Nurse Molly Returns by Katherine Soh

Author:Katherine Soh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789810755607
Publisher: Epigram Books
Published: 2017-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

6 FIRST BLIND DATE

FEBRUARY MARKED THE sixth and last month I would be working in the internal medicine ward. As with all Public Service Commission Nursing Scholars, I was rotated on a six-month basis to a different ward for expedited exposure to different working environments. Come March, I’d be sent to the general surgical ward for my next posting. I looked forward to the change because I was really beginning to tire of the work in the medical ward. There wasn’t any direct patient care; we were more like glorified clerks supporting doctors in their administrative work, and I wanted more.

As I lay in my bed one night on a day off, reflecting on the things I’d learned in the last five months, I heard the telephone ring. Since I rarely received any calls, I didn’t bother to answer, thinking that it was probably someone at my dad’s timber transportation business. He took a lot of calls from his staff in the evenings, who reported to him on the day’s dealings, although I was surprised that someone was calling so late. Business was usually completed by sundown; most construction didn’t carry on in the dark because of building protocols and regulations.

So I didn’t bother about the ringing phone until my mother’s head emerged from behind my door.

She didn’t knock, as usual, and just entered my room at will. I wished she wouldn’t do this, but I’d made myself swear never to bring it up again; one time I had asked if she wouldn’t mind knocking first before coming in, and she’d gone on for an hour about how “my wings had hardened with age” (a negative Chinese saying meaning that one had grown up and no longer listened to one’s elders), and that I no longer needed her or looked to her for companionship. I was a good-for-nothing daughter who didn’t know how much money my parents had spent on my upbringing, I was showing disrespect by not recognising who had paid for the roof over my head, and I was too bold to ask her to knock before entering the room that she and my father had paid for with their hard-earned money.

That was the last time I broached the privacy issue. If anything, it had spurred me on even more to get myself legally married and out of the house as soon as I could.

Many of my friends were quite shocked that my parents still held such conservative values, but it didn’t matter what they thought because at the end of the day I was the one who had to live my life under their pervasive governance. I could have just packed my bags and moved out to a rented flat, but I had an unexplained, deep-seated fear of aggravating my parents. And I was sure that if I ever mentioned renting a place on my own, they would freak out. Whatever they’d done to ingrain complete obedience in me had succeeded.

“Molly, dear!” my mother said in chirpy Mandarin, which didn’t bode well.

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