School

Someone once told me that I should enjoy my childhood and school because it would be the happiest time of my life. That thought made me miserable! Why? I hated my childhood and I hated school.

I was the only boy in the family until I was thirteen. I grew up in Tawau. In those days, Tawau was this little town in Sabah. Now it is a very big municipality! My dad built us a very nice wooden house on stilts in a quaint little village not too far away from the town centre. It was a lovely home with green creepers climbing up to the roof and then cascading down providing the home with a lovely natural canopy. It was built next to the Kuhara river. Later my dad did some expansion work and built an exercise cum yoga studio below the house. I had a lot of fun in this house.

Yes, I had a lot of fun. The sad part of it was that I had to have all this fun by myself. My mum would never allow me to play with the neighborhood kids. The reason? She did not want me to pick up “bad language” or play in the river like the other neighbor kids. I had quite a bad start in learning social skills.

To make matters worse, I was sent to study in a Chinese school where everything was taught in Mandarin. I hardly spoke any Chinese in those days. This, coupled with my poor social skills, forced me into isolation. I never made any friends until I was in primary six, by which time, I had already mastered Mandarin.

By the time I went to Secondary school, language was no longer a barrier. However, my social skills were at its all time low. I was very self absorbed and thought of myself as being better than everyone else. To make things even worse, I changed school secondary school four times! From Tawau to Petaling Jaya to Kuala Lumpur and then back to Kota Kinabalu.

Ask me now about my school life and it is all a blur. However, I must add that I had the best education of my life while in La Salle Secondary in Kota Kinabalu. This was the first place I learned to eat humble pie. The story is quite interesting…

When I was in form four, I was given the opportunity to organize the school English speech contest. I put in a lot of effort in organizing the event. I also represented my class in the contest. While delivering my speech, the entire school gathered in the assembly hall was not paying attention. Instead the jeered and booed. Half way through my speech, I stopped and scolded everyone. I told them that the school hall was not built for animals and if they wanted to make animal noises, they should step outside and do it. Then I calmly continued from where I stopped in my speech.

That day was the start of my learning curve… I won the speech contest but also won the wrath of the entire student body. In one short day, I had gone from a relatively unknown to the most hated student in the school. Everywhere I went, fellow students would chant “animal”!

How I overcame this? Stay tuned….