Part 4: From my childhood to my adulthood (1994 to 2000)

As I am writing this, I have already received so many kind messages from my readers after I had published parts 1, 2 and 3. I was preparing myself for a deluge of hate mail but to get kind messages has been just totally awesome. So I am going to continue my story at the point where I entered the army to serve my 2 years 4 months of military conscription, otherwise known as NS (national service) in Singapore. I actually entered NS with a very positive attitude, remember at that age, all I wanted to do was to assert my independence as an adult and what better opportunity to do that than leaving home and joining the army. My relationship with my father only grew more and more distant at that time - you see, my father didn't do national service. By the time it was introduced in 1967, my father was deemed way too old to serve by as he was 29 - instead, he was made to perform some administrative duties in an office as a civilian for just a few months as his 'contribution' to the Singapore Armed Forces, he told me that it was simple, if not a bit boring at times. He had this one black & white photo of him seated at a desk from that period, he looked so young and had a big smile on his face in that photo. No one had prepared me for what awaited me in NS but no, this is not a blog post where I bitch about NS, that is a whole other discussion for another time - instead I shall focus on the relationship I had with my father. 

Based on his own experience and assumptions, my father had assumed that NS would be simple, he had every faith in the system and he trusted the government with his only son. I felt quite let down by my father as a result - at least there were some older guys in my church then who made an effort to mentally prepare me for it. Unlike my father, these guys were young enough to have served NS and knew exactly what I would have been expected to do. I think there was this expectation that NS would somehow make my father and I bond because it was a shared experience but that was not the case, given how different our experiences were to begin with. I tried to describe to my father what NS was like - I compare it to the Lord of the Flies situation because the people who were in charge of me were sometimes less than 12 months older than me, they were hardly responsible adults but were emotional teenagers who were way out of their depth. My father however had this very simplistic view of NS, that it was a cross between a primary school and a holiday camp, where everything was very well organized and the officers acted like school teachers to make sure the soldiers behaved themselves. When I tried to challenge his simplified version of how things actually worked in the military, he just went into complete denial - that's just an example of what it is like to deal with an adult who is deeply autistic. It was too hard for him to change his opinion even when presented with evidence, so he simply goes into denial and calls me a liar in the process. You can see how his choice of refusing to believe me and calling me a liar would instantly alienate me as a son. I had gone to my father for emotional support but I got dismissed as a liar instead, so where do we go from there? 

Here's something about NS and Singaporean parents which really irks me - a lot of Singaporean parents (including my own) have very high expectations of national service. They expect it to transform their sons from boys to men, whilst miraculously fixing every single fault in their sons in the process. This is how unrealistic they are: they think they can fuck up their sons by being bad parents for 18 years, then simply hand their son over to the SAF who will then fix everything - yeah right. I can see where this attitude comes from and it is a fairly innocent response that has gotten way out of control, allow me to give you an analogy to explain. This summer, I was on a bus ride from Strasbourg in France to Karlsruhe in Germany - normally this bus trip should about one hour as the two cities are 85 km apart. However, shortly into the bus ride, just after we had crossed over into Germany, the bus broke down in the small town of Kehl. We were then told that the bus company would send a replacement bus service in about 2 or 3 hours and we would receive a text message to tell us when the replacement bus would arrive at Kehl bus station. I had not even planned to visit Kehl on this trip but somehow I found myself in Kehl and I decided to make the most of it - let's explore this little town. I had resigned myself to the fact that I was going to be stuck in Kehl for a few hours; so I found a nice place for lunch, then we had a walk around the town center, did some shopping, took a walk along the river and then went for an ice cream before heading back to the bus station for our onward journey. What was the alternative? I would have gained nothing if I just sat at Kehl bus station and sulked about my terrible luck but at the same time, I was also quite realistic about what Kehl had to offer since it was really just a sleepy little German town that even most German people have never even heard of. 

Likewise, Singaporean parents know that their son would have to serve NS - there's just no way to avoid it. But there's a huge difference between having a "let's make the most of it" attitude (like I adopted when I was stuck in Kehl, Germany) and imagining that NS is the most fantastic experience that your son is ever going to have. The problem arises when people don't have to do NS (such as the mothers and sisters) start having these unrealistic expectations because it is not them who has to do the NS - so it would be the equivalent of me telling my mother that I'm stuck in a town called Kehl and her replying, "I'm sure Kehl is really beautiful, you'll have a great time there" without knowing anything about Kehl. So whilst the rest of my family had these ridiculously optimistic expectations about how awesome NS would be based on nothing more than wishful thinking, I did go into NS with the same pragmatic attitude as I did in Kehl, "I'm going to be stuck here, so I am going to make the most of it." This may seem like a subtle difference on the surface but I cannot stress how crucial this difference was back then - when I was facing massive challenges trying to adapt to a very difficult environment, my family was under the impression that I was having some kind of adventure holiday camp with loads of fun activities all day long, that NS was really like an extended holiday. I suppose my frustration stems from one simple but crucial fact: I'm the only one in my family who has ever served NS, so why don't the rest of them just humbly ask me, "tell me what NS is really like", then listen to me; that would have been quite an interesting conversation. This was the cause of a lot of conflict because I had tried to reach out to my family for empathy but didn't get any. Talk about growing up - that was the moment I had to grow up quickly and learn to deal with my challenges myself, with no help from family. 

