What She Knew
In December 1997, I called her from the parking lot of the University of Southwestern Louisiana cafeteria. The Honda Prelude was running for heat. I told her one-point-oh. Just the number. She said, you’re still in the game.
She was the only person on either side of the Pacific who knew. My parents did not know. Her parents did not know. Her mother, who had grown up Cantonese and had taught her daughter how to read people, did not know. The boy who had been scrubbing eggs at five in the morning in the cafeteria, who had spent the night before performing with fire at Peking Garden, who was about to be told by Dr. Massiha that industrial technology was a place where the ninety-nine percent could be built — that boy had been edited for every audience except hers.
She had the unedited version. She made her choice with the data nobody else had.
In the winter of 1997, she was in an apartment in SS15, Subang Jaya, finishing her accounting coursework before transferring to Perth for her final year. She had been the girl from the apartment upstairs from the one I had lived in two years earlier, at Inti College, when we were both nineteen and both following the migration of Malaysian Chinese students through American degree programs into universities our parents could pronounce only with effort.
She is from Kuantan, the beach town on the east coast, where the seafood is still what she talks about thirty years later when something on a menu in Lafayette reminds her of home. Her father, an easier read than her mother, supported the accounting trajectory and the move to Perth and whatever came after Perth, which had not yet been determined. Her mother spoke Cantonese to her at home and taught her one thing above all the others, the rule she had absorbed from her own mother and her mother before that. Manners ahead of everything else. How you treat people matters more than what you achieve.
During the phone calls that winter, when I was failing visibly to her and invisibly to everyone else, she would say, try your best. She would say, you didn’t come all this way to fail. She would say these things in the same voice she had brought with her to college, as if Subang Jaya had not yet remade her into anything else.
She had a path that did not require me. Perth, and then probably Australia for the years after that, and eventually whatever an accounting career builds. A career her mother understood, a trajectory her family could see clearly. There was no Lafayette in her future yet. The Lafayette that came later was a Lafayette she chose into, not a Lafayette she inherited.
In December 1997, when I told her one-point-oh, she could have used what her mother had taught her about reading people and walked. Her family would have understood. There was nothing to hold her. She said, you’re still in the game. She kept saying it for the next two and a half years until I graduated.
The first house we lived in together was on Sunny Lane; it was a 2,200 square foot mid-century in Lafayette that I had bought in 2001 at twenty-three, on OPT status, technically temporary in every legal sense. The house came with a bedroom for my brother Nick, who arrived from Malaysia in 2003, and a bedroom for whatever came next. For the years before whatever came next, it was just the two of us.
We bought two foldable trays. We ate dinner on them in front of the television. We did this most nights for years. The dining table existed, but the trays were better. They were small enough to fit on the couch in front of us, and the couch was small enough that we sat next to each other rather than across. We watched whatever was on. We talked. We did not have a strategy for our marriage. We had foldable trays.
This was before the architecture. Before the warehouses in Broussard, before the Springwood Circle house with the cathedral ceiling, before the Houston house I built while she was pregnant, before the Parc Gardens units, before the Chevron contracts. Before there were ten properties for the mortgages to service. The marriage that existed in front of the television set, on those folding trays, was the marriage I have spent the last twenty-five years trying to get back to.
She was not yet the eldest daughter-in-law of a Lau family that would expect her to absorb everything I could not carry. She was a woman in her twenties eating dinner with her husband on a foldable tray in a small house in Louisiana that nobody in either of our families could quite picture.
In late July 2025, a CT scan I had been waiting on was posted to my patient portal a few days before the urologist would see it. I read the imaging report first, the way patients now do, and I told my wife what it said before any doctor had said anything. She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, let’s see what the doctor says, and let’s hope it’s not cancer.
A few days later, Dr. Chassaignac called with the diagnosis and the next steps. About a month after that, the in-person consult laid out what kind of cancer and what kind of treatment. When the urologist gave us the staging, my wife was teary-eyed, but she did not cry uncontrollably. That is not who she is. She is a strong person inside, strong enough to arrive at a doctor’s office prepared for whatever the doctor is about to say.
The four-million-dollar policy I had bought years ago, that she had once told me she would rather stay poor than collect on, would now do exactly what I had bought it to do. The thing she had protested would become the thing that protects our son. She did not say this in the urologist’s office, and she has not said it since. She does not need to.
She does not let me cook in the kitchen. She has told me, more than once, that I make a big mess when I cook. The kitchen is hers. Which is to say, the food is hers, the territory the food comes out of is hers, and the small economies of what gets cooked, what gets eaten, how a meal is built, and where the leftovers go are hers.
Her best dish, in my opinion, is spaghetti cooked in a mushroom sauce with asparagus and bacon. I have asked her where the recipe comes from, but she has not told me. On the nights she is making it, I can smell the bacon and the mushroom sauce before I cross the threshold from the garage to the kitchen, the aroma reaching me first, the way her cooking has reached me first for thirty years. Her plain spicy spaghetti is my second favorite. There are other dishes too. They are hers.
I have come to know her as someone who would let me have the last piece of chicken even if she was hungry. Not because the gesture is large. Because the gesture is small, and small things are the fabric of a marriage that has lasted twenty years across one ocean, through one cancer diagnosis, and around the architecture of mortgages I built and am now letting fall.
In December 1997, she had every reason to walk. Her mother had taught her how to read people. Her path did not require me. The data she had, the only complete data set on either side of the Pacific, was bad. She said, you’re still in the game, which was a kindness her mother had taught her without knowing, in 1997, exactly how that kindness would be spent.
She has been spending it ever since. Daily. In small kindnesses I am only now learning to see. The piece of chicken is one of them. The foldable trays were one. The let’s see what the doctor says was one. The kitchen she will not let me into is one.
She knew. She has always known. I am the one catching up.
Until next week,
Eddie