There is a Chinese saying: 家丑不可外扬 – ‘Don’t display your family’s dirty linen in public’. This is part of the Chinese mentality of ‘saving face’ – keep quiet, repress it, don’t show it around. I suppose every family is prone to this – a friend reminded me recently of the analogy of looking like a duck, serene and composed on the surface, but frantically paddling underwater. I’m not a fan of this mentality. If something is kept hidden, how can it be treated? Being vulnerable is the first step to healing.
If there is no suffering you will be poor for it, because suffering gives you depth. A man who has not suffered will always remain on the surface. Suffering gives you depth. Really, if there is no suffering you will be saltless. You will be nothing, just a boring phenomenon. Suffering gives you tone, a keenness. A quality comes to you which only suffering can give, which no happiness can give. [...] The heart is created through suffering; through pain you evolve.
The Book of Secrets, Osho
At the same time, I am sorry for the suffering I inflicted on others through my selfish actions in my adolescence – especially my mother, my father, and my brother. Although I am not completely finished, I am glad to report that I have made good progress in my forgiveness lessons in this regard! Forgiving myself and others is always an on-going work.
Warning: the following is not feel-good material. If you are not in a good / stable mood, please stop and continue when you are feeling better.
Family troubles
I’m about age 13. My father has issues with compulsive hoarding. If you do not know what hoarding is, you can see here. Conditions were not as horrible as it can be in pictures you can see on the web – but it was bad. It is an all-pervasive dark cloud around our physical and emotional lives. The ‘stuff’ seems to have a life of its own – it grows silently and ominously – piles of books, documents, bags, paraphernalia. The mountain of tools threaten to burst out of the storeroom. Nothing works properly in the house – it is always waiting to be repaired. ‘Stuff’ is everywhere. Our personal space is being invaded all the time. We fight constantly over clearing the ‘stuff’ – why can’t you stop accumulating junk? Why are you making us suffer?
Everybody has issues. If you were entirely psychologically whole, you would be able to move through life without any kind of event being able to disturb your mental peace and sense of calm. Hoarding just happens to be my Dad’s. Isn’t it so strange that we can be so acutely aware of our problems – our overeating, our addiction to unhealthy relationships, alcohol, you name it – we see the suffering it creates, both in us and in others, but yet, in the face of the problem we remain absolutely powerless. Why? We have no control because these roots are unconscious. Many times we cannot even begin to understand why they are there – it was because of our upbringing, our parents upbringing, that one incident 20 years ago in the school canteen where John stole my toy, etc etc.
It can be helpful to understand why. That is the domain of psychotherapy. However, we don’t need to know why. Who cares? (Apart from your therapist $$). They are all manifestations of the ego. Be aware of them. Just witness. Watch them like clouds going by. Forgive. Don’t react, don’t identify with the problem. And gradually they will putter out like a candle that has run out of wax. It’s not going to happen overnight – indeed, some deeply ingrained issues will take years of practice – but the problem will stop if you cut off all the fuel. There is and can be no doubt – it is law.
My parents quarrel constantly about money, even though we never go hungry. The egos of my parents are constantly at each others throats, pushing each others buttons. My mother, although having the best of intentions, is prone to over-reacting and excessive nagging. She is the ‘perfect’ partner for my father’s stubborn, paranoid behaviours. They fight nearly every day, at every meal. It is a environment of incredible emotional violence, a veritable war zone of constant shouting and screaming. There is no issue too trivial not to have an argument about.
Every single day is a new spin on the same issue: ‘I paid for X, you didn’t pay for Y.’ ‘Why are you so stingy?’ ‘You didn’t return the car with a full tank.’ ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees you know.’ Marshall Rosenberg has an excellent book about communicating with clarity and compassion – ‘Non-violent communication’. The language between us is exactly the opposite – violent communication. Everybody wants to be understood first. There is rarely any empathy. There is never any ‘Please’, ‘Thank you’, ‘I’m sorry’, and definitely no ‘I love you’. It’s too mushy. Too awkward. Inappropriate. Unnecessary.
Self-imposed isolation
To cope, I shield myself – I go into self-imposed isolation. I’m about 14 when the family is coming back from a Chinese New Year gathering. My father is driving. I’m sitting in the back seat, my mother and father screaming at each other about something. The noise is unbearable in the closed confines of the car. I can’t get out and I certainly don’t want to get involved. I can only look out of the window and bear with it until we get home. Something snaps – I have made up my mind. I know I have had enough. A cold, steel wall of finality comes down clanging in my mind. I cannot have these flawed people as my role models: from here on, it’s me and myself.
Thereafter, I speak in monosyllables to my family. Yes, No, OK, F**k off. Doors slam several times a day. I guard my room, my space, like a fanatic, flying into a rage whenever someone touched anything of mine. I keep my doors locked all the time. Friends never come over. I keep my ‘outside’ life secret from my family.
Above all, I know I have to rise above all of this mess. It is crystal clear to me – it is ALL about money! If there was enough money, there would never be any arguments about not having enough money! With enough money, I can do anything I want. I will buy my independence. I will buy my way out of suffering.
