I just had a mug of the best, wholesomely thick bittergourd soup that money cannot buy.

When poured from the pot into the mug one can only faintly smell the hint of familiar herbs. Stirring a little, the steam uncovers a bit more of the contents of the soup.

And when I introduce it to my lips, there is all of that wholesome thickness of bak kut that fills your taste buds. Gently, as the soup slides past my tongue and into my throat, the inevitable bitter quality rolls onto the sides and back of your tongue, and the bittergourd seeks to cleanse your tongue of any traces of salty potato chips or sweet chocolate stains that you so engagingly gobbled one day ago.

Compared to eating, drinking is a refined act of elegance and good-mannered social posture. And what you introduce to your lips is a reflection of your being.

Money cannot buy that bittergourd soup because it simply cannot replicate the feelings and love of my mother who took pains to make the soup. Using yang sheng herbs she arrested the stark bitterness of the bittergourd fruit so that it would only come in ebbs and flows, as opposed to a raging washing flood.

Words cannot say how much weight my mum was on my life.

A pillar of inner strength and iron will, she shielded me from life's flagrant attempts to numbify and break down an innocent young soul. Always the stalwart, she took by the horns the challenges to my soul and obstacles to my being. Always the silent supporter, standing two steps behind me.

The same person who also damned me into eternal social awkwardness and impasse, never to be part of any social circle, and to always be mindful of my lingering solace in individuality and deep analytic thought. Unable to fully participate in the highly-complex and many-multi-level-symbolic game that peers engage, inside out, prior to their impending march into the cogs of social machinery and office drudgery.

I am not in self-pity. No, for there's no objectively written rule that says that not being normal is abnormal. Huxley quotes Fromm, where he points out that in a rationalised system of impossible ideology and unfulfilable social standards and immensely irrational expectations on the individual , the person who appears most normal is in fact, the most abnormal. Cos the system is not natural at all.

Some people suggest that I break away from my mum's influence. You've got to be more you, you know. More like the you that is supposed to look like everybody else who's your age. Well, which parts of me are my mother's?

Why do I respect my mum? I think we have to go beyond the usual Confucian fillial piety rhetoric and all. When you enter into relations with a person, you either like or dun like the person. Simple as that. If you like the person, you respect and treat him/her well. If you don't, well there's always the due respect that he/she is entitled to.

And I enjoy my time with mum. I do even today. She's a hard-bitten woman with a list of wisecracks that Homer cannot fathom. When I play too much guitar and wear black clothes she hides them and expects me to find it myself. And then there's that wonderful bittergourd soup that she makes.

I think few relate to my mum as well as I do. That's a fact.



Love your mothers.