Sequenced Writing: Interview Report

Mother’s Words of Wisdom in Shopping

“Mom, I need your credit card information to pay for my new contact lenses. Please reply me ASAP.” A few seconds after I select the button “Send Message” on my mobile phone, my home telephone rang. My initial reaction was: Whoa, since she’s the one who made the call, then I won’t have to pay the phone bill for this session! Considering the “free” long-distance phone call, I decided to take advantage of her time and come up with some questions I have to ask her for my interview report assignment in my writing class.

“Are you fine, darling? Have you eaten your dinner? Here’s the information you asked for. By the way, I just bought Louis Vuitton’s latest Damier Canvas handbag! What do you think?” It’s obvious why I chose her as my interviewee just by listening to her first sentences on the phone. Mariaty Ng is a parent whose job is to control all of the financial aspects in her children’s lives. She’s also a woman who has spent 23 years of her married life learning how to resist her shopaholistic temptations upon receiving a monthly paycheck from her husband. Most importantly, she’s also a shopaholic herself who adores fashion, but knows how to manage her financial plans as a shopper, as a parent, and as a housewife. But the question is, how did she learn to balance her expenditures and savings at the same time while upholding both her responsibilities and her personal desires? Since the greatest lessons we learn in life are mostly based on personal experiences that we encounter through time, I asked her to flash a little blast from the past in chronological order: Before marriage, before children, and after children.

Before marrying father, mother was a very timid teenager. She had a very restricted life back then because my grandmother was overprotective. Mom wasn’t very happy with her monochrome life as a teenager – colorless in such a way that she never got the chance to be given what she truly wants versus her needs. During those times, mother resisted her inner desires by confining herself to achieving good grades, eating proper meals, and getting enough rest – basically doing what was needed to be done, only to satisfy her mother. So whenever she went to shop for clothes, the reasons were simply because the old ones were torn or because she gained weight. She listened obediently to her mother when she said “If you don’t need it, don’t buy it”, but grandma never knew that she dreamed of marrying someone soon to escape from her “prison.”

It was after my parents got married that all mother could see was the real world outside of her tiny bubble. The marriage was her dream that came true, because father was the one who went to her rescue from prison, and also happened to be someone who came from a wealthy family. For the first time in her life, she was given the freedom to buy whatever she wants. Although she was finally given the privilege to spend her money in any way she wanted, she never left behind the “don’t need, don’t buy” idea from her mother whenever she went for a shopping spree. The idea left permanent footprints throughout the rest of my mother’s life, and it would largely affect how she manages her money from then on. Whenever she’s shopping, this idea would cross her mind and make her either reconsider buying the item, or, if she liked the item, she would compare the same item with many different stores just to pay for the lowest price possible.

It didn’t take more than a year until my elder brother was born. The thought of my father providing full financial support for starting a family also came to mind, especially when father and mother decided to have only three children, of which, by the way, I was the youngest and also the only daughter. Ever since she became a mother, she has always held the responsibility to prevent herself from blundering parenting needs with her personal happiness. Children’s needs became the first priority ahead of everything else, so there was a decrease in the amount of expenditures on clothes, handbags and shoes as to her year of honeymoon .

As we can see from these experiences mother had been through in the separated timelines of her life, the foundation of her present shopping habit came from grandma’s idea of “don’t need, don’t buy.” The question now is, how does she actually apply all the things she has learned into her shopper’s life today?

What I’ve noticed over the years is that she keeps each of us children a journal containing records about the expensive Chinese herbs and other essential food supplements we’ve consumed each month, since her children’s health is on top of her priority list in parenting. As for our allowance, father is the one responsible for handing 25 USD to each of us every week. Mother also fixed a specific amount of wages for each of our housemaids per week and also a number of 1,000,000,000 Rupiah (approximately 10,990 USD) as the maximum amount of money she can spend for her personal shopping activities within two months. Since that maximum number was pretty huge, she kept another notebook for herself to record every major expense she made, such as Louis Vuitton’s Damier Canvas handbag, which costs up to 1,030 USD. This was done to keep track of her own transactions so that she won’t faint at the end of the year when she reads her annual credit card billing information from the bank. Thankfully, she only buys expensive goods once in every two months, because the larger sum of money was meant to be spent on weekly grocery shopping. Now the question is, what are the things she considers before buying an item?

Let me give you an example of how shopping works for her when deciding whether or not I should buy my contact lenses. Colored toric lenses are specially made according to your doctor’s prescription if you have done an eye checkup recently, which is why they are very expensive. You can no longer find colored toric lenses in Indonesia, as the optical services have stopped ordering for imports of this product. For this reason, my mom suggested me to buy this type of lenses while I am in America, no matter how much it costs. She wouldn’t mind if it was so expensive that she had to sacrifice her personal shopping days. Like I said, her children’s needs are above everything else.

Although to some people toric lenses don't have to be colored, having the color itself is just for the sake of fashion. However, toric lenses that are tailored to the degrees of your eyes are a must to enhance your vision. Besides needing the item, fashion is also in the wish-list. So in this case, mother has no problems at all in handing over a huge sum of money in return for the many advantages. That was how she had suggested colored toric lenses over normal toric lenses for me.

“…So the important thing is for you to think carefully whether something is worth buying or not; are you going to use it often? Is it durable enough for you to use it longer? More importantly: DO YOU LIKE IT?” Of course she doesn’t want to be like grandma who wanted her daughter to find only what she needs, without listening to the deepest desires within her daughter’s heart. She understood how I want to make shopping an activity that I can enjoy as much as possible, and also came up with a system of managing her finance to provide basic family and housing maintenance. Even though she is not responsible for her children’s weekly allowance, as a mother she has to teach us how to shop sensibly and why should we do so. Otherwise, she might really faint at the end of the year and we would have to ask dad for help. Nevertheless, mother’s belief in buying only what I need, but also what I like, is what truly makes shopping not only useful, but also enjoyable.

97/100

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Stacia,

Your paper is not only entertaining and informative, but it also reveals quite a bit about your mother’s life and her values. Great paper! My only question when I finished reading it was this: Do your brothers have the same kind of shopaholic tendencies as you?