Tianni on Shopping: The Family Tradition

Photos of the children at the Blue Sky Healing Home, and some of the youngest residents asleep in their cots

I was baptised as a Roman Catholic when I was about five. Then, whether and how to celebrate Christmas was a foregone conclusion.

After dinner on the evening of Christmas Eve, my family of four would dress in our best and troop out the door for midnight mass at our neighbourhood church. Standing in a sea of lighted candles under the night sky as the familiar strains of carols emanate from within the packed sanctuary, I would gawk at the teenage girls from church in their black sequinned dresses and twirled hair being chatted up by smitten boys and think how much I wanted to look like them when I grew up and how magical a night Christmas was.

Then at 17, I converted to Christianity. As part of an enthusiastically evangelical church, celebrating Christmas was again a no-brainer. But, in place of my as yet unfulfilled childhood dream of dressing up to the nines for candlelit masses at the stroke of midnight, Christmas became an passionately religious affair during which I’d drag unsuspecting non-believer friends to house ‘parties’ where I’ll movingly regale them with the story behind Christmas and beseech them to convert.

But somewhere between 23 to 28, my convictions became closer to what’s known as an agnostic atheist. And for the first time I started having to think about what meaning, if any, the festival really held for me stripped of its religious roots. Being an ethnic Chinese who has grown up in Asia, in a family that has always been fiercely nuclear, the tradition of Santa Claus or Turkeys or boisterous dinners with extended family was completely lost on me. Sure, there had been the annual shopping trips my parents had brought my brother and I to in order for us to pick out our own Christmas presents (no, Santa doesn’t climb down the chimney in our household). And I remember the Christmas Day brunches with balloons and streamers and clumsy dancing by some hotel’s too thin Santa Claus(es). And of course, possibly the most wonderful of all, the cartoon marathons (Smurfs!) running on TV all throughout Christmas day. But to a young rebellious adult eager to etch out her independence, including in the area of festivals, the tradition my parents had tried to create for our small family failed to pass muster as a cool Christmas custom I could adopt as my own.

So for a while in my early twenties, Christmas became nothing more than yet another excuse to spend more money in the malls and eat out at fancy restaurants. I’d have romantic dinners with my beau on Christmas Eve, and with the knowledge that I’m entitled to a full day of pampering on the special day, ask for a bag or/and pair of shoes I’ve been coveting as my Christmas gift. On the rare occasion, we’ll spend the night with friends on the town and drink ourselves silly. Then I grew older. Perhaps it was biological changes, or perhaps it was a growing sense of mortality, but increasingly I felt the need to spend Christmas together with my parents. For a few years before I left Singapore, I tried to clobber together a family tradition from the scrapheap of yesteryear, buying presents for my parents and insisting that we, sometimes including my already married brother, eat together as a family on Christmas Eve. But of course, I left Singapore, and that practice fell apart before it was even given the chance to take root.

Somehow, this year, three years after I became a mother, the thought of creating our very own Christmas tradition for our little family crossed my mind. My daughter was old enough to notice that Christmas trees were springing up in every mall and restaurant we went to, and even her Chinese preschool had gotten in on the festivities, decorating with tinsels and baubles and holding its own Christmas party a week before Christmas. Just as my parents had given me warm memories of Christmas in childhood to look back on, I was aware that we were responsible for the memories she’d have when she grew up.

We’ll have a home cooked dinner on Christmas Eve’s I thought, but what do we do on Christmas Day? I toyed with the idea of bringing her to a Christmas brunch at one of the many big hotels in the city having a Christmas special something or other. I still had fond memories of the ones I went to when I was young, and most of them also came with roving Santa Clauses, ‘live’ Christmas carolling and kiddy festive partying of some kind that would save me the work of trying to create some ‘festive air’ in our home.

But apparently in the spirit of things, the Christmas feasting all came with price tags so large, any nostalgic goodwill I was feeling over the season was quickly drained. I also wasn’t sure that the tradition I wanted for my child at Christmas was one that would further fuel the freewheeling consumer bandwagon that every retailer was so eager to cash in on this time of the year. Yes, telling myself that I had an excuse to spend without guilt at least one day every year could potentially feel oh-so-good. But another part of me really didn't want to be a sucker and buy into the clear exploitation by businesses that had absolutely nothing to do with whatever Christmas could stand for, religiously or not.

