Galactic Space Terror

I’ve heard about what high school in the USA is like. People don’t like going to high school over there. It’s a bitchy, competitive place. If you’re in a lousy ghetto neighbourhood school then there is plenty of violence, bullying and the occasional gun massacre. If you’re in a exclusive prep school, there is plenty of bitchy competitiveness, one-upmanship, nerds vs jocks. I think there are places with good spirit where the atmosphere is nurturing, people have a good sense of belonging. But I think either they are fairly rare or you don’t see them so much in media representations.

I think RJC would have fallen in between these 2 extremes, but I think it was a little bitchy. It is strange that I could have gone to 2 schools that are so closely associated with each other – RI and RJ, and feel so different towards them. I always felt that there was a sense of camaraderie in RI that was completely missing in RJ. Perhaps the stakes were less high – I could screw up my “O” levels, (to a limited extent I did) and still get to the next level, and as for RJC – I didn’t appreciate it at that time how relatively easy it was for me to get into the uni I got into, and how somebody from maybe another JC but managing to accomplish what I did accomplish might not get in. Furthermore it was a junior college where all the feeder schools going into it were unisex schools, the first time that you had a lot of hormone fuelled guys trying to impress girls, and it made the environment that much more competitive.

Yes, this is RJC, the one which would 10 years later produce the likes of Li Hongyi and Wee Shu Min.

For me it was not that easy because I think while the balance of power between the nerds and jocks was even in RI, in RJC it was firmly on the side of the jocks, since we had such a pro- sports principal.

I can look back on my days at RJC as being fairly carefree, in spite of the academic pressure. That would have to wait when I got to the U. Because if you haven’t figure out by now, I’m one of those lucky guys who have the magical ability to understand in 5 minutes what it takes mere mortals 1 hour to understand, that’s one, and secondly I never had to take any classes outside the ones that I’m traditionally strong in, ie Maths and Science.

They weren’t completely happy days, and I wished that I had done a lot of things that I didn’t do during those years. I wish I had been more sympathetic to those around me who had to struggle more than I did, and I wish that I was more curious about the outside world back in those days, it would have served me well in the army, in the uni and at work. I also wish that I had more confidence about myself, and realised that I was not as unattractive as I thought I was. (But this is not saying much because I thought I was the ugliest guy around.) The only tofu I was eating was from the canteen stall that I frequented a lot around that time. God, I must have had some seriously beautiful skin and bad flatulence.

I was glad that I was among the engineers. The arts guys are typically more astute, and always slightly more bitchy (but smarter – I took up political science in uni because I wanted to find out just what it was that made them so smart). And there were not a few hot chicks there. Those were the more street smart guys (at least they were more street smart at that time) and foxy chicks, a lot of the same girls who would later on earn the NUS faculty the reputation of having the most chio zhabors. And even one of the hotter chicks in my class, the one who turned up on the first day of class wrapped in an SCGS uniform that she was about to outgrow – so tight that catwoman would look at her and start hyperventilating – she who would brave the risk of heroically ripping up her uniform by actually bending over to put her schoolbag on the ground in front of her – she who would give a second meaning to “flag raising ceremony” and “standing at attention” – she would get into the Law faculty.

Sorry about my digression into happy memories from the past. Anyway, the Arts chicks were usually hotter and held to a higher standard of hotness – except for 1, who was, honestly speaking, ugly as fuck. I don’t know if it was merely her looks, or that she was as obnoxious as she looked. (But we all know that being obnoxious and being obnoxious looking are loosely correlated.) Whatever it was, she was definitely in a vicious cycle (and probably in a vicious circle of friends). You could have the odd cutting remark flying out unexpectedly, or you could have the insouciant slight, or even the unintentioned but careless blow to your dignity. There were rumours that she once wrote a love note to a fairly attractive female teacher, and attempted, in full view of the rest of the class, to slip it under her skirt.

I didn’t know her personally although I knew people who knew her (and they gave me the rumours). You had to conceal the first flinch of revulsion when you bumped into her, but otherwise you could just pretend that she wasn’t that ugly. But she was massively unpopular. The ugliness gives way to insecurity, the insecurity causes more clingy behaviour, the clingy behaviour makes you even more unattractive as a person than the ugliness alone, and eventually you have a reputation and nobody is your friend. There was this “school event” where the whole school had to go to a big auditorium. I would not forget the sight – she was on one of the seats near the back, the tiered seats. Most of the seats in the gallery were taken, except for those in a perimeter around her – the empty seats forming a ring around her.

And things were about to blow back in the ugliest way possible. At the entrance of the old RJC library at Mount Sinai Road, there was a room where you would put your bag there. Most students in those days had a file containing all the lecture notes, and all the other stuff went into a bag. So you usually brought the file there to study. Thing is, near the prelims, she would squirrel away the files, and chuck them in a garbage bin. This went on for quite a long time, a few weeks, and it would cause widespread panic among her victims, although most of her victims would be lucky enough to get their stuff back. Eventually she was caught and had to be sent for counselling. I don’t know if she picked the victims, I don’t think she did. Many of them never did her any wrong.

People knew the score, and didn’t entirely blame her. What we witnessed, before this terrorism thing became a big issue, was basically terrorism. The logic is the same – somebody who feels oppressed, unable to seek redress for her problems, and she takes it out on the random person on the street, maybe to make herself heard, or maybe because this is the one and only way she can exert power over her fellow human beings. She did people wrong, and also people did her wrong.