To whack or not to whack

Russell Peters was right. Asian people whack their kids. They whack their kids hard. But what are the repercussions of this century-old way of Asian upbringing?

My mother told me a story that popped into my head whilst I was writing this:

A household of four generations of women lived together in which one day the youngest, a child of 8, asked her mother why she always cut the edges off the sausages before putting them into the frying pan.

The mother said that she didn't know, but that was how her mother had been making the sausages since she was a little girl.

After the little girl pressed on, and out of curiousity, the mother asked the grandmother the reason behind this suddenly weird and senseless practice... only to find that the grandmother had no idea why either.

So off the three went to the great-grandmother, who was reading her newspaper through her fishing bowl glasses. She looked at them with her 80-year- old squinty eyes, smacked her lips and said:

"Why, our frying pan was too small to house the sausages, so we had to cut the tip of the sausages off to make the damn sausages fit! Now go away and leave me in peace!"

With that ending, my mother also left a cautionary note, that it is sometimes more practical to question how some things had been done all this while, than to just take it at face value. Of course, this particular story sounds more like an anecdote and no harm ever came from having to cut off the edges of sausages before they are cooked, but what about the other traditions that we are to follow, based on what our great-grandmothers tell us?

Being beaten for some Asians can be construed as a symbolic gesture of being loved (and I say this loosely) because it is not uncommon in Asian countries that children are beaten as they grew up. It's not as bad as it sounds: parents use clothes hangers, belts, wooden spoons, the back of their hands and rattan canes they call rotan.

Aahh.. the rotan. That was a huge hit in schools back in the days when teachers are still allowed to cane students for disciplinary problems. After awhile, some smart alec went overseas then came back and figured out it was 'inhumane' to put children through this form of capital punishment and banned rotans from school. And that's when everything went haywire and crime skyrocketed among students. But that's another story.

Like all of my peers, I grew up with beatings and with a lot of medicated oil for relief afterwards; my husband was beaten by a teacher in school for not doing his homework. Til this day, he remembers the name of the teacher who gave him bruises on his backside. I think that that was the reason the teacher did it... to be remembered.

Anyways, my husband's parents never lifted a finger at him, although his older brother did. The mother of a friend of mine broke a wooden spoon when she was disciplining her. She bought another spoon the next day. Then, there was another boy classmate who takes the beatings in the form of a hose. I'm not sure if that works. But my parents chose leather belts as their prime arsenal. They had four daughters and we turned out okay. In fact, my mother said that we were easier to handle than her grandkids, and I believe her.

Speaking of the third generation, kids nowadays don't get beaten for anything. You have globalization to thank for that. Now, to be safe and to prevent heart attacks in some of those reading this, we have to define the word: beat. The beating I'm talking about here isn't the Rihanna type. It ranges from a slap on the palm, a tick behind the ear, the twisting of the earlobes to a full-out whack on a diaper-padded bottom. The kids were never in any harm's way, and yet this low-level form of violence (if you can call it that) were not even extended to them.

And the no.1 reason I hear as the main excuse is: They don't know better. They're too young.

Lady, in the wise words of Russell Peters: beat your kids.

If they know how to play with fire, knives or power sockets, they know enough to be given a whack. Similarly, if they know how to cause harm to another human being, leading to the death of that human being... I don't care if you are 10, you are going to hang for that. The more civilised society has become, the more understanding we are, the more threat we put ourselves into... and we tend to not own up to what are supposed to be our responsibilities.

You see this in many developed countries. One shoots up a whole community because he loses a job. Another, because he couldn't speak English or communicate with another person. Kids who couldn't take the bullying in school takes his father's gun to school and to his classmates and teacher, then to themselves. In Japan a few years back a guy storms a kindergarden, killing innocent children who can barely pronounce their a i u e o, whilst illegal immigrants here rob, kidnap and kill locals because they are out of work and they have family members to feed.

None of these people are actually sorry. They were pressed, they were influenced by the need to counterattack when provoked but none of them actually took responsibility for their actions. And that is very worrying. But to most of them, it is acceptable because they had been pushed to a corner and they are just retaliating. It's like how they say, things that were criminal in normal society are not necessarily criminal in times of war.

But I digressed.

Children need to be taught the idea and concept of responsibility at a very young age. They have to understand that everything they do have consequences and perhaps by teaching them young, we might actually help save the future generation from self-annihilation.

The future seems so grim, suddenly. Or maybe it's just the coffee talking.