And then it struck me that our family Christmas tradition from this year on could be to consciously go against this tide of festive consumption. Instead, we would spend the occasion doing something for others. And as it happens, there are no shortage of such opportunities in China, where everywhere we turn, there will be glaring examples of lack and the unequally dispensed hand of providence. We called up an orphanage for children with medical needs that I’d read about and asked them what we could bring for them on Christmas Day. They were delighted.


A staff at the home unpacking some of the food and clothing items we brought, thanks to donations from friends

It is my hope that this will be the start of a family tradition my daughter will herself have fond memories of many years later.


Kaela on her first of hopefully many 'Christmas giving' visits (due to privacy concerns, we couldn't take pixs of the children)

Tianni on Love: When does a home stop being a home?

My daughter has lived in Beijing since she was a teensy two-month-old baby. That’s not saying much, if you consider she’s only three. But if you take into account that these three years have also been her whole life thus far, it’s pretty significant, especially when the little one actually thinks of China as her home and speaks Mandarin Chinese as mellifluously as any other native preschooler.

In fact, the girl feels such affection for her home city, she refers to her little compact world -- literally the one square kilometer ringing our apartment that includes her kindergarten, favorite mall, park and comfort restaurants -- as “My Beijing”, a term always said with an undisguised hint of patriotic pride as if her tiny sliver of this vast chaotic capital city is the equivalent of a sovereign nation. To her it is. Infallibly, at the end of a day’s outing outside of this little fiefdom she presides over, or on the annual trips back to Singapore to see family, little K would begin missing the home that she has adopted (and which has adopted her in kind) and ask to be back in “My Beijing”.

Who could blame her for thinking she belongs to a different country from her parents? All the memories she’s formed in her young life –- her pioneering steps, the little friends in preschool, her beloved ayi, the first snowman, the tiny playground she gazes longingly down on from her window each morning –- all the big and little things that makes up one’s life, for her they have all been largely formulated here. And my heart aches thinking of the eventuality of tearing her away from all these memories she’s formed in her host country, from the only life she’s ever known, back to a country that I still consider as my home but which she’s a complete stranger to.

Yes, we’ve been recently thinking of moving back to our country of origin, for a variety of reasons I shall not expound on. And the excitement over the new chapter in our lives such a move could potentially open up has been countered by a host of complex emotions. Not least over the worry if little K would adopt her new home country with the same devotion she’s done with China. Yes, I’ve heard that little kids adapt easily, that they’ve short memories, that even perhaps that they’re too young at this point to have their feelings taken seriously. But I fear the little gal could, like her mum, be that tad too sensitive and sentimental. Complicating it all is, if I were to be honest, I don’t really want her to adapt completely to a new home and in the process forget all about My Beijing. For it’s also been both Our Beijing.

It’s been here that I first found my footing as a mother and where we gradually established our mother-daughter relationship, from the early antagonistic sleepless months of my fuzzy postnatal memory, to the breakthrough end of the first year during which I’d become to her, the indispensable “Mummeeeee!!!”, and she’d grown into this 1 meter tall chili padi (a tiny, very spicy chili pepper) who’s also quickly cementing her position as my youngest best bud.

Some evenings after putting her to sleep and with the significant other away on one of his perennial work trips, I sit in the silent hall of our rented apartment, trying to take in with my senses as much as I can of the space that both of us have become so familiar with, and that I know will one day be inhabited by others, perhaps even another family with its own loud-voiced little wonder. I gaze at K’s first tricycle in its usual corner of the room, likely abandoned by the distractible one in mid-pedal, and imagine how different this space will be when both vehicle and person no longer making their noisy loops on the parquet flooring. I take in the view of the floral sun hats we conveniently toss atop the wooden carving of the couple frozen in a kiss, and wonder over how naked they’ll look without the adornments, how much the hats now look to me a part of the sculpture that had come along with the furnishings. And I peer into the girl’s darkened bedroom where she sleeps sprawled on the bed in her usual haphazard fashion, and attempt to imprint onto my permanent memory the scene I’ve looked upon night after night that will no longer be once we go, because the bed won’t be the same, the room won’t be the same, and the little girl will eventually not fit under her favorite “whale blanket”.

Making a mountain out of mould(hills)? Perhaps. But memories are something I’ve never been good with, because they haunt me even when covered with the dust and cobwebs of the passing of time. Change, I’m good with, but not nostalgia. Take my home country to which I feel an umbilical connection to. Every time I visit and chance upon roads or places I’ve once routinely frequented, I get assaulted by a volley of flashbacks from an expired period in my life that resembles nothing of my present life, and which thus makes the emotions that well up in me all the more bittersweet. I figure the attachment I feel is because the sum total of the years I’ve spent in Singapore still exceeds those I’ve spent outside of it, and the outdated memories are the result of not having made any fresh memories of much significance there.

