Wind In My Head: A picture, painting a thousand words
Wind In My Head
Monday, January 24, 2005
A picture, painting a thousand words
We're just out of the long weekend and it feels slightly surreal to be in school once again. Especially when the long weekend didn't particularly feel like a restful one. It was filled with tuition, debate competition, the revelation that all my mysterious symptoms actually did add up to something- sinusitis...and over and above all that, my family deciding that this weekend was the weekend to embrace the time honoured tradition of taking those extremely artificial graduation photos at a studio where no one spoke English.My brother who is a doctor, mercifully escaped the taking of said photos immediately after graduation because I was still in Melbourne at that time. You see, you can't take these photos with anyone left out, so they waited. Then within six months of me getting back from Melbourne, we announced we were getting married so once again, this issue of taking graduation photos got pushed to the backburner. What more, I had promised the parentals a family portrait during our wedding photo shoot.
But it's been about two years since we've done that one and my mother has been basically bugging my brother to actually get married so that she would have another opportunity to dress up--she has very quickly forgotten the stress that she had to go through for my wedding--so, seeing that a wedding isn't about to be in the works, she has had to campaign hard for this photo session, which in her opinion comes second to a wedding thingyinmagig. We've tried hard to delay it, our favourite excuse being that the brother who was the centre of this whole shebang was on call most of the time, backed up with the constant travelling and the huge amounts of marking that plagues the two teachers in the fold. But this time, it wasn't going to be enough. She was determined and she went ahead and booked the studio before annoucing to us how we were going to spend Sunday afternoon.
Dutifully, we all turn up, even the children who were actually quite well behaved during the shoot. As usual, and something we often repress and block out of our memories after, we are posed like dolls. A head a little more to the left, tilted... a hand 2 inches further up your husband's arm, a shoulder slightly more opened so that more of the handsome gentleman's body can be seen, a chin that needs to be raised slighly, but oh! Not too much otherwise it gives off the look of being too stressed... a smile, with too much teeth, too artificial..no! Don't grin! Another smile, too smile, not enough teeth, show Uncle your beautiful teeth!!
Yes, all this done in Chinese, mostly directed at the two children who don't have enough knowledge of Chinese even when you put them together to understand squat.
By the end of it, the famous Ngpatience was beginning to show it's true colours. Beth was beginning to whine and act up, the Big University Student (that's what my bro was called) was sweating under his robes and a full suit, my other brother was cussing under his breath for all the false starts that occurred because just before the gormless photographer yelled "3!", he'd discover that the children were staring somewhere else or picking at the clothes, shoes, hair, nose etc.
All in all, it was a very painful 2 hours of my life, made even more miserable by the fact that my eye was blurry from the sinus infection discharge and I desperately needed to take of my contact lenses. So, my Big University Student brother and I confronted my mother after that and made her swear, no more photos, regardless of marriage, the conferring of a PhD, twins, triplets...nothing!
Of course, she didn't listen because while we were changing to our non-party clothes, she said sotto voce, that it was such a headache with 2 children, what more when I had children!!! Did she not hear us confronting her just now??? To make matters worse, she later remembered that she had wanted both my Big University Brother and I to be in our grad gowns and wondered if that oculd be arranged. In all the indignance I could channel into my slowly disappearing voice, I hollered "OVER MY DEAD BODY!", to which she just cackled and walked away.
I asked Dan what the attraction was to these oversized, tasteless, oft-gold gilded family portraits. His parents have two of those, hunking big ones hanging in their lving and dining rooms for all to admire, gawk or generally stare slack jawed at the enormousness of it all. He said it was a matter of family pride and to remember the pride that comes with seeing your offspring, don a motar board, a gown that would be put to much more use and fun if we could prance around like Batman and the scroll. I thought that was why we had commencement and that was bad enough (but another story for another time), but apparently no, it has to be eternally etched and possibly blown up to 150R. I guess it's not enough to be able to say that my son's a judge, a doctor, a teacher or was conferred first class honours. It's much better to have the cap and gown, even if it was from a shoddy university in the boondocks. The visual, more powerful... If a picture paints a thousand words...
Yup, no doubt.
But then again, it's all fine and good to bitch and rant about the stupidity of these apparently time honoured traditions. Everyone says we grow up to be our parents and I do worry that growing up to be like them would among other things make me desire for the same sort of gross represenation of familial pride. I hope when my kids graduate from college, I'd go to the commencement, take some photos on a beautiful lawn and be done with it then and there. We thought that was what Big University Student brother's commencement going to be, running around on South Lawn at uni, taking the most natural and candid of photos. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough. It wasn't serious enough, solemn enough, BIG enough for my parents to remind them that their son now had an M.B.B.S behind his name.
Incidentally, this rant was a thousand words long.
Ondine tossed this thought in at 08:34
1 thoughts...
-
At 10:04 pm
Kay said... At least you didn't have a portrait taken---but it was at a nice place in Clarke Quay with a mute photographer, so Mandarin was not a problem---only once, with a now very ex boyfriend. I threw that one out with the trash last weekend (the photo, not the ex, or is it, uh, nevermind...)... It's not like I would put it up or anything. =)