According to him when he finished his primary school , a Malay medium school, in 1965, he had a choice to continue his education in Malay medium or English Medium secondary school. He took the advice of his mother to have his secondary school education in an English medium secondary school although which meant that he had to spend one extra year in remove class instead of starting straight in year one if he chose the Malay medium school. To his mother if he chose the Malay medium school he had to be sure to get to university in order to be guaranteed a job after graduation; if he chose an English medium school and could not manage to get a place in university he would not have a problem to land a job with his Cambridge School Certificate ( the Cambridge School Certificate was later replaced by MCE which was then replaced with SPM until today).
He landed a job in a factory and rose to quite a high position but during the financial crisis in 1997 the factory was not doing well and he took a decision to resign. He moved the whole family to Johore Bahru selling "nasi lemak" to make a living. The whole family, his wife and four children (3 boys and one girl) chipped in to run the business of selling "nasi lemak". He and his wife decided to stop at four at the age of 32 worrying that they just could not bring up the children well if they had more children to look after. The biggest worry in his mind was drug. When the eldest child went to kindergarden, he and his wife decided that the wife quit the job and stayed at home to look after the children. He instilled in his children that they must make it to university otherwise when they grew up they might have to have 2 to 3 jobs to raise a family. He smartly and rightly spurred his eldest child to study well to give a good example to the other siblings. He did not allow his children to watch TV programme during school days. Considering that in Johore Bahru there were so many channels available from Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, it must be very tough to discipline the children not to watch TV programme during school days. He made it a point to have early dinners like most Chinese families so that the kids could have more time to study after dinner. After 10pm every night all the children would come out of the room from studying and march into the kitchen to help in the preparation of next day's "nasi lemak' business.
He made it. All the children are now university graduates except the youngest one who is still in university. I congratulated him for his success and said to him that driving taxi now is his hobby and not his job. To my surprise he disagreed with it. Tax driving is still his job because he has no pension to depend on. Although the children do give the mother money but they would keep the money for the children. He and his wife are now saving up his hard earned money to go for their first pilgrimage to Mecca.
This is such a marvelous man who brought up his family with such success on his own feet and does not feel that others and the government are owing him and his family a living. En Md Nasir Nordin ( I got his name from the name card he passed to me hoping that I can call for his service the next time I want to go to KLIA from home), I am so proud of you and thank you for brightening me up and giving me ray of hope for this country. If Malaysia has more of this family like yours there is no doubt our future generation would have a very bright future. I wish my former colleague En Kassim, who is now very involved in literary work, has a chance to read this and decides to write a story on you because you are such a fine role model for others to emulate.
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