It is yet another day. My eyes open up as I wake and I stare at the wall. Slowly, the realization hits me that the last two days were very much real, not some terrible nightmare conjured from the deep-seated fears of my heart. The idea of the nightmare that I find myself once again having to pick up the pieces of my life. I cry, because honestly, what else can I do? I long learned that keeping tears In just makes you feel worse. That’s why whenever I can, I cry. I wasn’t always like this. In fact it wasn’t all too long ago that I was very much a different person. I was less scared, less anxious, less troubled and perhaps less aware. But 5 years is a very long time in the development of a person’s character. Thing is: I still feel the person that I once was inside of me. I feel it whenever I talk to friends, whenever I am with my family. And I miss her, I miss her a lot. Though I know there are some things that are well and truly irreversible – I don’t think I can ever go back to the carefree and somewhat ignorant person I was then – I also realise that somehow, I need to get rid of all the emotional baggage that has been saddled on me these past formative years before I have any real hope or finding real lasting happiness.
I still remember an incident when I was about 12 or 13 vividly. I was with my two best friends then, and we were a silly lot. There was a store that sold sambal fishballs in school that were really yummy. My friend and I would scarf down 2 of them, then run all the way from the canteen to our classrooms where our water bottles lay. Run because honestly the sambal was too hot for us to handle, and it’d make us cry. But we felt free and happy. People looked at us weirdly as we tore past them on the staircase, but we couldn’t care less.
I never felt like I fit in anywhere. I always felt like the child that was a bit too weird for the norm. Too rebellious and stubborn even at a young age, too much of a troublemaker, too energetic and too enthusiastic. I remember because I felt so out of place, I was constantly searching for affirmation. I tried to hang out with the ‘cool’ girls, like all misguided kids do. Of course they evidently didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I even remember a friend I had since I was 7 jokingly referring to me as someone she didn’t regard highly when we were both 11. It hurt then, it still hurts now. Somehow, I managed to survive with nary a conscious dent, though I know deep down it exacerbated the already present childhood traumas of my heart.
My family was a very unconventional one – and by this I refer to my father’s side of the family. Its structure was mainly matriarchal. I came from a line of strong and empowered women. Even though my father was evidently the one that wore the pants in my parents relationship, I always knew I was surrounded my strong women. My grandmother, just 70 this year, used to run multiple businesses in what was very much a male dominated field in the 1950s, much less in a conservative Asian society. Her mother before her also ran the family business after her husband died and built up a family fortune only for it to be gambled away by her second son. Then there was my Aunt, an opinionated, assertive woman who again worked in a male dominated field – computer science in the ‘80s, who was also simultaneously battling lupus. It seems evident that a streak of strength, determination, ambition, stubbornness and intelligence ran through my blood.
However there were other things brewing in the family bloodlines as well. There were also propensities to extremely bad tempers, extreme anxiety, paranoia and depression even. It’s of much debate whether such attributes are passed through the generations through genes or nuture, but all I can say is I either inherited all the abovementioned attributes directly, or through my relationship with the family absorbed all of them. I do wonder if things were ceteris paribus, whether I would have gone on to be close to where the Wong women are, whether I’d be more settled and happy. But either way fate threw me a wild card: my brother.
My brother was probably the first indication that I would live a less than average life. Born when I was 4, he was supposedly a playmate that I longed for. My father always said that he didn’t want a second child because he knew that as a child, I needed a lot of attention. Either way this got thrown into the wind when it was discovered that my brother was also autistic and a low functioning one to boot.
I remember being very happy when he was first born, but as I struggled to understand why my brother wasn’t like the rest, I got angrier and frustrated. I didn’t understand why everyone was making such a fuss about him, I remember getting very jealous and upset. It’s one thing to say “your brother’s different” to a child, but very much another for that child to understand. To understand why her brother isn’t talking, and playing with her like she thought he would and at the same time taking the family’s attention away from her. I ended up bullying him. I was the proverbial horror child without a conscience.
Having a brother like Ryan also had another effect on me, it made me partly the centre of unwanted attention. Everyone didn’t know how to relate to him. It either went two ways, the oh-my-dear-you’re-so-pitiful way or the why-is-that-kid-so-weird way. More than often it was the latter sort of stare. Growing up I remember the dehumanizing stares of people around me as I went about with my brother. I could see the way they looked at me differently, as the cogs in their heads started moving, trying to figure out whether or not I was mentally disabled too. I felt burdened by the way people viewed me. People assumed I was mentally disabled by extension.
