Some Like it Haute

all in a nutshell.

today i realised how pale and uneventful my life was compared to my dad's. i do not just mean his decades of wordly experince, but rather what he experieced in his youth.

for example, i have a gelato-scooping part-time job and worked as a bag lady in a rather chi-chi boutique. well, what he did in his days were pretty much out of this world. apart from doing odd-jobs for his taxi driver father (my grandfather), my dad actually sold chinese new year cards in a makeshift hawker store, earning twenty cents for every card sold. he even went to my uncle's factory and did manual labour such as hammering and wleding raw materials. and though he did give tuition to australian kids, as an undergraduate, he eventually gave up his job for a friend who had (back then) lost his father in a shipping accident as the friend's father had been the sole breadwinner.

even his family life was much more radical then mine. his family wad immersed in poverty for a good part of his youth. when my grandfather had a sort-of affair and squandered his meagre salary on a cabarat girl, my granmother had to literally beg for the simplest of necessities. my dad basically had to save to study abroad as my grandparents simply had limited means of providing for such luxury. my dad left singapapore for uk with ten thousand dollars worth of sheer savings and eventually studied his way out of desolation. he and my mum lived on a budget of 7pounds per person weekly and items such as macdonalds and kfc was literally un-sniff off.

i almost feel bland for leading such a priviledged life.