There was nothing remarkable about that first day it was hot, humid, and sunny just like the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year.
When I was four, my parents enrolled me in piano classes. Indeed, the middle-class lifestyle they had attained uncannily resembles suburbanites of the nineties, halfway around the world, in the United States: the stay-at-home Mom, Dad returning home at the same hour every day from his 9 to 5 job, the entire family sitting down at the dinner table every evening, day after day… and new dreams for the next generation.įor me, and for many newly middle-class families, this brave new dream came in the form of musical training. Their life-stories had followed a similar trajectory to that of many children of immigrants. If there was any romance at all in the idea of being the pioneering generation of a brand new country, it was that their lives progressed in step with the country’s progress, so that by the time I was born, my parents, like most of the population, were comfortably middle-class. Her Chinese name means “leaf,” and her sisters have names varying from “flower” to “baby.” Her late father used to say: “You still ask for a good name? You should be happy we can even put food on the table!”
It may sound like a romantic notion, but the truth was far from that: my mother grew up in a cramped, noisy household of ten children, none of whom finished tenth grade. My mother was born a year before Singapore declared her independence.īoth my parents were the first generation to be born and bred in a country that had also just been newly birthed.
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