Sunday Times: Past Imperfect, Future Tense
May 17th, 2009 by Colin Goh and Yen Yen Woo
The following was published in The Sunday Times on 17 May 2009:
Sunday Times 17 May 2009
Past Imperfect, Future Tense
by Colin Goh in New York
“I think I’m going to be a useless parent,” I told the Wife last week.
“Is that a supposition or a statement of intent?” she replied, eyebrows knit with alarm. “I warn you, ah: don’t think you can siam changing diapers.”
“Premonition, lah,” I sighed. We were sitting in the neonatal intensive care unit spending time with Yakuza Baby (so nicknamed because, as explained in the last column, she came into the world while we were watching a Japanese gangster movie).
My sense of foreboding arose after it struck me how different our daughter’s life would be from either the Wife’s or mine. I know all kids grow up in ways their parents can never fully anticipate - I doubt my dad ever foresaw his son forging a career consisting of long stretches spent accessing a parallel universe through a keyboard and screen – but what lies ahead for Yakuza Baby seemed especially opaque to me.
Living in New York, we can never share our past and heritage with her in any truly tangible way. Sure, we could tell her about it, and show her photos, or maybe she’d get to see some of it during visits, but it wouldn’t really be the same.
Part of it would be not having old friends or family nearby. Getting to wave to Ah Kong and Ah Ma via webcam just can’t compensate for actually having grandparents around. As it is, thanks to the H1N1 virus, my poor parents have had to postpone their visit to see the grandchild they’d been demanding for years until… well, until I guess all the pigs in Mexico have completed their course of Tamiflu, whenever that might be.
And while the Wife’s mother did manage to make it here before the outbreak broke (she came to implement the Wife’s traditional Chinese postpartum ‘confinement’ treatment, or, as I like to call it, the ‘All-Ginger-All-The-Time Diet Plan’), the porcine pandemic also affected her ability to spend time with the baby. Halfway through her visit, the hospital banned anyone other than parents from visiting the babies, especially because the school that is the locus for New York’s outbreak is only a mile away. We had to beg the administrator to tolong-tolong let her see her granddaughter for five minutes the day before her flight home to Singapore. “So ko lian,” the Mother-in-Law lamented as she held Yakuza Baby’s teeny hand. “Donno when she can get to taste my ter tor tng (pig stomach soup)!”
And I guess that’s kind of why I suspect I’ll be a useless dad. Whatever life experience I can impart to my daughter would never have the heft of reality. To her, our life in Singapore would always have a hand-me-down, fairy-tale quality about it. Really? Your country, like, banned chewing gum and smacks people on their ass and stuff? And you used to, like, write for a “newspaper”? What’s that, Dad? Is that like a blog? Duuuude! She might eventually taste, and even like, ter tor tng, but probably only in a ‘Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmerman’ kind of way.
But at the same time I was lamenting the loss of the past, I was also getting a glimpse of Yakuza Baby’s future. I knew that growing up in New York, she would be more patched in to globalizing forces than anywhere else in the world. We Singaporeans like to think we’re multi-cultural, but we don’t have a patch on New York. I counted at least ten different nationalities amongst the neonatal ICU nurses alone. In the course of Yakuza Baby’s stay, she was tended to by Russian, Irish, Thai, Filipino, Chinese, Dominican, Jamaican, African, Korean, Indian and regular Caucasian American nurses. And then there were the patients. I wonder what school for Yakuza Baby will be like.
So while her sense of heritage might not be as complete as I’d like, on the other hand, her future is probably much more pregnant with possibility than I could have ever imagined. I guess it’s a trade-off I can live with, not that I really have a say in it.
And maybe I’m being overly sentimental about Yakuza Baby not getting enough contact with Singapore anyway. With today’s global population flows, who knows?
Case in point: the hospital staff member who came to take down Yakuza Baby’s details for her birth certificate introduced herself with “Hello, I’m Bee Leng…” Bee Leng? I asked. With a Hokkien name like that, are you by any chance from… And she was!
