Gam: "I still don't know what I want to do after—after school. Many of my friends are good at math and science. Things are better for them. In my school, in order to get into the math and science program, you have to pass a level. If you fail, you go to language arts program. I'm in language arts, but not because my grades were bad. I knew that I didn't want to do math and science.
I'm also very lucky. My parents don't tell me what to area to study in. Some of my friends—it's not like that. I'm very lucky."
Me: "Gam, I think you're very wise because you know that you don't know, and because you know you're lucky. I wasn't like that when I was your age—I didn't think I was lucky.
I also think our youth is too short of a time for us to spend doing things that we know aren't going to make us happy. I know that this is a kind of selfish way of thinking, especially when it happens to go against what a parent might want and/or think is best for a kid, but this is what I learned in America: Spend good time trying to find what you love, and when you find it, fight for it with all your heart. Having someone decide who you are and what you should be is a sad waste of life; how could anyone else know what you want? The part of you that you created through the decisions that you've made consciously is the most precious part of who you are... Did that make sense, Gam?"
Gam has the roundest, squishiest cheeks I have ever seen in a girl, and when she smiles, they squeeze into balls of soft flesh that pushes her round eyes into crescent moons. Those crescent moons twinkled at me in the unlit backseat of the car as we drove home, Ajarn L humming softly while we continued to talk.
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