Growing Up, Staying Young

 

Hiu-fai Fong

 

 

I had trouble sleeping that night.  The peaceful, rhythmic breathing of my younger sister across the room could not calm me as I lay under the covers in the dark, listening for the heavy footsteps of an elderly man sneaking through the downstairs floor of my house. With one hand firmly choking Red Blankie, I reached with the other to turn the alarm clock on my bedstand toward me.  The fluorescent red digits whispered 12:03 in the still, black room.  Perhaps he will come soon.

 

Delicate tingles danced up my arms, as I froze like a nervous cat, ears up, ready and alert.  I rehearsed the carefully planned sequence of events in my head.  A suspicious and unfamiliar sound from the living room would be my signal -- a wet snow boot hitting the carpet, a clumsy hand inadvertently knocking over a dish on the fireplace, or a rustle of papers.  Carefully, I would slide out of my flowered bed without waking my sleeping sister, tiptoe gently across the bedroom floor out into the chilly hall, and down the first five stairs, avoiding the creaky spots in the floor along the way.  There, peering around the corner of the wall that ended at the fifth stair, I would at last behold the mysterious man whom no one in my family -- not Mommy, not Daddy, and of course not little Ming -- had ever seen.  The bearded man would be dressed in a red suit with white trim.  His name was Santa Claus.  Mommy and Daddy had told me that Santa and his nine reindeer wouldn't come to put presents under the Christmas tree until after I had fallen asleep, but of course, they didn't know about my brilliant plan to catch the old man in the act. 

 

Squinting under the meager moonlight that peered in through my bedroom window, I forced myself to open another Berenstein Bears book, the 13^th one of the night, hoping that by the time I reached the last page, Santa would finally be here.

 

* * * * *

 

"This world is but a canvas to our imagination," wrote Henry David Thoreau.  As a young child, I clung to this inspirational message and ran with it to millions of marvelous places in my mind.  I believed in everything, from my "invisible" collie Fluffy to Santa Claus, Rudolf, and the rest of the reindeer.  Everything I saw and heard and read sang to me, inspired me, and thrilled me.

 

When my mom wouldn't let me have a puppy, Fluffy came into my life.  She was my imaginary collie, every bit as real as the dogs I saw climbing against the scratched windows of the mall pet shops.  I took her for walks around my back yard, fed her juicy crimson mulberries from our tree, and taught her to rescue children from burning buildings, like Lassie did on Nickelodeon.  My time with Fluffy was limited, however, when I found a job in the restaurant business.  As the owner, waiter, and cook, I spent many hours in the red and yellow playhouse in my basement taking orders from hungry customers and preparing exotic foods for their culinary pleasure.

 

My best friend Jenny joined me in many of my childhood adventures.  After reading Freckle Juice by Judy Blume in second grade, she and I were convinced we could get rid of her horrible brown freckles with a fantastic concoction of rainbow colored vitamins, brilliant blue bathroom cleanser, delightful soap bubbles, hairspray mist, and two tablespoons of mouthwash.  Unfortunately, Jenny refused to have a taste of the murky, pungent solution after we had finished making it, and we had to explore other options for freckle-removal.

 

* * * * *

 

Looking back through the distant haze of memory into that magical period of my youth, it is difficult for me, as a young adult, to completely understand this outrageously imaginative and idealistic girl of my childhood.  Somewhere along the way, I lost her uncanny ability to fulfill any unattainable wish or desire with a creation of the mind.  Somewhere else along the way, I began questioning her absolute faith in all that was given to her as "the truth."  I don't know when and where and how this transformation came about, but as I recount all these stories from my childhood, I can't help but laugh at their naïve simplicity.  

 

Similarly, in the movie "Dogma," a character named Bethany confided in her friend Liz that she no longer felt inspired and moved by the grand, biblical stories she heard in Church.  "I don't think I have any faith left," she admitted sadly. 

           

"Faith is like a glass of water," Liz explained. "When you're young, the glass is full, and it's easy to fill up.  But the older you get, the bigger the glass gets, and the same amount of water doesn't fill the glass anymore."

           

Just as Bethany, a 25-year-old woman, sees herself questioning the religious beliefs she readily embraced as a child, I likewise notice a little skepticism growing inside me.  Perhaps it began the moment some grade-school classmate convinced me that there was actually no Santa Claus.  I am probably not alone in this feeling.  As we grow older, we begin to find that our perception of the idyllic world around us changes and that our long-held beliefs will not always "fill the water glass" or provide satisfactory explanations. Oftentimes, these realizations are extremely discomforting.  Not long after I recovered from the news about Santa Claus, I had to deal with the shocking news that I did not magically appear in my Mommy's stomach one day to be born nine months later, but that my Daddy was a key player in the whole process.  Nowadays, I would not be able to conjure up an imaginary dog to entertain me for hours no matter how hard I try.

 

In the summer of 1993, I went back to Disney Land as a teenager and was surprised to see how radically it had changed.  The frightening witch in the Snow White and the Seven Dwarves ride that jumped out at the end and cursed me with months of vivid nightmares when I was seven years old, now seemed silly and mechanical.  The beautiful Jasmine character walking around signing autographs and posing in photos with eager children looked less like a true Arabian princess than an exhausted woman with an artificial smile and heavy makeup that was melting in the 93-degree heat.  Where, I wondered, was the magical paradise for which I had distinct memories?

 

Perhaps Liz's comparison between faith and a glass of water has an element of truth to it.  I certainly do not believe in everything as innocently as I did as a child.  It is now less than two weeks away from 21^st birthday -- a day which signifies my official departure from childhood and legal entrance into adulthood.  Surprisingly, I feel a little sad.  "Why?" my baffled classmate asked me.  "Do you really want to still be a child, still believing blindly in Santa Claus and other things that don't exist?"

 

Certainly I do not wish to be childishly ignorant.  Nor do I want to continue thinking that everything I am told is the absolute, irrefutable truth.  But in fact there is something quite comforting about believing that the world is my own personal playground  -- "a canvas to [my] imagination" -- without evil or suffering.  After all, there is a part of me that yearns to be protected and to be assured that every problem I face will be resolved "happily ever after" as in the fairy tales my dad used to read to me.

 

Whenever I am particularly stressed out, as I was this summer as I prepared to take the Medical College Admissions Test, my strongest feeling is a desire to be at home.  Somehow, "home," with my parents, is a place where I will always be The Child and where I can temporarily escape from the realities that overwhelm me as a young adult.  My parents always joke about how they still see me as the little girl who used to  climb out of her shopping cart and run around fearlessly in the crowded supermarket, knowing her parents would somehow find her in the end.  Perhaps there are some elements of childhood imagination and idealism that will stay with me forever.  Though I don't stay up anymore on Christmas Eve, reading books to wait for Santa Claus, I still have the power to believe in other abstractions besides the white-bearded man -- entities such as "fate" or "true love" that may seem every bit as fanciful.  I also have the ability to imagine a society that does not use bombs to solve disagreements and can instead trust in reason and diplomacy.  The idealistic notion that one person can make a difference in the world motivates me everyday in my quest to be a doctor.

 

As a child, I read the story of Peter Pan, an adolescent boy who refused to grow up and thus stayed in Never Never Land, a magical place where he wouldn't age and could spend his days in spectacular adventures.  I hope that as I grow another year older, I can always keep a little Peter Pan in my spirit, that I can see a story in even the most simple things around me, and that I will continue, every Christmas Eve, to leave cookies and milk out for Santa Claus.