Like father, like daughter.

When you’re completely honest to yourself, not only would you truly understand yourself but you also get a look in others’ minds. Because in reality, we aren’t that unique.

 

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That afternoon while having sushi with my mom, I told her how I have come to fully realize I am truly her and my father’s daughter. I know where I got my inability to abandon rationality (from my mom, surprisingly)… and I continued to look for examples…

 

List of why I am the hybrid of my parents

1. At times hard, apathetic and distance – Mom; Soft-hearted, extremely sympathetic and caring – Dad (surprise, surprise)
2. Easy to please, content – Mama; Easy to be depressed, unhappy – Papa
3. Ambitious – Mom; Not so much – Dad
4. Optimistic – Mama; Pessimistic – Dada
5. Insensitive – Mom; Sensitive – Dad
6. Bold – Mom; Careful – Dad
7. Heads in the clouds – Mom; Feet on the ground – Dad.
8. Easy going – Ma; Difficult – Ba
9. Stubbornness – Mom; More Stubbornness – Dad.

 

The list goes on and on… I distinctly remember saying to my mom “no wonder I’m extreme, with you two as parents!” Actually I told her I understood how she and my father work, why she/he think and do things in certain ways… because they made me (not only in a biological sense). However, that understanding is slowly sketching a bad but realistic outlook of a highly possible future.

 

My shower head at home broke for the second time within three months. My mom told me that the stuff the contractor used on the house were extremely cheap and of terrible material, so as long they were used, they will break. It so happens that I shower everyday (first time it broke was less than one week after the move, the second time was almost two weeks after it was replaced).

 

She had the guy come up to fix it once, and he advised her to get a new shower head and tube instead of using the same brand. So last Sunday night I was in for a big shock when my father suddenly showed up at my place with a key (following behind was my mother and maid), stormed into the bathroom, yelled and cursed the whole time. Based on my understanding, apparently I twisted and turned the shower head at weird angles and tangled the tube. Other than sheer stupidity from my part, I couldn’t fathom why on earth I would do all that.

 

Maybe because I was no longer exposed to yelling and cursing from my dad, I was pretty much in shock. I couldn’t force myself to speak, but silently watched my parents and listened to the contrast of my mom softly telling him what was wrong with the thing and him shouting how we break everything we use. They just stayed for five minutes, and when they left, I was drained.

 

That night in bed, I revisited my thoughts on having children in the future. For some weird reason, I know almost exactly how much my parents love and care for me and my brothers… and for my dad, he loved us to an extend that he rather be the bad guy and be hated by us when he has our best interest at heart, making decisions for us… etc. He loved and cared so much he went for the extreme. He had such high expectations of us and we didn’t deliver.

 

I know why he has such high expectations… maybe because he gave us everything he didn’t have, or maybe he thinks that since he’s just an average person and if we can’t beat him or just simply catch up with him on any area, we have to be dim and wouldn’t be able to survive in this dog-eat-dog world, making him extremely worried about us, pushing him… if you ask me, I do expect my children to be at least be the same if not better than me in areas like Chinese, English, Math, maybe Art… and I sincerely believe everything I know, everything I can do are just “basics”… and that probably is, I think, exactly what my father thinks of himself (oddly, he is also very skeptical and never trusted others’ expertise), leading me to the conclusion that I’m going to end up being my father when it comes to parenting.

 

Needless to say, I’d never want to treat my children like my father did. The worse part was that everything was done out of love not spite, therefore making me unable to hate him. After that night, the next two days I’ve had nightmares; my and my brothers hiding but he can still find, catch and hurt us… (which I found ironic considering that both me and Vincent felt the safest when he hugged us to sleep at night when we were younger). I felt the nightmares were such an exaggeration; just me dramatizing the whole situation (for God’s sake, it was just five minutes, get a grip…), but I guess despite all that, he has such a profound psychological impact on me that I could never rid even though I rarely see him in normal life now.

 

I guess he has helped me into becoming a better-equipped person; after all he was the one who strongly stressed the importance of English (the many “you speak like a HK student” was somehow a terrible insult), Factorization (getting good at that was the reason I wasn’t so bad in other areas in math), and has encouraged me to do Art (when we were younger he was extremely annoyed at Vincent’s inability to draw freehand the world map while I easily could… and he was extremely annoyed with my inability to memorize Chinese passages while my brothers easily could…). He couldn’t emphasis enough that if it weren’t for him we would all be nothing. But honestly, I’d never want anyone to go through what I went through internally even if it can make them a better person.

