My Childhood - Part 4

The other thing I can remember is entrepreneurship. It was 1984, way before any programmes by the government to promote entrepreneurship. I was in primary 5. Somehow, someone started a newsletter, writing stories, riddles and news reports of what’s going on in school. Sold it for 50 cents a copy. Neat. And as usual, our idea of entrepreneurship is to emulate what is working – thus we each started our own magazine, recruiting our own writers, artists, and printers.

After a few magazines and newsletters were out, I decided to take the risk of starting my own business. Recruited a classmate, borrowed my mum’s typewriter and we spent the weekends writing up stories and copying jokes and riddles off books that we borrowed from the library. Well, we did not know about plagiarism, copyright and MITA then, so spare me the lecture. We just typed, drew, and photocopied.

Once we get to it, we are thinking like businessmen, even without all the training. We tried direct marketing – sending out subscription forms to our classmates and friends from other classes. We tried advertising – putting out notices about what’s in the next issue. We tried wholesaling – giving discounts to friends who are interested to resell to earn profits. We even thought about cost cutting - got my mum to copy them at her work place, so we do not need to pay for photocopying.

Primary school education came and went. By primary 6, I was forever getting poor results. Ranked the bottom 30% of the entire cohort. Ranked the bottom 20% in my class. Very quickly, it was PSLE. Didn’t felt very confident of my performance. Then it was time to choose my secondary school.

My father, as usual, wanted me to go to a good secondary school. We had 6 choices, and he chose SAP schools for the first 3. High expectations. My results came back a few months later – 245 points, with A’s for English, Chinese and Science, A* for Mathematics. (I am not bragging. Just going to bring out the irony about my capabilities in Mathematics in later chapters of my life.)

So, I landed up in the secondary school of our 4th choice – Queenstown Secondary Technical School. (Today, it is known as Queenstown Secondary School)