Twenty

In that evening I went to a gathering of my university classmates.

Yes, it's twenty years since we graduated.

There were some 110 of us in 1991, and we saw 90 coming that evening. Since there are three of us working overseas (actually four, but Jimmy did come back for the evening), one jumped (maybe two, my memory is not accurate), and one in jail, the attendance was remarkably high.

Certainly better than any of the lectures that we had when we were students.

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An unexpected difficulty of organizing this event was, you know, how to define a classmate.

It goes like this: There were around 80 of us when we began with the pre-medical year. It became 120 when we entered year one (some new comers after the A level examination, as well as a dozen of repeaters). By 1991, actually only 86 of these 120 young persons graduated - the others fell back to the next class, or chose (maybe in the passive voice) to leave the medical school. Along the years we had another two dozens of friends joining us from the previous class.

Difficult times those might seem when we were in it, on looking back, our memory did a wonderful job; only the sweet fragments are left for us as the aftertaste twenty years later.