My two sisters and mother are exempt because of their gender and my father was too old when it was first implemented. I was the only one in my family to wholeheartedly condemn the entire system whilst the rest of them who never had to do NS chose to give it the benefit of the doubt much to my frustration. I grew up a lot during NS, it was like being thrown in the deep end of the pool and told "now would be a good time to learn how to swim". The thing I regret the most was that I pretty much learnt to swim on my own with no help from my father - if ever there was a time that I needed help from a parent to help me out that would have been it, but I didn't get any help. If I may make an honest assessment of the situation, he couldn't even if wanted to - my father is autistic and has very poor social skills, he was in fact very lucky in that he was working in the very sterile environment of the primary school which is a far cry from the complex office politics I have to carefully negotiate in the working world. He imagined the world to be so well organized, so logical and safe because that was the environment he was used to in the primary school where he worked - he wasn't sociable, he didn't know how to talk to strangers or make friends, he wasn't confident, there was no way he would have coped with such a toxic environment. To be fair, asking him to guide me through NS or to expect him to prepare me adequately for what I had to encounter in NS would have been like me approaching to help me with my French homework. Even if I did ask, there was no way he could have helped me, even if he wanted to and so I suppose that was why I simply didn't ask. 

Ah French. Ironically, that was the one thing that really helped me through my time in NS. I managed to find some of my sister's old textbooks and then bought some other French books to start teaching myself French, my brain had missed the learning process - after all, I had gone from having just completed my A levels to the army, when I didn't need to study anything at all. At first I did it merely to keep my brain active but I realized that not only did I really enjoy it, I was actually really good at it. I became obsessed with studying French, I spent all my free time with my French books and when I could get out of the army camp, I was trying to see what other French study materials I could get my hands on in the big bookstores. At a time when my relationship with my father had totally broken down because he had accused me of being a liar about how broken the system was, this was his one opportunity to bond with me over my new found passion - except of course, he didn't. It was not like I didn't tell my family about my new passion, it was first met with derision: my father told me that if I couldn't master Chinese, so how could I study a third language? My sister who had much better grades in Chinese than I did couldn't master French, how could I possibly succeed where my sister had failed? At times, he was dismissive, as if he was sure I would soon find something new to play with and give up on French. But since he didn't even speak English, he probably couldn't tell the difference between French and English - so if I was reading a French book, it was a big deal to me then; but to him I was merely reading a European "Angmoh" book.

Of course, I know my Singaporean peers would condemn me for being this spoilt brat who expected my father to indulge my every whim and fancy; they would accuse me of being extremely demanding and selfish, that I was the evil bastard who was morally deficient for expecting my father to be excited by my interest in learning French. You see the running theme here, in our Asian culture, the parents are never at fault so by default, it is always the child who has to take all the blame. Hence I didn't dare to say anything when my father just ignored the fact that I was teaching myself a third language, neither him nor my mother wanted to be a part of it and I was used to them behaving like that. Mind you, my current American CEO's daughter has just completed A level Chinese and is going to study Chinese at university - from the moment she started doing Chinese 6 years ago at school, he had always talked to me about it and he would even bring her to the office just to get her to chat to me in Mandarin. Just this week, I had a conversation with him about how compound words work in Chinese, about how the word for telephone is 电话 = "electric speech", movie is 电影 = "electric shadow" and computer is 电脑 = "electric brain". He would be like, "teach me something really smart to say in Mandarin, so I can surprise her when I get home later", or "Can you help me leave her a voice mail in Mandarin and I want to see if she understands you." Look, my CEO can't speak Mandarin, but I can see he is genuinely interested in what his daughter is learning rather than interested in the Chinese language per se, that is what normal parents do. It is when I see how other parents take an interest in their children that I realize how my relationship with my father is just not normal.

