by Aqilah Teo
Once I caught him scuttling from my room wearing my t-shirt. He looked very cute waddling around in the oversized shirt that flapped about his ankles, so I let him be.
Jan still does somewhat think that I own the best of everything. Now, however, he generously lets me keep most of my belongings and only spirits away my munching snacks.
Generally, autistic individuals are said not to display or have emotions. Jan does, however. He has always had a personality of his own.
He turns jealous when he thinks our parents pay more attention to his sister; he gets disappointed if he thinks we have broken a promise to him; he is happy when he gets his favourite food or listens to his favourite music, or when he simply gets his own way; he gets angry if anyone tries to share his food – he used to signal the domestic help not to go near his food and would refuse to eat till they were a good distance away. He also worries if any of us are absent from home for more than a day, and forms strong attachments to his family and caregivers.
A particularly endearing trait is Jan’s show of concern when any of the family falls ill. He massages our mother’s head when she is recovering in bed, pats mine when I come down with bad fevers, and straightens father’s pillows when he is under the weather. When we say ‘Thank you Jan, I feel better’, he smiles and is cheerful and energetic again.
Some may argue that it has nothing to do with emotional responses; the boy merely copies the actions of others in context, which generally would in itself be an achievement for a child with autism. They could be right.
But we must not tell Jan this; he knows how to feel offended.
The 7th Step
My brother understands the concept of danger. For example, he is very careful when crossing the road. At the sight of oncoming cars, he would pull whomever he was holding by the hand to the other side in terrific helter-skelter urgency.
Jan had road safety lessons back in Balestier, but school lessons teach what should be done and when. I doubt anyone could have taught him the concept of fear. Jan somehow figured it out on his own.
One of my brother’s most pronounced fears is that of heights. He will not go near railings, parapets and other barriers which bar the way to any great drop. If you tried to bring him near one, he would put up a staunch resistance and then give you the evil eyeball.
There is no pattern to Jan’s fears. They are as random and irrational as the fears of regular people. He may be frightened of heights but he has no trouble with deep swimming pools. He can look down to see his feet dangling a long way from the bottom of the pool and be completely unafraid.
I usually allow him to follow me to the deepest end, where he will abandon the safety buoys and plunge into the water.
The 8th Step
Living with my brother means constantly having to outwit him at every step. More often than not, this fails, but we try anyway.
One of the hardest things to do is, as I have mentioned, hiding things from him. It is exactly like the whole business with the soap. Another shiny example is the time we tried to hide all the scissors and trimmers in the house after he latched onto the habit of snipping cables, wires and even his own eyebrows. Jan almost always managed to get his hands on a pair whenever he wanted. Some of those pairs of scissors and nail clippers had been kept away under lock and key. I am not joking.
The family stopped asking, a long time ago, questions beginning with the words “how did he manage to”. We work so hard to conceal things from him that sometimes we actually succeed. (‘There’s no way he’s going to find it now!’) Then it turns out the hiding place is so good that we cannot find it ourselves again either. It is a good magic trick to make many of your household items disappear.
The upside is, whenever it seems impossible to find something in the house, I call for Jan’s assistance. All I have to do is look away for a few minutes and he almost always turns up with the lost object.
My brother likes to wonder about things. He likes to find out what makes things run, and is curious about the cause and effect of actions and ideas. I definitely would not presume to know what precisely is going on in his head. This is simply my conclusion after years of observation.
When Jan was younger, he would dismantle the furniture and examine the pieces. He would also take apart electronic devices. We would find the skeletons of our household appliances and other electronic widgets all over the house.
I imagine he thinks, ‘What will happen if I push this button or flick that switch? And why?’ My brother would spend many more hours fascinated by the innards of a telephone than with a commercial toy.
Jan has his own way of looking at the world. It is strange how he can sometimes make the logical seem illogical, or the illogical logical. Perhaps what normal people define as logic does not apply in the laws of his world.
One afternoon, our domestic help had just finished frying a fish for lunch. She placed it on a plate next to the kitchen stove and went away for a few minutes, only to come back and find the plate empty. My brother loves a good cooked fish, so we thought that little Jan had snuck the fish someplace in the house to snack on it. The girl fried another fish, then finished preparing the rest of lunch.
It was only that evening when we discovered the whereabouts of the missing fish. We found it swimming, as it were, alongside the goldfish in the pond in our balcony.
I am not sure if that fish had flown before ending up in the pond – one could just imagine it whizzing through the air, launched by a small hand.
For another of Jan’s specialities is his good aim, a talent which he displayed from a young age. One of my fondest memories happened when I was about seven and the little fellow about a year old. I had been dozing on a mattress in the living room in the afternoon. The tot had been in his playpen, right at the head of the mattress.
I remember having a dream in which I was playing in a garden, until I somehow fell down some stairs and bumped my head painfully a few times. Still dreaming, I began to grow distressed when the bumping would not stop.
