Wednesday, October 3, 2012

(68) A Prisoner of Birth by Jeffrey Archer

This is not one of Archer's best sellers. From what the publisher wrote, Kane and Abel sold better.

In a sense, everyone of us is a prisoner of our birth. My mother was a rubber tapper in her youth. My father was relatively well educated by private tutor hired by a few village families. Sadly, Chinese classical education was never in great demand in a British colony. He started working for a soft drink company as a lowly salesman who sat beside the lorry driver. When he married my mother in 1956, he earned one hundred and twenty dollars monthly.

I am very fortunate that I was born after independence. Education was free for 11 years. As a result, girls were educated. After years of struggle, I improved my English enough to win a scholarship from a small college in USA. The education abroad freed me from the prison of my birth from an insignificant beginning. My former childhood neighborhood friends are accounts clerks and administrative assistants (not that I see those jobs as unworthy). Without my strong will to excel, I would probably have ended up somewhere with similar jobs as that was what my background indicated me  to be.

Danny grew up in the poorer part of London. His accents would forever mark him as a lowly person from the lower, hardly literate back ground. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time, fate threw him into jail as a murderer even though he was innocent. But it was in jail that he learned to read and passed his GCSE O-Levels. Later he escaped from a high security prison as Sir Nicholas Moncrieff. After that he inherited the huge Moncrieff estate as Sir M willed it to him before his death. It is interesting that four years in prison changed his life totally.

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