Saturday, December 1, 2012

(168) A Change of Heart by Jeffrey Archer

In this short story, the white man who caused the death of a black man survived to use the deceased's heart to live another 4 years.

On the first level, he did literally changed his own heart for a negro's heart.

Figuratively, he awoke with full repentance. He gave up everything to serve the poor and needy blacks that he did not even treat as humans before his operation.

I don't want to appear as a white basher here. I believe that given certain backgrounds, circumstances and culture, any race could and would treat some other races as sub-human. I heard that in Singapore, only mainland Chinese with money were allowed in to artificially keep up the Chinese to non-Chinese ratio for election purposes. Australia has been on a pro-white but against Asian immigration policy for decades.

In my country, the English standard was artificially killed from 1976 or thereabouts. Overnight, all subjects in elementary and high schools were switched to be taught in the national language. Now we see the result: in a premier public university, out of a small batch of first year English Literature students, they could not find 5 qualified students who could work towards Lit degrees. For practical reasons, all the students from that year may have to be shunted to an easier stream called English Studies.

These current students are lucky that they were admitted to courses of studies that are recognized and would not cost a bomb. Back to my batch, most of my friends who would have qualified by merit to enter into public universities ended up as article clerks and worked their ways to become chartered accountants. There was the class clown Jack (I remember him as the practical joker who put ice cubes down the prettiest girl's collar). He is a chartered accountant now and lives in Australia with his family. There was Clarence, the tallest boy with nimble fingers who could confidently extract things from the girls' pockets without touching us. Clarence is the Head of an Accountancy College in town now. There was the bad boy Vincent who owns his Accounting Consultancy. There was Pamela who took eight years to qualify for her ACCA, she married late and has a son at 43 years old. These are the few accountants I can off hand name out of a class of 30.

1 comment:

  1. Such a nice story. One must have to read it after all This is what we repeatedly do.

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