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My first exposure to the English language was when I was about to start junior high school. When I passed the entrance examination for a private Catholic school, the school gave me a special homework assignment. It was a book of English penmanship exercises. The Catholic school had its elementary school from which most of the junior high students came. They had already learned English at elementary school while new students from public elementary schools like me had never learned it. The school intended to fill the gap in the English education by making the new students do their homework during the spring break before school started. I was learning how to write the English alphabet from an A while most other students wrote and read English easily. I knew almost no English words let alone their spellings. I dreaded to think how much work I would need to catch up with them. I was the smartest kid in the public elementary school I attended, and now, I was at the bottom of the private junior high. A few days later, the school held an orientation day when my mother and I went to get a school uniform, a uniform gym suit, uniform shoes, uniform indoor shoes and uniform bags. My mother was in a good mood, as the school was quite famous and she had become part of it. There, we encountered for the first time the mothers and their children who came from the school’s privileged elementary school. By all appearances, they were undoubtedly rich. They wore, talked, and acted all differently from people I had known. The English education wasn’t the only gap between them and me…
