I come from a rather typical conservative Chinese family.
Dad and mom love me and my brother in many ways, and have tried their best to provide us whatever material comfort they could afford. Love was never explicitly expressed, and was instead often awkward and under heavy pretense.
Growing up in the family seem rather normal, except that my mom and dad fight ever since I could remember anything, and I haven’t really been close with my brother since high school. As small a family as ours is, we were never close knit.
Over the years, I began to feel a certain void in me, a certain hunger that I needed to fill, and have since tried to fill throughout my early adult life in various ways.
Finding a boyfriend was one of the first thing I wanted to do ever since I watched the many Hollywood films and TV shows, because they made me believe that this person would magically bring love into my life and make me feel fulfilled. And hence tried and failed I did, only to learn that true love is really something that is not borne merely by chance nor will, but rather … a bit of both, and that the process of looking for one can sometimes be more damaging than constructive for my own good.
All the love I wanted to give and to receive back to fill the void, had been the driving force behind my incessant pursue of this person called ‘boyfriend’.
Failing in finding a boyfriend, sex was often the unfortunate substitute. Just because it was always more immediately available and offered a temporal sense of acceptance and physical contact. But I always discover in the end, that the stigmata which carried along with it only gotten me more suffering and unhappiness.
When I finally got into my first relationship, I felt like the luckiest person on Earth. So much so that I gave it everything that I had, even things that I didn’t have, to make sure I’d never lose it.
Eventhough in the end it didn’t work out, and that I probably got myself broken in ways I didn’t know I could, I did come very close to having the void filled at some point.
These days I still regard ‘O’ (and our dear female cat) as my only family in Singapore, despite the fact that I have an uncle who lives here. And ‘O’ hasn’t done anything to prove otherwise, he knows more things about me than even my own family, and he still cares for me.
I do not regret having met him, because if nothing else, I always thought that the family I made with him and our cat is the greatest accomplishment I have since I’ve arrived in Singapore.
But I can only hope, that perhaps someday, I will be able to build a real family that I can call my own – a boyfriend (or better, a husband) and a child (be it a pet or a real children).
And perhaps then, the void would be filled for good.
