Part 2: When all you have is a hammer (1976 to 1988)

Hi guys welcome back, a quick update on my father's situation: he has had his surgery today at NUH and is on the mend, the doctors are very happy with his condition further to the surgery. So here's the part 2 to my quest to figure out why I have had such a cold and distant relationship with my father. In part 1, I dealt with my father's life from his childhood to the moment I was born - the whole point of part 1 was simple: even before I was born, my father had already a lot of issues and problems in his life to resolve, many of these issues and problems prevented him from being in a position to be a good father to me. I'm not here to blame him for what happened, but my agenda is simple: all I want to do is make sense of the past. When I was a child, I didn't have all the information I had today and I certainly didn't have the intelligence or maturity to figure out what the hell was going on - thus this is merely an exercise for me to understand my past and hopefully find some kind of peace. I started writing this series when my sister did scare me with news that my father was in hospital with heart problems requiring surgery, so before I had all the details of what happened, I did get worried for a moment, like what if he was dying then what? Okay let's pick up where we left off: the year was 1976, I was a newborn baby then and returned from the Kadang Kerbau hospital in Singapore with my parents and older two sisters. 

In life, sometimes you get a lucky break and there were two lucky breaks that my father got when I was very young - we're talking about the period from when I was a baby to when I was a young child. Firstly, my rich uncle helped out my family a lot - when I was four, we moved to a house we couldn't otherwise afford without my uncle's injection of an undisclosed sum of money. My father never admitted how much money my uncle gave him but I know that without that gift, my father could have never afforded that house and my parents still live in that house today. Likewise, the second lucky break my parents got was my eldest sister - despite the fact that she was only eight years older than me, goodness me, she was mature beyond her years. She saw how my neither of my parents were in any position to take care of me, so she just stepped up as big sister and she was more of a parent to me in my younger years than my parents ever were. She took such good care of me and when my second sister was old enough, she too stepped into that nurturing row despite being only four years older than me. I benefited hugely from my two older sisters being extremely caring in a way my parents never were. A lot of you might have jumped to the conclusion that my father hates me because I'm gay but no, he started resenting me even when I was a baby, long before I even spoke my first words because the concept of having a son was completely missold to him as the last piece of the puzzle to make his life complete. Like Tan, my father became extremely resentful towards everyone in society including me; my childhood would have been a lot more grim if not for my uncle's money and my sisters' valiant efforts to take good care of me, I am eternally grateful to my two sisters. 

Back then, money was indeed a problem - yes we got some help from my rich uncle but my father was very reluctant to ask his older brother for more money, it made him feel like a failure to accept my uncle's money. Yet at the same time, my parents were just primary school teachers and they were trying to raise three children - they tried to earn more money by spending their evenings and weekends giving private tuition and they even took in lodgers in the house. We would have Malaysian and Thai foreign students staying with us - it was a popular arrangement for foreign students as they felt like they were a part of a family and there were at least two guardians taking care of them; it was far more expensive than simply sending these foreign students to live in a student hostel but as they were young (some were even in primary school at that time), my parents were trusted as guardians because they were teachers and thus were able to generate some extra money for the family that way. Doing three jobs (teaching at the school, giving private tuition, taking care of the lodger) meant that my parents had very little time for me as a child and I was very lucky that I had two older sisters who stepped in, because they realized that I would have been totally neglected otherwise. This is a narrative echoed across the third world, fathers from poor families in countries like the Philippines, Bangladesh and India end up seeking employment abroad because they can't make ends meet to feed their families, then they spend the next decade or two working their butts off to raise children they barely know. The same thing happens in rural China, where fathers go off to find better paid work in the city to give their children a better future but end up having very distant relationships with their children after that separation. It does beg the question - why bother having children if you're not planning to be a parent?

The answer to that question is simple: society demands that these men get married and have children, whether or not they are financially able to support these children or not. Men are made to feel that their lives are incomplete until they fulfill that obligation and in the case of Chinese families - that obligation isn't just to have children but to produce a male heir to carry on the family name. What they are less clear about is how fulfilling this obligation would bring the individual any joy apart from simply gaining the approval of the wider community who abide by these cultural values. Thus by that token, what my father did has been done by millions of fathers across Asia and indeed across the world. Despite the fact that my parents never really got along (I am still baffled as to why they even thought they were a good match in the first place since they have so little in common), the one thing that they did have in common was this reverence for traditional Chinese values and that meant that they were very afraid to 'lose face' - they may argue a lot in private but were keen to show the rest of the community that they were a happy couple. I remember seeing these old photographs of my older sisters from before I was born - my father did a lot more activities with them, even took a lot more photos of them and I remember looking at a photo of my father with my oldest sister at Seletar reservoir thinking, why doesn't my father do things like that with me? Am I such a bad and naughty boy that he is ignoring me and refusing to spend time with me? Did I do something very wrong? Of course I now know the answer; it wasn't about me at all. The world doesn't revolve around me, my father had other problems to deal with (such as my mother), that was why he had almost no time for me. 

