Ink

“F***ing asian.”

The man was quite obviously drunk and backed up by another goon, leering and thuggish. Drunk as they were, they seemed quite capable of reducing me to a bloodied mess before we arrived at the next train station. Our carriage was quite empty save for the occasional bored or sleepy passenger. Some looked up at this interruption, perhaps hoping for entertainment; others simply looked away. The train rattled on.

Growing up asian, you soon learn that the odds are stacked against you in life. Film and television are 88% Caucasian; and being young and impressionable, this typically ensures that the standard teenage daydream bears a closer resemblance to the cast of Friends than an asian family dinner table. Needless to say, it is a lonely time.

Asian parents are typically quite pragmatic in the upbringing of their children. Children are not so much cuddlier family members but investments into the future – indentured employees in their private retirement empire. In the olden days, when a college education wasn’t a determining factor of success, this was often seen in the establishment of large families. Being a single child was unheard of and usually brought up chatter about a couple’s ‘fertility’.

I like to picture those olden days as the halcyon times of growing up asian. Film and television were the luxuries of the truly wealthy, and trouble could always be blamed on any of the half dozen or so other siblings. With so many children, college was an unlikely prospect, and parents behaved accordingly. The children ran wild or underfoot as was their preference – their parents blindly trusting their education to the school of hard knocks.

In modern times, and the rising costs of living, the asian family conglomerate has downsized to about two overeducated and stressed out children. College is the goal, and an asian parent would have to be convicted for abuse before letting their children disappoint them. After school hours are increasingly spent in front of hired tutors, homework the priority before sports. Social gatherings are essentially reconnaissance missions to scope the competition and harp on about their own progeny.

Increasingly however, none of this boastfulness tends to trickle down to the by now sociopathic little monster their parenting has created. That said, I narrowly escaped this brainwashing by the dubious dint of being a particularly late bloomer.

Through most of my schooling life, my one gift to my parents’ social interactions would be my freakish height. This my parents quite proudly and likely truthfully attributed to a healthy diet (enforced) and good genes (no effort of mine). To put it mildly however, growing up freakishly tall and a day dreamer left my parents at a loss with how to position my negligible achievements versus my failings – which were agreed to be many and varied.

However, to say that I was spared any of the pressure would have been unfair to us both. Being not quite dumb enough to be labeled as ’special’ but far too disinterested to live up to my parents’ expectations left me with the unflattering categorization of being ’slow’. This, to my parents, meant extra hours of after school coaching and time with tutors – activities which they embraced with unabashed enthusiasm, much to my dismay.

This, coupled with extreme religiosity on my mother’s side – is what I blame my social misadventures upon to this day. In an asian family, or at least mine, it’s perfectly acceptable to open a conversation with a discussion of how much your current job is making you and how much better off you are than the average joe. In Australia, to my surprise, this is apparently rude.

It took several misadventures and awkward silences before I realized this social gaffe – which I promptly blamed on my parents. I figured if I had to put up with mind-numbing after school tuition and the consequent social skills or lack thereof, then my parents could put up with a bit of fair blame.

On the question of religion, asians tend to veer in two distinct and separate directions. The general direction is to steer clear of it – rudely if necessary. In our society, religion is something you tend to be born with, like having brown eyes or the inability to grow proper facial hair. It is something you observed when it was convenient to do so, usually by taking the day off. But otherwise it is treated like a familiar old coat, usually packed away to gather dust until it’s needed.

The other direction is that adopted by converts – the rebellious few who decided that their parent’s religion was not for them and that they would prove their freedom by essentially replacing their current doctrine with another. And these tend towards bible-thumping, tongues speaking evangelicalism – whereupon every accomplishment, professional or otherwise, is a gift from the Almighty with little or no thanks to the sweat from the accomplisher’s brow. There are probably a few out there who will accuse me of unfair discrimination at this point, and I dare say there are probably sanskrit-thumping, sutra chanting Buddhist converts out there; but I have yet to meet them.

It was to my misfortune however, that my mother would turn out to be one of the latter. It would later turn out in my college years that my hidden talent was obviously a gift from Above, to make up for all that lost time, and for which I should be thankful and give praise.

Had I not spent my childhood being blamed (admittedly correctly) for my own disinterest in all curricular subjects, instead of God, I might have found this idea intriguing. However, as it stood, my post-adolescence cynicism had just hit its peak and the very idea that my work was being attributed to someone I’d never met was somewhat appalling. It would be a judgement that would haunt me for the rest of my life – the feeling of just never being quite good enough, and even when I was, being told that it probably wasn’t my fault.

This and more came back to me on the train that night, faced by an aggressor that I had never before met, judged by a man who didn’t know me. My entire life I had faced being judged and so right now, on this train, I gave that simple ingrained response that I had prepared for it: I cowered.

“F***ing asians,” he repeated again, as if by adding a plural the connotation of what he was mad at would be more generalized instead of pointed at me. By this time several passengers had started to take notice and were probably discomfiting him by the force of their full attention.

At this point the train pulled into the next stop, and to my relief, the drunk and his buddy stumbled off, now yammering on about how asians were no better than anyone else despite what they thought. Personally, I agreed.

The blonde girl next to me, looking up from her book, finally took notice and flipped them the bird as they left, and to my chagrin, called out for them to come back and say that again to my face. She glanced at me and shrugged briefly before returning to her book. The train rattled on.

The air was frosty that August night as I stepped off the train and onto the platform at my stop, the next. My mind was a blank from the end of the adrenaline rush and implied humiliation, my only thought was to get home and sink under my bedcovers for the night. And it was with this thought I was leaving the station in brisk footsteps when a quiet tap on my shoulder paused me and I turned.

