One Step Forward

Oolong Tea

My secondary one Chinese teacher used to liken marking our essay scripts to drinking Chinese tea. Some essays were soothing like herbal tea, agreeable and leaving a lingering pleasant aftertaste. Others were like oolong, bitter and frown-inducing. When marking our scripts, he would alternate between oolong and herbal tea to neutralize the unpalatable effects of the former. I thought it was a very clever analogy even though I knew quite obviously which category my essays belonged to. Suffice to say even I wouldn’t have said no to a double dose of jasmine flavor when reading my own work back then.

Until I was in secondary school I never read a Chinese storybook from cover to cover. I don't think I even got through one chapter of a single book. There are vague recollections of storybooks about legendary soldiers lying around, but they remained incomprehensible and neglected till they were banished to the big-collection-of-useless-stuff department in a large forbidding cupboard.

All the years of neglect meant that I had a huge gap to bridge when I took up Chinese as a first language, which incidentally I was eligible for on the strength of my other subjects, in secondary school. Suddenly I had to write a critique of one newspaper clipping weekly. Suddenly I was expected to read Chinese newspapers.

Since the only Chinese newspapers lying around at home were my grandfather's copies of the evening edition tabloids bought chiefly for the 4D results printed on them, and I didn't know any better at the time, the first few clippings I selected were mostly of the rather sensationalist variety: taxi driver's throat slashed by robber; bar hostess disfigured in acid attack, and so on.

I think it was into the second month of school when my esteemed teacher finally saw fit to pass a few general comments about our work turned in so far. In short, the quality of our writing corresponded to the newsworthiness of the newspaper clipping. If the clipping was on a worthy topic such as a national policy or social commentary, then the critique was likely to be a well thought-out and fluent piece. On the other hand, garbage news rather tends to induce garbage comments.

I don't know if that was aimed specifically at me, but I took his comments on board and made an effort to buy the Chinese broadsheet for at least one day per week from that day onwards. My first attempt at reading a Chinese broadsheet was extremely trying to say the least. Most of the words in the bold headline screaming out for recognition were met with a blank look and the first paragraph alone took a few minutes to digest, word by word.

Gradually the newspaper reports I chose to write on became more up-market: lawyer embezzles millions; corrupt civil servant stashes bribes into secret account. Just kidding. My writing was still deplorable I suppose, but at least I had a better variety of news reports to choose from now.

At the same time we also had to do book reviews of storybooks --- which were thankfully mostly compilations of short stories or novellas, which I found more manageable. Some of the stories were rather meaningful as well, which added to my enjoyment of getting to grips with the language. There are people who detest doing things they’re not adept in, but I was never like that. Any sign of weakness is an opportunity to improve oneself, a challenge to be overcome. Or so I think anyway.

Looking back it's been a long journey, but at that time I only treated each assignment as individual class work to be completed on time. I never begrudged my Chinese teacher for his unflattering opinion of my work; on the contrary I respected him for his forthrightness and strove even harder to produce a standard of work acceptable to him. Personally he was always encouraging to me as well, recognizing the effort I was putting in. Unlike my overzealous Chinese Literature teacher who made us memorize and recite Tang poems every lesson, he was nurturing and never overbearing, so I had no reason to dislike him.

Interestingly my Chinese teacher was also appointed my form teacher in Secondary Two. While many teachers write mostly clichéd comments in report books like "Student X needs to put in more effort in maths and history" and "So-and-so is a well-liked girl in class who always hands in her work on time", Zhao laoshi [teacher] was his usual candid self. He quoted only a ten-word Chinese phrase in my report book yet the comments though brief rang true. They translate into "If one has the endeavor, even a metal rod can be polished into a needle." Or as he might have said, with expert preparation even unappetizing oolong tea can be brewed into an exquisite delicacy.

Zhu Chang Fen

"Nobody ever appreciates artificial flowers as we know they'll be around forever."

--- overheard at a CNY bazaar

It is the late 1980s, a hot and sticky afternoon. The school bell rings relentlessly like a headache-inducing pneumatic drill to mark the end of the school day and we line up in twos at the front of our classroom, large water tumblers slung across a shoulder and oversized bags clung onto our backs, before filing out in an orderly manner. Outside, we are joined by children from other classes and all semblance of order is soon lost as rows of twos merge into one another until a bottleneck forms in the common corridor.

I see my grandfather waiting in the school porch as we edge out slowly step by step. He is there again. He is always there. Always in his blue short-sleeved shirt, black trousers and with a black umbrella in his hand.

Not again, I think. I do enjoy our fifteen minutes walk home from school together but I am now a middle form student and to be frank I am starting to get embarrassed by all this close parenting. After all, I am very well capable of carrying my oversized schoolbag and walking home alone by myself, just like most of my classmates.

I walk up to my grandfather and see some red zhu chang fen sauce around his mouth. There are dark red stains on his blue shirt as well. Oh god this is simply embarrassing, I think. He must have stopped by the coffee shop for a bite on his way to picking me up. Why doesn't he wipe the sauce off with his handkerchief? Someone should offer him a piece of tissue paper.

He is chatting with my classmate's mother as I approach him. "Oooh, that's your grandson," she coos in that condescendingly annoying adult tone in Hokkien. I tug gently at my grandfather's age-spot dotted hand and start to walk away. Let's get out of this place, I think. The mother shouts after my grandfather as I lead him away, "Take care, ah chek [uncle]!"

Later I find out that it was not zhu chang fen sauce splattered around my grandfather's face after all. He had fallen flat on his face on an unforgiving concrete pavement on his way to my school. The dark red stains on his blue shirt were that of his own blood. Needless to say, I felt like the worst grandchild in the world.

My grandfather still continued walking me to and from school most days of the week after that incident but I never felt embarrassed about it again. A few years later when I was in Primary Five, my father asked me to take the school bus to school, which of course drew howls of derision from me initially. My grandfather was getting old, he explained, and he wanted to save him the daily exertion.

It was one of the first times I was consciously aware of making a sacrifice for the sake of someone else. To someone who was handed his own set of house keys at the ripe old age of nine (I was already a latchkey kid before I had even heard of the word, much less understood what it meant), taking a school bus to school packed with lower Primary kids everyday was practically a form of emasculation. Still, I went along with the arrangement in a rather cooperative manner, though I often alighted early across the road, opposite my house, before the school bus made a large detour just so that I could sneak up from behind on my grandfather, who would be waiting for me at the designated stop in front of our house.

After I was posted to a secondary school two bus rides away, I thought the days of our long walks together were effectively over. So it was to my surprise that I saw an old man one morning clad in unmistakable blue shirt and black trousers ambling up the hill, looking lost, as throngs of students were streaming out of classrooms to get to the terraces for flag raising.

I ran up to him just like before, but this time I only felt a sense of guilt instead of public embarrassment. Holding his wrinkled hand, I pointed out my classroom to him with my other hand. He nodded his head dismissively and waved me towards the terraces before turning back downhill towards the bus-stop.

I watched him walk away, his sweat-stained back betraying the effort he had made to reach the top of the hill. Without knowing why, I chased after him and tapped him lightly on his shoulder. I'm going to join the other guys for flag raising now, I signaled, since he is deaf. He nodded his head again and waved me away. Go on, you silly boy, be on your way already. And he turned away again, walking step-by-step to the bottom of the hill and under the giant arch before he disappeared from sight.