Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle

Neither Here, Nor There

Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle

Here again on a Singapore stopover, I am more tourist than at home. I can order at the nearest Kopi Tiam with ease and my train card has credit from the last visit, as I reside in my third culture.

Expatriate life in South East Asia affords me and my siblings a close proximity to my mother’s family on Singapore Island. Our bevy of aunties and uncles rejoice in simultaneously indulging and chastising their nieces and nephew in curt sentences ending with ‘lah’ or ‘lor’.

A Caucasian father and a lack of fluency in Hokkien or Cantonese, affords me enough cultural disconnect to flit around the more demanding Chinese-family expectations over manners, money and sensibilities. Instead, I casually revel in shopping stopovers fuelled by loud banquet dinners and late-night family excursions to East Coast Park Maccas. I do not stay long enough to suffocate from their apartment-living or strain under the gaze of Big Brother or a higher spiritual calling.

She greets me with the usual ‘Why you no call me?’ her voice moving up an octave as if she is practising karaoke. I am yet to realise that

‘call me’ does not refer to making a telephone call; where my Singlish is lacking my ingrained compliance learns to imitate, so I respond with a customary, ‘Hello Auntie’.

Her eyes narrow in confusion that I appear alone and I’m not sure I can tell her about an unplanned overlap in boyfriends that arose during this Europe trip, or that I am yet to sort it out. But she takes to my skirting of the topic like she’s seen a headline on a broadsheet.

‘Ahyor’ she exclaims in a long drawl, rolling her eyes and slowly turning her head away for dramatic effect. ‘More boyfriend? Why so many boyfriend meh? Wahlau!’. She throws her arms up and stamps her foot hard to the ground. Her five-foot barely nothing frame is clothed in fashion seasoned for life on the equator; a buttoned crop top, white hotpants, platform stilettos with ankle straps and permed black hair pinned high.

‘Come. Come. We must pray for you. Fai tee lah!’ she says, beckoning with both hands. Her few words and decisive movements point out all my shortcomings; that I will become the black sheep of the family, that the world must wait while we pray for my soul, and that she would stop at nothing to keep me safe and loved. I follow as she turns away from the hotel and into the crowded street.

We turn the corner to front the ornate architecture of Si Ma Lu Guanyin Tang Temple, an 1884 Taoist sanctuary dedicated to Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy. Here she pauses, presses her palms together, raises them to her forehead and bows three times. My imitation is a lopsided single bow, the corner of my eyes still watching her. I don’t know how to blend in here, so my efforts default to observance and obedience.

Joss sticks are thrust into my hand and I follow her steps over the threshold, under the intricate archway and into the courtyard guarded by dragon statues and an abundance of gold-leaf. We are in a sea of worshippers, whose devotion is embodied in vessels full of ash where candles and incense sticks burn, smoke and shorten. The sandalwood fumes distort my vision as incense is continually placed into the central censer, a giant ornate metal bowl filled to the brim with layers upon layers of ash from prayers gone before.

I had come to expect my everyday actions, or inactions, would forever give my aunties excuse for concern; they seemed to enjoy any reason to dispense a sharp yet gentle mocking. However in here, I am embraced and protected in holy refuge. I am engrossed in her ritual,

leaving the all-knowing reclining buddhas, gods and goddesses to become vivid only upon later reflection.

The three burning sticks in her raised palms bob up and down in front of her while she mutters softly at an altar. Smoke curls as her movements fan the smouldering sticks and hasten the ash to crumble. Her eyes remain shut, yet her focus is entirely on me, as if she holds all that will become of me in her hands and in her determined prayer.

I raise my palms and incense to make a comparatively vague appeal to the higher forces witnessing us.

We deposit the remainder of our sticks, make our final bows and return outside to the humid streets heading for the air-conditioned shopping mall.

Months later, I become engaged in Singapore the same week her husband dies. Outside the temple, I pray for her union that ended abruptly and for the one her prayers had provided for me. She had lived with him in their three-bedroom government flat, yet they never seemed to share a bedroom, nor did we ever see any wedding photographs. Over time, we saw him less as he busied himself in business while she began to bring her boyfriend to quieter family dinners, where to talk to him would be to lose face.

