Walking Bananas

My niece is starting Primary 1 in January. As the eldest of 3+1 kids, she going to a public school about 5 minutes walk from the house. She was all excited to progress on to school proper. UNTIL she found out that it was a public school and thus, would be predominantly Malay medium.

As parents, we all want the best for our kids. I remember how mum and dad used to put every single dollar by just so I could have the new examination model electone organ at home to practice on. And whenever dad had a bonus declaration, we would all pack our bags and teddy bears to scoot off to some foreign destination for a holiday.

I am living practically on fresh air and sunshine to put my daughter through a private school education cos she is severely handicapped in the Malay language. Casting her in an environment where most of her circle would be speaking in the language, school would be living hell for her. And if 12 months down the road, my circumstances improve, her brother would follow suit but as a luxury and not as a necessity.

My kids speak only in English to me and their entire social network. Hearing Lydia speak Chinese is like hearing Whites speaking Mandarin! My grandma speaks to them in our native tongue, and they reply in English. Do something nice for them and they would give you the reaction of "Oh Mummy! That's simply wonderful!" Ask them a question and they would ask for a minute to think about it with a "Lemme get back to you on that."

I wonder where and IF we had gone wrong in bringing up our kids: for them to be the yellow bananas that they are right now. Is it the bane of Astro's 24-hour Disney Network? Or simply because our generation had evolved too drastically, and this is the result of it.

For now, I don't have a resolution to the situation of helping my kids improve their grades in our national and native language. Nor do I have the solution as to how to address these young'uns going "I'm not Chinese! I'm English!"

Hopefully over time, these yellow bananas would go brown in the sun and become nationalised.

And if they don't, I guess we'd just have to up and move to somewhere like Manchester or New York or Paris.