Old Cucumber Soup by Wu Xueting
A thirty-year-old woman struggles with self-doubt and living on her own for the first time.
First published in Pandan Weekly in January 2025.
From the author:
This story was inspired by my own anxieties about change and messing up. I’ve always been an indecisive person, and as I grow older, there have been more and more life-changing decisions that I struggle with. How do I ever stop second-guessing myself? How can I find my own path rather than be led by external pressures and regret? These are some of the questions I wanted to explore in myself through this story.
I’m very grateful for the comments and suggestions from my groupmates at the September workshop of SEA Lit Circle. They not only gave me constructive feedback on plot holes and enhancing the impact of the story, but also helped me gain a deeper understanding of the story myself!
Listen to the author read an excerpt of the piece:
After the last of the trucks have left, I shut the door to my room and roll the words around in my mouth like a ball of hard candy. I’ve moved out.
What was, for two months and sixteen days, a stumbling process of Googling, number crunching, house viewing, and furniture shopping, has come to an end. There are no more calls to the bank to make, no more books to pack. There is no next step. Only anything and everything that lies ahead of me.
A wave of nausea rolls through me. Just as I reach the door wanting to get some air, it swings open from the outside.
My mother has her bag hooked on her shoulder. “If everything is all right, we’ll get going now.”
Behind her, my father gives me a big thumbs up. “Don’t miss us too much,” he says with a chuckle. “But if you ever do, you can come back anytime.”
“Anytime within a month,” my mother says. “One month and I’m moving my rice cake containers into your room.”
The thought of the room I had lived in for all thirty years of my life becoming storage for my mother’s home business makes me feel sick again. Her tone is light, but her eyes, locked onto mine, say what she really means: Don’t you think of coming back.
I walk them to the front door, where we are joined by Auntie Bee and Uncle Kean, the middle-aged couple who’s letting out the room in their apartment to me. Auntie Bee promises to make sure that I eat well, and my parents thank her in a way that makes me wonder what else they talked about me when I wasn’t around. At the lift lobby, my parents turn around. They smile at me wordlessly, and I’m seized by an urge to ask them not to leave. Wait, I want to say, maybe I’m not ready yet.
But the lift is here. “Remember to take your vitamins,” my mother says. And then they’re gone.
Feeling Auntie Bee’s and Uncle Kean’s eyes on me, I swallow the nausea that rose in my throat again. When I catch Auntie Bee’s eye, she flashes me a reassuring smile. They seem to have an impression that I am emotionally fragile, which isn’t completely unfounded given the way I burst into tears the day we met. What must have run through their heads to see a fully grown woman of thirty break into sobs at their perfectly innocent question about whether I was dating anyone, which made them rush to change the subject to my job, only for me to dissolve into a bigger, blubbering mess. That they still ended up letting the room to me is a miracle I do not dare question.
I really struck gold with this place. The area is quiet, and a gentle breeze blows in through the window in my room. Still, I pass my first night here tossing and turning, and stumble out of the apartment the next day with my head in such a fog that I get on the wrong bus and arrive late at the office.
Farah, my manager, strides over to my desk, sweat dotting her brows despite the air-conditioned office. She cuts off my apologies for my lateness, and tells me about an investor that she’s meeting in about two hours. It was only just arranged, and she knows it’s extremely last minute, but could I prepare her presentation for the meeting right now?
I do a quick yet thorough search online about the investor’s profile, then pull up the template we always use for presentations, and make the necessary edits to adapt it for the investor. An hour and ten minutes after we spoke, I send the file to Farah. She replies within seconds: Amazing!! I knew I could count on you, Wan Jing.
There isn’t much left of the morning. I make myself a cup of coffee, and settle into the Monday flow of answering emails and updating the team’s calendars. I don’t look up from the screen until Jamie and Neha, two other assistants, come over and tell me it’s noon. We head to the food court downstairs, where I get chicken rice from the stall whose auntie knows my order—steamed, with one egg, no coriander—and we catch up on things that happened over the weekend. We carry on talking long after our plates are scraped clean, until Jamie points out that it’s been an hour, and we shuffle back to the office, back to the emails and reports that suck me into a world of their own until the sun sets.
It’s a rhythm I’ve settled into and sometimes find myself actually enjoying after five years at this job. As I pack up and say goodbye to my coworkers, Wei An’s words find their way into my head again. When will you ever get out of your comfortable life and actually live?
Since Wei An broke off our engagement and left for Tokyo, I’ve looked back on our relationship and wondered how we even lasted three years. He was always itching to do something new and different, the kind of person who would accept a job abroad right away, while I was the kind of person who would tell him I couldn’t imagine living without my favourite Vietnamese restaurant.
