Childhood Lessons

My mum and dad were those typical Chinese parents that believed their kids needed to be perfect and excel in everything. To reach this lofty goal they enlisted us in piano, swimming and various other things, including Mandarin Chinese classes on Saturday mornings.

This of course was the cruelest thing you could do to a kid.

A Saturday was meant to be spent playing and enjoying life. Instead we were sent to a public school full of Westernized Chinese Canadian kids who according to their parents were pathetic ambassadors to our country and language. We were there to learn our heritage and language, but like the rest of the kids, I was daydreaming of cartoons, cereal and my bike.

In our family, if we weren't in Chinese school, we were woken early on Saturday morning to start cleaning. It was another obsessive compulsive ritual my mother had, that is still ingrained in me now. We would get up, eat, then start to vacuum, mop, clean the bathrooms, dust, polish the wood, then polish the silver, cut the grass, and any other chore that my parents thought they could torture us with.

We hated every minute of it, and whenever we told them that the other kids never had to do things like this, they would say, "You want to be like them? All dirty and living in dusty mouldy houses? Then go!"

Of course we wouldn't. It was a trick of theirs.

If we turned our backs and tried to walk out of the door, they would say " Fine, I guess you do not care how hard your mother and father work to put food on the table. All we wanted was a little help, but instead our children want to leave and play and make us do all the work".

It was like living with Jewish guilt. We were household slaves with benefits, and my parents were the warlords who ruled this little kingdom with an guilt trips.

As I got older, I began to delve into my inner deviousness. I would dread the idea of having to go to Chinese classes on Saturdays, so I found out where the electrical panel was and in the middle of the night, when everyone was asleep, I would tiptoe across the house, open the panel and switch off the main power supply, wait a few minutes, then turn it back on. This of course would screw up all the digital alarm clocks in the house. If that didn't work, I would sneak into my parents room and change their alarm to go off at 11:00am instead of 7:30am.

The plan worked. I thought I was being brilliant, until they decided to stick a battery in the alarm clock as a backup power supply. I obviously got this trickery gene from them and soon realised that my deviousness and intelligence was no match for theirs.

When we were stuck at home to clean, I would sometimes turn the vaccum on and leave it there. I would then drag my feet along the carpet creating the illusion that our Filter Queen had cleaned that room or hallway. It worked for a while, but mum caught on when she noticed my hair was sticking up on end from the static. She'd walk up behind me and touch me, giving me a shock that would run down my spine and out my anus. And as punishment, she gave me the extra duty of laundry and cleaning out the cupboards. I learned my lesson stopped cutting corners, and soon began to take pride in the gleaming floors and the satisfying vacuum patterns on the carpet.

I was becoming a good tidy child. I was becoming disciplined and responsible. I was also becoming my mother.

There was no better example then when my friends came over and walked in with their shoes. "Oh my God!" I'd say, "What are you, stupid? I just spent 2 hours cleaning these floors. You're not a pig so stop acting like one." It didn't occur to me, how big a nelly I sounded, and years later I still do the same thing.

Primping, cleaning, tidying. It was my mothers' trademark. And now, it's mine. Back then it was called being thorough and clean. Nowadays, they call it OCD.