How would life have turned out: 02 (Singapore)

In my younger days, most Chinese parents aspired for their children to become one of the following three when they grew up, and in the order given: 

1. doctor

2. lawyer

3. accountant

    I read a book about Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) and his work in Africa when I was about ten, and aspired to go and work with him.

    I was in the Science Stream for my four secondary school years, and got good marks.  It was, therefore, automatically taken for granted that I should go into the pre-med(ical) class for my two Pre-U years.

    For some reason, however, in spite of all the hard work I'd put in for physics and chemistry, I simply never got my head around them.  Even the physics and chemistry lab experiments never quite produced the readings required, although I'd followed the instructions to a tee.

    In hindsight, I should've switched over to the Arts Stream after a year of this, but it was never my ambition to do History or Geography or Literature, I wanted to heal people, so I doggedly stuck to physics and chemistry, perhaps hoping a miracle would happen last minute.

    Well, that miracle didn't happen, so I couldn't get into medical school.  It was a huge shock (/ source of shame) at the time, to have failed for the first time in my school life when I'd been top girl of the grade seven years out of ten for my secondary school.  Top girl out of 200 students.  (In those days, the standard size was 40–44 students per class, with five classes per grade at my convent school.  Nobody suffered from the size, although a big deal has been made out of class sizes here in the UK.)

    The alternative was nursing, but with three health professionals in the family, I was strongly discouraged from going into it:  low pay and low status; hard / heavy / dirty work; shift work which would mess up my family life when I got married.

    So that I could be financially independent as soon as possible, I took up a secretarial course.  That completely changed my life, because it got me to Taiwan (the American oil company job), and then I was able to use my secretarial course skills to support myself throughout my student years in London, working part-time as a telex operator.  (Typing wasn't a default and universal skill in those days, unlike now -- one had to learn it properly.  Don't forget it was the manual typewriter then, with the electric typewriter being still fairly novel.)

    Looking back, if | had passed my physics and chemistry and got into medical school, this is what I might have become -- based on what I think is a fairly typical model:

1. maybe set up my own health practice

2. lived in a bungalow house (rather than in a high rise block), or in an affluent residential compound

3. got married, had children

4. driven a Mercedes Benz

    No sour grapes here, but that's not me.  And in view of my being squeamish about blood and open wounds, failing Pre-U physics and chemistry was the message from above, I think.  (I know, I know, one can always go into the bloodless branches of medicine, but I think the basic training requires one to go through the whole gamut.)

(Singapore)