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This is a short little piece about my childhood. I wrote it as a post replying a friend's journal asking for things I did as a kid. If you'd like to, please share a little creative prose about your own childhood memories. I'd love to hear them.

Meanwhile, enjoy mine :

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I liked chasing the chickens beside the jungle, back when Singapore used to have jungle in the end of the 70's. I like that memory very much. The squishy sulphur-orange clay between my feet. The hens and their chicks always just managing to stay ahead of me. Screaming in malay. Seeing all my aunts and my mom in sarongs squatting around and bitching. Climbing the trees and picking fruits- some which no one outside of Asia knows about: Papaya, Rambutan, Guava, Lychee, Longan. Finding a praying mantis as long as my little 7 year-old forearm. It seemed so huge. Getting one of those wading pools for the backyard and swimming with the mosquito larvae that appeared overnight.

Longan are known as 'Mata Kuching' in malay. It means 'Cat's Eye's'. Which is a pretty good description. Once the skin was taken off, it had a translucent flesh that let you see the black seed inside with a white stripe down one side. It did look like a disembodied eye.

I never did it, I wasn't very skilled at it, but I'd follow the older malay kids as they caught jumping spiders into empty matchboxes and then have fights between them.

I was mad crazy about badminton and we'd just buy the net and shuttlecock and rackets. Then we'd string the net up between two trees and have a game. I was pretty good at it at the time. All Singapore kids however get into soccer. We'd find a good space under the apartment block and designate a stretch of wall with two slippers as the posts. I wasn't so good and was a terrible loser. I'd get very emotional and once I even threw a tantrum in the middle of recess, infront of everyone, because the best goalkeeping kid didn't want to play. Eventually I stopped because I hated acting that way.

I remember when I was 5 years old and going to my first primary school in Scotland, for some reason I was already very obsessed and knowledgeable about military things. I had unusual sway over the kids in the playground. I organised the boys into the drains as if they were trenches and we'd be shooting at some imaginary enemy across the driveway and in the soccerfield. We'd begin a charge, but all get tragically cut down as we stepped up out of the 'trench', roll back in Oscar-winning death scenes, play dead for about 5 seconds, then get up and continue the Battle for the Somme.