Last updated: 17 Sep, 2006
1984 - 1989
I was born in December 1984. Don’t remember much about that. Went to some Buddhist kindergarten (though I was Catholic) somewhere in Hougang, where my aunt was a teacher. Apparently I had quite a bit of trouble reading, and in kindergarten I couldn’t read books meant for readers my age. My language skills as a young child were horribly poor, quite unlike my sister who had seemed to take to language as a cat takes to fish (and a fish takes to water). My mom had a hard time getting me to read properly, and I had a hard time trying to please her by reading properly. But words were never my thing.
1990 - 1998
I still couldn’t read at my peer’s level. I remember in primary one picking up a book meant for kindergarteners, and I couldn’t read it. I was too young to understand the significance (and on hindsight there isn’t much, actually). In this period of time, I think I read less than 5 books for pleasure. The few that I did read were mainly from the fiction series “The Three Investigators”. I also loathed writing. This more or less continued all the way until 1998.
1998 - 2000
Then something changed in 1998. My secondary school introduced a reading program around this year, I think, and I started to read more. Due to the reading of Newsweek, I started dabbling in writing argumentative essays for English lessons, and to my surprise, they didn’t do as poorly as I thought they’d do. Previously, all my essays started with, “It was a dark and stormy night…” I never looked back, and almost every single essay I’ve done since then has been argumentative or non-fiction.
In mid-1999 I borrowed a book called “Talking to Ducks”. I don’t remember much about it now, except that it was one of those rare non-fiction books I borrowed from the library, and my first of the self-help genre. I don’t know why, but I remembered thoroughly enjoying it, if anything for the hope it inspired in me, that I could be better than I ever thought possible.
For all my life before that, I’d been following the rules, going with the flow, never quite bucking the trend or even thinking about it. I’d always considered myself middle to upper-middle class in everything that I did: never quite elite, but also never at the bottom.
My mom had more or less given up all hope that I’d be a success I think; it’s surprising how, now as I think about it, expectations of me were so low that I got away with just about everything (failing exams would be taken with a sigh, and a quick chiding, but not much else; whereas for my siblings, it seemed a cold war be on the cards everytime results were not as great as expected). But of course, perhaps my mom knew me better than I thought she did: I was too much of a “nice boy” to do anything too stupid; then again, perhaps my “gentle disposition” (as my teacher put it so nicely on my report card) helped me end the cold wars well before they became nuclear!
My mom recently made a big fuss over the academic position of my brother in his class. If I’m not wrong, he got 30 out of 39. If I wasn’t myself, I’d actually also think that it was quite bad too. But I’m me, and I had actually been hovering between 29 and 34 out of 39 from 1997 through mid-2000, so I can understand my brother’s position (literally and figuratively speaking). It was only during my O’level preliminary exams that I improved my class position to 25, and finally during the O’level to 15. I was ecstatic with that position.
My mom never once complained about my class position (yes, on hindsight it does occasionally puzzle me why she never did, perhaps like I said she had low expectations?), so I don’t really understand what my brother gets from her. But I told her, after hearing my brother’s disappointing (to her) class position that success early on does not guarantee success in the future, and nor does early failure equate to failure in the future. I consider myself a late-bloomer (as I have found so many December babies are), and I told her my brother might be something like that too. Besides, he’s got time on his side.
Talking to Ducks came at a time when my class position was somewhere around 30 or 32 of 39. I, along with a good friend of mine, Wilson, studied like mad together for the O’levels (by our standards really. I’ve heard of others, especially those more academic types, who’d have thought of our studying time as ridiculously low). It was the most I had ever studied in my life, but it turned out to have been the best investment of time ever. My grades for the O’s though not outstanding on an absolute scale, were absolutely oustanding for me. I made it to class position 15, the highest I had ever attained my whole academic life.
The thing about Talking to Ducks was that it prompted my first foray into goal setting. Perhaps it was this that gave me the motivation to work towards something, anything at all really. I had been a drifter for so long I forgot there were such things as goals.
In order to achieve my academic goals, I moved the computer out of my room (and swore to myself not to touch it except for one hour a day, or something like that), stayed back after school to study and created “Head Music”, a CD I compiled filled with instrumental and easy-listening tracks to aid me through my studying.
End-2000
After the O’levels, I started reading quite a bit. Going to the library, I would borrow quite a number of self improvement books, together with philosophical works. One day, I came across a book that quoted Albert Camus, and the quote (on suicide) was so powerful that I was determined to buy his book. That book, The Myth of Sissyphus, was the very first book I bought since Eric Cantona’s biography, bought in 1998.
And my love affair with books started. It was also during this time that I started writing a diary, modelled after the diary-writing style of the serial killer in the movie Seven (the serial killer wrote leaving no spaces between paragraphs; I stopped this after three pages as I found it impossible to write in this way and maintain my sanity, and thus continued normally from then onwards).
2001 - present
During my first three months in Serangoon Junior College (SRJC), I fell in love with two subjects: Economics (which prompted me to study Business in Temasek Poly), and General Paper (which prompted me to start writing for pleasure, on my website). Both required extensive writing, which I had at that point not really honed yet. But upon receiving favourable reviews on my writing (through grades), and having a comment that my writing was “mature” (I will never forget that), I knew I had something going. After I left SRJC, I had a few months of a lull period. I consumed almost a couple of books a week during this time, and started my love affair with reading, reading more in a month than I had previously my entire life.
One day, sometime in 2003, I decided to start a website solely for writing, a “blog” if you will. Back then I started on the blogging software called MoveableType, and bought the domain thecheese.net. I had a surprising number of hits, and people left positive comments on my writing, especially for an entry about a popular mandarin song by Teresa Teng, called “The Moon Represents My Heart“. It was a runaway success.