Part 3: My teenage student years (1988 to 1994)

Hello again guys, if you've not read parts 1 and 2, this part is not going to make much sense to you. It all started with me getting a worrying message from my sister that my father has been warded in hospital with a health scare, that led to me thinking what I would say to my father if he was indeed dying and I felt that I would be compelled to say the right thing to make a dying man have a few moments of peace before his death rather than speak my mind - so that's exactly what I am going to do here. I have nothing to gain by telling my father exactly why he was such a bad father to me (whether he is close to death or not), but I always feel that I should have the right to make sense of the past on my terms - so we pick up the story in January 1989, when I just started secondary school at Raffles Institution. If I may be honest, I was actually quite shocked that I did make it to that school because my parents had spent most of my childhood telling me how stupid and lazy I was - but there I was, having somehow made it to the top school in the country. Perhaps I wasn't that stupid after all; but I wasn't really that interested in Raffles Institution for their academic programme. No, instead I was attracted to that school because they had a good gymnastics programme and one of the best equipped gymnasiums in the country at that time - even the Singapore gymnastics national team trained at their Grange Road campus at that time and so that was pretty much the main reason why I wanted to go to Raffles Institution, it was just so I could do gymnastics everyday. 

What I did find out years later was that it was primarily my mother's idea that I should go to Raffles Institution instead of my father's alma mater, the Chinese High School. I preferred Raffles Institution naturally because I struggled with the Chinese language as a child and I thought their uniform was nicer but quite frankly at that age my opinion didn't matter. My mother had always had this struggle with my father after he overruled her in the late 1960s about supporting his younger sister through university, so my mother would use little things like that get her way and it was like a point scoring exercise for her. Talk about a totally dysfunctional marriage, who needs enemies when your spouse is plotting to deny you the very thing you wanted. This was a massive blow to my father as he had really wanted his only son to follow in his footsteps and study at his alma mater but my mother made sure that never happened. Mind you, both schools had a good gymnastics programme so I probably would have been okay with either choice at the end of the day. But there's one thing that you have to understand about my father, he doesn't know how to move on after a conflict like that - mind you, if he had his way, he would have packed me off to China or Taiwan so I could have an education entirely in Chinese as that was no longer possible in Singapore then. But he practically sulked when my mother announced that I was going to Raffles Institution - his way of reacting to my choice of secondary school was to simply boycott my teenage years, he took virtually no interest in whatever I did at school. I had thought all these years that I got to choose my own secondary school - little did I realize it was my mother's ploy to spite my father, by denying him one of his most cherished dreams. 

My father didn't have the social skills to resolve social conflicts like that - the sensible thing to do would be for all parties to state their case, have a mutually respectful discussion and then arrive at a decision. If you didn't get your way after that process, then you should humbly accept that the others have not been convinced by your arguments and respect their decision. That's not what my father does - he would raise his voice and shout at his wife and children and if he still doesn't get his way, then he would withdraw and sulk. There was something that did happen to me at secondary school which was fairly normal - I got interested in pop music, movies and TV programmes, I started reading magazines about singers and film stars. I would save up my pocket money to try to get my hands on two British magazines: Number One and Smash Hits. Between studying and going for training, reading those magazines was my only real leisure activity. Now all you have to do is Google to find out what's number one in the charts in any country in the world, but back in the 1989, I had to buy a magazine to get that information. My father was still sulking then and just ignored whatever I got up to, he had no idea which singers I was idolizing, what I was reading in those magazines or what was shaping my cultural identity. He had simply made the very wrong assumption that because he was my father, I would obey him, listen to him and adopt his cultural identity wholesale - that didn't happen of course. Like many teenagers in 1989, I would have listened to anything the Pet Shop Boys or Erasure said but I sure as hell wasn't paying any heed to what my father told me. He was oblivious to that and I wasn't about to point out the truth to him, thus I was just going to let sleeping dogs lie. 

