I attended ACS (Anglo-Chinese School) in Kindergarten. I’d been raised speaking Hakka within the family, and Cantonese among the neighbourhood kids. The teacher spoke Cantonese to me. I remember a boy, Bernard Wong, taking a liking to me and bringing me candy every day. We hung out. Then one day, he started getting obnoxious. I think he’d…
We lived on the 11th floor of the 14-storey high Templer Flats – Seremban’s Twin Towers – a welfare project for low-income families. 11 of us (9 kids plus our parents) crammed into a tiny 2-bedroom apartment. Each night the mattresses would be on the bedroom and living room floors to accommodate everyone. There was…
‘Oi, tukar, tukar!’ (Oi, change! Change!) yelled the Odeon cinema usher as he banged on the counter at my Dad’s canteen. He needed some change for whatever reason, and forgot to say please. I was furious; I’d had enough of his BS. At 15, I’d had a personality transplant; from a mild, soft-spoken and obedient…
This is our ‘san goong yan’ (new maid) – I whispered to the neighbourhood kids – as we sneaked our heads over the doorway to our flat. We wanted to stealthily check out the lady who was washing our clothes in the bathroom but she spotted us immediately. Yin ‘Chee’ (‘sister’ Yin) was only about 17 when she…
Throughout my time working at the Odeon, I had at best a love-hate relationship with it. It wasn’t always that way. When I was younger, I stayed at home whilst all my older brothers and sisters were out all day and night working. I wanted to join them, but thanks to my position in the…
It would seem in hindsight that he never stood a chance, even from the moment he was named as a baby. All the girls in our family have the middle name ‘Min’ and all the boys, ‘Choong’. His name was Choong Fee. Shortly thereafter, my mom saw a fortune teller. He told her it was…
According to my dad, mom planned on having four kids. This pic shows the four oldest kids – and that would have been it – neither I nor half my siblings would have existed. Then my mom visited a fortune teller. He told her he could see her husband marrying a second, younger wife in…
Found a pic of my mom smiling today. That’s rare. She usually looks wistful, stoic, maybe a bit weary. I don’t know if that was just how she was, or whether she was ill without yet knowing it. I know that just before she found out she had cancer, she had travelled back to China…
All my parents’ martial arts friends were there. A large group dominated by housewives who were Tai Chi students of my dad. There were one or two who remained life-long family friends, but I never cared for the majority of them. Even at that young age, I saw them as a bunch of privileged, mean…