Khan

We were both best friends of each other for so many years. I do not know his whereabouts at this time. Was he able to continue his education? Or has he already had some kinds of jobs for a living? For many years, I haven’t been in touch with him, and not even a letter was sent out or received. However, our friendship still remains an unforgettable piece of memory that I will never, for the rest of my life, dare to let go. It had been such a long time since the last time I saw him, a friend whom I once saw as the source of my jealousy and enviousness.

We were both raised in a small village in the Southern part of Vietnam, my homeland. Back in the old days, when most of the countrysides were not civilized and modern buildings were nowhere to be seen, our village seemed to be a paradise. The population was not even exceeding over a thousand people. The whole village was nothing like the present modern cities, which are full of vehicles, high buildings with the busy, overwhelming atmospheres cover nearly as far as the cities’ borders reach. Everything appeared to be so peaceful, calm and harmoniously existed along with the nature itself. Since the population wasn’t that big, there was only one school located at the center of our village with approximately two to three hundred students attended every year. The school was quite small but there was a lively and youthful feeling that always gave us students a sense of tireless and energetic activities going on around the campuses. The school offered educational programs for all people with different levels of education. There was a narrow lane leading from the school’s main gate to a 30-meter wide playground, and from which the lane was divided into smaller ones directing to newly built campuses, where all the first-graders to fifth-graders studied. Several campuses like that were built separately for each grade level, and there was even an campus served as a classroom to teach exclusively for adults whom, in their early ages, did not have a chance to go to school and be educated
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Khan and I were both best friends since first grade, and second, third and fourth grades passed with our friendship remained unyielding and unaltered. Khan, like most of the kids in my village back then, was originated from a poor, beggarly family. Khan had always wanted to go to school but his family couldn't afford to fund his education. Luckily, the government back then was offering chances for poor students to receive education like many others, and it was a miracle that Khan was chosen among hundreds of needy kids in the village. His dad was an angler, who had been working so hard days and nights to sustain the whole family and just to have enough food on every dinner was really a blessing to them all. Life had not been kind to them, with his mom being paralyzed completely due to a deadly, incurable disease, and along with his dad’s low salary, there were tons of struggles and sufferings his family had to endure for years. 

Unlike Khan, I was born in a wealthy, prosperous family. My family was not that rich, but compare to Khan’s circumstances and many other kids in the same village, I seemed to be the luckiest. Since I was a first-grader, I did not have to worry about anything besides focusing on school’s works and getting good grades. Everything was given to me like the blessings from god to a person who had done many charitable acts in his past life, or at least that was what my grandfather used to say every time I received gifts from my parents and other relatives. I used to think a lot about my grandfather’s statement, and if it was true, then was Khan a person who had always been committing sinful, calamitous acts in his past life, and now he had to pay an expensive price for what he did? I have never taken religious beliefs and teachings seriously, though, maybe because of all those spiritual cultivations my grandpa tried to plant into my mind so many times, and so that thought really did not stay for long inside my head.

Regardless of all the misfortunes and afflictions going on in his life, Khan had always been an excellence example of hard-working and intelligent students in our school. He often got involved in many contests and competitions in school. He had never let a competition pass by without attempting to gain the championship. He had failed many times though, but after each failure, I had always seen a stronger, more ambitious will growing inside of his eyes. Just like another one of my grandfather’s endless teachings, “The ones who never give up will be the ones standing on top of the others”. Indeed, I was able to see a true, fleshly example of the statement, Khan. Failures and losses had shaped his own successful self, and all those times that Khan’d failed were the steps he had taken to farther accomplishments. I did not know if it was Khan’s own misfortunes that had given him the firm resolution to fight back destitution, which had been dragging him down and preventing him from becoming successful ever since he was born. However, I have seen with my very own eyes, one after another, that he’d gone from losing to winning any contest he ever wanted to win. Soon after, Khan had become well known throughout the whole village. His reputation for winning so many competitions soon spread widely to other villages nearby, even bigger cities with many well-funded educational competitions knew of his name. The money he won after winning every contest went into helping his family, and he only kept a small amount of money for school supplies and some other expenses like treating me ice creams and candy. In spite of his intelligence and famousness, Khan was always acting humbly in front of me and other students. Many people in the village loved his humbleness and decency, and I back then thought proudly of myself for having a best friend like him.

