"What is primary school like?"

  Leon shrugged, scrawling down another sloppy answer in his exercise book. "It's harder than kindergarten."

  "I know that," Ling said indignantly, "everyone says so."

  He rolled his eyes. "Okay, okay, it's harder because you have more classes, like general studies, and you have to take tests. There's a lot of homework, too. Oh, and you can't play much."

  Ling pouted, watching as he roughly slammed his book shut and tossed it into his backpack. "Primary school doesn't sound fun."

  "It's not," Leon muttered under his breath.

  "I don't want to go to primary school," she declared, placing her hands on her hips, "I'm going to stay in kindergarten forever and ever."

  Hidden behind a stack of worksheets, Vicente highlighted a line in his textbook with bright yellow ink. "Primary school is tougher than kindergarten," he said, "but it's also more fun. You'll make lots of new friends and learn lots of new things."

  "Really?"

  Vicente rummaged through his pencil-case for another highlighter. "Really. General studies is an interesting subject, and you get to play lots of games in sci — "

  A deafening "SLAM" echoed throughout the apartment and made them all jump. Vicente dropped his highlighter and crept towards his parents' room, wincing at another "BANG" and a flurry of shouts.

  He didn't understand half the things his father was yelling, accusations about "sleeping around" and "being disloyal" and, strangest of all, "bringing home another brat". Taking a deep breath, Vicente raised one hand to knock on their door when Yao burst out of his room, looking half-dead with exhaustion.

  "Ah, they're fighting again?" Yao forced a smile and pushed him away from the door, leading him back to the dining room. "And right after Father's back from work, too." He looked at the clock, tugging at his blazer. "And it's already seven o'clock. We should start making dinner."

  And that was his cue. Closing his half-highlighted textbook, he followed Yao into the kitchen. He bit back a sigh and put his slippers back on. Looks like I'll have to finish my work tomorrow morning.

  The next hour saw the brothers washing vegetables, steaming rice and frying eggs, trying desperately to put together a decent meal. Yao and Vicente flurried around the kitchen, spilling sauces and dropping peels as the clock ticked away.

  While reaching for the bottle of oyster sauce, he bumped his wrist against a vegetable-filled pan and stifled a yelp of pain. He ran the burn under the sink, staring dejectedly at the red stripe forming on his wrist. How am I going to explain this tomorrow?

  "Brother," he called while wiping his wrist dry, "can you pass me a bandage, please?"

  No reply.

  He looked around the kitchen, at the still-cooking rice and the meat in the steamer. Yao was nowhere to be seen. "Yao?"

  Nothing.

  He switched off the stove and reached for a dish, arms straining to take the porcelain plate from the cupboard above his head. Vicente spooned the pan of Chinese cabbage into the plate and drizzled a spoonful of oyster sauce over it, before turning off the steamer and grabbing a pair of metal claws to retrieve the bland-looking steamed pork. His hands shook as he placed the heavy dish on the countertop.

  Running outside, he saw Leon and Ling poring over a book. "We had to read this for English class this year," Leon said, "it's about the beach." He looked up, noticing him wrapping a bandage around his wrist. "Oh, hi."

  Rubbing his sore wrist and smiling like Yao often did when he was tired, Vicente gestured vaguely at the table. "Dinner's ready. Can you clear the table?"

  He brought out the vegetables and meat wearing heat-proof gloves too large for him, then set down steaming bowls of rice that scorched his fingers.

  Ling tapped at the table. "Where are the placemats?"

  Blowing on his numb fingers, he scurried back to the kitchen to grab the mats from a drawer.

  After slipping placemats under each bowl of rice, he ran back again for the chopsticks and spoons, only to see Leon already carrying six pairs of chopsticks and fragile porcelain spoons out of the kitchen. "Thanks."

  Leon only gave him a pat on the shoulder (poking him in the face with a chopstick in the process) as he set the table.

  As the three of them took their seats, Yao came out of his room with a bandaged hand. "I'm sorry I left you to finish up, Vicente." He sat down and yawned, poking at the bloody bandage. "I cut myself while chopping the cabbages."

  Suddenly, the burn on his wrist felt less painful.

  Vicente shifted in his seat, looking at their messily-thrown together dinner and waiting for their parents to finally leave their bedroom. Their rice was just starting to turn cold when they arrived at the dining room, standing a good distance apart and not talking to each other.

  "Good evening," their mother said as she sat down.

  Their father was silent.

  "The food looks lovely." Their mother reached over Ling to take a piece of meat. "You're such a talented chef, Yao, even better than me. By the way, I'm sorry I haven't been able to cook recently."

  "Maybe if you hadn't spent your time seeing other men, you would've had time to cook for them," their father finally muttered.

  Their mother slammed her hands on the table, shooting her husband a murderous glare. "What I do is none of your business!"

