Money in my childhood
English Major Money and Meg wrote about their childhood memories of money and it inspired me to write something too.
I remembered the first time my parents tried to teach me about money. They (aka my mom) did it by giving me an allowance when I started Primary 1 at the ripe old age of 6. My mom started off by giving me a $1. And everyday, she would ask me how much I spent, and then would replace the money. Then I realised that if I wanted to buy something that cost more than a dollar (I have a slight obsession with stationary that continues till today), I would have to skip lunch, lie to my mother that I did spend money and save up the money to buy whatever it is that I want.
Do I feel bad about lying to my mother? Yes. But I suspect she knew. And then my sister started going to school too and my mother started just giving us both $1 each for each day of the school week (aka if there wasn’t school, no allowance) and I just started saving up whatever was left of it everyday. It just felt very much like a natural progression. I also had friends who were so amused at my affinity for Hainanese Chicken rice (I was fat as a lollipop and my reputation for gluttony was earned when I finished 5 plates of chicken rice in one sitting) that they would buy plate after plate of chicken rice to see when I would be so full that I won’t be able to eat anymore (recess would be over before I was satisfied). In this way, I pretty much ended up being able to save my allowance and still get fed everyday!
Gradually, we moved onto weekly allowances, followed by monthly allowances (always, the average was $1 a day for each working day). I used to think it was crazy when my friends would tell me that their parents gave them $200 a week. Crazy because my own father only has an allowance of $5 a day, and he’s an adult! I think that’s when I realised that my parents were very different from my classmates’ parents. We weren’t poor, but we weren’t very well-off either. And my parents scrimped and saved every penny we had. Yet, at the same time, my sister and I were treated like Princesses. We had access to drama, ballet and piano lessons (and I still regret not treasuring them when I was younger). So yes, we didn’t go to ‘private’ one-on-one classes and attended our classes at the Community Center but we were given every opportunity to suceed. AND, because my dad worked for the airline, we traveled every year to the US or to Australia and even though we stayed with relatives (to save money), at least we got to travel and go to DisneyLand!!
I also remembered the period immediately following my aunt’s death. She had died in a car accident very suddenly in Australia shortly after a messy divorce. Make that, she was still married to the ass-wipe (pardon my french) but she had filed divorce papers. All of a sudden, my mom started going ‘crazy’ with money. She bought health insurance, education insurance… I thought she had gone crazy with grief. But now that I’m grown up, I think the reason why she did that was because she viewed those insurance products as means of saving/investing for the future.
Because my dad worked literally like a dog, and because my mom made smart investing/saving choices, I was able to leave Singapore and come to the US for college. And its also because of their generousity that I am able to continue to be here for medical school.
All I really want to do is to be a doctor. So that I can take care of my patients, take care of my patients so they never have to worry about money again, and buy new shoes. Is that really so bad?
