the truth that he could not refute it.

So, if a woman was going to profess that she would make a sacrifice for him, it would hardly be a hardship for Fang Wu to accept it at face value. At the very least, that would salvage his pride.

“ Had you ?” he said, catching the same tone; “I honour you!” And there was silence between them for a little while.

On all accounts, such a moment ought to be a score in his favour. So why did it feel so much more like a blunder than a score?

Fang Wu could only blame his conscience – and his peripheral vision – for the feeling that he’d kicked the ball into his own net. Certainly, it was his prerogative to move on and he knew it, but the visible pain it gave Atiqah didn’t bring any joy to himself.

Besides, what did it all mean when she had been the one to profess that she’d never loved him? She was not a mean person and would not begrudge his happiness, that he now knew. He could be certain that she bore him no malice, but he didn’t think he had the capability to invoke her jealousy. Certainly, she wouldn’t betray her Muslim faith for him .

And for him to ever consider the possibility of converting again, it would take a lot more than a mere failure to meet his eye to convince him .

FangWuLeLe (12) – (11) The House of Eusoff
Hat-trick to The House of Eusoff for revealing Atiqah’s inner world
Three own goals to The House of Eusoff for outing Atiqah and general tactlessness

“How did your brother and sister-in-law meet?” asked Aizah, breaking the silence. “I mean, their love sounds like, you know, relationship goals.”

Atiqah could almost visualise the hashtag, but she didn’t know her sister cared for #goals in anything but her career life. She couldn’t remember the last time Aizah had ever brought home a male friend to meet the family.

“They served together in the Navy,” Fang Wu explained. “Of course, they couldn’t serve in the same chain of command due to conflicts of interest, so they had to spend a lot of time apart. But it seems to have only made them treasure their time together even more.”

“Do you know we tried downloading a Muslim dating app for Atiqah? It’s such a pity she deleted it,” chimed in Farah. “She said something like – I don’t know, finding a partner by swiping right felt so unemotional when it takes time and effort to truly get to know somebody.

“But I think what you said was kind of like that sort of feeling, that choosing someone just because of their profile picture can’t beat the strength of a relationship that has been tested through bonding and adversity.”

After a moment’s pause , Fang Wu enquired, rather clumsily – “How do Muslims date with apps?”

Atiqah knew he didn’t mean it in a racist sense, not after all that had happened between them. Rather, she thought, this was the first sign of curiosity he’d shown about whether they could have had other options all those years ago.

“I don’t know.” Farah shrugged. “As you can see, me and Azlan got together in school, so we never needed an app.”

“I guess it’s like those Muslims who drink alcohol?” suggested Aizah.

In the course of her work, Aizah spent a lot of time with counterparts from countries where Islam had a far bigger hold on society than it did in Singapore. As a result, she was familiar with the covert (and not-so-covert) breaches of religion that invariably happened when it was imposed on people by birth rather than choice.

It was Aizah who told Atiqah that Malay non-Muslims existed, even though they often lived in the closet. There was always the fear of censure from being seen eating during daylight hours in Ramadan or being spotted consuming pork. Strangely, drinking alcohol was one of the violations of Islam that some people did without feeling that it impinged upon their conscience or their Muslim status in any way.

“How recent was the incident with the app? Was it after Atiqah stopped playing?” were Fang Wu’s follow-up questions.

Surely, Atiqah felt, for someone who had just professed his admiration for Lele, he was taking an undue amount of interest in her sisters’ efforts to matchmake her.

“I think it was maybe when she was 22 or thereabouts,” said Farah. “I don’t really remember, but it must be around the time when I thought it was fun to get married at 18 and wanted everybody else to be like me.”

There couldn’t be anything worse for Farah to say, though Atiqah knew that her sister-in-law had no idea whom she was really talking to. To intimate that getting married at a young age was pure fun and games would make her younger self seem even more childish in Fang Wu’s eyes than he must believe already.

Fortunately for her, Azlan, who couldn’t stand not being the centre of attention for too long, changed the subject.

“Brother, do you want to come to our place and play FIFA? We came over so many times already, next time it’s your turn to come and hang out.” Looking to Atiqah because she was the cook for the household, he asked, “ Kakak (elder sister), that’s OK, right?”

“If he doesn’t mind, it won’t be any trouble,” said Atiqah. Privately, she knew any façade of indifference she kept would fall flat eventually. Hence, the less time she spent in Fang Wu’s company the better, but she wouldn’t say that at the expense of basic courtesy. “But I don’t think Fang Wu will find FIFA on the PlayStation fun when he’s been to the World Cup before.”

“Have you?” Azlan scratched his head. “I don’t remember. But I don’t remember any teams that don’t get past the quarterfinals.”

Trust Azlan, thought Atiqah, to find something to be snobbish about when every aspect of their existence gave them no right to judge anyone else. Since when had Singapore even made it to the World Cup, anyway? But she wouldn’t cause a scene by contradicting him in company.

“I did,” confirmed Fang Wu in a tone of complete nonchalance. “Scored the goal that equalised with the US, in fact. It was a 1-1 draw that broke the curse of China not having scored any goals at the World Cup.”

“So, you’re a football star,” said Aizah. “I would never have guessed! But then, nobody in the house watches Chinese football except Atiqah.

“You know, watching EPL in Singapore used to be very expensive because we had to get a set-top box each from Starhub and Singtel to get all the programs we wanted, but we’re all so crazy about football we did it anyway. The government stopped that because they had to stop the telcos profiteering from ordinary people.

“But even after we got all the football we wanted on one set-top box thanks to cross-carriage rights – and now, EPL is with Starhub anyway – Atiqah still pays extra money for the Sports+ package just so she can watch Chinese Super League. None of us understand why she does it. I mean, China is a world hegemony in so many things, but definitely not in football.”

At that very revealing speech from her sister, Atiqah couldn’t feel more naked if all her clothes had melted off her on the spot. She wondered if anyone could possibly die of embarrassment, because she very much wished to do so.

“What’s a hegemony? Aizah, you use such difficult words for what? Now we all cannot keep up with you.”

While Eusoff at least saw fit to break the awkward silence before it festered, Atiqah couldn’t stand seeing more of her family’s ignorance on display. Or rather, not in present company, for while could trust Xixi, Lele and Xiaoming not to be offended nor disgusted by her family’s foibles, they were in the company of the one person whom she could not.

“I think it’s time to serve the kueh ,” said Xixi, getting up and taking Xiaoming by the hand to lead him to the kitchen. “Atiqah, thanks for bringing such a nice dessert for all of us to enjoy.”

At the sight of the fragrant and delicate Nyonya cakes, everybody forgot about the risky politics of discussing China’s status as a world hegemony. Atiqah could never thank Xixi enough for her intervention. Privately, she decided that her family owed the couple a generous wedding gift when, or if, Xiaoming ever took it upon himself to propose.

Undoubtedly the boys, who hadn’t yet grown into acquired tastes like these, would have clamoured for ice cream instead of kueh if they were awake. Atiqah was grateful for the small mercy that they had both fallen asleep, sprawled along the sectional.

“Let me help you clear up,” she offered, stacking her sister’s empty bowl and plates on top of hers and getting up to carry everything to the kitchen sink. “Fang Wu, Xi Xi, Le Le, Xiao Ming, thank you very much for all the trouble you took to make dinner tonight.”

“Not at all.” The gentleman whom Atiqah thought would be most offended by what he had learned that evening was in front of her, taking the pile of crockery from her hands and blocking her path to the kitchen. “It must be very challenging to fast while feeding three people. Don’t worry, we can take care of these.”

While Fang Wu went off to the kitchen with the plates, Atiqah wondered in half-stupefaction at the depth with which he perceived her difficulties. Indeed, the practice of not eating nor drinking between sunup and sundown was tough, but to do so while providing food and water to her father and nephews throughout the day tested her resolve to the hilt.

“I hope you all had a good evening.” Upon returning from the kitchen, Fang Wu spoke to all of them, but Atiqah wondered if it was her imagination that he seemed to be addressing her personally. “I can walk you back to your flat.”

Instead of helping Eusoff the way he had the last time, Fang Wu went to the sectional and picked up the sleeping Aziz instead, so gently that he didn’t wake the child. Nodding at Azlan, he indicated silently to her brother to do the same with Yusuf.

There were scarcely any farewells uttered when he dropped them off at their flat, so as not to wake the sleeping children. In settling Aziz and Yusuf into the double bed they shared with their parents, Fang Wu even saw the chaos of Azlan’s room in its full glory. There was no hiding anything from him now.

And yet, when he turned and waved to them from outside their front gate, Atiqah felt that thus far, this was the closest thing to amity that she had experienced from him. At least, it was the first time he graced her with an expression that might in any way approximate a smile.

Part VI – 浪子回头 (The Return of the Prodigal)

VI.i – Xiaoming

East Coast Park was familiar territory to Xiaoming. Since childhood, he came here on at least a weekly basis. Yet tonight was not like other nights. Xiaoming tugged at the collar of his button-down Oxford shirt, trying his hardest not to sweat as he strolled down the footpath.

He’d asked Xixi to meet him at the Bedok Jetty. The 15 km (9 mile) long beachfront recreational area that lay just across the expressway in front of his block of flats wasn’t usually busy on weekdays, except during school holidays. But so long as they stayed away from the playground, food centre, and skate park, they could be certain of their relative privacy.

Bedok Jetty lay slightly beyond the parts of the park that were frequented by families. During the day, it was a haven for fishing. At sundown after work, with the sea breeze sweeping in to take away the stuffiness, it was an oasis of peace and serenity against the bustle of the city.

At least, it was as peaceful as any place could get within a bustling urban city-state. The East Coast Parkway, one of Singapore’s major expressways, was less than a kilometre away.

Xiaoming felt that he was coming of age, and this was his time to act upon it.

All along, he’d been waiting for the year of his thirtieth birthday to tie the knot with Xixi. If pressed, he wouldn’t be able to explain why he thought that was the right age to marry, but like all his decisions in life before this, he stuck to the choices that felt safe. And nobody could fault him for being too young and incautious if he spent his twenties in a steady relationship that culminated in marriage at thirty.

Now, though, he had reason to speak even though the momentous birthday was still several months away. He had been selected for a three-year overseas posting in Chengdu, Sichuan, with the statutory board where he worked. If he accepted the appointment, he would need to relocate, and he wanted Xixi to go with him.

He’d told his parents of his plans – after all, they needed to consult a geomancer to find auspicious wedding banquet and solemnization dates. He’d also roped Lele in and allowed her to tell Fang Wu. They were the ones who would be capturing this moment for posterity.

In short, everyone closest to the couple knew, except for the recipient of his proposal. Xiaoming didn’t know how to be romantic, not that Xixi seemed to mind. One of the things that he liked best about her was her preference for security over romance.

But Xiaoming had been privy to enough proposals from his friends and colleagues to feel the obligation to create some element of drama and surprise. It seemed that the ladies appreciated this, although it only put more pressure on Xiaoming.

He knew that Xixi would realize this wasn’t just any other day. Usually, they met on the weekends and rarely saw each other after work. But since this was a workday, she wouldn’t need foreknowledge of the occasion to be all dressed up in a skirt and heels. In fact, to Xiaoming’s mind, she always dressed up when they went out together. She never went more than five metres away from her front door without makeup.

Today, Xiaoming thought, Xixi looked prettier than ever. With the breeze ruffling her hair ever so slightly, against the backdrop of the sea he looked upon every day from his window, he could only think of one thing – that with Xixi, he would always be at home.

Yes, there was Xiaoming’s posting as an overseas Centre Director, which would take them away for three years if that was the path that he – or rather, they – might choose. They might even choose to extend their stay for more terms and be away for six years, even nine.

But at the end of that road, there was no doubt that they would eventually return to the seafront flat that Xiaoming had always called home, with this view greeting them every morning and evening. This was where they belonged.

~~~⚽~~~

VI.ii – Xixi

Xiaoming never asked her to come to the beach on a weekday. Without the need for any further hints, Xixi knew that this day was special.

At twenty-seven, Xixi wasn’t the first of her uni cohort to be proposed to, though she knew she also wouldn’t be the last. Among her current colleagues and former uni classmates, there were ladies who liked to one-up each other on how over-the-top their boyfriends’ romantic gestures could be. She’d heard of bombastic proposals proclaimed from the swankiest spots in town, such as the rooftop of Marina Bay Sands.

To Xixi, this was much more intimate and personal. East Coast Park was Xiaoming’s happy place; it had literally been a witness to him growing up. Through the nearly seven years they’d been dating, Xixi and Xiaoming had spent many private moments here after dinner with his parents. They didn’t walk as far as Bedok Jetty very often, but they cycled here – and beyond – on occasional Sunday or holiday afternoons when they wanted to get away from it all.

This was no cycling trip, and Xixi was aware of it. She’d taken the Thomson-East Coast Line train from her office and crossed the East Coast Parkway via underpass, making slow but careful progress in order not to mess up her work attire.

Seeing Xiaoming dressed in his best office wear confirmed Xixi’s suspicions of the nature of this meeting. Yet it still surprised her that at the end of the jetty, he went on bended knee.

“Zheng Xinxi – Xixi – will you marry me?” he asked.

As Xixi had always expected, Xiaoming’s proposal would be simple and straightforward. Nobody would ever credit him for his imagination, but Xixi was overjoyed to see that she’d overrated his pragmatism. She’d anticipated that he might propose over a meal at the food court, and this was much better than that.

“Xiaoming,” she said, stretching her arms out to help him to his feet, “of course the answer is yes.” Glowing with joy, she wrapped him up in a tearful hug.

