Running to Papa
“Ding” The elevator door sounded as it opened. The faint beginnings of a whistle cut through the evening hours. In the three-bedroom government apartment that housed my childhood, the dinner hour bustled with activity. My mother was supervising the in-home helper, the default fixture in every Singaporean home -- a seventeen year old from the Philippines or Indonesia -- with dinner. The house reeked of a blend of garlic and fatty pork; the sounds sizzled through the kitchen amidst my mother’s brisk and pragmatic instructions. Amongst the cacophony of smells, sounds, and directions, my three year old ears pricked up at the accented “Ding” and the whistle that followed. Faint, but distinct, the familiar tune got louder and louder. The source of this signature whistle was the highlight of my day.
“Papa is home! Papa is home!” I was beside myself with excitement. I flung myself at the front door and banged on it, demanding what was behind it.
My unbridled joy had made everyone look up from the evening chores and smile. They could always count on me to herald my father’s coming. I could hear Papa from the farthest end of the apartment. My mother wiped her hand on her apron and trailed behind me, clicking her tongue with affectionate impatience.
Papa ended the tune with a resounding rap on our front door -- “Rapp- raprapraprap- RAP RAP!” For a moment, we both stood on either side of the front door - I was holding my breath, my face dimpled with glee, unraveling like a puppy. Mommy finally opened the door and the reunion between Papa and I would be as momentous as if two seasons of war had passed between us.
My father’s head of jet-black hair was disheveled at the end of the day. The collar of his formal work shirt loosened and unbuttoned. By the time he reached the house, he always lost the tie he left the house with. Papa always looked uncomfortable in his professional attire, more comfortable in contractor T-shirts he got as freebies. At home, he walked around shirtless in the humid Singaporean weather. This moment was the threshold where he crossed over from being the talented architect he was all day to the childlike, gentle giant he was as my father. He was quick to transition, almost more comfortable with children than he was in the grown-up world of deadlines and tasks.
I scaled my father’s arms and legs like a coconut tree, covering his face with kisses and peppering the air with “Papapapapap!” my raps as sharp as his.
Papa’s strong arms threw me confidently over his shoulders. He was a strange blend of rough and tender. We wrestled like boys, but every now and then, a tenderness would wash over his eyes and he would look at me with the awe and admiration every little girl twirled in circles to achieve. “Mo-dak deng,” he would whisper to my mother-- the Cantonese word for “incomparable”, or elbow my her smilingly if sharing a secret. My father was an architect and the look in his eyes was one of an artist admiring a piece that he spent hours making. He took complete credit for me, and at three years old, I was more than happy to let him have it.
“ Come to the playroom! Come to the playroom!” The squeals parted into a unified chant. Some days we bounced to the beat of it on his shoulders. Other days, we stomped rhythmically to it all the way to the master bedroom, every step one step closer to a magical destination.
Our playroom (the master bedroom) was the center of the family’s nest. Sprawled out as a family, we watched TV there at the end of long days of school and work. With my sister and I at the foot of the bed, my father massaged my mother’s arthritic knees and ankles. When nightmares woke us up in the middle of the night, my sister and I landed there like homing pigeons. It was the town hall for family meetings; the sacred center where Papa opened the Bible and led family devotions.
But for the three year old at six pm, it was the secret rendezvous where my father and I met up daily. Laying on his back, my father balanced me on his shins and flung me up into the air as he kicked his legs; catching me deftly as I came flying down.
“Again! Again!” My high-pitched demands were insatiable. My exclamations of delight made everyone else in the rest of the small apartment chuckle. “What are you both doing?” My mother would pipe in occasionally, poking her head into the doorway, her forehead perspiring from the heat of cooking. “You guys are having way too much fun!” She reprimanded playfully. “Kok Leong, don’t get her too riled up, otherwise she cannot eat dinner.”
Things got busier when my sister was born. Soon after, Papa made partner at the firm and those predictable homecomings got fewer and fewer. As time passed, the “Toss-Up-in-the-Air” game became so rare it was a treat. What remained was the unfading connection between my father and I; and the indelible feeling of being airborne, flung between the sky and my father’s arms.
Eventually our interactions evolved from playful wrestling to us laying on our backs, chatting about my day. One day, I sat straight up and looked him in the eye.
