Friday, August 28, 2009

mom says i'm getting fat. i agree. i asked for suggestions for weight-loss methods, she said, do housework! mop the floor, wash clothes, iron clothes....

irritating shit. who's the housewife here.

Friday, August 07, 2009

may contain nuts--john o'farrell

i just saw a review that said this book's lousy. okay the person didn't say "lousy" per se, but this, instead: "I didn’t like this book, at all, for the most part. Sure, it was funny. But for John O’Farrell, well, it wasn’t quite up to snuff. It was heavy-handed, awkward, and tedious, at times."

and i was just about to blog about how i found this book quite nice. but wells. that review's just one leaf out of a whole forest.

okay so this book is about a bunch of extreme parents in an angmoh country, and you'll be surprised to read about how kiasu they are. almost exactly like singaporean parents. (which kind of makes my parents, unsingaporean, but that's a whole other issue.)

they go for millions of tutions, music classes, dancing classes, language lessons, horse riding and all that shit. and are forced to down herbal infusions to improve their brains. i've never really been to tuition, went for keyboard lessons but quit after a year, went for ballet for eight years until my mom decided it was a waste of money and attended art classes till i got bored and quit too. but i like chicken essence. and german was my choice.

but i guess these kids didn't have much of a choice. and they didn't even know if they're allergic to nuts, beause their parents never let them eat anything that has "may contain nuts" on the label. (hence the title)

so jo'f talks about a particular famile out of this group of families with extreme parents. not that this pair of parents aren't extreme, they are, and they actually went abit too extreme. molly, the child, wasn't really good in studying. in the clique, she's one of the worst in grades, so her parents naturally got panicky when it was near the chelsea college (kinda like raffles/hci in the sg context) entrance test, which all the other children in the clique are going for as well.

molly attempted tons of mock papers (and failed like all), tried and rejected herbal mixtures (of nettle and something-else), and the parents thought it was a gone case, that she'll be finally accepted in to chelsea college (hereby acronymed to cc), so they decided on a solution. that the mother (alice) takes the test on molly's behalf.

so alice dressed up as a teen on the day of the exam (complete with fake zits) and sat for it as molly. but because she sucked at math, she panicked halfway through her paper, and the girl beside her let her copy the answers.

and "molly" got full marks for all the papers. not only was she finally accepted into cc, she got a scholarship too. the girl that allowed "molly" to copy her answers, ruby, came second, hence no scholarship. but the thing is, ruby came from a poor family. no scholarship, no studying at cc. kinda like how i didn't go to nygh after my psle.

so of course alice got really guilty and she became really good to ruby and family, till one day ruby's mom knocked on the chaplin (molly's family) door and accused alice of stealing ruby's scholarship. turns out ruby recognised alice under all that disguise.

so they take the argument into the principal's office of cc, in which they came to a solution to compare handwriting to determine if alice really did cheat. molly's handwriting sample came from a a-star graded mother's day poem, and the other sample was, naturally, the test papers. the principal glanced at the two samples, perused them, and said they were an "excellent match". ruby's mom wanted to see it for herself, but the principal said that "it's a private poem by a child about her mother and I think we should respect that", so case closed.

but ruby insists it was alice she saw on exam day. and alice that copied her answers. but the pricipal wouldn't hear of it. ruby's mom 's last words, i.e. before she left the office, were: "If we were white and we told you that a black family had cheated, you'd believe the white people not the black." and the principal cooks up some crap answer of how they put up basketball nets for the son of the nigerian ambassador to prove they're not racist.

but after ruby and mom left, the principal said to molly's parents, "it's amazing how much a child's handwriting can change!" and "gave a conspiratorial laugh".

in the end though, alice gave up that scholarship of molly's and sent molly to a neighbourhood school, the same one that ruby went too, so she could get a more holistic education since she could mix with people of all sectors of the community. and when ruby got bullied by the school bullies, molly stood up for her.

i kinda like the ending, but i don't understand why ruby wasn't given the cc scholarship after molly's was withdrawn. anyway this book gave me more reason to not study, cuz it emphasises on how academia's not the deciding factor in life, and how tons of other random things like manners come into play. not a good time to read this book huh, when prelims are eleven days away.

a singapore writer should write a book like this. it'll be cool to read the conversations in singlish. and it'll be so much more closer to heart.