Ciao Bella, Money Heist and being an uncle

Ciao! Hi there guys, I am off to Venice in Italy this week. Oh yes, I'm off on holiday yet again, I've only just returned from my four-country adventure with my family. In fact I was only in Italy just last spring when I was in Tuscany but even though I have been through the airport in Venice, I've never actually been to Venice before and there are plenty of reasons to go to Venice. My partner saw a BA winter sale back in December and persuaded me that we should to Venice this winter, hence we've booked a long weekend there. To warm up my brain to speak Italian for this trip, I've been listening to a lot of Italian music on Youtube and of course, one of the songs which I've learnt to sing along to is Bella Ciao which was made popular by the TV series Money Heist (La Casa De Papel) and it is a song that has grown in popularity in the last few years. It is an old Italian folk song from the 19th century but has had its lyrics rewritten with a grittier feel as an anthem for revolution. Many versions of "Bella Ciao" are sung worldwide as an anti-fascist hymn of freedom and resistance, from Hong Kong to Chile. Like many, I first heard this Italian song after watching Money Heist - it is a highly successful Spanish drama series that my Estonian colleagues told me to watch a few years ago. I just love the way our world is so interconnected these days, such is the power of social media to unite us all through popular culture.

But perhaps I am reading too much into this, or I am guilty of seeing what I want to see. One of the most popular versions of Bella Ciao on Youtube right now is the Hardwell & Maddix remix which they performed live at the Tomorrowland music festival in Belgium in 2018. That Youtube video (see below) has over 25.7 million views, but that version of the song has been remixed beyond recognition with the DJ screaming random, inane things like "put your fucking hands up!" in English over the song. I actually love the partisan version of this song (which was the version used in Money Heist) and I do wonder how many people actually know anything about the origins of the song, what the Italian lyrics mean and the significance of this song as an anthem for revolution? Or are people just recognizing it as "that catchy song from Money Heist"? But nonetheless, the popularity of the series Money Heist is incredible. By 2018, the series was the most-watched non-English language series and one of the most-watched series overall on Netflix, especially in Europe and Latin America. I particularly love that series because it allows me to practice my Spanish and I love the way it presents the audience with a moral dilemma. Who are the bad guys? Who are the good guys? Are the police supposed to be the people you can trust? What about the government? And of course, every fan of the show has their favourite character - I adore Berlin, because he is your classic anti-hero. There are so many reasons to hate him, he's not a nice person, he is one of the most fearsome characters in the gang yet you're drawn to him because in this world, you no longer know who the good guys are - instead, you are simply drawn to the most charming person around.

Anyway, I need to get this off my chest. I always have this fear that makes me hesitate when it comes to my nephew: there's so much I want to do to help him become a better person. But obviously, we don't live in the same country, we don't even live in the same time zone and I barely get to spend a few days with him each year. What has this got to do with Money Heist and Ciao Bella? A few years ago when I visited Singapore, I wanted to surprise my sister the day I arrived - everyone had just assumed that I would be exhausted after the long flight from London, but I was actually pretty okay and just keen to catch up with her. So I turned up at her house unannounced hoping to surprise her, but instead she was working late in the office. My nephew and brother-in-law were at home, I think my brother-in-law was doing something on his phone and my nephew was watching TV, so I just sat down on the sofa and watched whatever my nephew was watching. It was some lame MediaCorp Chinese TV drama series about a family business jealously guarding their kueh recipes. The production quality was poor, the script was lame and the acting was bad. I did think at that point, there are far better things to watch on TV. Personally, I would have preferred if my nephew watched an American series like Suits (it would certainly improve his English) or even something like Money Heist which would expose him to another language and culture, making it a far more education experience whilst being entertained at the same time. But then I thought, he's probably had a long day and just wants to relax right now, the last thing he needs is his uncle to criticize even his choice of TV programmes - so I simply said nothing and I'm always doing that. I often find something I really want to criticize but I simply don't have the confidence to speak up even if it is about my own nephew.

The point I would have made (if I had the audacity to challenge my brother-in-law - which I don't) would have been this: what can he possibly learn from watching a trashy, low-budget local Singaporean TV programme? Surely he would have been better off watching something like Money Heist which would enrich him with the knowledge of another country's culture? After all, my nephew needs to learn a lot to prepare himself for the working world - beyond the topics covered in the academic syllabus, a major part of his education ought to be an awareness of the big bad world that lies beyond the gates of his school. Now you may argue that these TV programmes are designed to entertain rather than instruct, but nonetheless I believe that they do serve a purpose in terms of widening a teenager's perspective of the world, beyond the immediate experiences that they can get within the school environment. Without this knowledge, this awareness of how the adult world operates, how is the student meant to make that mental connection between what he is learning at school and how it may serve to help him in his career as an adult? That is why we end up with so many students in Singapore who may perform reasonably well at school but end up lost and clueless when they enter the working world. If we are to allow our teenagers some time to relax and watch TV, the least we can do is to make sure that they do gain some useful insights into the working world through the TV programmes that they watch. After all, I was certain that the Singaporean TV programme that my nephew was watching was so trashy and poorly produced there were really no educational value whatsoever to be gained from it and he may as well have been watching funny cat videos on Youtube.

