Kindergarten days.

So I was taking a jog around my neighbourhood and I saw a little boy, around the age of 5, flashing his set of pearly white teeth while waving at me, as if it's his first time seeing anyone jog around the nieghbourhood. Nevertheless, it got me smiling. For an instant, I felt like I wanted to become a child again. Free from the cares of the world, responsibilities and many other petty things.

With that being said, I want to share my many small pictures I have when I was in kindergarten. Most of it will revolve around my relationship with my Grandma, because she had been a large part of my life, especially during my childhood days. She, being a native of China, speaks no other language but her own dialect (not even Mandarin) but has come to pick up languages in Malaysia by listening (she doesn't speak but she can understand). Having been brought to a better place around 2 years ago, I can't help it but miss the moments I spent with her as a child.

1. I dislike eating red bean soup and fried beehoon (rice vermicelli).
When I was a young, innocent (still am) boy, my Grandma (whom I fondly call Ma Ma) loves to cook the two types of dishes together. Yes, one cannot exist without the other. Ma Ma cooks this as frequent as we breathe. Okay, well not that often, but sometimes twice to three times a week. Usually, if I have the dishes for lunch, it's high chance that I will be having it again for dinner or probably tea time. What makes it much worse is that sometimes the aunty that cooks meals for us in kindergarten, happens to cook the same dishes on that very day I will have red bean soup and beehoon at my Ma Ma's place. Yes, malnutrition is bad, but having to eat the same dishes three times a day sure can terrify a kid, too. But my Ma Ma loves me, it's just that she doesn't cook much fancy dishes. Back in China, you have to make do with what you have and whatever they have, isn't much to work with. You can't make awesome abalone soup when the only thing you have is vegetables, right?

2. When I hold a pencil (crayon, oil pastels, etc) and a paper, there's no stopping me!
Kids in my days don't really wield the power of the finger to swipe or tap a handheld device. Only the wealthy get to hold a Nintendo. Armed with only raw imagination, I always drew on papers what I felt. I drew things that were beyond imagination. I expressed many things in my art. I knew I wasn't the best at it, but drawing helped me express my thoughts as a child. I loved drawing Ultraman (he was my childhood hero back then, along with Doraemon and Crayon Shin Chan) and cars back then. I could still remember pestering anyone who could hold a pencil properly to draw me cars. Just cars. A simple look at pencil-drawn cars brings joy to me. Dad was always the victim of my enthusiasm with these drawings of car. Haha, those were the days of me going crazy of cars. Oh did I mention, I had taste, even since I was a young kid. I hated crayons and I loved oil pastels. (Crayons are hard and never fills up all the white spaces on an uneven piece of white paper. Those who have used crayons and pastels will understand me.) And as a kid, I always preferred using a CLEAR piece of A4 sheet, rather than foolscap paper with lines or A4 paper with company logos printed all over them. I felt that these were an obstruction to my free flow of drawing. Ah, taste is acquired. I happen to keep some of these "taste" as I was growing, probably up until now. :)

3. I happen to have very sharp memories of my surroundings as a kid.
There are many memories I have that are as vivid and clear as the day it happened. Many actually. Like:
(i) I remember that Mum bought my sister and I a rubber ball each. My sister had a red one and I had a blue one. The rubber ball had a picture of Garfield (yes, that fat orange cat) in it and is glittery. One fine day on the bus, I was admiring this new treasure that Mum has bought for me. I really felt proud and happy to have it. Unfortunately for me, the ball slipped out of my hand, and as bouncy as it is, it slowly bounced it's way down and out of the bus, never to be seen again. I don't remember crying but I felt really sad after that. It was fairly new, less than a week with me. And it was just gone, just like that. It was really traumatising as a kid, having lost something that he just found to love. Probably the reason why I get so sensitive and emotional now when small things happen to me.

(ii) I asked my Ma Ma to buy me Ultraman stickers from a WET MARKET! Back then, my Dad used to ferry my Ma Ma to the Old Klang Road (Jalan Klang Lama) Wet Market to do her weekly grocery shopping. Just a few weeks before that, Mum bought an Ultraman sticker sheet for me to add into my sticker book (YEA! Sticker collecting was a fad back then). I loved how the glossy stickers shone in when exposed to light at different angles. So, with this love for Ultraman, I asked  if Ma Ma could get me Ultraman stickers if they found them in the wet market, she said OK. At that time, I was a little doubtful. How did Ma MA know what Ultraman is even without asking me what it looks like? Probably she knew. But obviously, wet markets don't sell Ultraman stickers. I guess that was just another Saturday weekend at the market with my Dad and Ma Ma.

(iii) On the first day at my kindergarten (Kuen Cheng Kindergarten, it's still there!) I made a teacher roll down the stairs. No, it wasn't on purpose. In fact, I rolled down with her. It's the first day and every single kid must be excited and somewhat afraid to be separated from their parents. I was this overenthusiastic kid running up the stairs, not seeing what as ahead of me (I guess this is how "leap before you think" is practised) and BOOM! I knocked into another teacher and both of us went rolling down. If I don't not recall wrongly, we were going up the stairs from the back of the building. I'm pretty sure she wore a light-blue coloured dress and was a little plump, not fat, just plump. (The kind of plump that makes you smile when you see them). When both of us were finally at the bottom of the flight of stairs, we were both weeping. So much fun for the first day!

(iv) Once, I brought a very large toy car to school. A large, plastic toy car of a Mercedez Benz (don't know what model, but I can recognize it when I see it) which was glossy green in colour and had rims of a Proton Wira. Yes, the older Proton Wira. It made whirring noises when it's pushed and it was really cool! Being a fan of cars, and as a kid, this was as close to a sports car as any toy can be! Oh yes, so I brought it to school and there's this annoying fat boy (which I didn't really like) kept telling the teacher that I brought toys to school. Annoying much. Pfffft.

(v) Mum bought me my first Hot Wheels set which made me really happy. It was a toll plaza set and it came with a yellow Ferrari Testarossa. You can imagine me playing with that toy set for hours and hours on end with it, along with my other toy cars. I loved matchbox toy cars and Mum and Dad will surprise me with one every now and then. When I was allowed to buy one, I would always ask Dad, "Pa, which car faster? A or B?" and I will always end up choosing the one I liked, regardless of whether it was the faster one or not. Fickle-minded child I was. And sometimes, still am.

(vi) Mum always bought Happy Meals for us in sets of two. One set for me and one for my sister. Despite having a love hate relationship with my sister when we were younger (not the "I wanna' kill you hate", but the "I'm big bro, you listen to me" kind of hate), we were always the bestest of buddies. I think I was the cuter one of us both. I remember Mum once bought a set of two tiny tiger plush toys and my sister's tiger was labelled with a red mark and mine with a blue mark. She did the same for the lion, that came next in the series, too. Sometimes, Mattel would collaborate and I would have a Hot Wheels car and my sis would have a Barbie accessory. I still have Happy Meals once in a while to relive those moments as a child. It's magical.

I really missed being a child. Being simple. Free from all the annoyance of growing up. Being a child, you know you will be protected by your parents, no matter what. Growing up seems terrible to me, but I know I will rock the world. How was your childhood, care to share?