If You Still Recognise Me by Cynthia So

Author:Cynthia So
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stripes Publishing
Published: 2022-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

I’m still not sure what to do, exactly – not about Uncle Kevin, not about Ada, not about anything – so, after lunch, I ask Joan to come over.

When she turns up, she waves a USB stick at me, and I blink at her, confused. “I have hundreds of episodes of Chinese dramas on here,” she says. “They’ll keep your po po entertained.”

Joan describes several different Chinese dramas to Po Po, and Po Po chooses one. Joan starts playing it on the TV, and then Joan and I retreat into the kitchen, and I try to make her some coffee.

“You look like you have no idea what you’re doing,” she says, bemused, as I fumble around with my dad’s cafetière.

“Uh, I totally do,” I say, looking up instructions on my phone.

She laughs, batting my shoulder aside with a spoon. “No, you really don’t. Let me do it.”

I watch her. I’ve seen my dad make coffee lots of times before, but I’ve never paid that much attention. I try to now but I can’t stop thinking about Uncle Kevin.

“Po Po brought up something about Uncle Kevin’s ex-wife today,” I say. “It sounds like she wishes that he never divorced her.”

“That’s not uncommon,” Joan says. “I know my dad’s parents were really upset with him when he and Mum got a divorce. They thought he was in the wrong and should have tried to save the marriage for my sake or something. And now they don’t like my dad that much or my stepmum. We see them a few times every year, but it’s always awkward, and my stepmum hates it.”

“But if it’s the divorce that’s the issue that can’t possibly explain it. The divorce happened before I even started going to primary school, I think. It was before you and I became friends. So it was, like, another … six years or so after the divorce that my family stopped going back to Hong Kong. Unless those two things are unrelated? Like my grandparents got angry at Uncle Kevin for one thing, and then my Mum got angry at my grandparents for something else?”

“I guess that could be it.”

“Po Po said my mum didn’t like Gung Gung very much.”

“Maybe he wasn’t a good dad? And at some point your mum just decided she’d had enough and didn’t want to deal with him any more?”

Joan pours the steaming coffee from the cafetière into a mug and I think of her alone in this city for the first few days after she fled her family trip in Scotland. “Yeah. Maybe. Po Po said he was a ‘hard man’, whatever that means. He was so nice to me… I hope he wasn’t really awful.”

“Maybe it would be better if you stop there,” Joan says. “He’s gone. You never knew him that well. You can keep it that way and let everything stay in the past.”

“But what about Po Po and Uncle Kevin? I still don’t know how to reply to Uncle Kevin’s text.”

“OK, let

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