Needless to say, I become immensely self-absorbed. Uncaring, driven, cynical and bitter. Anger is fuel, Anger is power, Anger is strength. It is a ruthless, directed, calculated, cold anger. It is a dog-eat-dog world. Kill or be killed. Do whatever it takes, by any means necessary. I knew that education was my ticket out – out of Singapore, out of my family, out of petty squabbling.
Leaving Primary School for Secondary School
I form a split personality, one for school, one for home. I am an angel at school but a devil at home. I am a quiet, diligent pupil, outwardly respectful of authority but quietly rebellious. My teachers like me, even though I am never the star pupil or the most active in class. Beneath the surface, I hate the establishment. All that talk about loyalty and school spirit, attending compulsory rugby matches, mass dances, what a bunch of crap! I hate anything that is popular. I am too cool, too smart for that. I am above average in intelligence but I am not gifted – I have to work hard for good grades. I push myself hard – I revise my for my exams methodically and diligently.
I discover running. Running is good for me because it is an outlet for my anger – it gives me solace. I am honing myself, sculpting myself through pain. Running burns up the ego’s insatiable drive and aggression. Running is a game of mental willpower for me – how far can I push myself? I stop being a fat kid with cheek fat.
I score 256 on the PSLE (Primary School Leaving Examinations), missing the cut-off score for the school I want, the top school, Raffles Institution, 257, by 1 point. It looks like I have to settle for another school. I am inconsolable, crying on the way back, crying in my room. I feel like a failure. My mother, being a teacher herself, knows the principal of RI and makes an appeal. I go with her and my Dad to see this important man in his important office. My mom makes my case – I was the vice-head prefect in Tao Nan, I’m a good student, blah blah. They talk. He hardly looks at me the whole time. Finally, he asks me if I will work hard, I say yes. He says OK. I am overjoyed!
It turns out I’m not the only one who ‘pulled strings’ to get in. There’s a whole class of them, and I am one of the many. A class of oddballs – the jocks, the rugby players, the swimmers, sons of high-ranking military officers, the rich kids whose parents were urged to make a ‘small contribution’, the nearly-theres. We are an eccentric bunch with an equally eccentric form teacher – Mr Y. He is also our history teacher. Mr Y is an unabashedly male chauvinist – stating that history is made through predominantly male figures – why else would it be called HIS-tory?? He is generous in giving us dating advice and advice in dealing with girls. He also just happens to be married to our Geography teacher, Mrs Y. We tell Mrs Y about his classes. It is hilarious.
Scouting
I join the Scouts in secondary school – this was very important in my development – there is a lot of character building here: self-reliance, co-operation with others, and above all, discipline. Scouting was excellent preparation for my military service later on. I learn first aid, survival, navigation, and other outdoor skills. I admire Baden-Powell’s vision and his legacy of the scouting movement – I greatly enjoyed his seminal ‘Scouting for Boys’. I’m not sure how it is in other countries, but my experience with scouting was not all fun and games, singing songs around the campfire – there was a fair deal of hazing going on, seniors were excessively harsh on juniors at times, and we were often exposed to dangerous situations – climbing structures 3/4 stories up without safety equipment. One time – a huge falling pioneering / scaffolding structure misses my head by a couple of inches – I could have been seriously injured, if not killed. I am immensely grateful to be alive. Nonetheless, it is great fun to be to be doing a wide variety of outdoor activities with friends.
It is physically and mentally strenuous at times – especially during training camps – being woken up in the middle of the night to move campsites, PT sessions, getting punished for being disrespectful, disobedient, slow, etc. The worst of it was in sessions euphemistically called ‘ Batch Dynamics’ – 2/3 hour long torture sessions with your batch mates – crawling through drains, mud, working as a team to do certain tasks, puzzles, all in the name of building batch cohesion. I have to say that it worked well though – the dozen-odd of us became very close.
I do well for my ‘O’ levels and go to RJC, Raffles Junior College, one of the better Junior Colleges to do my ‘A’ Levels. Meeting girls after 4 years of a single-sex school for the first time is exciting and scary at all once. I’m supposed to go back and help out with the Scout group, but after a series of events in which I drop out of the President’s Scout Award program due to me getting lost in the woods during a hike, I decide I’ve had enough of scouts. I join the Outdoor Activities Club (ODAC) instead. ODAC turns out to be a lot of fun, and I make good friends there.
J – My first Girlfriend
In RJC, I meet my first girlfriend, J, a meaningful relationship which lasts for 6 good years. J is intelligent, pretty, popular and zany. She seems to have an endless source of chewing gum (a rarity in Singapore), which I happily ask her for every morning as an excuse to talk to her. She is anything but the demure, shy type – she speaks her mind with panache, refreshing for a Chinese-Singaporean girl. She is the model RGS (Raffles’ Girls School – a girls-only secondary school) girl – successful, driven and intelligent, but still feminine and fun-loving.
