Today, I finally ended my closet and stuff cleaning and rummage. I ended up looking at most things that makes me proud of myself. And of course, how can I forget all the kiddy and teeny letters I've piled up since grade school. More than the memories, it reminds me that I'm a good friend and classmate. Those days will never come back.
Even now, I'm still proud of myself. I thought I have made a lot of accomplishments, enough to make my parents and my grandparents proud of me. But I guess, it will never happen, not even in my dreams.
No matter how many my accomplishments are, how many outputs I've made, how much layout work I've done, how numerous my organizations are, how I got my rare awards and how I was featured at an expensive local magazine, there is in nothing that made them proud of me.
I just told myself that I have done everything. I took a job that almost took my life, I took a lot of sideline jobs and businesses, but nothing worked.
I wondered why.
Then I thought of the men in our family (my mother's side -- Chinese blood). My brother, my cousins, my uncle, my grandmother's brothers. All had their pitfalls. All had their own history of betrayals and misdeed. But never did I hear about this from my family. All facts are implied and obvious.
Since I was a child, I hear my grandmother talk about my uncle, all his pitfalls in a lighter way, a lot of cover-up stories and small good things become big. Little did I learned anything good about my mom because there are more bad stories than good ones.
Now that im all grown up, I still hear things about my uncle, my female cousin (she's still my uncle's daughter) from his first wife, and my two male cousins who caused chaos and bad records in my old school. So much for the good records I've left in my alma mater. My uncle's wives were all stories of irritation.
The same goes for my 26-year-old brother who is still in college. The lucky one who shifted courses 5 times in his lifetime. The dear one who had 5 girlfriends at the same time (all girls knew they were 5 in brother's life) and lost a child when a girlfriend accidentally got his child aborted during pregnancy. My parents decided not to support his education anymore because he's in college for 10 years but still haven't finished anything. Yet, my grandmother still kept on talking about his lovely duddly "apo".
I guess it's Chinese -- that men are favored over women. That men shall always be superior than women in our veins, even in the eyes of my grandmother who herself has experienced this old Chinese custom. She was deprived of inheritance being the first born (female).*
Curse the men in our family for being favored. Curse those who overlook the women no matter what we do. Curse them for covering-up the men's fault and mistakes. Curse the men in my Chinese veins and let them suffer their unexplainable skin allergies forever.
But let my children be saved from this curse.
* In the old Chinese custom, the first born child should be male, or else, the male (father) should marry another woman until his first born child is male.
