When I Grow Up

When I grow up, I want to be a someone that who would be able to stand up for the weak, poor and defenseless. I want to fight for the rights of the children because they are young and defenseless in many ways. I hate to see them abused by others in power and not having an education because they cannot afford it. I want to fight for the rights of women because I strongly believe that women have an equal right to education and also to employment. They have a right to be trained to have skills so that they can feed themselves and not be dependent on their husbands who sometimes beat the crap out of them.

Those were my thoughts when I was growing up. I wrote a composition when I was maybe in secondary 1 and won a prize and in that composition, I wrote that I wanted to be a lawyer to fight for the rights of women. But somewhere along the way, my aspirations to be a feminist lawyer kinda disappeared. Don't ask me why. Recently, I started reading a book, Women Hold Up Half the Sky, and it got me thinking again. I get mad thinking of women being tricked and forced into prostitution and sometimes dying from it either through murder, beatings and AIDS. I get madder reading about girls not given an opportunity to study and when they do get to school, they risk being killed.

It got me thinking again about my ambition when i was 13. The reality is that it's too late for me to head to law school and start all over again. Or actually, it might not be too late but I do not see the point or think there will be much of a return of investment. So I wonder, what can I do to make a difference to my belief? To a certain extent my job allows me to make that difference. I teach and I try my best to reach out to the underprivileged. But it's not enough and what else can I do? I don't know and I'm still thinking about it. But I believe that one does not have to do drastic stuff to make a difference. Even small acts if treating people with kindness and respect can make a difference to someone else. I get mad when people make disparaging remarks about foreign workers and domestic helpers in Singapore. They are people too. They need our respect too. It's the same in HK, I tell kids off when they treat their domestic help like crap. But one wonders where kids learn to treat their domestic help badly. Did they learn it from the adults around them? Some food for thoughts.