February 14, 2010
My dearest,
Today is the first day of the Chinese New Year. So I am back in my hometown, celebrating it with my family, reunion dinner and red packets and lunar cookies. Today is Valentine’s Day and so you are invited to dinner with your boss, a candlelit meal prepared by his girlfriend for three.
A few days earlier and we are braving the last minute rush to buy decorations for the new apartment. Chinese New Year is almost upon us and we have not gotten anything. Almond cookies and pineapple tarts? Check. Pussy willow and a beautiful vase to display it? Check. Festive songs? Download them MP3s. Check. Stuff to hang on the pussy willow and all over the place? We got plenty of angpows left over since we ain’t married and won’t be dishing them prosperity packets out anytime soon. They will do for decorations. Check.
Yesterday I drove home, a slow drive along the highway with countless other folks heading home for their reunion dinner. You stayed in KL and washed our clothes, hung them to dry, waited for the water filter installation guy to come over and get working. I went to the bank really late and tried to get fresh notes for my customary angpows for my parents, my sister and her kids. No luck. Got used ones. (Well, money is still money, right?) You made soup and noodles with canned abalone. I ate far too many of my niece’s legendary fried wontons.
We talk all the time, over the phone, over MSN. It’s the next best thing. I am in a Starbucks now, after the traditional vegetarian lunch on the first day, and you are telling me how you just bingo-ed again. (Online Scrabble addiction. It’s a terrible thing. Especially for the partners of them addicts.) You ask me where to buy wine for the dinner with your boss and his girlfriend tonight since Isetan is closed. We discuss taking him out for dinner tomorrow (since his lady is flying to Turkey) and maybe grabbing my best friend in tow (since her man is in Afghanistan). We think about our favourite seafood place. We fantasize about calamari fried in salted egg yolk and one-bone sticky spareribs and clams cooked in rice wine and stock and plenty of spicy cili padi.
We should try and reserve a table, we say. Do you wanna call, I ask you, or me? And you type a very quick “You lah.” and we both laugh, with LOLs on the screen and with real chest-thumping guffaws, in a Starbucks café, in the comforts of home. Our home.
It’s not the next best thing, this. I won’t settle for it. I’m driving back home to you, baby, and doing it soon. We will have our own reunion dinner cos I can’t imagine anyone else I’d rather be reuniting with. And while I don’t believe in Valentine’s Day — I don’t believe in roses or chocolates or smarmy greeting cards — I do believe in my Valentine, my baby, my better and more beautiful half, my joy and my bliss, my love, you.
Yours, ever and always.