Bedtime Stories for Children
Neverland & Unicorns
I went to Sunway Lagoon the other day with a couple of old friends. We’ve been having trouble coping with being young adults and feeling grey (we’re passed being blue) and were trying to recreate our childhood. Except, despite Sunway Lagoon being the most over-hyped theme park in the history of Malaysia and only 15 minutes away from my parents’ house, I never went there as a kid. My friends all got to go as kids. My mother was against the principle of it all. She didn’t want to support anything that made money out of giving people the illusion of danger and the sense that they’re about to die. She also thought the people behind the Sunway development made a bloody mess of the place and shouldn’t be made rich. Still, Sunway Lagoon featured greatly in my childhood because I remembered seeing countless of ads for it and wishing that my mother would let me risk my life and make lousy project developers rich every once in a while, just like all the other kids I knew. The older I get, the more people tell me that I’m turning into my mother. God, I’m not ready to turn into my mother. Not before I throw myself face first down a giant water slide.
Sunway Lagoon is tacky to the point of being laughable. But it was the most fun I had in a long time. Perhaps, it was sunstroke that made me feel deliriously happy. No, I think it was just the company of old friends that made the experience what it was. Old friends that I don’t get to see as often as I’d like to anymore. We had planned the outing a week in advance. I thought it was funny how we had to officially schedule ‘fun’ in our lives these days. When did Fun start needing to make an appointment before dropping in on you? The night before, I thought I was the only one that was ridiculously excited. But one friend says to me the next morning, “Shit, I’m more excited about today than I was before my first date with my boyfriend! I even planned my outfit and everything. Maybe I’m a lesbian and we’ve been friends all these years because I’m secretly hoping that if I hang around long enough, you’ll one day take your pants off for me.”
“Well, today’s your lucky day!” I said. I warned my friends that there’s a chance that my saggy, old tankini bottoms might accidentally come off on the way down the giant slides. I didn’t end up losing them but it did shift around alot and I’m afraid I might have flashed more bits to the Arab tourists at the park than I would have liked. Masyaallah.
After we had tired ourselves by going up a killer hill just so we can throw ourselves down the giant slides, we waded around the pathetic wave pool and basked in the sun. This is the life, we said. “It’s a Thursday morning and we’re splashing around a pool. Do you think we’ll still be able to get away with this when we’re 30?” asked one friend. Sure, as long as I have an adult holding my hand to make sure that I don’t wander off with some candy-offering stranger.
We then landed into an argument on whether Unicorns should be called Monocorns. I was in favor of Monocorn. Everyone else was a Unicorn supporter until they decided that it should really be called Unihorn. I argued that the thing on its head is more of a cone than it is a horn. So we settled on Unicone. Three years at university and this is the kind of conversation that amuses us most.
On our way home, we stopped by the oldest A&W branch in
Joni Mitchell was right. – paved paradise and put up a parking lot. But this wasn’t the time to think of Joni Mitchell and all her worries about the state of the world. On this day, we were in our own world, we were Peter Pan in Neverland and Wendy can go fuck herself, the anal-retentive prude.
By the way, it’s Monocone.
Kidnapping Mister Potato
On second thought, I don’t think I’m turning into my mother. I think my mother used to be something like me before she turned into well, her. “I can see that your mother used to be a punk like you,” said one friend.
“Hey man, first of all, only I am allowed to call my mother a punk-ass and second of all, you’ve got to be kidding, right?!” I had just finished telling her the story of how my mother tried to get me to commit an act of vandalism in
“No idea,” said my mother, “But it would be funny…..You should do it!”
My mother never ceases to shock me. Just when I thought I had her accurately pinned down as a middle-aged, ultra-conservative Ice Queen hermit with full obedience to the outdated social laws of propriety and all-consuming paranoid fear of trouble and danger, she tries to get me to kidnap Mister Potato….because it’s funny.
But then, I should have seen it coming; my family has been producing repressed punk-ass women for generations. For each time we think to ourselves, “Yeah, let’s fuck with ‘em all” a voice long ago genetically encoded into our heads by our First Prude Ancestor says, “What will the neighbors think?” (Nevermind that we currently live in a world where the neighbors hardly notice we exist, let alone give a damn what we do.).
While I don’t doubt that they love eachother, my mother is of the opinion that my grandmother is as maternal and affectionate as a pile of rocks. If I am the Jantan Macho (as the kids in college used to say), then my grandmother, with her tough-as-nails exterior is the original prototype. She would rather give you 100 bucks then give you a hug. I would know; I’ve been made rich from offering to hug her when I’m broke. No chick-flick moments for this lady, thanks. My grandmother often alludes to the fact that she was never really keen on settling down and being stuck at home with a family, like all the girls of her generation were expected to do. She did because she felt there were simply no other options and thus the good love she has for her family is often undermined by a creeping aura of buried resentment and bitterness or simply, a wistful yearning for something else. She would often say, with a mixture of pride and sadness that it’s nice to see girls these days, her granddaughters, being able to drive cars, travel the world on their own, pursue a career, yadida…. My grandmother is a Nazi when it comes to neatness and presentation but when my mother complains to her about me living like a jungle savage and stubbornly insisting on doing what I want, I can almost see a hint of a smile crack through Grandma’s stern face. When I got my belly pierced, my mother blew a fuse but when she calmed down, she warned me not to let Grandma see it in case she gets a heart attack or starts nagging my mother on not being able to keep her daughters in check the way she felt her mother expected her to. Funnily enough, it was my Grandma that insisted I show it to her. No shock, no disapproval, just a whole lot of curiosity, wonder and fascination. “Oooh…aaah…,” she went, “Sakit tak? Cucuk dengan apa? Tu berlian betul ke?” It was only after my mother showed up that my grandmother quickly covered her fascination with a stern, “Ish, macam lembu.”
Coming home from a day at Sunway Lagoon, I half-expected my mother to make some kind of sarky remark along the lines of “Ha, dah puas berlagak macam monyet hari ni?!” After all, a lot of other people that knew of my plans (and weren’t part on it) said, “Geez, how old are guys, man?! 10?” But instead my mother said, “You know, Maryam, sometimes I still feel like I’m still a kid inside...But I see my friends and how they behave and I think that I wouldn’t be a proper adult, a proper mother if I didn’t act like them…..”
Uh? What? Are we sharing here? Awkward. All I could say was, “Err..the slides were fun. Very exhilarating. And a Giant Duck kissed my hand on the way out. Oh, and I flashed a couple of tourists.”
And my mom said wistfully, “I’d still love to do the things you do but then, what would people think of a 56 year old grandmother in a bathing suit screaming and squealing down a giant water slide?”
I can't speak for anyone else but I know what I would think: Awesome.