Why am I so afraid to speak up at times like this? Firstly, I don't want to over-estimated the power of influence I have over my nephew. I can suggest that he watch a series like Money Heist, but whether or not he does so depends entirely on him at the end of the day - I'm just the uncle making the useful suggestions. Furthermore, how do you think my nephew is going to relate to me if the first thing I do is walk through the front door and start finding fault with little things like the TV programmes he likes to watch? I did worry that being overly critical would only alienate me from him, thus even further reducing the amount of influence I might have over him, so I had to be tactful and sensitive. Oh and it isn't just him I had to be tactful with, I didn't want my sister and my brother-in-law to think that I was critical of their parenting skills. My nephew is going to turn 17 this year and I know at that age, there's only so much a parent can do and he is a young adult - so I can't say things like, "why didn't you get him to do this" because it's not like when my nephew was much younger. We are now trying hard to encourage him to behave more like an adult and that means letting him make his own decisions; so within that context, finding fault with his choice of TV programmes probably would send a message like, "you're so immature, you're not capable of making the right decision, I can't trust you with anything, let an adult make that decision for you." No, sometimes we just have to stand back and let them make their own decisions - even terrible ones.

Look, things are going rather well with my nephew - he did quite well for his O levels, well enough to get into a decent JC and we're now thinking about his options beyond that as well. But I am far less interested in that, what impressed me more was the fact that he wanted to work part time after he completed his O levels and he was the one who found the job, went for the interview and despite my mother kicking up a huge fuss about it, he still went ahead with the decision. Oh my mother just wants to wrap him up in cotton wool and lock him up at home, she loves him of course, but she has no idea how to express that love or even what my nephew needs right now to mature into a confident young man. When I was teaching him how to ski in Spain, he showed a great attitude when it came to responding to a very difficult challenge. So with all those things in mind, I am happy to overlook his somewhat questionable choice in TV programmes but there's still a part of me that can't help but feel that perhaps I ought to say something. When we were on holiday together, my family were quite happy to use me as the interpreter whenever they needed something and I did try to teach them how to speak a little Spanish, but unfortunately they only managed the words 'hola' and 'gracias - just two words'. Most of the time they either just spoke English or they asked me to help them translate. So I was thus disappointed that my nephew wasn't more interested in the world around him when we were in some of the most beautiful parts of Europe.

So there was this afternoon in Madrid when we had finished lunch, I was quite happily just eavesdropping on the argument happening at the next table (hey they were speaking rather loudly and I am fluent in Spanish) but my nephew was simply looking down at his phone, oblivious to the world around him. I suppose he is just being a typical teenager, but that still doesn't make it any less unsociable to be glued to your phone at mealtimes. Look, I have an autistic father who has zero interest in anything foreign - he doesn't even speak English, he takes zero interest in anything outside Singapore and the Chinese speaking world. I am ashamed of my father's attitude and so I pushed myself to speak as many languages as possible, to learn as much as I can about the cultures of the countries that I am visiting. I would like to think that with a good education and a lot more money available, my nephew would become far more like me than my father, but well, the way he behaved on the holiday disappointed me - he was more like my father. He showed no interest in learning Spanish and he didn't ask me any questions about the places we were visiting: it was his father who was constantly feeding him information and acting like the geography teacher (and sometimes I would chip in and give some interesting facts as well). If it wasn't for my brother-in-law's valiant effort to make sure that his son got some kind of educational benefit from this trip - I don't actually know how much interest my nephew took in those countries he visited.

My brother-in-law would quiz my nephew like, "what is the name of the mountain we skied at yesterday? What is the name of this mountain range we are in?" And when my nephew couldn't give the right answer, my brother-in-law was obviously upset. Where do I draw the line? I can understand that my brother-in-law had obviously spent a lot of money taking his family on holiday to Europe and all he wanted in return was his son to pay a bit of attention to the things he was doing, not so much that he can use that information in some exam, but at least he would remember the details of that holiday and have some lovely memories. He wanted my nephew to make a greater effort to remember as that holiday was special for the family. Hence I do know that my brother-in-law is making a valiant effort in this aspect, that's why I don't want to seem critical. So by that token, I think it is only reasonable to expect my nephew to remember the name of a city or mountain that he has visited. But should I go down the same path and start quizzing my nephew every few hours, to see how many Spanish words he has memorized or if he remembered the names of the places we had visited the day before? Nah, I couldn't do that - it wouldn't be right. Besides, I did think that it wasn't that important to try to remember everything we did on that trip, as long as he took away some of the more important lessons in social skills that I was trying to teach him - simply things like saying please and thank you when dealing with people and learning how to engage people in simple conversation when being social. I certainly felt that those skills were far more important than actually remembering long lists of words in Spanish or remembering the name of every single city, town and village we passed through on that trip but I'm not convinced I managed to make that much of an impact on him even on that issue.