“Sorry ’bout that mate.”

It was another passenger from the train, a slightly older man, and he was apologizing on behalf of those two drunks. He spoke quietly, as if with those simple words he could wipe away the previous moments of terror and humiliation. It shouldn’t have. It did.

The other passengers shuffled past us, and with an apologetic smile, he joined them, vanishing into the darkness. I stood there awhile, chilled by the air and with my breath forming puffy white clouds, but for that instant warmed by that most uncommon of traits: grace.

My earliest childhood memory, and one I come back to every so often, revolves around my brother and I, both in primary school and both still co-conspirators against the despots we called our parents. I was seven, skinny and sickly, to the point where my parents had banned all forms of sweets and ices against the paranoia of another expensive hospital visit for use of their ventilator.

My junk food deprived diet was not informed so much by the health conscious morality of the time – there was none in the 1980s – but rather on my parents’ confusing insistence that I live to see my 18th birthday. Looking back now, I fully appreciate their sentiment; but viewed through the wide seven year-old eyes of that time, with my siblings heroically putting away processed sugar in coma inducing amounts, the double standard struck me as distinctly unfair.

Dessert was never a formal part of the meal in my family, but rather something to be snacked on throughout the day. Ice cream would be announced when my father rose from his permanent indentation on the living room couch, usually during advertising intermissions between Cantonese serial dramas. Expectantly, all three childish faces would immediately pop up from colouring, homework, or in my younger sister’s case, a pause in whining about how neither my brother nor I would ever play with her.

After the obligatory arm stretch and groan of strenuous long distance immobility – my father being a champion in his class – he would look around the room, and as if surprised by the fact that he has progeny, announce the prize of chocolate and strawberry ice cream for those who would be willing to assist him in the possibly epic journey to the freezer and back. Three willing bodies would shoot up in attention before he could ever finish this sentence, which would invariably end in “… except for Kelvin, because he’s still sick,” at which point I would crumple back to my colouring, carefully hiding my disappointment.

In my idle time, and my more emotional moments, I would day dream of myself suffering sudden death syndrome brought upon by a junk food-less diet. In my mind’s eye, my parents would be sobbing over my tiny coffin, regretting that they had denied me that one tiny triangle of a Toblerone bar that would have saved my life – and swearing that they would never buy sweets for my siblings again. The logic of the situation now strikes me as absurd considering the manner of my passing, but conventional wisdom notes that logic rarely features in the vengeful imagination of a slighted six year-old.

In my more sober moments of clarity, I would wish my siblings dead instead. The logic according to this theme was with two less members in the family, my parents could hardly deny me all the treats and sweets currently showered upon my healthier counterparts. This of course, hung upon the perceived notion that treats were a fixed allotment to every family by some strange authority to be disposed of rather than a luxury purchased as required. As time went on, this became the more persistent day dream – the childhood equivalent of a wet dream, where my parents shoved diabetic amounts of junk food at me, even as my siblings were mourned in black and white photographs hung on the wall.

Fast forward a year, and my induction into the hallowed halls of primary school, my brother and I would be crouched behind the crumbling white washed wall at the back of the school during the heat of afternoon recess – our clean starched white and blue uniforms inexorably getting grimier in the presence of equatorial dust and running sweat. The occasion was solemn, my brother, with the dubious maturity of being two years older than I, had just been granted that most adult of childhood privileges: an allowance.

It wasn’t much, my parents’ archaic idea of an allowance being a single dollar a week – a figure that kids nowadays would most likely sniff at; but for which at the time, in my eyes – having never been trusted with so much as a penny – was a small fortune worthy of respect and an enormous responsibility. My brother promptly used it to buy ice cream.

And this is what he unwrapped that day, with me as his only witness. The heat dripped sweat from our foreheads, even as we stood in the shade of the building’s rusty tin roof overhang. Also, wind whipped dust from the dry field around us and turned our white shirts varying shades of grey and brown, but it was nonetheless, in that childhood way, a solemn occasion.

The unwrapping complete, the prize now bare to the world, pale and glistening in the harsh light of noon sun, the brown and white tones of a frozen coconut and chocolate popsicle – an almost regional form of junk food from my childhood. My greedy eyes watched as my brother raised the freezing treat to his lips, with only a slight pause as he looked me in the eye, an older brother sizing up a younger one.

And the unexpected happened.

“Want some?” he proffered the untouched treat to me.

My mind raced, the guilt set in, the possibility of getting caught by our parents loomed large in my vision. I felt almost faint.

My brother, seeing my hesitation, threw in the catch, “… you only get one bite, and if you tell ma, I will kill you.”

And so it was on that hot June day, in conspiracy and away from the prying eyes of adults and possible disciplinarians that I had my first taste of ice cream. It was everything I had imagined and more. The coldness of it shocked my untrained tongue, the sweetness engulfed my tiny body as only a child’s body can be engulfed, the taste sharper and stronger, the ice colder and more painful – a memory I carry with me to this day.

The evening would see me on a ventilator in the emergency room – my childhood asthma aggravated by the introduction of a foreign substance into my system, my struggle to breathe panicking my teacher and parents enough to have me pulled from class and into the care of a familiar nurse.

There were accusations, parents and teachers argued over the cause of the sudden attack – something that hadn’t happened in months. There was a long interrogation, my playmates and I pulled aside to be asked if they had seen me playing with anything new, or eating anything I shouldn’t have. Doctors were consulted, my diet became even more restricted, I skipped school for a few days against the possibility of a relapse.

Through it all, I kept my silence. And my brother kept his. Co-conspirators against a dictatorial regime.