My Family and Other Globalizers | Thinking about babies? First, embrace the cats

But dogs and cats still occupied an awkward middle ground between pampered and prey. During the 2003 SARS pandemic, civet cats were blamed as the source of the coronavirus, leading to vigilante gangs rounding up stray cats and dogs off the streets and bludgeoning them to death.

It was against this larger background that we decided to get a cat, before quickly deciding two would be even better, to help us practise at being parents. The pets were to be our gateway drug to babies. We knew they would require constant care and discipline. But if we could rise to the occasion, maybe we could do the same with little humans.

We christened the two kittens that joined our family on a humid summer’s day in June 2006, Caramel and Tofu. Both had been found via a notice we’d posted on the bulletin board at the local vet’s office. Caramel’s “grandmother” had called us almost immediately. She lived in a crumbling, plant-filled house in an old-fashioned Beijing neighbourhood, close to ours. Her yard was home to a number of indoor-outdoor cats that she fed. One of them had recently had a litter and she offered us a pick.

On the same day as Caramel was due to be dropped off at ours, we got a call from a cat activist — a new demographic in the Beijing of those days — about another litter that was in desperate need of adoption. We hurried to the home of a professor at a technical university in the city’s north, in whose backyard dustbin a stray cat had recently had babies. They were severely malnourished, the activist lady told us.

My spouse and I peered into the bin and saw an array of wet, black eyes look up at us in terror. We picked one at random and called her Tofu, I can’t remember why.

Tofu was bathed, dried, vaccinated and handed over to us within an hour. She was stiff with shock. For the next few days, she lay in a corner hiding, shivering with fear and hatred of us, the alien hands who had snatched her from her family. The vet told us she was close to death, so injections and medicines were part of the fearsome regime we had to subject her to in the early days.

Being Caramel and Tofu’s parents, grew us up. We gained familiarity with vaccination schedules and deworming pills. We gave them baths and brushed out their tangled hair. We read up on ideal cat diets and fed them cooked liver and egg yolk. We learnt to clean pee and vomit; to love fiercely and always forgive. Our first son, Ishaan, was born two years later and Nico almost five years after, making them very much the junior siblings in our family of six.

Together we have lived in five countries, from China to Belgium, Indonesia, Japan and Spain. We liked to joke that Tofu, who over the years grew plump and regal, had gone from Dustbin to Diplomat.

During this time, I wrote two novels, Chinese Whiskers and Jakarta Tails, that starred fictionalised versions of the cats, but were true to their catsonalities. Caramel, called Soyabean in the books, was a bon-vivant, oriented towards food and the good things in life. He demanded attention and enjoyed the spotlight.

But Tofu, whose fictionalised version retained her name, preferred to observe from the sidelines. She retained something of the wild, spurning attempts to anthropomorphise her. She would climb up the pomegranate tree in our Beijing courtyard and look up at the clouds floating across, her eyes deep wells into which I imagined a sensitivity to the unfairness of life.

In Jakarta Tails, Tofu’s opening chapter reads: “My family’s absence was like a body ache. I lounged by the swimming pool, stomach stretched taut, fed and pampered, thinking of my siblings and my Mama. Were they dead? Knocked down by a passing car. Were they starving? Wandering about in the cold trying to scavenge scraps until their legs gave out under them? …How did that make sense? Everyone said my yunqi, my luck, was good. But what was yunqi? A shift in the wind? A moment when your eyes happened to look more appealing than your littermates’ to the pair of Ren (human) hands deciding which one to pick?”

Tofu filled our hearts, but she was never wholly ours. She recognised our need for her and allowed us whiskery kisses and furry cuddles, but there was a private part that remained locked away through the years.  And then last week, she died, just short of her seventeenth year. Her lungs gave out and the air left her.

We have been grief-struck since. But Tofu’s passing has also generated important conversations about families of choice, empathy, connection across species and the devastating, yet profound nature of love. It is the first experience with death for our boys, who have only known life with Tofu. It is also their first realisation of the vulnerability that is the other side of love’s coin.

Our family now has one less globalizer — but we remember her as forever hiding amid the trees in the garden, watching the clouds above drift with hungry wonder.

In Jakarta Tails, the final words are left, as they always were in my imagination, to Tofu:

“I stayed out in the garden. It was rare for it to be so cool. There was only a single wispy cloud drifting in the sky, changing shape as it moved.

I walked up to the frangipani tree. The fallen flowers were still heavy with water from the rain last night. I thought of how the pomegranate tree in our home in Beijing had changed into this frangipani one and how this huge bungalow had replaced our small courtyard home. We’d changed shape too, growing older, and in Soyabean’s case, at least, fatter. But I suppose it was all like the cloud. We — the cats and Ren (humans) and tree — were still the same cloud, just shifting outlines as we moved in time.”