The suicide of an 11 year old boy in Singapore: Limpeh's (very angry) reaction

Once in a while a story gets me so incredibly angry that I have to calm down before I blog about it - this is one such case. I thought of writing a piece to condemn the parents in the case of the 11 year old boy who killed himself after getting his primary 5 exam results. But then again, I know exactly what I will do - being too close to the subject, it would go into a tirade of how awful Asian parenting is, why Chinese culture is so toxic and why I hate Chinese culture so much. Sigh, I know have written enough posts on those topics already. There are plenty of angry Singaporeans who have condemned the parents in this case already (I would like to see the parents jailed for child abuse), so instead, I am going write about something quite different. I have written a piece that has address those who are average, in the middle of the spectrum who are neither scholars nor total failures. So what if your child simply 'bueh tak chek' then?

Why are so many Singaporean parents so retarded?

Now I like the way we make a distinction between bueh tak chek and boh tak chek in Hokkien. I would translate bueh tak chek as 不会读书 whilst boh tak chek would be 没有读(过)书 - why is this distinction important? The former indicates a person who (for want of a better word) is stupid - s/he could try to study 100 hours a week but even with the best tuition teachers that money can buy, s/he will still fail the exam. The latter however, indicates a person who (for whatever reason) has not studied - this person may simply be lazy or in some cases, has not been presented with the right opportunities to get an education: the result however, in both cases of boh/bueh tak chek are the same. However, there is a moral distinction between the two: take the case of my late uncle - he came from a very poor family and being the eldest son, he had to drop out of school to start working the moment my grandfather died. Now whilst he may claim to be uneducated because he never had the chance to finish his formal education, I don't think he is stupid at all. He managed to build up several small businesses over his lifetime and managed to raise his own family without having a single piece of paper qualification. He may be uneducated but he's definitely not stupid. If he had been given the right chances, if he had the opportunity and resources to have continued with his formal education, who knows? He may have gone on to university and his life would have turned out to be totally different.

So if your child is failing his exams because he is playful, distracted by computer games and not revising, then yes there is a question of discipline and boundaries that needs to be addressed urgently. However, if the child is failing his exams because he is a classic case of bueh tak chek - he is simply stupid and that is really through no fault of his own. If anyone is to blame, you can blame the parents for his gene pool. But if your child is stupid, then no amount of corporal punishment could turn that child into a genius. That's why I am so appalled at this case - it is 2016 for crying out aloud, not the 1970s. Children who are failing in school need professional help, not punishments and certainly not beatings. How is any kind of physical pain or punishment going to help a child understand how to solve simultaneous equations or understand how photosynthesis works? If you beat your child, you're only going to make matters far worse by making the child deeply unhappy. So allow me to make the following points about children who fail exams.

What should you do if your child can't pass exams?

1. We don't use what we learn at school anyway.

The vast majority of primary and secondary education is useless and irrelevant to our adult lives. But let's recognize the limits of what we are taught - there's a huge gulf between being able to speak a language and being able to communicate effectively in it. Sure you may have had good grades in English as a student, but are you able to present a new concept to your colleagues in a clear manner that will be easily understood? Even if you had top grades in maths at school, would you be able to decide where cuts should be made in a company which is facing a short-term cash flow problem so that all the employees can be still paid at the end of the month? Such subjects were meant to test our ability to understand a topic, we're not expected to remember any of that information when we enter the workforce - no, we only retain information that is relevant and useless to us. In a recent blog post I wrote, I realized that the vast majority of skills that I use in my work today were not taught to me at school or university - heck, that meant I could have spent a lot more time doing fun stuff rather than studying, given how useless it all turned out to be.

