Up close, by Crabgrass…
Growing up in the never ending oppressive heat and humidity in the tropics, I always had fantasies from the covers of Reader’s Digest of the various seasons, summery days of boys playing together in the tree house up on a giant oak tree or making snowman in the making. Life was boring while growing up. Childhood as I remembered was spent going to school from 7am to 1pm; not counting the earlier hour to wake up to get things ready and having a quick breakfast of two slices of toast and two runny eggs seasoned with soya sauce and white pepper. Recesses in the tuck shop were short and hurried as time was scrambled so that we could play with classmates. And when school was over for the day, it was for private tuition or homework. I wanted to learn how to play the piano and so I didn’t feel that was a chore. Whatever free time was having to go with my mother for her daily errands so that money won’t be spent on babysitting!
Getting up early for school is something us kids do not look kindly on. We were forced to sleep at 7pm but in practice, it was much later as we were still too wired up from the day. At least these sleeping rules were relaxed when I became a teenager. When TV sets came into the home, we were not allowed to watch programs after our bedtime curfew. I hate doing things that were forced upon me. On weekends, we were allowed to wake up later; that is, until the Carol Burnette show came on at 10am on Saturdays. I had a solid British education but American TV entertainment. Sunday was truly a day of rest. Thank goodness we were not Christians and need not going to church.
Rarer than Chinese New Year was a night out with Father taking the entire family out for dinner or even to a movie. Never had I blame him. Mother would always remind us that without father’s hard work, nary a bowl of rice be appearing on the table! In our younger days, Mother would take us to movies all day long during weekends, sometimes four in a row from 11am till the last show at 6pm with something for a bite as we drove from theatre to theatre. This was to distract the children from bickering, fighting and so forth. For crying is a bad omen for a superstitious father gambling at the weekend races. Even the word for “book” is not allowed to be mentioned as it share the same sound as “to lose” in Chinese.
I was never a top student, just somewhere in the middle ranking of the class. I remembered the first time I showed my report book to my mother that I ranked 22nd in the class out of a class of 44, I thought my mother would be pleased that I was not at the bottom of the class. She looked disappointed and what I got was the question, “Why I am not in the first place?”. Seemed that I made her lose the bragging rights to relatives having children of the same age. I was never interested in the lessons. They were boring and the teachers were not motivators. Then at the age of fourteen, I fell in love with my classmate! To please him, I became more adventurous, learning how to take a bus and going to places with him after school. He had taught me the first steps to independence from my Mother, the chauffeur. For an entire school year, when I was with him, going to school early no longer poses a problem for me. As a matter of fact, I even wanted to be at the classroom earlier so that I would be the first to welcome him and to take the opportunity to talk with him. There is no opportunity to talk when classes began. There are no rest periods between the classes. For the first time in my life my class ranking shot up stratospherically and I was in the top five. Even my Chinese classes performed well enough to get notice from the teacher. I wanted to compete with him and to excel with him so that he could look up to me. In the end, my love was unrequited.
In the next academic year, my grades returned to normal as we were now in different classrooms. No more chances to be desk mates anymore. Still, it was enough for me to into the Science Stream of the three classrooms. In a way, he had changed my life for the better. For better or worse, I am the type of person who cannot rise to the top without some carrot at the end of the stick. Of course, it would be ideal if it were a mutual love. He was the first in my life of three that without them, I would not be what I am today.
During my single years, I yearned for my Prince to come. Yes, I had kissed many toads and even frogs but none transformed. Once you were in love, poetic stirrings start to pour out from the heart and I began to write and even dabbled in poetry which I loathed in my literature classes. I agonized at the thought of dying a single life, This usually happened when my mind gets bored.
After note:
I was lucky that in the end, Heaven smiled upon me and found the light of my life. Looking back, my dreams of playing in a treehouse with friends never came into fruition, neither was the making of a snowman or a ride on a toboggan. However, I finally saw snow in my early twenties during a night drive on a lonely highway to Salt Lake City. The car stopped in the middle of a blizzard. I got out. I danced. I imagined myself to be Gene Kelly in “Singing in the Rain”. It lasted only for a few seconds. I didn’t want to get struck by an oncoming car. Afterwards, I had to stop by a 7-11 to get a cold large 7-Up to go! Morning came when I reached the city. I noticed that piled up snow was everywhere along the pavement. On a closer inspection, they were not pure white but very greyish and at times, blackish. At that moment onwards, I looked at snow with a very different view.
After writing this piece of myself, I remembered a poem I once wrote during those yesteryears…
Brr…. It’s so cold!
Looking back to my days of old…
A worn out top hat for him to wear,
And eyes in two lumps of coal.
Dead branches for the limbs,
One long scarf banded in red and green for the neck,
Two giant globes of white for a body of snow,
With a withered orange carrot - a pointy aged nose.
Hours squealed in delight in making a crooked upturned smile,
With what? You asked,
Now I do not know.
Those halcyon days are gone,
Limpid pools no longer flow.
Cold and blustery are the winds in blow,
Sipping hot chocolate away
As weighted years grow.
Translating this into a Literary Chinese style would not only be difficult but its explicit actions make the Chinese form sounds pedantic… This is the best I had come up so far,
1 霜降橫飛冷窗外 Everything outside the window is cold as snow falls in blustery winds,
2 歲月何易初夢改 How easy it is for Time to sway dreams of old!
3 幼時殷勤設雪人 For in childhood, how attentive I am to build a snowman,
4 今刻才知暖屋內 But now, realizing how cozy things are inside a warm house.
1 Literally, “snow falling in horizontally”. 冷 as a verb makes more sense than as an adjective.
2 初 means initial or early. I used “old” to make it rhyme. “Sway” is more meaningful than “correct” or “change”.
3 設 also means “to plan”. The line can also be translated as “… eagerly planning for a snowman”
Hopefully, as another era descends, I have enough knowledge for further refinement.
Monday, May 22, 2023
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