Horse with No Name on Play: Clash of the (Tiny) Titans

Cultural chasms are tricky things. You don't have to be Indiana Jones to get across one, but you certainly require the same amount of gumption.

As adults, life conditions us to fear failing in social situations. Failing to appear amicable, failing to be culturally sensitive are akin to falling off a social cliff. Stick to your own kind and people brand you a racist. Stick to your own company and they call you a hermit. Flit around and they call you a social butterfly. There's no winning.



But kids? I always imagined that kids have it easier. Stick 'em in the mud, and they all make mudpies together, regardless of race, language or religion.

After all, isn't play universal? The great cultural equalizer amongst the young? Isn't play. . . fun?

Life is a battlefield

To whit, the answer to that question seems to be embedded in this little conversation I overheard at a recent party:

Five-year-old: I'm not going to play with you cos you're an asshole.

Twelve-year-old: So don't.

Five-year-old: You said you were going to cut me!

Twelve-year-old: Trust me, if I was going to hurt you, your head would be so broken by now.

So, enlighten me: I'm a little out of touch with the standard witty repartee of the under-12 set, but when in the heck did kids start talking to one another like that?



Back home, I stayed up many nights worrying about scenarios just like the one above. Would Sweetpea be happy in Arizona? Would the kids here be too aggressive for her to handle? Would they all just embrace their differences and get along?

The little tete-a-tete made me take stock of the sort of behavior that floats to the surface, here especially, when the grown-ups are not around.

Okay, I'm not really so naive as to imagine that children are young innocents these days, what with all the mass media that envelopes them. But seriously. Seriously. The level of social politics among kids here can sometimes be mind-boggling, and I'm more than a little frightened for Sweetpea.

But I'm not going to be a hypocrite and pretend Singaporean kids are doormats. That they don't get into fights or swear. On the contrary, I took Sweetpea off the school bus during nursery school because the older boys (who were just in kindergarten 2, mind you) were harassing people with the foulest language imaginable.



And look, Sweetpea has her moody moments too. She swats at her baby sister, slams doors and throws things. But true-blue violence? Not a chance. At least, not 'til we came here.

Welcome to the jungle

I've been trying to reign in any smidgen of Mama Bear-hovering since we got here. Sweetpea is six, for crying out loud. While that isn't old enough to be going off to college, it is old enough to start learning some street smarts, especially on the playground.

So against every instinct I felt, I let her go downstairs on her own. (By downstairs, I literally mean, down one flight of stairs to the green outside our two-story apartment building). I'd hover at the window watching her the whole time she was out.

After a month here, Sweetpea became firm friends with a twelve-year-old girl in the complex.

They would play with a group of kids on the main green – the new BFF was the oldest and the youngest kid was a rowdy two-year-old who could outswear a sailor. Sweetpea always stayed within reasonable line-of-sight, which was one of my key conditions for letting her play outside on her own.

She seemed happy, returning each evening with some exciting story to tell. She felt like she belonged.

Belonging. It's such a powerful, yet power- sapping feeling, all at once.

In truth, Sweetpea was trapped, stuck in a cultural gulf and desperately trying to claw her way up. On one side was my conservative Asian upbringing. No cycling or wandering around the complex. No hanging out at the clubhouse on your own. Stay where I can see you. There are shadows and murderers at every turn.



On the other side was the carefree recklessness of her American pals. They gleefully rode into traffic in the carpark. They lobbed obscenities and rocks at one another all day. They hung out with nary a grownup in sight.

Nary a grownup. See, that's the thing. I want to let my daughter have her fun, become independent and all that. But as a journalist, I also used to cover the news coming out of the US. And after some of the things I had read over the wires, especially regarding the abduction of kids, it is suffice to say I wanted to bleach my brain afterwards.

So, yes, I'm big on adult supervision.

While it may seem contradictory to what I said earlier, the supervision I'm referring to is to protect my child from other adults. No one told me I'd have to protect her from other kids.

It soon became obvious to me that Sweetpea's new BFF was a queen bee, a stereotypical mean girl who alternately lavished attention on Sweetpea and tormented her. Sweetpea stuck to my rules, and instead of respecting them, and her, the kids would ditch her at the playground to go off by themselves.

And Sweetpea would wait for them. Like a puppy. Because she felt she belonged.

They treated her like a pawn in some crummy political game of human chess. But even a dumb animal that gets its tail trodden upon too many times will snap at you.

Sweetpea returned one evening, calm as could be. She announced she wasn't going to play with the kids downstairs anymore. Queen Bee and her minion soon appeared at our door - to apologize, so they said. Turns out, Sweetpea had bit her BFF on the arm.

Hang on. Rewind, I said. My kid? Bit someone? I turned to Sweetpea, who looked ashen. She fled to her room, big fat tears rolling down her cheeks.

Between sobs, Sweetpea recounted how her friends kept knocking her blocks down while they were playing in the clubhouse. (Which she wasn't allowed to go to in the first place!) She tolerated it at first. Then she got annoyed and walked off. When she returned, she couldn't find her jacket, and her pals sent her outside to look for it, in the trash cans.

When she tried to get back into the clubhouse, the BFF kept physically pushing her out.

“So you bit her?” I asked, horrified.

“It was an accident, Mom. I was trying to get her away from the door by pulling her jacket,” she said, so sorrowful and sorry.



Still, I grounded her for a week. Harsh? Maybe. But she had to know her reaction was unacceptable, no matter what the situation was. And I could see her point of view, even if I didn't agree with it. Faced with a predator larger than herself, she reacted on a primal level.

Would she have reacted the same way back home? Maybe. Did being surrounded by unruly behavior make her own behavior seem somehow acceptable in her eyes? Possibly. I'm still searching for answers.

Forgiven, not forgotten

I worried that the entire fiasco had turned Sweetpea off making friends with the local kids for good.

“The kids here are really aggressive,” she grumbled, adding that she preferred playing with the Singaporean kids we knew.

That gave me pause. I'm not the sort to stick to my own kind. Growing up in a mixed-race family, I never really identified with any 'kind' to begin with. But I couldn't force Sweetpea to run back out and make friends, especially after what she'd been through.

One Singaporean Dad I spoke to suggested that the entire incident with the BFF was racially motivated, while another Singaporean Mom noted that kids behave really differently when they're in school and when they're not.

“Maybe the school environment is just healthier,” she pointed out. “There's a strong focus on character development.”

There's a certain truth in that. And I would add another thought to it: Play is hard work, and kids are learning what is acceptable behavior, and what isn't, when dealing with friends. You add cultural differences to that mix – clashing non-verbal signals, misunderstandings over friendly or unfriendly behavior – and you have a powder keg of bad juju waiting to go off. Having a grownup around – one with some iota of common sense - neutralizes this.



Sweetpea did eventually make some friends - in school. Maybe I should be happy with that. It's a safe environment, with plenty of adults to tone down the playground politics. Baby steps, right?

Despite her issues with some of the kids downstairs, I don't want Sweetpea to assume that all of them will treat her that way. I don't want my daughter to give up looking for the good in people. No matter what their culture, color or creed.

When it comes down to it, navigating any cultural gulf – real or perceived – requires taking a leap of faith. Sometimes others aren't willing to do it, so you have to. But you also have to know how to land on your feet without taking too much damage to your heart.

And your friends? The real friends? You'll know who they are. They're the ones reaching out to you from the other side of that gulf. Culture be damned.