I watched as my brothers gulped down their mid-day meal of porridge and omelette. Barely 10 minutes ago, the two panting boys had stepped hastily through the doorway, threw their schoolbags in a corner and wriggled out of their sweat-drenched school uniforms. As usual, they had run all the way home along the kilometre-long winding and muddy path that gave us access to the back gate of Bedok Boys’ Primary School. Now, with their hunger appeased, the pair hurriedly helped me clear the dining table which doubled as our study table. Without much ado, both started to work on their school assignments for the day. Young as they were, the two boys knew they had a long and hard day ahead of them. Lined in neat rows along the side of one wall were stacks of dusty-looking, rough, brown papers. These were re-cycled from paper-bags which had been used to contain farm feed or cement powder. My parents had cleaned out the bags and straightened out the crumpled papers to get them ready for us to re-fold them into usable bags. My brothers knew that our family of nine had to work hard and fast. Each bundle of a thousand completed paper-bags could only fetch us three dollars for the larger ones and a dollar for the small ones. Making these bags had became our main source of income after my father’s spice business ground to a standstill when Indonesia announced a policy of confrontation towards Malaya in Jan 1963. As the nutmeg processed by his workers were imported from Indonesia, the Indonesian- Malaysian Confrontation or Konfrontasi which lasted from 1963 to 1966 immensely affected the business of my poor aging father. I can still remember the day I timidly asked my form-teacher to update my particulars, changing my father’s occupation from ‘Towkay’ to ‘unemployed’. Our family shifted from a spacious 4-room apartment located in the buzzing centre of Singapore to a tiny kampong house far to the East of the island. Five of us were schooling at that time and my youngest brother was only a year old. Reluctant though we kids were, my parents transferred us from the now defunct Tanjung Rhu Boys’ and Tanjung Rhu Girls’ Primary Schools to Bedok Boys’ and Bedok Girls’ Primary Schools. 1963 was a crucial year for me. I was to take my Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) in a totally strange environment.