EPTFilial piety isn't universal, and neither are whole, happy families. I remember my friend say those words to me, calming me down when an adult retorted an angry status I posted in a condescending, you're just an ungrateful dumb teenager tone. I never really tell people about this stuff, I've told a counselor about myself after a suicide scare (I wasn't going to do it anyway, I'll talk about this later), but that's because she's a stranger and she says nice stuff to me. If I told most people they'd be like, yeah well people are eating shit in Africa, so fuck your first world problems. But I always think to myself, not out loud of course, for people will condemn me, why did I draw the short straw, why do I have to live in agony, why wasn't I just born in a normal family like the rest of us.
If I were allowed two words to describe my life, they'd be Fear and Bonds. Even now in my late teens, these words define me. All of my achievements as a child, everything I did as a child, was out of fear. I had a very abusive mother, who has this weird goal of having a trophy child, and being a trophy mother. Tiger mother? Fuck that, I had the jackal. My mother always had this obsession over my grades. At this point, most people think, she's a good mother, you're just spoiled, and she cares for you.
As a child, I was beaten a lot. People tell me it's normal, she does it because she loves me, it's my fault for not listening to her. I mostly got beaten for bad grades, and I was told that once I grew up I would understand after I got a good life. But as I aged, I just grew angrier, and the more I think of it, the more I don't understand it. Because I never got beaten for my bad grades, I got beaten for anything. For dropping a cup, for dropping a phone, for playing with the rechargeable batteries of the phone, for not doing my homework, for getting a B, for not reading out a passage from my Chinese textbook enthusiastically, for not finishing a book that started reading, for making my mother mad and disrupting the peace in the home. That last part was my dad belting me after my mom went into a mad fit and beat me with a stick for failing a Chinese spelling test at the tender age of 7, he came up to the room, yelled "WHY IS THERE NOISE?", went out, I still remember the jingling of the belt, came back in and hit me "WHY THE FUCK IS THERE NOISE, I WANT PEACE IN THE HOUSE."
Oh and the part about reading passages from textbooks, that was my tutor beating me with a stick. I had this old woman who had 6 fingers, who beat me with a stick when I didn't pass her tests, I didn't read things properly or didn't finish her homework. My mother encouraged this.
It wasn't purposeful punishment. I received rage. I would get hit by anything that's available, a spoon, a remote control, newspaper, those cardboard pole things that you used to play with as a kid, rattan sticks used to hold plants up, canes (now available in all leading stores in Singapore!), my mom even tried to hit me with a golf club once, I never forget that, and I never forget the dent it caused on our wooden floorboards.
I never got to make mistakes as a kid, never got to be stupid, never got to be happy. My childhood was defined by dark rooms with poorly lit lamps, textbooks, and angry people. My mother would sit next to me, with the answer booklet right in her hand, and I would do work next to her for up to 4 hours. Any deviations from the booklet resulted in a beating. I remember I once got beaten for listing Kangaroo as a mammal because it wasn't in the booklet and my mother, who had basic education, didn't know better.
I remember the fear, the crying, the begging, I remember the pleading, I remember it all. I was so powerless. I remember once she beat me pretty bad, I yelled obscenities at her. She went into my room, and took my most prized possessions, and threw them all away in front of me. Stuff that my grandma gave me, stuff that my uncle gave me.
At school, I never had many friends. As you can see, my lifestyle was not optimal, and my parents didn't got for Parenting 101. I didn't know anything about morals, and my parents are pretty liberal, I mean it's the 21st century mang, fuck morals. I remember when I was young somewhere around 5-6, and I'd do something immature to embarrass my parents, despite them telling me that they would 'Skin me alive' or 'Kill me' if I did so (no hyperbole), my parents would be like, WHEN YOU GET HOME, YOU'RE GONNA GET IT, and they'd rush me home just to beat me up, and I'd say sorry, and they'd be like 'NO SORRY.' Anyways, basically I was a huge asshole in school, I was literally like a little Eric Cartman, I'd do stupid shit and bully all my classmates, cut their hair for fun, shoot stuff at them for fun, every other week my parents would get called by my frustrated teachers and I'd get beaten.
My mother is a really good liar, she's very good at pretending, hell I was told to lie all the time by my mother (fuck morals man!). My teachers never understood what went wrong with me, I was just simply a bad kid, my mother was a concerned loving parent and I was brought up in a well to do family! I never did my school homework. Almost every year, there will be this glorious event, where someone inspects my desk, or my locker (which I never locked and just dumped homework into) and find a years worth of homework untouched. Oh lawd the hell I had to pay. Fucking teachers. But I can't blame them, how could then know. How could they know that immediately after 7 hours of school, I had up to 5 hours of extra tuition lessons, with a bigger load of homework than all of my school work combined. How could they know that at the beginning over every year, I'd be doing End of the Year assessment papers. Then again, I did get straight As in everything, so my teachers saw me as some sort of genius who didn't do work and never tried. And I thought that was pretty cool. Rofl.
