My son, Isaac, recently bugged me for a yoyo. Usually, I can brush him off but he turns six in a few days time so I felt a need to get him a present he'd like.

What I didn't realise was that yoyos are not what they used to be. I remember my first yoyo - a red yoyo I had bought from the auntie who drove us the school bus to take us to school.

In those days, my private school bus operator would supplement her income by selling snacks and toys to the kids she ferried. The area at the front of the bus was like a fully stocked store. You could buy sour plums, potato chips and satay sticks of unknown preserved meat. I loved that mystery satay. We used to call it Rat Meat Satay because nobody knew what the sticky yellow strips of meat were made of.

In addition to all this, Bus Auntie sold yoyos.

The yoyo I was eyeing cost a princely 50 cents. My daily allowance at the time was 30 cents a day. I saved 10 cents a day for three days, foregoing the coloured water that passes off as syrup drink in the canteen, then mom gave me an extra 20 cents because it was my birthday, so I finally had enough to buy the Yoyo of My Dreams.

That was then. When yoyos did not have cartoons developed around them.

Isaac had a specific yoyo in mind too. It was a Super Yoyo based on a cartoon of the same name. Having seen the cartoon on TV, and also having friends who were carrying this elite yoyo, Isaac decided that he too, had to be a Super Yoyo-er.

I was dispatched to buy one for him. My first stop was a toy store and I saw how big the Super Yoyo selection was. There were the entry level yoyos, and the professional level ones. There were yoyos with motion-sensitive blinking LED lights in them (the best ones we had in my day were glow-in-the-dark). There were even the uber-expensive ones with the superior ball bearings and mini weights you could add to the yoyo to alter its physics so you could do tricks.

And they even had names. Names like Dragon Supreme, Golden Fire, Stealth Raider, Super Wasp, Ultra Russell, Fire Dragon and Super Aqua Dragon.

There are classes you can attend to learn the tricks.

Good Lord. These are the yoyos that Luke Skywalker plays with. That cost as much as Han Solo's ransom too.

My second stop was the provision shop downstairs. They had the clone of the Super Yoyo, also coincidentally called, Super Yoyo. The packaging was the same and it had the picture of the main character, Shunichi

Isaac was very specific about which Super Yoyo he wanted. It had to be Shunichi and preferably blue.

This is a boy who has trouble remembering his ting xie (Chinese spelling) but can remember a Japanese anime character's name.

I stood at the provision shop looking at the pirated, er, OEM version of the Shunichi Super Yoyo, nestled amongst the fake Pokemon cards and the Changing Robot (a.k.a. Fake Transformers) toys, and wondered.

"Should I get this one, which costs $4.90, or should I get the original one, at $24.90?"

Crucial life decisions indeed

In the end, I decided that my boy was too short to play a yoyo effectively anyway, and he was not planning to go professional any time soon (maybe after Primary 3), so the $4.90 cheapo edition would do.

He was very excited to get the Shunichi yoyo. He was already halfway there with his yoyo skills. His yoyo could go down with a plonk on the floor. Now all he had to do was to learn how to get it to spin back up and I would be able to retire and live off his professional yoyo career.

On Facebook, a friend who also got one for her kid helpfully told me that I needed to cut the string of the yoyo (measure from his waist down, she said), so that Isaac could play with it better.

So I cut the string for him. But the Super Yoyo clone had other problems. The string could not secure itself firmly to the centre axle of the yoyo and we had trouble winding it up.

"Papa! You spoiled it! You cut the string and that's why it does not work anymore!" cried Isaac, his dreams of being a professional yoyo player dashed.

"No, no. It's because the string is no good. Papa will find a way to fix it, ok?"

Kicking myself for blowing $4.90 on this piece of plastic junk with a faulty string, there was only one thing left to do.

I had to get the original version with the superior engineering.

But I draw the line at getting him the Super Aqua Dragon yoyo. Dragons should be macho, not aqua.


About Mr Brown
mrbrown aka Mr Kin Mun LEE is the accidental author of the popular Singapore website, mrbrown.com, and has been documenting the dysfunctional side of Singapore life since 1997.

Affectionately known as the Blogfather of Singapore, his readers follow his writings closely, which these days range from current affairs, his family, and even his trips abroad.

Currently, mrbrown also hosts the mrbrown show (mrbrownshow.com), probably Singapore's best known comedy and satire podcast.

mrbrown is married to Ginny, his long-suffering wife for 12 years, and is father to three lovely kids, Faith,  Isaac and Joy.