2. You're so not going to pursue something you suck at for a career.

Say you suck at maths, then in all probability, you're not going to want to become an accountant or do any kind of job that requires maths. I never enjoyed maths at school, I could just about get through my maths exams but never enjoyed the subject: yes I have basic numeracy skills that I use in my daily life, when working out how much change I should get when I hand over a £10 for a £7.65 purchase. Whoopee, that's primary two standard maths. I have told my mother over and over again (and she still can't believe me), I work in finance and I don't need maths. The only time I ever needed maths was to work out my invoices and check that I am paid the right amount (I usually double check, since I am self-employed and it can get quite complex with the way I am paid). Time for a dose of common sense people: you play to your strengths and you will pick a career where you not only will be good at your job - it should come easily to you. Why would you do the complete opposite and make everyday at work a miserable struggle? So if your kid fails some subjects, so what? Just take it as a clear sign for careers he should avoid and by the same token, where his strengths lie. As long as he hasn't failed every single subject, relax: there's not that much to worry about.

If you suck at maths, would you pursue a career that needs maths?

3. Whatever you learn at school is too general to be of any use to you as an adult.

Oh there was this one thing my mother said that made me gasp in total disbelief at just how naive she can be. When I got my first good job in banking, she said that it was because I did an 'S' paper in economics whilst at VJC. At this point I must explain that my mother is a retired teacher who has never ever done a job in the private sector - all she knows is teaching and as a teacher, she thinks that our paper qualifications are so bloody important and impressive. I told my mother whatever I did for my A levels at VJC is totally irrelevant as I can't remember most of the content of what I studied back in 1993 and 1994 - if you were to give me the same exams today, I would fail them all because there's just no way I can remember any of what I studied so many years later. That renders any results I got back then totally obsolete and irrelevant. If anything, the results proved that I can study something and understand it well enough to write essays about it in an exam situation - but even that is a totally useless skill as I don't write essays in my job.

Think about it: your school cannot possibly know exactly what job you are going to end up doing, hence they just teach you whatever you need to pass your exams which will probably turn out to be totally irrelevant to your future job(s) in due course. What happens in reality is when you get a new job, your line manager will make sure you get the appropriate training and help to be able to do your job well. You're not expected to hit the ground running. Every company will have their own way to do things and all passing exams prove is that you know how to study a subject and apply what you have learnt. Gatekeepers like fast learners who are able to adapt to new environments and those of us in the working world understand how this works. The only problem then lies with teachers: it is an ego thing. Imagine if a teacher said to the class, "hey, guys, really, please don't worry if you flunk next week's test as none of this really matters anyway in the long run. It really isn't important." No, that would seriously dent the teacher's ego, so instead he says, "you must pay attention as this is so vital for your future! What we are learning here is so extremely important!"

Why are we so obsessed with grades? What do they mean?

4. You only need to be good at one thing - so you may as well choose something you enjoy.

The vast majority of working only do one job and they do that well. There are people like me who are crazy enough to pursue two different careers and climb two but even I get to avoid the things I dislike out of sheer common sense. A dentist doesn't need to worry if he doesn't know what happened during WW2 as long as he takes good care of his patients' teeth. A baker doesn't need to worry about having to deal with algebra as long as he know what temperature to bake his delicious cakes at. A barber doesn't have to worry about spelling as long as his clients are very happy with their haircuts. An tax consultant doesn't have to worry about the periodic table, as long as his clients' tax affairs are all in good order. Need I go on? So why the hell are students expected to score straight As across a range of subjects as diverse as Chinese to geography to to literature to physics? If adults are not expected at all to have that range of knowledge, why are we expecting students to do that? By all means allow students to study these different subjects at school in the name of education and discovery, but don't expect them to excel at all of them. You're most likely going to be good at something you truly enjoy, so it is important to allow children the freedom explore a range of different activities and hobbies, to see if they can find something that they truly enjoy.

