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January 31, 2005

Retrospect

Once upon a time, I thought the world was my oyster. There remained tons of possibilities, to live and to grow old trying to explore as much as you could with this one life which you were given. In schools, we were asked to think about what we wanted to do for a big part of our lives before we got our identity cards. Teachers would mark these compositions entitled “My Ambition” through the “Grammar”, “Content” and “Spelling” schemes. Not much was discussed about what we wrote except for the occasional pep talk during Social Studies or Good Citizen classes.

Those were the days when we were constantly advised by our well-meaning parents about the dangers of being a road sweeper. For mine, I was always told by my mother about the need to eat as fast as I could during meals so that I would “tan wu jiak” (indirectly translated from Teochew, it means the early bird catches the worm). I never really asked her what eating quickly got anything to do with my academic pursuits, but as I grew older, I pondered over this often.

I was one of those who had loads of stamina to cross small but frequent hurdles but always stumbled whenever a big one came. Throughout my Primary school days, urged on by my mother and at times her sidekick – the cane, I would strive to move up in terms of my class and standard positions. I likened this to English football, where a sudden drop in position meant a bit of grueling and grilling from my folks about why things went pear-shaped.

Once incident which I remembered clearly was when I was nine. I was sitting for my English exam and struggling through my composition when our English teacher who doubled up as the invigilator, reminded us about the amount of time we had to finish our work. Something hit me then (I knew not what) and I panicked. My mind simply went blank and I submitted my work, having only written two paragraphs. Then, my form teacher heard about this and confronted my English teacher. This resulted in an argument between the two of them and I went home fearing the worst.

My PSLE results looked ok, but when they are put side by side with someone else’s array of “stars”, it paled in comparison. My father, who overestimated his son’s academic abilities (all helped on by a relentless slew of assessment books cramming), decided to put Singapore’s premier boys school (which was located at Patterson Road then) as the first choice. So it happened my PSLE aggregate score was just one less than the number needed to get one into the worst class in that school. I ended up preparing my “O”s in a neighbourhood school which gained a reputation, around that neighbourhood, for fights started off by its male and female students. Add to that, we only had four stalls in the canteen, an unused badminton court and two basketball courts as school amenities and two dilapidated buildings for the school (both built more than twenty years before I was born).

Year after year, our beleaguered principal, who might have been cursing his luck for ending up in such an institution, would address us during the first day of school, about the paucity of graduates which our school produced. In a way, he was trying to spur us up but I felt as though the confirmation of my academic abilities was validated by his speech.

We wore white shirts and white pants, which for boys our age, keeping them clean was harder than putting an elephant through the eye of the needle. It was the closest I could get to fulfill my father’s expectations of me being a true blue student of Singapore’s premier boy’s school. We could have easily passed off as any of those boys in R*I* or S*J*I* or B*P*G*H*S* if we do not open our mouths. Yet, spurred on now by my mother’s constantly nagging, I did well enough to finish within the top five consistently during my four years there.

Then the “O”s came and left. I got my results in 1991. Wearing my uniform for the last time with the pants filled with “unbleachable” stains after years of wear and days of after-exams football kickabout sessions and the CJC T-shirt (for I went there during the three-month thingy), I walked to the classroom, greeted my classmates and settled down for the final moment.

The déjà vu moment hit me when I got my results. If all my other six subjects could somehow move up a grade, I would have gotten myself within a rat’s ass of entering Singapore’s "second-tier" junior colleges. They would have been pretty impressive, but as circumstances would have dictated it, it was not the case.

It was an almost teary farewell for me when I had to call up my three-month-old friends from the JC (complete with hip and cool girls from those convent schools and fun-to-be-with blokes from boys’ schools) and tell them about how I would have to leave them.

I ended up enrolling in a course which was my sixth choice and the three years there became a big drag (and dread), having to struggle with chemical equations and physics calculations day after day. Lasses from convent or girls’ schools were few and far between in this faculty (not many lasses would enroll in an engineering discipline). Gradually, those fun days in JC and to a certain degree, secondary school (despite its dilapidated state), started fading away. At the end of my diploma course, the seed of what would grow and later eat into my self-esteem, was planted.

The world was no longer my oyster. It turned from bright and sunny (with hills after hills full of flowers, plush green grass, crystal clear lakes and rivers) into dark, gloomy and everywhere I turned, there was an almost suffocating, foreboding air about and around it. Throw in some of those unresolved identity issues every teenager had to go through, I got the first taste of the stinging bite from reality.

This year, I would turn 30. If I were to categorise my life in stages, the first decade would be one of “Strawberry Fields Forever”, the second would be associated with the bubble-gum-life of an adolescence and the awakening of those desires to have a close friend in someone of the opposite gender, while the third would probably be analogized as a gloomy, dark-clouds infested and dry land. This is also the age when I once spoke my mind about my demise during one fine day in secondary school, as I declared to my class my desire to end my life the day I turned 30, in front of my shocked teacher.

Posted by D W at January 31, 2005 06:33 PM

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