Hitching a car ride to school during my primary school years in the late 1960s, was a big hassle.
For some strange reason I would vomit every time I sat in a car. The fumes emitted from its exhaust that entered through the car’s opened windows and into the car’s interior tend to make me nauseous .
After that I would fall sick the entire morning. Teachers and classmates would look at me helplessly as I laid my head on the desk while the lessons went on.
It would be hours before I could regain my composure which by that time would require me to go through another ordeal of hitching the car ride back home.
As a result of such a phenomenon, I eventually resorted to walking to school, even if it meant taking me half an hour to do so.
Walking to Pasar Road English Primary School in Kuala Lumpur had its own uniqueness - a journey I found endlessly fascinating.
I would weave my way through narrow lanes and clusters of attap-roof kampong houses, each with its own sights and sounds.
In the early hours of the morning, under the dim glow from nearby homes, I could almost map the neighbourhood by its noises - the chatter from one house, the clanging pots from another. Pigs snorted restlessly in their pens as I passed by, a familiar soundtrack to my daily trek.
Very often I would stop by an open area where I was drawn to a small group of men and women sitting on small wooden stools in a circle. Surrounding them were a flock of roosters -all waiting to be castrated.
I could not recall the exact details but I remembered being mesmerised with the way they inserted something like a hooked needle and thread into the rooster and eventually pulling out what I believed must be the testicles.
It was only in later years that I found out a castrated rooster fetch a higher price in the market.
Those early morning walks taught me to observe life’s details - but it was at home that I learned to observe truth itself.
If there was one thing my late mother detested most, it was lies. A close second were half-truths - especially when told to serve one’s own advantage.
Make no mistake - to her, there was no margin of error. There was no such thing as a white lie. A lie was a lie, period.
I still remember the day when I came back from school, hastily threw my bag into the cupboard and rushed to look for my mother at a neighbouring house, where all my peers were eagerly waiting for some fun and games.
After a day of fun, one of them gifted me with a wine glass, a luxury item those days. I could still recall how my mother made a big fuss out of the wine glass which I brought home , accusing me of stealing the item.
She just refused to accept any explanation. As far as she was concerned, taking home anything from other people’s house without her prior consent was tantamount to stealing.
After a round of whipping, I was made to return the wine glass immediately. After that lesson, I learned not to take things from others without permission.
Whether by choice or pure naivety, she could not accept that a white lie might be socially acceptable.
It didn’t matter to her that a white lie was sometimes meant to protect someone’s feelings rather than to mislead for selfish reasons. In her moral universe, truth stood on sacred ground - uncompromising and absolute.
By my mother’s standards, even novelists might have been branded as liars. After all, fiction was nothing more than imagination woven into falsehoods.
Her unwavering sense of honesty could appear harsh, even unreasonable, to a child trying to navigate the shades of grey in human interactions.
Only in later years did I come to understand the reason behind her unyielding nature - that, at our tender age, we were not ready to handle the complex nuances between truths and lies.
For a child, moral boundaries need to be firm before they can later be softened by empathy or context. Only when we have learned integrity, can we begin to navigate the softer shades in between.
I realise that her stern lessons were acts of love - lessons that shaped my conscience more deeply than I ever knew.
What once felt like rigidity, I now see as clarity - the moral compass she left behind, steady and true, long after her voice faded from our home.
Vincent Lim (limhockmian@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
The User Content (as defined on Newswav Terms of Use) above including the views expressed and media (pictures, videos, citations etc) were submitted & posted by the author. Newswav is solely an aggregation platform that hosts the User Content. If you have any questions about the content, copyright or other issues of the work, please contact creator@newswav.com.