~~~⚽~~~

Vi.iii – Lele

Lele hit the “stop” button on her smartphone camera with a satisfied grin. When it came to her turn, she would love to have a big party with a professional camera crew. But for the painfully shy Xiaoming, she could only feel relieved that he had the sense to ask someone to record this special moment.

She’d dragged Fang Wu along with her to carry the proposal balloons, which spelled “Marry Me”. He’d wrangled the pink foil letters into a bunched-up bed sheet for concealment and wrestled with them to keep them from floating away.

Surely, he was the most fidgety wingman she’d ever seen, Lele thought. As a former professional athlete, he ought to be strong enough to manage a bunch of helium balloons without quite so much wrangling.

With the moment on bended knee caught and captured, Fang Wu was able to release his burden, handing the strung-together letters to Xiaoming.

“Wow,” Xixi gasped. “But now, everyone will know.”

Lele would prefer to believe that her sister cast her eyes down in mock embarrassment. But reserved as Xixi and Xiaoming could be, Lele knew very well that most likely, their bashfulness was real. Which meant that Xiaoming had gone way out of his comfort zone to make this occasion memorable for Xixi.

They captured a few more shots with Xiaoming presenting the balloons to Xixi, and the happy couple sealing it with a kiss.

Lele always kept her smartphone model up to date, which was great for such occasions when she needed a camera with good low-light performance. But she knew her hand-held shots would look amateurish in the wedding video up against the professionally taken same-day footage.

Not that Xixi and Xiaoming would mind – they were intensely private, almost as intensely frugal, and she respected their wish for her (and her other half) to be the only live witnesses to this special moment, simply because she was the person closest to Xixi.

“Do you not want people to see it?” Xiaoming asked. “I thought all ladies want dramatic proposals.”

“傻瓜 (Silly),” said Xixi affectionately, mussing Xiaoming’s hair, “everything you do for me is special.” She wound the string of the balloons around her wrist and let them flutter proudly behind her in the wind.

Their usual lack of demonstrativeness belied the obvious affection in Xixi’s and Xiaoming’s eyes. Lele could scarcely bear to watch, knowing that she had yet to inspire a similar gaze from Fang Wu. Even now, as she cast him a meaningful glance, all she saw was that he was looking away.

~~~⚽~~~

Vi.iv – Xiaoming

For dinner, Xiaoming had booked alfresco dining at the nearby Jumbo Seafood Restaurant, one of Singapore’s most popular chili crab chains. A whole crab would do very nicely for four people.

Tying the balloon string securely to his chair, Xiaoming let the words billow behind him. He had been brought up to believe that keeping his head down and getting the right answers was more important than being noticed, but now that Xixi was his for life, he didn’t mind proclaiming it from the rooftops.

Perhaps, being selected for an overseas posting gave him new confidence – or maybe it was love that made him bold.

Xiaoming was not at all in the habit of ordering wine, but it felt appropriate to get a bottle of Australian white wine to toast the occasion. After all, he and Xixi had more than one thing to celebrate.

“There’s one more thing I wanted to tell you,” Xiaoming announced, “I’ve been offered a post as the Centre Director in Chengdu.”

“太好了! (That’s terrific!)” squealed Xixi. “And so, you asked so I could move there with you!”

“Not just that,” Xiaoming countered. “I would have asked you anyway, because I’m turning thirty and I wouldn’t want to wait. But now I will get COLA (Cost of Living Allowance), which means we can afford a better place.”

Even though he was sure of Xixi’s loyalty to him, Xiaoming couldn’t help feeling insecure that his family wasn’t as wealthy as hers. As career civil servants, his parents had earned a decent and stable income but lived plainly and frugally. For example, they hadn’t renovated their flat in decades.

On the other hand, the Zhengs were a well-to-do business family, willing and able to afford all the extras. While Xiaoming knew Xixi didn’t thumb up her nose at public housing – a five-room HDB flat was decently middle-class in Singapore, and she was currently living in one too – he couldn’t help feeling that his ageing flat might seem inadequate to her parents and possibly her relatives.

Yet Xiaoming couldn’t bring himself to exchange the only home he knew for something newer. There were so many things about his parents’ flat that couldn’t be replaced or replicated: its prime location, the sea view that he loved, and the fact that his parents would never leave it. He knew that if Xixi loved him as much as he thought she did, she would take him as he was, flat and all. And she had.

Still, Xiaoming couldn’t deny that living overseas on expat terms for a few years would raise his status with her family. It meant he could come back with a handsome promotion into line management too, which would also be advantageous for his income and reputation.

“Congratulations!” As Xiaoming might have guessed, Fang Wu was the first to approve. While Xiaoming wouldn’t admit it, the appearance of Fang Wu in his life caused him a lot of stress. Nothing was more important to that dude than independence, which was the key aspect where Xiaoming couldn’t help feeling that he came up short. He was relieved that Xixi would have no reason to compare him with Fang Wu anymore.

“Xixi, are you excited to be closer to your parents?” Fang Wu continued. It hadn’t escaped Xiaoming that not having parents might have been a catalyst to Fang Wu’s accelerated independence. With this revelation that Fang Wu treasured family nonetheless, Xiaoming felt less judged than before.

“A two-hour flight isn’t exactly close,” replied Xixi, fiddling with her piece of crab. “I’ve never been in a new place away from my parents, Lele, and my friends. The first year of uni doesn’t count since I was in a hostel and made friends very quickly. But Xiaoming, since you will be with me, I won’t be scared.”

“Same here.” Xiaoming smiled a little shamefacedly. He wouldn’t confess aloud that he’d never lived anywhere but his parents’ flat for nearly thirty years. Even while attending the National University of Singapore, he’d stayed at home instead of at the hostels. “I’m actually more nervous about speaking Chinese all the time than about moving out on our own.”

“How can a Dunman High boy be worried about speaking Chinese?” teased Xixi.

Xiaoming had attended Tao Nan School and Dunman High, the most prestigious primary and secondary Special Assistance Plan (SAP) schools in the eastern part of the island. He’d studied Higher Chinese from Primary 1 to the ‘A’ Levels, but that still wasn’t enough to make him comfortable with conversing in Mandarin, when everything in Singapore was done in English.

“I think you know,” Xiaoming bantered back. “Haven’t we all seen Dunman High students on the MRT?” Like most people living in the eastern part of Singapore, he regularly encountered students in Dunman High uniforms conversing in English while commuting on public transportation. He’d been one of them once. “But with your help, I’m sure I can learn over time.”

“Xiaoming, how do you think Uncle and Aunty will take it?” asked Xixi a little nervously. It surprised Xiaoming that Xixi would worry more about his parents’ reactions than he did. Had he given her the impression that he was so dependent on them? And if he had, did it scare her?

“I think they’ll enjoy coming to visit,” he said, trying to sound confident. He’d done his research, and they would be able to stay in China visa-free for 30 days at a time. “We can take them to see the pandas.”

The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding was one of the major local attractions that gave the city its fame, with the surrounding forest being one of the best panda habitats. It was the home of the giant pandas that came to the Singapore Zoo on loans, and where the first panda cub born in Singapore had gone back to.

They continued talking deep into the night, discussing their future and the upcoming move. Xiaoming regaled the rest with stories about the collective excitement in Singapore at the birth of the first panda cub, a boy named Le Le 叻叻 (not to be confused with Xixi’s sister Lele 乐乐) in 2021.

Xiaoming was surprised to find Lele uncharacteristically silent. She’d badgered him incessantly about getting a flat for the past two years, so he knew she was supportive of him as a partner for her sister. Perhaps Lele might feel left out with him and Xixi moving away and leaving her behind, but he scarcely expected her to feel upset when it meant that she would have the whole flat to herself and Fang Wu.

But at twenty-five, Lele was an adult. There wasn’t much Xiaoming could do on her account. Besides, there were other concerns at the top of his mind.

After they finished dinner, Xiaoming called a Grab to pick Xixi up and send her home. Graciously, Lele and Fang Wu offered to take public transportation so that he could accompany Xixi in the car and bring the balloons. Xiaoming was grateful for the much-needed privacy.

“Xixi, do you think I am a late bloomer?” he asked. “I mean, normally CDs (Centre Directors) are appointed after three years of work, but it took me four years to get my Centre Directorship.”

“Oh, Xiaoming.” Xixi laid her head on his shoulder and stretched an arm across him. “Even if you never became a Centre Director, I’d love you anyway. No matter whether you get your promotion early or late, I’ll always be proud of you.” She gave him a blissful hug.

In the dark, Xiaoming’s face lit up, knowing that he had chosen the person who accepted him for who he was.

He wouldn’t fool himself into thinking he was a high-flyer, when many people got promoted faster than him. But he wasn’t doing too badly either – not everybody at his statutory board became Centre Directors, so it was better late than never. He was hardworking, meticulous and reliable, traits which paid off in the end.

Best of all, Xixi treasured him for it. Xiaoming would never call himself the luckiest man in the world (the way Fang Wu sometimes did), but he was happy to simply be lucky enough.

~~~⚽~~~

Vi.v – Lele

The travel plans that sprung up after Xixi and Xiaoming’s engagement put Lele into an even more desperate mood than before.

Of course, Xiaoming would join Xixi and Lele’s annual Lunar New Year visit to their parents in two months’ time. For the past six years, Xixi and Xiaoming had spent a fortnight in Changsha every summer, while passing the Lunar New Year with their respective families. That was the practical choice when in China the New Year holidays spanned a whole week, whereas people got only two days off in Singapore. Furthermore, travel fares were highly inflated during the Golden Week.

When Lele joined Xixi and Xiaoming’s summer trips home, she had already felt like a hanger-on even before their formal engagement. Her parents were too good; no matter how much they showered Xixi and Xiaoming with their approbation, they never openly criticised Lele for her singlehood. Yet, with every inch of praise her parents bestowed on Xiaoming, Lele felt the subtle pressure anyway.

Tagging on to the engaged Xixi and Xiaoming, with all the added baggage that the Lunar New Year brought, would be infinitely worse. The elder generation dispensed 红包 hongbao , or red packets enclosing cash gifts, to unmarried members of the younger generation. This customary practice was believed to bring luck.

Xixi and Xiaoming were almost certain to marry before Xiaoming embarked on his posting in Chengdu, so this would be the final New Year that they would be receiving hongbao instead of giving them. Lele knew that all the relatives they visited would point out this fact ad nauseum , even though she least wanted to be reminded of it.

The prospect of being stuck as the only hongbao recipient left in the family felt to Lele like a damning proclamation of her arrested development. All her life, she only wanted to catch up to her elder sister. She’d always rebelled against being a child or getting treated like one.

Yet Lele also knew that in Chinese families, marriage couldn’t be rushed. Wedding banquet venues were often oversubscribed, necessitating reservations twelve to eighteen months in advance. The waiting lists for new construction public housing flats in Singapore could be twice as long as that.

Even after the two to three years it took for dating to progress to engagement, the road from engagement to marriage was a long slog for those who didn’t buck tradition to short-circuit it.

For example, Xixi and Xiaoming would need to compromise on the wedding banquet to be married before his posting. Most likely, they would host a small dinner or a lunch instead of a standard banquet dinner with hundreds of guests.

But then, both their sets of parents were relatively easy-going. A more traditional family would force them to host the customary dinner banquet eventually, even if they’d lived as a married couple for months by the time it took place.

No matter what formalities Xixi and Xiaoming might still be awaiting at the time of their move to Chengdu, Lele was fully aware that she had no hope of catching up to them.

As far as her relationship with Fang Wu was concerned, Lele was barely at step one. And there wasn’t much she could do to accelerate their progress when the burden of courtship lay at least as much in the hands of the gentleman as the lady.

The only thing Lele could aim for was to have Fang Wu join her for the visit to Changsha, so that she could show her parents that she was doing something to address her single status.

