I've had the opportunity recently to
think through what my JC years were like. The funny thing is that I
mainly remember the good parts. I did enjoy a few good albums. I had to remind myself about the bad parts too. Some of my peers have children who are already in JC.
They were not good years when I was
living them, but now I get nostalgic when looking back on them. It
was basically a place where I was successful. I didn't know my job
most of the time, but I made it, and I was successful, in terms of
getting an “A” level result. I got into Snowy Hill.
Mainstream Singapore.
It was one of my few experiences in
mainstream Singaporean society. Before that, I was in the company of
the GEP kids. After that, I was in the amy, then Snowy Hill. When I was working for the "factory", half of my colleagues were foreigners.
When I was living through it, the only
thing that compared with it were the 2 best years of my life. So it
felt like a letdown. It was just a blur of lecture after lecture,
tardiness with homework. A lot of boredom. We were no longer in this
gilded world where people worried about us being bored. We were no
longer the centre of the universe. We were in the midst of these
express kids who looked at us with this mixture of horrid fascination
and envy.
I'm already at an age where I can no
longer emotionally relate to that version o myself. Like I can
imagine that 17 year old kid having a conversation with me now, and
there would be a lot of awkward silence. I'd be bored to death with
him, because I've already lived through his life, and he would be
bored with me, because I would have to deal with a lot of crap that
he wouldn't have been bothered with. Also, he might have heard about
the internet, because one of the smart nerds mentioned it in passing
to him, but he would not have a clue about the dominant role that it
woul play for the rest of his life.
I remember that quite a few jokes I
tried to tell fell flat. We went for dark, edgy, sarcastic humour. It
was too British / American for the express kids to get. I felt
trapped by our Confucian culture, who always made me feel like a bit
of a misfit. I longed for the freedoms that the West seemed to offer.
I think it was during those 2 years when I had the warmest feelings
towards the West. That would change when I actually had to live in
the West.
If I were to go back in time to my JC
days, I would have told myself to be more accepting of society, and
to see the good in people. (Actually more decent parents than mine
would have done that. But mine were not very aware of things.) There
was a lot of teaching us complex stuff that we would most probably
never use. But it was stuff that I was good at, so I wasn't going to
complain. But the school curriculum is something that resists change.
Boring
I remember being bored a lot of the
time when I was there. Nobody was responsible for making things
interesting for us. In secondary school, they tried to make sure that we
weren't bored. But we didn't have that anymore. Of course, there were
many ways of making life interesting on top of our cramming for
exams, but I didn't use them. It was boring but nice.
I spent a lot of time going to Tower
records. Back then, there was also Supreme records. I hovered around
there, trying to decide what to buy, rather than actually buying and
listening and moving on. That part wasn't good. It was diminishing
returns. In a way, the mystery for me now is that JC was so similar
to sec 3 and 4, but it felt so different. Maybe the newness of
discovering my music hobby was wearing off. I remember playing bass
at a performance with 2 of my acquaintances during a small concert,
and the experience was so cringe and turn off.
I had a JC teacher who was also the
creative writing teacher. She's passed away. People are starting to
think that she has Asperger's or something. Our GP lessons were
boring. I was the only one barely interested in talking in class and
I was tired of being the only one. She wasn't terrible, but why did I
have to have such a boring person?
I had a classmate who would leave her
schoolbag out on the ledge before GP class. She would ask to go to
the toilet halfway during class and never go back.
Year of angst, year of triumph
My time in that JC was divided into 2.
The first year was me spent moping about why things had gone downhill
since I had moved to JC. Social life was down, music was merely
awesome and not jaw-droppingly awesome. I got involved with a
disastrous drama production (OK, not merely involved, I was the
principal – the director and playwright). My drama career was in
tatters. I didn't have a social life. My grades were mediocre. I
didn't get straight As for my “O” levels, so I was thrown into
the class along with all the people who got a lot of As and a few Bs.
The second year was actually quite
good, in another way. I only had one thing to do, and that was to
study for my “A” levels. I was focused for the first time in
years, and I went from having a C and a D in my promos to having
almost straight “A”s in my prelims, and a few “S” paper
distinctions. I cast out the distractions. People knew what to focus
on.