When he countered that it was my chance to finally learn how to cook, I said nothing. It was something I had heard a hundred times before, a tirade he would launch into each time he made me food, which often were as elaborate as three-course meals. For all his exasperation at my cluelessness about simple things, he also enjoyed being the person to take care of me. A dynamic doomed from the start, and perhaps the reason we lasted as long as we did but not more.
I wonder what he’d think if he could see me now, about to make dinner for myself at my own place.
He’d probably laugh, because I have no idea what I’m doing. At the supermarket after work, I grabbed whatever that was cheap and had a familiar name on the packaging. Now, laid out on the kitchen table, they have suddenly turned into alien food. I didn’t know chicken comes in this big, glossy lump. And I know they’re called long beans, but have they always been this long? I’m searching for a recipe on my phone when Auntie Bee pokes her head into the kitchen.
“Need any help?”
I politely decline, but my stomach betrays me and we both laugh. I give in and ask, “What’s the easiest way to cook a chicken?”
Under Auntie Bee’s guidance, I chop everything up carefully and start frying them on two sizzling pans. It quickly dawns on me that I can’t possibly finish all of this on my own, so I ask Auntie Bee to have some with me, and put an extra pack of noodles to boil. It’s an odd meal: instant noodles in tom yum-seasoned soup, paired with Chinese-style stir-fry on separate plates. Certainly not as appetising as the meals I’ve had at home. But I feel like I could kiss those limp beans. I snap a photo with my phone and send it to my mother.
“I’ve never actually made a proper meal for myself before,” I confess to Auntie Bee as we dig in.
“Oh,” she says a little too loudly, then claps a hand over her mouth.
“I know, not something you’d expect to hear from a thirty-year-old woman.” I thank the stars that Uncle Kean is out with his friends tonight—one less witness to my failure at adulthood. “My mother gave up on trying to teach me to cook, or even to just watch over the cooking. I’d always let her braised pork dry up.”
“My kids were the same,” Auntie Bee says. “You’ll learn once you start having your own family.”
She tells me about her three children. The oldest two are married with kids of their own, and the youngest left not long ago for university abroad. The house started to feel too quiet, and so she and Uncle Kean decided to let out one of the extra bedrooms.
“You remind me of my youngest daughter,” Auntie Bee says. “We knew the day we met you that the room was yours.”
How deeply they must miss their children, for them to overlook our disastrous interview and later agree to a lower rent when I said that that was all I could reasonably afford right now.
“Where is your daughter studying?” I ask.
“Tokyo. She’s studying anima—what’s wrong?”
I quickly compose my face and tell her it’s nothing, but she doesn’t let it go. So I tell her everything, from how excited Wei An and I were about getting married, to the agonising weeks where he tried to convince me to join him in Tokyo, culminating in the big fight where he said those hurtful words.
“Is that why you decided to move out?” Auntie Bee asks. “To prove him wrong?”
I lower my head and smile at my noodles. “I know, it’s pathetic.”
“Not at all.” She picks up a piece of chicken and places it in my bowl. “I think it takes courage to do what you’re doing. But I hope you’re also doing it for yourself.”
It’s funny that I remind Auntie Bee of her daughter, because what she said just makes me think of my mother. My mother said something similar to me a while ago, when I nearly changed my mind about moving out.
The day after I had fixed a date with the moving company, the exhaustion of the whole process finally hit me, and I woke up aching all over. My mother touched the back of her hand to my forehead and told me to go back to sleep. The next time I opened my eyes, there was a familiar, rich aroma of pork bone broth in the air. I knew at once that it was old cucumber soup, my mother’s go-to remedy to cool me down whenever I’m unwell. As she placed the bowl on the table before me, I thought about how many times I had seen this scene, seen my mother’s red face as she bent over the steaming pot in the kitchen, seen her feed it to me spoonful by spoonful when I was a child and hated the soup’s earthy taste. And I realised how foolish I was to think I could live a day on my own without her.
Delirious from the fever and this cold reality, I started wailing in between gulps of
soup that I think I’ve made a terrible decision, I am always making terrible decisions, and I don’t know if I can do this, can’t I just cancel the rental agreement and stay here forever?
It was embarrassing, in hindsight, that I ranted like this to my mother, who got married when she was twenty-three and had me the year after, and now runs a rice cake business from home alongside her full-time job. But she listened to me without a word. When I finally paused to catch my breath, she took the spoon from my hand and set it down.
“You are not cancelling anything,” she said simply. “You are moving out.”
“I can’t,” I moaned. “I don’t even remember why I wanted to in the first place.”