That he would not, was something that Lele never anticipated. Thus far, hadn’t he always done her bidding?

~~~⚽~~~

Vi.vi – Fang Wu

All this chatter about travel to Changsha was grating on Fang Wu’s nerves.

In the few days since Xiaoming’s proposal, Xixi and Lele had scoured the Scoot website almost hourly in anticipation of booking the cheapest air fares.

For the sake of courtesy, he resisted telling them that airline tickets were never cheap in the Lunar New Year peak season, and that they ought to just book whatever was available and be done with it.

“We don’t need a row of three,” Lele called to Xiaoming. “Two pairs of two seats should be possible, right?”

“Two pairs of two? Why would you need four seats?”

Fang Wu disliked having the need to say out loud that he wouldn’t be joining them because it sounded rude. In fact, it shocked him that they assumed he would be part of the travelling party.

When it came to be rationally considered , Fang Wu didn’t have more off days than anybody else working in Singapore. Furthermore, his sister, who was retired and had all the off days in the world, would be coming to visit him. Who in their right mind could possibly think it reasonable for him to join them on this visit when he was only tangentially related (if at all) to the newly engaged couple?

“Xiaowu, you’re coming along, right? I thought you knew that!” Lele shot back.

Well, he hadn’t. While Fang Wu had to admit that he had not seriously thought on this subject before , he honestly didn’t suppose that he and Lele were established enough as a couple that a Lunar New Year visit to the parents would be customary.

“That was what I was searching for,” replied Xiaoming. “But I can only find one pair of available seats together, can you and Fang Wu sit separately?”

This was getting even more ridiculous – did Xixi and Xiaoming also consider his relationship with Lele to be that serious? Fang Wu could admit that he hadn’t protested when Lele had proclaimed him her boyfriend. But they’d only known each other for three months. How could any impartial third party ever deem them to be in meet-the-parents territory?

Besides, it didn’t escape Fang Wu that if he spent the Lunar New Year with Lele and her parents, everyone would consider them engaged. A Lunar New Year visit was much more loaded than a meet-the-parents trip at other times of the year. It meant he would be introduced to all Lele’s relatives as an honorary member of her family. Naturally, it would raise eyebrows if they didn’t follow through with a wedding within a year after doing that.

“I can’t go,” he pointed out. “I won’t be able to take that amount of time off during the school term.”

“Why not? Isn’t that what relief teachers are for?” argued Lele.

“How can I be considered reliable if I took time off like that in my first year? Besides, my sister has already made arrangements to visit me over here,” Fang Wu countered.

“But you said your sister’s plans could change anytime! So, you could just tell her to go to Changsha instead of Singapore,” ordered Lele. “You’re from Hunan, aren’t you? Don’t you have family there to visit?”

“We don’t. My brother is in the rural area. And I already promised to visit him for the Winter Solstice.”

This last statement was untrue unless Fang Wu took actions to give it veracity. His sister-in-law had been expecting a child when he last visited in the summer, so he did owe Fang Wen and his wife another visit before too long. But he’d initially planned for it to happen in either the March or June school holidays, not in December. He had barely settled in, so he had not intended to travel again so soon.

“You can tell your brother to come to Changsha,” insisted Lele. Had he reasoned and talked in vain ? If Fang Wu had ever believed that he admired Lele’s resolution of character, he hadn’t imagined that it would go to the extent of not being able to take ‘no’ for an answer.

“Yes, with a baby not even six months old,” remarked Fang Wu. He hated himself for resorting to sarcasm, but he couldn’t conceal his irritation anymore. “I’m sorry. I can’t go with you.”

“Xiaowu, come here.” Lele stood up and with a swish of her long hair, she strode to the door and pushed it open. The set of her jaw showed that she would bear no opposition.

Despite the many positions of authority he had held over the years (and still did), Fang Wu had never needed to be as stern as Lele was now to be obeyed.

He had met his match, or perhaps even his master, in obstinacy.

Lele grabbed his hand and led him downstairs, crossing the street to Tampines Central Park. Out there in the open, where Xixi and Xiaoming couldn’t hear them, she lit right into him.

“如果你不去，我也不去, (If you’re not going, I won’t go either,)” she threatened. “明白吗？ ([Do you] understand?)”

“这是你们之间的事, 干嘛要把我扯进去? (This is between you [and your family], why must you drag me into it?)” Fang Wu retorted.

“就因为是我的事，我偏要你管！ (Because this concerns me, I insist you must care [about it]!) 你要我收红包,收到几时？(For how long do you wish me to continue receiving red packets?)” Lele stamped her foot in frustration.

“我们才认识三个月, (We’ve only known each other for three months,)” parried Fang Wu, “谈这些不是太早了吧！ (Isn’t it too early to talk about this!)”

The moment after the words flew out of his mouth, Fang Wu felt his own hypocrisy recoil upon him like the stroke of a whip. There had once been a time when three months hadn’t been too soon for him to make up his mind. The only difference was that now, he’d made up his mind in the opposite direction.

“我们年纪已经不小了，还浪费时间干什么? (We’re not young anymore, why are we still wasting time?)” Lele demanded.

Switching to English, she continued, “Let me teach you a phrase in Singlish: ‘Ai’ means ‘want’, and ‘mai’ means ‘do you’. So, when you say, ‘Ai stead mai’, it means, ‘do you want to go steady with me’?”

She shot him a meaningful look, as if daring him to speak.

“你在问我吗？ (Are you asking me [this]?)” Fang Wu knew he was playing dumb, that he was being deliberately and irritatingly stubborn. But if that was how Lele wanted it, two could play at that game.

“难道你不想开口？(Don’t tell me you don’t wish to say [it]?)” Lele challenged him back.

“对不起。([I’m] sorry.)” How had this whole thing left Fang Wu feeling like a cad? He knew what Lele wanted to hear.

The problem was, he couldn’t bring himself to say it.

Yes, Fang Wu had been unguarded in approaching Lele, but he truly didn’t consider himself involved to the point of being no longer at his own disposal . Still, so long as Lele believed so, he had let her down.

“你就这样一走了之？ (You’re just going to go off like that?)” accused Lele. “既然这样，你就给我滚！ (Since [the situation is] like that, just go away!)”

Fang Wu felt cornered, regardless of whether this pickle was entirely of his own making. He wished he could say with a clear conscience that it was not, but even while resenting Lele’s obdurate behaviour, he knew that his moment of plausible denial had passed.

He should never have allowed Lele to continue addressing him by a pet name after he became conscious that things could go no farther between them. But when had he started feeling that way? He could not pinpoint the exact moment, yet this was undeniably how he felt now, and he couldn’t reverse it.

That she had entrapped him by referring to him as her boyfriend without his express consent was no reason for him not to have spoken out earlier. After all, couldn’t his silence be construed as tacit consent?

“非常抱歉，我不能成全你。([I’m] extremely sorry, I can’t do as you wish.)” With true penitence, Fang Wu hung his head. If he thought he had known indignity and humiliation before, it paled against the shame that now engulfed him.

All his life, Fang Wu had never done anything that rendered him unequal to looking others in the eye. But if he believed himself to be honourable to a fault, how had he ended up stooping to this level of passive-aggressiveness?

“我们就到此为止，(We’re over,)” declared Lele. “从此以后，一刀两断！ (From now on, [let’s] have a clean break!)”

Twice in his life, Fang Wu had dated someone seriously. Both times, he’d been dumped. Painfully, it dawned on him that when Atiqah had broken off with him, she had been the one to apologise, whereas Lele now expected him to apologise to her.

And he had apologised, repeatedly in fact, but it wasn’t enough to assuage either her anger or his conscience.

Lele stalked off before he did, holding her head high and steadfastly avoiding any eye contact. Clearly, she saw herself as the party with the moral advantage.

Fang Wu knew the only path for reconciliation with Lele would be to determine himself hers in honour if she wished it . However, he saw no virtue in continuing this deception. Perhaps it might have commenced unwittingly, but it would most certainly be wilful if he now chose to perpetuate it.

By letting things end here, he would be kinder to Lele than to himself, Fang Wu felt. He’d tried to pursue a relationship where he had best calculated the certainty of acceptance, only to find in hindsight that it had stroked his ego but hadn’t touched his heart.

She would move on; she would find somebody for whom the proclamations of love would not be a lie. He, on the other hand, had gambled twice in love and lost, with no guarantee of being third time lucky.

He barely knew where he wandered to before meandering back to his flat. Once he got home, he wasted no time in booking air tickets to visit his brother.

At such short notice, the nonstop flights on Scoot were fully booked. Fang Wu ended up with a circuitous flight itinerary via Kunming, leaving at 2:30 AM followed by nearly nine hours of travel time including the layover. After arriving at Changsha, he would need to take a long-distance bus into the countryside, making it at least a full day before he could reach his brother’s home.

The journey would be gruelling, but the physical punishment was roundly deserved. From the period when he realised how horribly he’d misled Lele and deceived himself, his emotional penance had become severe . No amount of corporeal suffering could compare to it.

Lele further proved Fang Wu’s unworthiness by showing up at his door the next morning, her swollen eyes belying her outward composure.

“昨天我太冲动了， (Yesterday, I was too impulsive,)” she admitted. Had he been in her place, Fang Wu thought, he would have tacked on an apology to that statement. But it wasn’t out of character for Lele to be too proud to say she was sorry for anything. Three months was enough to give Fang Wu some understanding of her personality, no matter what he had professed.

“那你会去吗？ (In that case, will you go?)” If Lele could temper down the ill feeling of the previous day, Fang Wu would respond in kind. To let go of anger sat much easier with Fang Wu’s conscience than holding onto it. How was it that only in hindsight he realised this too?

Resolutely, Lele shook her head. For a moment, Fang Wu felt guilty that he was driving her to snub her parents at the most important festive season for the year. Yet guilt wasn’t a good enough reason for him to humour her against his true inclination.

“子欲养而亲不在的感觉，我体验过。 (I know what it’s like to be too late to give my parents the support I would have wished to provide,)” he remarked, as gently as he could. “我劝你，还是去吧。 (I would advise you to go.)”

“我的事，你管不着。(My affairs are none of your business.)” In Lele’s voice, the rancour of the previous day was replaced by sheer resignation. “我祝你一路顺风。 (I wish you a safe journey.)”

When Fang Wu hadn’t told Lele that he would be flying off the very next day, he could only conclude that Lele was implying that she didn’t want to see him again. That she wouldn’t be communicating with him between now and the Winter Solstice, and most likely beyond.

“那么，(Then,)” he replied, “我祝福你。 (I wish you the best of luck.)”

With the barest of nods, Lele turned and walked away, leaving Fang Wu to close the door. The click of the lock underscored the finality of this conclusion to their relationship.

Left alone to his thoughts, Fang Wu gave in fully to his feelings of horror and remorse at the collateral damage he’d created.

If his unwillingness to commit to Lele had the power to make her cry, her feelings for him could not be as trifling as his turned out to be for her. He’d thought he was moving on, that he could settle for an uneventful relationship with any woman who matched him in cultural background and social standing, provided that her character was compatible enough with his.

“ A strong mind, with sweetness of manner ,” had made the first and the last of his mental description .

Lele hadn’t missed the mark on those standards – well, perhaps she fell short of the second condition now, after insisting on having her way despite his advice. Her petulance and stubbornness when he declined her request to travel to Changsha with her was the last straw to convince Fang Wu that they wouldn’t be happy together in the long run.

Worst of all, Fang Wu had figured this out only yesterday.

Prior to that, he had been forcing himself to believe that Lele was the most suitable woman within his reach, on the sole basis that she’d been born in the same province as him. Very ironically, they’d ended up quarrelling over the Confucian values that had been drummed into them from childhood, and they’d broken up using the shared language that should have drawn them together.

By forging ahead purely based on the surface attribute of race, despite his insufficient understanding of Lele’s personality, Fang Wu had been settling. He’d even been subconsciously aware that he was doing so, while completely oblivious to how he might have engaged Lele’s feelings and how deeply disappointed she must be now.

Another man, someone who regarded romantic relationships with less seriousness, might absolve himself of blame in a way that Fang Wu could not.

Mutually deciding not to proceed with someone you met through an app after a couple of dinner dates was one thing. Discovering you were fundamentally incompatible with someone after getting enmeshed into their daily life, perhaps even after getting them emotionally attached, was another. That was something Fang Wu might have learned earlier, if he hadn’t spent the past eight years with his career as a cover for his lack of focus in seeking a life partner.

A small part of Fang Wu wished that he could undo it all, that he could overlook the areas where he and Lele didn’t see eye to eye. She was six years younger than he and accustomed to being indulged with all her wishes. Therefore, he shouldn’t be surprised or repulsed by her decision to forgo paying her parents a Lunar New Year visit for purely self-centred reasons.

Unlike him, she had no experience yet of what she might regret in not taking every opportunity to bond with her family. He couldn’t expect her to value the same things he did, when she hadn’t been through enough disappointments in life to fully appreciate the good fortune and privilege she currently had.

Yet, a bigger part of Fang Wu stood firm; the easy road wouldn’t be the right one. Even if he could patch things up with Lele for now by caving in, in the long run it wouldn’t change that their values and priorities were misaligned.

A tiny voice whispered in his ear that someone right in front of him exemplified the precept of filial piety perfectly. So much so, in fact, that he should have no doubt as to why Lele would always come up short in his mind.

If he hadn’t witnessed the equanimity with which Atiqah handled the responsibility of looking after her father, even to the sacrifice of her promising future in football, would Fang Wu be as critical of Lele’s self-centredness and lack of filial piety at present?

Till the previous day, till the leisure for reflection which followed it , he had not understood the perfect excellence of Atiqah’s inner strength, with which Lele’s youthful wilfulness could so ill bear a comparison .

Till he experienced the burning shame of becoming the instrument of someone’s misery, he hadn’t been able to give his younger self – and Atiqah’s – the grace they merited for their honest intentions, despite the unfortunate result.

Till he compared his memories of being dumped by Atiqah with his current feelings after being dumped by Lele, he didn’t realise that he had imagined himself indifferent, when he had only been angry . But then, he hadn’t experienced true indifference until now.

The strongest lesson that Fang Wu’s fallout with Lele imprinted on him was the distinction between love and ego. He should have felt no shame in admitting to a broken heart, when it was far more disgraceful to selfishly, if not quite wilfully, break someone else’s.

---

Notes:
- Charles Hayter received an offer to hold a living for a young boy who was to inherit it when he grew up, 25 miles away from Uppercross in an area of Dorsetshire with good game. Chengdu is about four and a half hours from Singapore (Xiaoming's parents = Winthrop) and about 2 hours from Changsha (Xixi's parents = Uppercross), so it's within the ballpark of the 4-hour travelling time that 25 miles would have taken in the Regency era. Plus, its surrounding forests have pandas (hence, wildlife)!
- Like in canon, FW didn't end up getting entangled in an expectation of being engaged with Lele through any single grand gesture, but rather because he got increasingly embroiled in Lele's life like a frog cooking in a boiling pot. The last straw for him was becoming Xiaoming's wingman at his proposal and celebrating the engagement with a double date, which led to the expectation of the two couples travelling to Changsha to celebrate with the parents.

Layovers were sheer torture, worse than any of the eighteen levels of hell. When the Chinese Super League hadn’t deemed its players precious enough to be above flying commercially, Fang Wu knew he was throwing a toddler tantrum to think this way.

No, he might not be a snob or a diva (not yet, anyway). But when his mind was now trained to associate long flights with breakups, it ought not to be surprising that he was an even worse flyer than a two-year-old.

He still remembered his passage from Barcelona to Kunming eight years ago with videographic clarity. El Prat Airport was a shopping paradise on the inside, but all of it had passed him by in a blur. It had been a miracle that he’d even been able to find his gate when all he’d been able to think of was the sound of Atiqah’s voice, telling him that she didn’t love him, ringing in his ears.

In his funk, Fang Wu had missed the boarding announcements in Spanish and English. It had taken a desperate flight attendant, running out of the plane to hurriedly make an impromptu boarding call for him in Mandarin, to make him realise that the plane was about to leave without him.

“这是寻人广播，深圳航空 ZH866航班 – ZH866 – 即将就要起飞，请方武先生 – 方武先生 – 立即前往D13 号登机口 – D13 号 – 登机！ (This is a paging announcement, Shenzhen Airlines flight ZH 866 – ZH 866 – is about to take off. Can Mr. Fang Wu – Mr. Fang Wu – please come to gate D13 – gate D13 – for immediate boarding!)”

Somehow the sound of his own name had jolted him out of his thoughts sufficiently for Fang Wu to grab his backpack and shuffle to the aerobridge. The exasperated sighs of the ground staff upon seeing that he had been sitting right there in the gate hold area while they’d been anxiously paging him only added to his humiliation and indignity.

They probably thought he’d missed the earlier boarding calls not because he’d been distracted by the airport shopping, but because he didn’t understand English! Pettily, he’d chosen to dwell on the cabin crew speaking to him in Mandarin throughout the 13-hour flight as further evidence that they doubted his literacy in English, rather than the more likely explanation that they used Mandarin with everyone who looked Chinese.

Nothing on that flight had gone right. He’d clean forgotten that he was the one who’d volunteered to take economy class to save his club some money and instead resented the narrowness of his window seat on the Airbus A330. Coffee had tasted like drain water when served in paper cups, and none of the inflight meals had been flavourful enough to qualify as real food. There had been no films worth watching on the inflight entertainment.

For the half a day it had taken to transport him from Barcelona to Shenzhen, Fang Wu had turned into a grouchy, prickly monster.

Landing at Shenzhen Bao’an Airport hadn’t made things any better. Xia Jian had come with his newlywed wife all the way from Guangzhou, a 90-minute drive away, leaving at the crack of dawn to pick him up. He should have appreciated their kindness, but instead their curious and enthusiastic enquiries about the scenery and culture of Barcelona had felt more like being given the third degree.

And the belated wedding gift in his pocket had seemed to weigh as much as a brick. He’d missed Xia Jian’s wedding banquet that summer because his time was not his own. In fact, Fang Wu’s overnight stay in Guangzhou enroute to Kunming (the capital of Yunnan province where his new club was situated), with the newlyweds putting him up at their flat, had been the only chance he’d had to meet the Xias after switching clubs at the beginning of that year.

Less than forty-eight hours prior, Fang Wu had slipped 1,888 yuan (US$260) into a golden envelope. The special red packet, designed for weddings, bore the Chinese character 囍 with the double ‘xi’ to denote conjugal bliss, and a cartoon pop-up picture of a wedding couple in Chinese traditional dress. At the time, he’d looked upon the envelope with a smile, imagining how in a few years he might be throwing a banquet with his family and friends giving him envelopes like this.

With the tables turned upon him in a matter of hours, the red packet had felt as if it practically burned a hole in his pocket. He’d divested himself of it the instant he was settled in the back seat of Xia Jian’s car, with no recollection of how brusquely he might have handed it over to his friend.

None of this behaviour had been anything to be proud of. In fact, after Fang Wu had regained his senses, he’d made it a point to apologise to Xia Jian and Mrs. Xia before they saw him off at Guangzhou Baiyun Airport the next morning to catch his onward connection. To this day, he wondered if Xia Jian suspected that anything had been amiss with him beyond the jet lag that he’d claimed as an excuse for his boorishness.

There was something about Kunming and breakups that kept him in a time loop like Groundhog Day, Fang Wu decided. Eight and a half years later, here he was at Singapore Changi Airport at an unearthly hour past midnight, waiting to board his China Eastern Airlines flight headed there, not two days after he’d been dumped again.

Worse still, even though she wasn’t the one who dumped him this time, Nur Atiqah binti Eusoff was still firmly on his mind.

If atonement had a physical manifestation, spending four and a half hours in economy class at 2 AM on a Boeing 737 had to be it. There was no chance Fang Wu would get any sleep that night and no inflight entertainment on the plane, so thoughts of how he’d ruined everything – not just with Lele, but with Atiqah all over again – flitted constantly through his head.

Flying thirty thousand feet above somewhere in Thailand, Fang Wu had nothing to do but wish that he had earlier learnt to distinguish between the steadiness of principle and the obstinacy of self-will, between the daring of heedlessness and the resolution of a collected mind .

He was aghast at how grotesquely he had misinterpreted Atiqah’s situation. All these years, he’d wondered why he’d never seen her name on the starting XI at AFC (Asian Football Confederation) Women’s Asian Cup or SEA (South East Asia) Games matches.

All along, he had assumed that she had lacked the staying power to follow through with football, just as she had failed to follow through with his offer of love. If he hadn’t become privy to her family’s situation, he would never have realised how wrong he’d been.

After seeing Atiqah again, Fang Wu couldn’t delude himself any longer that she had ever treated his love for her as a game. She still dressed as modestly as before, perhaps even more so now that she wore the tudung whenever she went outside her immediate neighbourhood. Therefore, it was preposterous to think her in any way capable of playing with the feelings of a man.

He’d hung onto her words that she didn’t love him, to the extent of overlooking the words that had followed – that she couldn’t love him. Within the constraints of Islam, she hadn’t been at liberty to do so, much less say so. At only 19 years old and having never dated before, hanging all her hopes on a man who might convert to Islam years into the future must have terrified Atiqah.

That could only mean that he had been unjust to her merits, because he had been a sufferer from them . It must have taken a lot of courage for Atiqah to say out loud that she wished to wait for him when such a desire was so taboo, even if she had later retracted her promise. Being the one who held the option to convert, Fang Wu had held all the cards to their future, whereas Atiqah had hardly any choice at all – not then, and not now either.

Her character was now fixed on his mind as perfection itself, maintaining the loveliest medium of fortitude and gentleness . How could he ever have thought otherwise? She’d had him when she requested him not to bring her to expensive restaurants because she didn’t own the attire to do those places justice. When all the other young women he’d asked out previously would have jumped at the chance for him to splurge on posh dates, it was refreshing to find someone who cared more about those around her than herself, even at such a young age.

And what had sealed the deal for Fang Wu, not only then but thereafter, was what Atiqah had said to him when he invited her to go wakeboarding in Barcelona. She’d declined his offer to teach her how to ride for a very good reason: for people whose careers hinged on not getting injured, tempting fate through extreme sports in their leisure time felt like an unnecessary risk.

Atiqah’s advice had been why he’d toned down his tricks that day, staying on the flat rather than showing off on the obstacles like he always had before. And after that final outing, he’d never gotten on a wakeboard since.

Everybody Fang Wu knew had been impressed with his wakeboarding. His brother-in-law, who’d taught him to ride when he was fifteen, sometimes lamented that he’d chosen the wrong career. Despite her unwillingness for herself or for him to take the risks, the tricks he’d showed her had brought an admiring smile to Atiqah’s face and elicited her sincere applause, even though what he’d exhibited that day was only a fraction of his skill.

To give up his one indulgence, the only source of thrill that he’d looked forward to off the pitch, had been a sacrifice indeed. But Fang Wu had stuck to it because he believed in Atiqah’s advice. If she could lead him thus at 19, wasn’t her potential to become a trusted helpmeet boundless in the years to come? It was this that had made his 23-year-old self so certain that no matter how many years it took, he would never find her equal.

Eight years on, he was still following her counsel. This could only mean that he persisted in having loved none but her . That she had never been supplanted . That after having seen everything to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost , he was now left to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment, which had kept him from trying to regain her when thrown in his way .

Arriving at Kunming and having to bustle through Chinese immigration for his domestic connection interrupted Fang Wu’s train of thought. For all that he had allowed himself to succumb to peevishness the previous time, he resolved that he would do better now. Honouring his brother with the courtesy he was due was his only means of making things right while he was here on Chinese soil.

It was very generous of Fang Wen to welcome him when he was springing himself on his brother with barely two days’ notice. Fang Wu decided that he was better off staying a night in Changsha to buy some gifts for his brother’s family, so as not to repeat the ungraciousness that he had shown Xia Jian after flying in from Barcelona. Heartbreak was no excuse to treat others badly, and he was long overdue to learn that.

After booking a hotel on Ctrip and texting his brother on WeChat to apprise him of his amended plans, Fang Wu boarded his next flight in a slightly better frame of mind. There was nothing he could do about Lele’s disappointment except hope that it would weaken over distance and time. And as for Atiqah, he would return to Singapore after the Winter Solstice and act as circumstances might require .

The stakes for Fang Wu to pursue Atiqah romantically hadn’t changed. He would still need to state his intention to convert to Islam and pursue marriage upfront, if he wanted to take their relationship beyond the level of common neighbourliness.

But Fang Wu knew it would be premature to consider his readiness for conversion before he ascertained whether Atiqah was still interested in him. He had been willing to convert before, on the mere condition that his feelings were reciprocated. Discovering just how precious this second chance was to him should make his fears and doubts about Muslim conversion from the first time even less of a hurdle than before.

Meanwhile, he could find a degree of comfort in focusing on his brother’s joy, instead of wallowing in his own misery. The onward flight from Kunming to Changsha was just two hours, not enough for Fang Wu to get any meaningful rest. Still, fuelled by pure adrenaline, he roamed the city for the rest of the day after he arrived, in search of the best present to welcome his new nephew into the world.

Perhaps it was out of sheer fatigue, or possibly, it was the newfound peace he found from realising that far from being a victim, he had held the keys to his happiness all along. That night, all alone in a hotel room in Changsha, Fang Wu fell into the deepest and most restful sleep he’d had in years.


