Being the uncle looking in from the outside

Hi guys, allow me to get this off my chest as a follow up to my last post about what kind of uncle I should be to my nephew. I am very excited that my sister is visiting me in March, she will be on a business trip to Holland and will nip over to London at the end of that trip to spend a few days with me in London - I couldn't be more pleased. I then found out that she will arrive in London on the 16th March, well that happens to be the first day of my nephew's March school holidays. My brain went into planning mode quickly and I figured out that my nephew could get an overnight flight from Singapore to London on the evening of the 15th March (they usually take off between 11 pm and 1 am) and that would get him into London a few hours before my sister's flight touches down in London that same morning. I could pick him up at the airport and then we would be able to give him a quick break in London, before he would return to Singapore on the same flight as my sister. Oh I bet he would have totally loved that idea, but needless to say, everyone in my family shot that idea down on the basis that he is doing his O level exams his year and needs to study. So there was no point in me pushing for this (or even offering to pay for my nephew's plane ticket), given that nobody (apart from my nephew) would be on my side and I wasn't about to go to war with my family over this, especially since it was a war that I just can't win.

I am the funny uncle on the outside looking in.

The bulk of my nephew's exams will take place in October this year, that's a good 7 months after his March school holidays. Really, there is very little point in forcing the student to sit down and revise for an exam 7 months away when really, the student gains little from going through the motions. After all, for the Singaporean O level exams, a lot of it depends on rote learning - have you memorized the answers to the questions? Have you memorized enough case studies? So even if my nephew is able to memorize all the answers he needs for the exams on the 15th March, guess what? It's fairly pointless as he would need to revise again a lot closer to his exam for it to be fresh in his memory when he goes into that exam hall in October later this year. Perhaps he is still learning new material that he has yet to cover in his syllabus, but that would be covered during term time rather than during the holidays. One needs to understand how short term memory works. So for example, I bought a very nice loaf of sourdough bread at the supermarket yesterday and it is so recent that I even remember exactly how much I paid for it. I remember reading an interesting article about how sourdough bread is made so when I saw the loaf on sale, I thought, yeah why not that would be nice.  However, ask me a week or two from now and I might not even remember what kind of bread I bought, never mind how much I paid for it. This is because I will probably start encountering a lot of important things at work during the week and the details about the bread I bought will fade in my memory - especially after I have eaten it all and not even the crumbs are left.

Let me give you a classic example of how a lot of these exams and tests rely on short term memory. I studied Chinese in Singapore and I was subjected to a lot of rote learning: the dreaded 听写 where you were given a long list of words to memorize for the test, the teacher then reads out some or all the words from the list during the test and you were supposed to then write each word out correctly to prove that you have memorized them. There was also the silent 墨写 where the teacher wouldn't even do anything apart from saying, "开始" (begin) - that's when you were supposed to memorize a whom chunk of text from your textbook and you had to write the entire piece from memory. The problem with such teaching methods is that the student is effectively drawing upon short term memory to get through those tests, so if the student is given a test every week during term time (which was the standard procedure back in my day), then the student will be given something new to memorize every single week but that means that by the time you get to week 7 or 8, the student will start forgetting words from the first few weeks as that information was only held temporarily in the short term memory without ever being transferred to the child's long term memory bank, where the information is held in a far more secure manner. So students can revise intensively in the few weeks leading to an exam, ace the exam and then promptly forget most of what they have managed to memorize to get through the exam afterwards and still walk away with the A grade for that exam. I may have been a straight-A student in school, but believe me, I've forgotten most of what I did at school and university for that very same reason - thus actually rendering most of my education pointless.