While I resolve to update the memory bank with the unfolding of the next phase of our lives there, for little K though it’ll be different, at least until the inevitable moment when her memories in Singapore outweighs the ones made in Beijing. I really don’t know if that will be a good or bad thing, oh the ambivalence. How can one actually file out of sight memories that make up a period of one’s life without being utterly disrespectful to the people and relationships in it?

But perhaps that’s just the problem I have, thinking we’ve to prioritize memories along a linear progression of time. Perhaps if we think of them as existing all at once in parallel universes, and just us who happen to be inhabiting a different space at the moment, then we don’t really have any need for the sadness of letting go.

And little K can remain rooted to My Beijing and all that she loves in it, even while she finds new people and places to love in her newly adopted home.

Tianni on Play: Academy of the world

Headline translation of report in Singapore's My Paper: I can become a Superkid!

I can never quite make up my mind on whether I had been a good student or a bad one. As with many areas in my life, I can only conclude my student record has been unpredictable.

On second thought, no -- I take that back. I was definitely a bad student. Only, I was good enough to pass exams (at least the important ones) without really putting in the work. Yeah, go ahead, kill me.

Okay, now that I’ve got your attention…

My formal education – all 16 odd years of it – was largely received inside Singapore. It was also rather unfortunately, largely forgettable.

No, I don’t mean the lifelong friends whom I’d picked up along the way, or the opportunities to engage in numerous extra-curricular activities that allowed me to explore interests that my parent-sanctioned courses of study (Commerce!! Business!!) didn’t allow for.

I am referring to the Accounting classes and Business 101 lectures I’ve had to sit through half asleep, the Operations Processes homework I copied from classmates that I’ve handed in, and the Financial Accounting exams I didn’t turn up for.

I’m not proud of my nonchalance toward the most part of school. On the contrary, I look back on the last decade of my formal schooling with a truckload of regret that I'd walked away not learning more than I could have, simply because I was mostly studying subjects I had little interest in.

I had started out pretty motivated, often topping classes in primary school. I also had an affinity for language and was inclined toward the arts and humanities. My conservative parents however believed in the conventional path to success and more than that, in the conventional measure of success. Basically, in secondary school, that translated into "no arts stream." Later on, this was fine tuned into "Business = $$ = :-D."

So when it came time for university, out went my preferred choice of theater studies, and in came full-blown truancy. What had started mildly in junior college during which I would regularly excuse myself from classes in subjects I loathed for the endless "track training" became a way of life in university, a period during which I spent approximately 60 percent of my time engaged in countless hall and extra- curriculum activities -- running, swimming, drama, dance, you name it -- and only some of the remaining sitting in lecture halls. My disinterest grew to a point where I went through an entire term without attending a single class in subjects I highly disliked. When examinations came round, I decided to simply not show up for the papers (read: two glaring ‘F’s!!). During the last days of the final semester, I stepped for the first time inside the faculty library to photocopy a term's worth of handouts I'd missed, only to realize I actually needed a library card. What I see looking back on my uni years is a shameful waste of precious time and limited resources, and not just mine. I sincerely apologize to that student who didn't get a place in Biz Ad despite a genuine interest, because I accepted mine out of expediency.

Every parent's dream (if they work) - 'model' answers for the PSLE exams

Why I'm even bringing up this sorry history is the earlier online furor in Singapore over whether to reduce the weighting of the mother tongue (i.e., the compulsory second language subject) in the all-important Primary School Leaving Examinations. I didn't follow the whole debate closely, but what I generally grasped is this: some are concerned reducing the importance of Chinese (or Malay, or Tamil, or Hindi, whatever the case may be) in exams will lead to students paying less attention to their mother tongue, deteriorate an already dismal grasp of the second language and so further dilute our already weak cultural roots. Others argue reducing the pressure to score in the subject will make it more enjoyable to learn a second language and so boost standards. Still others fear taking away the need for good second-language scores for admissions into secondary schools will further fan the competition for limited seats in top schools in favor of those with a strong foundation in the English language (generally seen as being from English-educated, more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds).