~~~⚽~~~

Vi.vii – Fang Wen

Compared to his siblings, Fang Wen led a very modest and retiring life. The rural areas of China had seen many improvements in the past thirty years, but still lacked the luxuries that his sister and brother had gotten used to in the cities. He knew there were good reasons why he was the least-visited sibling, so whenever either of them came, he welcomed them with open arms.

While they were growing up, Fang Wen and Fang Wu had been polar opposites. Their parents had named them for the saying 文武双全 wen wu shuang quan , which meant that the contrasting qualities of learning and valour were needed to complete a man. And aptly, the personalities of their brothers matched their names.

Fang Wen, the elder by two years, had been bookish and obedient, the scholar of the family. Despite being the only sibling who went for higher education, he was the least travelled of the three. The farthest he had ventured from their childhood village was to study elementary education at Changsha Normal University before going back into the country as a teacher.

In contrast, the young Fang Wu had incessantly gotten into mischief, earning the nickname “孙悟空 Sun Wukong ”, or the Monkey King, for his exploits. He had loved that moniker, which fit perfectly with his reputation for righteous disobedience. When Fang Ying fashioned a cudgel (the weapon that Sun Wukong used) for him by decorating a bamboo stick with gold paint, he’d perfected the art of twirling it within days, carrying it everywhere he went.

Despite a substantial age gap, Fang Wu had always raided his elder siblings’ toys and books, so Fang Wen had never doubted his brother’s intelligence. But at school Fang Wu had been incapable of sitting still and constantly gave the appearance of inattention. That had possibly been the reason why he’d been pigeonholed into playing football instead of being set up for university.

With hindsight and the knowledge from his teacher training, Fang Wen wondered if his brother might have been bored in school because he was ahead of his class, or if he might have suffered from ADHD. Possibly, it could have been a combination of both. Regardless, when Fang Wu had now made more of a name for himself than if he’d pursued a more conventional career path, perhaps his missed opportunity to go to university didn’t matter.

“二哥！ (Second Big Brother!)” Even with his hands full of packages, Fang Wu managed to hug his brother after getting off the bus.

“你还好吗？ (How are you doing?)” Fang Wen reached out to take some of the parcels from his brother’s hands. For someone who had spent nine hours on planes and in airports just a day ago, Fang Wu looked great, but then he always did.

“还不错。 (Not bad.)” Fang Wen was used to his brother’s studied air of nonchalance. Still, he wondered why Fang Wu had come all this way at the last minute, even with the direct flights being full. If he had booked ahead for the March school holidays and gotten a nonstop flight, the plane ride to Changsha would have been just under five hours, instead of nearly double that.

Retirement from competitive sport had done his brother good, Fang Wen decided. In time-lapse, he’d watched the mischievous child of the past grow into an ebullient young man, but after his brother rose into the Super League, a sort of hard edge had grown around him. Fang Wen had put it down to the need for a world-class striker to develop some degree of ruthlessness, so he hadn’t thought too deeply about it.

In his oversize rapper-style puffer jacket, the fashion of the cities, Fang Wu didn’t look any more like he belonged in this village than he had during his halcyon days at Shanghai Port. Winters weren’t even that cold in the southern provinces, so Fang Wen knew that his brother was wearing it merely to look cool.