Just how good was my French? After studying it on my own throughout NS, I did a crash course in French after I got out of the army as I had a few months before I started university at UCL. At UCL, I registered for a French course and the administrator there told me, no no no this course is for people who have done A level French, you can only register for beginner's French. I challenged her to give me a test to ascertain my standard of French and I aced it - I went on to do a lot better than the vast majority of the British students in that course who had done French for ten to twelve years, whilst I had taught myself French in under two years. Even my French teacher at university thought I was a genius but my father didn't even know what I was studying at university - he didn't care and quite frankly, I don't even think he knows the difference between different European languages like French, Dutch, Welsh, German and Greek. To him, it was all in the category of "white people's stuff" he didn't simply understand and thus he took no notice of what I was doing with French. I was aware of the limitations of his understanding of the world, so once again, I did the Asian thing and didn't make a fuss about it. But looking back, I do think that most fathers would have been at least pleased that their children are good at something - I say this because I have seen other parents get excited over far more mundane "achievements" that their very mediocre children have presented them. But it is not about how grand these "achievements" are, it is more being involved in what the child is doing and taking an active interest in it. French had brought me great joy and I chose to make it a big part of my life. So it is in this context that I felt the way my father chose to ignore me was verging on spiteful but I didn't care: I was at university in London then, eight time zones away from my parents and hence I was very happy. 

It was not as if we didn't speak - I used to call home regularly and there were these very weird conversations on the phone. I would tell my father what I was doing at university, say imagine if I told him that I was doing a research project about how climate change is causing water shortages in England, most of my friends would react by simply asking me relevant questions to show interest, "so what have you learnt in your research? What is your deadline? Are you doing this as a group project or is it something you're doing on your own? Are you enjoying it or is it quite challenging?" Note that I deliberately pick questions that you can ask even if you knew absolutely nothing about climate change or geography, but you're just asking questions to convey the message that you are interested in the research I am doing. But no not my father, I would tell him what I was doing at university and then as if he didn't hear a word of what I said, he would tell me something really random like "I went to the shop earlier this afternoon and I wanted to buy toilet paper, then I saw that they had a special offer on washing detergent, so I got rather excited and I bought a lot of washing detergent as well." It would leave me feeling confused and frustrated, let's just say he didn't even have the basic social skills to know how to have a simple conversation - mind you, talking to my mother on the phone yielded pretty much the same results. I could spend ages telling her a story and then then she would just respond by saying, "do you want to talk to your sister? Hang on, I will pass the phone to her now." She wouldn't even try to respond to anything I might have told her, she would just run to get my sister. Mind you, my sister assured me that the problem wasn't with long distance phone calls, she could speak to my parents whilst in the same room - sitting just across the table and they would react in exactly the same way. 

There were two incidents that took my parents by shock and I am going to tell you how my sisters reacted to demonstrate how my sisters were really the ones who brought me up when I was a child. The first was me coming out to my parents - my parents were shocked of course but my two sisters were like, "well of course he is gay, we have known that for years, since he was young, like probably since he was 5 or 6. In fact, I would be shocked if he declared he had a girlfriend and wanted to get married, he would have to come out as straight to us." Then when I declared that I wasn't going to return to Singapore, again it was the same reaction, my parent were shocked that I had come to that decision as if it came out of the blue but my two sisters were once again like, "Seriously, what did you expect? Of course he was never going to come back to Singapore, if you had ever paid any attention to him and listened to anything he said, you would know that this was inevitable." So, how do we even try to make sense of all this? Well for starters, it only confirmed one thing that I had known for years - my parents had paid so little attention to me over the years that my sexuality and my decision not to return to Singapore shocked them and I can just imagine both my sisters rolling their eyes really hard at this point. Yet despite the fact that they were not close to me at all, they still (for some reason) wanted me back in Singapore - that's almost like how my parents want to still stay married after all these years despite having been fighting with each other all this time. I wasn't happy in Singapore, I didn't feel close to my parents at all, so it was a natural and simple decision to spread my wings and try working in another country instead since I didn't feel like I had much worth returning to in Singapore. So whilst my sisters understood that easily, my parents on the other hand never understood it. 

This only confirmed something I had felt for so many years already - I could deal with my two sisters like mature, sensible adults whereas my parents were child-like in their approach to life, unable to understand complex concepts. So for example, let's take a simple matter like me trying to find a job in the UK - now that's a rather complex topic that I have blogged a lot about here, but my parents had no concept of how it worked. So my sister would tell me, "don't worry, you just talk to me and I'll explain it to them later in a way they can understand, okay?" Hence I could then speak to my sister normally, like an adult, then she would break it down and explain it in very simple language to my parents. That is the complete opposite of what happens in the real world - I remember watching a mother and her very young daughter who are probably about 3 or 4 on the train recently. The little girl asked her mother, "Mummy, why is everybody on the train wearing a mask?" The mother then used very simple language to explain the whole concept of the Corona virus to her daughter and the role of the mask, but in a way even a little girl at that age could understand. That's the exact same process that I witness my sisters do with my parents - am I the only one who is frustrated that this process is the wrong way round in my family? Perhaps there's just a part of me that is jealous of my friends who grew up with parents who were in a position to do some proper parenting and that means being able to guide their children through life by offering advice, help and emotional support; whereas in my family, it had been my oldest sister has been playing that role to both my parents and I all this time - indeed, she has been the sensible pillar of strength in the entire family for all these years.

