So I'll share a moment I had that completely changed my way of thinking. I was walking to school with my amah (housekeeper) in Hong Kong. I think I was six or seven at the most. It was the time of year when tiny but brilliantly white flowers bloomed in the sub-tropical trees on the hill going up to my school. Their blooms didn't last long. Most of them fell to the ground after a few days, blanketing the streets in a fragrant confetti.

I went to a British school, and although most of the teachers and the headmaster were Brits, the school staff -- janitors, clerks, etc -- were Chinese, Cantonese in particular. There was one janitor all of the kids were afraid of. He was very tall, thin, and fairly old. What made us afraid was a cataract or sommit in one of his eyes that made the eye almost entirely white. He looked like, to us kids, a demon.

The staff for the most part didn't interact with the students. But that one morning, I saw the scary janitor walking down the hill as my amah and I walked up. I reacted by moving to the other side of my amah so that she was in between me and the janitor. He saw us and stopped, and picked a tiny white flower. Then he walked towards us.

I was really scared by this time, feeding on the fearful stories that my peers and I passed around about this demon of a man. I hid behind my amah, who was trying quite hard to calm me, and she gently admonished me for being afraid (and in hindsight, for being so rude.)

The man came to us and he crouched down and offered the flower to me. For the first time I could recall, he smiled, and his face broke out into a million laugh lines. His white eye was still there, but it wasn't so scary anymore.

I took the flower and in a small voice said "thank you" in Cantonese. He replied, "You're welcome" in a voice rich with age. He had a storyteller's voice. Then he rose, patted me on the head, and continued walking down the hill.

At that very moment I wanted to run to him and give him a big hug, even though I didn't know why just then. But after that, I remember times when my friends and peers would judge someone by their appearance, and I would be less inclined to accept their opinions as fact. As I grew older, I became less and less trusting of the surface. I wanted to see what was between the covers of the book before judging it.

To this day I keep looking back and wishing fervently that I had run to him and given him that hug, and apologized for judging him as I did. I'm sure he's long passed on, and I'm sure his life was a difficult one, labouring as he did as a janitor. I hope he was probably a grandparent, and I hope he had the chance to share that terrific voice of his telling stories to his kids and grandkids. I hope these things because I don't want to think of him as lonely. I won't deny that I still feel some considerable shame for my unthinking actions back then, but I hope I've made up for it by changing for the better.

And I hope others treated him better than I did.