the short wanderer

"Are you born in Britain?" my Romanian teacher once asked me. "Is English your first language?" asked my British friend, Alex, a friend I made from my summer school. "Did you go to any English tuition class?" asked Ong, my internship colleague. Disclaimer:  do not put a high expectation on me! I can assure you that my English is not that good... well, the fact that I had to repeat my IELTS last time is one of the proofs hehe But I just feel like looking back at how I get to speak in English, (though not really fluently, just enough to be able to have a conversation with other people) given the fact that I am such a kampung girl and English is undoubtedly something very, very foreign to me. My family speak full Malay at home. My dad speaks Perak dialect in his hometown, while my mum speaks Javanese with her family. So maybe for the sake of simplicity, all of us have been using standard Malay as our first language despite living in Terenggan...

“What if I don’t get A*?” . “What if I don’t have any positions in my college?” . “What if I’m not good at speaking?” . “What if I have to REPEAT MY PAPER??” . . E(X)=Expectations (it's a maths term I am so sorry if some of you are not aware huhu) Being in a position where you left your high school as the best student of the batch will evidently got yourself caught in a net full of terribly high expectations and high hopes horribly haunting after you (too many adverbs yet it's still inadequate to describe how I really felt in those days). Wow, best student. Wow, doing A-level for 18 months?! Crazy. Wow, a scholar? Wow, that scholarship? Wow, amazing! And all those things they found out about me…in which will all eventually come to the exact same final mutual statement: “You must the genius brightest smartest one lorh” All I can do is just grinned, and say, “No lah, of course I’m not”. But (obviously), no one would believe what...