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Confessions of a Broken Marionette-Chapter 1

The very first memory I had was probably being in my room, suckling at a milk bottle and my maternal grandmother looking down at me and talking to me something that I couldn’t understand or couldn’t even remember, and my mother was there as well. I was probably barely 2 years old at that time, and from there, my memories started to pick up, collecting and storing into the cranial archive that is my brain.

As my child-like mind began to absorb this thing called life, I began to learn bits and pieces of reality, starting with my own family. My mother, since the dawn of my cranial recollection, is a woman of fine tastes. She was born and bred in Taiwan and a typical city girl who had witnessed the ups and downs of a busy, sociable life of fast tracks and high rollers.

She has high ambitions and very headstrong, always wanting things to go her way. I remember my godmother telling me that she was her first and only best friend she had ever made since my mother came on her own to Kota Kinabalu 20 years ago to search for herself and gain her own independence, and had always have to put up with her eccentricities, much to the chagrin of others who couldn’t keep up with my mother and their amazement as to how my godmother could tolerate her and carry on being her friend for more than 20 years.

My mother had been a kindergarten teacher all her life, governing little children and wrapping them around her little finger, and somehow all the kids loved her for some reason. She always struck me as a woman who always made herself presentable no matter what the occasion. She was not short of vain and would never go out without her make-up and her day always started with standing or sitting in front of this 3-way mirror primping and pruning to turn herself from a plain China girl to a diva in less than half an hour.

My dad, on the other hand, is a good old-fashioned country boy who worked his way up to the city folk food chain. He is more or less a rough and tumble kind of guy who was childhood friends with my godmother’s husband and was the street-smart guy who knew the ins and outs of the harsh reality of society. He didn’t really believe in the commercialism of supermarkets and believes that things bought from stinky old marketplace ridden with flies, putrid smells and wet floors that you do not want to fall onto were the best and freshest of foods.

His family ran a Chinese apothecary cum pharmacy shop just downtown and both he and his younger brother inherited it at the event of their father’s death, and he was skilled in the knowledge of Chinese herbs and spices to cure all old-school ailments. If my dad were to be in a film, he’d probably play the China guy who provides the dealings of wondrous medicinal herbs and spices to the desperate people who could not cure their children by means of modern medicine.

My mom believed in the fact that a child must be multilingual in order to survive the competitive world, so at a very young age, I was exposed to the 3 basic languages of Malay, English and Mandarin Chinese. My maid took the role of speaking Malay to me and my mom took the role of speaking Mandarin Chinese to me, while English were dealt by both my dad and a healthy dose of English cartoons, mostly from Disney. Some say too many languages in the family might confuse the child and make them unable to communicate, but others say children can pick them up very fast and it would not be much of a problem. Either that or I probably just have an inborn talent for languages.

We used to go to Taiwan every few times a year to visit my maternal grandparents, and I always have fun with them and also hang out with my cousin, who was born from my youngest aunt from her first marriage (at that time I never knew he was born from her first marriage. I've always assumed he was her current husband's son). I even had my first gift (which was a dark-brown soft doggy doll) when I was 3 years old from my maternal eldest uncle that he personally designed (he's a novelty products designer). I remember coming down the stairs when I thought I heard talking, all groggy and sleepy, and my uncle greeted me and said “Happy Birthday” and gave me that doggy doll.

Come to think of it, from what I remember from my childhood photos, we seemed to have grown up together for the longest time, since we were babies (I remember a picture of me as a toddler staring at my cousin who was sucking a pacifier when he wasn't supposed to at his age—I think he's a year or two older than me), and we were the closest of friends, until he moved to America with his father after his parents' divorce, but that's another story.

Life with my parents was like my hometown version of the American dream. I had both parental figures that I love, a maid that looks after every whim and fancy of mine, a nice house with a great garden, everything a kid could ever wish for.

Everything was almost perfect. Everything was fine. Everything was just as it should be for a growing child to experience.

Except my mother was never satisfied and, to be honest, my dad wasn't exactly being the best dad in the world.

And also the fact that my mother was always the disciplinary measures, beating me black and blue, while my dad is the laissez-faire and/or pacifist parent, the one who stands in the sidelines while I get beaten black and blue yet the one I run towards to soothe my pain, making it clear that my mother was the demon and my dad the angel.

She is a perfectionist, planning things that will probably never happen and setting out things the way she sees it, and if nothing goes according to plan, she can complain and sulk for days at end. He is a go-with-the-flow guy that hates to be trapped in a cage, never plans ahead and lives for today. You'd think opposites attract, that their differences would balance each other out, but sometimes reality is a bitch.

My dad, like I said, was not the best of dad's in the world. He's an alcoholic. No, he doesn't drink and goes around beating wives and children, but he is definitely a drinker. He gets drunk, but thankfully he never lays a hand on us. He squanders most of his money on drinks and gambling (mostly mahjong) and investing on being a con man, which he totally sucked at because karma would just come back at him in the form of debts, and my mom had to clean up his mess. I remember at one point, they took away my piano to cover the debts he incurred and since then, piano lessons were no longer for me. I didn't understand it then coz I was a kid, but when I was older, I knew now why the piano had to go.