I just got my head down and studied,
and for the first time in a while, I started having good results. I
didn't get involved in any ECA. It was calm and peaceful for the
first time in a long while. It was boring but good. It was quietly
awesome. I finally saw the light at the end of a tunnel: My
university entrance requirements looked good, even without any proper
planning other than “you have to get as good grades as possible”.
My dreams of being a mathlete were
dead. My dreams of being a dramatist were dead. I had already
achieved what I had achieved. There was no use brushing up your ECAs
in your final year. But I still had a good set of exam results to
look forward to. I mastered the material, I even aced my special
papers, because I was able to go above and beyond what the average
person was going to know about Maths and Physics at “A” levels. I
remember working out a few first order differential equations, and
then thinking to myself: damn, I'm good!!!
Maybe I was in a good mood because I
had a job invigilating an exam. It was quite easy work, and I met a
girl that I developed a crush on.
Also, I knew that that was the last
year of K-12. I knew that life was good, I had some advantages in
dealing with science and maths and they allowed me to sail through
school life. I probably wasn't sure either way, but my life was about
to get worse. I would struggle for the next few years after
graduating from JC. In NS. In Snowy Hill. In the first few years of
work.
In JC2, all I had to do was study hard,
and I'd get my straight As. Actually, this was not 100% true, but I
had a good shot at an almost straight A. But I really had to strive
hard for it, and use all my advantages. And one of the advantages
back then was that almost everybody was rooting for me. My teachers
would write good things about me for my uni applications if I were to
hit the marks. All I had to do was to fulfill my side of the bargain.
I think that was the last time I managed to piece together a straight
A semester. And later on, people would not be able to do what I did,
which was to coast along with a B average all the time and push for
an A in the end. People were looking at grade point averages and no
longer allowing people to get away with having an idyllic life.
I had a classmate who didn't pass his
promotional exams. It cast a shadow on me. He came good in the end,
but I felt a little responsible for him failing because him getting
involved in my drama production was probably a factor. In a way that
drama production was a big push for me to carry on on the straight
and narrow. I had my fun with the ECAs and it turned out to be
disastrous, and it was almost a relief to do nothing more than study
all the time.
That part of my life had something to
teach me: the keeping your head down, being a steady person, living
according to a structure, grinding away. Living on the straight and
narrow. It wasn't romantic or wondrous like sec 3 and 4 were, but it
was probably a good idea of what a more adult life was like. Good.
Happy. Boring. I studied hard because it was a novel sensation, and I
was in no way burnt out. I had been keeping up, I was just a bit
behind, and I could use the home stretch to catch up. It was a big
relief, after years of underperformance. I was maybe sick and tired
of underperforming on my ECAs that it was a relief only having one
thing to worry about.
And I was also lucky, because, as it
turned out, I'm one of those guys who study better without the
stress. (Some other people do better with the stress.) So during the
prelims, I freaked out on one paper, and choked half an “A”
levels subject. But other than that subject, for which I got a C,
everything else was an A. I also got distinctions on my “S”
papers. After November, there was an awful 3 month wait for the “A”
levels to be graded, but I distinctly remember finding out that I got
very good results, but instead of great joy, I felt mainly relief.
Crush
I put her at the back of my head for 4
years before reconnecting with her. I sometimes wonder if it was fate
for me to be involved with her, because we met under rather
coincidental circumstances. I didn't know that she was going to be a
great source of misery. I got out of her life 12 years later,
swearing never to return. So it was one whole zodiac cycle.
That's the really interesting thing:
the things that seemed to be terrible were actually good for me.
There was the painful adjustment to normal Singapore life. There was
the disastrous drama production. There was the grind of studying.
Those things turned out to be pretty good for me in the end. And
there was codfish, and she turned out to be really bad, even though I
have to admit that there were good times.
Manufactured Angst
There was quite a bit of self-loathing
about Singapore back then. Maybe I got that from a good friend I was
hanging out with. Maybe it was the elitist mentality. But that friend
was gay, so I think that shaped his mindset. He was living in an
unfriendly world.
Maybe the problem was that I saw myself
through the eyes of the arts students and developed a self-loathing.
Maybe this was the seed of me starting to hate mathematics, this love
affair with mathematics turning into a love-hate affair. It would
blow up when I went to Snowy Hill to do mathematics. Then I would
find out that I'm not gifted in mathematics: I'm gifted in
philosophy, and I actually dreaded the minutae of organising my
thoughts into something worthwhile.
