Returning home from Taiwan was both a familiar and strange feeling. For starters, being away so long from home was giving me a sense of detachment, like someone having amnesia and they're trying to pick up the pieces to remember what they have lost. Everything looked different yet same to me somehow, and part of me wish I was back in Taiwan again, on familiar grounds.
Coming back to school was even more awkward for me, especially meeting my old friends and my old childhood flame (whom I had a crush on since first grade and rekindled after seeing him upon my return to school) again. They bombarded me with questions of where I've been and how was life and why did I just disappear and such, but of course, I had to deal with my homeroom teacher who seems to see me as a pet hate.
School semesters and school syllabus were different between Taiwan and Malaysia (especially a little bit on the timezone as well), and I distinctively remember that I was supposed to be put in Primary 4 because it was end of Primary 3 semester when I left Malaysia and went to study in Taiwan, but due to a technicality, I had to remain and follow their syllabus in Primary 3, and while I was still learning additions and subtractions at Taiwan, they were already into multiplications and divisions, which I have yet to learn because one, my math sucks; and two, my multiplication timetables also sucks. I was getting a little behind class because of that, and I became even more of a teacher's pet hate.
In fact, I got so behind classes because of me sucking in division, my mom beat me black and blue and made me stay up all night to do the fractions until I only got to sleep roughly at around 3 in the morning. And when I woke up for class, she was checking my work and made me stay there to listen to all my mistakes and how to correct them but I was so dizzy from lack of sleep that I literally fainted, and was late for class, which made my reputation with my homeroom teacher even worse because she didn't believe my fainting story and accused me of oversleeping.
That was the first time ever I actually stayed up so late at such a young age.
When I was old enough to understand, it seems that the reason why I was dragged along with my mom to so many offices was because they were looking for some guys who worked in the inside of the educational system to fabricate some letters to make it look like I was studying abroad in America because being that my school was a government school, they are very tentative in receiving students who have went to study in a Chinese environment. Had they not fabricated the documents, I would've been studying in a Chinese semi-government school instead, which was not part of my mom's ingenious and brilliant family planning to let me become the multilingual, all-rounder and Jack-of-all-trades daughter she envisioned me to be. So with the fake documents of me so-called studying in America (which broke more governmental rules than one), I was accepted back into school and I think that's why my homeroom teacher was having a grudge on me: Some kid who has never been under her rule of thumb just suddenly shows up in her class like they owned the place just because she studied abroad.
Turns out that my mom was renting a room in a double-storey home at a small corner housing estate with a woman and her two children: an elder daughter and a young son. I think the son's name is Alvin, but I do remember clearly the daughter's name was Adeline. I got to know the family slowly, and I heard that the husband was always away on business trips, so it's very rare to see him. My mom somehow mysteriously worked at night and stayed at home in the day, and in the daytime she would be sleeping while I would go to school, while at night, I don't see her coz she's at work and only comes home very, very late at night, in which I would already be sleeping, so yeah, again I still don't see her much.
But it was no big for me, because I had another new family to raise me, sort of.
I almost forgot how to speak the old Hakka (a Chinese dialect) that I grew up speaking when among friends, but with the family, it was like riding a bike again as it came back to me. The landlady is a nice woman who loves to cook, but quite strict to her children when required, although she can't seem to be able to badger her daughter because she was just as headstrong as she is, with the father's genetics thrown into the mix. The husband comes back once in a while, bringing gifts sometimes, and it was he who introduced the durian to me, which caused me to hate it with a passion. He is funny and a good laugh, but his appearance is rare, and now that I think about it, I do wonder if he has an affair somewhere else.
Speaking of the daughter, Adeline is quite pretty, but she was also quite masculine in a way despite having long hair and all the girly jazz. She likes to read women's magazines even though she probably doesn't know half of what she's reading and sometimes would ask me to translate health tips for her because they're written in traditional Chinese (she's a sucker for health tips). She also plays a role in disciplining her brother and can be far fiercer than her own mother. I remember at one time, Alvin did something wrong and she forced him to face the wall and made him pinch both his ears, and when the mother let him loose from the wall, he still didn't dare to let go of his ears unless his sister says so, and the sister had no intention to give him the green light despite the mother telling her to go easy on him, and he actually held his ears all day! She was that tough.
Alvin was pretty much an average kid who I think still studies in kindergarten at that time, and he's the usual fiesty, active boy who had more time and energy in his hands. They have a dog and a puppy named Snowy (I forgot what the name of the dog was) and a maid, who was technically hired by my mom to take care of me but since they're living under one roof, she takes care of the landlady and her family too. I would probably play a role in entertaining Alvin, playing with him and help him translate comic strips that came along with the women's magazines. We both have TV in our room because there was not much room downstairs to put the TV, but he likes to come to my room instead to watch because...well, I think coz it's bigger. He sometimes has to wait because I have tuition, but when I come home, I'll be the first person he runs to.
