For the third time that week, my pocket money had been extorted by a number of older girls. As I stood crying — frustrated and helpless — before my mother, she sighed and gripped me tightly. “You must be stronger — strong enough to defend yourself on your own now”, she urged in her attempt to get me to steel myself once and for all, “No one can help you better than yourself.”
Years passed and things got better; obstacles once seemingly insurmountable became problems quickly dealt with or easily looked over. As I grew up, I got better at reining in my emotions and tackling personal hardships internally.
Slowly but surely, like a typical teenager, interactions with my own family became less frequent; where dinners were quiet and conversations were reduced to mono-syllabic responses on my end. I saw no need to express or confide in excess. After all, silence was a way to be stronger — a better alternative to pitiful outcries of personal grievances.
One day, at the end of one of the many heated arguments between me and my mother, she exclaimed, “You never talk to us anymore, I don’t know who you are, and everything that you are hiding inside.”
In that moment, I was forced to reflect on the position I had primed myself to take upon. The very efforts I had taken to become mentally stronger only alienated me from the people whom I love. I had to re-learn what strength meant; that strong did not mean hateful, that “closing off” was merely a façade of strength, and ultimately a product of a larger fear of vulnerability. In a way, I had come full circle. Strength is, perhaps, as much to do with accepting one’s own weaknesses as it is with learning from them.
Moments of re-discovery often arise in what remains close to home and heart to people. Chan Jun Hong shares his reflection on his dialect, Cantonese, and its renewed sense of importance to him:
I grew up speaking it as a third language. It rolled off the tongues of familiar faces, but hardly anywhere else. As such, it was a language in which inflections were intimate but words were not well known. Yet, amidst the cacophony of Singlish, this language stood out for its mellifluousness. I was a moderate speaker of it as a boy in primary school. I was one of the few in my generation who could communicate relatively effectively with my grandparents (while most others were “cursed” with the inevitable consequence of the 1979 Speak Mandarin Campaign). I spoke it to my father, sometimes to my mother, and with my cousins.
Yet, as I grew up and spent less time at my grandmother’s house, as my English far exceeded my capabilities in other languages, as it seemed clearer that my mother tongue was Mandarin, and as my cousins went through these same processes — the language slipped from my tongue. I spoke to my mother in English, began injecting more English into conversations with my father, and us cousins started speaking to each other in English too.
Now that I’m a little older, I realise that, to me, this language represents the nostalgia of my childhood; the voices that urge me to finish soup is in fact my mother tongue — the language I grew up speaking. More than that, it also represents a class of Singaporeans deemed second-rate partly because of the language they speak. My attempt to re-learn Cantonese has given me the impetus to visit my grandparents more often. Time, however, might just be running out.
Chan Jun Hong is a sophomore at Yale-NUS College. He enjoys a nice cup of teh peng and is the self-proclaimed most fluent Singlish speaker in college.
For others, new circumstances and foreign perspectives create room for re-evaluation. Vernon Yian reflects on his time in National Service (NS), and how his experiences re-shaped certain personal views for him:
I was raised in bubbles — social and economic snowglobes that understood joy and tragedy by how much one achieved, and fair our simple skies were. Bracketed into a birdcage of grades and good jobs, I learnt fast the rules of fulfilment: joy is success — and only of one kind. It never seemed right.
Growing up was a slow breaking of this suspended reality.
Black flame inked across a bicep, trailing whiffs of Marlboro smoke, something of a mohawk — [redacted] was a gangster and my closest friend in NS. My memories from the military crowd with the lessons he had inadvertently taught me.
Joy was found in suffering, miles from success (and civilization) in tepid jungles and never-ending night missions — found in stray pats on the back, in togetherness, in all the aimless but spirited laughter. Joy was modest and had no need for aim or definition; no requisite exuberance of a breakthrough something but could simply simmer, warm and formless in human connection.
If there should be breakthroughs of joy, I learnt just how diverse they could be. The fifth day clean from cigarettes, the returning home of an absent father, the slow saving of NS allowance money to treat a family to dinner — I learnt that joy is couched in the relational; of how small and humble steps, taken well, is as magnificent as grand material achievement.
Growing up meant leaving the oversimplified world inside the curvature of our bubbles. Growing up meant finding joy in personhood over pedigree. Growing up has been (and continues to be) a lesson in sincerity. There are rougher edges and textures more human; joy more truthful.
Vernon Yian is an incoming freshman at the London School of Economics. Before his recent liberation, he was an anti-aircraft gunner in the RSAF. He enjoys Japanese literature, continental philosophy, and sandwiches.
