Song Bird

When I was a little girl, mum asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up.

“I want to be a doctor by day but I want to be a singer at night”, the little girl answered with a twinkle in her eyes.

“Why do you want to be a doctor and a singer? Won’t you be tired working day and night?” mum asked with a curios glance.

“I can make a lot of money being a doctor and I can also enjoy singing at night”, said the little girl.

At a tender age of 5 years old, I already knew that money makes the world go round and discovered my passion for singing. I remember pretending the holder of the skipping rope to be the microphone in which I had sang my hearts out to my Barbie dolls over tea.

25 years later, I grew up being neither a doctor nor a singer. I discovered pure science wasn’t really my forte but I still believe money makes the world a merry go round. The dollar sign $ has been my loyal working companion.

I still enjoy singing now though not on the stage in front of hundreds of audience. I had a shot to stardom when I was 12 years old. I was part of the school’s choir team, singing the alto section. We were the winner in the inter-school choir competition in the Klang Valley. It was fun singing in a harmonious group of alto, melody and soprano although it always raised the goose bumps on my skin whenever everyone sang at the same time in different octaves. After the competition, we went on the national TV to perform patriotic songs for national day celebration. So, in a way I did perform in front of audience.

I stopped performing professionally (ahem…publicly) as I entered high school when the invention of karaoke gave new meaning to singing. My friends and I began exchanging lyrics of our favourite songs. Many songs were in Mandarin and Cantonese dialects; which being non-Chinese educated; we had to translate painstakingly every syllable into familiar English sounds over repeated replaying, rewinding and pausing of the cassette in the good old radio. Then, we would memorized the translated phonetic lyrics until we know them like the back of our hands and perfected the Mandarin or Cantonese pronunciation just so that we could sing our favourite Hong Kong and Taiwanese pop songs at Song Bird Karaoke. Back then, Mandarin and Cantonese songs do not have ‘han yu pin yin’ (Chinese phonetic alphabet).

Many moons later and working, the karaoke craze has worn off on me. But I still enjoy singing. Today I caught myself singing Sonia’s ‘End of the World’ in the shower. The echoes of my voice in the shower cubicle sound great. It gives the same effect as singing on the microphone. I guess I could live with being a bathroom singer. =)