Did my father have good reason to have made that assumption? I think so - oddly enough, he made no effort to take any interest in what music my sisters listened to or what novels/magazines they read and my sisters did somehow compartmentalize it all in their heads: we may listen to Madonna and Michael Jackson and watch American movies for entertainment but when it comes to our cultural identity, we are exactly like our parents. But for me, by the time I was 13 in 1989, I knew I was going to move to London or New York when I was old enough - I was already plotting my escape from Singapore at that age. This was all happening right in front of my parents as I lived under the same roof but since they never took any interest in what I did (remember my father is still sulking over my choice of school at this point), they became oblivious that I really wanted to emigrate to the West even at that age. Now my father could have done two things: he could have either tried to take an interest in the kind of music I was listening to and found out which celebrities were influencing me the most at that point - but that would have been difficult because he didn't speak much English and all these famous people I looked up to were all white. The other thing my father could have done was to try to get me interested in singers and actors from places like Hong Kong, China and Taiwan; so he could at least make something he was a lot more familiar with a part of my cultural identity, in order to make sure we had something in common as I grew up. Guess what? He did neither, he couldn't be bothered. Besides, he was still sulking and ignoring me, I was simply left to my own devices, but either options would have involved a lot of complex social skills that my father simply didn't have. 

So all these things I was getting up to in secondary school - from gymnastics to school plays to science projects - my father took virtually no interest in what I did at all, there's another reason for that and I have to break from the time line to go back to the 1960s when my parents first started teaching. Back then, because they were teachers, they had a lot of respect from the parents of the students. My mother told me about how this student's mother once approached her after school for help - she had been sent a letter "by the government" but as she was barely literate, she had no idea what the letter meant and had asked my mother to explain the letter to her. My mother gladly stepped in and explained the letter to that grateful parent, it was moments like that which made my mother feel really important as a teacher and the wider role she played in the community. However, as the 1980s and 1990s approached, parents became a lot more highly educated and suddenly, the tables were turned. My parents were constantly challenged by the parents of their students - these parents were articulate and eloquent graduates who questioned whether my parents were qualified enough to teach their children. Then even the kids got more intelligent - back in the 1960s, there were children from poor families who showed up in the primary school barely able to count to ten or write their own names. By the time it was 1990, the kids were asking my parents such complex questions that my parents simply couldn't answer and they were terrified of appearing stupid or ill-qualified in front of the class when that happened. The world had changed a lot, Singapore had already become a very different place in 1990 and my parents were struggling to adapt to this new world - particularly my father.

My parents developed a method to deal with students who asked difficult questions - these students were merely curious, they weren't trying to be disruptive or mischievous. So they would simply brush that difficult question with a remark like, "we have so much to do today, I don't have time for your questions, we need to focus on what is going to be in the test next week." My father had no way of helping me with any of my homework that was done in English - because he was afraid of appearing stupid, he would avoid coming over to me and asking simple questions like, "what are you studying today?" Mind you, my mother did the same thing - so a a result, I was pretty much left on my own because they were too embarrassed to admit that they didn't understand anything I was studying at secondary school. I am still facing that problem today - I have given up trying to tell my parents what I do for a living because they wouldn't understand (oh I have tried but there's just no way of checking if they actually understand what I say or if they are too embarrassed to admit they don't), but they would be too proud to admit, "I don't understand." So they would keep quiet in the hopes that I wouldn't realize that they are too stupid to understand. That's what they did for so many years with the bright students of the 1990s asking them difficult questions in the classroom and this shattered their confidence. Gone were the days when being a primary school teacher was an easy job as the kids were pretty dumb, now the kids are stunningly intelligent, bright and articulate even at the age of ten and are reading about such complex issues, eager to improve their young minds all the time. My father was obsessed about not 'losing face' - so he would rather be a neglectful father who didn't take any interest in what I did than to come across a stupid, uneducated father who didn't understand most of the things his son got up to so this is what I would describe as a shit choice between two equally terrible option - a no-win situation. 

This didn't bother me much back in the day, most teenagers at that age wanted to assert their independence and feel like an adult. They wanted to do things like hang out in town with their friends late into the night without being accountable to their parents - it's little things like that which gives them that sense of independence. For me, I just stopped talking to my parents altogether at that time - he never took any interest in what I did in school and I wasn't going to be the needy child pestering him for his attention, remember I was desperate to feel like an independent adult at that age. So throughout my teenage years in the mid-1990s, he had no clue what the hell I got up to apart from twice a year checking that my results were good - in the Singaporean education system, we had the mid-year exams and the end-of-year exams and for most Singaporean parents, that was the barometer they used to check if their kids were doing okay. If the results were good, then your child is doing just fine. So perhaps at this point, some of you may point the finger at me and say, "you were the one keeping your distance from your parents, you were the one refusing to divulge information to your parents, thus how could you then blame them - you need to take some of the responsibility in this case." I then look at how my sister is being a parent to my nephew today - she goes to great lengths to win his trust so he feels he can speak to her about anything at all. My parents did none of that, I constantly felt that because my father spoke so little English, he was completely out of touch with the modern world so it was pointless speaking to him if he wouldn't understand anything and I might just end up leaving him worried about what I had to handle at school, since he was in no position to help anyway. 