I awoke, only to have the bumping and thudding against my skull continue. It took me a few seconds to realise that my sweet baby brother, using those small cardboard books my parents were always buying him, had been cheerfully using my head for target practice. Even as I looked up at his angelic little face, a book on teddy bears hit me squarely between the eyes.
One possible explanation for this charming awakening is that he might have been trying to get my attention. I used to dive into his playpen and we would have pillow-and-blanket-andteddy bear fights. And so, fed up with this silly sister who would not wake up, the little scholar had turned to his books.
The 9th Step
My brother hates cats.
He likes cartoon ones, such as Garfield and Doraemon, well enough. He just does not like the ones with real fur and spit.
It all started with a family trip to Malacca when he was about three years old. We had just finished lunch at a cluster of hawker stalls. My father had gone to pay for the food and as the rest of us were waiting by the roadside, I caught sight of Jan determinedly eyeing this brown-and-grey stray lying by the side of the road, nonchalantly washing its whiskers. Our domestic help, who was holding his hand, did not notice her charge’s new-found interest in the cat.
The cat was leisurely flicking its tail.
Left, right. Left, right. Left, right.
Before anyone could stop our little emperor, he had gleefully stomped on the cat’s tail as it landed with another soft thump on the ground.
Now, my mother used to buy Jan some really sturdy footwear – those Bubblegummer shoes with thick rubber soles. I had stubbed my toe on those things a few times. It had not been fun.
My brother had put enough zeal in his stomp for that cat to pass on the ensuing crook in its tail down generations of descendants.
With an enraged yowl, the affronted feline took a few hefty swipes at my brother’s shins, leaving long claw marks across them, before bolting. My brother yelle
d and the family hurried to tend to him. My mother, who had not witnessed the whole thing, blamed the cat.
From then on, Jan would never go near another cat again. It is said that autistic individuals may lack what is called “generalisation of learning”. It means they do not know how to apply what is learned in one situation to other similar circumstances. For example, an autistic child is taught not to scribble on a cupboard door. However he or she does not understand that they are not to scribble on any cupboard door, not just that particular one.
In this case, there was no worry about my brother lacking generalisation of learning; he got scratched by one cat, perfectly understood that he could very well be scratched by any other cat, and hence would never again be tempted to step on any cat’s tail.
I found out years later that I, at the time, probably had not explained clearly enough that Jan was the one who had first incurred the cat’s wrath. My mother had the notion that the cat had been depraved.
‘The poor thing,’ said my mother of Jan. ‘If I had been closer to that cat, I would have swiped at it with my bag before it ran away.’
‘Mummy,’ said I. ‘You do know that he started it.’
‘Eh?’
‘He stepped on the cat’s tail. Very heartily. With his Bubblegummer shoes on.’
There was a pause.
Then my mother said, ‘Oh, that would explain it then.’
The 10th Step
Jan used to have the fiercest tantrums when he was about four, right up till he was eight or so.
In that mood, he was like an unstoppable force of nature. If you tied a watering hose to him and let him loose, you could have watered an entire plantation in record time. One of the most trying aspects was his interest in little else but running around. Trying to calm him down or hold him back during a tantrum was akin to taming a squall.
I remember back when my mother was much stronger health wise, she would bring Jan to the market after seeing me off to school, as there was no one at home to mind him. Jan usually behaved himself fairly well when it came to these outings. He liked going out and riding the public transportation.
During one of these outings, an incident occurred that left an indelible mark on our memories.
My mother and Jan had taken a taxi to a small mart. When they arrived, the mart was still a few minutes from its appointed opening time. Jan, however, was thrilled at the sight of the mart and tried to get in. He and my mother were stopped by the mart folks. They said they would open at the time they were supposed to open, not a minute earlier and not a minute later.
‘Can’t you make an exception just this once?’ my mother asked them, as Jan began to cry. ‘He’s a special needs child. What difference will three or four minutes make?’
They said it was their policy, and that was that. My mother asked to speak with their supervisor or whoever was in charge. It turned out she was already talking to them.
Three-year-old Jan then went into a full-fledged tantrum. My mother managed to carry him, a screaming bundle of flailing arms and legs, some distance away from the entrance, whereupon he threw himself on the ground and cried and shrieked and rolled around till he was thoroughly red in the face. Then he cried some more till he turned a little blue.
The mart people went about their business as if nothing noteworthy was happening. It was none of their business and Policy stood on their side.
Some folks passing by stopped to help my mother. A few of them marched up to the mart people and demanded that my brother and mother be let in. However, they too lost to Policy. By the time the mart did finally open, not a minute earlier nor a minute later than it was supposed to, my brother had cried himself sick and my mother had to bring him home.
