Happy Families
I played that game with my neighbours in primary school; I'm sure you did too. Garish, highly coloured cartoon drawings of people, printed on cheap cardboard. The pack of cards we played with came in a 4-in-1 special, with packs for Donkey, Old Maid and Snap too. I used to dread Donkey and Old Maid, no child likes to be called either, even if you were lucky and the jeers only lasted for one round and the misfortune befell someone else. But woe betide if you ended up the Donkey or Old Maid for consecutive rounds, or worse still, the very last round before it was time to go home for dinner.
Snap was also painful - literally.
Happy Families, on the other hand, was much safer. Is Mr. Baker home? The sons and daughters in each family had alliterative names: Bobby Baker, Percy Plod.
***
Sundays leave a strange taste in my mouth, not least because it's the only day of the week where there doesn't seem to be much else to do after going to church and visiting my maternal grandparents, which means I can take an afternoon nap. My mouth always tastes a bit funny when I wake up, a taste reminiscent of lunch gone by.
It's also probably the only day of the week that I interact with my family for almost the entire day, given said activities. We even participate in the taking of the afternoon nap together when we get home, albeit in different parts of the house.
When I was 11 - it might have been 12 - and starting to think less about boys as slugs but as members of the opposite sex, I greatly desired one of those large, traditional families which seemed de riguer if you were attending a Methodist school. Or amongst my friends, anyway. Having cousins, especially male ones who attended ACS seemed like a big deal because it opened up new avenues to get to know boys. Admit it, getting to know boys was so the in thing to do at that age. Well, maybe not. But at some point or another it would have been THE thing to do.
It wasn't just that, though. It was also because these large families always seemed so happy. They would have a grand meet-up on Saturdays, and I vaguely recall thinking that it must have been fun because all the cousins (and their parents) were either from ACS and MGS, and close enough in age to relate to each other. There were maids to take care of food or at least cleaning up, and big houses with family rooms exclusively for watching TV in. In fact, I was so envious of friends with that sort of large, traditional family (large house for family meet-ups included) that I drew up an extensive list of fake relatives in my journal - and by extensive I don't just mean there were many of them. I gave all of them full names, names which I liked, like "Geraldine" and "Andrew". I was particularly fond of "Zhi" for boys' Chinese names, and "Ling" for girls'.
Personally, I hated my name until I grew used to it, because "Chloe" wasn't very popular with my generation and teachers would either pronounce it wrongly or directly call me "Mercy," which of course resulted in a lot of teasing. To top it all off, my Chinese name is "Wei Ming," which sounds like a boys name when you read the hanyu pinyin.
And I still suggested to Jon that we name our daughter 'Carmel.' (It IS biblical!)
I even went so far as to write fake autographs to myself in my autograph book, from fake male cousins - though I don't think they were very convincing, being far too neat for boys' handwriting, even though I did my best to make it look different from mine, and messy.
I still have those lists and that particular autograph book, if you ever want to see them do let me know.
***
My maternal grandparents live in a 3-room flat in Marine Terrace together with my uncle, who's a bachelor. They've lived there ever since they had to move from a shophouse in Little India, and that was where my mother stayed with her four siblings when she wasn't staying in the university hostel. It's a nice place, on the top floor; the front view is of the sea at East Coast Park and there's a nice breeze. There was upgrading too, recently: the lift now stops on every floor, and there's an extra room attached to the kitchen.
The three of them are lovely people, although I used to hate being told by my mother to give my uncle a kiss because his chin was usually covered with prickly hairs. And before life got harder for wai por Sundays in general meant the taste of her chicken rice, Chinese New Year Sundays the taste of her pineapple tarts and tang yuan, and Birthday Sundays the taste of her soy sauce chicken with mian sian and an egg. Always the egg. Dumpling Festival Sundays meant the the taste of her zhong zi, Mooncake Festival Sundays the taste of her mooncakes.
Gong gong (Kong kong?) used to be a school teacher, in a time when teachers were highly respected, and deserving of that respect. He had a stroke when I was 7, and wai por has been taking care of him all these years. They hardly get out of the house nowadays, because his mobility, severely impaired by the stroke in 1993, has been steadily decreasing over the years.
Now he just shuffles about slowly, and he has to be wheeled around in a wheelchair because walking is just too tiring for him, and he takes too long to move about. But pushing the wheelchair is tiring for wai por and she has gout - her joints hurt - so what can they do?
