When I open my eyes, the wall clock already has its short hand pointing at ten. No rush to get up since it’s a Sunday. On Sundays, I am free, free from work, from family, from all entanglements of our modern society.

On Sundays, my husband leaves the house early to pick up his daughter and spends the day at his parents’. On Sundays, even our noisy cat would leave me alone. My husband always makes sure that the cat is fed and her tray is cleared before leaving.
Sundays always bring me mixed emotions. If I have an adequate dose of social interaction on weekdays, I will enjoy Sunday by rolling in bed and doing nothing in particular. But if I don’t have any reason to go out and exhaust my energy all week, Sunday magnifies my loneliness. I have no authentic way to describe my Sundays, but to borrow the words Murakami’s Toru used to describe his Sundays, waiting for Naoko’s reply: “quiet, peaceful, and lonely”.

On Sundays, I don’t wind my spring.

Still, I need to rise at some point. This Sunday isn’t one of my usual Sundays.

I reach for the phone and send Stephen a text: “See you at the café.” Then I spend another hour in bed, thinking of what to have for lunch. How grim it is, that such a first-world problem sometimes can weigh our spirit to the bottom of the sea.

We would have Japanese, and Stephen would order tofu salad again, if his schedule wasn’t too booked up to have lunch with me. That guy must have tried tofu salad at every Japanese restaurant he’s been to. For a non-vegan, heavy eater, his obsession with tofu is rather fascinating.

****

Eating alone has become less dreadful over the years. Yet, sometimes I’m still unable to conjure enough confidence to walk into a restaurant and occupy a table for myself. In situations like these, a café seems more suitable to dine alone and pretend to savour one’s solitude.

“May I have your name or initials, please?” the barista asks.

“L. Just L,” I say.

Later, I receive my cup of latte with a neat handwritten line that read “Great day, Elle!” and a smiley face scribbled on it.

Perhaps because of my poor diction, non-Vietnamese always get my name wrong. I don’t mind. There’s no special endearment tied to my name, nor does it carry any hidden wishes from my parents. For more than a decade overseas, I’ve settled with “Lynn”, or “Ling”, or whatever my name sounds like to the person I’m conversing with.
I didn’t think I would need an English name. Vietnamese is challenging for the tongue. But my toneless one-syllable name should be simple enough for anyone to pronounce. Or so I thought.

I never thought I would leave Hà Nội either. Yet, here I am, trying to take root in this foreign soil. While my Vietnamese friends have scattered everywhere like dandelion seeds, Stephen is the last of them who stays.

****

Stephen has changed significantly from the last time we met. He is much slimmer now, and less of a guy who doesn’t care about how he looks. Instead of his usual T-shirt, he’s wearing a gingham shirt this time. Stephen’s most recent blind date in Hà Nội must be the catalyst for all these changes.

“Just back from Hà Nội?” I ask in Vietnamese, too eager to wait for him to take a seat first.

“How do you know?”

“It’s still cold there, isn’t it? You need moisturiser,” I point to my lips, implying his chapped lips.

“I must look terrible.”

“Not at all, you’re glowing,” I grin. “Things are going well with that girl you met lately?”
“Exceptionally well,” Stephen grins even broader. “We’re getting married next month. I’m trying to lose some weight to fit in the tuxedo.”

“What? So fast? How long has it been again?”

“Less than a year. But you know what they say, it doesn’t take long when you meet the right one.”

“Right time, right place, right person, huh?” I force a smile, trying to recover from the shock. I’m sincerely happy for him. Right time, yes. Right person, maybe. But not very much in the right place if I have a say in this. “Any chance you could sponsor a Dependent’s Pass for her to come here?”

“She doesn’t like it here. Also, being a doctor, it’s troublesome for her to relocate. Meanwhile, I got a few interviews lined up in Hà Nội already.”

If only I wasn’t so self-centred, I could stay happy for Stephen, and we could continue talking about his wide-open future. But I can’t contain this desolation that is screaming in my mind. “Everyone has moved on, except me. I’m stuck here.”

“What are you talking about? You got what we were all chasing after – a golden ticket to stay.”

Before meeting his future wife, Stephen was applying for Permanent Residency (PR). For a Vietnamese who isn’t married to a Singapore citizen, getting PR is almost impossible nowadays. But it got me excited knowing that at least one of my friends was planning to stay for the long haul. “What’s the point of staying when you have no one left?” I mull it over.

“You got your husband.”

