The year was 1973. I was a Form 5 student of  Methodist  Girls Secondary School (MGSS) in Malacca, Malaysia taking my final Malaysian Certificate of Education(MCE) exam. I think Dr Mahathir was the Education Minister in Malaysia then.

This was the year that the majority of the schools with predominantly high percentage of Chinese students in the whole of Malaysia failed their Malay papers in the MCE exam. My school MGSS has always had a high percentage of students who passed their Form 5 exams - usually above 80 percent pass the MCE exam.

But in 1973 MGSS only had an average of 30 percent who passed their MCE exam. Likewise the whole of Malaysia with schools that had a high percentage of Chinese students saw 20 to 30 percent passes in all these various individual schools.

This was a shameful chapter in Malaysia's history that was left untold to all of Malaysia.

Needless to say I had to stay behind in school and study for another long, wasted year just to take the whole MCE exam again. This time (1974) I received a credit of 3 in my Malay MCE paper.

There and then,  I decided that I was leaving Malaysia and never coming back. As soon as I could, I left Malaysia for good and never looked back. I remember sitting in the plane and humming the song of "I'm leaving on a jetplane' in 1976.

Unless Malaysia changes its discriminatory policies and has a level playing field for all it's citizens, the talented and the rich will continue to leave this land.

And the parents of the poor will also scrape and save to send their children overseas for a better opportunities in places where race is not a factor but one’s intelligence and talents are appreciated.