Family and Tan Ling Wei

I am an ordinary soon to be 20 years old girl from an ordinary family with extraordinary fantasies. My name is Tan Ling Wei, but since everybody is having a difficult time to pronounce Chinese names, I would rather be called as Zoey. I’m a Malaysian Chinese, and I was born in a big city with big shopping malls – Kuala Lumpur. When I was younger, I used to stay in Bentong which is my hometown in Pahang with my parents together with my grandparents. Since my parents were busy earning for a living, my grandparents were my guardians. Grandpa was my favourite person because he was the one who pampered me the most.

He would grant whatever wish I wished for, even if it was the stars in the sky which takes about more than 50,000 years to make the journey. I remembered there was once, my grandpa took me out on a bike to buy me a school bag. I was so young and I did not know how to place my legs on the passenger seat, consequently I hurt my foot by getting it trapped in the bicycle wheel. I was crying very loudly on the way home because I couldn’t stand the pain and there was a lot of blood. Grandpa’s face was full with guilt when he saw his beloved grandchild got hurt. Eventually, the crying stopped after grandpa’s continuous comforting.

The biggest gratitude goes to my mom. She’s not only an ordinary fulltime housewife, but also my dad’s part time personal assistant. On the other hand, she is the one who travels up and down to send me to university and my brother to school. Well, to put it in a nutshell, she has no time for herself at all. When I was 2 years old, I was admitted into the hospital and told that I had bronchitis. She was the one who took up the responsibility to take care of me, staying in the ward with me even when she was pregnant with my brother. A mother’s love is indeed instinctual, unconditional and forever for her child.

The closest person when I was young was my dad. He was the one who would patiently read me poems and stories when I was a baby. Whenever he got back from his work, he would snuggle me in his arms and sing me nursery rhymes. But as I age and hit puberty, our relationship drifted apart. I stopped having physical contacts with dad. Perhaps I was shy since I started noticing changes between females and males. However, the love I had for dad has never changed. Instead of expressing, it lays hidden. Ever heard of love and hate and relationship? Well, that’s the relationship I have with my 17 years old brother.

When we were young, we were like cats and dogs, fighting for toys, practically we fight for everything even until today. Even so, blood is thicker than water. Whenever we face any problems in life, we would console each other, and of course be there for each other. My brother and I have one thing in common, that is we love playing computer games. Whenever there’s free time, both of us would spend time playing Blackshot together either as team mates or rival to kill the time. Which girl would ever play computer games? That’s the common question whenever I come across to any of my friends.

Well, that would be me. The reason why am I so boyish is because when I was a toddler, I mixed mostly with my cousin brothers. When I finally got into a primary school, my friends were all boys, because they were less dramatic. During the recess time, the boys would invite me to the field for football. Overtime, my character died hard and hence the boyishness and clumsiness. I love to read since I started my high school. According to one of my Indian good friend, my English was very bad when I was in form 1. We still laugh about it today whenever she tells the story of me speaking broken English in class.

I started mixing around with the English educated friends to improve my English. Whenever I’ve difficulty understanding any English vocabulary, I would reach out to my friends and ask for an explanation. Furthermore, I started to build up the interest in reading. In the year 2008, when I was in my form 3, Twilight Saga had become famous as a romance novel about vampire love story. Since then, I started to have crazy fantasies of becoming a vampire as I could be an immortal and that I could keep my youth forever. As silly as I could be, reality is always cruel. No one can ever live as an immortal.

Everyone’s life will come to an end eventually when the time comes. Well, that’s my autobiography, a really simple one but of course, there’s much more in life that I couldn’t express in words here in this essay. I believe nobody is perfect. Everyone has their own flaws, so do I. Life is just like a roller coaster with ups and downs. It just boils down to every individual on how they deal with it. Last but not leaset, I would like to end with a favourite quote of mine about life, “Life doesn’t require that we be the best, only that we try our best. ”- H. Jackson Brown, Jr.