Personal 101: Dealing With Irrated “Uncle A”

(Picture source: www.theempire.com.au/)

I was reading with great interest on Sabrina’s ranting of her “Uncle A” in her blog – it was funny and truthful.

I guess there is one (or two) in every family – rivalry & competitions among relatives are just too common. I don’t know about you people but I am sure that in most families, whenever a major examination results are out, the first thing your parents will do is to call and check what relative’s children got for the same exam. Sounds familiar? Either that or you will be bombarded with calls from uncles and aunties who are just too curious to find out what you got for the exams compared to their children. To make things worse, for those who are going to sit for an exam, the often used “motivation” talk is that since the relative’s children got a 3As in the last exam, you need must get at least 4As, so that your parents will have something good to reply when the relatives call them to find about the results. Did I say “must get”? I guess such thing is normal – the parents always want their children to be top of everything especially where there is relatives are involved.

Anyway back to this Uncle A…

I have a similar “Uncle A” in my family – not so close but a little distance one (thank God!). I remember the time when I was thinking of doing Law after my Form Six. The news somehow spread among my relatives and most of them were very supportive of my intended move (most of them don’t believe in the local university anyway). One of my uncles even helped me to pay for the registration and the first month college fees. But not this “Uncle A” of mine! I had an unfortunate moment when I saw him at one of the family gathering and true to my suspicion; he was quick to ask me about my “plans”. I know that he know what are my plans but he simply acted as if he did not know.

I told him that I wanted to do Law and for the next an hour or so, he lectured me on how bad it is being a lawyer, that lawyers was a sinful profession, lawyers cheat people and blah, blah, blah. I could have walked away but it being a family gathering, there was not much space to escape. Besides, he was like following me around on this topic. Some of my other uncles helped me by telling him off politely but it was clear that he was not happy that I was intending to do up Law. At first, I thought that maybe he has a bad experience with lawyers and that is causing him to be very negative on my intention to do up Law. I was a fair person – I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Unfortunately, it was not the case it seems – for I got news that he forced one of his kids (who wanted to do business admin) to do Law as well. Not only that, the kid (let me just use the word “kid” instead of she or he – to hide the identity) suppose to get better marks than what I got for mine (I started earlier than this kid, so there was some kind of benchmark between the two of us). Whilst I had to contend doing Law in one of the local colleges in Malaysia (to save money), his kid was sent directly to UK to do Law. The last I heard when I was in my final years of the Law studies, the kid failed in the exams and was “asked” the exams again. The Uncle asked his kid to stay in UK until the kid had passed the exams – probably because the Uncle do not want to lose face, now that almost everyone in the family had now know of the story of his kid being sent to UK. Ha ha!

Anyway at end of the day, I passed my Law exams with flying colors and the Uncle A’s kid…well at that time was still in UK walking up and down the colleges trying to finish up the studies. Ha ha again! It has been some years since that incident happened and I have met the Uncle A on several occasions lately. He had toned down a lot but we were not prepared to let our guards down. The kid did not pass the Law exams, so the kid switched to other studies which were more preferable. I heard the kid was doing well now since the Uncle A failed in the earlier attempts and decided to allow his kid to decide on the studies.

It seems like some people do change…

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