Note to self
I realised about a year ago that some of the worst decisions in my life were made at the instigation of my parents.
Don't get me wrong, I love those parents of mine to bits, it's just that they seem to have this uncanny ability to pick the very things that are the worst for my spirit and mind.Even worse is the fact that despite this awful track record, I still consult them about most major life decisions.Because if nothing else I can always count on them to tell me which route looks the most practical, economical and stable. Unfortunately, the route picked out usually turns out to be all wrong for me as a person, despite its otherwise sterling qualities.
See, when I was 12, I went through the nightmare most people know as the PSLE exam and my parents set their heart on my going to a particular school that was not only decent( as in well ranked) but also very strong on chinese traditions. In short, they sent me to a chinese school, all because my chinese grades were poor and my father thought that it would be a good idea to improve my language abilities.
Please note that my spoken chinese was so poor at that point that I could barely string one or two sentences together. The four years there rank as possibly the lowest time in my life. Especially the first two years when I had to struggle with the fact that:
a) people thought I was a snob because I tended to speak english with a mild american accent( I had several speech lessons with an american)
b) Hokkien was literally a foreign language to me
c) Chinese was also a semi foreign language to me
d) they had seriously bitchy and dysfunctional chinese teachers who became my form teachers, hated my guts and picked on me in class.
To my mother's credit, she later realised the enormous disjunction between the way I operated and the way the school operated. Perhaps the clue that gave it away was the fact that I started flunking EVERYTHING and came home in tears all the time.
My not quite as observant dad still thinks it was a brilliant idea because it improved my chinese to no end.Which I have to admit it did. It was sink or swim and I learnt to swim only just in time. But the cost? Enormous hatred and scorn for all things chinese and asian.
I realised yesterday in a moment of unusual self reflexivity, that despite the fact that I'm a mostly mild and even tempered being, the thought of that school still makes my blood boil. I used to sit in class and think very hard about burning the school down or setting off a bomb in it.( I didn't because I sucked at science and couldn't figure out how to waste the whole place) And I pray that I might never run into some of those awful teachers again, because being the terribly irreverent and linguistically able person I am now, I will be able to curse them rather fluently in 4 languages in total, including Hokkien, our national curse language.
I got over the hatred of all things asian and chinese. I am chinese after all, and there is only so much self loathing one can take. But I never got over the hatred of that particular school and some particular teachers in it.
I'm posting this up as a blatant reminder to myself to grow a spine and not to take my parents' advice anymore except in their areas of technical expertise. Because I'm not 12 anymore and I don't have that many sets of four years to throw away being miserable and angry. That decision about secondary schools was not the only one to go awry, there were many other pieces of bad advice, including a well intentioned but misguided suggestion from my mother to study chemistry in university.
Some kids are lucky enough to follow in their parent's mould, in their ideology and spirit. So the general advice their parents dish out to them can be followed to the letter and it will usually work out.
I'm not one of those kids. And I cannot keep letting them run my life because the difference in expected and actual outcomes will kill me one day.
Don't get me wrong, I love those parents of mine to bits, it's just that they seem to have this uncanny ability to pick the very things that are the worst for my spirit and mind.Even worse is the fact that despite this awful track record, I still consult them about most major life decisions.Because if nothing else I can always count on them to tell me which route looks the most practical, economical and stable. Unfortunately, the route picked out usually turns out to be all wrong for me as a person, despite its otherwise sterling qualities.
See, when I was 12, I went through the nightmare most people know as the PSLE exam and my parents set their heart on my going to a particular school that was not only decent( as in well ranked) but also very strong on chinese traditions. In short, they sent me to a chinese school, all because my chinese grades were poor and my father thought that it would be a good idea to improve my language abilities.
Please note that my spoken chinese was so poor at that point that I could barely string one or two sentences together. The four years there rank as possibly the lowest time in my life. Especially the first two years when I had to struggle with the fact that:
a) people thought I was a snob because I tended to speak english with a mild american accent( I had several speech lessons with an american)
b) Hokkien was literally a foreign language to me
c) Chinese was also a semi foreign language to me
d) they had seriously bitchy and dysfunctional chinese teachers who became my form teachers, hated my guts and picked on me in class.
To my mother's credit, she later realised the enormous disjunction between the way I operated and the way the school operated. Perhaps the clue that gave it away was the fact that I started flunking EVERYTHING and came home in tears all the time.
My not quite as observant dad still thinks it was a brilliant idea because it improved my chinese to no end.Which I have to admit it did. It was sink or swim and I learnt to swim only just in time. But the cost? Enormous hatred and scorn for all things chinese and asian.
I realised yesterday in a moment of unusual self reflexivity, that despite the fact that I'm a mostly mild and even tempered being, the thought of that school still makes my blood boil. I used to sit in class and think very hard about burning the school down or setting off a bomb in it.( I didn't because I sucked at science and couldn't figure out how to waste the whole place) And I pray that I might never run into some of those awful teachers again, because being the terribly irreverent and linguistically able person I am now, I will be able to curse them rather fluently in 4 languages in total, including Hokkien, our national curse language.
I got over the hatred of all things asian and chinese. I am chinese after all, and there is only so much self loathing one can take. But I never got over the hatred of that particular school and some particular teachers in it.
I'm posting this up as a blatant reminder to myself to grow a spine and not to take my parents' advice anymore except in their areas of technical expertise. Because I'm not 12 anymore and I don't have that many sets of four years to throw away being miserable and angry. That decision about secondary schools was not the only one to go awry, there were many other pieces of bad advice, including a well intentioned but misguided suggestion from my mother to study chemistry in university.
Some kids are lucky enough to follow in their parent's mould, in their ideology and spirit. So the general advice their parents dish out to them can be followed to the letter and it will usually work out.
I'm not one of those kids. And I cannot keep letting them run my life because the difference in expected and actual outcomes will kill me one day.
posted by adinahaes at 5:54 AM
3 Comments:
yea... sometimes we need to follow our own instincts as opposed to our parents, we dont want to regret our life based on our parents fantasy like image on things
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
I guess it is the environment. If the language used in the family is english, then chinese is definitely NOT your mother tongue and so you can't force yourself to excel in it. But I think you are lucky, at least your english is powerful enough. Unlike most chinese-speaking households, whereby their english standard suc* and so is that of their chinese, like me!!! Nice blog, I am definitely going to visit this website frequently.
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