So let's go back to my loaf of sourdough bread from my local supermarket: buying bread at the supermarket is the kind of mundane activity that your brain will quickly forget - it is just not considered important information to store in your memory bank. However, when something unusual happens, we tend to remember that event far more clearly because it is makes a far deeper impression on your subconscious. Let me stay with the supermarket and give you an example of an incident there which I remember clearly: in a recent blog post, I talked about a woman 'Bella' (obviously not her real name) in my gymnastics club who caused a lot of trouble recently and guess what? I ran into her at my local supermarket. Oh boy, by the time I realized it was her, I thought it was too late to just turn and run the other way - I really didn't want to talk to her about what happened in the gym but I didn't want to make it look as if I was afraid of her. So as she walked past me, I nonchalantly said 'hello' to her - but at the last moment, I chickened out and didn't give her eye contact. So instead of looking straight into her eyes as I greeted her, I looked down into her shopping basket and I actually now have the contents of her shopping basket as clear as a photograph in my head. I can even tell you exactly what brand of shampoo she uses. So it takes something unusual like that really awkward social situation to make a mundane visit to the supermarket quite memorable. Now let's think about my nephew trying to revise for his O level exams - making him sit down in his room at home to go through his textbooks and revision notes is a truly mundane and boring process, there's nothing particularly exciting or memorable about that kind of learning that will lead him to good results. No, you have to think outside the box if you really want to help a student like that memorize a large volume of information for his exams.

Let me share with you another story relating to the learning of languages: if I can relate an incident or story to a particular word, then I will never forget it. The example I shall choose is the word in Swedish for 'sorry': förlåt (pronounced 'fer-lot') - I was in Stockholm for Gay Pride and had gone clubbing with my friends. I remember a particularly fat and drunk Swedish woman dancing unsteadily on the dance floor and I thought, she's going to fall over any moment now. Sure enough, she did and landed on a man, knocking him over in the process. A few of us walked over to make sure they were both alright. This Swedish lady was very embarrassed by what happened and kept apologizing to the man she had knocked over, förlåt, förlåt! It was the kind of hilarious, slapstick incident that is memorable; since I remember her falling over, I would remember the word förlåt because that word is now associated with that incident. So if my nephew were to come to London during his March holidays and I would take him somewhere beautiful like Syon Park - that would make an rather unusual setting for me to test him on some of the more tricky parts of his revision. I would then use various London examples and case studies to bring the subject to life, so it would a memorable experience for him - there's a method to my madness of course, I know how he recalls so many little details from his last visit to London because he was having a lot of fun; now who says we can't make revision a little bit more interesting and fun by doing it in nice locations especially if it is going to product great memories that he can more easily access during an exam? Contrast that to him sitting at his table, in his bedroom at home going through his notes and textbooks - I know which revision method would be far more effective. Rather, the root of the problem is a fundamental flaw endemic in Chinese culture.

Here's the problem I have with Asian parenting: it's all about rituals rather than the results. That's why I'm glad I no longer celebrate Chinese new year as I live in London now - you see, there are so many Chinese rituals associated with everything from tradition to superstition to custom. Let's take one that is fairly harmless: my father would make sure that 发菜 (also known as Fat Choy in Cantonese) during Chinese new year because 发菜 is a homonym with 发财 (literally, 'strike it rich' or 'make fortune') and thus a Chinese new year tradition to serve 发菜 during your Chinese new year celebrations as it is meant to create good fortune for you in the coming year. It is bland and fairly tasteless - 发菜 is really just a kind of black algae and eating it doesn't really create any real luck - by the same token, not eating it doesn't doom to you an unlucky year where you would lose a lot of money. Heck, I've not had any of that lucky Chinese vegetable for years but I seem to have no problems making a lot of money in corporate finance.  Eating a certain kind of vegetable during Chinese new year seems like a harmless part of our Chinese cultural traditions but my point is that Chinese people do not question whether or not this ritual actually delivers the results of delivering great fortune: they just do it regardless in the name of tradition without thinking and that's the part I loathe. My parents believe that locking my nephew in his room to force him to study for many hours must be a good thing, because they believe that it would deliver good results - but does it? I think making my nephew study harder in hopes of him getting better results is as useful as serving him 发菜 for every meal, in the hopes that he will become super rich. It just doesn't work like that. Chinese people are simply conditioned to follow rituals whether or not they deliver any tangible results at all - now I find that so disturbing.

