my exotic feature...
I was a plump and swarthy child with eyes of a somewhat oriental nature.

This did not go unnoticed by my peers at secondary school. By the end of my first term I had grown accustomed to hearing them warn one another to ‘mind the slope’ and I knew that should the teacher try to coax me into speaking before the class then my voice would be drowned out by merciless cries of ‘ah-so’ and ‘one cuppa cha’. However, during the course of one particularly abusive period of C.S., I found myself frustrated to the point of no return. I stood up, looked at the most insistent of the wags and thundered, “you shouldn’t say that!” Met by the silent glare of numerous eyes I felt my cheeks flush with embarrassment and my chubby fingers itch with sweat. How could I return to my seat having tried and failed so pathetically? I swallowed hard, cleared my mind and fixed my gaze on some far-off place in the distance. Then I told a lie which changed my life forever: “I am half-Chinese!”

The weeks that followed were without question the best that I would ever experience during full-time education. Not only had I seized some sort of moral victory, but I became something of a cultural phenomenon at my rather white and middle-class school. Aided by nights of research rather than homework, I became a leading local authority on all things kung-fu related – even guaranteeing some of my former tormenters that an uncle in Hong Kong would send over some nunchukas and ninja-stars, or as I sagely referred to them, ‘nunchaku’ and ‘hira shuriken’.

The term rolled by until it was time for parent’s evening. This was to be no problem for me – or so I thought, as I had already explained that my father was English, hence my surname, and my mother – my real mother that is – had been a Chinese revolutionary exiled to the UK in the 1970s. She had, I said, been imprisoned by the Chinese government after returning home to visit family and had subsequently died in a squalid jail in the Shandong region. “My father’s stupid new wife doesn’t know her shaobing from her xiao long bao,” I would often mournfully lament.

Alas, too many evenings spent memorizing dishes from the Chinese takeaway menu and scrutinizing the martial-arts equipment advertised in the back-pages of CVG lead my grades to plummet. Mr. Fothergill, a concerned geography/PE teacher, leaned across the desk to deal the deadly blow. “I just wonder if this could be related to grief,” he delicately speculated. “Grief?” asked my perplexed parents in unison. At this point I fled the scene, electing instead to wait outside and pray for Mr. Fothergill to be suddenly rendered speechless by some crippling disease or for the whole sorry mess to be overshadowed by nuclear annihilation. Needless to say, I was not to be so lucky. My mother sped from the school weeping uncontrollably, followed by my quietly furious father. I had never felt so ashamed.

From that day to this, I have no stomach for Chinese food. Each and every bite will for me always be as bitter as a loving mother’s tears.

Sorry Mummy, wherever you are...
(akzidenz grotesk, Sat 3 Mar 2007, 10:52, Reply)