There is an age before children learn to mind their own business.
Before they are taught that other people’s problems are not theirs to carry.
A student in Malaysia just reminded the internet what that age looks like.
It started with a joke
As shared by the teacher on Threads, the student had come to him buzzing after receiving excellent exam results and, in the way students do, half-jokingly asked to be rewarded.
“Can you belanja me Tealive?”
The teacher smiled and told him he would, just not yet.
He was newly posted and his salary had not come through. The student stopped and asked something the teacher was not prepared for:
Did he even have enough money to eat? The teacher said he would manage.
But the student remembered
That could have been the end of it. It was not.
The student returned with a handwritten note and some of his own savings, set aside so his teacher could buy food.
The teacher said he was almost brought to tears and prayed the boy would grow up to be a person of good character, successful in this life and the next.
What we used to be
The post spread quickly, but what people were really responding to was not the money.
It was the instinct behind it.
One commenter believed the student had grown up watching his parents give to others and simply did what felt natural to him.
Another said it plainly: “This kid has such high empathy.”
A former substitute teacher added that one of her own students had once gifted her stickers of her favourite K-pop group, purely because the student had paid enough attention to know she liked them.
“Kids really are naturally attentive like that,” she wrote. “As adults, we end up getting emotional whenever we think back about it.”
Most of us do. Because most of us were that child once, before we grew up and learned to look away.
Have a story to share?
Submit your story to ym.efillaerni@olleh and you may be featured on In Real Life Malaysia.
Read also: ‘I gave up my family to pursue my dreams’ Shares 34 YO M’sian woman – In Real Life
‘I gave up my family to pursue my dreams’ Shares 34 YO M’sian woman
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