 

When I silently watched my mom trying to soothe him, playing the compromising role, I was so sad for her… because she always has to be the one who compromises, the one who has to understand (and accept) his temperament and verbal abuse (I think it helps that she doesn’t pay much attention or think over people’s words too much, but he can say such terrible things.)… She was the one who taught us if we decided to do something, then don’t complain. I knew if I were her in the same position, for the sake of the husband and kids, I would do the same, because I am her. Both of them, in different ways, would sacrifice themselves for their loved ones.

 

But I don’t want to end up like her; I don’t want to be tied to someone who is like my father or in any way reminds me of him by choice; I don’t want to have someone in my life who’s going to have the same impact and power over me enough to hurt me. I am a very cautious person (situations: Dad; people: Mom), and being “safe” in many ways is very important to me… I don’t want to hurt other people or allow anyone else to hurt me, which got me to the conclusion that a solitude life is probably the most logical path for me. My mom’s nature and my father’s nurture on me are probably going to see that to the end.

Mid-Autumn Festival morning – Watching District 9

I’m trying to find a way to categorize my posts better… or to even chop down my day’s entry into several short posts so it’s easier to categorize. Even thought most of the time I’m the one reading my own blog (ha), I like things neat, tidy and very organized.

 

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Today’s Mid-Autumn Festival. Friends too busy, brothers not around, parents couldn’t care less about festivals and stuff, and I only work five days a week anyways, so I expected it to be just another typical Saturday.

 

Even though I’ve gone to see a movie just the day before yesterday, I let myself go watch District 9, despite my empty bank account. It was after all a festival today and for some reason I was feeling the exact opposite of upbeat, so I thought I needed the distractions. (Haha after I told Nicole that she should definitely go watch District 9, she recommended The Time Traveler’s Wife cos it made her cry like a baby throughout the whole movie. I’ve read and loved the book but never thought of watching it on film… so maybe I will go see it next Saturday?!)

 

I caught the morning show (again) and was late for 10 minutes, missing the intro. I don’t usually watch Sci-Fi movies, or any movies that involve a lot of slimy flesh or bodies exploding into tiny pieces, and I guess that’s why ever so often I found myself pushing my back against the chair; not because I’m scared of blood or anything but I just don’t enjoy watching scenes involving violence. There were also scenes were painful to watch, in a different sort of way. There were so many examples…

 

One would be Wikus pulling the plugs from the alien fetuses while explaining excitedly what was going on in the shack… and when he finally gave orders to have the nest burned down, the babies’ shrieks and screams were thought to be “interesting” and “noisy”… (I was finding examples in my head of men doing the same to animals, or even to fellow men…)… or the way he was no longer treated as a human in the lab; the officers were shocking him with high volts of electricity even though he was more than willing to comply with their commands to operate the alien weaponry… or when Wikus begged them not to force him to test the gun on an alien.

 

There was one scene was where Christopher explained to Wikus that his kid liked him because he thought they were the same. The alien kid was stretching out his arm to compare with Wikus’, only to be met with Wikus’ apparent disgust by the mere idea that they were remotely similar (Why did I not think that this alien kid was a girl? What if its species didn’t have a gender?). Sometimes grown ups over complicate things; sometimes it takes a child’s innocent association and observation to really get the gist of things…

 

One particular scene that got me into tears (note: this isn’t one of those tear-jerking movies) was where Christopher was stunned at the sight of his fellow beings being tortured under the name of scientific discovery/education/analysis/defense, and he literally froze when he stood in front of one of the study subjects; that was burnt/skinned/gone through whatever inhumane treatment.

 

Usually I cry in movies when I sympathize with certain characters at a particular moment (which happens more often than I would have liked… I’m such a cry baby when it comes to watching movies), but what was different this time was that a big part of me wasn’t crying for what Christopher was feeling, but rather not emotionally understanding why; why on earth people (the supposedly sane ones) can treat a living creature like that. I pained for the alien, I pained for Christopher, but I also pained for the human race for their lack of empathy for those that are different and their capability to disregard life, especially when it comes to monetary gain.

 

Despite sympathizing with the aliens, I also understood where the government and the people were coming from. Although quite a number of them were obviously out for the money, most of the things mankind did was done out of fear and skepticism. There we were presented with a bunch of big scary creatures, whose technology was more advanced, and were seemingly equal if not more capable than human beings in terms of intelligence. It threatened mankind’s position as the superior living being… they felt their lives were threatened because of the existence of a stronger species.