To me, the arguments all miss the most basic point. That just as there are students poor in maths or sciences or literature, there are students poor in languages. Just as there are backgrounds where the parents communicate with their children using Chinese, there are parents who use English; just as there are those who are comfortable crunching numbers, who surround their children with literary novels, or who instill an early love of natural sciences in their children. If there were as many diverse backgrounds and as many varied interests, why do we persist in holding young children's abilities and worth to standardized examinations that demand they perform equally well in everything, and penalizes them should they fall short on even one? If there is debate over the fairness of a compulsory second language, why not also debate that of measuring unique individuals with a generalized, standard measure?

I guess it means you can get 4 'A' stars if you memorize all the answers. Duh.

Of course, I'm hardly the first to question the standardized assessments of children. In China, some 10 million 17-year-olds sit each year for the college entrance examination, or gaokao, after spending their entire childhoods swotting for what has been criticized as nothing more than memory tests. The gaokao is seen as about the only way for rural families to break out of the poverty cycle, yet questions are being raised over whether they promote rote-learning over creativity and the ability to think for oneself.

(Read this interesting critique of the traditional Chinese education system)

There are as many arguments for standardized assessments, and truth is, until there is a better alternative of applying or assessing learning, the current vanguard will likely continue to be used.

But, as in my case, the possible consequence to enforcing something without an appreciation for "natural" talents or inclinations is a backlash, and at its worst, the potential hijacking of an individual's full potential. And that would serve the interests of no one. Fortunately for me at least, I've found one can try (or be obliged to) but never truly run away from oneself.

Over the past decade or so, I've found myself embarking on a real-world education, one that has proven far superior to any I'd received within the confines of educational institutions. Much of it had come from traveling and living in countries with cultural and political orders starkly different from home, and from interacting with a whole society's spectrum of people. I've been given crash courses in civic participation while witnessing public movements from Bangkok to Taipei, and realized politics isn't just restricted to an educated minority; in the developing countries, I've been sobered by inequalities in wealth distribution with both extreme poverty and wealth on display along a stretch of a single street. In rural Thailand, I was humbled by the grit of prepubescent muay thai boxers determined to rise above less than fortunate circumstances; in Taipei, I was educated in the inconvenient truth that taking responsibility for environmental degradation also involves a nugget of personal discomfort.

Throughout, I've read furiously on an array of books that pique my interest -- International Affairs, Development, Economics, Psychology -- not because they are mandated readings for a course, but because I personally desired to know more. Not surprisingly, most of these subjects fall into the Arts and Humanities department.

In a way, I've come full circle through my exploration of the world.

The people I meet outside of textbooks

But of course I can't explain that to my parents. They're still wondering when I'll end my gallivanting and begin a proper career in the business world.

Tianni on Shop: The Unbearable Inconvenience of (Responsible) Being

The waiting....and the coming (pictures from www.culture.tw)

On my days home during the one year I lived in Taipei, my ears will prick for the distant strains of Beethoven’s Fur Elise five minutes before and after 7p.m., save Wednesday and Sunday. It didn’t matter that the first barely perceptible notes were close to drowned in the din of downtown city traffic on the street one floor down. Or that the mangled tune broadcasting from afar was almost indistinguishable from the Chinese pop blaring from my neighbour’s. Like Pavlov’s perfectly-trained dog, I will sit at apt attention come the same time on said days, and spring up the moment I heard Fur Elise wafting in from outside my windows. Even on the rare occasion my ears somehow miss the cue, the opening and slamming of my neighbours’ doors, the rustling of plastic bags and the hurried slap of flip flops down the dank staircase outside my door will alert me to the much awaited occasion – the coming of the city’s garbage trucks.

Sometimes they even come in broad daylight... (pictures from http:// www.culture.tw)

(Watch this Youtube video, coincidentally shot near my old place)

Ludwig van Beethoven must be proud that more than a century after first being published, his classical composition is not only playing to broad swathes of Taipei's population, but also assuming a pivotal role in saving the earth. For Taipei is one of the greenest in East Asia precisely because of its unique waste management system, preluded by Fur Elise (at least where I live). Five days a week, the tune will herald the evening parade of the waste collection trucks and the recycling vehicles that follow along the streets in my former part of town, next to Da’an Park. Residents know they miss these trucks at their own peril, especially at the humid height of summer. They are about the only way residents can dispose of household waste and should they somehow miss the day’s rounds, the only other alternative for putrid bags of rotting garbage is to knot them as tight as possible and put them in the furthest corner of one's home till the next collection. Tough luck if it was a Tuesday or Saturday. I still remember the home stink of 2.5 days old organic waste putrefying in 35 deg C heat, it’s that unforgettable.

