He looked away while mumbling really quickly, ashamed to
keep eye-contact with me. He waited until I was distracted before blurting out
some unintelligible sounds.
“Tengok cikgu, saya sudah bagitau.” He said, accusing me of
not being wanting to hear what he answered.
Why would he be so embarrassed? All I asked was “Apa
cita-cita kamu?” To be honest, I really thought he was going to answer that he
wanted to be a WWE wrestler or something along those lines. I mean, it makes
sense for a 12-year old boy to have those dreams.
After relentless persuading, he finally gave in and mumbled engineer;
he would later spell it as injiner, but I digress. An engineer felt like such a
commonplace ambition (read: typical Asian kid ambition) for me while I was growing up, so why the hesitancy?
It was interesting to found out that as a kid growing up in
a high-need, low-income community, that was a rarity. He was the odd duckling,
and it was something that he was perhaps teased for. In this journey of teaching, I am still
finding out the crazy number of things that I take for granted.