To put things on context, we've gone an awfully long way with my nephew. Like me, he is autistic and the both of us struggled with social skills (well he still does today, but something clicked for me when I was serving NS) but academically we're not stupid. His O level results have certainly surprised all of us and he has most certainly proved to everyone that autistic or not, he is definitely as intelligent if not more intelligent than a lot of his peers. However, in the past, because of his autism diagnosis, none of us in the family dared to have high expectations - I'll bring up a suggestion about some educational activity that he could do and it would be shot down with the excuse, "that's nice but he can't do it as he is autistic." Whilst I hope that my family would stop using that excuse from now on, I do have to caution myself to go too far the other way and suggest that he does what I do. "I want you to watch all three seasons of Money Heist and I expect you to pick up Spanish in the process, there'll be a test at the end of it. Then once you're done with that, I have a season of Magnifica 70 - a Brazilian drama - for you and I expect you to have picked up Brazilian Portuguese by the end of it." No, that would be trying to turn him into me which would be totally the wrong thing to do. Parents (and uncles/aunties/teachers etc) should allow children to find their own path and become the adults they want to become whilst simply being supportive. Furthermore, I don't even live in the same country as my nephew so even if I do plant an idea in his head, such as in the case of skiing, it would be then up to his parents to have to finance and support that activity (not unless they were willing to put him on a plane and send him to London for me to take over for a few weeks.)

You might think that I am overreacting (and perhaps I am): watching one trashy TV programme to relax is really no big deal, no harm is done. After all, I too am guilty of watching my fair share of trashy, silly Youtube videos all the time! But that's perhaps looking at that incident in isolation - if you were to look at the bigger picture, well, I believe that this is a missed opportunity. There's so much my nephew can access about the outside world through the world of entertainment, there are so many cultures and countries he can learn about simply by watching movies and TV programmes. And if I may be blunt, I don't want him to end up like my father who is so incredibly ignorant about the world outside Singapore. At the heart of this is a genuine desire for my nephew to become well educated, that's all and I don't think it would be too harsh to suggest that he could do better in this aspect. I'm not even suggesting that he has to learn another language or spend time studying at another country at this stage, I would like to think that baby steps like watching an American TV programme for light entertainment instead of a local one might be far more beneficial to make him aware of the cultural differences when it comes to dealing with white people. I did recently do a post about one of my Taiwanese clients who acted like a bull in a china shop when it came to dealing with a British company - he is not a stupid man per se, just unaware of the differences in culture when it came to doing business in the West. The incident make me think that I can't take it for granted that my nephew will just learn such things and somebody has got to take concrete steps to teach him.

But nonetheless, I know I have to be careful and not overstep the mark. This is because of a terrible mistake my mother made and I am keen not to make the same mistake. You see, my mother had always wanted to learn how to play the piano but as she grew up in such a poor family, it wasn't possible. So instead, she had forced all three of her children  to learn the piano when really, she should have just taken those piano lessons for herself and left me the hell out of it. The fact is I had absolutely zero interest in learning the piano and hence I hated every moment of it - after I completed my last piano exam, just to spite my mother, I made it clear I would never ever touch the keys of a piano again and there is just so much hatred, bitterness and resentment over the piano. I can't possibly do that to my own nephew after having had a taste of that. I still hate my mother over that awful decision she made because she imposed her will on me without once asking me if I wanted to do it, what's more the piano teacher I had was as abusive as my mother and would not hesitate to grab a book of the top of the piano and strike me across the face if she felt that my playing wasn't good enough. I was so fucking traumatized by those piano lessons and I have made it clear to my mother that I blame her for it, that it was all her fault. So given how I had gone through such an awful experience myself, the last thing I want to do is to impose my passions (be it gymnastics or learning foreign languages) on my nephew because I know things can go awfully wrong if my nephew is simply not interested at all. At least he enjoyed skiing with me, much to my relief. I don't want to use this as an excuse to do little or nothing as an uncle though, but damn - it can be very tough to get the balance right as an uncle. 

So there you go, that's where I stand on the issue. How far do you think I can go as an uncle to try to be a positive influence on my nephew? On the issue of TV programmes, for crying out aloud, the local Singaporean programmes are so shit that even Singaporeans are opting for better, high-budget, successful programmes from China and Hong Kong for Chinese programmes and from the US and UK for English language programmes - so would it have been justified for me to have told my nephew, "why are you watching these poorly produced local programmes?" I don't want to come across as the mean uncle who would only allow my nephew to watch serious, educational documentaries but come on, even if my nephew was just after some light entertainment, then he can do far better sourcing much better produced dramas from Hong Kong, UK, USA or indeed Spain (Money Heist!). Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.