5. Bad Asian parents using grades as a barometer of morals. 

This is one thing that drives me nuts because it is so totally ridiculous. Asian parents always use grades to measure just how well behaved their children are. Their dumb "Asian logic" works like this: if the children are getting good grades at school, that means they are spending so many hours studying hard that they have no time to go out, make friends, go clubbing, take drugs, have loads of sex with strangers. So making these strict demands on their children to score straight As is done as a means to keep their children out of trouble, by ensuring that they are too busy studying to do anything else. But of course, this theory fails on so many levels. Firstly, some kids can study really hard but still fail their exams because they are stupid - is there any moral shortcoming on their part? Can they be blamed for being stupid? No, if anything, the parents are the ones who should be blamed for giving them poor genes. How does it feel now - when we turn the finger of blame back towards the dumb parents? These kids may have done absolutely nothing wrong and have tried extremely hard yet they still face the wrath of their parents for having failed their exams.

I am going to blame dysfunctional Chinese culture for this problem.

Likewise, the opposite can also be true - my parents were shocked that a culture of bullying existed in my secondary school despite it being one of the best in Singapore. In their Asian minds, the boys all had such good results so they cannot possibly be bullies or bad people. There is clearly no correlation between morals and getting good results - my mother (I kid you not) had assumed that the students at my university (one of the best in the UK) would all be chaste and celibate because how else would you be able to get such good grades if you were distracted by sex? When I told her that not only was I notoriously promiscuous during university but the vast majority of my classmates were sexually active, she just was stunned into total disbelief. You see, my mother is not highly educated, she never went to university - so she had these crazy assumptions and preconceptions about people (like me) who do get scholarships to go to the best universities in the world. I still find it hilarious that she believed that my good grades meant I was celibate and that despite her insistence of straight As from me, I still became such a total slut at university (whilst still getting great results). Go figure. Asian parenting totally sucks and makes no sense at all.

6. Don't automatically blame the child - have you blamed the teachers or parents yet?

The child who killed himself failed Chinese and maths - two subjects I struggled with in school. I had a mental block towards Chinese because I couldn't get along with my parents at all - instead of hating them (you don't get to choose your parents), I chose to blame their culture and hated all things Chinese instead. That led to me proclaiming that I hated the Chinese language and couldn't speak it - that annoyed the hell out of my father who just happened to be a Chinese teacher. Imagine the shame he felt when the son of a Chinese teacher can't speak Mandarin and turns out to be a total banana. Well, ironically, I actually speak much better Mandarin than most Singaporeans because I was practically raised by gymnastics coaches from China and I had spent more time with them than my own parents. But my complex and difficult situation at home made it hard for me to like learning Chinese when it depended so much on rote learning and I became far more interested in making my father angry by deliberately giving him the impression that I just can't get my head around Chinese. Perhaps my reading/writing isn't that strong today, but given my gift with communication skills, I have handled very complex tasks in Mandarin (for example with the press in China) and have even done TV for mainland China broadcast. Just imagine how good my Chinese would be if I actually got along with my parents or actually had half decent Chinese teachers who didn't totally suck at their jobs? Was it my fault that I had a really hard time with Chinese? Of course not - I blame my parents and the terrible teachers for having failed me.

What if the kid had a terrible teacher?

Likewise, I had a mental block with maths because I suffered one bad maths teacher after another. I received no encouragement and by the time I was a teenager, I had condemned myself in that department. I thought I was more creative and was good at other things - I told myself it was okay to totally suck at maths as I had other gifts. Then something strange happen at university - there was a compulsory statistics module and I scored 100% in it whilst most people struggled to pass. My classmates at university just assumed that I was this Asian geek who was a maths genius and none of them would believe that I struggled with maths all my life. Perhaps in hindsight, I had long given up on myself in that department - the combination of terrible teaches and an absence of any encouragement had convinced me I was terrible at maths when really, I wasn't at all. Again, was it my fault that I struggled with maths at school? Of course not - again, I blame my parents and teachers for having totally let me down.

