This website is for ordinary people, people like me who have no added advantages in life. No helper maid, no parents to help out! I grew up in a relatively wealthy household, but we had no maids, quite unlike the other wealthy households of that time.  My mum did the cooking, the cleaning and taking care of us kids. I think that at some stage, she tried her hand at interior design (ahem! she tried to tidy her own home), but she gave up because my Dad was a habitual white elephant collector. Indeed, whilst we did live in a swanky big place, every room was stashed full of bric bracs and second-hand electronic parts. All we had (thankfully!) was a path which we could actually walk on to get from room to room. 🤣 My Dad refused to throw anything away, his excuse being he could be needing that bric-brac for some project he was planning.

Due to the many stupid childhood games that our parents forced us to play as kids, I grew up to be quite a hermit. I loathed anything ‘group’ or ‘groupy’. I remember in polytechnic class, I asked for a transfer from a big group to a smaller group because handling peoples’ relations was so stressful to me! Why are polytechnics students assigned these group assignments?! Argh!! 🤬

Fortunately, I turned out alright. Why? I had 2 ‘traits’ going for me: (1) Whilst I was a sullen and lanky-looking kid, luckily I grew up to be quite pretty, and (2) I excelled in doing housework. Yeah, my mum would always force us to stand beside her and watched her while she cooked. And she gave us housework tasks even as kids. She said that the least a girl can do is to cook and clean. Yup! I grew up in this kind of ‘traditional thinking’ household. But I was lucky because it suited my character well. Whilst I was very quiet and became sullen in groups, I was quite a chatterbox when it came to a one-to-one setting (I’m really talking about dates, which were plenty starting from my early teenage years 😍👄🧒👦💘). I enjoyed cooking and cleaning simply because I was very good at it, and I could be alone doing it. In primary school, when we had to say out our ambition: I alternated between becoming a ranger taking care of the mountains, or a housewife. Nope, not ambitious at all, me! 🤫 I guess if Mum had known I had no ambition, she would not have spent a bomb sending me to a University overseas!

It was there that I got to know my husband. Having been through many break-ups in my ‘entire dating life’, I told him that he had to marry me without the ‘dating period’. His reply was “should be ok” instead of “yes”. And so, we got married after knowing each other for only a few months! 😂 But he knew what he was getting himself into. A sullen girl in University, who would suddenly become chirpy and bubbly back in our rental flat. And a sexy chick who had no qualms about going down on all fours to scrub that toilet floor!

It was ‘natural’ (why the heck is it natural???) that I did the housework after we returned to Singapore, but this time it was different. I had to shift from my Mum’s landed home into his Mother’s HDB. It was a nightmare because I had never used a squat toilet all my life! And the noise level in apartment living was so bad I could not sleep a wink! But the worst culture shock living with my MIL was that she was very, very religious and very, very superstitious. For example, she made me wash my undergarments and dry them separately, because she said my husband would have bad luck if his clothes touched my female body fluid discharge. I guess that back then, nobody dared to tell her that we washed all our clothes in the same batch in the Aussie public laundromat. Another example was when praying to Kuan Yin Goddess in her home. It was an elaborate show of holding a lit incense stick to my forehead whilst doing a vertical prostration of sorts! And my husband and I both had to pray to Kuan Yin Goddess in the mornings before going to work, and when we got back from work. In my new home, there was also no cleaning and cooking gadgets that I had become used to, not even a vacuum cleaner…