I have been told that I am making an unfair comparison: I am judging how my parents behaved in the 1990s by modern 2020 standards - that parents back in that era were all like that. I couldn't help but ask a question (and I do think this is a valid question): why bother having children if you're not going to take any or much interest in what they do or how they turn out? I think that is a question that is as valid in 1990 as it is in 2020. After all, I do recognize that my parents were working three jobs just to bring up their children - life was hard, they worked long hours, they made a lot of sacrifices just to provide for the family; I am indeed grateful for that fact of course. But if you would be the equivalent of paying a lot of money to go attend the premier of a very popular movie, only to sleep through most of the film - you've already paid so much money to watch the movie, then you may as well watch it. When I was a student in Paris in 1999, I could get really cheap movie tickets when I showed my student ID and thus I would watch loads of movies as that was a nice way to spend a freezing cold winter's afternoon. I would just show up at the cinema at Chatelet Les Halles and then just randomly pick a film that was showing in the half an next hour. I remember watching this really awful black & white French art house film that made no sense at all, it was pretentious to the point where it really didn't have a coherent plot. I really wanted to cut my losses and walk out of that film but even then, I hesitated because I thought, "I paid good money to watch this terrible French film, at least I could learn some French from it even if this awful film is not entertaining at all." One by one, I noticed some other people did walk out of the cinema before the film finished as it was really that dreadful. 

Thus by that token, did my childhood turn out to be such a terrible film to watch that my father literally said, "screw this I am cutting my losses" and walked out of the cinema after 30 minutes?  He still paid the bills of course but he had checked out mentally. That's the conclusion I came to back when I was a teenager, that I must have been such a failure and disappointment to my father that he has turned his back on me. That was hardly the case though, as a student, I outperformed 99.9% of my peers by getting not one but three scholarships - all that whilst becoming national champion gymnast three times. Oh yes, getting a scholarship or becoming a national champion once would be reason enough for to be proud, but to score a hat trick of doing it three times, to be a triple scholar and a three-time national champion? I hardly think I could be compared to that terrible French black & white art house movie, I remember how I had this discussion with the mother of one of my friends from gymnastics - she told me, "what you have achieved is incredible, you have proven to so many of the parents out there who think that students shouldn't spend too much time doing sports as it would affect their results - you're a success story. I am sure your parents are very proud of you." I gave her a wry smile and thanked her because I didn't want to tell her that my parents weren't proud of me - they weren't even aware of what I have achieved. So i t's not like I didn't tell them, they just weren't interested enough to react with pride. Regardless of what I achieved or how I have impressed others - my parents just acted as if they were not interested enough to care. 

Please allow me to explain that I'm not here to blame them or feel sorry for myself over what has happened back in the 1990s. I just want to figure out why I was treated like that - time for an analogy: anorexia. People who suffer from anorexia are painfully thin but they still feel as if they are too fat and need to lose weight. They may be skin and bones but they look in the mirror and think they are way too fat. Well, that was pretty much what I was like as a teenager: my parents made me feel like I was a failure because they denied me any kind of approval - I'll give you an example. When I was around 18 years old, I entered a play writing competition and won one of the top prizes; when I told my parents, they scolded me for wasting time doing an activity like that when I should have spent that time studying for my exams. Now you might wonder why they seemed needlessly cruel to me at that time - my calculated guess was that since they never won anything like awards, scholarships or gold medals growing up, they either felt that these things simply weren't as important as getting good grades at school or simply that they felt threatened and nervous; they felt inferior because they never won anything like that before, it was like the annoyingly smart student in their class asking them a question they didn't know the answer to all over again. I would like to think that most parents would react to a piece of news like that with joy and pride, but I got quite the opposite from them and I had to learn to be rational: a panel of experts read my writing and awarded me the top prize in the competition; my parents scolded me and condemned what I did without even knowing what I wrote. I should listen to the panel of experts, not my parents. Now you can see why I became very distant from my father in my teenage years, I actively avoided him as we lived under the same roof, but that did not bother him. 

