EPT
Part 1 - The Move
Working in a Chaebol company (Hyundae) has its pros and cons. A decent paycheck but having to go overseas every other day. One day, the employee gets sent to South-East Asia (for purposes up til now still unknown), for which his children and wife follow soon.
Now, migrating to a country with a totally different climate (summer 365 days a year) and national language (mainly English and Chinese, officially Malay) at an age of 5 may come off rather bad. The first few months in Singapore can be described as "being lost and alone in the Sahara Desert", albeit less hot than the actual Sahara Desert.
I remember living in a condominium ever since my new life began here due to some laws (foreigners can't really rent the local apartments here, which are cheap as fuck compared to the condominiums) and that took quite some toll on our finances. After paying for the rent and school fees (I attended an intentional school because we did not know the existence of a 'local government school' for which we had to pay only 1/100th of the fees we had to pay for international ones), there would hardly be any money left, hence there would be some days where we had to skip meals and save money.
Then my dad started his own business, took some loans and make the business grow. On the finance part, everything was working out well. But for me, nothing was. Migrating at an age when I should be starting to speak more of his own mother tongue, I could speak neither my own mother tongue nor English. Mandarin was out of the question. I was all alone. Desperate, my mother put me up for Chinese tutoring, hoping I would speak at least one language fluently.
Meanwhile, I would just attend school and try to pick up as much words as I could possibly do, return home and read more English books in hope of being able to understand the language, all while speaking Korean at home so as not to forget my roots. It was a linguistic nightmare. Playing was almost out of the question, so very often I would just stay at home (sorta like the modern term 'hikikomori' except I was in education), mainly due to the fact that I couldn't (and to some extent, didn't want to) communicate and interact with others.
For almost 2 years, I spent my life at the international school, until the day my father set up his own company and we moved house and I was finally sent to a local school.
- to be continued -
