Confessions of a Cat-holic (105)

Meanwhile, my new friends were forever on cloud nine. They could not care less about my master revenge scheme. So automatically, they thought that I wanted to get into medical school as much as they did, because they believed every one in Hong Kong wanted to be like them, working their ass off day and night sacrificing physical fitness and mental health.

Rebecca never liked me enough to talk to me inside and out of class. The only thing I remembered her talking was her obsession with Pokemon and Pikachu. At some point in the second semester of F4, she asked me to go to summer school with her in England. I was quite open to various study abroad options and UK was on my list. I had been to England only once or twice and I could not find a good program online and in person. If Rebecca brought me a nice brochure and recommended me a sound program, I thought to myself why not give it a try, even though I knew her intentions were too obvious. She wanted me to study abroad and forget about HKU medicine, which worked perfectly under my plan.

I knew what my new friends were thinking. They liked to think of me as a white washed bimbo, someone who only wanted to marry a white guy. Thanks to my friend and neighbour Vicki's speculations. She always claimed that I would drop out of college and get pregnant with a white guy if I were in a foreign country, like Britney Spears and her sisters. The fact that I liked to sing along the songs of Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys in school and at home kind of made me look like Elle Woods from Legally Blonde. I knew that. But we were all raised in the 90s. We were all crazy about Nick Carter, who would go around and say they had a crush on 50 cents or Usher? I was just doing what other kids were doing at the time. Everybody could sing "hit me baby one more time" at the time. I didn't see anything wrong with that.

So from a nerdy pro-China bookworm who used to laugh at Jennifer Lee's American accents, I then turned into an international school wannabe white washed bimbo who would only converse in English. I often thought to myself, what the fuck happened? From Wanchai to Central, only a bus stop away, I was perceived to be a completely different person by polar standards. Other than the fact that the English competency level of SPCCers was severely subpar, I could not think of a better answer. Actually, they thought that they aced the HKCEE exam like a piece of cake, but I had to say that their language abilities and humanities literarcy were close to failing, you could take it from me. They were not particularly local, or anti-international. But their diminished interests in humanities had made them almost illiterate in both Chinese and English.

So I went to the summer school with Rebecca in the summer before F5 started. I really liked it there. The food was delicious and the people were nice. The teaching staff were friendly, funny and stress-free looking. I learned a bit of English in the morning and I had my free time to engage in various activities in the afternoon and in the weekend. The town that the school was located was Cantebury in Kent, or Kent in Cantebury. I didn't know enough about the geographics of England to verify that. Anyhow, it was a small college town with just a few shops in the street outside of my summer school. I kind of liked that. It was through the summer school that I discovered I disliked big cities. I liked to be in a college town, which kind of compelled me to consider Cornell as my dream school in the US. On the weekends, we would have to take a bus to travel to Hastings, and a few cities nearby, whose name I had since forgotten. I liked the shopping part a lot but I didn't like it enough to be in the middle of London.

The summer school was kind of international. We had representatives from all over the world. There were a few students from Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Norway, Israel, Belgium, Japan and of course Hong Kong. Other than me and Rebecca, there were another few Hong Kong students from Maryknoll and DBS.

It was my first living abroad experience and my first time living in a dormitory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2GBzPZXR7Q