At the end...it's all about love

Well...not my family but my very friendly a-yi (domestic helper) for the past year. This morning while I was surfing, she asked me if I noticed a red bump on the side of her nose. I thought she wanted to show me a huge zit and was waiting for her description of how it came about. What really came about was that the 'huge zit' was an outcome of a fight with her husband.

For the past few Saturdays we have known she was feeling down because she had found out that her husband had been having an affair. She had never spoken about it and we had thought inappropriate to ask. (For my non-chinese friends, there's a saying about never hanging your dirty linen in public = It may be an open secret, but noone speaks of it; you almost have to deal with it yourself or with your family). Coming back to her, I asked about her fight and kept silent to listen to her. It was like listening to a Hong Kong drama serial (to lucky, spoilt brats like me that come from loving families). Apparently the affair was just the tip of the iceberg of the whole drama. After splitting up with the girl (which was 18 years old and they met on the internet!!!), he returned to Shanghai with my ah-yi and has been playing mahjong all day long!!! Even his brother-in-law who had constantly asked him to go for a bricklayer's job had given up. Not only that, he had previously failed in his entrepreneurial activities and owed 50,000RMB (6,000 SGD) and according to village interest rates, it accumulates 1,000RMB each year that this wasn't paid - now the amount is about 70,000RMB. Imagine that! And throughout it all my ah-yi has stayed by his side, working her back off in Shanghai, away from their so.

In spite of pouring her woes (not explicitly about money), all my mind was boggled about was these mental calculations of what she might earn each month.On weekdays, assuming 2 households and 3 hours each for 10RMB per hour and weekends 3 households for the same amount of time; it would come up to less than 2000RMB a month! That's not including the 400RMB she needs to pay for housing. So little to work around and she still has to deal with the unfaithful husband's rubbish and unrepentant ways! So back to the fight....she had thrown all his clothes out of the window, but he calmly picked all of them up and came back to the door asking to be let in. She was standing there ready with a vegetable knife, ready stop to him from entrance into her life ever again. And like a drama, he closed his eyes, put forth his neck near her knife in silent defiance - take my life if you want. Knowing through their ten years of marriage she would never hurt him. Sly, sly sly! Ah-yi was at her wit's end when she asked me what she should do, divorce or not.

Repeating this constantly as her mantra as if to believe in it, "If he leaves right at this moment, maybe I will not be able to eat for a few days. After all, we have been husband and wife for over ten years, we have love between us. But if this drama carries on, I know I'll be unhappy. Being unhappy for a short time, is better than if this is a long drawn torture."

And as abruptly as she started to talk about 'zit' drama, she stopped and went about cleaning. Half an hour later and a phone call that sent her shouting over the phone, she returned and spoke in soft tones, "he's going to Hangzhou right now. I don't know what is he going to do there, I don't believe him, maybe he's going off with that girl again. You know all the time when he was in Ningbo (with that girl), he would call me everyday, ask me to take care of myself and to ask if I had eaten well. Even when we fight now, cook meals for me and wait for me to return to have dinner".

"I think I will be upset for awhile now that he's gone and not be able to eat for a few days. This is the better alternative." As optimistic as I knew she was, I don't think she was convinced of her words either. At that point, I knew it wasn't the fear of being burden by his debts after divorce or his gambling ways. The affair by her 'loving' husband had crushed her and with all the thin threads of love holding her life together she had been able to get through with little. But what now? All the happiness she knew with him is frayed and unraveled.