Why I am a jiat-kentang banana

I had a strange afternoon which left me feeling depressed and thinking - and I have managed to put two things together and figured out why I am such a jiat-kentang banana.

Yellow on the outside, white on the inside. 

Because of my involvement in my gymnastics club, I was offered the chance to go on a free child protection & safeguarding course. It was only 3 hours and within walking distance from where I live, so I went for it. I didn't find it that relevant to be honest, but initially I wanted to learn more about what I could do as an uncle for my autistic nephew, so I thought maybe there were some pearls of wisdom to be gleamed. Instead, it brought back a lot of painful memories. 

The course focused a lot about identifying children who are abused at home, so that any kind of figure of authority (a teacher, a nurse, a social worker, a sports coach etc) can then intervene when they spot signs of abuse. I found myself surprised at the way I was thinking about it in the context of my own childhood - I had a physically abusive mother. Well, by 1970s and 1980s local standards, she would be a typical Singaporean mum but by 2013 British standards, they would have locked her up a long time ago. 

British teachers and carers are expected to spot signs of abuse.

We're not just talking about the odd smack on the bottom, my mother had a very short fuse and once she got angry, you knew she was going to keep hitting you until she got tired. There was no element of justifying what she did - she had serious anger management and psychological issues. In 2013, someone like her would have been referred for psychological help as she was clearly venting her anger and frustration on her children. By modern British standards, they would have charged her with assault already and taken her children away from her - but back in those days, we were but naughty children who deserved what we got. When I was 6, she broke a cup over my head - but that's nothing compared to the kind of abuse she inflicted on my sister. Here's the funny thing - the cup was meant for my sister but I somehow got in the way and the cup hit my head instead. 

There were a combination of quite a few factors that led to her being this physically abusive. Firstly, her own mother (my grandmother) was well known for being physically abusive, so in her culture it was perfectly acceptable to punish your children that way. Secondly, she suffered from severe migraines. So when she was already in severe pain, she was in no mood to attempt to exercise any kind of parenting - it was far easier to just lash out physically than to try to use words. Thirdly, she was taking a lot of crap from her colleagues at work and was already under a lot of mental stress at work - so she simply didn't have the energy to balance a demanding full time job and function as a mother to her three children. Fourthly, my sisters and I were all doing so well at school - and in those days, that was pretty much all that mattered to most Singaporeans, ie. "if the kids are doing well in their studies, then the mother must be doing a good job." As a result of the first four factors, she had serious anger management issues and psychological issues which were never ever properly addressed. Lastly, nobody questioned if what she did was right or wrong - she was allowed to make her mistakes and no one intervened. 

It was just so depressing sitting there in that seminar, listening to the speaker go on and on about tell-tale signs of a child being physically abused at home - and I thought, why didn't anyone say anything when I was being physically abused as a child? The answer was simple - it wasn't just one person, it was the culture. So for example, the teacher at school would not be sympathetic to me having been physically abused at home because the teacher would be just as likely to physically abuse his/her own children at home and would not hesitate to hit me if I had been a 'naughty' student. My father wasn't usually the one to hit me, but when he did - he could be as savage as my mother and there were countless times when he stood by and did nothing as my mother viciously beat the hell out of her children. 

But hey. We're Chinese. We're Singaporean. That's normal, isn't it? Do I just have to accept it? 

I have two sisters - one is just as bitter as I am about the way my parents have been physically abusive (possibly even more bitter?), the other one just says, "it's all a long time ago, let it go. Forgive, forget, it doesn't matter anymore, move on." I remember their justification being, "it's our Chinese culture, that's how we teach our children - and if you think we punished you harshly, you should see what (insert names) did to their children..." Yeah like that's supposed to justify anything. I didn't buy of their bullshit - oh please lah, I was so much smarter than that. 

What should I do when I feel shitty about my childhood?

The extreme physical violence stopped when I hit puberty and thankfully had a growth spurt which meant that I became taller than my mother and could fend off her savage blows (or simply run away, fast). It all happened in my primary school years and my mother did mellow with age - she has turned into a docile, little old granny today, a shadow of her former self. Looking at her today, it is hard to reconcile some of my memories with the little old lady I see before me.