You see, that's why I am frustrated with my family - they say that my nephew shouldn't take a holiday because he needs to study, but if you ask them for more details about what special revision exercises they have to make the most of his March school holidays, they don't have anything planned. I say, if you have nothing planned, then you're actually better off letting him take a holiday where he can have some fun and pick up some useful skills that may not be related to his curriculum but are directly related to being an adult. So imagine if we said to him, "pack your bags, here's your air ticket, you're going to London. Oh and uncle Alex will be rather busy working, so you will make your way to his house on your own - you know your way, plan your own journey." From the age of 14, I used to travel on my own without my parents whilst representing Singapore in gymnastics competitions - yeah we had a coach with us, but we were basically teenagers who were taking care of ourselves. There are so many useful skills he needs to learn about functioning like an adult and you can't expect him to learn any of these skills if you are depriving him of such valuable opportunities like that - what is he going to learn in his bedroom, memorizing his textbooks and revision notes? Mind you, this is what I hate about Singaporean teachers - they refuse to admit that what they are teaching is mostly useless and irrelevant to the real world, but because of their egos, they bully their students into spending so many precious hours memorizing what they were taught when that time could be spent learning far more useful and practical skills related to the real world out there.

Oh wait, but it gets worse, much worse: I have seen the way my mother tries to help my nephew with his studies and it is cringe worthy. You see, my mother is not only a retired primary school teacher - she is possibly the worst teacher I have ever met. She's probably okay teaching very young children, but I saw her reading my nephew's geography textbook to him line by line without actually adding any value, in her awful English whilst mispronouncing many words. That's not revision, that's a teacher who likes the sound of her own voice whilst being blissfully oblivious to how fucking awful she sounds. Look, my nephew can read, he doesn't need my mother to read the textbook to him yet she simply doesn't have the kind of skills necessary to teach teenagers. To be frank, most of my nephew's syllabus is way beyond her anyway - she doesn't understand most of what she is reading in my nephew's textbooks, which is why her only way of 'helping' or 'teaching' is to simply stick to the script and read the textbook out to him line by line. Now, she may have read him many stories like that when he was very young and fair enough, if you can get past her very strong Singaporean accent, I can see the value of reading stories to a young child. But this is not how you get a 16 year old to revise for his geography exam - you need to trust the teenager to do his own revision and all you have to do really is to test if he has properly understood the lessons by asking him to apply what he knows, rather than checking if he has memorized the textbook.

Let me give you an example of what I did with my nephew during my last visit to Singapore: in his social studies, he has a short chapter about the concept of social class in Singapore and this was of course a very controversial topic for a lot of Singaporeans who refused to accept that they were of lower social-economic status. I remember discussing that topic with him prior to writing a number of posts on my blog on the very same issue and I recall stumbling upon the tricky issue of education: after all, it was entirely possible that a very privileged guy from a crazy rich family turns out to be totally useless at studying and flunks all his exams. Yet in his textbooks, it does list education level as one of the factors to determine one's social-economic status: so how do we classify the rich guy who is well and truly stupid then? This guy is rich because his parents have a lot of money, he probably won't have the skills to earn much money but that's okay because his parents are filthy rich and can fund a very comfortable lifestyle for him even if he fails all his exams. So, how do you classify someone like that then? Then I pointed out that I have friends who are graduates from NUS but have failed to find decent jobs and are struggling to make ends meet today (I have even blogged about this), how would you classify them compared to the rich guy who has flunked all his exams but is still a lot richer than all of us, thanks to the wealth he has inherited from his parents? His textbook has made the rather simplistic assumption that if you're clever enough to make it to university, then you must be of high social-economic status and if you're stupid enough to flunk all your exams, then you're automatically condemned to be of lower social-economic status but I pointed out to my nephew that real life isn't that straight forward and there are people whom you would struggle to place in one category or another.

I could see my mother's eyes glaze over at that point as the point I was making had become way too complex for her simple mind to comprehend. She couldn't handle the ambiguity of the situation, you see as a primary school teacher, she liked being able to categorize things conveniently. Oh I remember how she struggled over the concept of whether a winter melon 冬瓜 was a fruit or a vegetable. After all, strictly speaking, it is a fruit but in Chinese cooking, it is usually cooked as a vegetable, particularly in soups with a pork or chicken stock. My mother got confused as you would find the winter melons amongst the vegetables like cabbages, carrots, potatoes and broccoli in a supermarket, rather than amongst the fruits like pineapples, bananas, watermelons and mangoes. I remember how she tried to justify it by saying that winter melon wasn't sweet like a ripe mango, that's why it can't be a fruit (but it is, not all fruits are sweet). Struggling with ambiguity was not something my mother could handle - in her mind, the textbook had given my nephew a simple and straight forward classification and all he had to do was to follow the formula without questioning it, that would be enough to get him through the exams. Yet I had somehow managed to point out that the classification system was overly simplistic and had limited use in more complex real life situations. Our short discussion gave my nephew food for thought because I challenged him to think: I would ask open ended questions like, "so how do you think we should classify someone like that and why?" My mother on the other hand would never dare ask my nephew a question like that because she is terrified of exposing her ignorance about the issue and she still strongly believes that the textbook is the holy grail that contains all the answers. Oh it would be for the kids in primary school but not for my 16 year old nephew!