The first time I learned of the city’s garbage disposal methods though, it sounded absolutely bizarre, especially to the ears of a Singaporean used to having trash cans on every street corner and a garbage chute within (or just outside) the home into which bags of refuse disappear as if by magic. In Taipei, one will be hard pressed to find a single bin on the streets for stretches on end. It's not uncommon to go out for an entire day only to lug home empty drink bottles and lumps of used tissue for disposal via what would by now have evolved into a sophisticated home waste sorting mechanism. For aside from the dearth of public trash cans and the strictly scheduled rounds of collection trucks, in Taiwan residents had to also separate organic waste from the recyclables, and among the recyclables, to separate the paper from the glass from the plastics, each type of which went into their own special recycling truck which only came by on designated days.

When I eventually mustered enough courage to lug my days-old trash down to the street corner, I dragged my feet and dawdled behind a chattering crowd of domestic helpers and housewives in pyjamas so I could study how the intricate sanitation system worked. Still, on that occasion, I ended up getting a earful from the sanitation worker handling the trash for 1) failing to use a city-approved trash bag that had to be purchase from the supermarket at $0.25 a piece, and 2) trying to dispose of newspapers on a plastics-only day. So intimidating was this recycling/trash-tax mechanism, it took me all ofa month or two to get the recycling days and the trash bags exactly right. In between, my husband and I took care of the trash we failed to throw out in a most shameful way -- by splitting them into tiny bags which we’ll then take out under cover of night to stuff into the teensy waste bins that fortunately for us, Taiwanese public parks still had in plenty.

Clean and green with no dustbins (pictures from http://commons.wikimedia.org)

But I eventually got into the swing of recycling and surprising myself, derived immense satisfaction in organizing household trash. I loved knowing that the two-litre plastic milk bottles going into my 'Plastics' corner won't be adding to some landfill but will be used again. I also relished scrapping dinner leftovers into the 'Organic Waste' bags, knowing some hogs at a farm will slurp up my mediocre cooking more enthusiastically than my spouse did. By the end of our stay in Taipei, I was close to 8 months pregnant and eagerly lumbering down the stairs to street level every time Fur Elise played so I could join the rest of the neighbourhood in meeting the trucks with our perfectly sorted trash in their blue city-approved 25-cent bags.

By the end of one year, I had come a long way from my public park dumping days, finally having gotten the hang of being a (more) environmentally aware citizen. But then I moved to China, where recycling, like the no smoking rule indoors, seemed to be just another motto hanging from the lips of officials but far removed from the reality of ordinary people. Here, pedestrians toss cigarette butts and fruit peel into bins distinctly marked for recycling and vendors use the flimsiest of plastic bags that can barely stay intact for half a day, let alone be reused. And while I was used to seeing Taiwanese friends whip out their own chopsticks and cutlery while out dining in restaurants, in Beijing, businesses deliver takeout paired with so may wooden chopsticks and disposable plastic cutlery, it's like there is no tomorrow. Which considering this is the world's largest population, may indeed become a not-too-distant reality for planet earth.

Trash bin on Beijing street - looks nice, doesn't work that nicely

Against this unsupportive backdrop, I'd have reverted to my pre-Taipei environmentally unfriendly days if not for my noisy conscience. Indoctrinated from a year of chasing after garbage trucks, it loudly protests each time I mindlessly crush a paper cup or trash a plastic bottle. So to assuage it, I've taken to lugging around my heavy metal coffee mug in an already overweight work satchel to save on paper cups and, while trying to kick my addiction to Beijing's abundant delivery services, compensate by avoiding take-outs from wasteful restaurants (like the one that doles out one plastic container each for noodles, soup and sauce). I also shop with a shopping bag and insist to delivery boys that they take back plastic bags and cutlery that come with my lunch, which must certainly befuddle them since the motto here leans more towards, when it's free, grab more.

Signs of too many take-outs

So far, no sweat. But when it comes to having to put up with physical discomforts, like literally sweating, I'm finding being environmentally-friendly is not so easy. Especially when I really really hate the heat. Almost nothing gets to me more than when I'm in a rush getting the tot and myself ready for school and work and I get all sweaty before we even go out the door. And that has made my 'greening' efforts a little tricky when this summer the mercury in Beijing soared past 40 deg C. In addition to the night time usage I've rationed myself in the summer months without which none of us pampered ones would be able to fall asleep, I've had to leave the air conditioner blasting away in the mornings while chasing the little one all over the apartment. During these sweltering months, I've also had to ditch my two-wheeler, the same one that brings me to work even when temperatures fall below freezing, in favour of the air-conditioned interiors of a cab. Even the garlic-breath of Chinese cabbies is a better option than the embarrassment of stepping into my workplace with my shirt plastered to my back with sweat.

