It was in my friendship with you that I was first introduced to the notion of class. When I was in the first grade I heard my mother saying she had no cash and, for a moment, I thought that money only existed as cash and therefore that was it, and I braced myself for less than three meals a day. Yet we did have lunch that day, and dinner a few hours later, and breakfast the following morning, and I sort of forgot about the instinctive, animal desperation my childish ignorance had, for an instant, granted me.
I am not poor. But to you, I most certainly am. In the fourth grade, my father dropped me off at school for an expedition, to Sibu I think it was. As the bus left school with forty or so eager children little over a decade into this sugarcoated version of the human condition, I observed my father at the bus stop opposite school, and pointed him out to you. You reacted to my normality as if it was a strange anomaly.
“Your father takes the public bus? Wow you’re kind of… poor.”
Some other children turned to me, wide-eyed and unblinking, as if I was some parasite. They shuffled in their seats a deliberate inch away from me.
You, who received tuition for every subject you took. You, whose parents bought you all that you wanted, every second-generation Beyblade. You, whose father barred from eating at food courts or taking public transport. You, who learnt Taekwondo in an air-conditioned room with padded floors while I did my patterns in the outdoor basketball court of a community centre. You, who told a table of comfortable fifth graders one art class that I lived in a HDB, who turned to me, then turned away from me, like I was a parasite.
Why shouldn’t they have believed it? Why shouldn’t they have associated the home of half their country with the parasitical?
You, who rallied a class of reluctant fourth-graders to write a “get well soon” card for me when I got dengue. You, who were my best friend. You, the unwitting spiritual descendent of Confucius himself, but also really just a lonely, insecure only-child.
I wish I could talk to you. But something very tall stands between our worlds. I think you’re starting to know what it is by now.