So you see, if that's the quality of the tuition my nephew is getting at home with my mother, then it is pretty obvious that he is going to learn far more from traveling than sitting down at the table with my mother and his textbooks. My mother is such an awful teacher and she thinks she is a brilliant teacher - oh dear. It might be a different story if he had a brilliant tuition teacher who could stimulate his thinking quite the same way as I am prepared to. Besides, I think there's far more to bringing up a child than getting him to do well in his exams - what about preparing him for his adulthood? I've made this point on my blog many times before already, it is far more important for young people to develop the right kind of social skills to thrive in the adult world than to score straight As for their exams. Here's the one reassuring fact I know about my nephew: he's not stupid, phew. Thankfully, he's pretty intelligent and if he hasn't done that well in his exams, that's probably because he lacks the focus to sit down and put in the hours of revision necessary to deliver straight As and that's totally normal for a teenager like him. As long as he didn't turn out to be as stupid as my parents, I'm already extremely satisfied with the situation! What I am far more concerned about are his social skills and nobody in my family seems to want to address that issue - all young people need to develop a wide range of soft skills to be able to cope in the working world and for my nephew, he has just two years to catch up with his peers before he enlists for national service. That is a rather urgent situation but everyone seems to prefer to focus on his exams instead - hello? This is all so incredibly frustrating for me because I know I'm right and they're all so wrong; but yet, I have no say over the matter.

But looking beyond his national service, let me tell you what concerns me most about my nephew as a person who is also autistic. If no one is going to push him to develop those social skills, then he will grow into an adult with little or just very poor social skills and there are serious consequences to that. Let's look at what is happening in China today where there is a booming 'live streaming' industry - now for those of you who are not familiar with it, live steaming is a form of online entertainment where these performers (the vast majority of them beautiful young women) would stream for several hours a day and there are various apps you can use to tune in to their streaming. The ladies would chat with their fans, sing, dance, perform musical instruments or even do something as mundane as eat a meal - their fans could then reward them with virtual gifts which they must buy with real money and the performers can exchange those gifts for real money. The most successful performers in China in this medium can make over US$20,000 a month just from the gifts alone - that means they are earning more than doctors, accountants and engineers in China today. This is the tightly regulated industry in China so whilst it is tolerated by the government, pornographic content is not permitted - but there are plenty of other websites outside China where the performers are not subjected this kind of censorship and they can do all kinds of sexual stuff on camera for their fans during their broadcast. (And there's always VPN of course for those in China who wish to access such content.) Nonetheless, the cleaner, censored version in China remains extremely popular amongst young men in China because these men are not after X-rated pornographic content - no, they are merely extremely lonely and lack the social skills to find a real girlfriend. Hence this kind of interaction with the streamers is all they have.

Think about the migrant worker who has left his village in rural China to go work in big city in China - he probably works very long hours and has to send a lot of his earnings back to his family back in the countryside. He doesn't have the kind of disposable income to have a girlfriend and to take her out on fancy dates, he probably lacks the self-confidence to even chat to the beautiful lady whom he runs into at the local supermarket all the time. Thus these live streamers become a kind of virtual girlfriend they turn to late at night after work - if they are having dinner at home on their own, they can at least tune in to the broadcast to feel some kind of companionship and have some kind of social interaction with their favourite performer. Of course, you would have to shower her with virtual gifts if you want their attention, but these lonely young men don't mind spending what little money they have on her as such virtual gifts are still reasonably affordable - oh this is a business that understands the market well. The most popular performers will have thousands of viewers every night and if even a small amount of the viewers give the performers a small amount, it all adds up to a lot. Now these people are known as 屌丝 diǎosī - which is a colloquial term that roughly translates as 'loser' in English. The 屌丝 has no money, he doesn't own his own property, he probably can't get a well paid job, he is struggling to make ends meeet, he probably is quite ugly, possibly quite overweight as well and thus simply doesn't have the self-confidence to get into a relationship, hence he turns to these popular streamers for some kind of companionship after work. This is an aspect of Chinese culture that you wouldn't often hear about in the mainstream media as it is quite a tragic situation.