“Right! Me expecting him to learn Vietnamese is already overwhelming enough for him, let alone replacing all my friends.”

“This doesn’t mean the end of our friendship, right? We can still hang out when you visit home.”

“Of course, it’ll be just like the good old days,” I lie.

I know it all too well by now, that the good old days will never return. When people relocate, their lives refocus. Their priorities change, and their social circles refresh. Gradually but certainly, I will be out of their lives. Sure, we will meet again. And for a fleeting moment over some coffee table, we may fill each other with an illusion of reconnection. We may still call each other good friends. But when they hit rock bottom, I won’t be there to share the pain. And vice versa.

This meetup marks the beginning of the end. It’s the first time Stephen’s needed to rush out on me. He has a bunch of other people to bid farewell to before his flight tomorrow. Unlike me. Touch wood if I got divorced today, I could just pack up and leave on the same day. No one left in Singapore would need a farewell from me. Foolishly I thought, after marrying a local guy, I could finally be able to call this place home. But Stephen’s departure once again stirs up the bitterness I first tasted when Rachel left.

****

The image of a youthful Rachel never fades in my memory, even though motherhood has transformed her in many ways. The Rachel I met during a Vietnamese students’ gathering back in polytechnic was a social butterfly: pretty, witty, and exceptionally confident. Rach attracted almost every guy, which intimidated almost every girl. But it wasn’t hard to see through her imperfection. Rach herself was a mess, yet she never shied away from who she was. That courage to put her rawness on display, in my opinion, was exactly what made Rachel attractive. She contrasted me in every possible aspect. So naturally, we had not been friends.

Until Rachel happened to text me on that devastating afternoon when my first love had just ended. I held on to her like a lifeline. We went out for dinner so I could talk trash about my ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend. As mental health gained more awareness these days, many understood better the requirements of a great confidant – two listening ears with less than a mouth. But back then, Rach gave me the exact opposite, and that didn’t bother me. What mattered the most was that I didn’t have to be alone. Someone was there for me. Physically present.

By the time I got over my heartbreak, the bond with Rach had become liberating. For the first time since I moved overseas, I stopped questioning about belonging. We didn’t find home, but we’d found each other. What made Rach a homeless soul like me? I never truly knew. Maybe it was a few things we had in common: growing up in a dysfunctional family, being outlanders in this country. Or maybe, it was the way Rach used to live her life, bound to no solidified goal. Whatever it was, her companionship locked away all my regrets and self-doubts so that I could enjoy a taste of freedom.

Friday nights spent with Rach were always the highlight of my youth. We were both at our first job. Broke-ass. But invaluable memories of mine were usually crafted this way. We made it a tradition to meet after work, grab a drink from a convenience store, climb up on one side of the Read Bridge, and watch the vibrant nightlife playing out like a music video. People passing by. Water flowing under. A giant slingshot shooting for the stars. On some high-spirited nights, we even stood up, danced around and sang along to the surrounding music as if nobody was looking. Obviously, people were looking. But I wasn’t my usual timid self, because Rach’s confidence was spilling all over me.

When Rach left, the delusion of belonging was quickly shaken off my being. Once again, I was made aware that I was a foreigner, and I wasn’t home. Rach didn’t belong here. I didn’t belong here. To foreigners like us, staying or leaving wasn’t entirely up to our desire. Among the 1.7 million foreigners who lived in Singapore, only thirty thousand PR applications got approved each year. We all did the math. In most cases, this country had swallowed up our entire youth and spat out no leftover bones. After Rach, many more of my people had left, empty-handed, to find their future somewhere else.

****

I, on the contrary, never intended to, but always had a reason to stay. When I finished my diploma, there was a bond obligation to be served. When I lost my first job, there was a bachelor’s degree to be completed. And when I lost my community, well, there was T – a local guy who couldn’t leave his country – my husband.

At the Marina Barrage, lying barefoot on the grass, listening to colourful kites fluttering above our heads, I whispered to T that he was my anchor. And it remained true in many ways. I cherished this statement in every possible way, except the locale restriction of it. Every time we quarrelled, the temptation knocked violently on my impulse, instigating me to flee the country. Every time we fought, I pulled out my desperate bargaining card: “I stay here because of you, in return for what? A dead-end career and many Sundays being by myself. Why can’t you just give in to me over this little thing?”

But T didn’t fold his cards. “I’m sorry that we have to stay because I need to be here for my daughter,” he said. “But if staying here is such a sacrifice for you, I’ll never be able to match you, no matter how many little things I would give in to you.”

