It Wasn’t That Big of a Deal
Photo owned by Vitaly Gorbachev on Pexels Around 2000 or 2001, my mum’s neighborhood held a karaoke competition as part of the Independence Day celebrations. We had moved into that neighborhood only three or four years earlier, and Mum wasn’t a socially active person back then, so I thought, I wanna make friends with people my age in the neighborhood. So I signed up for the competition. I chose “Bintang Kehidupan” by Nike Ardilla. I think it was because there weren’t many options on their karaoke machine (for both Indonesian and Western songs), so I picked one I was already familiar with. As I finished singing, I saw Mum at the bottom of the stage stairs; her face was red. Just as I reached her, she took my hand and dragged me back to our house. When we were finally inside, she snapped at me, telling me that I had embarrassed her, that I shouldn’t put myself at the center of attention since we were quite new in the neighborhood, and that we didn’t wanna create any drama. I tried to arg...
