May 2019 – Corgi Lumpur

Homecooked meals? Can’t relate as a child of a hoarder

The gas burners have not worked properly for years and we resort to an electric stove placed over the original stove top.

Every vacation back to Malaysia, one of the things so many my friends, both local and abroad, like to say is “must be nice seeing your family again and enjoying their homecooked meals” As a person who grew up in a house run by a hoarder (my physically and mentally abusive father frequently proclaims himself as “the king of the house”) with living conditions that are deteriorating rapidly with time (the house has never been renovated, at all, in the past 30 years), I cannot relate to this statement. I’m nice enough to reply with a smile but the truth is I have been unable to enjoy a true, fully homecooked meal for the past 5 years, if not more. Here’s why.

A typical modern day living in the abusive hoarder house and narcissist parents

Shown in the middle is the table that’s too high for any chair in the house.

It is 1:30am and I am writing this from the discomforts of a table (the only one I can find without any clutter on it and isn’t buried in junk) that is far too high for any of the low quality, crap-grade chairs in the house. I would normally be in bed by this time, except I’ve just been woken up by light filling the room. In a sleepy and ranty murmur, I instinctively mumble “what the hell is going on”. At this point, it should’ve been a rhetorical question and there’s no point in asking: I’m spending another day living in the shithole hoarder house when I should have booked an Airbnb for my vacation.

How it’s like to live with an abusive hoarder, Malaysian edition

I grew up in a hoarder household all my life. I could never put a finger on what was wrong living in this house, nor did I actually realize it was a problem until I started living on my own at 18 and experiencing how my friends lived. In fact, I only discovered the term “hoarder” and what it meant a decade ago while living in the US… and later, how prevalent the issue is in South East Asia (I can speak for Malaysia and Singapore) but how little it’s discussed, or even acknowledged as an issue. Let me tell you what it’s like living in a house with 1+2 hoarders and how hellish of an living situation it is.