Every so often, when I reflected on the bigger picture, I found it ironic, almost like a distorted joke, the way my marriage mirrored my relationship with my mother. The way I lost my temper, the way I made demands, the way I argued, it was very much my mother’s way. Luckily, T wasn’t me. Guilt-tripping didn’t work on him. He was opinionated enough that he refused to join the cycle. He refused to let what I called sacrifices suffocate him into submission.

Eventually, I came to the realisation myself, that T could have easily won the argument if he had set out to compare sacrifices. While I battled through one day of the week, he was in a silent battle every night, not being able to tuck his daughter in bed. Hence, to be fair, the least I could do was to quit dumping my misery on my husband.

****

At this point, the only person I had regular meetups with, who seemed willing to listen to my problems, was my insurance guy. Though he preferred being called a financial advisor, I couldn’t bring myself to indulge him. We rarely talked about finance.
When I opened up about how dejected I felt, wondering if I could ever feel at home, he circled back to my husband. How frustrating! Was it so hopeless that an emotional state of mine could only be found in the hands of somebody else?

“You see, my wife used to carry the same feelings because of her estranged relationship with her family,” he explained. “So when I proposed to her, I promised that she would be a part of my family. And that support has brought her to a much better place now, I’d like to believe.”

“That’s nice.” Nice for his wife. Pretty much useless in my case, since I wasn’t welcomed by my in-laws, even before they knew of my existence.

I once harboured a similar expectation, that a caring in-law family would give me what my parents failed to provide. Nobody got to choose the family they were born into, but one could choose their in-laws, right? I used to see it as my second chance to be part of a functional family, where parents could show their kids what love looked like, siblings could be each other’s best friends, and everyone would see me for who I was, not a resemblance of the person they resented. Half consciously, I allowed this expectation to form a pattern in my dating history. Every boy I dated was extremely close to their family, a doting brother to their little brother/sister, a proud son who spoke of his parents with glowing admiration.

Little did I consider, such a family had their own standards to uphold, and I was never their chosen daughter-in-law. When they looked at me, they saw a family behind that was a little too complicated for their precious son. It was funny. Because the single trouble they knew about was that my parents got divorced.

They knew little to nothing about my father, who didn’t finish secondary school, used to be an alcoholic, a gambling addict, and had been in jail for an assault on my mother’s co-worker.

They knew a little more about my mother, who was a chief accountant of a foreign company, spoke a bit of English and Japanese, and had some commendable traits which were necessary to be a single mom. Nobody knew about her insecurities, her possessiveness, her manipulation. Nobody but me.

If they stopped at “her parents are divorced” and concluded that my family was too complicated, I supposed they were right.

****

Then T came along. It was tough for me to justify how I should feel, whether it was a consolation that his parental disapproval this time had nothing to do with my family. This time, it was his ex-wife who stood in my way.

“My parents have to maintain a good relationship with my ex so they can continue seeing their grandkid,” T gingerly explained why his parents didn’t want to acknowledge me. “They don’t want to do anything that seems like a betrayal to her.”

Alright, so this whole delicate situation might not be about me, or my family at all. Even then, it stung just the same. So long to the acceptance I’d been craving for.

If there was anyone who sought acceptance harder than me, it was my mother. Despite how much she adored T – she even called him the son she never had – my mother was against my marriage because, in her words, “it is socially unacceptable to marry someone without his parents’ blessings.”

We had a big fight over it, until I realised my mother’s reaction wasn’t solely about social acceptance. It was about the wounded pride of a mother who did her very best to raise a good daughter who yet wasn’t good enough to marry into another family. Though I’d stopped being upset with my mother, this comprehension didn’t make it any easier to call home and face her questions about when I would be meeting my in-laws. As a result, I drifted even further from my family, and nowhere close to T’s family.

****

For now, my single purpose on this Sunday is to rush back and serve our cat dinner in time. “Our cat” used to belong to T and his ex, a brown tabby with a bobtail named Miu Miu. The first time we met, Miu Miu was already an adult cat, as round as a chunky sausage, surely not the cutest cat I’d ever seen. But before I knew it, she found an expressway into my heart with her melodic rumbling purrs.

Although it wasn’t my choice to adopt her, she is my responsibility now. And Miu Miu, without any doubt, will purr with the loudest contentment to welcome me home, on a Sunday night.