 

At the back of our heads, it’s always the survival of the fittest; and history has shown that without intervention (law, economics… etc), the fittest has always devoured the weak. So before the aliens have a chance to hurt us, we hurt them first, know everything there was to know about them, isolate and prevent them from getting help. When it comes to “survival”, should we ignore our supposedly compassionate nature as humans? Where do you keep the balance between “self-defense” and “humanity” (I’ve come to see the word “humanity” is pretty ironic)? I remember reading something about the more intelligent a being, the more inclined it is to keep peace. Turns out the humans in the movie weren’t that intelligent after all.

 

It may seem that the movie didn’t have a good ending, but there was. Wikus, like most of mankind, was weak and scared. In spite of all that human weaknesses, he showed compassion in the end when he turned back to help Christopher and urged him to get back to the spaceship and fly home.

 

Even me as a newbie in sci-fi movies, knows this movie could be boring to people who were expecting loads of technological stuff (I loved those blue glowing projection buttons, which you can move around three dimensionally), lots of machinery action or a hyper exciting plot. So maybe they should stop show trailers with only flesh-exploding shots and humans fighting aliens in HK? District 9 was more about getting viewers to think about issues on racism and xenophobia, but instead of featuring an ethnic race which we are prone to have formed certain perceptions in our minds, we get to be free from stereotyping and see discrimination in its purest form.

 

I got out of the theater wondering how I and so many others, are so absorbed in our lives, finding joy over tiny things and fretting over petty stuff when there are so many bigger problems around us. How or should we make a balance between caring for the small things in our personal lives and the big ones that are so beyond our reach?

Physical and Psychological Torment that men might not be able to handle.

For some reason a book that I read almost three years ago came up to my mind today. It made me sick to my stomach; knowing that it was based on a true story I couldn’t bring myself to read it a second time for a while. It’s Lorenzo Carcaterra – Sleepers. All I can say is, if anyone deserves to die for their sins, those men who were shot certainly did.

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There was this book I read, Catherine Atkins – When Jeff comes home, a couple of years ago. Immediately after finishing it I had Vincent and Steven read it. When I told my mom the theme of the book and I had my brothers to read it, she was ready to strangle me but after I told her my thoughts she wasn’t so displeased. Basically it was about a young boy who was kidnapped when he was 13, was held captive and sexually abused for almost three years.

If you ask a girl what could be the worst thing that could ever happen to her, it would include either being killed (climbing up into the girl’s room that was at least ten stories high in the middle of the night, stab and decapitate her… ah the power of love.) or getting raped. Even for the most clueless girl, the term rape must have at some point crossed her mind. Not to de-dramatize the whole ordeal, but at the very least the worst was somehow “expected” and most of the time they have a vague idea of how much they can lose. Not to mention women have grown up surrounded by horrible tales of such physical and mental torture and learn to somewhat avoid situations when there is such a threat.

Ask guys the same questions, the worst they could think of would probably be either getting killed or castrated. Very rarely would they consider rape. However, because most guys have so little education on this subject where they might be the victim, or that it seems to them that they have little possibility of facing it in normal life, the damage can be so much deeper; because in no way can they imagine the degree the shame and helplessness… it’s humiliation down to the core, down to the most basic animalistic characters of the body and soul… and it’s forever. Rape is more likely to break a guy because of their inborn pride and ego as a male being. Girls, even with strong female pride, somehow are mentally more adapted (because of the “training” through out history maybe?) of recovering from psychological torment (this is Definitely NOT a reason why you rape a girl…). All this makes guys more vulnerable to such attacks.

The most terrible thing about rape is that it’s almost unpreventable. I’ve heard of a father attempting to rape his baby girl three days after the baby was carried home; mothers sexually assaulting their sons; the case of the father in Austria imprisoned and raped his daughters for over twenty years… my parents never really specifically taught me to protect myself against issues as such, rather they told me to be constantly vigilant of my surroundings, don’t trust no one because anyone could hurt you… etc @@. So I wonder, how is it possible for me to teach my children (if I decide to have any) of such horrors? How can I hint to them that anyone, even their own parents, their aunties and uncles… can hurt you and in such a tremendously haunting way, and I probably have to remind them from time to time? I have to teach them that somehow they can trust no one. How can you teach your child to differentiate a simple hug or a kiss from something more? A child’s mind shouldn’t be polluted the world’s hideousness, but by keeping them ignorant would probably be the worst thing to do…

So when I read a blogger expressing how that unemployed guy, who killed his three sisters and beheaded his sister who just had her five-year-old birthday, deserves to die, I was thinking, that guy was under stress, he was sick, he was mentally weak… his actions were almost understandable. I believe that even though a person killed other people, it doesn’t give us, other human beings the right to do the same thing and kill (i.e. decide whether a person deserves to live). But rape… it’s not simply about the physiological need to have sex; people have targets, obsessions… something that can only be done by the intelligent human beings. I wonder with disgust of how humanity could manage to produce monsters as such.