I came back from an overseas school trip one day, and I realised my dad moved into my room. I was happy because I knew my parents divorced. Shortly after my dad tried to tell me in the nicest way possible that they split, but I knew and never cared. Of course, I went to stay with my dad, and my mother never objected, because who the fuck wants to live with a mad person. Life didn't feel different, I was never emotionally close to either parent. Yes I spent my whole life with my mother, right by my side, with a stick in her hand, for most of my childhood, but I never really spent time with her if you get what I mean. I always felt lonely, and nothing changed when she was out of my life, except on Fridays when I visit her.
My family was a pretty lonely family in general. We used to have a lot of friends, gatherings on Christmas at our house, we'd have family friends, barbecues and all that, like normal people! As I grew older, gatherings stopped, we rarely went out to meet family friends, and I rarely got to see my grandmother and uncle (dad's brother), which I used to see every other weekend. I learned later on that the family gatherings stopped because my mother was calling up all of my father's friends and telling them how my dad is an asshole and a cheat. We stopped seeing my grandmother and uncle, because they learned about what my mother did to me, and they 'strongly disapproved' of it, thus I was not allowed to see my grandmother and uncle, and my dad was forbidden from seeing his own mother and uncle.
My dad hit my mother on a few occasions before, thus my dad has a restraining order against my mom, this happening while they were still married. I remember that day clearly, I heard crying and my dad yelling. I walked upstairs and pushed open my room door. My dad was perched on top of my mother, slapping her and yelling stuff. It had something to do with my mother belittling my dad's job and my dad showing her who's boss. My dad was a person with a very quick and explosive temper, but he was usually not very violent, and fuck my mom, if she got beaten by my dad she deserved it. My mom would call all of my dad's friends after, thus my dad had no friends, except for his closest friend, this baller Iranian guy who sold $100,000 dollar carpets for a living, which he was not allowed to see because his best friend was a playboy or smth.
Anyway this is just a little portion of my whole and holistic childhood. I guess I'm writing this because I really have no one to rant to except to internet strangers. I have like maybe 3-4 close friends that I regularly keep in contact with, and a really sweet girlfriend. She's the nicest person in the world, I never really understood why she stayed on with me.
One thing that worries me, is that I may be a sociopath or psychopath of some sort. I think the reason why I used to bully the shit out of people was so that I could get a response and feel something, be it laughter at the expense of someone else, or sadness. I had this friend, who was a really cool guy, who I used to abuse the shit out of despite liking him (no not in a homo way), and I felt really sad that despite he was a 'friend', he never really was. One day I decided to stop it, and now he's my closest friend. Even with my GF, I'm pretty bad, sometimes I do really mean stuff to her, like say mean stuff to her, blame her for everything that go wrong, and threaten to leave her, just to get an emotional response, so that I can feel something. I cheated on her before, and the reason I did it, was mostly because I wanted to know how it felt to cheat on someone you loved. It's now one of my biggest regrets ever, she stayed on with me, but deep down she no longer trusts me 100%. I feel emotions of course, but it's not the same. I remember a time where I was happy, a time long ago, where I could feel more things. I love watching movies, no one understands why, but I learned everything I know about life when I watch movies, and more importantly, when I watch movies I feel emotions.
After my parents divorced, and with no one to beat me into having their goals, I simply had none. From straights As I dropped literally to maybe bottom 10 of the whole year. I'd avoid studying like a plague, I don't understand how people can be self motivated to study, I don't just dislike it, I HATE IT. Maybe it's because I associate that with pain or something, I don't know man. A tutor I had, which I hired in a last ditch attempt to pass told me something that haunted me ever since. She told me that I'm not motivated because I've never failed before and that I'd need to fuck up really bad before I'd wake up. Maybe that's true. I've been failing tests forever, for maybe 6 years straight, and I've never really felt any consequences, except for my dad chewing the shit out of me, but fuck, nothing's worse than my mom. So many empty promises, if you do well, you can do whatever you want, just this one time do well and it will all be over, if you do well I'll give you X. I get a 96/100, and some asshole gets 98 and then suddenly it's not cool because he did better than me and I didn't try hard enough. Fuck that, at least if I failed I didn't, not meet, anyone's expectations, my dad doesn't give a shit.
