Men’s Health: Man2Man: Fear & Loving

Orig­i­nally pub­lished in Men’s Health (May 2007)

You know how as kids, we were indoc­tri­nated at a young age about how truth and hon­esty trump untruth and dis­hon­esty? I was such a believer I decided to put that into prac­tice when I was about five. And who else to demon­strate that new found knowl­edge to than Mummy.

We were din­ing in a cof­fee house (that was what cafes were known as in the 1970s) and because I was the clum­si­est kid around, knocked over the sugar dis­penser and spilled sugar all over the table.

Only thing was that my mother had turned away to get the wait­ress’ atten­tion when it hap­pened. And so, a moral dilemma pre­sented itself, and just as quickly, what was learnt at kinder­garten that very week sud­denly sprang to my young mind and it was clear that I would tell THE TRUTH when the time came for THE TRUTH to out itself, or for untruth to push THE TRUTH off the stage after THE TRUTH had outed itself!

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And so when my mother did ask who it was that spilled the sugar, I remem­ber almost spring­ing off my seat, right hand raised, and shout­ing, “I did, Mummy!”

At that point my young mind learnt two things:

1) Nope. Hon­esty doesn’t pay, 2) Nin­jas do exist and my mother is their trainer.

I remem­ber com­ing to on the floor of the cof­fee house, attended to by a wait­ress, won­der­ing what had stung my head so badly that the entire right side of my face was numb and kinda swollen.

I would’ve attrib­uted my not see­ing mother’s open palm com­ing towards me to los­ing a few sec­onds of mem­ory from the con­cus­sive impact, but my brother cor­rob­o­rates my the­ory, telling me years later that he’d seen me fly off chairs for no appar­ent rea­son, mostly when seated next to or across from my mother.

One moment you’re say­ing some­thing author­i­ta­tively and with gusto, and the next, you’re sprawled across the floor or table, a help­less vic­tim of the stealthy dead­li­ness­ness of the Ninja Shaolin Slap.

Now, I’m not say­ing that my mother’s a ter­ri­fy­ing woman at all (though the time she asked some church friends of hers to exor­cise the ‘demon’ that was within my brother was quite scary). She’s what you would call a strong woman. Really strong. Stronger than most men. So strong, you’d bet­ter write some­thing nice about her lest she shows you how strong she is. That kind of strong.

A few years ago, my mother had a fall in the bath­room, and she had sat on the floor in pain, yelling for help for about half an hour before any­one came to her assis­tance. (That any­one was me, of course, and I didn’t think it was appro­pri­ate to tell her at that point that I didn’t know she was yelling for help because that was her tone of voice in any sit­u­a­tion anyway).

When I got to her, she was, what you would call, in a ‘com­plain­ing’ mood. My brother and I picked her up and car­ried her to her bed­room, where she con­tin­ued to berate us about not being around when she fell down.

My brother and I thought it was a sprain at best, and that our mother wouldn’t have been so ver­bose if it was any­thing worse. So we gave her two panadols and ate lunch before decid­ing to take her to the doctor’s for a con­sul­ta­tion – not because we weren’t con­cerned enough, but you know how clin­ics are as regards after-lunch con­sul­ta­tion hours, and you’d be lucky to get to see the doc­tor before 4pm – where we were asked to whisk her away to the near­est hos­pi­tal, where x-rays showed that our mother had bro­ken not one, but two bones in her leg, and where my brother and I stood, shell­shocked and feel­ing really guilty we took our time hav­ing lunch at Hol­land Village.

From the time we found her on the bath­room floor – approx­i­mately 11.30am — till the time she was warded at SGH – approx­i­mately 7.30pm — my mother was deal­ing with the pain of two bro­ken bones in her leg, on two 500mg panadols.

If you think that was just an indi­ca­tion of a high phys­i­cal pain thresh­old, and noth­ing to do with real strength, the fol­low­ing six weeks demon­strated oth­er­wise. At the SGH, my mother was seen by sev­eral promi­nent orthopaedic spe­cial­ists, all of whom advised that surgery was the best solu­tion for her, and that even with surgery, her chances of being able to walk again was slim, at best.

