I am writing this column on Mother’s Day and while mothers certainly do figure into the books I am reviewing, these books written by representatives of Pacific Rim ethnicities are all really about aunts instead. Many readers have not had exposure to such cultures where aunts have such a high status and direct influence, simply because in generations past there were very few female authors from those ethnic groups – and even fewer who would write about family dynamics. Frequently, any commentary on Asian families were written by Europeans who were on the outside looking in (often through very foggy lenses) and certainly not with any humor, unless it was pejorative! The young women writers I have read lately, however, not only openly discuss family dynamics, often with humor, but still very respectfully and clearly demonstrating love for family. They walk a fine line, and each author can be commended for her exceptional ability to strike a balance between understanding of tradition, and the need of so many women of today who have been brought to be submissive, to stand up and fight for love and respect.
Jesse Q. Sutanto is a perfect example of a writer who has had the influence of aunts all of her life and has been raised to be respectful and dutiful. Yet, Sutanto also spent her childhood shuttling from Indonesia to Singapore, and finally to England, and experienced enough different cultures make some interesting comparisons. She also has thirty aunts and uncles and forty-two first cousins – most of whom live quite close. She Really Knows Aunts! Thus, it is not surprising that her book is titled “Dial A for Aunties.”
This book has many dimensions. It is a book is about murder, but not really a mystery (we know who did it). It is a romantic comedy, but Meddy, our heroine, already lost the boy (happened in college and she still misses him). Primarily, it is a hilarious book about four very proper Chinese aunties, who must forget propriety when they have to go to great lengths to dump a body.
I hope you are already intrigued enough to read this laugh-out-loud book. Meddy, a devoted daughter and niece, studied photography in college; but after she graduated, got roped into joining her mom and meddling aunties in a wedding catering business. The business is going well, and their biggest contract yet is a 2,000-person wedding to be held on an island off the California coast. Weddings of this size among wealthy Chinese-Indonesian families are not that unusual by the way.
On the more personal front, however, we have Meddy getting a little long in the tooth by family standards (age about 25) to get married, and something Has. To. Be. Done. With the support of her sisters the aunties, her mom catfishes a rich “hunk” on a free internet dating site, sets up a blind date for Meddy, and tells her at the last minute all about it. Her mom and the aunts convince Meddy to go on this date with the rich guy (it would be very improper to cancel now), and that’s when things start to fall apart.
Meddy accidentally kills the blind date, panics, rolls the body into the trunk of her car, and drives home to mom and aunties asking for help. Of course they help! That’s what aunties do for their nieces.
Now we have a major wedding with 2,000 very rich guests, an inconvenient corpse in a portable cooler mistakenly transported to the island with the wedding cake, a hysterical bride, one creepy groom, and over one million dollars’ worth of wedding gifts. What could possibly go wrong? Yuppers – everything! Trust me, the antics of these aunties are well worth the read.
For more aunties we move to Mia P. Manansala, another delightful writer, who has penned “Arsenic and Adobo,” the first book in her Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery Series. Lila Macapagal, niece of Tita Rosie, is our heroine, and Oh my gulay! (Tagalong slang). We start out right away with a food critic, eating at Tita’s restaurant, face planting into his ginataang bilo-bilo. Yes, poison. The food critic’s stepfather accuses Tita Rosie of the murder, and then the detective in charge finds drugs in Lila’s locker at the restaurant.
Things quickly go downhill. Lila is arrested for drug trafficking, the restaurant is temporarily closed which threatens the entire family’s survival, and in desperation Lila and her best friend Adeena begin to investigate what really happened. Luckily, Lila’s aunties (called the Calendar Crew due to their names: April, Mae, June) come to the rescue. Of course, they are matchmaking, interfering, judgmental, and highly opinionated. Fortunately, they are also very nosy, have their fingers on the pulse of every neighborhood in the county, and come to the rescue. That’s what aunties are for.
Money is certainly an issue for both Lila and Meddy. Not so for Andrea Tang. She is the heroine of Lauren Ho’s fun read “The Last Tang Standing.” The meaning in this instance is that Andrea is on her way to becoming the last one in her generation to not be married. Everyone in her Chinese-Malaysian family is about to lose face on that one. Andrea is thirty-three, an attorney, living is a fancy condo in Singapore, and about to be made partner in the law firm.
Yet, those aunties of hers will not rest until her destiny is fulfilled, which in their eyes is being married to Mr. Right, Rich, and Handsome. Andrea is beaten down enough to give dating another chance and agrees to give Eric Deng, an auntie-approved date, a chance.
Written partly in the form of a diary, Andrea does try to do the right, submissive, expected thing. Love, however, has a way of upending all the expected things in life, and our heroine makes one disastrous mistake after another. Of course it will work out – this spoiler alert doesn’t count – because it’s in the writing itself that we gain insight into the Chinese-Malaysian culture, follow the transformation from past expectations to modern realities, and celebrate what the younger generation has become.
What also comes from all three books is Ho, Sutanto, and Manansala showing their writing chops by taking the very serious topic of traditional subservient female devotion to family, treating it with humor yet respect, and successfully juxtaposing it against a universal desire of women to find love and personal happiness.