I have this vivid memory of an incident from the mid 1980s, my parents taught at the same primary school and there was an event at the school where the staff had gathered for some celebrations. They surprised my father with a birthday cake as it was his birthday and it was a lovely cake, loads of candles - someone had clearly put in a lot of effort and another teacher took out a camera (note that back then, cameras were a lot more rare) and asked my mother to join my father for a photo by the birthday cake. My mother looked surprised but dutifully walked over and stood next to my father by the cake. Then out of the blue, one of the younger teachers yelled, "Kiss, kiss!" My father doesn't speak much English but even he understood that word; so quite spontaneously, he gave my mother a kiss on the cheek (and not the lips may I add) and I will never forget my mother's reaction. She pulled away, clearly very uncomfortable with the physical contact. It wasn't like she jumped away, but her body language was very clear about how she felt about being kissed by my father - she hated it, she found him repulsive, she really didn't want that kiss to happen and her reflex action told the whole story. Then she realized, oh shit, people are going to see how I have reacted and think our marriage is in trouble, so she gave the teachers the most awkward smile and then posed for a kiss (on the cheek) with my father. I knew that they had been arguing all week hence that made posing for that kiss extremely awkward for the both of them, but neither of them wanted their colleagues to know about their arguments; quite frankly, they would immediately die of shame if they knew that I had shared this incident on my blog. But this is not about them - this is about me making sense of what happened. 

Thus we have the context: my father worked very hard to make ends meet and had little time for me, so he needed to prioritize what little time he had left for me and he decided the most important thing to do was to teach me Chinese as that was the subject he taught at primary school. However, he was an awful teacher and the only way he could teach Chinese was to subject his students to a lot of rote learning - I was expected to memorize all of these complex Chinese characters and if I even got one stroke wrong or if I wrote the strokes in the wrong order, he would hit me as if I had committed such a heinous crime that warranted instant punishment. I'm trying to see things from his point of view: "I work so hard, day and night, I have made so many sacrifices just to provide for you and give you the chance to have a good education but you can't even be asked to memorize how to write these Chinese words? You ungrateful wretch, you frustrate the hell out of me, how am I supposed to teach you anything if you are too lazy to learn?" Oh he would beat me up, scream at me and call me stupid, his punishments were pretty typical of Chinese parents at the time but would horrify most parents of my generation in the West and would most certainly be deemed illegal under British law. Here's the thing: I am not just good at languages, I am a genius, a prodigy in the top 0.1% of the human population when it came to languages. I am a hyperglot: I speak 25 languages, 7 of them fluently but even when a brilliant prodigy is subjected to such horrifically bad teaching methods, then even the prodigy cannot learn under such conditions. The fact is I didn't hate the Chinese language, no instead I resented my father for the way he bullied, abused and punished me. But when you can convince a hyperglot like me that I can't speak a second language, then you must be the worst teacher in the world. 

My poor experience with learning Chinese with my father damaged my confidence with languages - after my father labeled me stupid and lazy for most of my childhood for not memorizing all of these complex Chinese characters, I had simply given up on myself. If even my own father told me that I was too stupid and lazy, how was I supposed to learn another language? I had resigned myself to the fact that I was going to be monolingual, that I will get through life just speaking English and that will have to suffice somehow. What didn't help of course was the fact that I had two older sisters who dutifully and obediently memorized any Chinese characters that my father would throw at them, even complete textbooks. They were equally afraid of my father's punishments and somehow, through a combination of natural intelligence and sheer hard work, they always rose to the challenge and memorized thousands of complex Chinese characters. Under those circumstances, I grew up convinced that I was not just the most stupid of the three children, but also the most lazy and good-for-nothing who constantly disappointed my parents with my bad behaviour. Of course, as a hyperglot today, I can look back and say it wasn't my fault - my father was the Chinese teacher from hell and there are far more enlightened way to teach a child a language. The fact that I managed to go on to master so many other languages and then revisit Chinese on my own, even mastering the more complex traditional Chinese script showed that I really didn't have a mental block towards Chinese - no I simply hated my father but couldn't bring myself to admit to that as a child, so instead I transferred that hatred towards the Chinese language he tried to make me learn. Guess what? I'm really brilliant at the Chinese language actually and it is just that my father was a really terrible teacher.

I am trying to understand things from my father's point of view here and I conclude that he was suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect: he was a terrible teacher, like seriously, I can't stress just how awful he was as a teacher but when you're suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect, you have no idea just how terrible you are and would even imagine that you're pretty good at what you do. He wasn't trying to deliberately sabotage my education, instead he was merely clueless at what he was doing because he was so hopelessly incompetent as a teacher. What he should have done was to convince me that learning Chinese would be useful and helpful for my future, or he could have tried to stoke my interest in the subject by introducing me to the more fascinating and interesting aspects of China's history and geography. Furthermore, Chinese is deemed to be the world's most complex language to learn because of the writing system, figure out how Chinese works and anything else that the education can throw at you will be a breeze - learning how to read and write in Chinese will be such good training for your brain to analyze and categorize complex datasets in a logical and systematic manner. Oh I could go on and on about why learning Chinese is great for a student but that's me talking - my father never explained any of that. His method was, "you need to score well for this Chinese test or you shall face my wrath." This kind of fear was a very blunt tool and he didn't have any other tools at his disposal given that his teaching methods weren't sophisticated or modern. None of this using logic to convince me why I would benefit from studying the Chinese language, no I was merely studying it because I was afraid of getting yet another severe beating from him. Now you know why I am justified in telling you that his teaching methods were absolutely horrific and positively medieval. Thus I spent the first 18 years of my life really hating the Chinese language, as a result of this bad experience.

