Deplorable Conversations with Cats and Other Distractions by Yeoh Jo-Ann
Am I crazy or is that cat talking to me?
This is another favourite to gush about to everyone I know. I took my time with this book because I didn’t want it to end. It’s perfect for long commutes but I must say, the descriptions of delicious Southeast Asian food made me hungry.
The protagonist is a lucky-go-happy man called Lucky Lee who’s had to put up with being teased about his name since forever. His name seems to have worked though, as he leads quite a charmed life and gets by on generational wealth. Even though he got a degree in architecture, he works at a cafe for fun with his friends and the building is owned by his family. His sister, Pearl Lee, is a famous food critic with her own recipe books and TV show. They have been very close since childhood. One day, Pearl dies in a plane accident, leaving behind her cat, Coconut. Lucky spirals into a slump and stays there, completely paralysed by grief and his memories of the childhood they shared. One day, Coconut starts talking to him and his world is turned upside-down.
Length-wise, this novel is pretty long but I like that about it. You need time to sink into it and really get into Lucky’s head. It felt like the kind of book where rushing/speedreading would greatly decrease the experience. Given that the themes are grief and loss, the slow pace and (initial) lack of exciting plot developments make you feel how long Lucky took to recover even a little bit. You can’t rush healing, and healing is not linear. Even when Lucky was travelling across Malaysia, Yeoh described in painstaking detail much of what Lucky saw/heard/tasted. It’s not like he got on the train and then the next scene is of him at his destination; every step of the process, no matter how insignificant, is noted. Isn’t it like that in real life? No one wakes up one morning having done a one-eighty. You plod through the days one by one feeling like nothing’s changing, only to realise months or even years later that you’ve come a long way.
I guess it is possible to say that Lucky and Pearl had a codependent relationship that prevented him from growing up properly. He is pushing 40 but still boyish, flitting from fling to fling and hare-brained project to project, extremely reliant on his sister and preoccupied with her opinion of him. And what many opinions she has—on his clothing, his girlfriends, his job, etc. In the flashbacks, it becomes apparent that Pearl was tyrant, protector, and surrogate mother all rolled into one. She’s not likeable but is charismatic in the way narcissists can be. Lucky is aware of her flaws but loves her regardless. As children, she bullied him relentlessly but they were united against their parents as close-in-age siblings tend to be. She had no qualms emotionally manipulating Lucky or encouraging his helplessness to keep him close to her. Their relationship is very complex and contradictory. I think most familial relationships are.
Structurally, this was an interesting take on the bildungsroman. Usually, protagonists in coming-of-age novels are children or teenagers on the cusp of entering adulthood. They go through hardship and traumtic events to emerge stronger in the end. Here, Lucky is already approaching middle age but has been stuck in his own Neverland, enabled by his family and background. When he loses his parents, then sister, then his family home to a fire, it forces him to reevaluate who he is outside of the privileges he was born with. His search for the self brings him to places outside his comfort zone where he must confront and take accountability for his past actions.
Lucky’s relationship with Coconut, and by extension, the cat community as a whole, is what snaps him out of his self-centred bubble and kickstarts his growth—he befriends the ‘crazy cat lady’ that everyone else avoids, reaches out to his estranged aunt, reconnects with an ex and achieves closure, starts thinking about how his actions have inconvenienced his friends all this time, and he learns how to take good care of another living being, namely, Coconut. He turns from someone who fed Coconut only when he felt like to obsessing over how to make her happy and comfortable, going so far as to buying fancy fresh fish from the market to perfectly sear on the outside while keeping the inside rare. In caring for Coconut, Lucky develops empathy and a sense of responsibility.
Coconut speaks to him and only to him, so for most of the novel, we don’t actually know if he was hallucinating or the cat really could speak. I liked the magical realism in this novel. I thought it was really fun and the ambiguity just added to it. Just for fun, I think it’s possible to read it both ways as follows.
Evidence that Coconut did not speak and it was just Lucky’s subconscious:
No one else could hear her at all. No one else saw her use the TV remote either.
She avoided speaking in the presence of other humans.
Lucky could not understand other cats.
Coconut often sounded like Pearl.
Evidence that Coconut did speak and magic exists:
She did return to Lucky after he apologised for lying to her.
She did follow their plan to split up at the causeway and reunite in JB.
She did follow Lucky to Ipoh and surprise him there.
She did bring all the other stray cats over from Eunos MRT station.
Anyway, the point is not whether Coconut really could speak to Lucky, but that this phenomenon happened only after Pearl died and he was completely depressed. If you can take a cat’s word for it, Coconut started talking only because she deemed Lucky in need of her help. When Lucky builds something with his own hands just to make her happy—a giant climbing structure—this labour of love both heals and redeems him. He even gains the approval of all the cats in the east side of Singapore. That’s no mean feat. Cats are extremely picky about who they like or approve of. They have sensitive vibe checkers, so only sincerity and dedication can win them over, which Lucky displayed when he built something incredible for Coconut. What a change for someone who used to live only for himself! If you believe that Coconut speaking was entirely imagined, the fact that she stopped means that he attained fulfilment or that he stopped needing some vestige of Pearl to cling onto, signalling true independence.