Forty years ago, my father tried to cross the Shizi Ocean in Southern China with the hope of escaping to Hong Kong. “It was late at night, my brother and I borrowed an old boat and tried to row our way down to Hong Kong. The next thing we saw were the Communist policemen pointing their guns at us and taking us to jail,” he recalls as he lights a cigarette. “But that did not stop us. We had to get out of that oppressive system.” As a child of the Cultural Revolution, my father withstood countless trials living under the Communist regime. He witnessed how the Communist government took over his family’s business – a Soy Sauce factory which previous generations had worked really hard to build and keep running, and the burning of precious family relics. He was constantly bullied in school because of his supposedly ‘Capitalist’ family background. “No one played with me, except little Wai. Oh, Little Wai was so good…but he never had the guts to get out of that system. He still lives on the farm.”
The death of Mao Zedong marked a new era for my family which had an impact on my own personal history. Deng Xiaoping came into power and his economic reforms allowed people more freedom to travel. My father had a brother who started a business in El Salvador. In 1981, with only seven US dollars in his pocket and a one-way ticket, he flew over to El Salvador, a small country in Central America; a country that was ransacked by a civil war at that time. Nevertheless, he worked hard ---making Chop Suey and Chao Mein in his brother’s small restaurant with the sounds of bombs and guns in the background. He and my uncle faithfully sent money over to China to keep their starving relatives alive.
In the late 1980s, I was born into this humble Chinese family during the height of the Salvadorean Civil War. Even though my family did not have much at the time, they invested what they had into my education. My father enrolled me into the British School, one of the best schools in the country. He said that Education would open many doors in the future. Thanks to the British School I began to grasp and understand the world with a more holistic and critical perspective. The IB programme opened my eyes to the literature and rich experiences of other cultures.
After graduating, I was accepted into the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. While there, I joined a NGO which gave me opportunities to travel to the far ends of the world. For three Summers, I would go to the Fiji Islands to help lead and direct an after school tutoring club. From this experience, I learned that Education is a transformational and a powerful tool which helps build communities. It was so enriching to cultivate positive and inspiring relationships with my students. Many of them have become teachers to this day.
After completing my undergrad, I spent three months in the township of Khayelitsha in Cape Town, South Africa volunteering as an English teacher and team leader in an after-school programme. I witnessed how the AIDS stricken township lacked schools and after-school facilities to take care of their young people. Parents had to travel and work long hours, leaving their young behind vulnerable to strangers and dangerous situations.
The place that I made the definite decision to dedicate my life to education and empowering youth for a better future was when I travelled to Antananarivo, Madagascar in 2012. My heart wrenched when I saw the extreme poverty in the city. That 3-month trip was eye-opening as I soon learned that most of my students lived under $2 USD a day. Many of them did not have enough money for medical expenses or food.
Although, I am currently working as an IB Theory of Knowledge and a Language Arts teacher in a private school serving the wealthier community in Escazú, my heart still lies with the people from the poorer communities. This was confirmed last year when I travelled to Senegal to volunteer with Marabout children who have been abandoned by their families. One day, as I saw the Marabout children begging for food on the streets, I remembered my father’s words: “Education can give you the tools for change. Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”