But cooler months are coming this way, I can feel it these days on the evening breeze. And with them, I tell myself I will renew my earnest efforts in saving the planet. This time round the test of endurance will be the other way, as we see if we can huddle under our blankets till the city's central heating is turned on mid-November. Failing which we will reach for the heat switch in our apartment and flip me back onto my private guilt trip.

Tianni on Eat: Be Very Hungry

About a month ago, the Chinese-owned nursery our two-and-a-half-year-old goes to in Beijing decided it wanted to improve communication between teachers and parents.


Little K’s playground - Huijia. Hardly the swankiest in the area, but positively paradisaical compared to others

So it started giving out a feedback form at the end of each week, summarizing the curriculum covered in class and listing out the progress made by each tot in memorizing songs, distinguishing colors, or the like. This being one of the world’s last remaining bastions of communal (communist) spiritedness, the weekly reports also included observations on the kids’ ability to play together and cooperate with others, and their participation in herd, I mean, group activities.

I did not initially pay much notice to the A4-size slips of paper handed to me when I dropped the tot off at school. After all, I’ve become quite familiar with the school’s eagerness to introduce so-called progressive measures befitting its status as a private preschool and its corresponding inability to follow through with these policies. Take its Web site, for example. Each parent was issued an ID and password and told that we could keep in touch with our children’s progress in class with photos and updates posted online every day. It sounded like a brilliant idea, especially to working parents like me. Except that after about a month, the daily updates dwindled into a fortnightly trickle, and then eventually stopped completely. The last batch of photos posted online is dated November 2009, about five months ago.


Drawing, games and outdoor activities – a packed curriculum for little tots to justify astronomical fees

Expecting this feedback form to follow the same quick route to obsolescence, I forgot about the sheets handed to me. Until I got home from work one day and the ayi (helper) in all seriousness told me, “Kaela,” basically meaning, my daughter is anti-social at school. Now my nanny has been with us for close to the duration of our stay in China, helping to look after the kiddo since she was a teensy 2-month-old baby. A proud, tough (and loud) Beijinger who was during Mao’s revolution sent into the countryside for ‘re-education,’ she is also highly competitive on behalf of my toddler. The image of her running with my girl in her arms and overtaking dozens of other nannies and children in order to grab the most sweets during Halloween trick-or-treating has seared itself for posterity into my memory. So when she spoke to me in that tone, I had to pick up the form and see for myself if the sky had indeed fallen.

Predictably it hadn’t, but apparently, disliking group activities and preferring alone time in class was equally bad, if not worse. Then her teacher, in trying to put this terrible piece of news across in the gentlest manner, wrote after the initial remarks that she is “certain” Little K will “improve with time.” She was trying to be reassuring, I must add, but that only made me wonder how bad my daughter’s crime really was.







Now, first things first. This preschool my daughter attends is one of a rash of privately-run early education schools that have mushroomed across China in the past decade. Adopting Western concepts of early childhood nurturing with bilingual instruction, these businesses have very much succeeded in cashing in on the consequences of the country’s one-child policy, namely two generations so far of over-indulged children and their obsessively competitive parents who are, in the words of a Singaporean statesman, very “hungry” for their offspring to succeed in life. In a country where the average income is about SGD$8,000 per annum in large cities like Beijing, these schools cost about $400 a month, an astronomical sum by any stretch of balance-sheet arithmetic. One can only imagine the extent to which middle-income Chinese parents must have scrimped and saved in order to hedge on their future retirement – a burden that traditionally falls on the children.

Still, fees at these upscale local nurseries pale in comparison to truly "international" kindergartens run by foreign investors and staffed, not by local staff and the token "English teacher" (usually a straggly Peace Corps-type foreigner looking to earn pocket money during local immersion), but by full-time native English speakers holding relevant qualifications to boot. These nurseries charge at the least, double of what private Chinese schools advertise, ostensibly because they bestow upon their young charges not just an early classroom introduction to tomorrow’s United Nations world, but also a much-coveted North American accent. The promise of an early boost up the crowded societal ladder has seen no lack of affluent parents fill many an international classroom with young Chinese faces.


Forget Baby Einstein; for these kids of migrant workers, 'kindergartens' are basically cheap and sometimes unsafe daycare while their parents labor in the city


Half an hour’s drive from the city center, it’s a different world at the Cuigezhuang village largely inhabited by migrants workers.