Another theory that one of my readers has suggested to me was that my parents played no part in me becoming a national champion gymnast or being a scholar. So if I went off and won something like a gymnastics competition, it was simply something that they weren't involved in personally so they're that interested. So here's an analogy: imagine if you got the news that your cousin won the lottery and is expecting to receive over 5 million dollars as a result. How excited you feel about that news would depend on whether or not you're close to your cousin: is she going to buy you a nice gift with those winnings? Might she take you out for dinner at an expensive restaurant? Would she even spend some of that money to take you on a dream holiday to somewhere exotic and beautiful? Might she even just give you a big wad of cash and share her winnings with you? Or is she going to do none of the above because it's her money, she's not going to share that with you as you have absolutely nothing to do with how she won that money? In the case of me winning that play writing competition, well my reader point out to me that I didn't involve my parents at any stage of the process - I found the details of the competition through a friend, I didn't tell them I was taking part. I didn't talk to them about what I was writing, at no point did I involve them in the process. They certainly did not teach me anything about creative writing. I merely wrote the play quietly in my spare time, mailed it off to the organizers (not thinking that I would win anything) and only told them about it when the results were announced. Was it any surprise that they didn't feel involved at all and thus found it hard to get excited about it? I rolled my eyes and replied, "even if I did go to my parents when I was writing the play, they are not educated enough to help in any way at all; so that was the main reason why I didn't get them involved."

Something that has always confused me was the fact that I have always acknowledged that my parents worked so freaking hard to bring up three children on their meager incomes - when you put in so much hard work, when you make such a big sacrifice, wouldn't you want to celebrate every single one of your children's achievements so you can say, "I worked so hard to bring up my children and it has all been worthwhile - look at what my son has achieved today." American gymnast Riley McCusker came from a poor working class family, but when her parents realized how incredibly talented she was in the sport - they worked super hard to earn enough money for her to pursue her dreams and now she is on the national team, hoping to make it to the Olympics next year. Seeing their daughter compete in Tokyo next year would have made all their sacrifices worthwhile. By the same token, you would have thought that my achievements could have been something my parents would have been proud of but ironically, they snubbed me totally and refuse to even take any interest in any of my achievements. So in the case of my father, either he was too uneducated and stupid to appreciate what I had achieved, or there was such a huge language barrier that it prevented us from communicating. And please, for crying out aloud, don't ever tell me, "I'm sure he's proud of you" because if he is, he sure has gone out of his way to convey the total opposite. Look, I'm not so desperate for his praise or approval - this isn't about me anymore; I'm just baffled as to why he wouldn't use my achievements to feel slightly better about his decades of hard work and sacrifices. After all he has achieved so little in his lifetime, at least he should brag about what his children have achieved. 

In our Asian culture, children are meant to give their parents unconditional respect, this respect didn't depend on the parents earning it or having good parenting skills. No, it was unconditional and that's exactly what my two older sisters did. It took me a long time to find the right word to describe the way my parents treated my two older sisters and 'disgracefully' seems most appropriate. A bone of contention that existed between me and my second sister was the allegation that I was the favoured child because I was the son, that I was loved far more than she ever was. I do want to have my say about the issue: yes there was an element of truth to what she said but let's get down to the specifics. They treated her very badly, they only treated me badly - I was abused less, it wasn't like they treated me really well whilst they treated her like shit. No, it's like if two prisoners in the jail were whipped for the same crime - the female prisoner gets whipped 20 times and the male prisoner only got whipped 15 times, then the female prisoner protests and claims, "why are you treating him better than me? It is not fair." Note that the male prisoner got whipped 15 times, it was not as if he was eating ice cream and watching TV whilst the female prisoner was whipped 20 times. Was I treated better than my sister? Yes I was. But if you put that comparison aside, did my parents treat me badly and abuse me? Yes they did, just not as badly as they treated my sister. Thus my sister had always felt that I didn't have just cause to complain but I have to disagree with her - two wrongs don't make a right. I'm sorry she suffered more than me, but it was not as if I didn't suffer at all. Her perspective was warped as she was trying to make sense of the situation as an abused child back then, I can only hope that as an adult she can revisit those memories and realize that her initial impression was so inaccurate. 