Nowadays, even when you can’t go home, home just might come your way anyway.
One Response to “Sunday Times: Past Imperfect, Future Tense”
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Dear Collin,
This column touched me in a very personal way because it’s something that I know that I will have to contend with at some point or another.
I’m still young (well, relatively), and babies aren’t anywhere on the planned horizon yet, but it looks increasingly likely that I’d be raising a child here in the US. I’m filled with both a sense of apprehension and optimism, the inner turmoil of raising a child here vs. there notwithstanding.
I’m a Singaporean who pursued my university education in Boston, MA. I met an Korean American boy one summer early in my Freshmen year and four years later after graduating, we got married. He has been to Singapore about 6 times by now, loves his morning economical bee hoon and knows how and when to use the term “ah pui.”
We now live in Boston where I pursue a career in cancer research, something that I couldn’t have done had I remained in Singapore. I say “couldn’t” because I was one of those late-bloomers who didn’t take studying seriously enough so by the time I was ready for a university education, I was left with the the choice of studying business or social sciences or humanities, something very general, subjects for the also-rans after all the medical and engieering posts were filled up with the top grade students. And no amount of passion in evolutionary biology could secure me a place to study science in the local universities - it isn’t a topic that was taught readily in secondary schools, it was something I had developed a keen interest in purely by reading the works of Charles Darwin himself, Richard Dawkins and other populist writers like Matt Ridley.
Furthermore, something about the government’s strategy to make Singapore into a biomedical research hub (which resulted in the creation of Biopolis) didn’t seem all that right to me - I thought my career stood a better chance in a place where research and a research culture had been cultivated and established for a long time. I know Singaporeans like things good, cheap and fast, but not everything is like Maggi mee - you certainly cannot build a research enterprise out of nothing and expect it to be glitch-free. This opinion seems vindicated in recent times, especially with stories like that of Dr. Cai Mingjie (the Cab driver with a Stanford PhD), who was booted from an A*Star institution under very suspicious circumstances.
The Hubby loves Singapore though, because he’s a jaded American who was thrilled at seeing an actual scenario where Government actually works - such a situation was only ever a hypothesis, discussed in political science classes. No American of his age can remember a time where his/her tax dollars actually seemed to be working for the people; I mean look at Boston - there are potholes in the roads everywhere! And what would take a quarter of the time for a Bangladeshi worker to do, would really take 5 full-time construction workers here in Boston to do.
We have seriously discussed the merits of raising our children here versus there, and our conclusion is tantalizingly close to yours’ and your wife’s. Family is of course a big deal to me too - Singaporeans grow up with very tight-knit extended families who they get to see all the time. Americans on the other hand, are more fond of the “nuclear family” concept and when the kids reach college-age, they disperse all over the country and practically re-unite only once a year on Thanksgiving. While my child may never experience that pseudo-Kampong feeling of a large family, he/she would have the space to become more independent. Part of me champions the need for isolation from your parents’ at a certain age, because there comes a time when an individual needs to come to terms with his own thoughts and with who he is - it is, I believe, crucial to develop a certain maturity in the way one thinks, not to mention, a certain clarity of mind which is just more difficult to achieve being constantly under your parents’ roof (and noses).
Anyway, thanks for writing this post and expressing so eloquently your hopes and fears for Yakuza Baby! I’ve wanted to write for a while, especially when I discovered your blog and read the essay “Paved with good intentions,” which was a startling revelation that made me realize that I wasn’t alone. I sought both strength and comfort in those words. Maybe sometime when you too aren’t busy with changing diapers any longer, we could all grab dinner in Brooklyn (read about your post on Lugar’s) or Dim Sum in Flushing; the Hubby works in New York City so either he’s here in Boston on weekends or I’m there. Meanwhile, take care and here’s wishing you and your wife much joy with your new bundle of joy (they grow up quickly don’t they)!
Best,
Mel