“Papa!” My voice lowered in gravity.
“Yes?” His eyes twinkled.
“It’s not right,” I said emphatically. “What the teachers are doing in school is not right.”
I was ten years old then and did not have all the right words; just a deep feeling in my gut that something was wrong.
“Wrong” through the eyes of a child meant a growing understanding that a child’s life in Singapore consists of tests and grades. These decisive red letters scribbled casually on a page possessed the power to change the way my teacher looked at me. My grades determined if I could be a prefect and help kids stand in line. Those letters came with privileges, distinction, and favor. They created the cliques in the class and the status among the girls. Like a map, the teachers hung them on the bulletin board after each test, and the students referred to them to learn the lay of the land in the classroom. The teachers used the grade list to allocate resources, attention and care. These grades decided if I had time to play after school or if I needed hours of tutoring.
As I grew older I realized those grades determined access to schools and career paths. With a single examination a year, Singapore “streamed” their first graders into ten different levels of Chinese language. At nine years old, these tests established if you had the aptitude for medicine, and at sixteen if you were college bound. With each momentous exam, more and more choices were pruned from each child’s educational journey.
It was a merciless system of educational compartmentalization where half a million children were merely cogs in a factory. Because we were a country whose only natural resource was human capital, school became the space where they identified, classified, and developed the country’s most precious resource. Through the educational system, the government identified the strata of society that would be most “economically productive” and invested resources, scholarships, and tax deductions to that population. If you had college-educated parents, you were encouraged to bear more children. You got tax-deductions and entries to schools. Those who did not make the grade were “re-allocated” to polytechnics and trade-schools that would benefit the country in other ways.
As a result, parents infected their children with anxiety years before these examinations came due. The best-selling books in the country were assessment books compiling a decade’s worth of actual Cambridge examinations. Every child spent after-school hours tutoring. The workbook and tutoring industry survived every recession the country ever experienced. Parental success was measured by what school, what subject track, and what grades their children were getting.
I was horrified, years before I understood what I was outraged by. I just knew those tests, those grades weren’t really me. My teachers weren’t seeing me, and they weren’t seeing my friends. It was wrong to see people as letters on a page. I was certain my father had no clue this was going on. If he did, he surely would not condone it.
“ There is something wrong with the system, Papa,” I spoke almost under my breath. I was certain he did not know. This was my father, the one that threw me in the air and caught me every time. The one who believed in creativity and individuality, the one who put crayons in my hands and coached me for art competitions. This was the father who could tear the most obscure animals out of paper in any shape or form. Surely he did not know, and would not approve, of a system like this.
I would tell him and he would rescue me. He would get me out of here. He would banish me from this horrible place where people were evaluated by their performance and treated like commodities.
“I do know,” he said in a voice equally grave.
My eyes widened with surprise. “You do?”
Our home could not be more diametrically opposed. Ours was one where we stressed process, not product, where family meetings gave my sister and I a voice to argue a case against cod liver oil. My parents never looked over my shoulder for school, although they stressed doing our best and praised us for effort. They treated our grades seriously, but never once did we ever feel we were defined by them. Surely, surely they did not condone this insane system. How could the world out there be so different from the one at home?
“ You have to play the System to get out of the System,” My father said quietly.
The twinkle in my father’s eye suddenly steeled. A strange shadow fell over his face, a sternness that surfaced for the very first time. The giggles that punctuated the air with all the bedroom antics suddenly silenced. It was as if someone pressed the mute button on a scene that I knew by heart as a child. One that I had re-run in my head over and over every time I needed to come back to home base – back to what really mattered in life. Everything between ground and sky got resolved when my father threw me up in the air.
I was confused. This was Papa, the one that I counted on to catch me every time. This time, I felt him fling me up into the air and myself falling headlong in slow motion, crashing to the ground as he watched.
Something in me shattered before I hit the ground. Papa never endorsed Singapore, but he never disproved of it either; and in this in-between limbo space, he abandoned me to fight for myself. I felt myself thrown into the deep end of the pool -- Unsaid in those words was the mandate: Prove to me that you can survive this, and then you can leave it, but he made me stay.
​
Query
Proposal