Dinner with Relatives

The last time I had dinner with relatives and family was in Chinese New Year. For two nights (I managed to get out of the third one, thank God) I stuffed myself with food because I had to keep myself occupied. Since it was Dinner, there was nothing else to do but Eat.

 

One of the reasons I don’t like going to these dinners, other than the awkwardness (everyone is obligated to show up and make small talk) and the fact that it’s a complete waste of time, is that they serve dinner late (at 8 or 9). I have dinner early, like 5 or 6 because I can’t sleep with a full stomach. The extra weight, no sleep… it’s just not worth it when nothing good comes out of it, like “having a nice time” for example. The mere reason I went was because I didn’t go on the third night in CNY… and out of respect (sort of).

 

This time I got smart: I ate in slow motion, so I could keep holding on to my chopsticks and pretend to be busy with chewing instead of painfully bored. I was so slow that it took me more than half an hour to finish a tiny bowl of lukewarm soup (in case you’re wondering, it’s about the size of a medium cupcake you get in bakeries); and I ate noodles by the string. Then I kept on drinking tea and water… but turns out I stayed up till 3 o’clock in the morning. Not because of the tea, but I was trying to find out what is going one with my younger cousin, Jonathan.

 

In sum up in a few sentences, he picked up smoking (all typical consequences aside, considering his age and the recent increase of tax, it is basically a very unwise move from his part), hangs out with the wrong crowd, skips school very often (he has just started his first year in university) and has no friends there. The horrible part of all this is that all I did was ask my aunt how my two cousins, Jonathan and Maxwell were doing (cos they weren’t there =_=) and that was her immediate reply.

 

I wasn’t really surprised of how comfortable she was saying all these things to me; I got this impression that our family sees portraying their own children in the worst light possible as a way of socializing with each other. I took her rather nonchalant attitude as having no idea how to help her son and that she is afraid that the more she does the more she will push him further away, which has happened a couple of years ago.

 

Originally I thought she was exaggerating. He always did pretty well in high school and got into one of the best universities in HK (UST, University of Stress Science and Tension Technology). True he grew reserved and quiet, but who hasn’t (Picture me, Vincent Steven Jason Max and Jon at a family reunion, sitting quietly and staring at our bowls, occasionally murmuring a word to the person next to us)? Now that there’s only Max Jon and me left in HK, and I don’t see them as often when the other three were in HK, we don’t have much to say but me inquiring  “how’s life lately” and them politely replied “it’s Okay/Fine”. Anyway, most moms’ idea of “bad people” means kids who turn in their homework late, or that they almost failed in their last math exam.

 

So that night I asked Jason to see if he knew anything (he is closer to Jon than anyone of us ever were), then it became an MSN group discussion with Max, Jason and Jon’s ex girlfriend Polly. Turns out the things my aunt said weren’t exaggerated; they were greatly understated. Him being forced to leave school after this semester if he goes on like this is just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, the more I learnt, the more I’m sure my aunt doesn’t really no idea how serious this has become. All these information came from Polly, who he opens up but does not listen to. I saw that as his cry for help.

 

Although we were never close I have this strong urge to help him, even thought it really isn’t in my power to get him out of this mess. All I can do is to talk to him, try to get him share his thoughts with me, and see if we could come up with a solution to his problems. But the thing is he doesn’t open up to people… I plan to ask him out for lunch or something and tell him his options, and tell him the ordeal I’ve been through in my first year in university too… My biggest concern is that he doesn’t know who to turn to, and he doesn’t need someone to state the obvious like “smoking is no good for you/those friends of yours are bad Bad people/Do well in school”. I just hope he will give me (or anyone who can guide him) a chance to listen to his problems, and me being able to let him know that he’s not alone.

 

Sigh. Nothing good really comes out from dinner with (my) relatives, does it.