So in the case of the 11 year old boy who killed himself, why did his stupid mother assume that if her son scores badly in a subject, it is somehow his fault? The boy is just 11 years old for crying out aloud - what if he is suffering from a bad teacher? What if he was suffering from bullying at school and that affected his studies? What if he was suffering from more bad parenting from his stupid mother? My point is simple: I was a triple-scholar, my IQ places me in the top 1% of the human population and I speak ten languages. I'm not just smart, but incredibly so. Yet if you had looked at some of my maths and Chinese results as a student in Singapore, you would probably shake your head and thought I was a stupid boy. Very stupid indeed. So if your children fail an exam or two - are you prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt long enough to look into why they have failed? Don't assume your children are stupid just because they fail an exam - there are good reasons why some very smart people still fail exams in school and it is not always their fault.

So whose fault is it if a child struggles at school?

7. Accept the things in life you cannot change.

There are just some things in life you can't change no matter how hard you try - if this boy had already tried his very best, then why should his mother have any reason to cane him or punish him for his bad results? If this kid had constantly had good results and then suddenly fails an exam, okay then we have reason to suspect something went very wrong - there would be questions to be asked, like was he distracted by something that stopped him from studying for these exams? But it seemed that this kid constantly had mediocre and below-average results for the last few years, why can't the mother just accept her child for what he is? No amount of beating or punishment is going to turn him into a genius, so why not just accept the hand that fate has dealt you? There are so many things in life we can get angry over, especially if we didn't get what we wanted. Maybe this mother wanted a brilliant child who could get straight As and go on to become a scholar - she didn't get what she wanted, so she brutally punished the child and drove him to suicide because she wasn't happy or satisfied? I'd like to see her jailed for what she did to her son! 

8. Stop demonizing people who are below average. 

Singaporeans are incredibly cruel to those who are not mega-successful or rich - taxi drivers tend to bear the brunt of this snobbery as the epitome of failure in Singapore. Many Singaporeans are not even aware when they are perpetuating this mindset, let me give you an example. Statistically, we know that not everyone can get straight As and there will be people who will fail exams - they will end up doing manual labour - hence the distinction between blue and white collar jobs. Such people who end up in blue collar jobs make an honest living. They may not earn a lot of money but are they such bad people who deserved to be demonized for not having become a doctor, banker or a lawyer? When we started treating blue collar workers with more dignity and respect, our education system and society will stop demonizing those who are probably going to end up in blue collar jobs. They do jobs that are vital for our society to run - they are certainly not criminals who have done anything wrong, so why are they being demonized as such then?

9. The scope of primary and even secondary education is very limited.

The boy who killed himself was tested in four subjects (I am treating Chinese and Higher Chinese effectively as one subject) and that reflects on just how limited the scope of primary and even secondary education is. Allow me to talk about some of my friends here in London who have some very interesting jobs (and earn a lot of money): Nadia is a music PR consultant who promotes the latest singers/bands and she has described her job as kissing many frogs (some turn into princes, others don't) but she gets paid a lot by the record label to work her PR magic. Is there any correlation between the skills she uses today with her primary or even secondary education? None whatsoever, she thrives on her 'soft skills' in dealing with people - there isn't a course in any university which can help her, she understands what kind of popular music young people like and studies the charts to spot trends, a lot of the time she just has to go with her gut instinct to decide which band or singer to push into which markets.

Nadia confessed to having been average in school - she was often berated by her teachers for having spent more time listening to music, reading up on her favourite singers or bands than studying for her exams. It turns out that the activity that was dismissed as "a waste of time" is making her a lot of money today - Nadia probably earns in a month what her primary school teachers earned in a year. (Yeah she gets the last laugh.) Given the rigid limits of primary education, there was nothing her teachers could do to incorporate her interest in pop music into what Nadia was examined on. We are all unique individuals at the end of the day, we all have different interests, skills and talents yet the primary school syllabus can often feel like squeezing a round peg into a square hole - well, more like squeezing pegs of a range of different shapes and sizes into the same square hole. How many cases of Nadia have there been - individuals who clearly have a talent for something that simply cannot be measured by the very limited scope of our education system? How many people like Nadia have been dismissed as 'lazy' or 'stupid' by the education system?