My earliest memories of seeing the rift starting to come apart was 3 years old when they started fighting. I was always told to go to my room because parents arguing is not meant for a child to see, but even though I do, I was never asked to close the door and since my room was joined together with the master bedroom, I can still see them fighting, yelling at each other with my mom screaming her throat out and hitting at him while my dad tries to shield himself and push her away, in which it gets her more angry and lash out even more. That's the thing about my mom. When she hits you, she expects you to stand still and take it. To fight back is just to incur her wrath more, and that applies even to the adults. She is a prideful woman, I'll give her that.

Later on, the rift got torn even worse when I remembered being with my dad for the longest time and never seeing my mother. I always found myself living from house to house with different friends and different families all taking care of me and the kids playing with me. Years later, when I was old enough to understand, I was hearing two sides of the tale: My dad said he did it to hide me away from my mother, to protect me; my mom said he kidnapped me. I don’t know which to believe, because if it were true that he kidnapped me, why did it take so long for my mom to find me if she really loved me and worried about me so much, and yet if it wasn't a kidnapping, why was my memory involved going to a police station and the police talking sense into my parents?

One place that I bunked in where I remember the most was a wooden home where I sleep in bunk beds with the kids in an outback small village. I remember eating instant noodles all the time and I remember feeding their cat instant noodles as well and even shared the spoon with it, allowing it to lick the soup off my spoon. The kids were friendly, though I barely remember their faces (probably coz I was so bloody young). The other place I remember the most was a home where there were was a boy and lots of older girls in the family. I think I remember at one point I love staying there so much that I didn't want to leave, hiding under someone's bed so that my dad won't find me, but it was a false alarm and they managed to coax me out and comfort me by giving me paper and pencil to do my drawings and let me watch "The Little Mermaid" for the very first time.

It was also the years when I experienced my first sexual harassment of sorts. I was 5 years old at the time when one of my mom’s friends came to visit with her two sons, one probably roughly almost between the age of 10 to 12 and the other one almost the same age as me. The younger son was probably a student of my mom’s, so while the adults talked, we were told to stay upstairs and entertain ourselves with cartoon or something. My dad was not at home as usual (no idea where he has gone to, or probably I didn’t remember), so we all gathered in the master bedroom and I put on a video for them to watch.

Then all of a sudden I was talked into being French-kissed by him while the younger brother watched as if it was the most normal thing to do. Of course, at that time, I didn’t know any better and went along with it, but now that I thought about it, it felt like something out of a bad porno movie to have my virgin kiss being stolen like that. He asked me to use the blanket to cover them under the pretense of being too cold in an air-conditioned room while watching the video—and my mother never suspected a thing when she saw us three under the covers—but in reality, I was asked to touch and let myself be touched on the ‘nether regions’ by the older brother. Again, at that time, I didn’t know any better, and when it was time for them to go, he gave me one last kiss and told me not to tell anyone, that it would be our little secret and if I were good, he’ll show me a good time the next time he visits.

I think after about a week later, when my mom and I had a casual talk while she was at the mirror diva-ing herself as usual, he suddenly came to mind and I told my mom everything that he had done as if it was the most normal thing to say, because honestly, how would I know? I had no idea what he was doing and at the time, I didn’t know it was a bad thing. My mom scolded me for not telling her earlier and after that, I never saw the boy again. Until now, I never knew of his fate.

Then soon everything started to fall apart. We still went to Taiwan but the frequency was lessening down to only during Chinese New Year, and sometimes only my mom and I went while my dad disappeared to goodness knows where for days at end. My maternal grandparents started to hate my dad with a passion, but I guess it's understandable. It’s parental instinct to want to take sides with your child, especially when it's your daughter and that she is being bullied by a man. I don't blame them really, but they didn't have to make me make an enemy out of my dad either.

There was one point, if I remember faintly, that my parents' argument got so out of hand that my mother sort of, kind of lost her sanity a little and was behaving like a babbling fool. I think I was still roughly 3 or 4 years old at the time, and I was sleeping in bed, and my parents were fighting as usual until my dad couldn't handle my mom's outburst anymore and had to call in my godmother (whom I see her so much more of a mother than my own) to talk her straight. No go. She was babbling like a fool and crying like a baby and hugging me tight or something, if my groggy memory serves me correctly. I think she was hospitalized at the psych ward for a while because in my memory, I remember being in some sort of hospital with a lot of white-themed background and my mother being fed by a nurse while I climbed on the bed wanting my mom and not wanting to leave.

The last straw was when my mom found out that my dad was having an affair when he went missing yet again and tried to call him but heard another woman on the other line, which explains his disappearing acts. I soon learnt that the call was made all the way to Kuala Lumpur where my dad and his mistress were dating. I don't remember anything about going to court or any of that child custody jazz that always shown on TV. I only knew, in my 6-year-old mind, that I was dragged along by my mom for no reason, no longer living in that “American Dream” house. No one sat me down and talked to me about them going to be separated or who would you go with and stuff. In fact, probably the last thing my dad ever did as a father before the separation was enrolling me into primary school for first grade and that was it. It just somehow naturally flowed into my life that I will only see my dad in the weekends.

That’s where the nightmare started...

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