***
"Mum, I want to go to Malaysia to help out the children and adults," Evonne said to her mother one day after she turned sixteen. She was watching a documentary about Malaysian kids not having enough dental care, leading to poor oral health and losing their teeth at such a young age. At that moment, Evonne had made a lifelong decision.
She was going to become a dentist so she could help provide dental care in her mother's homeland, Malaysia.
It wasn't until ten years later that she and her team of dental professionals accomplished that goal, setting up a practice in the heart of Johor Bahru city Province, donating free dental care for all who would utilize their service. She usually frequented Malaysia on her holiday at least once a year to check on the progress of the children there.
On her twenty-fifth birthday, Evonne went into the world of periodontology, wanting to further study the subject of gum disease, so she could provide more service to the community. And she did that within three years.
****
Evonne stared at the flickering candles, her mind flitting back to reality. All the goals she had planned she'd accomplished. Everything she had wanted she'd received. But now Evonne, aged thirty, was lost.
She bit her lip and stared at the candlelight dancing in front of her, those flames providing just enough light to illuminate the many smiling faces that now stared back at her—the faces of her many nephews, eyeing her weirdly, not understanding why their aunt would be fabricating mass saltwater production down her cheeks;
her cousins and their husbands, holding each other's hands, eyeing her with mixed feelings of sadness because they seemed to know what she was going through since they were of similar age; and then her mother and father, hugging each other at their ripe old age, looking at her worriedly. Evonne took all of this in.
And then a painful cord struck through her heart and she reached a moment of epiphany, that single moment when she finally realized what everyone was talking about for the past two decades. Love. Marriage. Family. Children.
Too busy was she trying to achieve her status, her career, and her reputation that she had forgotten all about that other important aspect of her life: love. Sifting through her memories, Evonne tried to place any fond memory where she was actually in love with someone.
Her mind drew a blank. There was none, nothing, a big fat zero, just a single goose egg. She had never had her first kiss, never had her first dance at a formal during high school, never went to a nightclub, never had a boyfriend, never had or experienced anything that a girl her age should have done while growing up. In her entire thirty years of life, she had been working.
In high school, she spent her days working, if not studying.
When she finally entered university, again she was so busy studying and working she had forgotten to go to the annual dental ball, forgot to look around her as her other classmates eyed each other across the room and asked one another on dates.
And even after she graduated from dentistry, she still forgot to have fun, forgot to go out and celebrate her success at achieving such a high degree. And now she was about to enter the big three-zero zone.