Aunty Lee's Delights (28 page)

Reading Group Guide

1. When her wealthy husband died, Rosie Lee could have settled for life as a Tai-Tai: “wearing designer clothes and going for manicures and overseas holidays.” Why do you think she decided to open Aunty Lee’s Delights instead?

2. How would you describe Aunty Lee’s relationship with her stepson, Mark, and his wife, Selina? What’s her motive for keeping them close? And what is theirs for staying close?

3. “To Aunty Lee, comfort meant being dressed for the job. It was obvious to her that getting the upper hand in an interview with a police officer required a different outfit from supervising the cleaning of bean sprouts.” What do you think of Aunty Lee’s deliberate change of clothing? Do we tend to change how we present ourselves depending on who we’re dealing with?

4. How women dress is frequently commented upon in
Aunty Lee’s Delights
, from Aunty Lee’s changes of clothing to Selina’s belief that “how women talked, dressed, and behaved was to blame for unwanted male attention” to Frank Cunningham’s proclamation that “short-haired women in pants . . . it’s just not right.” How do these views reveal things about the characters who hold them? How do the different women in the novel—Selina, Carla, and Nina, for example—deal with expectations about how they should look and behave?

5. When Aunty Lee goes to visit SSS Salim at his office, she makes sure to take along an assortment of her best snacks, which are so delicious that the previously wary Salim “looked across at Aunty Lee with something like devotion in his eyes.” Give other examples of Aunty Lee using her culinary powers to influence people. Is there a special food guaranteed to earn your devotion?

6. Aunty Lee says that she is personally invested in finding Laura and Marianne’s killer because “The two girls who died both came to eat in my restaurant. If they ate my cooking, they are my guests and they are my family.” Later she tells Carla, “I feel responsible for the people I feed. Once my food has gone into them and become part of them and their lives, I become part of their lives.” Do you believe her? Are there other reasons for her sleuthing?

7. The characters in
Aunty Lee’s Delights
come from the many ethnic communities who live in Singapore, including Indian, Australian, Filipino, and Peranakan (people of mixed Malay and Chinese descent like Aunty Lee and the novel’s author, Ovidia Yu). Do the characters still fit into a kind of social hierarchy, or are they all treated equally in Singaporean culture? Can you detect positives and negatives about this mix of ethnicities?

8. Aunty Lee reflects that “People ought to go through the ideas they carried around in their heads regularly as they turned out their store cupboards. No matter how wisely you shopped, there would be things in the depths that were past their expiration dates or gone damp and moldy—or that had been picked up on impulse and were no longer relevant. Aunty Lee believed everything inside a head or cupboard could affect everything else in it by going bad, or just taking up more space than it was worth.” Which characters have ideas that might need to be updated or discarded? Which have a few bad ideas that might be spoiling everything else in their lives?

9. Rosie Lee’s late husband, M. L. Lee, described her as “
em zhai se
—not afraid to die,” which describes how “Aunty Lee drove everyone around her through frustration to despair as she pursued some triviality that no one else could see any point in.” What do you make of this description of Aunty Lee? By the end of the novel, how has her
em zhai se
personality made a difference?

Also by Ovidia Yu

F
ICTION

The Mouse Marathon

Miss Moorthy Investigates

C
HILDREN
’
S
B
OOKS

The Mudskipper

P
LAY
C
OLLECTIONS

Eight Plays

S
HORT
S
TORY
C
OLLECTIONS

Mistress and Other Creative Takeoffs,

with Desmond Sim and Kwuan Loh

N
ONFICTION

Guiding in Singapore:

A Chronology of Guide Events 1917 to 1990

Credits

Cover design and photograph by Laura Klynstra

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

AUNTY
LEE
’
S
DELIGHTS
. Copyright © 2013 by Ovidia Yu. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST
EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-222715-7

EPub Edition SEPTEMBER 2013 ISBN 9780062227164

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