And maybe that's why I'm trying to ruin the one thing that's going right with me, my girlfriend. Our first meeting was through a friends party, in which I asked her if she wanted to "Get outta her", and then we hooked up. I asked her out thinking she was all into me and all that, and I proclaimed her my girlfriend without her actually agreeing to it. Maybe like the 3rd time in bed, a day before her birthday, she agreed. She was really into our relationship, but I just wasn't feeling it because I wanted to sleep with one girl of every race before I settled with her. I even told her that, I'm such an asshole. Deep down I knew, she was the one. A girl like her is literally one in a million. She's not without her imperfections, and it pissed the hell out of me off when she used to talk about how Hermes is every girls goal in life and argue with me about stupid stuff like how Dinosaurs aren't real and are really illusions put by the devil to trick us from God, but she's special.
She's the nicest person I've met. When we went into a relationship, she took it extremely serious, she'd wait for me and pick me up from school almost everyday, she'd travel to my house to pick me up, despite the 2 hour journey back to her house, she'd say sweet things to me, she made me feel not like a piece of shit all the time. I have absolutely no idea what she sees in me, but I'm hella grateful for that. I pretty much took advantage of the fact that she was taking this really seriously by threatening to break it off when I didn't get what I want, and I'd treat her like crap to make myself feel good. While I was still into the sleep with as many girls as possible phase, my heart told me to stick with it, albeit for the sake of sticking to it because I had a gut feeling about this.
Sometime after cheating on her, and making her really sad. I saw her beauty. Not her looks, she's really pretty, but many girls are pretty as well. Her inner beauty. I don't understand how someone can be so nice, but it's really beautiful. I used to look down on her for being so nice to everyone and getting taken advantaged of; All her male friends were there simply in hopes that they'd get to fuck her one day. She has a really abusive family, so in that sense we are in the same situation. Her father, goes out of his way NOT to pay for her things (agreement that her mother pays for her things, not her father), has stated his distaste for her, and beats her for not doing well in her studies. Her mother vents her frustrations on her, and her sister relishes in the fact that she's daddy's favorite one, and abuses my gf for not getting grades as good as hers. After being her boyfriend for a year, I still don't know her sister's name, she calls her Alien.
For one of the major national exams, my girlfriend for top 3% of the year, in the whole country. Unfortunately that was overshadowed by the fact that her younger sister got number 1 in the whole country when she was of age. When I met my GF, she was in a mess, engaging in pretty self-destructive behavior, having hookups with random people for the sake of it, getting drunk all the time, and her grades plummeted to fail. This during the final year, before the A levels. She studied as hard as she could, but she still didn't do really well for her As, she improved a hell lot from the mid term fails, but she couldn't make up for the time lost for most of the year, partying hard and what not. Still, she managed to get into a local university with a full scholarship, so that's not too bad. Her parents disagree, and refuse to give her any allowance to live on (cost of living in Singapore is very expensive), and refused to pay for her administration fees. Her father made her pay for the costs of the A levels as punishment.
I feel really bad for her, she tolerates all the shit she gets from her family, if I was her I'd kill them all. Her father constantly belittles her for failing to go into a top University, and actively seeks new ways to punish her, even today, well a year after the A levels. She gets punished and yelled at for going home after 11 because, as a result of her parents not giving her a single cent (not even for school, she had to use her savings since birth to pay for some summer school stint at Uni), she has to work at a Cake shop part time from 8am-10pm, with no breaks, that's right, no breaks, to support herself. She lives in a really isolated part of the country, and it takes freaking at least an hour to reach any place civilized.
She does this all without complaining and she's a real inspiration to me. Her dad, and her dad's side of the family frequently belittle her and talk down to her, because she's not a good person (muslim). Bringing dishonour to the family because she's pursuing a finance career, I think that has something to do with Jews. Her family is muslim but she's a closet Christian, lollolol. It's ridiculous when she recounts to me how her dad complains that he can't afford to pay for her stuff, and then goes on to purchase a luxury car and own luxury watches (Patek). It's ridiculous how her mother tried to force her to quit her job and accept an allowance of 244USD a month. Which is impossible to live on in Singapore as a university student. A good meal here costs at least 4USD, you have to travel around in Singapore, and assuming you use public transport (Train and all that) as a Uni student, you'd be paying around 1-2USD a day to move around. I remember one time when she were she was so excited because she told me she got an internship at a 5 star hotel, only to be in tears later on because her dad beat her as a hotel job is 'sleazy'.
Anyway this ends my reflections (rants) for today, hopefully if I have the time, and if people actually read my stuff, I should be writing more. It's been a long time! Next up, I'll write about my 5 year old sister, who lives alone with my mother.
