Mrs Ong arched her brow and said, “I accept your apology. I would like an apology from the other parent too. Otherwise, I will advise my husband not to go ahead with the school excursion to Jurong Bird Park he was thinking of sponsoring for the year-end holidays. I myself will also put an end to the weekly play dates.”
The entire class understood the terms and gasped. Some of the girls began to whimper. The Darkie user glared at Gimme Lao and hissed fiercely, “This is all your mother’s fault!” All the children who heard it turned and focused their collective glares of hatred on Gimme Lao. His cheeks burning, Gimme Lao stood up and walked towards his mother. There was an ambivalent look in his eyes as he asked his mother in a whispery voice, “Do you want to apologise?”
Gimme Lao’s mother’s eyes were red with anger, but her tone was firm and decisive when she said, “No, we should not apologise.” Gimme Lao bit his lip and nodded in silence. There was a flash of understanding between mother and son as they held hands and strolled out of the classroom. They could hear muffled comments and discussions behind their backs and knew the remarks would not be friendly. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was that they stood their ground.
The two of them took a bus down to Cold Storage Milk Bar at Orchard Road and had ice cream. They shared a banana split, taking turns to scoop from the three balls of vanilla, chocolate and strawberry flavours. Lost in their respective thoughts, neither spoke. Afterwards, they strolled over to the MPH bookstore at Stamford Road. Gimme Lao found a Children’s Encyclopaedia of Birds and spent an hour browsing through with melancholy. When Gimme Lao’s mother asked if that was the book he wanted, Gimme nodded. He would have to be content with the illustrations now that there would not be any school excursion to the Jurong Bird Park. Not quite the real thing, but they would have to do.
Gimme Lao’s mother saw her boy looking downcast and fury surged in her chest again. This time, the anger was no longer directed at the snobbish woman who thought she could dictate which child would get to have fun and which child would not. Truth was, she could. That woman could effectively ostracise her boy and deprive him of what he craved for. And Gimme Lao’s mother was furious that she herself was unable to protect her child from the pain and the hurt.
That very moment, Gimme Lao’s mother made a momentous decision. She would find the money to sponsor the school excursion to Jurong Bird Park herself.
Gimme Lao’s mother was under no illusion about their financial standing. Her husband worked as a clerk in an insurance company and brought home a fixed pay of 180 dollars a month. She herself earned 120 dollars a month at the pharmacy. They could afford the house mortgage, but not a car. They could bring their boy for a day trip to the zoo, but an overseas holiday was out of the question. To pay for entrance tickets for 26 children and a teacher to the Jurong Bird Park, hire a bus to ferry them to and fro and possibly buy them lunch, could easily add up to their combined take-home pay for the month. There was no way she was going to dip into the family savings.
The money would have to be additional earnings.
Three days later, Gimme Lao’s mother deposited Gimme at Grandma Toh’s place after dinner. Her husband was surprised to see her putting on lipstick.
“Where are you going?” he asked, while getting ready to leave for his weekly session of Chinese chess. Despite the fact that he wasn’t very good at it, Gimme Lao’s father was a fanatic. When they first got married, he engaged his wife in the game two to three nights a week. Over time Gimme Lao’s mother lost interest; her husband’s moves were tediously slow and his strategies embarrassingly transparent. She was glad when he met a fellow chess enthusiast of similar calibre at his workplace, a sales manager called Harrison Pua who lived six bus stops away. The pair had stuck to their weekly matches for several years now.
“I need to talk to Harrison,” she remarked. “I know he is constantly recruiting new sales staff.”
“But we have discussed this before,” Gimme Lao’s father was unable to hide the whine in his voice. “I can’t do sales. I know Harrison says anybody can be trained but…I am just not ready.”
“I am.”
Harrison Pua was indeed on the constant lookout for new talent, and he immediately spotted the steely resolve in the woman’s eyes. Although Harrison Pua had occasionally suggested Gimme Lao’s father join his sales team, it had never progressed beyond a mere suggestion. Harrison knew his chess mate well. The man was gentle and amiable, but lacked drive. The only time he could summon aggression was in their game of Chinese chess.
