These days, I am very depressed. My caring friends are asking me why. The huge list of reasons includes professional exams, cramp coursework, career, income in the future, not being able to gather with my friends, and most devastating one – pressure from family!
Today, right after having a difficult exam. I decided to skip half day of class to have yumcha with my mum. In that 2 hours of lunch, I couldn’t really count how many times she subjectively compared me with my similar aged relatives, which they are very successful people in every aspects in fact. I am pretty sure all C9 do this all the time, and this is very annoying.
Other than this, I am also very stressful in making my own decisions. Especially when I am the eldest son in a Hakka family. My own decision is not my own, what I do will more or less affect my young cousins. Being a responsible role-model is actually not easy.
Mum was commenting about my career strategy, compared me with only the most successful people she met.
She didn’t really see the difference between how much investment the very successful people and the investment in me.
All the examples she talked about has one common fact, they are strategically put into top kindergarten, top primary school, top secondary school, strategically moved overseas to take the easier version of A-Level exam, financed to study top university, networked to top firms for internship, not to mention the huge sum they paid for private tutoring. These kids are trained to be future leaders of our society. Investment of PARKnSHOP get a huge profit in return is what it suppose to be.
What about me, I was also strategically put into nearest cheap kindergarten, nearest primary school, a nearby highschool which was a bottom 10, had some luck to go Australia for a “background laundry”. I had no one to ask when I had problem with public exams in highschool, no good private tutor. My English is learnt from Filipino maids (lol, I support Filipino maids getting PR). All these aren’t necessarily bad, without all these, Defoe is probably not the Defoe I am.
People from top school won’t understand how the environment it was in a band 5. Classmates were drugged, jailed for robbing people after school, involved in gang fight, etc… Teachers were not giving up anyone, so whenever there is one Chinese-new-migrant joining the class, the English class could start again from teaching “I am a boy”. These kids are trained to be future fuckers of our society. And yes, we all fucked up our HKCEE. That’s what you get with the investment capital of a fishball hawker, no chance to compete with PARKnSHOP.
To generalise advices my mom gave me. Mother thinks:
I studied too much.
Yes, I admit that I am over-educated. You don’t know how bad it feels when people laughs at my single digit HKCEE result. The only way I can think of is to shut these peoples’ mouth with a better qualification than they have. This worked very well, study is tax deductable and is counting towards my CPD hours anyway.
I aim too high, not practical.
Everyone is a CEO of himself, I know I am shit, and I know I have 99.9999% chance of failing to be very successful, but I am 100% sure that I want to work like an ox, try my very best to be very successful. Whatever other people says, I would rather try hard and die, than to live like a dumbass till 2099. By the way, who were comparing me with the very successful people all the time in the first place?
I am not smart enough to say things nicely to please others.
I take this advice. I also found myself criticising too much, sometimes hurting others feeling. Will mind what I say. Thanks mom.