hollaback_
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
today got progressively worse. while
nicky's teacher's day experience was heartwarming, mine was far from it. unfortunately, mine didn't mirror his as i regressed in reverse chronological order, as the hours went by,to my former schools.
morning in rj wasn't too bad. mr evans' assertion that the harlequin in
Heart of Darkness was homosexual was rather amusing. and the teachers loved our little gifts for them.
mr wong (coming back a minute after receiving a bottle of hoegardden from us) : which reminds me, your assignments..
lynette : oh after drinking that, you'll forget all about it!
brian (immediately after thrusting the sparkling grape juice bottle to mrs tan the moment she came out from the staffroom) : m'am it's fake one!
mrs tan : you didn't put something inside that goes "give me A give me A give me A" right
yonghui's tagline for mr lim's (history teacher) 'special brew' : you make the dead look good.
anyway, the concert in the hall was pretty boring. the split-level design of the hall makes it even worse, cos it kind of detaches those on the upper floor from what's really going on. the emcees probably should have broken up into 2 different locations, it would've made the event much livelier. ugh it also gives the national day parade feel though. too many musical items, including a failed budding magician who dropped his freaking wand! but props to his valiant attempts and slickness even in stumbling. guess i should have just gone to the library instead, since apparently they'd stepped down the uptightness about ponning, after national day. BUT luckily i didn't, because i saw something that made me very higggggggghhhhhhhh whee! (:
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after i was done in rj, it was already 1130. i decided to pop by ri to see the remnants of people still lingering around. only saw ms E quah, mr P lim and mrs Tan mh, who asked me why i was the only one from my class who came to see her, and i couldn't come up with anything really adequate in reply. i guess it was worse seeing the whole of 4H there in full force at the tables next to her favourite table outside SR2. strike 1.
after spending about 10 minutes in ri, i got really bored especially since rosie smith was hustling the teachers off for staff lunch at god-knows-where. which meant that there wouldn't be anyone left to talk to. sweesen who was still there suggested that we go back to our primary school, even though when i came to school in the morning i had absolutely no intention of doing so, cos i hadn't been there in years and it wasn't like i was dying to go anyway. on a whim, i accepted his suggestion.
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i think i could have saved my time, actually. but i guess after this year, i'll be moving into something different so this is the last chance i'll ever get to go there. well it's not like i can't, just that if even as a student i'm too busy to make time or really care, what makes anyone think it'd be any easier when i'm an adult? it's quite weird though, i think i stopped going to my primary school in either sec2 or 3, probably the former.
so anyway, there we were - the cream building with the concourse whitewashed and repainted an ugly pukegreen shade. the field all restructured such that only a fraction of a patch remained, everything else a concrete slab of basketball court cake. the stage in the hall ostentatiously remodelled such that the steps were no longer at the sides, but the whole length of the stage, giving that wide, superficial hollywood feel as though one were going up to receive an award at the oscars. insistence on the general office for us to get a visitor's pass, the visitor's logbook next to the teachers' one full of unfamiliar and strange names. malay names, a whole stretch of them. i am not racist, but this in an SAP school? there's something wrong there.
we saw mrs G, talking to a mrleonglookalike (whom we later found out was 28 years old, an ex-student) and seeing that she was one of the last few remaining teachers who we could still recognise as part of our primary education, we decided to go over, and that was when it all came crashing down.
she didn't recognise us.
and it was so awkward, so so awkward i don't think i've ever felt that embarrassed in such a long time. the terrible silence that washed over us after she admitted that she couldn't recall who we were (but knew a man who graduated 10 years before us) was so overpowering. we just stood there dumbly, looking at the ground lost in our own private admissions of inadequacies - her, her memory and us our arrogance that we would be remembered no matter what.
what could we have hoped? that people whose only memories of us as cute bubbly kids would continue ruminating over us after we'd left their lives, especially since they wouldn't even know if they'd ever see us again? mrs G herself said that normally the ex-students disappear after sec2. the exception to the rule was 28yearoldman who'd returned every year. of course they'd remember him. not us - those who came and went as we liked, confident that our status as luminaries during our time would keep us forever etched in the minds of our teachers. we are but, as quoted from conrad, merely "jewels flashing in the night of time".