Sometimes, it is not a matter of whether a person can or cannot help. It is a matter of whether they choose to. The mini-mart staff chose not to. My mother was not the only person who left the place disgusted; so were the other people who had stopped to help her. That mart lost more than a few customers that morning.
On the bright side, this is proof that not all our countrymen and women are cold, standoffish and unhelpful as are often portrayed. My family will always remember that there are indeed lovely people around who would help a mother in need.
The 11th Step
As he grew older, Jan took a greater interest in various things, such as writing. My mother would spend hours with him, teaching him to write and draw and colour.
He used to be able to write nice legible letters, the proof of which could be seen on table surfaces, the backs of chairs and the walls at home, where he had scrawled his name. I was torn between scolding him and wanting to have a good laugh at having the perpetrator sign his name at the scene of the crime.
Law enforcement would take an interesting turn if culprits everywhere acquired such a habit. Another entertaining image was the thought of putting a black cloth mask over his face and handing him a toy rapier.
Soon my brother was introduced to the wonderful world of computers and, along with it, computer keyboards. Jan gave up his pens and crayons; he probably ceased to see the point.
He stopped writing by hand and has since typed everything he wanted to write. He has not been bothered to pick up a pen or pencil for years, and it is a bit of a pity as he has probably forgotten most of his penmanship.
At the keyboard, he types out little compositions such as “Go to the shop and buy ice-cream” or “Mummy buy pizza”. If he is in a more diligent mood, he might type a few sentences about what happens first and what happens next, and what happens after that.
I suppose it qualifies as a “story” of sorts. These stories are mostly about things he has seen or done or would like to do. He understands the notion of causality to some extent. At the very least, he is conscious of the idea that things occur in sequence.
The 12th Step
Jan will follow instructions if he is in the mood. When he was younger, he would follow instructions when he stopped running long enough to hear them and carry them out. Nowadays, if he is not in the mood, he will either give you a grumpy look and flounce away or ignore you altogether.
If one catches Jan in good humour, however, he can be very helpful. He will sometimes even take the initiative with household chores without being told.
The slight catch is that taking the initiative also gives him the chance to plan and execute Big Ideas around the house. Big Ideas can be quite hazardous to our laundry, cooking and the lifespan of miscellaneous household appliances.
The 13th Step
My brother has a sense of humour and it is a decidedly mischievous one. He would snicker, snigger and smirk, for instance, whenever he pulls a fast one on somebody else. Jan is also a big admirer of Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean. He has watched the television series, the live-action movies and the cartoons. It is the hijinks that tickle him. He is always entertained by the fixes Mr Bean gets in and out of, and the messes generated along the way.
Mr Bean can get ingeniously acrobatic in his attempts to get out of trouble, and therein lies the fun. For Jan takes great amusement in things that go bump and crack and crash on screen (which might not make him that much different from regular people). His favourite movie is the Disney animated film Hercules, which too has a lot of crashing and thundering in it, and he has played and bested the computer game version countless times.
It is not surprising that Jan is also a great fan of Jim Davis’s Garfield comics. They are filled with crashes and thumps and falls, in bright colours. An illustrated character can also pull a monkey face at Jan for as long as he chooses to stay on the page. Jan is especially entertained when a member of the family is there to act out the cartoon mishaps and antics, complete with crunching and tooting and loud splat sounds.
It is worth the theatrics when Jan afterwards sits down to pore over the comic books, turning page after page, or when he totes the books around as prized possessions.
I imagine it is this love for the theatrical that makes Jan a dev
otee of Cantonese and Teochew opera videos, what with the clashing and clanging of cymbals and drums, dramatic string music, stirring singing, glittering costumes and larger-than-life characters.
He first began watching them at home with my father, and still watches them today. If my mother and I happen to join in, my father would translate the story for us non-dialect speakers. I used to have trouble appreciating Chinese opera, and was only moved to take a look when my brother showed such great fascination.
It was blatant sibling rivalry, of course. I had not wanted to end up the uncultured offspring.
The 14th Step
There is an idea that special needs children need not be disciplined. While this is not always true, the rod is frowned upon with great wagging eyebrows.
The doctors greatly disapprove of corporal punishment for special needs children. It offers no solutions and may even make things worse. Personally, I think the notion of hitting children should be locked up in a special mental cell and the keys thrown away.
In the case of professionals who work with children, we literally do not lay one finger upon the child when meting out punishment. Violence begets violence. What is the point of fretting about the violence children watch on television when grown-ups around them are themselves being violent?
Jan, for instance, can get out of line when he gets his way too much. In fact he can be positively infuriating. However, he listens to reason. If we get angry, he gets angrier and we get nowhere.
We have found that Calm Reasoning is the best way to make him understand that there is no need to get upset. We let him know the reason we do or do not want him to do something. When Jan misbehaves, Calm Reasoning shows him that we do not disapprove of him, but rather, we take issue with what he has done.