But sitting down to a simple bowl of home-cooked noodles with Fang Wen and his wife Huixian (惠娴) for lunch, Fang Wu appeared unusually content. In fact, Fang Wen hadn’t seen his brother appear so relaxed in more than eight years. To boot, a fortnight’s stay was much longer than any of his previous visits for over a decade.

And Fang Wu hadn’t lost his youthful sense of humour, nor his knack for buying the most hilarious gag gifts. From one of the biggest bundles he carried, he whipped out a life-size Ne Zha (哪吒) doll which was bigger than his three-month-old nephew currently.

“你会把孩子弄哭， (You’ll make the baby cry,)” Fang Wen predicted with a chuckle. The record-breaking Ne Zha animated series had been all the rage for several years, and he had to admit that the bratty demon child warrior somewhat resembled his younger brother. But a big-headed doll that sent out voodoo vibes with its black-rimmed eyes was not what he nor Huixian would ever think of getting for their son, especially not at this age.

Apparently, little Shengwu (胜武) had more in common with his uncle (and namesake) than his father, because the child gurgled with laughter and batted at the doll when it was dangled in front of him.

“果然是未来的武林盟主， (As expected, [he’s] a future warrior chief,)” said Fang Wu, laughing.

“他的确很像你。 (He is indeed very much like you.)” Fang Wen treated his brother to an indulgent smile.

Though Fang Wen still thought it was sad that he and his brother had been deprived of many years of growing up together, he was thankful, not for the first time, that they had remained close, somehow transcending the barriers of time and distance.

~~~⚽~~~

Vi.vii – Fang Wu

Seeing his brother’s happiness ought to be enough. Fang Wu could have no other pleasure , when he deserved none .

Life was slow here, giving him much leisure and solitude for lamenting the blindness of his own pride and the blunders of his own calculations should he so wish. But there was a simplicity about his daily routine that offered him a welcome respite. Every day, he bought fresh produce from elderly street vendors, helped his brother and sister-in-law with laundry and diaper changes, and played with his baby nephew whenever the child was awake.

For the Winter Solstice, they made the traditional dessert of 汤圆 tangyuan . The sense of companionship as they rolled the spherical rice flour dumplings by hand was worth this impromptu visit, Fang Wu decided. Had he remained in Singapore, he would most likely have been trapped spending the Winter Solstice and Christmas with Lele. He hoped that with some weeks to cool off, it wouldn’t be so horribly awkward anymore when they inevitably ran into each other at the foot of their block.

Eid, or Hari Raya Puasa as it was called in Singapore, would fall on the 23rd of December, two days after the Winter Solstice. A part of Fang Wu wished he could be there with Atiqah and her family to break their fast. But he had been hasty and precipitate too many times when a more deliberate approach might have served him better. Rebounding from Lele to Atiqah in a pinch would look horrible and be respectful to neither of them.

Besides, after he returned to Singapore and ascertained Atiqah’s level of romantic interest in him, Fang Wu would still have to figure out how he fit in with her personal beliefs and choices. With the deeper insight gained from residing in a country with a substantial Muslim population, he could now see that Muslim life was more nuanced than he had previously believed.

In Singapore, Malay Muslims were a racial minority. But they were numerous enough to become a prominent pillar of society anyway. Malay was one of the four national languages, Muslim holidays were observed on the national public holiday calendar, and halal establishments were widely available. Within a society that respected Muslims but wasn’t exclusively Islamic, observance of the Muslim faith was more like a spectrum than a binary concept.

It was possible – and much more accepted in Singapore than in Spain – to wrap one’s entire life around Islam. Fang Wu had seen children who attended madrasahs (Islamic religious schools) instead of the mainstream local education system. Madrasah pupils were easily identifiable by their uniforms, which incorporated elements of Malay traditional dress. Some local families even dressed their daughters in headscarves at preschool age.

However, these were the minority among Singapore’s Malay Muslims. Far more of them, including Atiqah and her family, studied and worked in mainstream Singaporean society with nothing to set them apart except for the occasional donning of Malay traditional attire and their adherence to a halal diet. If they prayed during the day, it was done so discreetly that hardly anyone else noticed.

At the hot pot dinner, Atiqah’s sister, Aizah, had mentioned that some Muslims drank alcohol. It didn’t mean that the rules of Islam were flexible, just that people’s private decisions on how they observed Islam (or not) varied widely. If Fang Wu were to convert, he was determined to show proper respect for the rules, but he hadn’t realised that the standards he’d set for himself might exceed those of some people who had been born Muslim.

From eight years ago, Fang Wu knew one thing: the 19-year-old Atiqah had been willing to consider his suit, if he would convert to Islam for her. Still, he didn’t know whether over the years, her views towards having a non-Malay partner might have changed.

But one thing gave him hope: despite her straitened finances, she’d been willing to pay extra to watch the Chinese Super League.

Which meant that most likely, she’d watched all his club matches. Was this for him?

Fang Wu stayed with his brother through Christmas, before he had to return for the start of the school year. The night before he left, he confessed everything.

In particular, it felt good to unburden one thing to his brother: his sense of guilt from having been unfair to Atiqah for so long. First through his overly precipitate offer of courtship eight years ago, and now for having been emotionally closed to her when he had the chance to reconcile.

“我亏欠她太多, (I’ve let her down too much,)” he lamented. “如果是你，你会原谅我吗？ (If it were you [in her shoes], would you forgive me?)”

“有时候，你也需要宽容自己, (Sometimes, you need to be more forgiving of yourself,)” Fang Wen replied. “告诉我，如果没有那种障碍，你还会那么做吗？ (Tell me, if you didn’t have that barrier [of religion], would you still have done things that way?)”

“绝对不会！ (Of course not!)” Fang Wu exclaimed, recoiling in horror. “我会好好地追求她。 (I would have courted her properly.)”

“当时你毫无选择，也不算是你的错。 (At that time, you had no choice, so it shouldn’t be considered your fault.)” Fang Wen reassured him.

Hearing someone blame him less than he had blamed himself was an unexpected relief to Fang Wu. Perhaps he should have confided in his siblings sooner; he knew he would have, if he’d known they wouldn’t think less of him for his folly.

“但我想问你, (But I would like to ask you,)” Fang Wen continued, “中国女孩儿多的是，为什么你偏要选一位穆斯林人? (There are so many ladies in China, why would you insist on choosing a Muslim?)”

“她的天分绝无仅有，我一看就迷上了， (Her talent is so exceptional that I was bewitched at first sight,)” Fang Wu replied.

“生活对象，是凭天分来选吗？ (Do you choose a life partner by their talent?)” enquired Fang Wen, quirking an eyebrow.

It was a very good question, and this was the reason why Fang Wu needed his sensible big brother to counsel him.

Of course, Fang Wu had been dazzled by Atiqah because she was a prodigy. And yet he would give himself the credit for making every effort not to take advantage of her youth.

He hadn’t counted how many times he’d watched her training sessions before approaching her, but back then, he’d been content to admire her skills from a distance. Only when he couldn’t stand the injustice of her perennial loneliness had he stepped forward to offer his companionship.

With such lavish recommendations as her talent and character offered, he could not have possibly fail ed to fall in love. But now, all the sheen of the prodigy was gone. He had come to know her as a neighbour, someone who blended in the crowd, but still her best qualities shone through like a beacon of light. If given the chance to defend her case, he wished nothing more than to make sure it was known that she was special.

“我还可以说， (And I will add,)” Fang Wu declared, “她是一位佳人。 (She is a [unusually] good person.)”

“那么，你要回去好好得追她， (Then, you must go back and court her well,)” Fang Wen advised enthusiastically. “你还在等什么？ (What are you waiting for?)”

“你觉得我还有机会吗？ (Do you think I still have a chance?) 好马不吃回头草 （A good horse doesn’t return to old pastures,）” quoted Fang Wu, referencing an old Chinese proverb.

“你可别忘记下一句， (You shouldn’t forget the next part [of that saying],)” Fang Wen reminded him. “浪子回头金不换。 (A prodigal who returns is more valuable than gold.)”

Under that starless sky, in the silence of a village far away from the hustle that Fang Wu had gotten used to since before his teens, the two brothers sat in silent acknowledgment. Clapping his hand on his brother’s shoulder, Fang Wen offered one last encouragement before he retired for the night.

“小弟，我祝你好运， (Little brother, I wish you luck),” he said.

Left alone once again with his thoughts, Fang Wu could not help but marvel at the sense of vindication that now surged through him. Eight was an auspicious number, but he would have denied that this hiatus of that many years was anything but untoward. Except that now, he had come to learn how truly lucky he was.

He had been a prodigal. But he was on the cusp of his return. This was his chance to make things right.

A prodigal who came back was worth more than gold. If he could be worth even half of that to her, he would call himself the most fortunate man in the world.

---

Note : Here we have a concrete exposition of what "For you alone I think and plan" could look like.

Part VII – The Other Eusoff

Taxi drivers, Atiqah knew, considered her the bane of their existence.

She felt guilty for not taking Eusoff out more often to let him participate in society. Our Tampines Hub, a mega-facility with sporting and community facilities for residents of all ages, had regular wellness and social activities for seniors. But one kilometre was too far for Eusoff to walk, and Atiqah didn’t want him to trip and fall getting on and off the public feeder bus.

So, every time they went there, Atiqah would get a taxi or call a Grab, and deal with the driver’s chagrin at the short and unprofitable trip. Aizah gave her a stash of cash to tip the drivers to ensure they received fair compensation, but Atiqah still felt a stab of remorse over the justified surliness with which she and Eusoff were often greeted.

If on any occasion the taxi driver was kind to them, Atiqah felt even worse. It was hard to earn money in a world where the cost of living was spiralling up. Taxi and Grab drivers’ margins were razor thin. So, anyone who willingly gave up their profits to ferry an elderly man and his daughter was an angel.

During Ramadan, though, one was supposed to do good deeds. Atiqah hoped to be altruistic enough not to expect rewards, but it couldn’t hurt that virtuous acts were multiplied in this holy month. That gave her an extra incentive to power through discomfort to do things which were unpleasant for her, but good for her father.

Zumba, cooking classes, brisk walking, and gardening were among the many activities available for seniors at Our Tampines Hub. At 55, Eusoff was younger than most of the senior citizens who attended People’s Association (PA) active ageing programmes. But with his unwillingness to use his prosthetic foot to its full potential, he behaved twenty years older than he really was.

Atiqah was used to standing out as the only young person attending the seniors’ activities. Or at least, the only one who wasn’t a domestic helper. Unlike the helpers, Atiqah participated zealously to encourage her father to enjoy himself. Sadly, her efforts, which often felt uncomfortably performative, were often futile because Eusoff was perfectly satisfied to do nothing.

The volunteers often took pity on Atiqah and gave Eusoff extra attention to coax him to participate. Therefore, when another pair of brown hands came into her field of vision as she harvested worm compost for the Eco-Community Garden, she wasn’t entirely surprised.

Surely, this was the month when every Malay person was trying to do good, after all.

“ Encik (Mister), come, let me help you,” said the owner of the hands, addressing her father even though he was taking the worm compost from her.

“It’s OK,” said Atiqah instinctively. “I can manage.”

In truth, she hated handling worm poop, but she accepted that this was the eco-friendly way to make fertiliser. And community gardening was one of the few activities that wasn’t too fast paced for Eusoff to fully participate in.

“I need practice, anyway,” the man demurred, taking over the task of harvesting from her. “I just started volunteering here – by the way, my name is Said bin Eusoff.”

Malays didn’t have surnames. Instead, their last names were their fathers’ names. Therefore, sharing the last name of “Eusoff” didn’t mean Said and Atiqah were related in any way, only that they both had fathers named Eusoff.

“Are you volunteering for Ramadan?” asked Eusoff.

Atiqah couldn’t blame her father for being nosy when Said looked far too young to be a retiree. By her estimation, he was probably in his late thirties, at most about forty. Global warming was making it increasingly uncomfortable to wear long pants in Singapore without air-conditioning, but he was decked out in hipster-style skinny jeans and a loose plaid button-down thrown over a T-shirt. Definitely overdressed for a neighbourhood community centre, though Atiqah was the pot calling the kettle black since, in the interest of modesty, she’d swapped her shorts out for jeans.

“I just sold my company, so I thought it might be nice to help out in the community until I get my next idea,” explained Said. “Just in time for Ramadan, not bad, right?”

“What type of company was it?” Atiqah asked. She was intrigued that Said had apparently made enough of a windfall not to work. It was far more common for the Chinese, who had a killer instinct for money, to strike it rich than the Malays, who preferred to take life slowly.

“We grew biomass in Indonesia. Quite a good business lah , every Singaporean wants to travel, right? This is the stuff that keeps planes flying even with the end of fossil fuels.”

Travel was only a theoretical notion for Atiqah. Even when she’d lived in Barcelona, she hadn’t been at liberty to go elsewhere except for competitions. Aizah added to their growing collection of bric-a-bracs after every official trip, but even she travelled mostly within the region, and only for work.

Yet Atiqah knew that hers wasn’t the typical Singapore experience. Even at the neighbourhood primary and secondary schools she’d attended before going to Spain, she’d had classmates whose parents took them overseas twice a year or more. And those whose parents couldn’t afford to go on family holidays earned money through part-time jobs to do so after they graduated. Singapore was a small island, and people were naturally curious about the world beyond it.

Sometime in the distant future, perhaps Atiqah’s appetite for travel might change. But for now, she simply saw no point in coveting things that weren’t available to her. That was a principle which she’d been forced to apply lately to matters other than travel, too.

“When my children have the money, I want to go on the haj ,” declared Eusoff. Atiqah knew he’d say that, because he’d been wishing for it since she and her siblings were children.

The haj was a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammed. Every adult Muslim was expected to make this journey once in a lifetime if they were physically and financially able to do so.

“Actually, the haj was the first thing I did when I had enough money to travel,” Said acknowledged breezily. “It was my father’s dream, too. I was, like, 28, I think? Anyway, it was about a year after I finished uni.”

“So, you took your dad on the haj .” Atiqah couldn’t help smiling at Said.

She wasn’t fazed by Said’s admission that he had graduated at a later age than most. With two years of mandatory military service, men in Singapore normally got out of uni at 24 or 25. Rather, it impressed Atiqah that Said’s first priority had been to fulfil his father’s wish, above the many places that must be more interesting to people of their generation. When they set aside enough money to do so, she and Aizah aimed to do the same.

“Yah, that was his first time going out of Singapore. My first time, too.” Said grinned. “When I was young, we were poor. My father was a condo security guard his whole life. I never thought I could get a windfall and give my parents everything.”

Atiqah wasn’t surprised that Eusoff perked up upon hearing that Said had more in common with them than they might imagine. Despite the equality of opportunity across the races in education and employment, the Malays were over-represented in the lower-income groups because they valued religion and community more than paper qualifications and money, unlike their Chinese and Indian counterparts.

Malays who rose above their disadvantaged circumstances and did well were highly estimable, and even more so when they honoured their roots and family ties. Madam Halimah Yacob, the eighth President of Singapore, had been such. Born to an Indian father and a Malay mother, Madam Halimah had grown up in the humblest of households. Her father had died when she was eight. The youngest of five siblings supported by their widowed mother, she had worked at her mother’s food stall since the age of 10.

The empowerment given to American children by telling them that they could become the next President rang hollow compared to witnessing a Malay woman who had grown up in a one-room rental HDB flat taking on one of the highest offices in the government. Although the Prime Minister, as the head of government, was responsible for all the major policy decisions, the President served as a ceremonial head of state and had custodial duties of the national budget.

It had been even more inspiring to see that at the time of her appointment to office in an uncontested election, Madam Halimah had still lived in a HDB flat. At the time, Atiqah had been an impressionable 11-year-old in Primary Five. She never forgot the sense of pride that she’d felt, all through her tween and teen years, at seeing her country represented by a woman in a tudung .

Every Malay rags-to-riches story – her former President’s, Aizah’s, and now Said’s – was a comforting reminder to Atiqah that social mobility in Singapore was very much alive. Self-made success was something she liked to root for.

“Which condo?” asked Eusoff.

“Erm, I think it was called Kellynch Hall?” Said scratched his head. “Anyway, it was really far, my dad had to ride his motorbike every day.”

“Kellynch Hall? I was security guard there too! Ah, so your father was on the other shift, is it? Now I remember, he was also called Eusoff!”

Atiqah hadn’t seen her father crack such a wide smile since his diagnosis. It had never entered her consciousness that he might miss his old life so much.

“Orr!” A look of comprehension dawned on Said’s face. “So, Pakcik , you are the other Eusoff! My dad used to talk about you, he said you rode a Vespa!”

“And your father rode a Kawasaki!” Eusoff hadn’t been this animated in years, Atiqah realised. She’d been so focused on her father’s physical needs that she hadn’t thought much about his emotional ones. Surely, it was a gift from Allah to allow her father to reconnect with the family of his old colleague, especially in the month of Ramadan!

“We should visit your father,” suggested Eusoff. “You still stay in Tampines?”

“Yah, we stay on the other side, Tampines Street 41. I bought an exec maisonette five years ago,” announced Said with visible pride.

Surreptitiously, Atiqah checked the time on her phone. True enough, the hour was almost up – and surely, it had been rude of them to monopolise Said’s time.

“Said,” she interjected, “do you need to help other people?”

“S --!” Said swore, glancing at his smartwatch. “I should be helping to wrap up in a few minutes. Thanks for reminding me, I totally forgot about the time.”

“No problem.” Atiqah waved him off with a smile. “Sorry we held you up, please do whatever you need to do.”

“Do you all have transport later? I can give you a lift if you need,” offered Said.

“Wah, thank you so much! Where should we wait for you?” Eusoff’s ready acceptance of an offer of transport from a stranger surprised Atiqah. If he trusted people so readily, what kind of security guard had he been?

But then, Eusoff had worked with Said’s father. It was her to whom Said was a stranger, not her father, she realised. She’d still been in school when Eusoff had been working, so naturally, there had been no reason for her to cross paths with her father’s colleague’s son who was so much older than her.

And besides, Atiqah recalled, she’d once allowed someone to walk her back to her dorm on much less prior acquaintance. All she had known about Fang Wu, at the very beginning of their relationship, was that he had played as a pro at the same club where she had trained, and that he was Chinese. Those were hardly good reasons to trust somebody, yet she had done so instantly.

Surely, with Said’s business success and his current occupation as a People’s Association (PA) volunteer, there could be no doubt of his being a sensible man. Ten minutes were enough to certify that.

And his black BMW X5 with M Sport coloured trim on its kidney grille was so extravagant that it made her jaw drop. Prices of cars were so beyond her reach that Atiqah didn’t keep track of them, but she knew a luxury vehicle could outprice a small HDB flat.

“It’s second-hand,” rationalised Said with an apologetic attempt at modesty. “I don’t really need it now that I’m not in business anymore, but I might as well run out the rest of my COE (Certificate of Entitlement).”

Instead of dropping them off at their void deck, Said parked the car and helped Eusoff all the way to their front door. There had been only one other person who had done that in the recent past. Towards her father, Said’s manners were so exactly what they ought to be, so polished, so easy, so agreeable, that she could compare them in excellence to only one other person’s manners. They were not the same, but they were, perhaps, equally good.

Said didn’t address Atiqah directly until he left them at their gate. “You’re the daughter, right?” he asked, just before he took his leave.

“I’m the second daughter. My name is Atiqah.” Awkwardly, she wondered if she should extend her hand so he should shake it. Western manners would dictate so, but Muslim conduct didn’t require it.

“Pleased to meet you, Atiqah.” She realised that Said wasn’t looking at her hand, but at her face.

Honestly, with her tudung , her face was all that anyone might look at. Atiqah felt self-conscious that her loose long sleeve T-shirt and jeans were decidedly more casual than Said’s hipster outfit, even though it was evident that Said (while completely a gentleman in manner) admired her exceedingly .

“Thanks for taking care of my father.” Atiqah didn’t know why she found Said’s attention just as awkward as it was flattering. At her age, she shouldn’t be unaccustomed to men admiring her. It was pathetic – it spoke of how little she went out into the world.

“No problem. Eh, I gave Pakcik my number, so next time you come to the CC (community centre), text me, OK? I can come and drive you.” Said waved his phone at her to say goodbye.

“OK.” Atiqah knew she ought to feel elated at this solution to her predicament. She could take her father to community activities without having to feel bad about making taxi drivers lose money.

So, why didn’t she? A filial, devout, kind, and rich Malay man had just befriended her father. There were so many aspects of Said that were worthy of respect, yet she hesitated at the prospect of becoming too beholden to him. Knowing that her reasons might not fully stand up to scrutiny, she avoided thinking about them too deeply.