As a child growing up, two of my biggest social groups I remember were that of my mother’s family and church. My mother’s family, bless their souls, were a wonderful and kind lot. All of them happy-go-lucky folks. However as much as they were accepting people, they never knew how to relate to my brother. It’s almost as they saw him their minds immediately blanked out. They just didn’t know what to do or what to make of my brother, and I, the sister was caught up in all of this. I always felt alienated from them because of my brother. Sure every Chinese New Year they’d grasp my wrists and tell me to eat more, else I’d be blown away by the wind. They’d pat my head and tell me I’m a smart girl and to study hard. But I felt less like a person and more like an object. I was the unrelatable unreachable enigma.
Church as well posed similar problems, but to a lesser extent. This is probably because in church I was separated from my brother. Still it lingered, all the curious questions, all the stories that people begged for from me. I admit to telling great whopping lies at the expense of my brother to make the others laugh and like me. I still remember the details of those stories, probably because I still feel guilty. There were other aspects too, like hearing others, especially the younger children say things like ‘Why is that Ryan so weird?”. Hearing that hurt me to no end. Sometimes I’d fight back, but more often than not I’d just keep silent.
My parents were also very different from that of other parents. They always treated me in a mature manner. I’m not sure if this is because they had their hands full with my brother, or whether that was their actual parenting style. They pretty much let me do whatever I wanted, with little discipline. My parents really only scolded me when I got exceptionally out of hand. As a result when I was young, I went about mostly untamed, doing things impulsively and speaking my mind without care. They didn’t even force me to study, resulting in me pretty much coasting about with bad grades for most of my schooling life. My parents also never stopped telling my how much they loved me, how clever I was and how pretty I was, yet it served to have little effect on my self esteem.
Looking back, I actually attribute most of the stereotypical parenting to have come from my paternal grandmother, Mama as I called her. When I was young, I clung to her like crazy. Once I even spontaneously flew with her to Ipoh because I refused to let go of her at the airport. She used to wake me up every morning, get my clothes ready and make breakfast for me. After school she’d teach me Mandarin for many hours (which would later turn out to backfire) and force me to exercise. She’d make a special dinner for me because I was a fussy eater and then force me into bed next to her when she went to sleep at 9pm. For many years that was my routine, till finally I got too rebellious for her to handle at 11. She hired a tuition teacher.
My relationship with Mandarin has always been a tricky one. It started when I was first dumped in Nanyang Kindergarten, a rather traditional Chinese school, after we moved, from a predominantly English liberal sort of Montessori. Naturally this move was akin to caging a previously free bird. First day of school I went home crying because I had been badly scolded for not knowing how to write my name in Mandarin. That was really when my grandmother really started intervening in my education.
I hated that school. I don’t remember having many friends as the new kid. The others weren’t friendly at all. As a result I recall trying too hard to fit in, with the end result of being subjected to even more social isolation from the others. The boys, who I really wanted to be friends with for some now unfathomable reason, turned this round on its head and ended up bullying me. I remember Nanyang so vividly only for how miserable I felt, all 6 months long of it. To this day I can really only recall having 3 other kids who were nice to be a treated me kindly.
Primary school was a well known Christian Girls School, the main reason why I was even planted in Nanyang for 6 months. First day of school I remember being really happy because C my friend from church was also in the same class as me. We talked so much that we got separated by the teacher within the first few days of school. I don’t really remember very much except that I spent the next few years doing the same things, trying too hard to seek affirmation from teachers, trying too hard to seek affirmation from classmates and random incidents of talking back to teachers. I fainted once when I was 9 and the teacher had to carry me to the sick bay. When I regained consciousness, I puked all over her. I was incredibly awesome in that way.
The first time I recall really really having to study hard was when I was 12 and sitting for the PSLE. I had gotten 192 or something for the preliminary exams and my mother panicked. She took leave for a few days and sat me down for some good old Singapore style cramming. It was the first time she actively participated in my education. I sat for the examination, scored 212 and managed to get into the sister Secondary school. Hooray. But there is one incident that happened on that day that stands out in my mind though it wasn’t made known to me then, of a certain call made to my grandmother by C’s mother, L as she shall be known. L, a long time church friend of my parents as well as my Sunday school teacher. In the call she asked my grandmother how I did for the exams, and when my grandmother told her she sounded very surprised, then annoyed. My grandmother was offended and relayed this to my parents.
L, was the person who would later destroy my old life and change me forever.
No comments:
Post a Comment