She sets the groom’s challenge for our wedding tea ceremony – sing a love song by Andy Lau or be refused entry to my parent’s house, north of the river. The Karaoke Queen’s slender neck sharply juts out of her stiff-collared silk cheongsam and relaxes into a resigned sigh when a tone-deaf groom fails to recall a single Canto-Pop note.

‘Why like that lor? Ang moh ah you!’ she says with wagging finger in exaggerated disappointment. In eight inflected syllables she tells him he is just another Caucasian who cannot sing karaoke, my parents failed in their responsibility to ensure I marry well, perhaps it was she who mixed up my boyfriends in her temple prayers and finally, assures him that she is his auntie too.

Soon after, the shadow of her illness grows as large as her defiance of it. She returns to the ancestral homeland of Malaysia to drink concoctions from healers, in avoidance of Western medicine and unbecoming hospital gowns. In three short years, thyroid cancer takes her voice then her life.

Her altar is set at the end of her raised coffin presenting food offerings, lamps, candles and incense. A chair as the centrepiece is

Book of Kuan-yin (installation view), 2002, inkjet print, ink, synthetic polymer paint on Chinese accordion book, courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne. Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, John Curtin Gallery, 2022. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.

draped with her traditional black dress and shoes placed at the feet, while a framed glamour portrait rests at its head. Silk screens and flowers form a wide marquee around her gold painted wooden casket adorned with lotus flowers, leaving room for the monks to circle it during final night prayers. The rest of the apartment building’s openair ground floor is filled with collapsible round dining tables set with handkerchiefs and mini tissue packets for the daily stream of visitors. Like a hawker food centre, a chef with a wok serves lunch and dinner over the five days her embalmed body lies in wake. On the last day, monks commence a procession to the crematorium.

Within hours her remains are handed over to family in a plastic storage box, ready for the final act at a Monastery on Bright Hill. There, a columbarium assistant unfolds a red cloth and gently lies each calcified fragment of bone on the table while family observe curiously. He talks about each body part they belong to, while my uncles whisper

an English translation just for me. Larger pieces are examined and placed side by side, while smaller flakes and shards are assigned to piles of likeness.

One-by-one each family member follows an unspoken hierarchy to take their turn selecting fragments to reassemble inside a large white ceramic urn. I watch and wait until all aunties and uncles are finished and am surprised to see recognisable pieces of bone waiting for me. I pick up a long femur or fibula and add it to the neat stack inside the vessel. They encourage me to select more, so I add a few vertebrae then step back for her boyfriend to have his turn.

As the urn fills to the brim with her reconstructed frame, I feel the small room swell with omnipresence. We have scrutinised her embodiment piece by piece, yet she has departed to the next life and is not here with us. I recognise her state of in-between and wonder if my deeper knowing can only come from a feeling of home.

Author’s note Lee’s reflections on her acceptance and reclamation of her Chinese Australian heritage mirror the transitions I have made with my own mixed race. Upon seeing the title of her work, Auntie (2008), thoughts surfaced of one of my Singaporean aunties who seamlessly imparted her confidence and self-assurance every time we met. In hindsight she rebuffed my self-preserving denial of my Chinese roots and relationships by excluding explanations or translations. It was decades before I worked out ‘call me’ equated to ‘say my name’, making a ‘hello’ incomplete without the full ‘Ni Hao, Auntie’. Just like the ageless carbon copies in Auntie, mine will stay forever young.

Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle is a third culture kid who grew up in Kuwait, England and Indonesia. She is a photographer and writer who works in communications with John Curtin Gallery. She is an advocate for inclusion in the arts sector and sits on the board of the National Association for Visual Arts, is an Arts Advisory Committee member with the City of Vincent and is a co-founder of the arts jobs network Creative Collab.

[Top] Traversing the Blue (detail), 2007, photocopy, acrylic, oil and wax on board, courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore. Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, John Curtin Gallery, 2022; [bottom] Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, 2022, installation view, John Curtin Gallery, (left to right) Traversing the Blue, 2007, photocopy, acrylic, oil and wax on board; Fire painting, 2008, acrylic and wax on aluminium boards; both courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.