Unfortunately for my dear future investment of a daughter, her parents, both relatively poor scribes, can’t afford to give her a leg up in the Darwinian race with a blue-chip preschool enrolment. In our darkest guilt-laden hours, we reason that our liberal-leaning tendencies towards egalitarianism can only make our toddler a better human being, even if she has to make a living in adulthood cleaning for these rich mainland kids who are poised to take over the world with their melodious Beijing Mandarin and perfect American English.

My delusions, however, haven’t stopped me from fretting, as good mothers do, of depriving my only child of a good start in life and generally having been too lax. After all, I’ve been guilty of not using picture flashcards on her the moment she started to crawl, and of not having signed her up for any of the myriad music-and-movement classes other mothers had when she finally learnt to totter upright.

Yes, Little K could be only two and yes, toddlers at this age are generally disinterested in their own kind, but perhaps, just perhaps, her lack of social graces is an early signal that she is neither likely to be voted class monitor, nor to win the title of Miss Popularity, nor to run for the college student union. In all likelihood, she could be a complete failure in the schmoozing and networking circles that characterize high-level corporate success. It was a complete nightmare to think that my precious daughter will be following in my very footsteps!


Barebones -- no fancy equipment, no ‘English teachers,’ no early childhood curriculum.

Much has been said about how hard Chinese parents push their children from a tender age, but you don’t really appreciate it until you experience first-hand the jostle to survive among 1.3 billion people on a day-to-day, cheek-to-jowl basis. Whether it’s the millions lining up for seats at the train stations at Spring Festival, the tens of thousands queuing up for admissions interviews into the country’s top universities, or the thousands applying for a few hundred civil service job openings, cut-throat competition is just a day in the life for mainland Chinese.

Often, the only difference determining which side of the great divide one belonged to – whether one was comfortably behind the wheel of a luxury European car on the clogged streets, or perched on two thin rubber wheels in between two-feet-high sacks of potatoes – was whether one had the opportunities afforded by well-connected and moneyed parents, or lacking that, had struggled hard enough to lay hands on a brand-name college degree. Social realities have given birth to a generation of parents and youngsters willing to go to great, and here I mean extreme, lengths for the faintest hope of raising a few notches their social standing. The corruption rampant in every tier of Chinese society or the dishonest merchants selling fake milk or eggs to me do not pronounce a judgement on morals, but only reflect the necessities of survival in the jungle. Play by the rules of victors or risk being sidelined.

It’s hard not to face up to the stiff realities of competition that my daughter, cocooned as she is, will likely find herself up against when China becomes a global superpower and its swathes of very hungry and ambitious citizens venture abroad in ever larger droves. At the very least, I’ve chided myself, I could equip her with as many soft skills as I can afford to buy. Perhaps there was even a special course somewhere on the Art of Playschool Socializing that I could sign her up for.

Very thankfully, about a month after it introduced the feedback forms, the school stopped handing them out, as I'd expected. I could at last return to my laissez-faire parenting and deluded faith in stress-free childhoods. The worrying, I tell myself, can wait, at least till the day Little K runs home crying over her first broken heart.

Tianni on Love: Coming Home

As far back as I can recall, I’ve always been trying to escape where I was, to go to where I wasn’t. In the years before the maturity for realizing this on my own, the travels took place in the form of an untameable wandering mind (much to the detriment of school report cards). During elementary school, I often rushed back from classes to flop onto my bedroom floor, still in uniform, to continue the narrative of a previous day’s daydream, a favorite theme being running free through the wilderness as a wild-haired Pocahontas.



Taking off from Singapore China Airport

So the minute I could escape the constant watchfulness that comes with living with conservative Asian parents, I took off. It started small, with jaunts across the Causeway. Limited by tight student budgets, college friends and I would cycle hundreds of kilometres up Malaysia’s beautiful west coast or sleep on remote eastern islands in rat-infested beach huts. For some years, I dated a guy with my same measure of wanderlust and together we explored the ruins of the Acropolis, trekked over mountains to ancient Machu Picchu, and walked through a deserted Belfast hours before a bomb exploded. One birthday during my early twenties, I shivered with a girlfriend inside a hovel with no bed or running water on the Nepal-Tibet border. Six days later, we rolled into Lhasa in a truck we’d hitched a ride on at 4,000 meters, heads throbbing from the altitude and deliriously belting out Tibetan songs with the driver.



