So long and Thanks for all the fish

Last night I went back home to have dinner with my parents. It was a cold and rainy night, so it was great to have a nice home cook meal. We had mee hoon in soup with meat balls and fish balls. It was a simple dish my grandma made but it tasted wonderful so I had 2 servings.

After the wonderful dinner, my mum had to wreck the evening by making me clean up old room and throw away all my stuff which I don’t need. This is want of the reason I rarely see my folks, because they always have something for me to do, when I am back home. I have left home for close to a year and everytime I go back home, I am asked to either fixed their computer for clean/fix something up. So I guess last night was no different. They had packed all my old things into a few boxes and my mum wants to minimize the number of boxes, so she asked me to check each boxes and throw away anything I did not want.

Thank god that she did not ask me to throw away my extensive collections of comics. Oh yeah why don’t I just take all my stuff back to my place, why I would love to, but the place I am renting at the moment can’t even fit a tenth of what I have. Anyway during my clean up I found a few interesting things.

I guess it wasn’t surprising that I still had all my notes from high school and my notes why I was in Uni, but the most amazing find was a letter from my old best friend from Malaysia Wong Li Soong. Man I have not seen or heard from him for over 10 years. In those times we used to write letter to each other every month (note 1988 before GUI emails clients). Man we were so young an innocent then, it was one of the saddest time in my life. I had to leave all my friends and not just move to another town but to another country. I remember the first few months after our migrations, I used to secretly cry in my bed, because I missed my old friends and also because Aussie kids were laughing and bullying me because I talked funny. I remember that I was the only Asian kid in the whole class.

But what am I to do? I was still in primary school; I can’t go back to Malaysian since my family is now in Australia, and so I was stuck here. It was hard, but I guess it is true in what they say, if it doesn’t kill you, it just makes you stronger. So I had to learn to speak Australian, try to lose my “Lah” and try to fit in.

In the course of trying to survive my new environment, I began to lose touch with my old friends from Malaysia. In the end I was only in contact with 3 friends Li Soong, Teo Eugene and JM (who eventually became my first love). I went back to Malaysia in 93/94 to visit them, man it was great. To talk about the old times in school and to see how much they have changed. Sadly after that get together we all started to begin to prepare for our tertiary education. The last I heard Li Soong went to Canada to study and Eugene, I had no idea where he is.

So anyway now here I am reminiscing of the good old days and trying to figure out what should I throw and what should I keep.

Should I keep the old letters I had from my old friends from Malaysia? If so why?
Should I keep the old lecture notes?
Or should I just trash everything and begin a new…?