“So find your reason why. A reason for yourself. Then take it step by step.”
This memory, along with Auntie Bee’s words, carry me through the next few days. I start to get the hang of cooking, and learn how to make a few more dishes from Auntie Bee. And after decorating my room with a bunch of artwork I found on sale, I’ve started to look forward to returning to it every evening.
But my body still can’t adjust to the place. Every day is a cycle of fighting myself to go to sleep at night until I finally do and wake up way past my alarm. On Friday, I show up to work so late that I completely miss our company meeting.
My mother hears the fatigue in my voice when she calls me on Saturday morning, and declares that she’s coming over. There’s a tea she knows that will help. Quickly, I remind her that I’m supposed to be learning to take care of myself. Besides, I’m having Jamie and Neha over for dinner, and I need to get ready.
Keeping the stakes low, I’m sticking to dishes I have already learnt and made with Auntie Bee’s help. Determined to put the dinner together myself, I made a dinner reservation for Auntie Bee and Uncle Kean at a restaurant, with tickets to a movie afterwards.
It starts off well. I season the fish fillets and stick them in the oven, then get to work on the vegetables. A few minutes later, I’m pretty sure the cauliflower is done, but I taste one and realise they’re still a little raw. I turn the heat up and go check on the fish, and that’s when my heart sinks. The juices have all dried up, and the flesh cracks into small flakes when I cut into it. I’m poking at each fillet to see how much is salvageable when a strong smell of smoke makes me look up. I rush to dump water into the pan, but it’s no use. The cauliflower is gone too.
And so is all my energy for the day. What looked so simple with Auntie Bee by my side turned into a disaster in my hands. All I want to do is curl up in bed with ice cream and a movie. But Jamie and Neha are not deterred when I tell them what happened, and they make a reservation at a restaurant.
Being the only assistants in the office, the three of us have naturally grown close. Soon after we settle in at our table, the girls must have sensed my dejection. They try to involve me in their conversation, and even order a bottle of champagne despite my protests.
“We’re celebrating today,” Neha tells the waiter taking our order. “Our friend here”—she gestures at me—“recently moved out into her own place.”
The waiter, who looks like he’s still in secondary school, looks at me with interest. “How much is the rent? I’ve been dying to get away from my parents.” When I tell him, his brow knits in confusion. “Are you just renting a room?”
I nod, and he rolls his eyes. “That’s not your own place then.”
I feel as though I’ve been struck. Someone from another table waves him over, and he walks off without another word.
Jamie breaks the silence first. “How rude,” she says. “Don’t listen to him. And anyway, that’s not the only thing we’re celebrating today.” She nudges Neha beside her. “Tell her.”
“Okay, so,” Neha begins, “remember the thing we wanted to tell you about at lunch yesterday?” I nod. They came to my desk at noon looking like they were bursting with gossip, but I had to catch up with the emails I had missed that morning. “Farah made an announcement at the meeting. Pei Yu is leaving the company.”
“No way.” Pei Yu is a project manager, and I haven’t seen a project manager leave the company since I joined five years ago.
Neha isn’t done. “They didn’t say anything more, but later near the end of the day, I overheard the managers talking about it in the pantry, and guess who Farah said will be taking over the position?”
Before I can say a word, Jamie blurts out, “It’s you!”
They look at me with their arms half-raised, mouths wide, ready to shriek with me at my cue. And I wait for a cue in myself too, for a surge of elation to hit me. After all, what feeling other than joy and excitement should someone have about a promotion, especially someone who’s been an assistant for as long as I have? Yet all I think of is I can’t.
“I can’t,” I say. “I can’t talk to clients and give presentations and lead projects.” And maybe I don’t want to.
They wave my words off and tell me of course I can. “No one is better for the job than you,” Jamie says.
The champagne arrives, and they cheer. The noisy flurry of cork popping and glass clinking cuts into my anxiety like whiplash. I want to pull them back to the conversation and yell that I’m serious. And how silly is that? Their twinkling eyes, their cries of how happy they are for me, all seem to laugh at it. It’s surprisingly easy to bury myself in their loud joy, and soon I find myself mimicking it as though it were my own.
We finish the bottle between us easily, leaving little room for actual dinner, which remains half-untouched on our plates when we leave. We aren’t ready for the night to end just yet, though, so we decide to check out the rooftop bar above the restaurant. Upstairs, a light breeze rolls through the air. Mixed with the warm buzz of champagne in my stomach, it makes me feel a rush of boldness. I go through two drinks and am about to order a third when Neha puts a hand on my arm. “Maybe you should take it easy,” she says.
