The Little Girl and Hand-drawn Flowers

“Why do you want to be so different from everyone around you?”

A question I’ve never given a truthful answer to before

Picture from deviantart.com. Words by Robert Frost.

The highlight of the week in my old all-boys secondary school was the PE period. 10 minutes before PE, all the dudes were already fidgeting, feeling the rise of adrenaline for a rough spot of footie to come and the rise of impatience at whichever teacher that was taking the pre-PE class. 5 minutes before PE, more than half the guys were already at the field – all changed and raring to start.

"Boys."¹

Of course, there was always someone who would not share the class’s enthusiasm for football. That someone would consider it a perfectly silly and futile exercise (Honestly, twenty-two sweaty guys chasing after a ball in a huge field?). That someone would not even bother to bring his physical kit to school. That someone would instead pack a good novel to read when he was left alone in an empty classroom when his mates were out in the field (laughably) emulating Beckham.

That someone was me. That screwball. That insufferable elitist slash Mr. I’m-Just-Too-Cool-to-be-Like-You.

I don’t give a sh!t how many goals Manchester United scored against team X in that game Y nights ago. I don’t care if Real Madrid bought Beckham like a whore for some insane sum of money, or that Rooney bangs senior citizens, or what kind of razor Zidane uses to shave his nuts. I have no interest in sports cars and could barely tell Porsche and a Toyota apart – let alone all the model types with names that sounded as if they belonged to government experimental stealth bombers. I insisted on buying only the cheapest, most durable and practical Nokia phones as opposed to getting those MP3 player + gazillion-mega-pixel camera + game console + GPRS + ICBM launching capabilities type of mobile phone hybrids which my friends worked two part-time jobs simultaneously to pay for. I have never worn a pair of jeans in my life. What I know about gadgets won’t fill a thimble. I’d pick a long, thoughtful, artsy movie over an action thriller any day of the week. The anime/manga japanophile culture had left me unmoved. And oh, I detest seafood don’t lynch me, please.

The thing is; there seems to be an overwhelming personal drive to choose² differently from my approximate majority. It’s not that I’m trying very hard to be a social freak – it’s just that being different comes so naturally to me. Whatever the flock does, I do not.

The standing postulation is that I get a colossal kick out of saying “I don’t do that,” and watch people stare at me incredulously - which I assure you is rather far from the truth. The most recent time anyone asked me the question at the top was regarding my total dependence³ on the Keith L. Moore’s Clinically Oriented Anatomy textbook (which most people deemed unreadable), and my complete ignorance of the contents of B. D. Chaurasia’s Human Anatomy trilogy (which everyone thought to be essential and sure-to-fail-if-you-one-if-you-don’t-read). In spite of the odds cited against my favour, I passed anyway *takes a bow*.

The book everyone thought was crap.

Maybe I’m just afraid of losing my individuality – so afraid that I don’t even mind walking off the nice, paved, flower-skirted roads.

Maybe.

Now, let me tell you a story. You like stories, don’t you? Everybody likes stories (yeah, even me);

Between the period of time when I was three and six years old, I studied in a missionary kindergarten called Pei Daw. Frankly, I can’t remember much from my time there - just snippets of playground games, scenes where I wetted my shorts, and this truly massive Indian girl who sat beside me in one of the classes. I remember that we were supposed to leave the classroom everyday in a line of twos and that the boys were forced to hold hands with the girls while standing in that line. I remember replacing another boy in a skit during the annual graduation kiddie performances because he couldn’t act for peanuts. I remember that there was a durian tree standing in the middle of the playground and that our teachers would forbid us to play there during the fruiting seasons⁴. I remember that I can read and speak Chinese better at that age than I can do so now.

Memories, memories, dressed in black-and-white – but one particular memory stood out in colours;

I was sitting alone by the drain watching the other kids play in the playground. Frankly, I don’t know why but there I was – alone.

A little girl wearing a bright red skirt came and sat beside. In one of her tiny hands was a box of colour pencils, and there was a piece of paper in the other. She showed me that piece of paper and I saw that she had half-decorated it with drawings of flowers – uniformed, five-petal blossoms in red.

“Can you help me draw more flowers?” she asked me earnestly in Mandarin. “I want you to fill the paper with flowers.”

I wordlessly took that piece of paper from her and proceeded to draw, solemnly copying the flowers she had already drawn on that piece of paper. I drew mine in red as well, and all of them had five petals – just like hers. I even drew them the same size.

But before I could finish, she took her colour pencil and her paper back, and walked away.

Ps: In case you haven't yet realise it, I have already answered the question in the beginning.


The one and only,
k0k s3n w4i

¹ I'm saying this not with an affectionate smile, but with my eyes rolled to the back of my head.
² Keyword.
³ T-O-T-A-L D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-C-E. Not even class notes (because I've lost most of them). And not even Netter's Atlas of Human Anatomy (because I was too cheap to buy one).
⁴ Durian + Heads of 3-to-6-year-old Kids = Tragedy + Lawsuit