~~~⚽~~~

“How many cans should we get?” Atiqah was shopping with Aizah at the NTUC (National Trades Union Congress) FairPrice supermarket opposite their block. Xixi’s and Xiaoming’s engagement photo, backlit with the sunset at Bedok Jetty, had just popped up on their Instagram feeds, which meant they needed to prepare a gift.

“There’s four of them, right? So, one can each will look stingy, but maybe we can do two cans each? Or three? There’s three of us working, so yah, let’s do four times three.” The supermarket shelf looked pitifully bare after Aizah divested it of twelve cans of abalone.

Four of them – of course. Atiqah had to get used to the fact that Fang Wu was nearly a part of Xixi and Lele’s family now. There could not be a doubt, to her mind there was none, of what would follow before long . When she only had to swipe left on Xixi’s engagement Instagram post to reveal a shot of the two couples feasting on chili crab by the sea, the prospect of one engagement engendering another was inevitable.

“Come, come, come!” Xixi ushered Aizah and Atiqah into her flat eagerly when the sisters arrived carrying two reusable bags with six cans each. “Wah, you didn’t have to spend so much money, this must have cost a lot!”

“It’s just a small gift,” replied Aizah modestly. Two hundred and forty dollars wasn’t a small amount to Atiqah, but she knew Aizah would consider anything less inappropriately stingy for a once-in-a-lifetime event like this, given the (theoretical) number of working adults in the family. To keep up with her university friends, Aizah imposed upper-middle-class expectations on the expenditures which were visible to others.

“I’m so happy for you!” Atiqah exclaimed, throwing her arms around Xixi in a hug.

“Come and hug me too!” Lele launched herself at Atiqah the moment she let go of Xixi. “I hope there will be another happy occasion soon.”

It was a relief, Atiqah decided, that neither of the gentlemen were visiting with Xixi and Lele at the moment. How awkward it would be – beyond awkward – to congratulate them on this long-awaited engagement with the tacit anticipation of another!

Had the men been present, even hugging Xixi and Lele would have drawn up memories of what she might have once wished to do with one of them, even if they had never acted on that impulse.

Was it true, then, that a man and a woman could never be alone, because the third person among them was the devil?

Perhaps it was, because Atiqah could not speak the name of Fang Wu, and look straight forward to anybody’s eye . She’d become so selfish that she couldn’t even offer anticipatory congratulations to Lele.

“We’re going home for Chinese New Year,” Lele barrelled on, thankfully not waiting for any response from her. “And this time, we’ll be staying for fifteen days. I can’t wait, it’s so exciting to show Xiaowu my home and my family!”

“And since Xiaoming is getting posted to Chengdu, Lele and Fang Wu can have this flat all to themselves!” squealed Xixi.

“Wah, Xiaoming got promoted? You’re so lucky, congrats!” Aizah pounced on Xixi, sparking off another round of enthusiastic hugging and joyful exclamations.

This flat, the one next to Atiqah’s, would almost certainly become the matrimonial home of Fang Wu and Zheng Xinle. A few months hence , and it might be filled with all that was glowing and bright in prosperous love, all that was most unlike her!

It could be the last time she would feel comfortable visiting this place, Atiqah realised. For the past four years, her family and the Zheng sisters had gone back and forth between their flats, exchanging food gifts and simply hanging out to chat. She and Aizah had been trusted confidantes in every aspect of the sisters’ love lives.

But once Fang Wu and Lele were married, this chapter would have to close. Leaving their neighbourly relationship open, at least on her end, would be tantamount to inviting back the devil which never ceased to haunt her every moment in that gentleman’s presence.

This was goodbye, then, to the flat which would continue to exist, but which would never be the same again to her. It stood the record of many sensations of pain, once severe, but now softened; and of some instances of relenting feeling, some breathings of friendship and reconciliation, which could never be looked for again, and which could never cease to be dear.

Aizah’s, Lele’s, and Xixi’s voices continued in happy animation, completely oblivious to Atiqah’s quietness.

“Next time, please take a picture with Le Le for us, OK? I mean, Le Le the panda, not you!” Naturally Aizah, who so loved travelling, was beyond thrilled about Xiaoming’s future posting to Chengdu.

“Why not me? I’m not cuter than a panda?” Lele pretended to sulk in mock disappointment, but the perky lilt in her voice betrayed what she really knew. Of course, Lele was cute, and Atiqah was sure no man in the world existed who’d deny that.

“You got someone else to take pictures of you already,” Aizah teased, chuckling. “Don’t be so greedy, can or not?”

“I can’t help it if everyone loves me,” declared Lele. “And after both of us are married, we will find some nice Muslim guys for you! I mean, both of you. Atiqah, where are you?”

“I’m here.” Popping up from where she had hunched in a corner of the sectional while Aizah and the Zheng sisters were gathered around the dining table, Atiqah waved feebly to indicate that she wasn’t ignoring them.

“I was saying – Atiqah, are you OK?” Self-centred as Lele could be, she still had a kind heart. That was why the Zheng sisters were such good friends with Atiqah and Aizah. But much as she would have appreciated Lele’s friendly concern at other times, Atiqah wished that Lele could have remained oblivious to this.

“Yah, yah, I’m fine.” Atiqah forced a smile. “Did you say you’re going to the city of pandas? How cute!”

“Yes! Chengdu is the home of the pandas.” Plopping herself next to Atiqah on the sofa, Xixi scrolled through her phone to pull up a panda video. “It’s so sweet that they only mate with the one they love, just like me!

“We used to think they would go extinct, because it was so hard to breed them! People tried all kinds of ways to get pandas to have babies… Xiaoming told me the Le Le panda baby from Singapore was born through artificial insemination.

“But then, when they let the pandas move around on their own, they found out pandas don’t really need that kind of help. They were so much better at having babies when they could find another panda they liked, instead of people choosing for them! And now, they’re not endangered anymore!”

Oh no, thought Atiqah, I’m a panda. And with an unavailable panda mate, the idea of such monogamy didn’t warrant the cutesy heart-hands Xixi was making over the subject.