My dad had heard of my return probably from my mom, because the regular weekend visitations ensued. I remember the first thing he did for me was to get me a library card membership to have access to a big huge library down at the outback, somewhere in Penampang, where he will drop me off there so he could manage the shop for a while, where I'll sit there and read tons and tons of books, then when he comes back to pick me, I will be armed with books that I want to borrow back home and read them at his place before returning it to the library for more books the following weekend. I really enjoyed my time with him because again, I am allowed to be the spoilt child, being pampered and looked after. I enjoyed him taking me to Tanjung Aru beach to eat as much as I liked, and I enjoyed the fact that despite me wanting to watch a cartoon or animated movie, he is willing to sit through it and watch it with me. In fact, turns out he actually enjoyed The Lion King and Toy Story.
Still, I was always the one to suffer for my dad's sins and my mom's wrath, and all because of the child support money he always seemed to avoid paying. When I relay the message from my mom for him to pay child support, he would always ask me to tell her that he would pay it next week (in which he will only pay it 2 weeks later) and suffer the black and blue episodes on his behalf. Sometimes when I have too much fun and forget to ask for child support from him, again I suffer the black and blue, with the addition of my mom screaming down my neck saying "You're doing this to spite me, aren't you? You love your dad more than me, so you're taking his side. Why don't you go with him forever and be done with me??" or more or less something like that.
When I continued on further to assimilate life back in my old school and getting reacquainted with my old classmates, one of my friends had been eyeing me a little weird for a few days, and when the other classmates noticed, they thought we were having some sort of puppy love relationship going on. Then it got to the point where he actually asked me to talk to him in private outside the classroom during the free period, spurring more suspicions from my classmates and that was when I knew what job my mom had been doing all along every night: She worked in a speakeasy, a karaoke and bar lounge as a behind-the-scenes office worker, but apparently there were cases in which she would be a customer's escort lady as well. My friend knew of this because his parents went to the speakeasy to have some drinks and recognized my mom there, and he accused me of having a prostitute mother, in which I denied at first, but then that one fateful day where I was taken along for the ride to the speakeasy and saw her working in the office, I knew there was some truth in what my friend had allegedly said about my mother's line of work.
Still, in an odd way, I wasn't embarrassed. I was not angry. I was...indifferent. Like it didn't matter to me what she worked as, as long as it doesn't bother my life.
I also experienced another case of sexual harassment during that timeframe, and at that time, I knew better about what was going on. I was about 9, 10 years old at that time and was back to weekend overnight stays at my dad’s place where I re-familiarize with the place and got to rekindle my friendship with the neighbourhood kids. Apparently they seemed to have hired some new blood as housing estate security guards for the neighbourhood watch. I was sexually harassed, and I mean literally being touched at the ‘nether regions’ by one of the new blood when I was sharing his bike for fun while he did his rounds. He would come over the house on a pretense that he was checking security and he would start feeling me up, touching places where he wasn’t supposed to touch and kissing me in places he shouldn’t be kissing. I didn’t need to be a genius to know then what he was doing, but I didn’t want my visitations to my dad’s place to end either if my mom caught wind of this (and I know from experience that things would get very, very ugly between my parents if she knew), so I grit my teeth and bear with it, and when there was indication of the guard paying his usual “visit”, I would run and hide in the corner and ignore the knocking doors, sobbing and praying that he would go away.
Another thing that happened to me during that timeframe that I would never forget, that made my trust waver even more of my mom. My mom had actually forgotten to pick me up from tuition one time. My tuition that day ended in the afternoon, but no matter how I waited and waited, my mom never came. I remembered clearly it wasn't the weekend visitation, so my dad wouldn't be picking me up. Because my mom didn't have a cell phone at that time and I don't know where she worked and I don't know my landlady's phone number (haven't got it memorized yet), the next person I could think of was calling my dad, but no one picked up the phone either because my dad had a habit of being gone from the house all day or sometimes just doesn't pick up the phone because of the phobia of hearing my mom's voice on the other line demanding money, and I didn't know my dad's workplace phone number either.
So I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Nightfall came. Failed phonecalls. Still no car came to pick me. I ended up spending the night in my tuition teacher's home and only then my mom came to pick me the next morning, claiming that she had forgotten to pick me.
You can understand a little bit more now why was I so detached from her and why have I never been able to connect with her. Because she had never really personally raised me. It had always been me with another family after another. There was not really any heart to heart talk or mother-daughter bonding between us. It's like we both lived in different worlds with a very thin bridge connecting to us that would collapse anytime soon with neglect.
