Of onions and tissue paper

Now this post is about the little boy and myself.

The place is at Jurong West St91( So I thought its really near NTU, unfortunately I realised its not so near after all.) ANyway I was offered $20 for an hour of teaching kiddie stuff on Thursday evening. The agent mentioned that I had to teach Hanyu Pinyin and English.

I had conjured up a mental image of the boy and his family.
1. The parents must be rich. Why else would they want to blow $20 an hour on their K1 kid?
2. They must be very busy, hence they have no time to read to their baby.
3. They can't speak or write Chinese at all, (Super Ang Moh type), hence they need someone to come in and speak some Mandarin to their kid and pronounce the Hanyu Pinyin way.

I was so wrong. Totally off tangent.

1. The parents are NOT rich. There are 6 people - Grandpa+Grandma+Dad+Mum+Kid+Baby living in a sparsely furnished 3 room flat.

2. Once again the agency got it wrong. I must be cursed.. The mother says she only wanted help with English. Says she can speak some English but nobody in the house speaks English to the kid so she wanted someone to come and speak to him as his standard is below average. (She sounded Malaysian to me.)

And so I had come with a Hanyu Pinyin and English guidebook as instructed by the agent who messed up and the mother very kindly reassured me that its okie, that she can keep the chinese book for later use and paid me the money for the books.

That brings me to a problem here. As much as I want the cash, i don't think there is much i can do for the kid. Unlike the very noisy Primary One class who couldn't keep silent for more than 3min and drove me nutty, he doesn't talk to me much. I doubt I have the ability to make him open up to me. And there is really no point in wasting their money when they're already financially taxed.

And looking at this particularly family reminded me of the time when my mother was forced to engage an English tutor for me in K2. My tutor was also an undergrad at that point of time. Basically no one in the house speaks English too. SO i could barely string an English sentence together. And i had just transferred to a new Kindergarten after moving and it turns out that at the new place, my English was way below normal. (Don't ask me how 2 PAP Kindergartens can have such big differences.)

Anyway, the aweful relevation came when I got back my paper for the English test. My form teacher had given out most of the scripts as I sat there dreading THE moment. When i finally got it back, I was one of the last few in class and had failed miserably.

The teacher's one liner did the trick though. I don't rem her face, or name, whether its Mdm, Mrs or Miss, but i rem the sentence very well...

"You don't even know how to spell 'O-N-I-O-N' ?"

I clutched the test paper and kept quiet. The teacher moved on.

When the class ended, I started bawling my heart out the moment i stepped out of class.

My mother's friend, who had come to pick up her daughter, spotted me at the void deck and asked " Shui2 Qi1 Fu4 Ni3?" I managed to thrust her the offending exam paper and muttered something about failing it, in between sobbing, swallowing my own snoot and spreading the mixture of tears and mucus on my face by wiping with my hands. She proceeded to help me wipe off some of the gunk on my face, unfortunately it seemed that my tear ducts and nose had gone into "over-production" mode.

She then handed her packet of tissue to me, told me to stay put and left me alone for a bit to pick up her daughter before coming back. By then i had tissue bits stuck all over my face.
And she brought me home in the super unglam state to my rather alarmed mother.

This story eventually became her "must-repeat every year" story whenever we bai4 nian2 during CNY.