Conquering the Great Wall

By the time I left for a year of study in Canada, I had satiated my crazed appetite for adventure and paradoxically yearned for something more permanent. Merely passing through a country could no longer satisfy me. Sure, everywhere I went, I learned at least the local parlance for the toilet, and how to knock prices lower on souvenirs. I religiously avoided tourist traps and swore by dog-eared Lonely Planet bibles.

But at the end of each trip I was still a tourist with nothing more than snapshots to show. I longed to immerse in foreign cultures, to live the lives of locals and go through their daily grind -- of jostling with peak-hour commuters on public transport, grabbing a midday bite with the local lunchtime crowd, or idling a weekend away at an inconspicuous neighborhood joint with nothing but a book and anonymity for company. Perhaps, I thought, in this way something from each country will rub off permanently on me.

While I had never once stopped to contemplate my own roots and what it meant to be a Singaporean out in the world during my day-tripping days, over the years of working and living abroad, I have found myself repeatedly confronted with the question of my own cultural identity.

At film school in Toronto, classmates were surprised I spoke English, told me how “cute” my accent was and took me to an exhibition on China’s communist past hoping I could somehow do a simultaneous translation while shedding light on the country’s history. I had to explain that while yes, I was ethnically Chinese, I was really more comfortable speaking English, my accent sounded as “cute” to their ears as theirs to mine, and no, I couldn’t read half of the Chinese descriptions on the exhibits.



Exhibit of love for the motherland ahead of China’s 60th anniversary

In Bangkok, during crazy morning dashes to catch the train to work, I often found myself silently swearing as I tried to overtake maddeningly relaxed Thai commuters who blocked my path as I took double steps up moving escalators. Unlike the Singaporeans I knew who saw escalators as an aid to speed up already burning paces, I was frustrated by laid-back Thais who actually had the good sense to use an escalator the way it’s meant to be used – as a tool to reduce work done.



A Singapore flavour to the 2006 Thai anti-government protests



Thai flag caught in a tropical storm

In Taiwan, it was my femininity as a woman, more specifically a Singaporean female with a typically independent and assertive streak, that was called into question when I found myself quite out of my league among immaculately groomed Taipei women who, with their skilful manipulation of cloying vocal chords, had men eating out of their manicured snow-white hands.

Moving between multicultural newsrooms in different countries, I've also become aware of the fact that as a Singaporean with my pseudo-Western outlook on the world yet distinctly Asian appearance and upbringing, I was right smack in the middle of a cultural netherworld. Not only do we not have the gung ho optimism of the North Americans or possess their global cultural currency, Singaporeans are also not quite Asian like our neighbors. Used to a system that runs strictly by the law, we sorely lack the shrewdness or savvy of the Chinese who have from young navigated a complex lawless universe. Used to clockwork efficiency, we come to demand the same from others and end up much too blunt and straight-shooting for the taste of more laid back Asians like Thais. By the same measure, our ignorance of and impatience with the intricacies of diplomacy make us appear hopelessly rude to faultlessly polite Japanese. Making this disconnect even wider, we speak English that doesn't sound very much like English to unaccustomed ears, and our grasp of our second language (in my case Chinese) is at best, rudimentary, and at worst, jarring to the ears.

Far from being the 'global citizen' I've fancied myself to be, one who could blend effortlessly into the backdrop of any culture I chose to be part of, I've found that outside of Singapore, I inhabit a rather unique space, one that doesn't really identify with any age-old civilization nor to the Western hegemony of current times. It is one that, quite simply put, is just Singaporean.

This burgeoning awareness of my national identity was fed with each trip I made back home. Among local friends, I found I did not have to consciously ee-nun-cee-ate every word I spoke, lest my listeners did not comprehend me, nor did I have to explain the back stories to personal anecdotes I told. With fellow Singaporeans, especially those with a shared history, I could literally just launch and take off, confident of having a common cultural starting point. I became aware of just how at home I actually felt, back at home.

Let me first confess. I’ve always been one of those who snicker at the overly conscious scores of heart-tugging Singapore National Day songs. Throw a whole bunch of people together and get them to sing along to rousing chords and my bet is, everyone is going to shed at least a few tears and feel patriotic emotions they may not even possess. But recently, I’ve found myself eagerly craning to see through the plane’s tiny windows when flying home on visits.



Touching down at Changi: the feeling of home

And invariably, just as the island’s eastern shoreline appears with its familiar clusters of high-rise HDB flats, interspersed with the careful rows of urban greenery, the first strains of a Kit Chan song will begin its refrain in my ears. “This is home, truly….”