Yvonne is constantly busy: managing the household, mothering her child, staying on top of her job. Perfection and control always seem too far away... Especially when it comes to Yati, the help, who doesn't make things better by being her daughter's favourite person at home. A portrayal of the complexities of motherhood in modern-day life in Singapore through an upperclass lens, and how it connects women across cultures, across class. Written in 2016 by Kirin Heng.

 Children these days... Yvonne stood in the middle of her daughter’s kindergarten playroom, staring at the four-year-old, whose mouth was open wide and emitting the most ear-piercing scream.

“Bel, Bel,” Yvonne heard herself saying. “Isabel. Shut up.”

But the screaming only intensified as Bel took a plastic container and dumped its contents, all four hundred grams of the expensive aglio-olio pasta Yvonne had ordered from her favourite Italian restaurant, like a splat of play dough on the ground. The olive oil and sauce seeped into the foamy carpet of the play area Bel had been playing on when Yvonne had come with an offering of pasta to make up for the fact that she had been absent the previous day during her daughter’s kindergarten’s Children’s Day celebrations. Yvonne looked around for the teacher, who was standing on the side assisting a little boy with his spelling, watching the drama out of the corner of her eye. She turned her head to acknowledge Yvonne’s gaze and smiled a little, shaking her head, as if to say kids these days.

Or she could have been meaning to say, what kind of mother does not know her daughter hates pasta? The kind who misses the second-best day of her daughter’s kindergarten life, obviously. Or perhaps, this woman does not know how to discipline her own daughter.

“Mam, mam,” she heard a voice behind her. She turned, in a haze, and nearly jumped when she saw her maid, Yati, there. In this chaos, she had forgotten she had taken her maid along for the errands she had been running that day. “Mam, Bel she... is not that she don’t like the pasta. She tell me yesterday that she upset you never come for the Children’s Day. Mam, she disappointed.”

Yvonne stared at the maid. How was it that, in the three months she had been in her employ, this short, thick and fierce-looking Indonesian maid was choosing this moment to do the most talking she had done so far? True, she was nothing like Yvonne’s previous maids, who had been emaciated and looked perpetually uncertain, an expression which Yvonne associated with their subservience. But those skinny maids had proven, once comfortable in their new working environment, to be too talkative. This was a trait which Yvonne associated with the weaker characteristics of her sex, and which she had little patience for. She experienced enough of her subordinates at work gossiping, and could not stand it in her own home. More than their love for empty chitchat, she could not stand the ultra-femininity of these maids: each of them had worn short skirts and pale pink lipstick on their days out. After each day’s work had been done, she would hole herself up in her room downstairs, and when Yvonne had gone to the toilet on the second floor, she could hear the maid’s laughter and voice pitched higher than usual.

These maids had obviously used this ultra-femininity to catch foreign workers from Bangladesh and India and Pakistan for lovers on their Sundays off. Even if they had husbands and children back home. She had fired every one of them once they revealed themselves to be this brand of maid, which was why she had requested that the next maid the agency sent her would be one who did not require days off. And one who was taciturn.

But here was Yati, standing there, assuming she understood Bel better than Yvonne herself did.

Yvonne shot a quick glance at the only other adult in the room, but the teacher did not seem to have heard what Yati had said. Yvonne cleared her throat.

“No, Yati, she is just being spoilt. I have spoilt this girl too much, given her whatever she wants, and still because she doesn’t feel like eating what I bought her, she throws a tantrum.” She said this loudly enough, for the benefit of Bel to hear.

“Bel, stand up!”

Her daughter refused to obey, glaring down at the pasta. “Bel! You will stand up now and clean up the mess you’ve made!”

When Yvonne stooped down and pinched the ample, soft flesh of her daughter’s upper arm, the little girl screeched louder than she had previously and stood up from the squatting position she had been sitting in. But instead of reaching for a tissue paper from the box next to her to clean up the mess, Bel ran to Yati the Bull. Her perpetual frown and fleshy body made for manual labour in her rural village back home had been what earned her the secret nickname from Yvonne and her husband.

Clinging onto a fleshy leg, Bel eked out, through the gap between Yati’s two knees, “I hate you!” Just then, the bell rang, cuing all the children to cease their quiet play-hour and rush to the door, into the arms of their waiting parents outside.

But Bel stayed put. She would not let go of Yati’s leg, and so the woman had to scoop the little girl, up into those strong fleshy arms, and carry her there. Yvonne walked a short distance behind them, past the stares of all the other mothers who were petting their own children. Once in the car park, it took both women even more pulling and tugging to lug Bel to the car and into her elevated safety seat.

On the drive back, everyone sat in silence. Soon, they reached home. Right after she was free of her seatbelt, Bel jumped out of the car and raced ahead of them into the house.