And guess what? She has a very selective memory - my mother can choose to 'not remember' some episodes. My sister has confronted her about an incident when my mother smashed my sister's head against the wall for not getting full marks for a maths test. According to my sister, she grabbed my sister's long hair and swung her at the wall at full pelt and even as my sister lay semi-conscious on the floor from the blow, my mother was standing over her screaming her head off, oblivious to what she has just done to her own daughter. Well my mother flatly denied that ever happened and my sister is adamant that it has scarred her for life. After seeing the way my mother denied and swore that the incident never happened, I decided it wasn't worth my while digging up the past as I know my mother would denied everything - yes, including breaking that cup over my head which did scar me for life. By that token, I chose to believe my sister and not my mother. (But no, I don't want another argument with my mother - what do I have to gain by making her feel shit about herself today? What is the point? Let's not go there.) 

I don't want to confront my mother about the past. What would I gain?

There was one thing that struck me this afternoon. The speaker was saying that there was this case where he had to intervene when a mother would punish her daughter by smashing up her favourite dolls and toys - well, in the UK, if you physically hit the child, you would be arrested (yes we live in a civilized country). Since the mother couldn't hit the child, the mother lashed out at the toys and the toys took the brunt of the physical violence. Harmless enough, you may say? After all, the mother bought the toys so if she smashed them, she is merely smashing what she bought, as long as it is the doll or toy who got smashed up and not the daughter? Wrong. The mother is setting a very bad example for the daughter, ie. "if you're angry with someone, you smash up something they love so as to make them feel the pain." 

The daughter then had a fight with the neighbour's children and proceeded to break all the windows of the neighbour's car by throwing big rocks through their windows. Well guess where the daughter learnt this from? What kind of example did the mother set for her daughter by choosing this method of punishment? What are the long term consequences of the damage this form of bad parenting has caused the daughter? (And my that token, what kind of example did my mother set me, with all her anger management issues?) 

Anger management should be taken seriously before it becomes a problem.

This story struck a chord with me because that was something a colleague of my mother used to do and my mother condoned it. When I heard the story, I didn't question it - I just thought, "well at least the toys are getting hit instead of the child..." But I am now aghast at the way we didn't challenge the way bad parents got away with so much abuse and bad parenting in Singapore back in the 1980s. It's so wrong. Well, the trend has gone completely the other way and that isn't helping the situation either. 

You know what the irony is? There's nothing Chinese about the use of corporal punishment - hell no, it exists in Europe, Africa, America, Australia - just about anywhere, any country. Parents resort to smacking their children when they are at the end of their tether, ie. "I have tried everything else to get you to comply and I have ran out of parenting techniques, so I am just going to resort to hitting you instead." That is a universal situation that cuts across any cultural boundary and a situation that stressed parents find themselves in.

Would simply avoiding the issue make it go away? 

As a child growing up in Singapore, I couldn't rebel against this - I couldn't tell my parents that I disagreed with their parenting techniques when I was completely dependent on them. It didn't mean that I liked or condone what they did either - I silently rejected their methods of parenting all that time. A way for me to project this in an oblique, indirect manner was to reject anything and everything Chinese. Sure I scored nothing less than straight As for Chinese language at school, but I didn't touch one piece of Chinese culture as a child growing up. I didn't read Chinese magazines or newspapers, I refused to watch Chinese TV programmes or movies and I especially refused to listen to a single piece of Chinese pop music. Instead, I consumed British and American media instead. It was my way of rebelling - I was determined to bleach my cultural identity totally white to spite my parents. 

You see, this is where I differed from a lot of 'jiat kentang' bananas (ie. yellow on the outside, white on the inside) - your typical 'potato eater' (a Chinese person who favours Western culture) would probably not be able to speak much Chinese, but that wasn't the case for me. I was brilliant at Chinese at school (well, my dad is a retired Chinese teacher - what did you expect?) yet I chose to reject Chinese culture for a different reason. For many years, I just defaulted to this teenage rebellion mode - ie. "if my parents like it, I must reject it. If they rejects it, I must embrace it." Ooh guess what ? My father hates the French, therefore I must study French to level where I can proudly declare to him that my French is much better than my Mandarin. Done.

Yes my French is better than my Chinese.

After all these years of rejecting my parents' culture, it is hard to change the habit of a lifetime. Let me give you an example. When I was in Singapore a few weeks ago, I picked up my nephew's Chinese textbook. My nephew is 10, he is in primary four and of course I could read every word - but I pretended to read it out aloud and then struggle with the most basic words. And just to make sure I wind my dad up, I then asked my dad to help me read the difficult words and then I said, "Oh I can't read Chinese any more, I give up, I have forgotten all of it." (In English, of course.) 