My father was educated under the now defunct "Chinese education system" when the main language of instruction was Mandarin and all subjects were taught in Mandarin, with English being taught as a foreign language. This was finally abolished in 1983 when the MOE finally said all students in Singapore had to be taught in English. Even by the late 1970s the writing was on the wall for these Chinese schools, the enrollment in these Chinese schools had fallen drastically and many were voluntarily converting to English schools because English was seen as the language that would grant students a brighter future. I know for a fact that my father had really wanted all his children to be educated in the Chinese education as he was a Chinese cultural chauvinist - he felt that Chinese culture was vastly superior to Western culture and he feared that our brains would be corrupted by decadent, evil Western ideas if we were educated in English. My two older sisters were put in English language schools thankfully because my mother had her way and quite frankly, my father didn't care - they were girls and he was happy to let them go to any school they wanted as long as his only son went to a Chinese school but his plans were foiled by the ministry of education of Singapore in 1983. That was the year I started primary school and perhaps that was why my father was so insistent that I had to be good in Chinese because I was simply not getting the number of hours in school being exposed to the language, being forced to learn subjects like mathematics and science in Chinese. So in his mind, he was simply trying to help but the harder the he tried to teach me Chinese, the more I hated the subject and the worse my results became as he made me hate the language. 

In hindsight of course, I can say that my father meant well. There's an English saying coined by Abraham Maslow in 1966, "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."He wasn't highly educated, he wasn't that intelligent - he had found a job that he knew how to do and quite frankly, the primary school syllabus really isn't that difficult. So teaching me Chinese was his hammer and he was going to solve all the issues to do with parenting through teaching me Chinese. If your child is at home studying his Chinese textbook, then he is not outside, playing with the other kids getting into all kinds of trouble - problem solved! If your child is lazy, then teach him how to develop a sense of discipline by making him memorize chunks of text from the Chinese textbook - problem solved! If your child is worried about getting a good job in the future, then make him study Chinese so he can do business with China - problem solved! I could go on, but it was pretty amazing how my father viewed studying Chinese to be the solution to any problem I could face. So when I was about 11 years old, I decided to be cheeky and asked my parents where babies came from because my classmates had been talking about that at school - what was my father's response to that? Did he sit down and have that difficult conversation with me about how the human reproductive system works? Nope, he said that the lazy teachers in my school were not giving us enough homework, that's why our minds had turned to such disgusting matters and we were being corrupted by the English education system. His solution? You guessed it - more Chinese homework! Yeah I'd get Chinese homework from my Chinese teacher at school and more Chinese homework from my own father. You can see why his parenting methods were incredibly inadequate in this context: he meant well but he was so totally out of his depth. I can look back and laugh of course but it wasn't funny then.

The problem of course was compounded by the fact that my father wasn't just stubborn, he is completely autistic and suffers from Asperger's Syndrome. A reasonable father would simply accept other points of views when it came to an issue to do with parenting, but for my father, he stuck to his guns so stubbornly when it came to the importance of learning Chinese as the panacea for all the problems and challenges I might face in life. To make matters worse, my mother never challenged his methods (oh she was equally clueless when it came to parenting) but my two older sisters were too afraid of him to ever complain about anything - they simply buried their noses in their Chinese textbooks and produced those perfect results in their Chinese exams to please him whilst I was occasionally failing the subject in school and that made him so angry. It wasn't just the fact that he felt deeply shamed by the fact that as a Chinese teacher, his own son couldn't even pass the subject at school - no, it was because he had attached so much value and importance to the learning of the subject as the barometer for everything else in lie. If I was failing Chinese at school, that means I must be a drug addict or getting involved in criminal gangs and I would have a one way ticket to a long jail sentence because the good kids would score straight As for Chinese, only an immoral scoundrel like me would end up failing Chinese. I remember when I told my parents that I suffered from severe bullying in secondary school, my parents' first reaction was, "it couldn't have been serious because your grades were pretty alright at the time." See? You could have a eating disorder, be self-harming, be suicidal or be bullied relentlessly at school - but Asian parents only care about your grades. 

So I shall end part 2 here, at the point where I am 12 years old and about to start secondary school. I had just aced my PSLE and had earned myself a place in the top school in the country at the time. You'd think that most parents would be overjoyed to be in that position but not my parents. I shall continue in part 3 how I started becoming increasingly alienated from my parents as a teenager when I started secondary school. Once again, to all my regular readers, a huge thank you for joining me on this process where I am making sense of the past on my terms. I couldn't do all this without knowing that I have your kind support and I am most grateful to you all. Part 3 will follow very shortly guys - akan datang!