Viewpoints
Wheel Power
Published:
Thursday October 3, 2013 MYT 12:00:00 AM
Updated: Thursday October 3, 2013 MYT 1:41:53 PM
Updated: Thursday October 3, 2013 MYT 1:41:53 PM
Memories that warm the heart
The writer as a teenager.
Old photographs often trigger a flood of nostalgia.
I RECEIVED a most pleasant surprise recently. A friend, John S. Thomas, whom I had not been in contact with for more than 30 years, got in touch with me again on Facebook.
What was even more sentimental about our online “reunion” was a black and white photograph of myself that I had sent to John via snail mail when I was in my late teens. I had almost forgotten about it until John sent it back to me.
The picture brought back many happy – and some sad – memories from the past. The most prominent feature was, of course, my wheelchair.
It was the first of three wheelchairs which I have been using since I became a paraplegic at the age of 10. A botched surgery left me paralysed. I couldn’t move around much in the house until the wheelchair came along. It quickly became the most important thing in my life.
I loved my wheelchair. I thought it was the greatest invention on earth because I was able to use it to get around the house by myself.
The wheelchair also gave me the opportunity to explore the neighbourhood. I equipped my wheelchair with rear view mirrors and a few bells.
People and cars could always tell, from a distance, when I was approaching. I even tried the bread man’s horn, but abandoned it quickly when I was mistaken for the real thing. It is not easy making friends when you are in a wheelchair. So I used my special gadgets to impress the neighbourhood kids with my super wheelchair. It worked like a charm.
I would wait everyday for evening to come to join my friends for games like hide-and-seek, in which I would be the one doing the finding all the time. The kids would hide in drains and tunnels, and creep up on me from behind. Although I could spot them with my rear view mirror, I would sometimes pretend I did not see them and let them “win” in good sporting spirit.
I would also be included in their badminton games. I would sit in one position and hit the shuttlecock that they served to me.
However, slowly my friends stopped playing with me and one by one they disappeared.
Later, I found out that their parents told them not to do so “because they wouldn’t get enough exercise playing with someone in a wheelchair”.
That was my first lesson on discrimination.
Then I turned my attention to shortwave radio after I discovered an old radio in the storeroom. It was my window to the world.
My first international radio station was the Far East Broadcasting Company from Manila in the Philippines. I soon got introduced to John, who taught me how to write QSL cards to world radio broadcasts. These special postcards give valuable feedback to radio stations about their reception in Malaysia.
Radio suddenly became my classroom to the world. Programmes like BBC and the Voice Of America, in particular, spoke about incredible things disabled people were achieving with proper support from their respective countries. One of them was about blind people who went wind surfing. Imagine that!
I wrote to the US Embassy in Kuala Lumpur to enquire about this. They arranged a trip for me to go to the United States where I stayed for three months, learning about disabled people.
Whilst I was there, I took my first public bus with a hydraulic lift.
I also rode on a special wheelchair water-ski hooked to a powerboat on the sea. I even rafted down a white-water river to prove that disabilities don’t bog you down.
Look at me now as a city councillor and a columnist. If anyone had suggested this to me back then, I would have laughed it off.
As for my water sports exploits and adventures, I wished I had asked someone to take some pictures of me during those exhilarating moments.
I would have loved to put the pictures in this column for my childhood friends to see, with a poser for their parents: “Is this enough exercise for you?”
Wheelpower goes monthly from this issue and will appear on the first Thursday of every month.
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