(because von doth protest too much)

here is von's famed scissors essay, circa 2001. (now all one needs is to find the story of the indestructible rat)

When I was seven, I ran into a wall while fiddling with a pair of scissors and sliced off a very small portion of my thumb. While stanching the copious flow of blood, my mother consoled me, saying over and over ‘You’ll be the first of our family to go to university.’ Life wasn’t written by Jewish author with a mother possessing an eidetic memory, and so the reason behind this strange pronouncement is now lost in the mists of time. My mother claims to remember no such thing and insists improbably that what she actually said was ‘See what happens when you run with scissors’, but I choose to believe otherwise.

For me the episode retains the clarity of a glass of water, because it is the very overture in my mother’s eventual symphony of education-related utterances. When the conversation turns to education, my mother never fails to gripe about how she, fourth child in a brood of eleven, never went to university while her mother managed to scrape together enough money for all but one of her brothers to go. Its le rêve d'étoiles in the vernacular. My suspicions that these complaints were purely a matter of ritual were confirmed last year by my grandmother, who told me that my mother had secretly confessed to her some years back that going to university would have ‘driven her mad’. (This revelation happened in a Starbucks outlet where my grandmother bought a caramel frappucino. Despite what the Joy Luck Club has taught thousands of moviegoers around the world, Chinese grandmothers do not all have mah-jongg in their blood. Mine climbs mountains.) The scales have fallen from my eyes and I now see my mother’s scheme for what it is: a successful attempt to induce a guilt trip and more intense application to the textbooks.

The fact that neither of my parents attended university has been ingrained in me since forever, mostly implicitly. They took my education very seriously. I remember my mother queuing before the sun rose outside a kindergarten run by nuns with a reputation for inculcating scholastic excellence. My father and I brought sandwiches and reinforcements in the form of an aunt. The registration line stretched 200 meters and the kindergarten was oversubscribed by a factor of 11 to 1 (I got in). I also have earlier memories of my father reading to me while I was still in cot. I know I was in a cot because the memory of Green Eggs and Ham in a Singaporean accent is interlaced inextricably with the image of dangling multicoloured animals. It has also been revealed to me that when I was approximately the size of a small eraser, all my mother’s sisters took turns to read jokes and passages from Reader’s Digest to my mother’s stomach. Noting my warped sense of humour and propensity for reading at the dinner table, the aunts have since switched to playing Bach and reading recipes (for girls) in the hope for more socially acceptable descendants. Aunts and uncles still take turns queueing for places in choice nurseries.

Chinese families have a reputation for being almost neurotic about education. There is some truth in that. The first doctor in the extended family saw 43 familiar faces in the crowd at his graduation ceremony in Edinburgh, Scotland. Scholastic achievement is vicariously experienced by the entire family, not just the individual. Something of the same attitude prevails in my nuclear family and it showed itself over dinner these last weeks past when, during the fruit, someone will ask ‘You don’t look very concerned about those applications. Your father and I never got a chance to go to university and look where we ended up.’ She knows very well that I agonise over every form and envelope and yet she manages to sound more like Mrs Portnoy every day. If I get admitted, my parents will probably have simultaneous joy-induced heart attacks. I would too, in the best tradition of Chinese offspring.

There’s still a little lump on my thumb where the scissors sliced and I remember exactly what my mother said.