60 pages • 2 hours read
Jesse Q. SutantoDial A for Aunties
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Meddy Chan believes her family is cursed to have all the men die or leave. No matter which country the women live in—China, Indonesia, or the US—the women are all abandoned. Meddy is the only girl of her generation, and though she, too, wants to leave her family when it’s time to choose a college, she ultimately decides to be a filial daughter and stay close to home to support her mother and three aunts.
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Meddy and her mother meet her aunts for dim sum. In a mixture of Chinese, Indonesian, and English—Meddy is only fluent in English—they discuss an important upcoming wedding they’ll be working. The Chans run a family wedding business: Big Aunt is the pastry chef; Second Aunt is the hair/makeup professional; Ma is the florist; Fourth Aunt is the wedding singer; and Meddy is the photographer. The wedding is an important one for their business, as both bride and groom come from rich and influential Chinese Indonesian families. Despite friction between the aunts, preparations and the business seem to be going well. Secretly, however, Meddy dreams of breaking away from the family business to start her own independent photography studio.
Meddy’s mother and aunts interrupt her thoughts with a “happy” surprise: They have set her up on a date for that night by pretending to be her on a dating app. According to them, the man is a great catch—as well as the owner of the hotel where the wedding will take place. Meddy is appalled at her family’s actions, but she yields to her family’s pressuring and agrees to go.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Meddy recalls her sophomore year of college. Earlier that year, she befriended a boy named Nathan Chan, whom she quickly fell for. Initially, she isn’t sure he feels the same way. When he invites her to a college party, though, Meddy’s best friend Selena convinces her to go, despite Meddy’s misgivings. At the party, Meddy meets up with Nathan, and they kiss.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
In the present, Meddy is apprehensive about her date with Jake, the supposed venue owner, but also aware that she needs to move on from her break-up with Nathan four years ago. The dinner date is awkward, as Jake is clearly more interested in her than she is in him. Meddy also hasn’t seen the messages between him and Ma, so she is improvising as she goes.
Tipsy after dinner, Meddy tries to order a ride, but Jake insists on driving her home. In the car, he makes unwanted advances on her and starts driving into a secluded area. Meddy panics and Tases him. She is knocked unconscious as the car swerves and collides with a tree.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
The novel flashes back to Meddy’s junior year in college. She and Nathan are happily dating, though the relationship is a secret from Meddy’s family; as a Christmas gift, Selena helps arrange for Meddy to meet Nathan’s parents in England. Nathan’s parents, who are white and Hong Kong Chinese, are very friendly, but Meddy is self-conscious about herself and her family given their obvious class differences. Meddy is also torn between her filial duty to stay with her family and her desire to be with Nathan, and she wrestles as well with the family curse of male abandonment. Still, Meddy loves Nathan, so she resolves to tell her family about him over dim sum.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
In the present, Meddy regains consciousness. She sees Jake unconscious, bleeding from his ear, and believes she has killed him. Panicking, she tries to call 911, but her phone is dead, and she can’t bear to touch Jake to find his. Despite colliding with a tree, her car is drivable, so she moves his body—still warm—to the trunk and covers his face with a sweater. She drives home, seeking comfort in family.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary
The novel flashes back to Meddy’s junior year, six years ago. She is ready to tell her family about Nathan over their weekend dim sum, only to be upstaged by the announcement that her mother and aunts want to start a wedding business and make her their wedding photographer. Escaping outside the restaurant, Meddy is initially reluctant, unhappy that her family is railroading her life and her career. However, once she considers the wedding business, she is actually interested in helping. Ma finds her and tells her that she doesn’t actually have to join the wedding business if she doesn’t want to, but Meddy commits to it, deciding to wait to tell them about Nathan.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary
In the present, Meddy arrives home, still panicking. Ma finds her in the garage, where Meddy tells her everything in tears. Ma looks at the body in the trunk, then calls in the aunts. As everyone gets caught up, Meddy and Fourth Aunt read the messages between Ma and Jake; due to cultural, linguistic, and generational differences, Ma accidentally sexted Jake, leading to miscommunications during Meddy’s date; however, they all agree, Jake’s advances in the car were inexcusable, and Meddy was justified in Tasing him.
The women discuss what to do with the body in Meddy’s car. They decide not to contact the police, fearing consequences for having moved the body. However, they are uncertain how to get rid of the corpse.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary
The novel flashes back one last time to Meddy’s senior year in college, four years ago. The wedding business is booming; Meddy looks forward to joining her relatives after graduation. However, she has yet to tell them about Nathan, having resolved to do so after graduation. Nathan then announces news of his own—he has an offer for his dream career in New York and wants Meddy to come with him.
Meddy balks, thinking of the family curse and her filial duty to her family’s business. She decides to preemptively break up with Nathan before he can leave her. Nathan is shocked; Meddy is devastated.
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary
In the present, Meddy and her relatives go to examine Jake’s body. As they discuss what to do with it, they also voice concerns about superstitions, such as not touching a dead body or attending a wedding right after a funeral. Eventually, they decide to put Jake in a freezer until they can dispose of him after the wedding. As Big Aunt is the only one with a freezer that is big enough, they must transport him to Big Aunt’s house.
As they wrap the body in blankets, Meddy realizes the body is still warm, even after so much time has passed. She tries to take his pulse, but comes to no conclusion due to intervening panic and superstition. They transport him to Big Aunt’s car.
Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary
At Big Aunt’s bakery, the Chans encounter Big Aunt’s masterpiece of a wedding cake and its buttercream frosting. Though they admire her work, its size means they can’t use the fridge to store the body. Instead, they put it in a cooler, burying it under blankets and baking supplies. They put notes on the cooler, warning Big Aunt’s staff not to open it, and pile more baking supplies on top, just in case. After a round of gratitude, everyone disperses for home.
Part 1, Chapter 11 Summary
Ma wakes Meddy to go to Big Aunt’s bakery and deal with the body cooler before the wedding. When they arrive, they discover that Big Aunt’s staff has mistakenly taken the cooler with the other baking supplies to the wedding venue; everything has already been transported to the venue via yacht. After updating Fourth Aunt, who will arrive later, the other Chans rush to the hotel and attempt to gauge discovery of the body and/or the missing hotelier, but no one seems the wiser. On the way to the hotel from the yacht, Meddy remembers Jake’s missing phone; they decide to search the body before their respective wedding duties begin. At the hotel, they encounter the real owner—Nathan.
Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 11 Analysis
The purpose of Part 1 (including the Prologue) is exposition, setting the scene—and the stakes—for the rest of the novel: Nathan is introduced through Meddy’s flashbacks, so that his official character entrance is more dramatic, both for Meddy’s love life and the legal repercussions regarding Jake’s body. Meddy and her aunts’ characters are also introduced, defining Meddy’s current close-but-complicated relationship with them and the contrast between her college self and her post-graduation self. Many of the themes are also introduced in this section, to be expanded upon later in the novel.
The most important theme in the novel, Family Duty Versus Independence, is clear from the Prologue. Although Meddy loves her family and knows she is loved in return, she feels stifled by them and their meddling, and she dreams of leaving and finding her own space. She first expresses this desire by secretly applying to Columbia University in New York as well as the more local California schools. However, Meddy simultaneously feels guilty about this desire, as she has grown up believing in the family curse—that is, that the men in her family are destined to abandon the women or die. Meddy therefore also believes that to be a “good daughter” or niece, she must stay with her family even if that means abandoning her own dreams. Because she is “the only one not heartless enough to leave” (3), she eventually gives up her dream of Columbia in favor of a California college. The fear of the family curse also influences her hesitation to tell her family about Nathan and her later breakup with him—she fears that Nathan, too, will eventually abandon her, and she can’t bear to hurt her family by leaving with him for New York. Therefore, Meddy chooses family over true love and breaks up with him, sacrificing her dreams for her family’s wedding business.
The reader’s knowledge of Meddy’s secret desire to both leave the family business and her pining for Nathan also help introduce the symbolism of the Corpse. While the connection will be strengthened later in the novel, Meddy and her family’s panic and struggle to deal with the body reflects Meddy’s own rising tensions regarding her own inner struggles. Although she understands her family’s good intentions in setting up the date with Jake, she dislikes their meddling in her love life. She can’t tell them directly without offending them, though, which she feels would go against her personal values of respecting her elders. In the same vein, she can’t reveal her desire for independence without hurting her family and quitting the family business. However, she is also reaching the limit of what she can tolerate. Meddy’s mounting struggle to keep her real feelings hidden, compared with her family’s unwillingness to question their own sometimes overbearing behavior, is reflected through the fact that Meddy is the only one truly willing (relatively) to touch the body: Meddy moves it into her car, covers the face, and tries to check for a pulse. Just as the worst of the emotional labor falls to Meddy in her relationship with her family, the worst of the physical tasks fall to her in dealing with the corpse. Finally, the corpse’s subsequent transport to the wedding venue demonstrates that no matter how hard Meddy tries to hide her secret, it will follow her wherever she goes, culminating in Nathan’s reappearance in her life.
The themes of The Karmic Justice of Honesty and Lies and Intergenerational Immigration are introduced and entwined in this section as well, most clearly depicted through Meddy’s college romance with Nathan. Meddy loves Nathan and loves who she is with him, which is partly why she has difficulty being fully honest with him, especially with her family. While she hopes for a future with him, she doesn’t want him to see her more passive behavior at home, and she anticipates that her family’s behavior would embarrass her if they met him. This apprehension is exacerbated when she meets Nathan’s family, as they, despite also being a multicultural Chinese family, are vastly different from her own. Meddy expects some level of difference, as Nathan is British and she grew up in the US, but she feels the class differences most keenly. She notes that Nathan’s family home was featured in a magazine, while she once found mushrooms in a forgotten mug at her house. In addition, Nathan’s white mother and Hong Kong Chinese father are collected and refined, while Chinese Indonesian Ma and the aunts are cheerful and boisterous, able to shove through a crowded dim sum restaurant with ease. All of these differences intimidate Meddy, and she copes with them by lying her way out of conflict. Specifically, despite valuing honesty, she lies to her family about wanting to join (and stay with) the family wedding business and to Nathan about wanting to break up. Because she isn’t honest, she suffers.
Finally, the motif of Weddings is also briefly introduced in this section. The Chans run a wedding business, which by definition caters to and facilitates a ritual that symbolizes two families coming together to create a new third family—a dramatic change. Meddy dreams of making such a change, thereby escaping her current life, but at the start of the novel, she lacks the courage to realize this dream. However, the upcoming wedding Meddy is working is high stakes. In addition to making or breaking her family business and Nathan’s business, even though Meddy is not the bride, the wedding is a backdrop always reminding the reader that Meddy is on the verge of substantial change.
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By Jesse Q. Sutanto
