Last night, we had our reunion dinner.
My third brother confronted my youngest brother, asked why the latter took weeks to respond to messages.
My youngest brother was unhappy to be rebuked and left the dinner before it began.
My eldest brother wanted me to placate my youngest brother but I refused. I thought he needed some time to cool down.
The tension was gelatinous - wobbly, soft, encompassing.
It encased and seeped into our pores, like malodourous oil films over barely flopping pelicans.
My youngest brother returned and we had a facsimile of a reunion, making small talk over a steaming pot of meat pieces, vegetable bits, whole baby abalone and seafood. Raw cold fish balls sank. Cooked ones bloat-floated.
After dinner, we continued to tidy up my parents' room. They are hoarders.
Seven threadbare mattresses all with stains and smells. Ragged covers and pillowcases sticky to the touch. Plastic bags flaking into pieces. Heaps of socks, clothes, undergarment. Dust bunnies breeding dust bunnies over books, bottles, clothes.
It was draining - more emotionally than physically - to tidy up this dirty stinky hellhole.
My third brother had to make two separate trips to a decently far place to get rid of a miscellany of broken bits, unused cables, unworn clothes, dirty blankets, squashed pillows. If these box cartons were simply deposited in the rubbish bins outside my place, my mother will search through everything and carry them back into that room.
This woman is responsible for these mess nests. She sees value in rubbish and could not bear to throw anything away lest they come in useful.
Once, I walked behind her along the street, watched her zigzag from rubbish bin to rubbish bin, looking for things to pick up and bring home. Neighbours visit the household to complain about her scavenging.
My aunts and uncles do not get along with her. Her tendencies to pick up thrash, to look into another's handbag, to have very low standards in whatever she does.
She from a different country, she eldest with five siblings, she childhood of scarcity, she adulthood of paucity. She with four sons raised in that room, each wearing increasingly tattered clothes.
She, a mother I cannot be proud of.
I try my best, I really do.
While walking with her out to the train station - she wanted to visit Chinatown, I wanted to head home after this unexpected cleaning session - she grabbed my arm for support and tried to help me with my hand carry items. Her loud totter, her unsteady gait. She could not neither walk fast nor long. Still, she tried to help.
Then the ranting began.
How to document her unhappiness that her husband does not support her, that my uncles and aunties are poisoning us with their observations and complaints, that we cleared her collected trove.
The breaking point was me saying that I would buy new mattresses for her.
She told me not to waste money, that she was happier when I was not around yesterday, that I shouldn't have returned.
Of her four sons, I was always blamed. I was not the first to initiate. I was not the only involved in clearing.
She intended to hurt and I allowed that comment to burrow through a tear in the skin, to pulse along blood vessels into the heart, muscular, thumping.
A few hours, while wondering how do to forgive all this, I stepped on a field mouse scurrying across the pebbled pathway. Against my slipper, it squeaked and squirmed, helpless but only for a brief moment.
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