Stories of KK

Some people would call us plain stupid. That’s the amount of monthly salary KK is giving up - the difference between one job offer and another - because he aspires to get behind an office desk and draw up building designs for the first time in his life, instead of getting all hot and sweaty on a work site which he's done for 10 years.  In a nutshell, his Masters (if it comes through and it should) has finally opened the door for him to join a design consultancy and with a year or two of designs under his belt, he will then be able to try and become a certified Professional Engineer which is, I gather, the top echelon of the profession and which is where I hope he will finally make big bucks to feed us all.  Come Monday he dons his spiffy new work shirts and heads off to an air-conditioned building somewhere in Thomson to work, for the first time in his life, as a Design Engineer.    God bless, in the last three weeks since we returned he hasn't even had to browse thr...

Tomorrow is KK’s sixth and last exam: Engineering Geology. He hopes it’s the last time in his life he ever touches anything academic. He says exactly the same thing this semester as he did last year: As a father, he can no longer be a student. Not a full-time, full fee-paying one anyway. Instead of the reverence which most students would treat their reference books, his textbook is vandalized with picures of Day and Dee, and Day’s scribbles.    But anyway, I suspect the sea of red makes him happier than the text. One of Day’s monsters.    Results come out a week after our return to Singapore.

The call usually comes at 430pm. My mobile phone spews out its Nokia ditty, and all three of us at home stop what we are doing because the sound of a ringing phone is so rarely heard around here. Once I end the call, I grab Dee's pink toy stroller, bundle the kids into their jackets and shoes, head out with the house keys in my fleece pocket and nothing else. For we aren't going far. Just 100 metres down the road, at the end of a tree-shaded lane, to Bardon Park; a place we very imaginatively call the "green field". Straight to the centre of the field where there is a cricket strip, I sit down watching the darkening sky as the kids take turns to push the stroller, draw faces in the sand with twigs and play with the many dogs who are chasing tennis balls. Then KK appears over the crest of the hill. Backpack on, sweaty from his 30-minute trek from school, the University of New South Wales. That's what everyone is waiting for. Squealing, the kids abandon twigs and st...

I doubt if I would be able to do what KK is doing now: hit the books after leaving academia for 10 years.  It doesn’t help that by his own reckoning, he hasn’t actually studied hard for closer to 20 years. The last time he actually paid due diligence to his books was during his Chinese High days, after which his heart was set on having fun.  Happily, he’s discovered all there is to discover, and nothing is going to sway him now. He swots morning to night, sitting at the dining table (no study table unfortunately), obediently eating whatever I manage to churn out from the kitchen.  The tremendous amount of pressure he feels certainly helps: When he looks up from his books, I can imagine he feels fully responsible for dragging his entire family along with him and that he had better score damn well to justify the opportunity cost. If I were him, I’d be stressed out of my head. I’m glad I’m not the one studying but I'm glad he took up the challenge.

We are all here in Sydney because my husband's studying. But precisely WHAT is he studying? Aha. I don't think I've mentioned this. He's not a man of airy-fairy words, ideas and debate. Neither is he a man of numbers, business or accounts. Nope. He's a man who is down-to-earth and grounded in more ways that one. He studies soil, rocks and structures. As boring as it may sound to others, he finds it tremendously interesting. What he says is: Everything starts from the ground. True, true. This past week, a particular module he is studying has brought him on field trips to rather interesting sites. He goes to school, and like an excursion, a bus takes him and his classmates on hour-long journeys to the sites. This is a pit which goes down for a hundred metres. Problem is, Australia's rocks are very different from Singapore's rock, he's never seen any of it before, and he's struggling with that. A couple of days, he came back from school with his head in...

When my brother called me recently, one of the first things he asked was: “So what are you all eating?” A most valid question. Considering that instant noodles are my forte. (I did cook instant noodles for our first meal here, in Sydney)  KK has been doing all the cooking.  The one time I tried to cook here – a fried noodle dish – I cut up all the ingredients beautifully, set them in their plates and then stared. I had to think about whether to throw in bacon or the carrots first. In the end, I waited for him to put ladle to the pan.  I’m ashamed to say, he is a much better, or rather, a much more comfortable cook than I am. He’s not a great cook, no Iron Chef here. But he manages to make do with whatever is available and concoct edible and basic stuff. Here he’s doing up chicken soup. I’m once again most ashamed to say, soup was a mystery to me. I had no idea what or how to make soup. Night after night, thanks to my parents and the maid, scrumptious Cantonese soups (the ...

This is my first-ever blog posting in Capital Letters and that's because it's something that is so, so important.  Essentially, whole family is going to Sydney in a few months time with toddler and newborn babe in tow, and all four of us are going to live on nothing but the meagre savings of a lowly paid engineer and a stay-home mom. (savings are also going to pay for hubby's astronomical school fees) For over a year.   What an adventure eh! God knows, this has been a long time coming. Since KK graduated a decade ago he's been raring to get his Masters degree in civil engineering, but the local unis flatly rejected him year after year and the last straw was when my nasty letter to a uni dean, asking exactly what was the problem with KK, was answered in a most pragmatic and cold manner: With such awful university grades (lots of Fs), albeit from 10 years ago, the most brilliant job record would never get him into the uni. Fine. That's that for never-give-ch...