And her trying to rebuild that bridge between us during the later years on was just too late.
Coming back to school was even more awkward for me, especially meeting my old friends and my old childhood flame (whom I had a crush on since first grade and rekindled after seeing him upon my return to school) again. They bombarded me with questions of where I've been and how was life and why did I just disappear and such, but of course, I had to deal with my homeroom teacher who seems to see me as a pet hate.
School semesters and school syllabus were different between Taiwan and Malaysia (especially a little bit on the timezone as well), and I distinctively remember that I was supposed to be put in Primary 4 because it was end of Primary 3 semester when I left Malaysia and went to study in Taiwan, but due to a technicality, I had to remain and follow their syllabus in Primary 3, and while I was still learning additions and subtractions at Taiwan, they were already into multiplications and divisions, which I have yet to learn because one, my math sucks; and two, my multiplication timetables also sucks. I was getting a little behind class because of that, and I became even more of a teacher's pet hate.
In fact, I got so behind classes because of me sucking in division, my mom beat me black and blue and made me stay up all night to do the fractions until I only got to sleep roughly at around 3 in the morning. And when I woke up for class, she was checking my work and made me stay there to listen to all my mistakes and how to correct them but I was so dizzy from lack of sleep that I literally fainted, and was late for class, which made my reputation with my homeroom teacher even worse because she didn't believe my fainting story and accused me of oversleeping.
That was the first time ever I actually stayed up so late at such a young age.
When I was old enough to understand, it seems that the reason why I was dragged along with my mom to so many offices was because they were looking for some guys who worked in the inside of the educational system to fabricate some letters to make it look like I was studying abroad in America because being that my school was a government school, they are very tentative in receiving students who have went to study in a Chinese environment. Had they not fabricated the documents, I would've been studying in a Chinese semi-government school instead, which was not part of my mom's ingenious and brilliant family planning to let me become the multilingual, all-rounder and Jack-of-all-trades daughter she envisioned me to be. So with the fake documents of me so-called studying in America (which broke more governmental rules than one), I was accepted back into school and I think that's why my homeroom teacher was having a grudge on me: Some kid who has never been under her rule of thumb just suddenly shows up in her class like they owned the place just because she studied abroad.
Turns out that my mom was renting a room in a double-storey home at a small corner housing estate with a woman and her two children: an elder daughter and a young son. I think the son's name is Alvin, but I do remember clearly the daughter's name was Adeline. I got to know the family slowly, and I heard that the husband was always away on business trips, so it's very rare to see him. My mom somehow mysteriously worked at night and stayed at home in the day, and in the daytime she would be sleeping while I would go to school, while at night, I don't see her coz she's at work and only comes home very, very late at night, in which I would already be sleeping, so yeah, again I still don't see her much.
But it was no big for me, because I had another new family to raise me, sort of.
I almost forgot how to speak the old Hakka (a Chinese dialect) that I grew up speaking when among friends, but with the family, it was like riding a bike again as it came back to me. The landlady is a nice woman who loves to cook, but quite strict to her children when required, although she can't seem to be able to badger her daughter because she was just as headstrong as she is, with the father's genetics thrown into the mix. The husband comes back once in a while, bringing gifts sometimes, and it was he who introduced the durian to me, which caused me to hate it with a passion. He is funny and a good laugh, but his appearance is rare, and now that I think about it, I do wonder if he has an affair somewhere else.
Speaking of the daughter, Adeline is quite pretty, but she was also quite masculine in a way despite having long hair and all the girly jazz. She likes to read women's magazines even though she probably doesn't know half of what she's reading and sometimes would ask me to translate health tips for her because they're written in traditional Chinese (she's a sucker for health tips). She also plays a role in disciplining her brother and can be far fiercer than her own mother. I remember at one time, Alvin did something wrong and she forced him to face the wall and made him pinch both his ears, and when the mother let him loose from the wall, he still didn't dare to let go of his ears unless his sister says so, and the sister had no intention to give him the green light despite the mother telling her to go easy on him, and he actually held his ears all day! She was that tough.
Alvin was pretty much an average kid who I think still studies in kindergarten at that time, and he's the usual fiesty, active boy who had more time and energy in his hands. They have a dog and a puppy named Snowy (I forgot what the name of the dog was) and a maid, who was technically hired by my mom to take care of me but since they're living under one roof, she takes care of the landlady and her family too. I would probably play a role in entertaining Alvin, playing with him and help him translate comic strips that came along with the women's magazines. We both have TV in our room because there was not much room downstairs to put the TV, but he likes to come to my room instead to watch because...well, I think coz it's bigger. He sometimes has to wait because I have tuition, but when I come home, I'll be the first person he runs to.