  "You're abandoning the children and lying to me!" Their father exclaimed back. "That's completely my business, you — "

  "Yue Ling's graduation photos came out today," Yao interjected, "Ling, why don't you go get them and show Mother and Father?"

  Clearly sensing another argument, Ling slipped quietly out of her chair and skipped towards her bedroom.

  "Jia Lin," Yao continued, "Ling's graduation ceremony was just a week ago, and you were the only one who managed to go watch her. How was it?"

  Only just stopping a comment on how Yao hadn't wanted him to go to the ceremony from slipping out, he replied, "her class did a dance performance. Ling wore that new dress we saved up for, too."

  "And she stuck her certificate to the wall," Leon added, his mouth full of rice.

  Ling returned to the dining room, proudly showing off three snapshots of her on stage. "The teachers said that I danced good!"

  Their father took a photograph of Ling mid-dance, the sequins on her crimson dress sparkling in the flash-light of the camera. "Very nice."

  "You must have danced beautifully," their mother remarked, "when I was your age, we didn't get to dance during our graduation ceremony."

  She swallowed a mouthful of cabbage and blinked at their mother. "Not even in primary school?"

  Their mother smiled indulgently. "Back in my day, graduation ceremonies were boring. They just gave us our certificates, then we went home. You all are very lucky to have such interesting ceremonies."

  "Ohhh." Ling nodded. Next to her, their father muttered something about an epic secondary school graduation party that their mother still had photos of.

  "During my graduation ceremony, I had to deliver a speech," Yao said, "and I remember standing on stage, in front of everyone, all shaking and scared. I nearly fell down the stairs as I left! But hearing all those people clap when I was done, that was amazing."

  Vicente leaned forward, eager to be included. "And when I had to deliver my speech, I nearly forgot my lines. In the middle of my speech, Leon even started crying from a stomach-ache."

  "Hey!" Leon said indignantly.

  "Leon," Ling asked, setting her chopsticks down, "what did you do when you graduated?"

  "He tripped over his shoelaces during his performance."

  Leon kicked him from under the table.

  Their father cleared his throat. "Ling, are you excited for primary school?"

  She nibbled on her fried egg, looking around at her brothers. "Jia Long said that primary school was hard, but Jia Lin said it was fun. Who's wrong?"

  "I'm right," Leon said, "primary school has loads of homework and evil teachers. Brother only says it's fun because he gets good grades."

  "School is fun no matter how you do," Vicente objected.

  "It's not!" He waved his chopsticks around as he spoke. "You know, one time my class teacher caught me talking to my seat-mate, and she made me stay behind to write 'I will not disturb my classmates' fifty times!"

  Ling shuddered. "That sounds scary."

  "Don't you worry." Yao looked pointedly at Leon. "As long as you're good, and do all your homework, the teachers won't punish you. My old class teachers in the primary division were really nice to me, too."

  "Yes, well..." Their mother sighed, taking a short glance at their father. "You won't be able to join your brothers in primary school this September."

  Leon was the first to react. "Why?"

  "This August, we're leaving Taipei," their mother announced. "We'll be off to another country, somewhere in the West, and we'll have a new home."

  "Again?" Vicente almost said.

  "We're planning to buy this little apartment in Arlingdale, a small city far away from here," their father added.

  Arlingdale. It sounded so peculiarly foreign, nothing like the cities or districts they'd heard of before. It was different from Freguesia da Sé or Wan Chai or Kaohsiung or all the places they were familiar with.

  He didn't like it.

  Yao's face was a careful mask of nonchalance. "Do we have to speak Mandarin there?"

  "You will have to speak English," their mother replied.

  Ling whined out loud and crossed her arms. "But my English is bad."

  Their father raised an eyebrow disapprovingly. "Then you'll have to get better."

  Vicente thought of his English tests and their unremarkable scores, always eighty-nines or A-'s, falling short of perfection. He remembered catching a glimpse of Leon's English assessments, almost always above ninety marks or stamped with bright, proud A's.

  It was the only subject he was good at.

  Leon was the only one out of the four of them who could speak English flawlessly without an accent, or not mingling his sentences with Cantonese or Mandarin. His Mandarin, on the other hand, was heavily accented, every other sentence turning into awkward Cantonese until he could stop talking. It was clear that he'd fit right in once they moved to the West.

  After dinner, Leon went straight to his room, instantly grabbing a book from his desk and flicking it open. Vicente glanced at the yellowing pages of Leon's book, filled with little English words like black ants. He didn't understand half the words that Leon seemed to be practically eating up.

  He sat down at his desk, cleared away the clutter and pulled out his handbook. He read through his teacher's reviews of his speaking assessments, his lilted Mandarin and his broken English, the only thing in school he was bad at.

  Arlingdale would mean constant conversations in English, mocking looks every time he stuttered or forgot a word. It meant the start of a new life, for the third time in six years.