It was utterly depressing that even a topic as innocuous as pandas could remind her of the hopelessness of her situation. Holding the phone that Xixi had handed her, she pretended to be engrossed in panda photos until Aizah tapped her on the shoulder and told her it was time to leave.

“I truly congratulate you,” Atiqah said to Xixi as they parted at the door. With some effort, she added, “Both of you.”

Lele deserved graciousness, for her well-earned and impending domestic bliss. Atiqah knew how long Lele had been waiting for a man who would commit, the way Xiaoming had to Xixi, and that Fang Wu would be the husband she deserved. For Atiqah had no doubt that Fang Wu would be a good husband for anyone.

“Thank you.” Xixi’s eyes were shining. “I can’t wait to invite you to the wedding dinner, we can do a no pork no lard table for you.”

“We’re looking forward to it!” Aizah’s effusiveness was enough for the two of them, Atiqah noted with some relief.

They left the flat then, and she left it all behind her, all but the recollection that such things had been . If Atiqah mourned at all for the briefness of her reconnection with Fang Wu – briefer even than their initial acquaintance in Barcelona had been – she could never show it. At her flat where she even shared a bedroom with her sister, there was no space for the tears that pricked threateningly at her eyes.

Her past with Fang Wu was a haram secret which Atiqah had never shared with her family because one’s sins were private. Perhaps it was a blessing from Allah, she decided, that things could be left to end like this. With Fang Wu married to her neighbour, everything would be safe enough . She would no longer bemoan the many anxious feelings she had wasted on the subject when forced to lock away the past and keep her eyes on the future.

Hadn’t she wished, just weeks ago, that she didn’t have to see Fang Wu falling in love with and marrying a Chinese woman? And yet, here she was grieving the loss of the scraps of friendship and kindness that Fang Wu had tossed to her. All this contradictory thinking made hardly any sense to her. Why couldn’t she just be logical and either accept him as an indifferent neighbour, or forget about him completely?

If trying to move on (though she would never forget) was the only way Atiqah could expunge her sin for good, she decided she ought to be thankful for it.

~~~⚽~~~

Before Atiqah could plan for another outing to Our Tampines Hub with her father, Said texted Eusoff with an invitation to his flat to visit his parents.

“ Ayah can’t wait to see you,” he said eagerly to Eusoff while helping him into the front passenger seat of his BMW. “He misses working, too.”

Everybody missed working – Atiqah certainly did, especially when her work had also been a sport she loved. But to admit it would sound too much like a resentment of her filial duty.

Said’s block was on the other side of the town centre from theirs, close to Gongshang Primary which was the most over-subscribed school in Tampines. It was certain that his flat was worth more than S$1 million. Atiqah’s family home was not too shabby either – if they sold their flat, they would get S$800K at least – but cash-poor as they were, they’d never sell because it would be impossible to afford another place with the same combination of space and accessibility.

Nonetheless, the real indicator of Said’s disposable income was not the size and location of his flat, but the industrial-chic décor that could not have been achieved without the heavy hand of an architect and an interior designer.

Executive maisonettes, which were designed to give the illusion of living in a house instead of an apartment, measured 1,700 square feet and had two storeys with a balcony on the lower floor. With its bold black panel walls and fittings, every square foot of Said’s flat screamed “bachelor pad”. Even the original stairs had been hacked away and replaced with a black metal spiral staircase.

Despite the relentlessly modern interior, Said’s parents, Eusoff and Fatimah, seemed highly traditional. They’d dressed in baju kurung (Malay traditional attire) even though this was a casual home gathering. So had Eusoff and Atiqah, lending a strange air of formality to this meeting which was ostensibly a reunion between two former colleagues.

“Brother!” The two Eusoffs heartily exchanged pats on the back. Atiqah was heartened to see her father rekindle an old friendship. She knew he’d been isolated and lonely, especially after he lost his foot.

There were lots of things the two Eusoffs had to catch up on. They reminisced about their old motorcycles, discussed the changes in their neighbourhoods, and boasted about the achievements of their children.

“You know, my son was in the newspapers,” Said’s father said, pointing to a framed Straits Times article on the wall. “From zero to hero! You think N(T) (Normal (Technical) Stream) hopeless already, right? Who thought he can go university?”

Compared to the awkward and scruffy young man pictured in the newspaper cutting, Said had visibly aged. His underbite had gotten more prominent, and he had gained weight. Nonetheless, with maturity and success he had gained a sense of sophistication, too. Or was it simply that he now had the money to buy more fashionable clothes?

Either way, Said wasn’t innately handsome, but he looked much better now than before, thanks to the hipster vibe that he’d cultivated.

From her seat, Atiqah couldn’t read the fine print of the article, only the headline. But that was enough to see that he’d made the news for getting his Bachelor’s degree at age 27 after working his way up from the Normal (Technical) stream.

“ Ayah , why must you always boast about this?” protested Said. “What’s there to be proud of about being in Normal Tech?”

The Normal (Technical) Stream, also known as “Normal Tech” or “N(T)”, used to be the secondary school stream for the lowest academic achievers. Even Azlan, who never studied, had ended up one step higher in the Normal (Academic) Stream.

Working all the way up from the bottom was a trait which Atiqah deemed worthy of respect. Normal Tech students, who were channelled into the Institute of Technical Education (ITE) for vocational training after secondary school, had to prove themselves through multiple academic promotions to enter university. Said’s road to success couldn’t have been easy, even though Atiqah was shocked that his primary school results had apparently been worse than Azlan’s.

“I think you should be proud of what you’ve achieved,” said Atiqah, surprising herself with her willingness to speak up for Said. “It means everything you have is from your own effort, because nothing was handed to you.”

“It just means I was a pai kia (Hokkien for gangster) when I was young,” remarked Said, brusquely waving Atiqah’s comment away.

“My daughter was in the papers too,” Atiqah’s father chimed in, eager to show that his family was by no means inferior. “She got a football scholarship to Barcelona when she was 14 years old only!”

“Ah, that’s why you look so familiar!” A glint of recognition came into Said’s father’s eyes. “Which team were you?”

“Tampines Rovers, 2026 to 2031,” Atiqah rattled off almost mechanically.

“So, you went to Barcelona in 2022?” Said’s mother, Fatimah, counted off the years on her fingers with creased eyebrows.

“2021, actually,” Atiqah corrected. “It was the year I was in Sec 3.”

“2021 was also Said’s graduation year,” Fatimah pointed out. “ Encik , our kids made the newspapers in the same year!”

Fatimah made it sound like some crazy kind of kismet, but when she did the arithmetic, Atiqah found it meant that Said was 40. That was the uppermost part of the age range she’d pegged him in.

Perhaps the age gap was enough to explain Atiqah’s lack of reciprocity to Said’s attraction. Was that reasonable, or was it wrong to practise age discrimination? Every positive thing she learned about Said added to the pressure Atiqah felt to desire something more than friendship from him, and when she didn’t, she couldn’t stop second-guessing herself.

“So, are you married?” her father asked Said. Atiqah could only presume that he’d been doing the maths too and found Said’s apparent singlehood at this advanced age hard to believe.

“Not yet,” replied Said. “I spent most of the last 10 years almost living in Indonesia. To make a successful business, you need to eat, sleep and breathe it, where got time?”

“Now you better hurry up, ah ,” urged Said’s father. “40 years old already, still wait for what?”

“ Ayah , don’t worry lah .” Rightfully, Said seemed just as eager to shut down this tangent of conversation as Atiqah felt. “Marriage is serious, cannot rush one.”

Every opinion Said uttered was either technically or politically correct. Even with his parents pushing him towards insta-love, Said was still giving Atiqah space, despite being attracted to her. The force of unspoken expectations, Atiqah realised, could be more crushing than if those obligations had been stated out loud.

“That’s enough about me,” continued Said, deflecting the conversation. “ Pakcik , how will you be celebrating Hari Raya?”

It couldn’t be denied that Said was very socially adept. He saved the afternoon from spiralling into a nagging session about marriage by turning the conversation toward his business and the renovations in his flat. Everything he said painted Said in the best light: he had interesting and extensive knowledge about Indonesia, he was a canny entrepreneur, and his aesthetic tastes were perfectly on-trend for an affluent Millennial.

Atiqah never doubted that Said was a great guy. When he talked about how he’d cobbled together money from various odd jobs in his last year of uni to fund his parents’ haj , she had to call him a good Muslim, too. But still, in many ways that mattered, he was everything she wasn’t.

They left Said’s flat at 5 PM, late enough to give Atiqah stress about getting dinner ready in time and being late to pick up the boys from preschool. Deftly, Said put those concerns to rest by making stops at Tampines Central for them to pick up dinner, and at the boys’ preschool to take them home. He didn’t even complain about the boys leaving greasy handprints on his shiny leather seats.

Much as Atiqah was obliged to feel grateful to Said, she couldn’t help worrying that a policeman might pull them over for ferrying two preschoolers without child seats. Within a five-minute car ride, Aziz managed to defeat the purpose of being belted in by wriggling free of the adult shoulder belt. Meanwhile, the only way Atiqah could keep two-year-old Yusuf safe was to hold him on her lap, but that wasn’t legal.

Said carried Yusuf up to their flat while Atiqah held Aziz by one hand and her father by the other. With some dread, she expected him to try to catch her eye again when he said goodbye, yet she didn’t know what to think when he didn’t.

He left them with an invitation to break their fast on Hari Raya at his flat with his family, all seven of them. It was incredibly generous – it led Atiqah to consider that maybe he might not be interested in her after all, but simply in reconnecting their families. Perhaps she had fallen into the trap of over-thinking.

Grow up, Atiqah told herself. There was no denying that Said’s friendship would be good for her father. Having such egotistical thoughts as to believe Said was attracted to her because of just one look was an unnecessary over-complication of the situation.

She’d made the mistake once of assuming that a man and a woman couldn’t develop an attraction beyond the boundaries of race, language, and religion. Now, she wouldn’t fall into the reverse trap of assuming that because those barriers didn’t exist, romance must follow.

Atiqah might have lost all hope in one relationship, but it didn’t have to mean that she had to jump into love with the next man who came along. Said could be her friend. She could do this. He might speak of things that were beyond her world, but he was still easy to talk to.

And now that Atiqah would be losing the company of Xixi and Lele in a few months, perhaps having a new friend might be as good for her as it was for her father.

~~~⚽~~~

“It’s over,” sobbed Lele. Resting her crossed arms on the coffee table, she buried her face in them and dissolved into tears.

Lele had nearly beaten down their front door while Atiqah was tidying up the bedroom. At first, Atiqah had wondered if anyone next door might be sick or injured, but now she realised why Lele had come here, instead of going home.

Xixi and Xiaoming must be in the thick of wedding planning, especially since it was Saturday. If Lele and Fang Wu had just broken up, a blissfully engaged couple would be the last thing Lele would wish to see, and she wouldn’t want to taint their joy by inflicting her grief on them.

“Who broke it off, you or him?” asked Eusoff. “If it’s him, I can scold him for you.”

“I did,” replied Lele, her muffled voice breaking up between sobs. “I broke off with him.”

“Why?” Atiqah was perplexed. She knew Lele was eager to be in a relationship, and she hoped that Fang Wu would know his own mind early enough not to be endangering the happiness of anyone or impeaching his own honour . Unlike Atiqah’s own situation eight years ago, there were no obstacles to a blissful marriage between Lele and him.

Putting an arm around Lele’s trembling shoulders, Atiqah grabbed a tissue and handed it to Lele under the table.

“Thanks.” Lele took the tissue, but didn’t raise her head for a very long while, though Atiqah could feel the shaking of her shoulders slowly subsiding.

In a tiny voice, Lele said, “It… it’s hopeless. He’s never been warm to me.”

The truth of that statement hit Atiqah like a sledgehammer.

She had, several times, reflected that the dynamic between Fang Wu and Lele did not yet look like love. He was friendly and jovial, and bantered with Lele in Mandarin as if it was their own secret language.

But Atiqah hadn’t seen Fang Wu discussing anything truly personal with Lele. Of course, she assumed that such conversations would probably take place behind closed doors, out of her earshot, so she couldn’t be sure that what she didn’t see wasn’t happening.

To know that such interactions had never happened left her divided between sympathy for Lele and, if her conscience allowed it, something very much like relief for herself.

Atiqah scarcely dared to keep the conversation going, unsure if she was helping Lele to achieve closure, or if she was seeking it for her own sake.

“Why do you believe that?” she finally asked, after a long period of hesitation.

Dabbing at her eyes with the tissue that Atiqah had given her, Lele raised her head, then her shoulders, straightening up and lifting her chin.

“I asked him to come with me to visit my parents for the New Year,” she said, a measured air of injured dignity creeping into her voice. “But he refused.”

“Going to meet parents for Chinese New Year is for when you want to marry already,” lectured Eusoff. “You so impatient for what? Marriage cannot be rushed - our Azlan dated Farah for two years before they got married! Why don’t you wait one more year and see?”

“It’s not even about marriage.” Lele sighed. “I taught him the phrase ‘ai stead mai’ to get him to say it to me. But he won’t even say that. He doesn’t love me, when I loved him so much!”

“You must have,” Atiqah affirmed, though she felt blindsided by Lele’s statement. Had she been deceiving herself with her conviction that Lele hadn’t behaved any differently with Fang Wu than with all the other men who had dated her?

Or did Lele believe it was love simply because Fang Wu had stuck around the longest?

“I mean, I know a lot of girls would find him easy to love,” Lele continued. “He’s smart, he’s handsome, and he was a football celebrity back home.