It was a beautiful bungalow, recently renovated to look like a Grecian temple from the outside, replete with concrete columns and a wide balcony. The ground floor consisted of a garage for three cars, and above it was a small swimming pool, which had cost them 200 thousand dollars to install. Plastic palm trees, bought from a boutique store that specialized in manufacturing authentic plastic plants, surrounded either side of the pool.

Behind the pool were sliding glass doors, with dreamy white curtains that fluttered on days when the wind was generous. The living room was interconnected with the kitchen, a westernized bar separating the two. With its marble countertops and metal finishes, the kitchen was state-of-the-art. The bedrooms were on the third floor: Bel’s room was next to her parents’ master bedroom, whilst the vacant room Yvonne’s late father had occupied was opposite it. Each had its own bathroom, with a large bathtub. The master bedroom’s had a Jacuzzi built into the floor.

The maid, and the maids before her, lived downstairs, in a little room behind the garage. She had her own little toilet, which also had a shower attached to its top, so that she was able to clean herself in that square. Her room had a small window and space for a bed and squashed beside it, a little cupboard to put her folded clothes, but little more. She was luckier than most, a fact which Yvonne had made sure to tell her at least twice when she had moved in, as they brought her suitcase and cardboard box into the room and squashed them beneath her bed. Other maids had a bad time working in Singapore: some slept on balconies and in toilets, on threadbare mattresses made of stacked thin blankets. Others ate nothing but rice and greens, and were given no meat.

Here, in this whitewashed house of shiny apparatus and bountiful food, Yati was allowed to live and not merely survive.

Once in the house, Yati set to work washing the plastic box that had been used to contain the pasta. Yvonne settled down on the balcony and picked up a copy of Time magazine. But the words did not mean much to her, and after a while of flipping, she turned her head to regard Yati. “Yati, come here.”

“Yes, Mam.”

Once the fleshy woman was in front of her, Yvonne eyed her even more closely.

“You happy, Yati?” she asked.

“Ya, Mam.”

“Hmm. Good. You got how many kids back home again?” She said all this very slowly, using the local dialect of English much more heavily than she usually did.

“Ah, Ma’am, got, three.”

“How old?”

“Five, seven and ten, mam.” “Oh... So all older than Bel, ah.” Yvonne received a grunt in return.

“What your husband working as?” she asked out of politeness, after she had realized she had never asked after him.

There was a long silence, before the maid spoke. “He dead, Mam.”

Oh. What should she say? Sorry? But sorry was a word of indulgence. Sorry invited intimacy and comfort.

“Oh,” she mouthed hollowly. She went back to the magazine on her silk lap, cuing Yati to go back to work. But again, her mind would not process the words, and instead turned to some recent memories, replaying over and over in her mind’s eye like a spoilt television. She shuddered and got up, brushing past Yati in the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water. “Yati,” she said. “I going up to my room, but I want a glass of wine. You bring it to my room, please? The red wine.”

She clambered up the stairs to her room, and closed the lacy curtains. Sinking into the plush king-sized bed she shared with her husband, she placed her arm over her eyes to shut out the sunset rays spilling into the room through the patterned holes in the curtains, and lifted it when Yati came, glass of wine dutifully in hand. She was watching all the while Yati silently placed the glass of wine on her bedside table and left. Then she placed her arm over her eyes again.

But after a few minutes, she lifted it and frowned at the ceiling.

Her mind was stuck on the memory of her father’s funeral a few weeks back. The event had been smooth enough: after holding onto life for almost ninety-four years, two more years than the doctor had prophesised, the old man had slipped away in his sleep.

The eulogies and obituary had already been taken care of. Out had come the contacts for the funeral director, the Protestant pastor, and crematorium manager, which had been on standby in Yvonne’s phonebook ever since her father’s third heart attack three years ago. Then had been more calls she’d had to make to the extended family and family friends.

But she had not prepared herself for the amount of socializing that was required of the main hostess of the funeral. Old acquaintances, young acquaintances, long-lost friends of her father’s she had never even met, collectors of her father’s paintings here to pay their respects, but who had really come out of curiosity to see what the old painter himself really looked like embalmed... But the worst were those close friends of her father’s, who must have had seen many more deaths in their long lives and yet were close to bawling at this funeral, and whom she did not know how to comfort. And it had not helped that her husband had taken a backseat role to this hosting responsibility: he had told her a few years prior to that, when his own mother had died, that he did not grieve well since “grieving was for women”. She had understood then, that his way of grieving was a passive silence, an internal reminiscing of what was lost. Yet tapping around on her heels all day, sweaty in her white blazer, taking care of people’s drinks and feelings, Yvonne had barely found any time to grieve herself.

