I spent my twenties in the United States.
During college, the most difficult part for me was always writing essays.
Critical thinking.
That phrase followed me everywhere.
But for someone raised in a system built on memorization and multiple-choice exams,
critical thinking was not a familiar skill — it was a foreign language.
Years later, after getting married and having a child,
I wanted something different for my own child.
An education unlike mine.
That desire led us to Malaysia, a country known for its many international schools.
I believed creativity and critical thinking could be nurtured there.
With that hope, we chose an American-curriculum school.
What I didn’t expect was how much disappointment I would feel.
I realize now that my expectations were not directed at individual teachers.
They were expectations about education itself.
Somewhere along the way, I had assumed that in a more “international” environment,
children would be met with greater flexibility,
and differences would be held more gently.
Why did I believe that so easily?
By third grade, my child was struggling.
He was surrounded by rougher dynamics among peers,
and he began developing fear — especially toward teachers with loud voices.
School slowly became a place of tension rather than learning.
I want to be clear:
this experience was never about race or nationality.
This is not a story about discrimination.
I also know this clearly now:
my disappointment does not mean that the school failed everyone.
Other families may have felt satisfied.
Other children may have thrived in the same environment.
What I was facing was not a universal truth,
but a personal gap —
a gap between my expectations of education and the reality my child was living in.
I was disappointed not because the system was entirely wrong,
but because it was not right for us.
It was about a system that failed to recognize my child’s strengths
and instead magnified his differences as deficiencies.
What made the disappointment deeper was this:
no one seemed curious about who he was good at being.
In that environment, being different was treated as something to fix,
rather than something to understand.
Eventually, I no longer wanted to endure that landscape.
It felt like a town made entirely of wounds —
and I wanted to escape.
So I left my job.
And we moved again, this time to a British-curriculum school.
Not because I believed one country’s education was superior to another,
but because I was still searching —
searching for a place where my child could exist
without being reduced to what he was not.
”Some nights, the stars were the only thing that stayed the same.“