‘Control your own destiny or someone else will.’
— Jack Welch (1935-2020), former CEO of General Electric (GE)
A redemption T the end of June, my email inbox dinged with a name I recognised but hadn’t seen in over 20 years.
I was on a week’s leave, enjoying some downtime with my family in the U.S., when the email’s sender said he’d wanted to reach out to me for a long time.
He’d never forgotten me. It was Paul D.—or, more formally, ex-school principal Paul D.
For years, he watched the implosion of my dismal secondary school career from his administrative perch as head of school.
In the email, he said he had been following my weekly columns and viewpoints, reading some of my heartfelt stories in the Sarawak Tribune—especially “The teacher who saw me” and “Battle scars.”.
Occasionally, he’d look me up to see what I was up to.
And then he apologised to me.
He said he felt the school had failed me.
“Schools just didn’t know what to do with rebellious kids like you in those days,” he wrote; they weren’t equipped to deal with my situation.
My situation was this: I was finishing my Form 4 and had probably attended fewer days than I’d missed.
I’d failed nearly all my classes.
My grades boasted a lineup of ‘Es’ and ‘Fs,’ with one shining ‘A’ in mathematics.
(I say ‘boasted’ because you really do have to miss quite a lot of school to fail so spectacularly.)
Then there were the fistfights, the pranks with fire, the vandalism.
I even walked out halfway through the UPSR and PMR exam— because why not?
As an undergrad, I nearly got myself expelled under the Universities and University Colleges Act of 1971 (UUCA) for… let’s just say economic activism.
I went from earning Dean’s Awards in Economics for four straight semesters, making a bit of history in the process. But then, it all slipped away.
All of this was the public face of my private hell.
My response to this was to fight back, to sneak out, to do whatever drugs I could corral, to fight, to flee.
But it was the suspensions that did me in at school; more than seven in a single academic year doomed you.
And I had well over seven. I might have had 17.
Paul had no choice but to expel me.
I remember his face the day he called me to his office.
He seemed almost ashamed by having to formally cut me loose.
For my part, I tried to maintain my wagger: No big deal; I didn’t need school anyway.
But I walked out of his office trembling.
I knew I had done it this time. I’d hit my lowest point.
My mother picked me up from Paul’s office, and as we walked home, my entire, bleak future stretched out before me.
I was 17 years old.
I bused tables and washed dishes at an eatery, the lowest of low-income jobs. How would I survive the next year, the next 10 and the next 70?
What ultimately saved me was the willingness of my Math teacher, Madam Lucy and an education counsellor in the U.S. Embassy, Jim Mietus, who happened to be a Columbia University admissions officer, to see me as a person — not as a subpar transcript or a series of boxes left unticked but as a complicated math geek who’d had very few opportunities and a lot of bad luck and who had made a series of fearless decisions but might make something of his life nonetheless.
One day, in front of my parents and with Madam Lucy translating into Bidayuh, Jim said with intense seriousness than the words suggest:
“You have to go back to school and regain control. You’re so elegant at solving Logarithmic and Quadratic Functions like nobody else I’ve seen at your age. You want to be stuck here, wasting that kind of power?”
Columbia lit me on fire like some modern-day Prometheus.
I threw everything I had into it and graduated magna cum laude.
That fire took me places I’d only dreamed of, from hopping continents to climbing the ranks to become a top analyst on Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon’s team.
Somewhere along the way, I also began writing for newspapers, facing rejections more often than not.
But that kept me going too, and eventually, it brought me here — editing stories for the newspaper.
Not one of these successes would have been possible without the men and women who took a chance on me.
Sitting by the river with Jim, munching on rambutans, he said, “I’m going to take a chance on you, Medecci,” those were probably the most important words of my life.
The language matters.
He wasn’t just giving me a chance; he was also staking himself on my fulfilling whatever promise he must have seen in me.
Chances always work in two ways. Someone gives; someone else takes.
But the risk is shared.
I was recounting those moments to Paul over breakfast in Tabuan Jaya recently.
He agreed that my trajectory would be difficult to replicate these days.
“For someone taking a chance on somebody, there’s going to be much more exposure to ‘Why this person and why not this person?’ I didn’t have to worry about any of that.”
Then he brought up another classmate, Gracie, whom he took a chance on years ago who is an economist at Deloitte in Singapore.
She told Paul that we’d shared a stage at a forum hosted by Temasek Holdings four years ago — though I didn’t notice her.
It might seem like low stakes, a matter of acceptance or rejection for just that one life, just that one person.
“But it’s not just one person,”
Paul told me, “because one person impacts so many.”
My daughter Bella is now the exact age I was when Paul expelled me for the first time.
Unlike my younger self, she is admired by friends, serves as a class leader and proudly represents her school in the Math Olympiad.
The running joke in our house is that good grades, stubbornness and thrifted clothes are her form of rebellion.
Yet even with pretty stellar records, she and her peers feel awash in anxiety over every test, every extracurricular decision, and every semester’s course schedule.
The school tracks their performances the way chief finance officers (CFOs) track the stock market.
Her experience couldn’t be more different from mine, and yet what we share from our teenage years is the dread that what happens now will forever determine what happens later.
I am eternally grateful that this wasn’t true for me.
But for her and her peers? And for those thousands of other kids like me once, whom the world doesn’t see?
I wish I could reassure them that their futures aren’t necessarily determined by their youthful decisions — good or bad.
But honestly, I’m not sure I can.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
