I met you in my dream

‘I met you in my dream last night. Can you guess where we met?’ Having recognised my voice, my niece was shouting excitedly on the phone.

‘The zoo?’ I asked. It was one of her favourite haunts, and thanks to her frequent visits she was chosen as the best zebra painter in her class.

‘No. It was Disneyland!’ she said, in high spirits.

‘Was it good?’

‘Yes. We had great fun there,’ she laughed.

To mark her third birthday two years ago, her parents took her to the Disneyland which is across the border in Hong Kong. I was told that she was so exhilarated by that experience that on returning home, she complained that until she was back in the Mickey Mouse Hotel, which is designed to accommodate the family visitors from mainland China, she would not be able to go to sleep.

Unlike any previous generations in my family, my niece can dream about an overseas trip and have all her material needs satisfied. The other day she even suggested that it would be ideal if the family could spend at least one day in a nice place away from home: by nice she meant nothing less than a four-star hotel.

Her generation is spoilt by choice. Or is it?

For the third year now since she was admitted to pre-school, she was spending her entire summer holidays at school rather than at home. Her schedule was packed: Chinese, English, singing, dancing, arts and crafts, chess, painting and more recently, piano. Is she happy? Yes, she is. Nearly everybody in her school stays there throughout the two long holidays of every year. It is their way of life – to be packed off from home all year round so that their parents can get on with their careers. No working parents can afford to switch to part-time work in order to bring up their only child. And what is more, since her parents are so busy during the week and cannot get home till seven or eight o’clock at night, the only leisure time my niece has with her parents is at weekends. But even then her father is on call, and in order to be with him all day she learnt early on to keep her fingers crossed.

Spending nearly all of her time at school, and without the freedom to go downstairs alone for fear of being kidnapped, my niece seems to me to be like a prisoner.