But wait, it gets worse. The young girl in the train listened to her mother's explanation and accepted it - she's a sensible and reasonable young girl who is willing to learn from her mother. My father has always been the most stubborn, argumentative, unreasonable child you would ever meet; allow me to give you an example. When I announced in 2000 that I have managed to find a job in London after graduation, my father said something like (and I am translating here) that it was nice that the white people would give me a chance as a Chinese person. I was really insulted by that remark because I wasn't hired to fill some ethnic minority quota in the company - my skin colour had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I was hired, I was chosen because they clearly saw the potential in me as someone who had a lot to offer. I don't need any sympathy or charity to compete with white people in the job market. How did my father react to me telling him that he was wrong? He got really argumentative and launched into this massive tirade about how nasty, awful and racist white people are - I tried to reason with him: private companies care about one thing the most - making money. That's why such companies ignore the issue of skin colour, nationality or religion and simply hire the best talent. The reason why he behaves like that is because he feels that he would 'lose face' if he admitted that he was wrong or that I knew more about the subject than he did - this was a reflex from being a primary school teacher, where the teacher would feel acutely embarrassed if they couldn't answer a question the student asked. I don't expect my father to know anything, I just hope he would be a more reasonable person to deal with in such a situation and actually just listen to me.

Of course, I know that most Asian people would condemn me and make me the villain here. You can take the boy out of Singapore but you can't take Singapore out of the boy - sometimes I even condemn myself because there is still a part of me that thinks like an Asian. One thing that living in England did was really open my eyes to other families and how what kind of families they have; I suppose when I was growing up in Singapore, I spent so much time with my own family that I didn't realize how different other families were but when I made friends with people in London and observed how they interacted with their parents, it simply confirmed what I had known all this time: my family wasn't normal - my family was extremely abnormal. Most of my Singaporean peers will point out that I speak Mandarin and Hokkien, I am a lot more educated than my parents and thus the onus is entirely on me to bridge the gap in order to build a relationship - I have to put in 100% of the effort whilst the parent has to do nothing. That's not how things work in the West: I have observed how the parent and child relationship would evolve into one of equals, once the child is in their 20s. But holy shit in the case of my family, my parents have become the child and I am the one who has no time for their childish bullshit whilst my sister just dutifully steps up and plays the part of the parent to my parents. Through my work I have formed relationships with older adults in the UK who are about my parents' age, but the relationship is so much more profound than the extremely shallow, cold and distant relationship I have with my parents. Thus instead of focusing on how miserable my relationship is with my parents, I expanded my social circle here in the UK and found so many incredible friends - I picked my battles.

So at this point of the story, it is summer 2000 - I had just graduated and had found myself a job in London much to my parents' dismay; they wanted me to return to Singapore and I plain refused. I had been so happy in London and so miserable in Singapore; so why the hell would I want to return to Singapore? I didn't even think my parents knew why they wanted me to return to Singapore - we never talked, they had no idea what the hell I was doing with my life, my friends at university knew far more about me than my own parents did. I was a complete stranger to them - they think they knew their own son but that impression was based on what I was like as a young child. Going through the army and university had turned me from a boy to man: I learned a lot, I became wiser and more mature, my social skills improved a lot and my parents simply had not been a part of that process. By 2000, I knew I had come a long way, I had changed a lot but my parents were totally unaware of how I had changed and they made no effort whatsoever to get to know me. This was paradoxical: why would they insist on dragging me back from London, just so they can ignore me in Singapore? If they wanted to ignore me, they could do that from 8 time zones away and then I can at least be a lot happier in London. I realized that's exactly what they were doing to my two older sisters: they were simply ignored so based on the way they treated my two sisters, that made my decision to stay in London easy. In London, I had loads of wonderful friends who were interested in me and took such good care of me; in Singapore, I had parents who wanted to ignore me. 

Part 4 will end here and part 5 will mark the final period of 2000 to 2020, the last 20 years when I had been working mostly in London, but in many places around the world as well. So once again, I thank you for joining me on this journey.