none of the teachers i'd wished to see were there. mr T, mdm L, mr G and mr L had already left the school so nothing doing there. mdm T wasn't at her table and ms S had been on medical leave for a few months. the only two teachers who meant the absolute most to me when i was still a young impressionable boy, and were still teaching there. they'd probably be the only two that could remember me. or maybe they've forgotten too since i got lazy and haven't seen them in ages. out of sight, out of mind. sigh, what a janet/wings relationship a la colin cheong's
The Stolen Child. i don't know. at least they weren't there for me to find out the truth about their memories.. just in case it'd be negative. we left notes with our contacts behind. hopefully they'll reply.
and it wasn't just the sense of change that had overrun the school that was oppresive. the feeling of being aged was heavy, when all around us were little sec1 kids yabbering and jabbering away, in their assortment of neighbourhood school uniforms. i felt old, i really did. it's like a whole different generation. i don't think i saw a single rafflesian, or top tier student either. maybe a NY girl here, or a chinese high boy there. tells you a lot about the standard of the school in recent years huh. i guess it was bound to come anyway with the new principal instituting changes and relaxing the firm grip on being bilingual with SAP, diluting the strong chinese culture etc etc. that's what you get when you meddle around with something that's unbroken. i see a similar future for RI with bob koh (changing the physical will soon change the intangible), but that's another story for another day.
mr H saw us as we were leaving, and he evidently didn't want to talk to us, because he too couldn't recall who the hell we were. he smartly turned it around when mrs G started showing off her 28yearold ex-student, by promptly telling us after that that "that should be the way!", after all we've only left for 6 compared to 16 years. also, his primary school was torn down already and that's the only valid reason not to visit your primary school, so we should continue coming.
i was all smiles, but cursing deep within. what's the point of returning, when you can't even remember us. it's so pretentious. but at the rate the school is going down the drain, won't be long before we'll be justified and blameless for not returning. i was very annoyed by his comments. you're not even interested in talking to us, we don't even know anyone else here, it's just for the veneer and sake of keeping up appearances and boosting your ego that your teaching career has spanned so many years and you're tao2 li2 man3 tian1 xia4 so much so that your students are uncountable right. why bother, when i'm just a nameless face with a new pair of specs, and you pretending to recognise me when you really don't.
i felt sorrier for mrs G though, who seemed really genuine as she urged us to come back again. i highly doubt i'll be doing so, but i couldn't bear to tell her that. i didn't want to be rude to mr H either, even though i was very tempted to. he who jokingly (in very bad taste if i might add) proclaimd "ah the boy from the Really Idiotic school!" the moment he saw me when i returned in sec1. i can't warp that impression. even though we've all moved on our separate ways and forgotten each other, with only vague memories and impressions, the image of us as good obedient children will always remain. and an obedient child is never rude to his seniors and elders.
i guess this is really the end. sometime ago i was revisiting all the elements of my past - or rather they came up to me through some incident or another. and then of late, everything's being stripped away. handphone, email, sweet memories of childhood. i feel afraid, like maxine hong-kingston, i'll need to redefine myself totally on my own since lineage is not applicable. "they don't connect" and there's nothing left in the past anymore, besides pristine nostalgia that shouldn't be marred by the jarring truth of altered reality. which is the reason why i got very apprehensive of moving back to bishan at the end of last year. the past and present cannot coincide together, one has to give way to the other.
guess it's appropriate to end off with something nick said -
i miss 6/9 '99 says:somehow ri didn't hold as much for me.
for some weird reason.
maybe cos i didn't excel enough for the teachers to really remember me.and to that i say, it doesn't matter how well you do, but how well you bother to make yourself remembered. you're just another student, no matter how stellar you were during your heyday.
mike just took up your time at
7:34 pm
th time!