The wife was a different creature altogether. When Harrison explained that it took six weeks to undergo training and sit for the certification examination, the woman frowned and asked why should it take so long.
Harrison veiled his grin with a look of concern as he enquired cautiously, “Are you in urgent need of money? I can always give you a loan first, to tide things over.”
“I need money to organise a school excursion for my son.” Gimme Lao’s mother saw the look of worry on her husband’s face and decided to be frank about her intentions. “Thank you for your offer, but I want to do this myself. Just sign me up for the training, Harrison.”
Two months later, Barber Bay was surprised to see Gimme Lao’s mother walk into his shop in the evening. He allowed the unfolded razor to laze against a lathered chin as he gave her a visual frisk and tried to determine what it was that looked unfamiliar. It wasn’t the wavy perm in her hair, nor the bold crimson on her lips, although he was seeing these for the first time. It was the look in her eyes. There was a focused shine in them.
If her unannounced visit merely surprised him, her behaviour shocked him. After greeting him amicably, Gimme Lao’s mother sat on an adjacent chair and introduced herself to the customer whose chin he was shaving. For the remaining 20 minutes while the man was trapped, Gimme Lao’s mother chatted about the unpredictability of life, discussed the responsibility of a man to his family, emphasised the importance of life insurance coverage and asked for an appointment to show the man what her company had to offer. Sustained by a tiny flask of herbal chrysanthemum tea she brought herself, Gimme Lao’s mother engaged the next five customers while they remained immobilised in the barber chair. By the time the last customer left, she had secured two follow-up appointments for herself.
One month later, Gimme Lao’s mother received her first commission cheque from the insurance company. The next day, Gimme Lao was proud to submit a note to Miss Foo Swee Peng. The note stated that his mother would be glad to sponsor a school excursion to Jurong Bird Park for the entire class.
Including Janice Ong.
FOUR
WHEN GIMME LAO was 11, his mother showed him her new name card. In the delicate cursive of Apple Chancery font, the card pronounced her to be Mary Lao, Sales Manager of the Overseas Assurance Company. She also told him that she was well on her way to qualify for the coveted Million Dollar Round Table industry award.
The seven sales agents recruited by Mary Lao knew her story well. It all started with a rude awakening, when the child she loved was made miserable because she as a parent did not wield as much power and influence as the next parent. She was infuriated with herself when she realised she had been lazy with her calling as a mother. It was a jungle out there, and she had picked a role as tame as a mouse deer. As a result, she was defenceless when her offspring was threatened. Fired up by the awakening, she took drastic steps to change her role. She passed the insurance certification examination at the first attempt and closed four cases quickly within the first month. That she was able to sponsor a school trip for her child and his classmates to Jurong Bird Park marked the turning point. She was grooming herself to be a tiger in the jungle. That became the first of Mary Lao’s Five Rules of Success.
Pick your role.
Her agents were invariably shocked when Mary Lao talked about her husband’s failings with brutal honesty. She likened him to a stubborn mouse deer, content to earn a meagre salary even when she
had demonstrated how she could earn in a month what he earned in a year. If one chose to wear the skin of a mouse deer, one could never grow claws.
Mary Lao always ended her sharing by reiterating that it was meant as an illustration, not ridicule. In truth, she wasn’t so sure herself.
Back when she closed her first case five years ago, she was ecstatic and roaring to celebrate. She took her family down to Queen Elizabeth Walk and showed Gimme Lao where she and his father used to go on dates. She described how the hired trishaw dropped them at the Merlion statue, the towering sculpture fusing the head of a lion with the tail of a fish. From there, the two of them strolled along the embankment and took in the nectarous fragrance of the frangipani. Stars dotted the night sky as far as the eye could see, merging with the flickering lights of the cargo ships parked along the seafront. At the end of Queen Elizabeth Walk, they often stopped for supper at the Satay Club, an open cluster of hawkers roasting skewered beef, chicken, pork and mutton on charcoal grills. The air would be thick with succulent enticement. They would order 10 sticks of satay and a block of chewy rice wrapped in coconut leaves to share. Until Gimme was born, those nights were the high points of her life.
