Gratefulness

Kinda funny that I thought about something really so irrelevant to college life last week. I thought of raising my own kids in the United States in the future. I mean, why not? They will have greater access to reputable education (screw our secondary school sejarah), be able to get better paying jobs here, and etc, etc. Nonetheless, I do not want my children to be American -- American in culture, American in attitude. With everything provided for, many American kids are, sadly, very lackadaisical. For instance, just observe my university. Many students come to class, hoping to only pass the class. 1800 USD for an individual class. Do the calculation into Ringgit.

I tutored a student the other day. She had a paper due the next day, and she had even hardly begun doing anything. Although I did all I could to help her, I felt angry that she did not even put any effort in trying to write her essay. It's not a hard thing to do, so why flunk a class that costed your parents 1800 USD. For the most part, I practically wrote the paper for her. For such a developed country, America sure does produce a lot of people who take for granted many of her priveleges.

Yet, are we really that different too? Well, I think most Malaysians truly value education (no wonder why our parents are always trying to ship us into an educational institution right after secondary school). But, I can't say that for sure about food. With a wide array of delicious food, I can't deny we're spoiled for choice. Funny ain't it, that we can head up to Asia Cafe, and yet find that there's no food there. Try coming to this side of America, where there's only Little Panda, which serves mediocrity with a price overblown price tag.

In order to prove my point, let's look at our common ignorance by observing the easily available (and obtainable) morning breakfast, tau sar pau. For something that costs us 80 sen, or more, depending on where you get it, we'd just buy them pau-s, and reheat them conveniently at home before eating. Have we ever stop and think how hard it actually is to make those? For a bite of scrumptious hot pau filled with warm melt-in-mouth tau sar, the person who made it had to prepare the pastry, and then labor for hours just to make the tau sar (if you happen to buy in a reputable seller, they, most often than not, make their filling from scratch), just to sell them for a price not even a fraction of what they had worked. All we do is to just plop those little buggers into our mouth without even a thought. I made those darn pau-s this morning, so I kinda understand how those pau auntie or uncle would have felt. Actually I made only 7 of them, only to find myself losing appetite after I finished making them.

2 hours of hard work to get so little red bean paste.

Even the pau-s did not look flat like the ones we would usually buy in Malaysia

I guess in the end, nobody really can escape from taking things for granted. It's just the way we are made. Better be aware, next time, of the things we are currently taking for granted, before they're taken away from us. Be grateful.