My stamp collection hobby

One of the small time hobbies that I had put it at the very remote far end corner of my memories was the collection of stamps. I did not remember exactly how I started it. Most probably rooted from some kind of student newspaper that I subscribed when I was in the primary school. It was some cross words puzzles or quizes, upon filling in the right answers and then sent to the publisher of the newspaper, prizes were won in the form of little gifts. Initially my standard 4 and 5 class teacher Mr. Kong Ying Peng helped me with the solving of those puzzles. However at the later part when I gathered enough knowledge, with better command of the Chinese language, I answered those puzzles on my own and submitted to him for final review or correction before I sent off by post. A lot of the times, my school mates did the same and they managed to win more impressive prizes than me. On one particular occasion, the prize I won were beautiful stamps that portrayed some famous ancient Chinese poets, pioneer in the field of Chinese medicine such as Mr. Li Shi Zhen etc. Those were really very attractive stamps which I kept inside a very nice stamp album I bought specially for keeping them. Inside the album, there were also other stamps from then the Malayan states and also those from China taken out from the envelopes of letters sent all the way from my aunty in China etc. Then one fine day I brought the album along to tuition class and showed off to some of my friends. Unfortunately, during the recess time of the tuition class, portion of the very nice stamps were stolen. Though this was just a minor incident in my life during my primary school days, I still remember it till this day. This is because I really like those first collection of my stamps very much!

In the same tuition class, there was also this mischievous case of lost photo from our then little lady classmate Miss Wan Yin Fong, her personal photo was somehow taken out from her pencil box and passed around the class. It was at the instant that the photo was passed on to me, she eventually discovered the loss of her photo, and she cried and thought I was the culprit. I was somehow stunned and remained speechless and did not manage to explain myself the actual situation. This was probably because it was my first experience confronted by a little girl crying in front of me. Many years later I heard she migrated to New Zealand and I have never seen her again!

Coming back to the collection of stamps, I am not sure eventually where had that stamp album gone to, if I am wrong, I might have passed it on to my younger brother KM Lee long long time ago. Being my younger brother I liked to pass him things, I remember very well that I had passed on to him my boys scout log book with many hand drawn nice pictures inside it.