I can talk about plenty of other friends who are making truckloads of money today doing interesting things that are not remotely related to anything they have studied at school or even university. My friend Seb works for a perfume company and he is part of a team which creates the perfumes - he spends his days in the lab sniffing different scents and deciding which go well together. He had been fascinated with perfumes from a young age. Seb does a lot of experiments with the different scents and I know what you're thinking - does he have a degree in chemistry? I asked him that, he told me that he flunked chemistry at school and drove most of his science teachers nuts. He doesn't need to know what the chemical composition of an ingredient like essential oil of sandalwood doesn't tell him anything about how it smells or how it would smell when blended with other ingredients in a perfume. The skills he uses for his job were either learnt on the job (he works for one of the biggest perfume producers in the UK) and he has a 'nose' for scents - ie. it's a talent, it's a gift - his nose can pick up the most subtle differences in smell when most of us would think, "that kinda smells fruity". Seb earns more a week than his former chemistry teacher would earn in a year. 

Okay, perhaps I am deliberately picking two success stories, two friends who are fabulously wealthy to make my point - but my point is simple: we may have skills, talents or special interests that fall outside the rigid limits of the primary/secondary school syllabus. Some of us (like myself) have somehow managed to do what was asked of us in school anyway and then go on to build careers that completely ignored everything we did in school - what a total waste of time eh? Then there are others like Nadia and Seb who were mediocre, even below average in school and then went on to be incredibly successful in their chosen fields - which once again, have absolutely nothing to do with their education. The problem clearly lies with the system - but can we allow teenagers, even children to decide what they want to study and pursue at that age? People like Seb, Nadia and myself didn't quite know what career paths we would pursue until we were adults. Surely the way ahead is to relax the rigid system to give students more say in what they want to pursue and widen the scope of the education to give students the opportunity to do more independent projects on subjects of their choice. What makes me really angry though, is the way so many Singaporean kids are made to feel inadequate and useless by the teachers, their parents, their peers, their society - indeed by the entire bloody system if they cannot perform these very specific tasks within the narrow scope of the education system.

Can we help students discover where their talents lie?

10. And conversely, even if you do well at primary school or beyond, so what? 

Thanks to social media, I am able to see what my former classmates are up to today. I did go to some of the top schools in Singapore for my secondary education (RI & VJC) and to get a place in those schools in those days, yes you had to have very good grades for your PSLE and 'O' levels. But did doing well in those exams guarantee my former classmates success in life? Not really - there seems to be quite a wide range of achievements. There is a housewife who is busy raising her young children whilst giving a few hours of tuition a week (to primary school kids) to the CEO of an investment bank in America - and there's everything in between. In short, if you were to look at that list, it would look pretty random, it certainly wouldn't read as the list of the most successful people from my peer group in Singapore. Should that come as a surprise? That list comprised of students who were good at memorizing loads of facts and doing well in a very rigid examination system - those were not skills that served any of us well in the working world. Nobody is going to pay any of us to study to pass exams the way we did as students - so why are Singaporeans so hung up on exam results then? It makes no sense. Something needs to change before more kids kill themselves.

So there you go, that's a very long post because this topic has struck so many raw nerves with me. I am still furious with the way this horrific case of child abuse is not being treated as such by the authorities in Singapore - why aren't the parents of this boy arrested already for manslaughter, child abuse or at least gross negligence? Why is this simply treated as a tragic accident when we can place the blame squarely on the parents for being such horrible, evil monsters? So many people are being nice in offering kind words of condolences, fuck that - I wanna see the parents arrested and thrown in jail for a very long time, I want to hold them responsible for their crimes and I want justice for that poor boy. Are you as angry about this horrific case? What do you think we should do as a society, how should we react? What can we do to prevent more children killing themselves? What about students who fail exams at school, what are your thoughts on the issue? Please leave a comment below and let's talk about it - many thanks for reading.