After one par­tic­u­larly try­ing day at the hos­pi­tal, where two of the spe­cial­ists declared, in a way that wasn’t very nice, that she would never walk again if she did not opt for surgery, my mother wept. But they were not those kinds of tears.

They were tears that meant that she was going to defy every surgeon’s opin­ion and walk again no mat­ter what. No mat­ter that she had to endure six weeks of trac­tion, a sec­ondary infec­tion that required a trans­fer to Tan Tock Seng hos­pi­tal, food poi­son­ing (yes, hos­pi­tal food can cause that too), and the pain of not being able to go shop­ping for so long.

It goes with­out say­ing that she was able to walk again within a year, and what she had to say about the naysay­ing spe­cial­ists after that should also go with­out saying.

And six years before that, my mother suf­fered from and sur­vived cer­vi­cal can­cer, though at one stage, another sec­ondary infec­tion had also resulted in a lengthy spell at the hospital.

And before that, Mum had polio as a child, and the dis­ease had rav­aged her bones and only a timely sur­gi­cal inter­ven­tion saved her from being crip­pled. Today, her left leg is shorter than her right by a few inches. (And you can see why the orthopaedic spe­cial­ists were so pes­simistic about her recov­ery). Back in her day, this meant being laughed at by her sib­lings, class­mates and friends. That also meant that she was even more deter­mined to be able to walk with­out any aid.

Not that her polio-induced limp­ing was that obvi­ous, but her gait was abnor­mal enough for peo­ple to ask about it, even though my mother never spoke about it openly. When we were kids, my sib­lings and I never needed to know because we knew enough about the Ninja Shaolin Slap and its accom­pa­ny­ing mantra – child who utter wrong thing shall per­ish at hand of jus­tice – and it was obvi­ous that it was a sore point, some­thing which I gar­nered off a well-meaning uncle, whose eleventh beer com­pelled had him to make me under­stand more about my mother.

Speak­ing of uncles and aunts, my mother grew up in a small house in Serem­ban, Malaysia, with 14, or was it 15 broth­ers and sis­ters. I don’t remem­ber how many of each gen­der there were, but it was a fam­ily large enough that a nephew or niece could be older than a sib­ling (there is in fact, an uncle and a cousin who were born on the same day), and when we last took a fam­ily por­trait in 1992, the pho­tog­ra­pher had to cross the street to cap­ture the entire fam­ily, 50 odd grand­kids to boot.

As you can imag­ine, the noise lev­els in that house­hold would be quite tremen­dous – and this prob­a­bly explains why my mother talks so loudly on the phone – she inter­coms her sec­re­tary but her voice through the wall’s louder than what you’d hear in your ear­piece. But that’s not the point of the story, because I’d still get Ninja Shaolin Slapped if I were to go on.

So, as you can imag­ine, my mother has sis­ters she hasn’t met for years, nieces and nephews all over the globe, and appar­ently, a brother who was for­merly on the board of the NKF, but we don’t talk about him at the din­ner table. A fam­ily so large I’d imag­ine how dif­fi­cult it was to have the atten­tion an ordi­nary child would require. Much less a girl, in a Chi­nese fam­ily, suf­fer­ing from the effects of polio. I’d imag­ine you’d either be bro­ken, or you’d grow up deter­mined to suc­ceed, take the bus out of Serem­ban and never turn back.

But when you left your home­town and suc­ceeded in life and busi­ness, you might have had some emo­tional bag­gage, and some peo­ple might have said of you in the 80s that those things on your shoul­ders were not your blous­es’ shoul­der pads, but a cou­ple of rather large chips, one on each shoul­der. Your chil­dren may have com­plained about you, telling oth­ers some time after the first Gulf War, that ‘my mother is the mother of all moth­ers’, and your clients may have some­times left your office, ears buzzing, won­der­ing how come it was their con­sul­tant berat­ing them instead of the other way around…

But Mummy, when I see you hold­ing Josh (my nephew) and play­ing with him, you’re stronger than every­thing that’s made you what you are. You are all love. And we love you back. Happy Mother’s Day.