Mary Lao was glad that Gimme was in sync with her gaiety. She could tell the boy was as exhilarated by the promised school trip as she herself was by the bright future of her budding career. What perplexed her was her husband’s brooding silence. Mary Lao waited till their order of satay arrived and Gimme was preoccupied with the rare treat before asking him in a soft tone, whatever was the matter.
“What you are doing is not very nice.”
Mary Lao was astonished, both by the admonishing tone of voice and by his readiness with the reproach. He had obviously been harbouring the resentment for a while now.
“The way you barge into the barbershop and bombard the customers with no regard to how Barber Bay feels is rude, to say the least. Does it not concern you that you may scare away some of his customers?”
“Has he complained to you?” Mary Lao was curious.
“No, Barber Bay is too decent a gentleman to complain. But that doesn’t give you the right to bully him.”
Mary Lao knotted her brows as she studied her husband. He was not given to quick temper, and this outburst was uncharacteristic of him. It was especially puzzling because he was not even on close terms with Barber Bay. “Why are you so upset when Barber Bay himself did not make a complaint?”
“Because I hate to see nice people bullied.” Her husband pressed on. “Remember the incident when Barber Bay was bullied by the laksa hawker and had to wash his sambal chilli jars for weeks? It’s not right. And poor Barber Bay would still be washing the jars if Grandma Toh hadn’t intervened. I hate to see you doing the same thing to him.”
Mary Lao reminded herself to soften her tone as she explained what she thought was painfully obvious, to her husband. “First of all, I don’t see myself bullying anybody. Barber Bay offers his customers hair cutting services, while I offer them insurance service. Many people don’t realise they need insurance, so I make the fact clear to them. Eventually, when their families collect insurance benefits, they too will thank me. They thank me, not because I am nice to them, but because I provided a necessary service to them. In fact, I am confident that before the year ends, I will sign Barber Bay up for his first insurance policy too.”
“If he ends up buying a policy from you, it is because he is too nice to say no,” her husband rebuked.
Irked by his bullheadedness, Mary Lao raised her voice, “This preoccupation with being nice and decent is precisely the problem with you, Mr Lao Sheng Yang! You can’t stand people not liking you. And you find it more important to be nice and likable than right and effective. Guess what? If you choose to be nice in life, you will end up washing other people’s sambal chilli jars. I don’t aspire to be nice. I do what is necessary to get what I want. If others don’t like it, it’s their problem, not mine.”
What occurred next caught Mary Lao and her husband off guard. His tiny cheeks bulging with a chunk of half masticated mutton, Gimme suddenly waved his satay stick in the air like a wand and in a mumbled outburst, regurgitated what he just heard, “I don’t aspire to be nice. I do what is necessary to get what I want. If others don’t like it, it’s their problem, not mine. Kekeke…”
That ended any serious discussion for the night.
Although Mary Lao did not enjoy arguing with her husband, his dissension did help to delineate and entrench her stance. She did not need her prospects to like her. She just needed them to realise that they needed life insurance. Her role was really very simple. Once they heard her out, any sensible person would want to sign on the dotted line to acquire an insurance policy.
Or so she thought initially.
As the weeks went by, Mary Lao became increasingly amazed by how few people were willing to face the truth or have their comfort zones challenged. Many people did not like to discuss death, or accidents or illnesses. Since that was what Mary Lao generally discussed, they had a tendency to avoid her. If they found themselves in her company, they made it obvious that they were willing to discuss the unbearable heat of the day, or the horrendous price of vegetables, but not the unbearable tragedy of illness and death, nor the horrendous hardship that widows and orphans suffered. Such topics made them uncomfortable.
