Sunday School

My mother believes in Deng Xiaoping's famous quote, "It does not matter whether the cat is black or white so long as it catches the mice."

Just consider how I got to go to church when I was young...

To provide some background: When I was in primary school, the medium of instruction in school had already been changed to Malay, and the second language was English. Thus, I did not have a chance to learn Chinese - which my mother thought was a shame.

So when my mother found out about the Sunday school at the Emmanuel Baptist Church which was conducted in Cantonese, she allowed me and my sisters to attend the classes every Sunday - notwithstanding that she was not a believer. Both my mother and grandmother were Taoists and for a short while, my mother was also a believer of a Japanese sect of Buddhism.

But my mother has always been a practical sort of person. She thought that by attending the Sunday school, we would get some "free" exposure to the formal Chinese script and that would be good for us. In her opinion, the content was secondary - and anyway, my mother would rationalise, which religion teaches its followers to be bad?

Christianity was not totally alien to my mother. Her father (my grandfather, already deceased at that time) was a Christian. All my mother's cousins were Christians too. In fact, it was her cousins who attended Emmanuel Baptist and encouraged my mother to send us there.

So that was how I started going to Sunday School. Our Sunday school book was written in Chinese characters and every week we were supposed to memorise a "golden" verse in Cantonese. Besides the verses, I soon got to learn the books of the Bible and names of prophets in Cantonese. We also sang Cantonese worship songs.

The Sunday school made it hassle-free for us to attend. A small church van would come to pick us up about 7:30am and bring us home after Sunday school about 11am - gratis. We got to know the van-driver pretty well - he was a volunteer of course and was really a butcher on weekdays. My mother would give us 10 cents or 20 cents each time so that we could put into the offering bag that was passed around.

We became involved in other church activities as well. During the school holidays, we would attend the Vacation Bible School that was conducted within the church premises itself. Every year, we would participate in the Bible Verse Recital Competition.

I remember doing quite well in those competitions - in fact, it was for one of those competitions that I first learnt the entire passage on Love from 1 Corinthians 13:

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails."

But I did not do it in English - imagine memorising the whole verse in Cantonese, lol!

"爱是恒久忍耐，又有恩慈。爱是不嫉妒，不自夸，不张狂；不作失礼的事，不求自己的益处，不轻易动怒，不计较人的过犯；不喜欢不义，只喜欢真理。爱是凡事包容，凡事相信，凡事盼望，凡事忍耐。爱是永存不息的。"

Easter, Christmas... we would be celebrating them at the church and we would invite family members to participate in the events. My grandmother and mother would come to church on those special occasions. I also remember witnessing baptism ceremonies whereby members who were being baptised were totally submerged in water in the small glass enclosure that was at the center of the pulpit.

Sad to say, Cantonese remains my foreign tongue. My knowledge of the Bible could only be superficial because I could not really read Chinese, without formal instruction. Thus, when I was older, I inevitably turned to reading the Bible in English and started attending other churches.

But I would always remember the warm-hearted members and pastors of Emmanuel Baptist who made us all feel very welcomed in the church. My mother would be glad that her objective was achieved - albeit in a small way. After all, I did become acquainted with the Chinese script in the end!