When I was in JC, that was the height
of my love affair with the West. I was fascinated with the coverage
of the OJ Simpson case. At that time it was still the era of grunge,
so I bought into the Gen X narrative, that life was actually quite
terrible: “my so-called life”, where everybody was pretending to
be happy, and that to be more honest, you were supposed to show your
true, angsty self. But I didn't have much self-awareness. Life in
Singapore was actually really good, and I didn't actually know that.
I was fretting over non-existent problems. There's so much of: “if
only I had appreciated what I had back then!” People were
complaining because they had real problems. My problems were mainly
mental: I just had to learn to appreciate what I already had, to see
the good things in life as they really were!
But there was a break in pop culture in
the 90s: and it's only apparent when I look back on it. Grunge was a
relief to me: it was a culture which acknowledged the seedy reality.
It was the misfits and the outcasts briefly having their day in the
sun: or at least it was about multiple subcultures having their day
in the sun, having a tent large enough for everyone. But it was also
about the bullies who dominated the culture being overthrown. Well –
they were not bullies, but they were just people who expected
everybody to be normal. Then Kurt Cobain killed himself.
So the troubled people who did grunge
were cast aside from the main arena. The junkies in Alice in Chains
and Stone Temple Pilots. Soundgarden, who treated their art as a form
of therapy. In their place was britpop and Oasis. Noel Gallagher
literally heard “I hate myself and I want to die” by Nirvana and
wrote another song in response: “Live Forever”.
Grunge was itself a reaction against
the masculinity of hair metal. Those guys worked hard and played
hard. They were handsome and had chiselled features and always got
the girls. But they were anal retentive, heteronormative, and always
sang the same song over and over. Then now the pendulum swung back
and alternative rock became less whiny. It was more joyous, communal,
in love with itself, and with life. Public Enemy could be joyous, but
it took itself too seriously. It got replaced with gangsta rap in the
end, and the more cartoonish Wu Tang Clan. Beastie Boys already put
out “Paul's Boutique” and “Check Your Head”. But those were
ahead of its time. It's only around the time of “Ill Communication”
when they got their due, and in turn they influenced Beck, who also
worked with the Dust Brothers.
This new, more joyous mood was more
like JC2. I listened quite a bit to Bjork's “Post”. It was weird,
it wasn't entirely happy, but it wasn't completely angst ridden as
well. It was the sound of a person who got her shit together, and who
was enjoying life. Massive Attack's “Protection” was a reminder
of what a great album “Blue Lines” was. It was like a nice,
comfortable sweater, to be enjoyed by a laid back person.
There always was a bit of contempt for
the lifestyle that Singapore had in store for us. Go to university,
get a good job, get married, settle down, have kids. Maybe I loved
the teenage lifestyle too much for that. Maybe there were certain
things I could not get my head around and I never resolved that.
Maybe I loved the fantasies more than the reality of using up my time
on earth to do what I really wanted to do.
It was around this time when the idea
was floated that maybe I could go overseas for my college. And I was
very much looking forward to that, although I had no idea what to
expect. Since I was more of a half empty than a half full person:
being in NUS meant another few more years of a dreary existence. But
going overseas meant that I would have to work so much harder to
adjust to life. But it was around the time when some of the
admissions officers from ivy league universities started visiting us.
It's around that time when they pasted the rankings of top
universities .
I remember barely knowing what to
write, and knowing that I did not have enough life experience to talk
about my personal statement. But on Snowy Hill's application, I did
mention that I was the first person in my family to go to university,
and that may have helped me.
I remember going to a reading room at
somebody's house, and he had magazines from everywhere. I remember
being in a room where you had all the back copies of “Financial
Times”. This was before the internet, before Singapore's library
branches got revamped and before Borders opened in Singapore. So to
suddenly see a window upon the world was a vast eye-opener for me. I
would say that JC2 was also for me the first year of
hyper-globalisation, when everything would be changed. My first
encounter with it was a good and happy one. That was before we knew
that we were going to compete with foreigners for jobs for the rest
of our lives.
In many ways I was cocooned in my
comfort zone, and in other ways I was brought out of my comfort zone.
It was being a fish out of water. In some ways I was just glad that
... there were 4 times that I had to deal with being a fish out of
water. JC, National Service, college and work. And I'm glad that I
negotiated all 4 of them.