In conclusion, my parents made no effort to connect with me when I was a teenager. In my sisters' case, they did the exact same thing and my two sisters still unconditionally offered their respect to my parents. I did take it personally, I did feel that something was wrong. Many people in Singapore would condemn me of course, they would put the blame solely on me as the needy child who wanted more attention that I deserved or needed but I swear, my parents knew absolutely nothing about me even back then. They had no idea whom my friends were at school, they had no idea whom I looked up to and admired, they had no idea what my ambitions were or what my goals in life were - they simply weren't interested. There were plenty of opportunities to find out of course: take the time when I won that play writing competition, a normal parent would ask the child, "so, what did you write about in your play?" That would give the parent some insight into what mattered to the child but no, my parents were not normal, they weren't interested at all. That was why I plotted my escape from Singapore from the time I was in my early teens - my parents acted as if they didn't want me around, that they weren't the least bit interested in me and that left me feeling perplexed. My calculated guess was that they had children simply to conform to what society expected them to do, but by the time they had a son, they weren't really prepared to be parents and didn't have a clue what they were meant to do as parents. This is a far cry from how my peers behaved when they decide to have a child and make huge efforts to become good parents. My sisters dealt with this by offering unconditional respect to my parents et par contre, I dealt with it by leaving Singapore for good.

As much as I try to portray the fact that I am so incredibly Westernized/Anglicized, that I have turned my back on my parents' Chinese cultural identity, there are still some parts of my behaviour that are nonetheless influenced by my parents' culture and there are even parts of my behaviour that are remarkably similar to my mother's. So if my mother was angry with my father, she wouldn't say exactly what was bothering her (LOL, probably because the list would be way too long), so she would pick on one seemingly minor incident and then make a big fuss about it - like how my father left the kitchen in a mess after preparing a meal. Oh it was bizarre - just ask him to clean up the kitchen and the problem is solved or get someone else like me to do it for you if you don't want to do it, why get so upset? But of course, she couldn't even bring him to pay enough attention to her and she didn't have the social skills to engage him in a more meaningful way, so she would kick up a huge fuss and throw massive tantrums over seemingly minor issues like that. It was all very passive aggressive, I remember how I went through this period of being vegetarian not so much because I had any moral qualms about killing animals for meat, but I simply wanted to see if my parents would react if I declared, "I am not like you, don't eat meat anymore, I am different from you. I am provoking you, I want you to ask me why I having given up meat and that will force you to take an interest in what I do, think and feel." Sure enough, they barely noticed, they didn't even remember that I went vegetarian at meal times. Oh I tried so many things to try to get their attention in my late teens but nothing worked and I soon got the message: you simply can't force someone to take an interest in you. 

This does remind me a lot of my late grandmother - whenever she felt neglected and lonely because her children and grandchildren were too busy with their lives, she would dial 999 for an ambulance, get admitted into hospital in dramatic circumstances only for the doctor to find out that there was nothing wrong with her. My grandmother did it simply to alarm her children, so they would rush to visit her at the hospital thinking she was about to die. I remember how my mother was given a stern scolding by a doctor, he stressed that ambulances were for medical emergencies, not for lonely old ladies to use as a taxi when they wanted attention from their children. He then accused my mother of not visiting my grandmother enough as he couldn't bring himself to scold my elderly grandmother but my point is that in Chinese culture, people often lack the most basic social skills to even verbalize simple needs like, "I want you to pay attention to me. I would like you to take more interest in what I am doing." So if the adults in my family like my grandmother and mother were behaving like this - at best, they were severely autistic (that gives them a medical excuse to be batshit crazy) and at worst, they were irrational, irresponsible and setting a terrible example for me (don't forget I was still just a child back then). Thus if this was the context of my family and how there was a complete absence of any kind of basic social skills to develop normal relationships, then how the hell was I supposed to have a normal relationship with my father under such circumstances? If my parents didn't even have basic social skills, was I supposed to somehow learn social skills elsewhere to help mend my poor relationship with my parents? Why is this great responsibility entirely on my shoulders? 

I am going to end part 3 here because this was the point when I was about to go to the army, it marked my transition from being a teenager to being a an adult. I know I was only 18 years old at the stage and technically speaking, still a teenager but they treat you like an adult in the army. So this seems like a natural place to end part 3 and start part 4 with my time in the army. Given that my father will never ever be honest with me when it comes to questions like, "why did you ignore me for most of my teenage years? Why weren't you even slightly interested in what I did back then?" Oh I can just imagine how he would react - he would lie that he was a great father who took great interest, then he would get so upset that the rest of my family would berate me for upsetting him. No, in law, he would be referred to as an unreliable witness, you can't believe a word he says - in a court case, you would never call an unreliable witness to give evidence in court. Thus in order to make sense of what happened in the past, all I can do is lay out the facts here in my blog and try to connect the dots as a sensible, intelligent, well-educated adult trying to solve a mystery. Once again, to all my readers, I am incredibly grateful to your support in helping me through this process to make sense of the past. Many thanks guys!