Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto
Dear Reader,
Thank you so much for picking up Dial A for Aunties. This book is a love letter to my family—a ridiculously large bunch with a long history of immigration. All four of my grandparents came from China to Indonesia between 1920 and 1930, and when they arrived in Indonesia, they changed their Chinese names to Indonesian ones to avoid xenophobia. Chen became Sutanto. Ho became Wijaya. As they fully integrated themselves into Indonesian culture, so too did their offspring. My parents grew up speaking Bahasa Indonesia as a first language and Mandarin as a second language.
With my generation, my parents sent us to Singapore to avoid the nineties riots—clashes in Indonesia against the Chinese population. Fortunately, now Indonesia is a wonderfully diverse country in terms of race and religion, and we are afforded the kind of freedom our parents didn’t have. While in Singapore, my cousins and I quickly adopted English as our first language. Some of us （cough, cough, me） forgot how to speak Indonesian almost entirely. Whenever my parents visited, we struggled to communicate with each other.
The result of all this moving around is a mish-mash of languages. My family is technically trilingual, but each of the three languages we speak is broken in some way. I’m most comfortable in English, then Mandarin because I spent ten years studying it in Singapore, and then Indonesian. My parents are fluent in Indonesian and Mandarin, and speak halting, broken English. When we speak to each other, the sentences are jagged and cracked, and we often struggle to convey what we’re trying to say. This is the price my parents have had to pay to ensure that my brother and I were safe and sound.
Some of the aunties in Dial A for Aunties speak the sort of broken English that my parents’ generation does. Their grasp of the English language is not a reflection of their intelligence, but a reflection of the sacrifice that they have made for us. They are, in essence, trilingual, and I am so proud of this heritage. I’m aware while writing this that I’m straddling a very fine line between authenticity and stereotype, and it’s my hope that this book defies the latter. It is by no means representative of the Asian community as a whole; no single book can possibly represent such a large community of individuals.
I hope that this book gives you a little peek into the fierce love with which my family raised us and protects us to this day.
Best,
Jesse
Prologue
Eight Years Ago
There is a curse in my family. It’s followed us all the way from China, where it took my great-grandfather （freak accident on the farm that involved a pregnant sow and an unfortunately placed rake）， to Indonesia, where it claimed my grandfather （a stroke at the age of thirty, nothing quite so dramatic as great-grandfather’s demise but still rather upsetting）。 My mom and aunts figured that a Chinese curse wouldn’t follow them to the West, so after they all got married, they moved to San Gabriel, California. But not only did the curse find them, it mutated. Instead of killing the men in my family, it made them leave, which is so much worse. At least Yeye died loving my Nainai. The first one who left was Big Uncle. Then Second Uncle, and then—then it was my dad, who left without a word in the dead of night. Just up and disappeared, like a ghost. I woke up one morning, asked where he was, and Ma slapped down a bowl of congee and said, “Eat.” That was when I knew the curse had claimed him. When my male cousins graduated, they left too, opting for schools like NYU and Penn State instead of any of the perfectly fine colleges in California.
“Ah, Nat, you sooo lucky,” Big Aunt says, the day my mom announces that I’ve applied to eight schools, all of them in California. The farthest one is Berkeley, and we’ve had countless arguments over that. Ma thinks anything farther than UC Irvine is too far; she won’t be able to drop by randomly and clean my dorm and nag at my roommate to go to sleep early and drink lots of water. Big Aunt’s son, Hendra, is at Boston College and ignores 99.999 percent of her calls. The other 0.001 percent is when he runs out of money and has to ask her for more.
“Oh, so lucky,” Second Aunt says, patting her chest and smiling sadly, probably thinking of my cousin Nikky in Philly, who never calls and only comes back once a year. Her other son, Axel, is in New York. I last saw him two years ago, when he moved out. Finally, he’d said. When it’s your turn, Meddy, fly far and don’t look back. “Daughters never leave you. Girl is such blessing,” Second Aunt says. She reaches out and pinches my cheek.
Fourth Aunt grunts and continues shelling roasted, salted pumpkin seeds. Ma is her biggest nemesis, and she’d rather choke on a pumpkin seed than agree that Ma’s the lucky one out of all of them. But when Ma isn’t looking, she glances over at me and gives me a wink. I’m proud of you, kid.