Pork Marks, Plain Porridge and "Feng Shui"

The days that followed were more tolerable.  At least I was able to get a lukewarm bath in a day.  The temperature was much reduced after I had yelled out my demands. I insisted that children ought to be heard, not just be seen.  My grandma had to waggle a stick to remind me of my manners.  I had also learnt to sulk and my mother pointed out to me that my face had grown a few inches longer.

For a period of about three months, which had seemed like decades, after I had chickenpox I was put on a strict diet of mostly plain rice porridge and bland foods.  No black soya sauce, the minimum amount of oil, no shrimps, no meat of rooster, no ginger or any spicy foods. 


 The restrictions were imposed to ward off either any recurrence of the disease or the possibility of getting pock marks from the remaining hard-to-heal blisters.  The pock marks especially the ones on ‘strategic’ places of certain parts of the face were believed to influence one’s lives, said some clairvoyants.  A scar or scars on the wrong places would jeopardise good fortune in one’s life, so human intervention was necessary.  It was all part and parcel of what they called ‘fate’.

As a result of this fear of getting pork marks, it was many meals of plain rice porridge eaten with preserved radish, preserved leeks,  preserved  olives , salted egg (only the white was allowed) and sometimes steamed non-oily fish.


  Had I not protested, this kind of meal would have continued because the two elderly ladies would not have imagined that I would not like them.  When they were in China, a meal like the ones they had served me was considered godsend.  They had not much to eat during the pre-Communist rule.   Getting exhausted with having to force me to eat, my mother slowly abandoned the whole idea and relaxed the ‘rules’ a little.  She gave me some of the food cooked for the rest of the family.

I was not a very vain child since young.  I would rather trade my freedom for many other things and in this case, flawless skin and the so-called ‘good fortune’.  Even as a child I was not convinced of several housewives’ tales or beliefs that I had often pricked my ears to listen.  I remained sceptical of them even though I had imbibed them at some time or other. 

When I had finished high school and started working, my sister used to describe my situation as not ‘smooth sailing’ for I did not have the luck to further my studies like most of my friends had.  She pointed to the pock mark on my left eye brow which had caused the length to be much shorter than the right one. 


 She thought it was the wrong place to have the mark and it had not only spoiled my looks, it had also given me bad luck.  Yes, I unwilling agreed with her because the other ‘bad luck’ she did not mention was the demise of my mother when I was eleven. It was the worst of luck but I refused to think that it had to do with my non-compliance.