觉得感人

I've never won any lottery in my life, and I say I no longer need to anymore, because I won the most important lottery in my life when I was 6 years old.

I come from a not-so-well-off working class family, and my father and mother were both uneducated and clueless about schooling other than to send us to neighborhood schools in the MacPherson area. As a pre-school kid, I was lazy and unmotivated... failed all my exams in the PAP kindy and ended up last in class... not that I cared then.

Somehow, my mother got wind of an opportunity to send me to St. Andrew's Junior for P1. It was one of the top schools in the nation in the early 70s. So she packed me off one day and we made a trip down for the registration. Being a hot school, it was already the last stage of the registration exercise and they have to ballot because about 50 odd people were vying for only about 20 vacancies. The school hall was packed with people and the atmosphere heavy with anticipation. My mother's hand tightened around mine each time the name on the selected ticket was read, and loosened in disappointment when it wasn't mine. It went on and on for 19 times.

Mine was the last name to be called. I looked up and for the first time in my life, I saw tears streaming down my mother's face. It was at that moment that I finally realized how important this was to her and how much she loved me to go through all the trouble of getting through the system just to get me into that school. It was the turning point for me. I suddenly had a purpose in life, and that is to make the best use of this hard-won opportunity and to make my mother's effort all worthwhile. Throughout my life, whenever I have to do a major exam, project or presentation, I always recall this particular moment in my life and understand why I'm doing what I have to do. It was to make my mother proud of me.