Misfit
But one of the biggest stories was that everybody was growing up in ways that I wasn't able to. People were involved in student councils, leadership positions, representing Singapore in olympiads. My achievements were frankly quite modest compared to some of what others were up to. What my sister was up to.
I did feel very excluded from
conversations. In retrospect, the failures of those years may have
set me on the wrong course. It's well and good that I discovered that
I excelled at academics and the arts. But in terms of living in the
real world and managing things, these things barely registered with
me. I would be an almighty grind for me to develop these skills that
some people were more talented than me anyway. Maybe that's why it
was so hard to talk to my fellow classmates at this point: people
were dealing with things that barely registered on my radar, and I
wasn't keeping up or keeping in. True, I had better music than most
of them, but that would matter very little later on in life.
I didn't use the time to become a
mathlete, or to have some music related activities. Maybe we were
required to be more enterprising in order to have an interesting
life, and I didn't have that yet. I remember JC orientation, and it
just made me feel very disorientated. It was your introduction to
high school, American style, where you had to negotiate the
fragmented landscape of tribes and cultures, and adapt to another way
of life that you didn't understand. It was what I would call “late
adolescence”. I would still be cool in a few ways, but I think that
would be the first of me being unable to navigate life well.
I'm older now, and I know more. I don't
know if I can go back to being as ignorant as I was and try and make
some sense of how and why I was unable to adjust. I'm more flexible,
and more accommodating to changes in my life. For example, I didn't
really understand or relate to the changes in mood. I didn't fully
embrace the funkier version of 90s music. I was too wrapped up in my
own angst. I don't know if that was my natural temperament.
I studied all the time, and maybe I
didn't have anything else left over for friendship. Or I never
mastered the give and take that it involved. Or I didn't know how to
not be nerdy, or how to be cool. Or I couldn't step outside myself. I
don't know: I was just lost in that arena.
This would also be the last time we had
all our perks as children. Singapore does a great job of bringing up
their children. We would be amazed at how organised everything is.
All our lecture notes were printed out for us. They were literally
called “handouts”. Some of them were fill in the blanks: we would
go to lecture, the notes would have a few key words left out, and
then we would attend the lectures and fill in the blanks. We were
almost spoonfed everything. But some of us were just good at grasping
concepts, and life was a breeze, we would ace everything, as long as
we put in a nominal ammount of effort.
What I do know now is that I had
difficulties with this “nominal amount of effort”. I made it, but
I barely made it. They probably tried to create an environment where,
if I failed, it would not be because I lacked executive function. And
they hoped that I would pick it up later on in life. Well, I'm
learning, but it's hard.
Much of my childhood was basically
idyllic. I could laze away a few afternoons, owing to my failure to
get my shit together to do something productive. What I do know now
is that I was operating under near perfect conditions for creativity.
But that wasn't it.
I'm a big believer that the school
system should never take up all of a student's time. The student
needs room to breathe, to grow, and to reflect. To become an
individual. Since school is not one size fits all, every student is
in some way a misfit, and he shouldn't be living like a misfit for
all of his waking hours.
Live Through This
When I was in national service, I had a
staff sergeant who was always happy to dish out advice for people who
would listen. He said, “SAF stands for serve and fuck off. You come
in here because you're required to do your 2.5 years. You do it,
because everybody has to do it. And then you'd fuck off. And in the
meantime, make sure that you leave with a clean slate. Do not go to
DB and have it on your record. Do not extend your 2.5 years and serve
more than what you came in here for. Do not suffer any permanent
injuries or death.”
When I was in JC, I didn't have in mind
that I was building a community. I had friends, and some of them were
friends for a real long time. But I regarded most of my classmates as
no more than fellow travellers, and I was just passing through. I
didn't really keep in contact with them. That was the worst thing I
did in JC. I was only at the middle of the totem pole, when I could
have been nearer the top. I probably didn't understand then that it
was not that hard to get more friends. Or maybe I hadn't resolved the
mental blocks that would prevent me from getting down and hanging
out.
So there were probably times when I
could have developed executive functions. In JC, I just ignored them.
In NS, I was just in a mindset where I wanted to get away with as
little work as I could put in. In Snowy Hill, I was chasing down various
things like I was chasing butterflies, barely thinking about how to
put the big picture together. Later on in my working life, I was just happy to
be a jack of all trades and a master of none. We always imagined that
things would work out in the end. We always imagined that we could
work hard and play hard and still come up on top.