“But… I thought… I was better than that, I had a chance to see the person he is inside. In Chinese, we say 正人君子 zheng ren jun zi , you know, a true gentleman?

“That’s what he is. It’s what makes him so special. Remember the time he carried your nephew back after the hot pot and made your brother help with the other one? He wouldn’t let the ladies carry the kids when the men are there to do it!”

That incident had stayed with Atiqah, too. She, Aizah, and Farah were inured to the reality of having to wrangle the boys, while also helping their father, whenever the family ventured out of their flat. With a ratio of four adults to two rambunctious children and an amputee elder, nobody was spared from pitching in.

If Azlan was with them, he did his duty by handling one of his children. Atiqah gave her brother the credit for that. Still, it was far from enough to spare the women from physical labour.

Azlan’s kids weren’t Fang Wu’s responsibility at all, not by a long way. Yet, he was the only person who not only stood by the belief that it was unfair to make the fasting women carry the boys but also acted on it.

He’d even taken the bigger child, the one who was injured, because he’d seen Azlan bump Aziz’s shoulder by accident before. Ending the evening with a four-year-old’s meltdown would have ruined the mood for everyone.

That was why Atiqah had such difficulty putting Fang Wu out of her mind. And she’d given Lele far too little credit for her ability to appreciate Fang Wu’s full worth.

“Lele, do you believe in fate?” Atiqah asked. She wouldn’t speculate on why Fang Wu couldn’t commit to Lele, but she could draw some cold comfort from one thing: she and Lele were now in the same boat. There would be no need for her to stifle any jealousy for her neighbour.

“I don’t want to,” replied Lele staunchly. “Do you know why the Ne Zha film broke so many records? It’s because he says, ‘我命由我不由天 wo ming you wo bu you tian ’. My fate is up to me, not to God. Everyone wants to believe that. I want to, and I did. But maybe you’re right; some things are just not up to me.”

“Lele,” Atiqah pulled her friend into a tight hug, burying her face in Lele’s shoulder. “I think all of us need to accept that there will be things not meant for us. It isn’t anybody’s fault.”

“I know.” Lele hugged back, and Atiqah could feel Lele’s tears soaking through her T-shirt. “Now I do.”

Atiqah wished that she could let her own tears fall. But just as it had been Lele’s prerogative to love Fang Wu when Atiqah couldn’t, Lele now had the right to openly display her heartbreak, which Atiqah never had.

~~~⚽~~~

Said didn’t wait for Hari Raya to hang out again. Immediately after the two Eusoffs met, they set up a WhatsApp group chat for both families. The first post on that chat came from Said, requesting permission to come by that Sunday to meet all the siblings, which was willingly granted.

Eusoff had described the visit to Said’s flat so vividly that Aizah and Azlan were full of curiosity about their wealthy new friend. While Aizah was intrigued by the possibility of conversation with someone as educated as she was, Azlan cared more about the down-to-earth matter of raiding Said’s video library.

Azlan: “do u hv netflix?”

Said: “sure do. netflix, hulu, everything”

Azlan: “can bring laptop anot?”

Said: “np”

Said was an immediate hit with Atiqah’s siblings, but most of that was due to cupboard love.

Streaming wasn’t in the family budget since they were already paying for local cable TV on Starhub. When Atiqah started buying the Sports+ package to watch Chinese Super League, Aizah gave up HBO so their total cable bill wouldn’t increase. It mattered little to Aizah, who got her HBO fix from hotels during work trips, but Azlan complained constantly about not having access to American programmes that ‘everybody’ was talking about.

Hulu, which wasn’t locally available in Singapore, was too unattainable for them to even dream of. When they were already pinching pennies on cable, getting a VPN was far down the list of non-essentials.

“Have you watched Ramy ?” Said asked the sisters, while Azlan browsed the video library on his laptop.

“No,” said Atiqah, “but I’ve always been OK without streaming. I only need Channel News Asia and football to make me happy.”

“I’d like to,” said Aizah, “and since you have Hulu, why not?”

Watching an American drama whose opening sequence showed people standing in line at a mosque was a transformative experience. Local TV aired Malay programming on the free Suria channel, but this was the first time Atiqah saw a Western TV show depicting Muslim life in such detail.

It was refreshing to see Muslims portrayed as everyday people on Western media, instead of being stereotyped as terrorists. Yet, this story was nothing like her lived reality.

“I think Ramy is a horrible person,” Atiqah blurted out at the end of Episode 1.

Almost immediately, she regretted saying it, in case she hurt Said’s feelings. She needn’t have worried, because Said agreed enthusiastically.

“I think so too,” he said. “Will you tell me why?”

“Because he got the seriousness of the sins wrong!” Atiqah threw up her hands in exasperation. “How can he call himself a practicing Muslim when he thinks nothing of committing the second worst sin and sweats all the small ones?

“Just because he commits it with non-Muslims doesn’t mean HE isn’t committing it! What a hypocrite!”

At the end of Atiqah’s diatribe, Said gave her a hearty round of applause.

“I agree with everything you said. Yes, he’s a hypocrite. But do such hypocrites exist? I think you know the answer as well as I do.”

They were talking about zina (fornication), but of course, none of them would speak the word out loud. It was the second worst Islamic crime next to murder.

Dating like the Americans, for Muslims, could end up as a crime that was technically punishable by 100 strokes of the cane. In Singapore, just like in the West, the punishment might not be meted out, but Atiqah didn’t think it possible to justify doing this without a crazy amount of moral whiplash.

“I think Atiqah has a point,” said Aizah. “When Crazy Rich Asians came out, everyone was up in arms about what it meant for Chinese representation. If this is supposed to be Muslim representation, I agree it isn’t our story.”

Atiqah knew Aizah would be just as proud and happy as she was that this wasn’t their story. Watching Ramy left her with a deep sense of just how privileged she was.

Malays were indigenous to Singapore, and Islam was respected and supported, but not militantly enforced. Atiqah and her family were able to practice her religion freely with neither draconian punishment for their sins, nor discrimination from non-Muslims despite being an ethnic minority.

This supportive environment was why Atiqah could spend the four most impressionable years of her life in Spain, and yet not be tempted into the permissiveness of the local culture. She had come home with her faith intact. That ought to be a justifiable reason for pride, she felt.

“No, it’s not,” agreed Said. “But this is American TV. People like to watch trainwrecks.”

“This is definitely a trainwreck,” said Atiqah, “but we’re still paying money to watch it.”

“That’s because nothing is seen until it’s seen by the US,” observed Said. “Why did you think I bought my VPN?”

“But you agree,” said Atiqah with a smile, “that a good Muslim is one who truly believes in the principle of what they are practicing and makes their best effort to avoid sin?”

“That isn’t a good Muslim,” replied Said. “That’s the best. A good Muslim just needs to fast, pray, and repent his sins.”

“I’m a good Muslim,” Azlan chimed in. “I married the first girl who I felt attracted to, so I never sinned.”

“You?” Aizah playfully swung a cushion at her brother. “Come on lah , how can you call yourself a good Muslim when you can’t even support your own kids?”

“I can,” protested Azlan. “Who pays for all the toys?”

“And who pays for all the food?” retorted Aizah.

“You do,” admitted Azlan. “But the amount Farah and I pay every month is just as much as you.”

That was true, too. Raising kids in middle-class Singapore was highly competitive and came with staggering costs. As the person who did the accounts in the family, Atiqah knew that Azlan and Farah’s monthly expenditure exceeded the total of everyone else’s.

If they hadn’t had children, Azlan and Farah might have been able to squeak by. But when private tuition bills would replace preschool fees after the boys started primary school, it would be a long time before they’d be able to contribute anything meaningful to the household at large.

“Brother, you’re not bad already,” Said reassured Azlan. “I couldn’t support my parents until I was 30.”

Men valued their support to the family in terms of the money they raked in, but what about the work Atiqah did to keep the house running? What was the value of that, when with no formal earnings (only a spending allowance from Aizah), its worth on paper was nothing?

As if he had read Atiqah’s thoughts, Said jumped in to defend her case.

“Actually, I think giving money is taking the easy way out,” he said. “We need to give more credit to the women who do the heavy lifting.” He raised his can of Coke Zero to Atiqah in a mock toast.

For too long, Atiqah had been accustomed to her contributions being overlooked because of their lack of monetary value. The men patted themselves on the back whenever they raked in a dollar (look at Azlan!) but the hard physical labour she did every day was taken for granted, even by her family who loved her.

Though Atiqah couldn’t fully agree with Said’s sense of patriarchy and could not believe in their having the same sort of piety, she was pleased with him for acknowledging her sacrifices for her family. Her conscience also admitted that while Said spent too much money chasing American culture, it was more than excusable in the light of the worldliness he needed to make it in business. At least, he saw the disconnect of compromising one’s faith to fit into Western Millennial culture as clearly as she did.

“Hey, women can be the breadwinners, too!” protested Aizah, giving Said a playful whack with the sofa cushion she’d been hugging. “Look at me!”

In retrospect, Atiqah would eventually see that this was the closest her sister had come to physically touching any man in her presence. But in that moment, she was too caught up in Said’s praise to realise it.

~~~⚽~~~

By the time the two families met to break their fast on Hari Raya Puasa, Said was nearly a fixture in Eusoff’s and Atiqah’s lives.

Not only had they seen him at a few more community activities, but he also dropped by regularly at their flat to watch TV. Because of his familiarity with Western pop culture, he was considered a firm friend of all the family members from her generation, including Farah.

Said was incredibly skilful at pleasing everybody. Azlan forgave Said for knowing nothing about video games because he generously streamed the Western TV shows they didn’t normally get to watch. Eusoff overlooked the permissiveness portrayed in those shows because, as an international businessman, Said had the right to be worldlier than them. And Said only needed to buy McDonald’s Happy Meals for the boys to turn Farah into putty.

Aizah continued to flirt subtly at Said, but Atiqah supposed that Said didn’t notice because she was hardly at home. In any case, Said was just as friendly to Aizah as he was to the rest of the family, but not more, and he didn’t flirt back.

For Hari Raya, Said and his parents had prepared a real spread. Or rather, most of the work had been done by Said’s mother Fatimah, which the men gave her due credit for.

There were several variations of curry: beef rendang and the vegetable curry sayur lodeh were staunch favourites. They had ketupat , which was rice cubes wrapped in woven coconut leaves, and stir-fried prawns in sambal sauce too.

Everything was laid out on the floor, where they ate sitting cross-legged. With the furniture moved aside to create a large eating space, Said’s spacious living room looked positively cavernous. The traditional patterned woven rug they spread out on the floor to sit on clashed with the bare stone industrial-chic flooring but gave it a splash of warmth.

Said’s pointed efforts to draw Atiqah out in conversation were painfully obvious. She wondered why he wished to single her out, when surely her sister would have more intelligent things to say. Being a university graduate, Aizah was so much more matched to Said in education than Atiqah felt herself to be.

“Did you watch Aksi Mat Yoyo when you a kid?” he asked. When the show hadn’t been called that since the 1990s, the question immediately underscored his age.

Atiqah didn’t remember which children’s programmes she’d watched. All her childhood memories were about football.

“Oh, you mean Mat Yoyo !” Aizah answered instead. “Yoyo and Yaya were so cute! Yah, I watched it in Malay and English.”

“Tell me more about Europe.” Lots of people had asked Atiqah that when she first returned, but by now that was old news. “How many countries did you visit when you were there?”

“Most of the time, I didn’t leave Spain,” said Atiqah. “I was a student, so I only travelled to compete.”

“Did you know Europe is my favourite? I go there at least once a year. Scenery, culture, history, all that cannot be beat!”

That had to be expensive again, another indication of the wide gulf between their habits and expectations.

“Oh, you did? I went Switzerland once,” said Aizah excitedly. “Geneva, for WTO (World Trade Organization) meetings. I had such bad jet lag, six o’ clock I wanted to sleep already!”

“Switzerland was interesting,” agreed Said, “but it’s so disciplined, I feel like I’m still in Singapore. Guess it means we got the Swiss standard of living! I prefer France or Italy, to rent a car and drive in the countryside.”

His lived experience of Europe was miles away from hers. Despite having lived for more than four years in Spain, Atiqah had never ventured outside the cities and had never seen snow.

“I really like the art,” said Atiqah, marvelling at her ability to speak of anything relating to that fateful summer with a considerable portion of apparent indifference and calmness . “Barcelona is so open and expressive… the opposite of Singapore, where everything is about efficiency.”

“You’re so extraordinary,” observed Said. “When you went there, you were so young. But you still knew how to appreciate the culture, without being overly influenced by it.”

To be so highly rated by a sensible man and held up thus as a model of female excellence , was a charm which Atiqah could not immediately resist . Said had hit upon the one thing she was immensely proud of and given her due appreciation for it.

“You know,” whispered Aizah, “he’s right. I think Said likes you.”

“No, lah !” denied Atiqah in a fierce whisper, though she felt her cheeks burning with embarrassment.

She hoped Said hadn’t overheard their exchange. No, he was engaged in a conversation with Azlan about Netflix’s Adolescence . That was another thing she couldn’t reconcile – how Said openly admired her virtue while gravitating towards all the “trending” Western TV shows that displayed highly toxic behaviour.

Could it be true that Said was interested in her? But if so, why didn’t she feel any warmth in the way he spoke to her? Was it that her feelings were still adverse to any man save one , or was it merely an availability bias? Because Atiqah was the sibling who always accompanied their father, Said saw her the most. It couldn’t be anything else, when they’d barely known each other for a month.

Or perhaps, the answer was simply that she was a panda.