Puzzled concern spreads across Neha’s and Jamie’s faces, and I can’t stand to look at them another second longer. I pull away from Neha and say I need to use the bathroom. Locked in a cubicle, I crouch on the floor, pull out my phone from my pocket, and give in to the thing I’ve held myself back from doing for the past two months and twenty-three days.
“Wan Jing?” a groggy voice says when the call finally connects. “Do you know what time it is here right now?”
The familiar sound of his voice shocks me for a moment. “I moved out,” I say. “I moved out and I’m going to become a project manager and I’m not scared at all. Who’s too comfortable in her life now? Everything’s scary but I’m not scared. Did you hear me? I’m not scared at all.”
After a pause, Wei An says, “Are you drunk?”
He says something more but I talk over him, saying over and over, “I’m not scared I’m not scared I’m not scared.” I go on for a while until a burp forces me to stop, and I realise that the line is silent. Wei An has hung up.
When the girls find me later, I’m sprawled out on the grimy floor outside the bathroom, staring up at the stars in the sky. They drag me up to my feet, down the stairs, and out to the street, where a taxi suddenly appears. As they help me onto the backseat, the taxi driver asks where I’m headed. Jamie asks me for the address to my place, and I laugh. “It’s not actually my own place, remember?”
I consider going to my parents’ place, but the thought of my mother’s face when she finds me in the morning makes me want to throw up. It’s taking me so long to answer such a simple question, which makes me bend over in laughter again. Finally, Jamie digs her phone out, taps around, then shows something on her screen to the driver.
The world feels like it’s spinning when I stumble out of the taxi. Everything feels foreign—the building, the lift, the corridor. It’s dark when I enter the door. I nearly trip over something, and a clatter rips through the quiet. I’m still trying to feel around for whatever it is on the floor when light floods my vision and a figure in a blue nightgown comes towards me. It’s my mother.
“Are you okay?” she says. “It’s past one in the morning.”
I go to her and throw my arms around her. She startles but holds me, and at her gentle touch, I become a child again. Everything I’ve held inside me tonight comes pouring out.
“Ma,” I sob.
She rubs my back and makes soothing sounds against my ear, and it makes me cry harder. Something about my mother feels odd. She’s smaller and smells different. I’m not drunk enough to ignore it, but I’m not sober enough to care. I press into her and let the soft hum of her voice reverberate through me until everything turns black.
When I wake up, I find myself on my bed. It’s been so long since I slept through the night, for a moment I simply lie there in wonder. Then my head throbs with a sharp pain, and it all comes back to me. It wasn’t a dream.
I make my way to the living room, where Auntie Bee and Uncle Kean are sitting, each with a steaming cup in hand.
“How are you feeling?” Uncle Kean asks. “You gave us quite a scare last night.”
I stammer out apologies like an idiot, unable to meet their eyes. Auntie Bee waves them away and pours me a cup of the same hot drink from a thermos on the table. “Tea from your mother,” she explains. “She says you haven’t been sleeping well.”
“My mother was here?”
“She didn’t want to wake you. She brought you some food.” Auntie Bee gestures for me to follow her into the kitchen. She opens the refrigerator, and my mouth waters as I imagine containers of carrot cake and other dishes I love by my mother.
Auntie Bee pulls out a red plastic bag. Inside it are a few smaller bags. I open one to find raw pork ribs, and in another, the wrinkled, orange-brown skin of an old cucumber. After a confused second, my mind flashes to a message my mother sent me after our phone call yesterday. I grab my phone from my room. It’s a photo of a piece of lined notepaper. At the top, written in my mother’s neat, tight hand, are the words Recipe for Old Cucumber Soup.
It looks easier than I thought it would be. I can almost taste the earthy, slightly sour broth on my tongue, feel it melt my hangover away. I still haven’t figured out where my life is going and how to be okay with that, but maybe I can do this. Maybe I can follow five simple steps and make old cucumber soup for myself.
Propping my phone with my mother’s recipe up in the kitchen, I get started. I wash the old cucumber, cut it into half lengthwise, then scoop the seeds out with a spoon. I’m nearly done cutting up the cucumber when I realise that I’ve cut the pieces too thin, thinner than I remember my mother made it. How did I manage to ruin the soup already?
There is nothing in the recipe about how thick the cucumber pieces should be. There is, however, a short note that I did not notice earlier. In a corner at the end, my mother wrote, Tweak recipe as desired.
Well. I do desire smaller and softer food right now with my headache. This could still work out well.
All right then. I turn back to the recipe. Next step.
Wu Xueting is an English literature graduate who currently writes for local media in Singapore, where she lives—and yes, still with her parents.
Instagram: @yeahitsxueting
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