My brother has the potential to achieve so much, yet he is held back by circumstances. This might not be such a different story from that of many regular people. However, in Jan’s case, the most common answer that anyone can offer is the “institution thing”.
Jan is a paradox. This is why it is not easy to answer questions such as “What is your brother like?”, “Is he a high-functioning autistic?” and “Is he dependent?”
Easy questions would be “Is he strong?”, “Does he like going out?” and “Would he get very, very irritated if someone came along and swiped a bite off his lunch, especially if that lunch happened to be freshly baked lasagna?”
The paradox lies in his level of dependence. It sometimes seems as though Jan is perched upon both extreme ends of the spectrum at the same time.
He is highly independent. He can cook rice and prepare his own food – whatever that does not involve cooking at the stove itself – and drink. He plays on the computer and on his gaming system, and operates CD and VCD players to watch movies he likes. He goes beyond having self-help skills; he would fix things at home with a speed that leaves the rest of us goggling. He would do tremendously heartwarming things, like sponging a family member who has a fever or rubbing my mother’s feet if they are sore. Once, he even took it upon himself to tidy my room so that it would be ready for me when I got home from work.
Yet, Jan has problems with his toileting, fusses and grows restless and has tantrums, does not clean up after himself, and cannot do a thing for himself nowadays if his family is not around him.
For the questions people ask about Jan which are not so easy to answer, my parents and I usually take a few moments to try and organise our thoughts before replying. Sometimes we just smile.
Mum once remarked, ‘He looks like such a grown person outside. But once he steps into the house, he looks like a baby again.’
It is something that we had all noticed, and is quite amusing but at the same time quite melancholic.
Something else occurred to my mother.
‘I’ve been looking after a baby for the last nineteen years,’ she said in amazement. ‘People get exhausted looking after babies after one or two. No wonder I’m a little drained.’
Then my mother smiled. It was such a quiet and beautiful smile.
The 6th Step
One of the last things I ever wanted to be was a teacher.
I never liked teaching. Or perhaps I felt I did not have the talent or interest for it. The occasional tutoring stints were fine, but teaching itself to me was about as alien as a blue cow with pink spots and a purple unicorn’s horn.
In my childhood I aspired to be a whole range of things. I was going to be a lawyer, a doctor, a mechanic, a baker, a designer. And one profession that was decidedly not included in this colourful assortment was teaching.
The irony of me teaching kindergarten is that I was expelled from mine. I had gone AWOL one too many times because of poor health. I was probably one of the pioneers to achieve such a feat, but there you have it.
One of my memories from kindergarten was being separated into our mother tongue classes for the first time. I remember my form teacher, a plump, kindly-looking Malay lady, looking at me as I stood still when all the other children were shuffling to their respective classes. I must have looked like a lost sheep, and she asked me if I was not going to go to my class. I then asked her which one. She looked a little bewildered, then went to check her register before informing me that my beloved parents had put me down for Mandarin.
Now, dear Reader, the problem with this was that I had never spoken a word of Mandarin in my short life. The only Mandarin I knew were a few words I had grown used to hearing on Chinese drama serials. I was flabbergasted; it was as if my parents had thrown me into a foreign pit, as though they had put me in a parcel and shipped me off to the Sahara.
Naturally I failed spectacularly in Mandarin class. I was, admittedly, not the most hardworking pupil my teachers had encountered. My memories of the lessons now are hazy at best. I do remember my Mandarin teacher teaching us the Chinese character for “home”, and explaining to us that it looked like a pig under a roof. Thus, a pig under a roof was about the length and breadth of my kindergarten Mandarin education.
I recall the November just before I was to enter primary school. I was barely literate as I had, by then, abandoned my alphabets and numbers for a long time. Somehow, through my parents’ efforts, I managed to regain it all in time for school.
As I had not had much real schooling experience, my mother had to constantly remind me that exams were when children were not allowed to look at what their friends were writing. In my very first examination, I placed second in class and to this day it is one of my mother’s most favourite stories.
After that auspicious beginning, I became a good student without trying. I never really studied in primary school. I had also never known tutors nor tuition, despised assessment books and would only sit down to crack them open, with great reluctance, under threat of punishment.
When the Primary School Leaving Exam drew near, my brother helped me out by throwing all my school books down a drain. My parents fretted but – it was inappropriate of me, of course – I rejoiced.
The rejoicing faded somewhat when, exactly on the Sunday before my first
