6 - My early life.

"I was born and raised in Hong Kong."

That's the simple version of my early life. The simple sentence that I'll share with people that probably don't have much interest in learning more, the people who don't care, the people who consider their lives to be big and interesting enough. But, to me, the past seventeen-and-a-half years have been remarkable, and scary, and every living second of my time now is spent not knowing what I'm doing or why I do it. I certainly like to pretend that I do know what I'm doing, though. I've always tried to be independent, confident in my own ability and self-reliant. I believe I've inherited that quality from my parents who constantly don't know what they're doing at all either, but they pretend. They try.

I was born conventionally (not by C-section) in a hospital. She was 23 at the time while he was 27. They met while working at a hotel. She was the voice that you hear on the room service hotline and he was the bellboy that would conveniently carry your luggage to your room. They were both naive and they fell in love. They got married. I was an accident.

My father was unfaithful to my mother, sleeping with other women while I was in the womb. That wasn't too big of an issue... My mother always aspired to be a teacher and as soon as she was relieved of the burden that is me, she went out to find work and pursue her goals. My father ended up being the househusband, feeding me baby food, amusing me with toys and wiping my ass. For two years, the family dynamic was this way and it frustrated my father greatly because he firmly believed that the man should be the one working and earning the dough. He would take me to countless part-time jobs with me lying in a crib under the office desk. He would get fired because of me. He just couldn't find stable work and he felt emasculated as my caretaker. One day, while my mother was at work, he moved out and took me with him.

For three painful months, my mother searched desperately for me and my father. My dad would hang up on her whenever she called and my paternal grandparents wouldn't let her know a thing, always staying on my father's side. They would tell my mother that Michael was okay, but for three months, all that would satisfy her maternal instincts was to hear my tiny voice innocently whisper the words, Michael loves Mommy.

They were still married when my father had 'kidnapped' me. My mother could take it no longer and she filed for divorce. My father was forced to let my mother see me again. In court, it was clear that my mother deserved full custody since she had the stable income, and the large family to back her up, while my father had nothing. In addition, my mother had cunningly tape-recorded all the phone conversations with my dad during the three months she was separated from me. It proved that my father had purposefully separated us and that my paternal grandparents had encouraged it to happen. I belonged to my mother from that point onwards.

I went to Toronto, Canada, and lived there from the ages of two to four. I don't remember much honestly, but I know I was happy. I know this by watching numerous video tapes that my mother had recorded with the excitement and enthusiasm that all typical mothers have when their kids are that young and cute and when technology had begun to enable parents to capture their children on digital media. Parenting me on her own was something that she was so proud of, and nowadays, everyone on both sides of my family would agree that she deserved to be proud.

I remember I was watching one of these videos and we were going to a cherry farm. One segment of the video exhibited me on the very top step of a ladder, picking off cherries with my tiny, plump hands. My mother asked me, "Are you scared?" and I replied with, "no." When we had finished our day in the cherry farm, we sat down around a wooden table and she asked me, "Would you like some of my cherries?" and I said, "no." And then on the car ride home, she asked me, "Michael, are you happy today?" and I continued staring out the window without answering her. Seeing myself at that age reacting to my mother in such a way really touches me and as I watch the tape, I cry. I cry because even at that age, I knew I was independent, I knew I didn't need my mother's help, I knew I wasn't scared to face the world. The one thing that's always been difficult for me though is finding happiness. More than ten years ago, this was already the case...

I've had some good times in my childhood, though, obviously. My mother decided that my father could have me for my kindergarten year as long as my mother could see me once every weekend. I have to say that my kindergarten year was probably my happiest, my favorite, it was my best.

My father was a manager at a restaurant at the time. The restaurant served fries, burgers, garden salads, club sandwiches, hot dogs, ice-cold Coca Cola, onion rings, ribs, potato skins, and all the traditional comfort food that any kid would love to eat everyday - for free. While he was at work, I had a baby-sitter. My father was paying for diapers at a convenience store one day and my father asked the nineteen-year-old cashier lady if she would like to take care of me instead. Each day, she would ride her bike to kindergarten with me sitting in the backseat, and after school, she would bring me to the playground, or McDonald's or the beach. The baby-sitter lived with us, so it was pretty much just me and her all the time.

When my dad was free on his days off, he spent his time teaching me how to ride a bike and how to swim. He brought me fishing and hiking too. We also had a lot of barbecues in the backyard where I picked up a few fire-making and steak-perfecting skills. We were very outdoorsy, something that I really miss from my life now where it's all books, exams, essays and university applications. I don't just miss being a kid like everybody else does. I miss being that kid, the kid that I was at the time, diving to the depths of incredibly salty water without my goggles. I miss hiking to the top of a mountain that appeared to be a million metres high just for the sake of it, just because I could at my age. I miss biking in the middle of the night, being a little daredevil that wasn't scared of the dark.

Speaking of which, there was one night when I couldn't fall asleep. I was five years old. I went out to see if my dad was watching television, but I found that my father and my baby-sitter were both not present in the house. I decided to go out for some fresh air on my bike, perhaps stop by McDonald's for an apple pie. I did go to McDonald's and surprisingly found my father and my baby-sitter seated at one of the tables. My father gave me some money for three apple pies and when I returned with the food, my father gave me some big news.

It was there and then that I found out that my baby-sitter and my father had fallen in love, and that she was pregnant. I remember smiling ever-so-widely at the thought of me becoming a big brother, and I was so happy for these adults whom I loved so dearly. Despite the fact that I was still young, I knew that family is important and that love is great. Unfortunately, when she was just four months into the pregnancy, it was time for me to be returned to my mother for primary school. My best year had ended there.

I had little contact with my father for the next six years. I didn't know that I was a big brother to a beautiful baby sister. I didn't know my baby-sitter got pregnant again, and gave birth to another girl. I didn't know that the restaurant my father worked in got shut down and that he lost his job. I didn't know that he started an internship working as a private investigator. Most of all, I didn't know they weren't married. I always assumed that they were, but they weren't. I didn't know anything.

After I turned six and left my dad, my mother began to provide the childhood experience that she deemed to be the best, filled with books, travels and (of course) many good times with her. I can't say I hated it entirely. I enjoyed learning at school and I loved to read. She would always bring me out to have dinner, or to go see the latest movie, or to the bookstore. Every summer holiday, she would take me somewhere foreign and this engrained in me this passion to travel all the time, a passion that I reckon will exist within in me for my whole life. She took me skiing in Korea, and diving in Thailand, and shopping in Japan. I saw Niagara Falls, the White House and the Statue of Liberty. It was truly unbelievable as I think about it now. My time with my dad allowed me to learn a lot about the great outdoors, while my time with my mother was something a whole lot different. It was about building academic learning, about travel, about broadening my perspective.

Both of them have shaped my early life into one that I am very proud of, one that has been enriching, fulfilling, joyous, incredible and one that I sometimes miss so badly. I'm crying as I type this, not because I'm unhappy that I cannot relive the past, but because I'm impressed by my upbringing, I'm happy that I had one like such. The second half of my life has been a lot harder, and I'm glad that at least the first half was lived truly happy. It's the sort of childhood that I wish my future kids will have. I wish they will learn the important lessons in life the way I learnt them. There's a lot that goes on in my life right now, but everything that I'm doing now is to achieve that one goal, to parent children that will grow up happy and proud to have me as a dad.

I'm far from being a good father now. I'm only seventeen. I'm only a student. But one day, I will know what I'm doing. I'm sick of pretending to know what I'm doing. I'm tired of trying to do the right thing. I will be a good dad.