The Talk I Never Got — And Had to Give Anyway

My mother never talked to me about sex. Not once. Not a word about periods, not a word about boys, not a word about what was happening to my body when I was eleven and genuinely terrified about what was going on. I found out about menstruation from a girl in my class whose older sister had told her, and the information arrived garbled and alarming, mostly wrong on the details. I was not unusual. This was just how things were in Hong Kong in the 1990s — in most households, sex was something that simply did not exist in the space between parents and children. You learned from wherever you could. You pieced it together. You were mostly embarrassed about all of it for years.

I told myself I would do things differently with my kids. I said this easily, in the abstract, in the way you say things before you have to actually do them.

Then my daughter was ten, turning eleven, and I noticed the changes, and I knew the moment had arrived. And I sat with it for six weeks doing nothing.

Here is what sex education in a Hong Kong local school actually looks like. In P5 or P6, there is one lesson — sometimes two — under the umbrella of "health education" or "personal growth." The teacher, who is not a trained sex educator and is visibly uncomfortable, explains that boys and girls go through something called puberty. There are diagrams. The diagrams are clinical and designed to convey as little information as possible. Nobody asks questions because nobody wants to be the child who asked a question in that lesson. The children leave knowing marginally more than they did before. The lesson is not followed up. That is, in most local schools, the entirety of the formal sex education your child receives before secondary school.

In secondary school, it gets slightly more substantial — there are sections on reproductive health, sometimes STIs, sometimes (rarely, briefly) contraception — but by then most teenagers have already formed their understanding of sex from other sources. Those sources are: peers, social media, and pornography. None of these sources are particularly interested in accuracy, consent, or emotional complexity.

So parents are supposed to fill this gap. Parents who, in most cases, grew up exactly like I did. Parents who have never once in their lives said the word "vagina" to another person. Good luck to all of us.

The conversation I eventually had with my daughter went like this. I sat down next to her on the sofa one evening after her brother was in bed. I had a book — I'd bought one of those illustrated puberty guides from a bookshop in Causeway Bay, the kind with cheerful diagrams and reassuring chapter titles. I held it in my hands like a prop. I said: "I want to talk to you about some things that are going to happen to your body, and I want you to know you can always ask me anything."

She looked at me with the expression of someone who has just discovered a spider in their shoe.

I pushed through. I talked about periods. I used the word "menstruation." I talked about breasts, about body hair, about the fact that she might start to notice boys differently, or girls, and that this was normal. I used, for the first time in my life in a conversation with another person, the word "penis." I felt as though I might die. I did not die.

What I got right: I did it. I sat there and I said the actual words and I didn't faint or retreat into euphemism. I gave her the book and told her to read it, and that if anything confused her she should come to me. I told her periods could hurt and that she should tell me when hers started, not be embarrassed about it.

What I got badly wrong: I talked too much. I prepared a sort of internal lecture and delivered it rather than having a conversation. I didn't ask her what she already knew, which meant I probably repeated things she'd already figured out, and possibly missed things she was actually confused about. I was so focused on getting through it that I forgot to make it feel like a conversation rather than a presentation. I was also, probably, visibly terrified, which did not help her feel that this was a normal thing to talk about.

What I wish I'd done differently: Started earlier. Had a series of small conversations instead of one enormous one. And asked her first — "what do you already know?" Because she knew more than I thought, and some of what she knew was wrong, and I would have been more useful addressing the specific gaps rather than covering everything from first principles.

Still. I'm glad I did it imperfectly rather than not at all. Because the alternative — staying silent, the way my mother stayed silent, the way her mother stayed silent before her — isn't neutral. Silence teaches children that their bodies and their sexuality are shameful subjects, topics not fit for family conversation. Children who grow up with that lesson don't stop having questions. They just stop asking their parents.

My daughter is in S2 now. She asks me things. Not everything, I'm sure — she's fifteen. But she asks me things. That's worth every minute of mortification.