"So what are you?"

I have always envied those who can answer this in a long-winded way to include every continent on earth and throw in various mix of spices in quarters or eighths, or even sixteenths. My friend, Ms Pants Advocate, can list over half of the UN Security Council in her blood stream.

Being just full-blooded anything seems so...dull.

On a recent trip to China with my parents, a revelation came one night out at dinner in Chengdu.

"Dad! Let's do the family tree when we get home!" I excitedly said. Earlier, we had visited an elderly relative who revealed all the glory of the old family. Oxford scholars, renowned surgeons and crazed artists abound in the thick volume of my paternal grandmother's family tree.

"Pfft!" My fat cousin scoffed at the idea.

"We're not doing YOUR family tree. We're doing OURS!" I scoffed back. He's on my mother's side of the family and thus we don't share the same surname.

"Sometimes, you find things things you don't want to know, " he retorted quietly.

Given my limited mastery of the Chinese language, all I could come up with was very loudly, "I DON'T CARE!" and a pout.

My outburst was met by silence around the dinner table. Momma and Pappa looked embarrassed. We don't know what drugs she's been taking while on her own in Melbourne, we might need to have a quiet chat with her later, the look on their faces revealed.

And then the silence was broken by my cousin.

"You want to find out about how your grandfather's mother was not even his mother? The old man was illegitimate! The woman was a sing-song girl who became a concubine!"

"What?!" This was obviously news to my mother as well. At that point I couldn't tell if she was upset or confused.

"See, you don't want to play with history," fat cousin emphasised again.

Silence ensued while plates of Szechuan delicacies were brought to our table. I picked at the green peppercorns and stole looks at my mother in between. I wondered, what was the psyche of a woman who just found out her much admired father was a bastard?

"Well. That could explain why he was an outrageously good-looking man." She finally said, with a hint of smugness.

"The old man was still a bastard." Fat cousin insisted.

"Shut it!" I said defensively of the man who caught a tortoise for me the first time we met. "He was still your grandfather."

The uncomfortable silence continued.

Two weeks ago, I turned 26. The momentous occasion this year was all the more special when I received a Graf von Faber-Castell mechanical pencil from Le Garçon.Though it is not jewellery or handbag, it is more than enough bling to last me for a very very long time.
[1989. Shanghai, China.]

I saw my first mechanical pencil at a stationery store on Huaihai Road with my Mama. It was shiny silver with a handsome black grip. I thought it was the classiest thing I had ever seen in my life and bound to make me have the best handwriting in the whole school. Unfortunately, this was back in the old country - fine things were rare and expensive.

"You can have that pencil if you get full marks in your test next week," my Mama bribed. It took a bold statement like that to move me away from the glass cabinet that the mechanical pencil was encased in.

I studied my times table and Chinese poetry like crazy that week. But as fate would have it, I didn't get full marks. I got 89% in Chinese and 97% in Maths. I stared at the numbers in the report card with bitterness as I thought about how the mechanical pencil was going to be encased in that glass cabinet forever. I was seven-years-old and had already started to develop a tendency for the melodramatic.

Slowly, I began to change the numbers on the report card. I was seven-years-old and had not yet learned that there was no possible way of making either "89" or "97" look like "100".

On the way home, the guilt of it all started to weigh down on me. I was also aware that the two 100's did not really look that legitimate. It all got too much that when I handed my passive Papa the report card, I burst out crying and fessed up.

Like how they were for the rest of my childhood, they didn't lose their temper or yell. They simply said they were disappointed and it was enough for the water works to overflow the dam again.

A few days later, while shopping with my Mama, I saw the mechanical pencil again in the same store. I stared at it again and quickly walked away. But this time, Mama pulled me back to the glass cabinet.

"You changed your marks so you could have this, didn't you?" she asked.

I sheepishly agreed.

"I was going to buy it for you anyway. But if I buy it for you today, you will have to never lie again."

I nodded but I felt awful. It was a prize I shouldn't have won. It was also 3RMB and I knew that Mama only took home 20RMB a week. When I finally held the pencil in my hand, I got no satfisfaction in knowing that it was mine. It was tainted goods. I put it in my desk drawer when I got home and never used it.
"So that's the worst thing you've ever done in your whole life?" Le Garçon asked when we were trading childhood stories about a year ago. "You fibbed your way into getting some pencil and that's the worst you've got?"

"It was a mechanical pencil! And I lied to get it and mum still bought it for me even though it cost 15% of her weekly wage! I was a horrible child!"

"That's still the worst thing you've ever done?" He asked in disbelief.
On my birthday, I tore through the wrapping and shook the box slightly to hear if it sounded like the pair of earrings I had been hinting for all week. When I finally opened the white oblong box, I was seven-years-old again, staring at the classiest thing ever.

"So you can have one legitimately now," he said.

But what was I supposed to tell my parents? I have not spoken about my downfall of 1989 since the event.

A day later, my passive Papa called.

"What did the Boy get you for your birthday?" he asked.

"He got me a mechanical pencil."

"A what?"

"Remember that time in second grade when I changed my mark so I could get a mechanical pencil?" It was inevitable to relive the shame all over again.

"No? When did that happen?" Passive Papa was clueless.

"In second grade! Mum said I could only have it if I aced my tests that term." I was starting to get exasperated that he couldn't remember the worst thing I have ever done in my life.

"So you changed marks?" Passive Papa started to laugh.

"Yes. I felt awful."

"Why your mother not buy it for you? It couldn't be that much!" He said sympathetically.

"But she did! And it was 3RMB when you guys only made 20RMB a week!"

"How you still remember that?" he asked.

"How do you not remember that??" I asked, "You mean I've been carrying the guilt of this horrible thing I did for almost twenty years and you guys don't even remember?"

"No. Can't remember."