Why does TIS family sound SO Familiar? :-)

Except from a journalist friend's blog...

"At any one time, there would be three copies of the current issue of Workers' Party journal The Hammer lying around the flat.

It usually went like this: First Kay would spot JBJ, shirt sleeves rolled up and back-combed leonine mane streaked with grey, hawking copies of The Hammer at Raffles Place MRT station on her way to work. "80 cents for The Hammer!" he rasped, over and over again, holding up the cheaply photocopied rag. She would buy one, handing the money over to him and looking at him straight in the eye, unlike other corporate serfs streaming out of the station who would look purposefully away or pretend to be distracted. Several hours later, her dad would buy a copy from the man and his equally elderly co-worker when they migrated up north to Toa Payoh MRT station. And then her mother would arrive home with packets of food for dinner and a third copy of The Hammer, blithely unaware of the earlier transactions. "Aiyah, I see him so poor thing, how can I not buy?" she would tell Kay in Mandarin when confronted with the other two copies. It always happened. They never actually read any of the articles, long diatribes on rising living costs, unfair retrenchments and unjust detentions.

They were the family who supported the underdog. Come election time, whenever their incumbent XXX candidate went door-to-door to canvas for votes -- his minions always several floors ahead of him to prepare the residents for his arrival -- Kay, her brother and her parents would lock the door, shutter up their windows, turn off the TV and the lights, and pretend there was no one at home. Familiar with their ways, their Malay neighbours next-door would tell the XXX grassroots workers, helpfully: "Nobody at home, lah. They go on holiday." Whenever there were election rallies at the open space below their block and residents flanked the corridors and void decks to watch the campaigning, Kay's father would sometimes, cheekily, make a big show out of waving a hammer, during the smattering of polite cheering and applause at the end of a XXX speech.

Then one election year, they found out that their mother had all along been marking a tick instead of a cross, as was the rule, on her balloting slip. "But I thought on forms whenever you want something you put a tick beside it? It was like that during our school days too," she said innocently when Kay and her brother howled over her mistake, realising that Madam Tan Lee Geok had been casting spoilt votes all these years, instead of giving her vote to the opposition as she had assumed."