She later goes on to study in Oxford and Harvard, and joins a management consulting firm (yawn). I grew a lot in that relationship – we were very well-suited for each other, I am the introvert, she is the extrovert, I am the idealist and she is the pragmatist. We make each other laugh – a lot. We have an atypical relationship – we swear affectionately at each other in public, people think we are having a serious argument. I give her a sea-monkey kit for one of her birthdays. (Card says: ‘For the girl who has everything’). One Valentine’s Day I present her a musical box which has a vibrator, some lubricant, and a photo of myself. She laughs. I am so happy to have a girl who gets my sense of humor.
Personal development, the occult, the paranormal, and the spiritual
My drive to succeed leads me naturally to the area of personal development. I read Stephen Covey’s ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Although I am highly skeptical, my mind is entirely open to new concepts. There is an entire other world of the occult and the paranormal, which I read about. UFOs, Aliens, Chakras, crystals and lost civilisations. There is nobody to talk to about these things – I am all clammed up inside. I experiment with some pamphlets that my brother reads – psychic development and the like. I practice visualizing daily, red and golden orbs in my solar plexus and my third eye. I try to see auras. It doesn’t work. I get frustrated. I know that there is an element of truth in some practices, but I am blocked somehow. Why am I blocked? More frustration. I try astral projection and have one experience – it was both dreamlike and real at the same time. I ‘imagine’ I am high up in the air, stuck in the middle of the roof of our house, my upper body above the tiles and my lower body dangling from the ceiling. I’m not sure what to make of the experience.
I am getting familiar with visualization, going into my mental screen, taking an mental elevator down to my ‘safe place’ to relax and to create. Something interesting and unexpected happens as a result of my visualization work – I am calmer and less angry. It is an interesting ‘side-effect’ – I am doing this to achieve my goals, eg. success, grades, money – but I am becoming somehow more peaceful and more loving! This new dimension is strange but pleasant.
There is still no proper communication between my family and I, but at least I can view them without anger in some moments. It is calming. I gain better control over my mental states. In the midst of a heated argument with Mum one afternoon, I suddenly decide not to be angry. I won’t be angry any longer! I smile and walk out. It is immensely liberating.
Planning for University
I am in the engineering stream in RJC. I am studying double math, economics and physics. I like physics a lot, and seriously consider studying it for my undergraduate degree. Physics appealed to me because it was the foundation for science. With my atheist / agnostic hat still partially on, science seemed to equate with truth. It was logical, rational, scientific. I take 2 ‘S’ papers – harder ‘A’ level papers for students intending to take up scholarships.
The concept of the ‘scholarship’ in the Singaporean context goes as such – an organisation or company, usually some branch of the government – be it the civil service, the military, or some statutory board pays for your education abroad and in return, you have to come back to Singapore to serve your ‘bond’ for a number of years, usually 4. Needless to say, there is fierce competition for such scholarships, with the awardees being heralded as bright shining stars waiting for a bright future. Future generals, cabinet ministers, the future leaders of the country.
With my anti-establishment nature, I do not want to serve the government. I have big big dreams – I want to be a big swinging dick on the trading floor, I want to be the next big thing in silicon valley! But my family is not rich either. My results in my ‘A Levels’ are good enough to try for a scholarship. My mother would like me to take up one – she is sold into the idea, it’s just 4 years? It’s free education with guaranteed employment! So prestigious! I will have a son as a scholar! I manage to persuade her that her investment in me will pay off – I will make it, and then some. She reluctantly agrees. It is a big chunk of her savings. I am lucky and blessed to have my mother.
My dad is not of the same opinion. It’s too much money, too expensive. Why bother going overseas when there is a perfectly good university in Singapore, for a fraction of the price? My Dad refuses to pay for my education abroad. He thinks going the local university, the National University of Singapore, is just as good, and a lot cheaper. It’s good value for money! He will contribute an amount equivalent to the local university fees, regardless of where I study. It is a fraction of the cost my mother will contribute towards my education in the UK. There is more arguing and animosity over this, as usual. I apply for the US and UK universities. Cambridge and Stanford say no. Cornell and Imperial say yes. Tuition fees in Cornell are ridiculous. I decide to study Mechanical Engineering in Imperial – Engineering being a professional degree, more practical and employable.
University life will have to wait though – towards the end of my Junior College days, I receive my enlistment letter in the mail. It is time for 2.5 years of what every Singaporean male dreads – compulsory National Service in the military…
Back to My Story – Part 1: Childhood
To be continued in My Story – Part 3a: Army – Basic Military Training
On behalf of Spirit, I say, you are very welcome! Love, Ken - 
Ken -
Excellent read, I just passed this onto a colleague who was doing a little research on that. And he actually bought me lunch because I found it for him smile So let me rephrase that: Thanks for lunch!
That's awesome! Thanks for sharing that with me.
A breezy read of one's life story. Well written and thoughts provoking. Very much looking forward to the next chapter.
[...] Parallel to this was my interest in personal development. I read ‘Being Happy’ by Andrew Matthews. I discovered an ancient copy of ‘Think and Grow Rich’ by Napoleon Hill in my father’s closet. I encountered the Silva Mind Method and visualisation. NLP. Speed reading. There was something incredibly empowering in these books – the vision of the human having unlimited potential. The next phase of my life would be shaped tremendously by these concepts… To be continued in Part 2: Adolescence [...]