Perhaps you can say that it is a childish move on my part (and I would not disagree with you), but I do that instead of confronting my parents about the way I was physically abused as a child. I can't bring myself to talk about it with my parents (well my sister has tried and failed). So instead I pretend I can't read Chinese anymore just to irritate my dad who is a Chinese teacher. Imagine the shame a Chinese teacher would feel when his own adult son can't read a primary 4 Chinese textbook. When my father makes any references to Chinese culture in casual conversation, I would feign ignorance and pretend I don't know any of the things he talks about (from 梁山伯與茱麗葉 to any references to Chinese medicine or Chinese history). "Who is 郭富城? I have never heard of him?" I would pretend. But it goes beyond that - I would tell them things like, "Angmoh culture is better, Angmoh society is more civilized, look at all these PRCs in Singapore, I hope you like your Chinese culture for you will be sharing Singapore with a lot more PRCs in the future. They have been stealing cutlery off planes, that's Chinese culture for you and it sucks, I want no part of it."

Remember the way my mother convenient forgot the way she slammed my sister's head into the wall? Well, my parents have mastered the art of believing what they want to believe and they want to believe that they have been good parents. So why am I so fixated with showing my parents that I have totally rejected their culture? I suppose it was one way for me to show that their parenting... did not achieve the desired effect. After all, they often use the fact that I am a triple scholar (and a former national champion gymnast etc) to demonstrate to the world just what brilliant parents they have been and if that is what they want to believe, it was difficult to try to tell them otherwise. So I had to pick on one aspect of my upbringing that meant a lot to them, spit it in their faces and say, "there, I have totally rejected your culture - you have failed to make it a part of my life after all these years. I am not like you and I am doing everything I can to make sure I grow up to be very different from you by making sure I have a very different cultural identity." I look at some children who want to grow up to be like their parents... I was doing everything I could to let them know I didn't want to grow up to be anything like them - if they couldn't read and interpret that signal... 

Do they care? Probably not. Actually, I know they're probably going, "oh there he goes again, play another record Alex, that one is getting so stale we're so bloody bored of it. Shut the hell up already, nobody gives a shit what you think or do anymore, really." They're far more interested in my nephew (their grandson) than what I do these days anyway. But what is the alternative? There is a part of me that tried so hard to do what my older sister did, ie. "forgive, forget, leave it - it's so long ago, move on." But each time something (like today's workshop) reminds me of the kind of physical abuse I took as a child, I get very depressed because it has been the elephant in the room that no one has talked about all these years. When I heard about how damaged, abused kids go on to lead dysfunctional adult lives and wind up in jail, unemployable or as drug addicts, I think, "actually I didn't turn out too bad. Things could have been so much worse, in hindsight... I turned out okay despite everything that has happened." I chose on something I had control over (my cultural identity) to project my act of rebellion and if I had missed out on anything in the process by rejecting my parents' culture, that's my loss and I can live with that. 

My parents hated cold weather and so I embraced winter in a big way. 

I guess I just had to get that off my chest. As I left the workshop, I defaulted to something I always did when I felt depressed like that. I went shopping - a bit of retail therapy. It was easy to cheer myself up by buying nice clothes and shoes whenever something made me feel very depressed. I have done that for years and shopping is a nice distraction from the shit in life. (I wonder if that is why Singaporeans love shopping so much?) But it didn't help as I wandered from store to store - looking at beautiful clothes and shiny gadgets... My thoughts raced around my heads, with memories coming back to haunt me. I wasn't thinking straight at all. I was so confused I almost tripped coming out of a store. I decided, no, I will blog about it as putting words down on a page allows me to organize these random thoughts and make sense of the situation. (I do recommend it, even if no one reads what you write.) 

I suppose it's strange that these two events are associated - but when I describe the cause and effect, it makes sense at last and I do expect a lot of hate mail from Chinese people everywhere who really resent jiat-kentang bananas like myself, but you know what? I believe that I can also find some empathy from my other regular readers who may be able to relate to the kind of upbringing I have had and can offer some insight into my situation. All I can offer is my honesty in the way I have dealt with the situation thus far and share my story, because I am sick and tired of going shopping every time I feel depressed about the physical abuse I suffered in my childhood. 

Don't bottle it up - come and talk to Limpeh if you're upset. 

Hey, don't be a stranger. If there's something that has been troubling you for a long time, leave me a comment below and get it off your chest. Let's talk about it. It's better to talk than to distract oneself with shopping. Thanks for reading.