It was only when she, with the whole collection of people, had stood behind the glass wall, watching the casket slide along the automated rail to the furnace in the crematorium, that she let a few tears slide down her face.

Behind her, she heard someone sobbing loudly. She turned to lay her watering eyes on Yati, whose face was already blotchy and eyes puffy. Free of Bel, who was in her father’s arms, the maid was using her big palms to swat tears away from her face as she wailed loudly.

Later, outside in the reception area, as people walked past her at the door to give their condolences again, a few had remarked upon this.

“Wah, it really show how much of a great man Grandpa Koh was, har? Even the maid who took care of him in his old age remembers him so much and misses him so much,” remarked a distant relative.

“Yati really cared for your dad. That was so moving!” exclaimed a subordinate from work, who was one of those ultra-feminines who gossiped in the coffee room whenever she had a chance to break.

Then an old friend of her father’s: “We all grieve in our own way, eh? Some quietly, and some in excesses.” This had been a parting remark, and towards the end of it, his wrinkly old eyes had twinkled towards the direction of Yati, in whose arms Bel was now cradled.

Now, as she laid down on her bed, considering them, the words began to take on another meaning. After another moment of contemplation, she started up.

She walked out into the hallway and stopped outside the door of her daughter’s room. The little girl was sitting cross-legged amidst a piles of toys, starting on a lego house, having built three walls out of different coloured bricks. “Bel-Bel,” Yvonne sang, sitting down beside her.

Bel looked up at her mother and turned her back on her, crossing her arms in silence. Her stubby little legs brushed pieces of lego aside as she moved, and she paid no attention to the colour-organized piles of lego she was disrupting.

“Bel Bel, why don’t you tell me what you are doing? What are you building?” The little girl said nothing, studying the wall in front of her.

Yvonne sighed.

At that moment, Yati came in with a tray that she placed at Bel’s feet. It was an afternoon snack of a small bowl containing strawberries and steamed rice, a combination Yvonne wrinkled her nose at. “Yati, what is this?”

“Mam, Bel she don’t like fruit. The only way she eat is if I put with rice.” “Oh.”

Yvonne stood up suddenly and returned to her room, remaining there until her husband came into the room. She was startled by the sound of the clinking of glass as he slid her forgotten glass of wine towards him and gulped it down in one go before setting it down with a knock that made Yvonne flinch. “Jesus. What a day. Mack doesn’t want to close the deal just yet. He says Morrison is being too demanding, but he doesn’t realize that if we don’t snap them up fast enough the past few weeks would have been for nothing. ”

“Honey,” Yvonne uttered, turning to him. “I’ve been thinking about something.”

“What?”

“I think we need to fire Yati.”

“What?! Why? She is a good maid, and certainly less troublesome than all the previous ones. Plus, Bel likes playing with her.”

“Yes, but... She’s too coarse and slow.” Yvonne sat up and did not look her husband in the eye. “When my friends are over and she’s serving us, she talks too loudly when she has to say something, like she’s retarded or something, and she fed Bel strawberries with rice today.”

After a moment of silence, her husband began to chuckle. “Listen, I don’t care much about what your silly bourgeois friends think, and I never bring my business partners back home for a meal, or bring my guys back here for a drink. So this issue you have to take care of. It’s your issue to take care of the domestics and household stuff, so it’s none of my business.”

Heat rose to Yvonne’s face, but she forced herself to laugh. “Yes, you’re right Jace.”

“Let’s go downstairs. Yati says dinner will be ready soon.”

Later that night, after having sat through a dinner during which Bel had spilt food all over the rug beneath the table, Yvonne made her way downstairs to the garage. Yati had finished washing and drying the dishes, and swept the kitchen floor, and was now holed up in her room, whose door was at the back of the garage.

Yvonne stood outside the door, frozen a little when she heard the sound of laughter through the door, and then a stream of rapid Bahasa. She had been wrong: this maid was not taciturn. Yvonne now realized that Yati was just inept in English, and that was probably why she hardly said a thing. With her limited knowledge of the language, Yvonne managed to decode the lines of Bahasa Yati was speaking; or rather, shouting, ostensibly to a phone.

“Mama misses you very much... Mama is working very hard to send you to school... Oh... I will come back soon.” Yvonne found herself wincing involuntarily. This certainly was a lie, because maids were only granted leave to go home after two years of working, and she was hardly in her third month of working for the Kohs.

Yvonne stood for quite a while outside the door, listening to Yati’s loud attempt to be soothing to each of her three children, over an apparently poor phone connection line. Then she dropped her hand away from the door, which she had been preparing to knock, and walked back up the stairs.