“Have you not noticed that the rowdy fishmonger who used to shout and beckon you at the market doesn’t do that anymore?” her husband remarked. “He doesn’t even want your business!”
Mary Lao did not like the snide undertone in his voice. She suppressed the urge to start an argument and told herself that she could do better than an attempt to convince. She would prove her point.
The following Sunday, Mary Lao picked the busiest hour at the market to pay the fishmonger a visit at his stall. Besieged by the weekend throng, it was easy for the fishmonger to ignore her. Over two hours, he noticed Mary Lao watching him and regularly scribbling on a notepad. When the throng eventually thinned out, he could no longer contain his curiosity.
“What are you doing, Mrs Lao?”
That was the break Mary Lao had been waiting for.
“I was doing some calculations,” she said. “In the last two hours, you sold more than 40 fish. Each fish sold required you to chop it up using that massive, unwieldy cleaver of yours. It must be hard on your wrist.”
The fishmonger raised the cleaver, waved it around dexterously and laughed, “Twenty years of practice. Practically part of my arm now!”
“I wonder if your wife can do the same?”
“Have you seen my wife?” the fishmonger sniggered. “She won’t last an hour!”
“What if you went on vacation, without your family, a really long one, and she had to do it?”
“Why would I want to go on vacation without my family?” The fishmonger was puzzled.
“Well, Grandma Toh’s husband did, many years ago. And he never returned, leaving Grandma Toh alone to fend for herself and her daughter.”
The fishmonger’s face turned ashen. He attended to one of his customers and pointedly ignored Mary Lao. But Mary Lao pressed on with her monologue. She took calculated advantage of his physical entrapment and kept hammering at the shield of resistance to reach the rational mind behind. It took a long while, but the fishmonger eventually saw that Mary Lao was not discussing his death, but his wife’s livelihood following. In the end, Mary Lao left the market with a discounted silver pomfret and a sales appointment scheduled for the same night.
The experience with the fishmonger developed into the second of Mary Lao’s Five Rules of Success.
Give yourself permission.
Mary Lao gave herself permission to behave in ways that did not endear her to others. She accosted the laksa hawker during his mid-afternoon hiatus and switched off his radio so he could hear her better. She surprised her tailor with a packet of his favourite ginger tea, but distressed him for an entire afternoon with her sales talk. Sh
e went to the provision shop to buy a bottle of vinegar and refused to leave until the shop owner granted her a sales appointment.
Although her prospects generally found her approach annoying, they started listening once she abraded their layer of scepticism. For the women, Mary’s reminder that they would be in trouble if the breadwinner in the family no longer provided for them struck fear. For the men, Mary’s appeal to their sense of responsibility as husbands and fathers bolstered their ego. When the required signature was finally inked on the dotted line, Mary Lao never thanked them for the business. She always made it a point to thank them for taking good care of their family.
As the months went by, Mary Lao’s husband became increasingly bewildered by her success. He was rattled when his chess mate, Harrison the sales manager, repeatedly referred to Mary Lao as the company’s star discovery of the decade. It went against his grain to accept that his wife could win the trust of her clients when she conducted herself in such an abrasive manner. Yet the truth could not be denied. Barely a year into her new career, his wife was earning three times his salary. Once, when she revisited the possibility of him switching into insurance sales, he stiffened and would not discuss it. Heaving a sigh of resignation, she asked if he would ever give himself permission to succeed in life. That was the first instance he felt hatred towards her.
When Mary Lao started making good money consistently, she began to indulge the family. She was proud to bring them to dim sum lunches on Sundays at the swanky Mayflower Restaurant and thought nothing of buying her boy a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for his birthday gift. She failed to notice that awkward moment of embarrassment every time the bill was wrongly delivered to her husband, and she had to snap her fingers to redirect the waiter. Neither was she aware that her son ceased asking her husband for permission, favours or advice. The child had sensed the shift of power in decision-making and had leaned in her direction accordingly.
Let's Give It Up for Gimme Lao! Page 6