Of course, not all the viewers on these streaming websites are 屌丝 losers - the performers are really hoping to get a 土豪 tǔháo, literally a big spender, a rich man who will lavish their favourite performers with extravagant gifts, such as a virtual birthday cake which can be purchased for just US$2,000. It is astonishing that a 土豪 would bother with such websites when clearly they have the money to go out there and at least attract some gold diggers even if they are quite old and ugly. But despite having considerable spending power, they still prefer to hide behind their mobile phones and laptops and interact only with these performers in the virtual world rather than try to find a real girlfriend. This situation reveals a much bigger problem with the younger generation in China today: many of the younger Chinese people were brought up with strict parents who demand that they study hard, get into a good university in order to land a good job. Add to that a culture where they have grown up with mobile phones and internet access, where they do most of their social interactions online rather than in person - this has led to a generation of younger Chinese people growing up with very poor social skills and many Chinese parents are oblivious to the problem or even see it as a benefit. Many Chinese parents would gladly have children who would gladly spend the weekend and evenings at home (no doubt, on their phones) rather than kids who want to hang out with their friends. I remember how my mother freaked out when my sister used some kind of perfumed toiletries product because my mother thought that the only reason why a teenage girl would use perfume would be to go out and seduce boys - that such girls will end up pregnant and addicted to drugs. So my mother would rather my sister stink of sweat than for her to have good personal hygiene. Thus under these constraints, many younger Chinese people would retreat into their phones and have very little confidence to form real relationships.

I had been describing a situation in China, but of course, I may as well be describing my nephew in Singapore as he is exactly like many of these young people in China today. His extended family are putting a lot of pressure on him to do well in school, he spends a lot of time on his mobile phone and his social skills are at least a few years behind his peers. If left on his own, without given any extra help when it comes to developing better social skills, he may end up like one of these Chinese men who turn to online streamers for companionship rather than get into a real relationship. Now I can already hear my family getting extremely angry with me and scolding me, "how dare you even suggest that! Your nephew is going to end up happily married with a wonderful woman one day and have a great family! Everything is going to be just fine!" Yeah of course we hope for the best but allow me to explain it this way: let's say you want my nephew to grow up to be a great swimmer. So for that to happen, you need to do a lay the foundations for his swimming career: you need to bring him to the pool regularly from a young age, invest in some suitable swim wear, you probably would need to pay for swimming lessons for many years, enroll him in a few swimming training camps a year, make him participate in loads of swimming competitions and all this time, you would also need to actively encourage him to keep up his swimming training. If you did none of the above, it would be totally unrealistic to expect him to suddenly turn into the next Joseph Schooling overnight when he comes an adult. Do you guys have any idea just how hard Schooling trained to become an Olympic champion? Well, you reap what you sow and you cannot expect a child to deliver a desirable result if you refuse to give him any help or support to achieve those results - but that's pretty much my family's unrealistic stance right now.

So there you go - that's my frustration being the uncle on the outside looking in, having absolutely no say and no influence over my nephew's upbringing. What do you think? Am I being overly pessimistic? Am I barking up the wrong tree? Or am I simply being totally unreasonable - after all, I accept that my family are not bringing up my nephew the way I would have chosen, but that doesn't mean that what they are doing is wrong or necessarily bad for him. It's the same way a very good friend chose a course at university that I didn't think suited her well - I advised her against it but she went ahead anyway and ultimately she still managed to have a great career after graduation. So just because someone doesn't do what I think they should do doesn't mean things will end up in a disaster and this could well be the case with my nephew. What do you think? Please share thought thoughts below and leave a comment, many thanks for reading.