It was our fifth year of school when things started to go bad. Khan’s famousness still remained well known, but my appreciation and admiration for his reputation were going down the hill. There had been annoying conversations going on within my family, and most of them were mainly focusing on comparing me with Khan. Back at that time, I was not much of a diligent student. My grades weren’t bad. In fact, I was ranked at the top ten students in my class, but that wasn’t anything comparing to Khan. Then before I even noticed, I was already participating in one of those comparing conversations. My mom started asking about how I was doing in school, how my grade was compare to Khan’s and if I was planning on participating in any competition at all. Then came my dad, grandparents with their own investigating questions. Even they had all been asking doubtful stuff like that subtly, I still felt something uneasy going on inside my mind. 

Just before Khan’s 11th birthday, I was planning to give him a surprising and meaningful present using the allowance that I had been saving for the whole year, a silver-plated pen. Khan once told me about how he would love to have a decent pen. I knew that a silver-plated pen wasn’t something Khan could afford, even with all his money from winning contests. In the past years, we normally celebrated Khan’s birthday with only the two of us singing some birthday songs while baking our own birthday cake at my house. It was first Khan’s idea to bake a birthday cake in his 8th birthday, when his dad just found an old, obsolete cooking book and gave it to him as a birthday present. When the day came, I had already prepared everything; candles were bought by my mom along with the ingredients for baking the cake, and the present was also ready. The clock had already passed 8 o’clock, and still there was no sign of Khan coming. I waited and waited for another two hours, and finally decided to give up waiting. Who would had known how I felt at that very moment, feeling the betrayal maybe, or trying to bring up for some comforting thoughts to reassure myself that there must had been something wrong happened that kept him from coming. Soon after that, I unwittingly heard from one of the kids in my class that there was an awesome birthday party at Khan’s house that night, and I was not invited, his best friend wasn’t invited. He was looking down on me.

I started to think of Khan as a nuisance. When I said a nuisance, I really meant it. Khan then seemed to be a total jerk in my eyes, a jerk that possessed admirable attributes and persistent gut. I started to question our friendship and my own ability to reach to a point even higher than Khan’s attainment. With all those thoughts floating aggressively inside my mind, I still admire and credit Khan for all that he’d gone through, because every time he failed, I was there, I was with him to encourage, support and push him forward, but it would seem that jealousy and resentment were so strong that I couldn’t resist. I started to see and feel things that I had never felt before. I saw the unfairness between us. The jealousy and enviousness began to swallow the whole of me, and I felt like my whole personality had changed, completely changed. What does he have but I don’t? How could people compare me to him like that? That was such a cruel way to compare two people who are each other’s best friends. In addition to that, he did not even invite me to his party. Khan was obviously looking down on me. All these questions soon began to fill my mind, feeding the resentfulness inside of me little by little until everything I was thinking went terribly wrong. Being consumed by enviousness and resentment, my mind was heading toward the wrong path. I knew there was something I had to do, to get back at him, and so I did what I shouldn’t have done. Before I even knew it, I was rushing hastily toward the room where a very important test was being held, and Khan was in there. I then requested to see Khan for a few minutes; just a few minutes conversation had changed my life greatly ever after.

Just a few days before, Khan told me about the national test he was about to take that could bring him the opportunity he had been longing for years, the opportunity to be an international student with a full tuition scholarship to Australia. I knew how hard it was for Khan to overcome a failure on his own, thus I thought that if this golden opportunity slips away from his hand, which would bring him down for good. And in that short conversation, I told him dishonestly about his mom’s condition, about how it just turned worse a moment ago and suggested him to abandon the test and rush home immediately to see his mom. To be honest, I didn’t think he would trust me without any hesitation because I believed we were barely best friends anymore, but he did. He hurried out of the room without even packing his stuff up or making any excuse to the instructor. Khan rushed precipitately back to his house just to find out that I was lying. He jumped recklessly on his old, aged bike and biked with all his might home to see his mother, suffering for the last moment and longing to see her son one last time. Obviously those were all the lies that I came up with. The distance between his house and the testing room could have easily been over two miles, and by the time he’d arrived at his house and found out he was tricked, it was too late to go back to the testing place, it was too late to undo all those that I had done to him.

After that incident, we hadn’t had a chance to talk for a while. One day, Khan unexpectedly came to my house and asked my mom if he could talk to me. It was unbelievable to think that Khan’s face did not show any sign of rage or anger when I saw him. It seemed like he did not hate me at all. Indeed, Khan did not hate me; he wasn’t disgusted by my execrable and baneful actions. He was glad that what I said to him were all lies; he was delighted that his mom was alright. After all, it was just me, who felt the shamefulness and hatred, not the hatred from others, but the hatred from deep down of my heart, the hatred of regret and disgrace.