My dad had heard of my return probably from my mom, because the regular weekend visitations ensued. I remember the first thing he did for me was to get me a library card membership to have access to a big huge library down at the outback, somewhere in Penampang, where he will drop me off there so he could manage the shop for a while, where I'll sit there and read tons and tons of books, then when he comes back to pick me, I will be armed with books that I want to borrow back home and read them at his place before returning it to the library for more books the following weekend. I really enjoyed my time with him because again, I am allowed to be the spoilt child, being pampered and looked after. I enjoyed him taking me to Tanjung Aru beach to eat as much as I liked, and I enjoyed the fact that despite me wanting to watch a cartoon or animated movie, he is willing to sit through it and watch it with me. In fact, turns out he actually enjoyed The Lion King and Toy Story.
Still, I was always the one to suffer for my dad's sins and my mom's wrath, and all because of the child support money he always seemed to avoid paying. When I relay the message from my mom for him to pay child support, he would always ask me to tell her that he would pay it next week (in which he will only pay it 2 weeks later) and suffer the black and blue episodes on his behalf. Sometimes when I have too much fun and forget to ask for child support from him, again I suffer the black and blue, with the addition of my mom screaming down my neck saying "You're doing this to spite me, aren't you? You love your dad more than me, so you're taking his side. Why don't you go with him forever and be done with me??" or more or less something like that.
When I continued on further to assimilate life back in my old school and getting reacquainted with my old classmates, one of my friends had been eyeing me a little weird for a few days, and when the other classmates noticed, they thought we were having some sort of puppy love relationship going on. Then it got to the point where he actually asked me to talk to him in private outside the classroom during the free period, spurring more suspicions from my classmates and that was when I knew what job my mom had been doing all along every night: She worked in a speakeasy, a karaoke and bar lounge as a behind-the-scenes office worker, but apparently there were cases in which she would be a customer's escort lady as well. My friend knew of this because his parents went to the speakeasy to have some drinks and recognized my mom there, and he accused me of having a prostitute mother, in which I denied at first, but then that one fateful day where I was taken along for the ride to the speakeasy and saw her working in the office, I knew there was some truth in what my friend had allegedly said about my mother's line of work.
Still, in an odd way, I wasn't embarrassed. I was not angry. I was...indifferent. Like it didn't matter to me what she worked as, as long as it doesn't bother my life.
I also experienced another case of sexual harassment during that timeframe, and at that time, I knew better about what was going on. I was about 9, 10 years old at that time and was back to weekend overnight stays at my dad’s place where I re-familiarize with the place and got to rekindle my friendship with the neighbourhood kids. Apparently they seemed to have hired some new blood as housing estate security guards for the neighbourhood watch. I was sexually harassed, and I mean literally being touched at the ‘nether regions’ by one of the new blood when I was sharing his bike for fun while he did his rounds. He would come over the house on a pretense that he was checking security and he would start feeling me up, touching places where he wasn’t supposed to touch and kissing me in places he shouldn’t be kissing. I didn’t need to be a genius to know then what he was doing, but I didn’t want my visitations to my dad’s place to end either if my mom caught wind of this (and I know from experience that things would get very, very ugly between my parents if she knew), so I grit my teeth and bear with it, and when there was indication of the guard paying his usual “visit”, I would run and hide in the corner and ignore the knocking doors, sobbing and praying that he would go away.
Another thing that happened to me during that timeframe that I would never forget, that made my trust waver even more of my mom. My mom had actually forgotten to pick me up from tuition one time. My tuition that day ended in the afternoon, but no matter how I waited and waited, my mom never came. I remembered clearly it wasn't the weekend visitation, so my dad wouldn't be picking me up. Because my mom didn't have a cell phone at that time and I don't know where she worked and I don't know my landlady's phone number (haven't got it memorized yet), the next person I could think of was calling my dad, but no one picked up the phone either because my dad had a habit of being gone from the house all day or sometimes just doesn't pick up the phone because of the phobia of hearing my mom's voice on the other line demanding money, and I didn't know my dad's workplace phone number either.
So I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Nightfall came. Failed phonecalls. Still no car came to pick me. I ended up spending the night in my tuition teacher's home and only then my mom came to pick me the next morning, claiming that she had forgotten to pick me.
You can understand a little bit more now why was I so detached from her and why have I never been able to connect with her. Because she had never really personally raised me. It had always been me with another family after another. There was not really any heart to heart talk or mother-daughter bonding between us. It's like we both lived in different worlds with a very thin bridge connecting to us that would collapse anytime soon with neglect.
And her trying to rebuild that bridge between us during the later years on was just too late.
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