Growing Up Tales

When I was growing up, we lived in a particularly tough neighborhood. It was much like the BRONX. Neighbors were not too friendly and fights broke out frequently.

Home was one bedroom where we all slept on the floor and the window was wooden louvres. This remained shut most of the time, so the whole place was always hot and stuffy. That explained why I was sickly as a child.

Mother always busied herself in the kitchen and we were left to our devices most of the time. Play-time meant role playing and I impersonated a teacher with high heels and feather duster to boot. We had doll paper cut-outs and collected stickers for our album.

Some books and comics were quite readily available as a live-in aunt worked as an "amah" for a Caucasian expatriate family. They included DC and Marvel Comics, Beano and Rupert the Bear. There were even Norse mythological heroes and I guessed the family must have been Nordic.

Toys were some wind-up Fisher and Price musical boxes and Ultra-Man dolls.

To ease our bowels more conveniently we had a sit-down toilet pot in the room too. On my way to school in the morning, it was customary for me to pack one or two big meat buns for breakfast. The "baos" then were certainly tastier than the ones now. It had more flavor and meat.

Not long after, we moved to the second modern satellite town in Singapore where I began my primary school years.

Come Christmas, my sister and I would go picking tree branches off the marsh land below where we lived. We would paint over the branches in wood color, stick on styrofoam flakes to resemble snow and adorn them with lights and ornaments. We have plates of circular styrofoam stuck to the ceilings and we will then stick these branches onto them.

That was how we celebrated festive occasions. There were always hand-crafted decorations of our own hanging in the home. Mother would bake all the butter cakes, jam tarts, love letters and egg tarts herself. The Nonya dumplings now sold in shops are a far cry from the ones Mother makes. We fry our rice and the fillings are hot, spicy and peppery with generous helpings of mushroom and pork.

Brother loves buying turn-table records and I remember we listened to selections of Deep Purple rock, Carpenters' ballad and Engelbert Humperdink's melodies. In case the younger people don't know, the music players of old are kind of like gramophones with a rotating disc and a stylus.

Sometimes after midnight, Brother would come home from his waitering work and buy us supper. Usually this is fried noodle hor-fun wrapped in some broad whitish palm leaves.

I remember our first color television set was a European Sierra set, a long one with speakers on both sides. The first color television program we watched was the cartoon Tarzan. It was really a pyrotechnical mosaical feast for the eyes.

Mother was one tough cookie. She had to escape the Japanese invasion along with her sister (who then died in the Japanese war here) and cousin. They fled Shan Tou, Guangdong and rode a ricekty bum-boat to Singapore, en route Hongkong. When war again broke out in Singapore, she took refuge in a nunnery and lived through seeing the Catholic ex-archbishop being beaten up by the Japanese invaders and the Maria Hertogh massacre.

She worked in the kitchen and in handcrafts for the convent. I remember the beautiful embroidered handkerchiefs she sews and our blankets were tiled designed fabrics sewn together (very much like the Fabric of the Nation we now have up on the panels).

She always tells us stories when she is not too busy in the kitchen.

My shirts were almost always her tailoring effort. She would shop for the cloth and then working on her Singer sewing machine, put together our clothes which include hers.

I can imagine how a young woman just into her teens having to fight tooth and nail for her livelihood and all alone to fend for herself during those heady days of the war and with Singapore on the brink of nationhood.

Dad is a quiet man and works in American General Motors. He is a Peranakan , schooled in English and colonial ways .

I remember myself as a student enjoying my kindergarten and primary school days very much. When I was in the PAP Community Foundation education centre, I was asked to lead in reading out Chinese phrases and won prizes usually cardboard picture cards.

I led in pledge-taking, took part in competitions like handwriting contests, story-telling and art posters . I acted in a skit of "Detective and Thief" and sang in a Talentime, a rendition of Donny and Marie "Paper Roses". I remember telling a story in Chinese about a big fish eating a small fish. I drew pictures of Mary, the Mother of God and won prizes. I enjoyed Catechism lessons and on answering questions correctly, would win holy pictures of Saints.

I was also precocious and big for my age. By the time I was in Primary 5, I looked like a younger adult, pimply and all.

Even in my lower secondary school years, I loved current affairs or science quizzes. Our team clinched the first place in a knowledge quiz and I worked with this friend Merwin who incidentally was teased a lot too for his large head. Kids can be cruel.

I was teased and bullied in school for everything - being fat, pimply and soft.

My circle of friends included Chinese, Indians, a Malay and Eurasians. Melvin, a Portugese Eurasian Indian invites us ever so often for lunch and I really love the belanchan he serves for our meals. Martin, a Chinese friend, takes us to his home along Lorong Napiri, a swampy road which winds past the mental institute of that time. I remember seeing all these naked men basking in its compound. Redzwan was my best buddy of sorts and he visited me for Chinese New Year and I did likewise for Hari Raya.

Joseph Ramalingam co-opted me for softball and I loved the sport so much even though he placed me on reserve eventually for the finals. We visited his home too and he was always playing soccer with his brothers.

So I think friendship transcended race and I wasn't even aware of their skin colors as I played and lived along them.

Life took a turn when my Dad was retrenched in my upper secondary school years. He went blind with cataract and glaucoma, which would have been preventable today with early detection. But it was also a fact that the older generation then always feared visiting hospitals and would bear medical ailments with a grin until it is too late. I had a tonsilectomy just before my 'O' levels because I was continually sick with fever and sore throat.

Somehow the older you get, the worse education seems to be - boring, stiff and no fun. It was mugging and exams, with very little room for discovery or activities. I knew I always had a thing for nature and the arts but this never had the opportunity for development back then.

I also never got to know what my options could have been or where I could have obtained help or to forge ahead with my talents. I didn't think bursaries were even available then.

I was mostly a slightly-above-average academic performer but with help I could perhaps make more headway. Moreover coming from a humble background, I was diffident and not as self-confident or assured as my richer or better-endowed peers.

By the time I got to Junior College, I was skipping classes like pop-corn. It was mostly a bad choice of course options and college. Life at home was not going well. My older sister had married young at 19 and was in an abusive and violent marriage ending in an acrimonious divorce.

Once my brother got married and with my sister-in-law around the home, there were in-laws problems and relationships all round deteriorated. That was when I decided to move.

I had a great yearning to earn my big bucks and live independently. I was also restless with the perpetual academic grind which is so lacking in practicalities. I guessed I could do better with more hands-on. In America, people leave the nest young and lead their own lives. So what I did was no different, which fostered character, independence and survivalship.