The Familiar Voice

Well there I was. The big time law student at Harvard. Pride and joy of my average Malaysian Chinese family. And what was this high-flying student doing on the weekend before her finals? Smoking marijuana in an alleyway with a few junkies. Not that she wasn’t one herself.

  Now don’t be too quick in judging me. I wasn’t always like this. I used to be very sure of myself. But that was in Malaysia, where I was the big fish in the small pond. Then I came to America. Due to the fact that I was Asian, I felt constantly pressured to do well. To prove that I deserved to be there, just like the rest of them. Granted, I wasn’t white. But I didn’t want to be either. I have always been proud of the fact that as a Chinese and a Malaysian, I knew the importance of preserving culture.
  I’m not quite sure just when my marijuana inhaling days began. I think it was the day I got to know Gwen. She was fun, edgy and she always acted like she didn’t have a care in the world. Gwen was from Singapore, and her father was rich enough to pay for her four years in Harvard, despite the fact that she barely scraped through her exams. It was on that fateful night that I had been ranting to Gwen about my workload when she handed me a stick of marijuana and told me to smoke it. “It’ll make you feel better” she said.

  I stumbled into my dorm room completely high. The place spun around me and I fell on my bed, laughing. Lisa, my dorm mate, shot me her signature ‘raised-eyebrow’ look in my direction. “You’re high again aren’t you?” she said, disgusted. Laughing, I nodded. I saw her rolling her eyes and shrugging before turning back to her laptop. “What’re you doing Lisa?” I asked lazily in a sing-song manner. “I’m instant messaging my mom,” she replied “some of us actually care about our old and grey parents back home that worked hard to get us here.” I stood up, offended. “I care about my parents!” I yelled. Lisa didn’t even flinch. “Sure you do” she said, not taking her eyes off her laptop screen “that’s why you never call them, and whenever they call, you’re always either stoned or too busy to talk to them.” I stuck my tongue out at her, and fell back into my bed.

  I woke up at 3am. My head still felt light, but the room had stopped spinning. Lisa was asleep on her side of the room. With a pang, I remembered her snide and sarcastic comment earlier. I couldn’t help but feel a slight twinge of guilt. I looked at the phone on my bedside table and decided to pick it up. I dialed the code, then the phone number I had memorized since the age of six. “Hello?” an old, female voice said. A tear rolled down my cheek, followed by another. Despite everything, I felt relieved when I heard the familiar voice again.

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