It will be his 78th birthday this Saturday, and we celebrated it last Sunday - all my aunts were there, and most of my cousins. Wai por looked so happy to see that we were all gathered as a family, and for once her hurting joints didn't really matter because it gave her joy to prepare food for us, to see how happy we were to eat her good cooking.
Because it was so crowded and there was so much noise I couldn't take my usual pre-afternoon nap nap, so I simply sat around observing things and people.
There are skeletons in the closet of the familial nature which are too personal to publish in such a public space, but last Sunday I was reminded of how strongly I had used to want a normal extended family of the sort which all my friends seemed to have. Doting aunts, jolly uncles. Grandparents with deep pockets who gave out fat red packets for almost every conceivable occasion, from birthdays to getting PSLE A stars. Per A star. Cousins one could relate to.
Or what I thought was 'normal' for immediate family, even. A father who would pick me up and send me to places instead of telling me that I had legs and walking was cheaper than petrol; a mother who would bring me shopping at 'cool' shops where I could purchase Roxy or Rip Curl items instead of me having just one pair of Giordano jeans for almost all of secondary school; a brother who was older than me instead of younger.
It will soon be time for me to bring Jon to meet my extended family, and I've been feeling ashamed that I am ashamed of some of them and thus ashamed to let him meet them.
I don't think those large, traditional - rich - families are all that happy either. Every family has skeletons in the closet, or don't they?
Come what may, blood will always be thicker than water. I'm older now, and I've come to truly appreciate my upbringing and admit that my parents knew best, but I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to truly appreciate all of my extended family. Visiting gong gong (I remember fretting over its spelling the time he had a stroke and I made a Get-Well Card) and wai por is like entering a whole different world, far from the trees and grass and large houses with one too many cars in their huge porches in my neighbourhood, far from the people I come into contact with daily. English speaking, healthy and able-bodied, well turned out, and as comfortable and content as the middle-class usually is, which sometimes means not very.
Birthday cakes from Awfully Chocolate or a hotel bakery well-known for cake, instead of Bengawan Solo ones topped with jellied fruit, flower-patterned marzipan lining its sides, held together with cream too light in texture to be pure cream. Cake a treat, only to be had on birthdays, always bought by the same aunt who's a cashier at Guardian Pharmacy.
I've come to realise that where gong gong and wai por and all my relatives are, is where the heart of Singapore really is. Not Orchard Road, not the CBD or the Esplanade Waterfront or the upcoming IR (Dear Government, please don't bail Sands out because then you might become partial in regulation of the IR).
And I'm glad of it, glad I'm a part of it.
***
Jon and I went to the National Museum and the Singapore Art Museum last Friday, and just before we went to the latter I said that I really wasn't in the mood for anything too high-brow and artsy fartsy. He assured me that This is Singapore man!.
So, not paying much attention to the list of exhibits at the entrance, we went up the stairs and the first thing we saw was a silver dog with the face of a joker lying on its back on a red cushion in a Venetian gondola. The dog also had a very huge and obvious penis.
My disgust soon turned into amusement as I read the explanation accompanying the work. It was by Vincent Leow (not the cute Evidence tutor, my mum thinks he might be the guy who was caught for cutting his pubic hair in public) and there was some long convoluted explanation about holidays and pets and photographs of the two. Something like that. It was Awfully Pretentious and we had a good laugh when I read it out in a Fake Pretentious Angmoh Accent. Just like the author probably intended.
It was then that we noticed that Ong Kim Seng's Heartlands was showing, explaining the bamboo poles with clothes hanging out of one of the museum's windows. When we turned into the first gallery showing his paintings there was a crowd of people gathered there, some taking notes, all listening to a man dressed in a short-sleeved, light blue shirt stretched a little too tightly over his belly, who looked just like a nice neighbourhood uncle you would smile at in the lift talking about the paintings.
I kept telling Jon that it was Ong Kim Seng himself, but he insisted that if it was everyone there would have been wearing suits and evening dresses. We even had a $2 bet on it, which Jon has already paid up with school canteen cai fan because I was correct.
I liked his paintings very much, much more than the strange silver dog-man. So much for modern art. Or modern all things, for that matter. Modern some things, yes. But not all.
