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HEROES: You passed! You did it!

Photo of Wong Chung Heng

By LIM WEI YUN

We may see, but not understand,
We may hear, but not comprehend.
Others jeer and call us strange,
While what we want is just a change
Of heart from them, some understanding.
Some hope, some love, some form of caring.
Welcome to my autistic mind.
Inside I’m sure that you will find
A world so different from the one you see,
Maybe, you will then appreciate me…

Your life isn’t a highway, and it hasn’t been a dream. It isn’t an easy road, and hasn’t been a piece of cake. Instead, the pathway of your existence could be described as a mountain trail: steep and riddled with vicious animals ready to strike at any moment. Occasionally, you fall into a deep pothole, but you always manage to pull yourself up and force yourself to keep going. You have an indomitable spirit, a fiery passion that keeps your hopes ablaze and your ambitions in sight. Nothing can stop you from achieving your goals and lighting the way to your future.

Not even the spectre of autism has managed to deter you from becoming the great person you are. At four, neither you nor your twin brother was able to speak. You’d suddenly laugh, cry or scream for no apparent reason. When your mother dragged the two of you to the Lions REACH Centre for Autistic Children, kicking and screaming, the volunteers shook their heads and sighed. Even the kindly Dr. Susie See didn’t even expect you to learn how to communicate.

However, both of you proved them wrong. Not only did you learn to talk in the time frame of one year, the two of you started to learn, almost catching up to the level of normal children. Your parents saw hope; the volunteers were ecstatic. Because of your remarkable progress, your parents decided to take a chance, and enroll both you and your brother in a mainstream primary school. The problem was: What school would accept a pair of hyperactive autistic twins?

That was when Dr. See stepped in. With her help, your parents managed to find a school with an understanding headmaster who gladly let the two of you familiarize yourselves with the school surroundings for three months before the first day of term. You would go to school, sit in the classroom, eat in the canteen, and learn how to use the toilets. Not that you did that, though; you often peed in the drain during the school term, much to the horror of your classmates and teachers. And although you don’t remember this, some of your classmates bullied you. They put sand in your water bottle, and called you names. You’d react aggressively by pulling the class timetable off the walls, leaving your poor mother to stay up all night making another one. Your future seemed bleak. There were times when your parents felt totally helpless.

The years that followed, on the contrary, were a drastic improvement. At the age of eight, you managed to memorize a speech after reading it only three times, and that was a turning-point for your mother. She decided that you had a good memory, and she could encourage you to study hard. It helped that you paid attention in class, and motivated yourself to revise what you had been taught in school. With the help of the volunteers at the centre, both you and your brother graduated from primary school and proceeded to secondary school.

Secondary school wasn’t smooth sailing, however. Once, both you and your brother were beaten up for attempting to persuade a bully to stop fighting, and the teasing and bullying from your earlier years continued. You were labeled “strange” and “queer.” Your Form 5 trial exam results were horrendously bad. You lay awake at night, unable to sleep. You worried about not being able to pass your exams. You worried about not being able to continue your education. Most of all, you worried about your future, a future that most autistic people would never get to experience. People told you not to put pressure on yourself, but you wanted to prove that you could do anything.

To remedy your restlessness, you made yourself put in even more effort. You stayed up reading until late. Your mother sat next to you every night, coaching you and guiding you. You even sacrificed recess so that you could catch up on your weaker subjects! This determination may have stemmed from your autism or it may have not. One thing that was certain, however, was that you were a fighter! You had overcome your autism to discipline yourself to sit down and concentrate, a task that is nearly impossible for many autistic adults. No matter how difficult it was for you to understand the simplest of sentences, you kept reading and re-reading until comprehension finally dawned upon you.

Time flies, and it was all too soon when you had to collect your SPM results. Nervously, you took the slip of paper from your teacher, wondering whether your efforts had paid off. Then, a big grin spread over your face. You had passed! You did it! You then requested to go to university, but your mother disagreed. She thought that it would be better for you if she sent you to Institute Perkim-Goon, and put you in a diploma course. Unfortunately, your brother did not achieve the same victory; but he had no intention to study any more. In his own words, he wanted to “sell eggs.”

You are now 22 years old, and you have almost passed your course, with one more paper to go. You want to become a network specialist, and you have described it as your “only goal in life”. You still display autistic traits like lack of eye contact, and the bullying still continues, but according to Dr See, “Every time I see Chung Heng, he has superseded my expectations.” Truly, not only have you exceeded what she expected of you, but you have shown the world that there is hope for every child.

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Subject: Heroes - Wong Chung Heng/Lim Wei Yun.