Confessions of a Cat-holic (109)

Speaking of which, I guessed what they said about the gangsters was right, that they were indeed very 古惑. They were coined with the term, 古惑仔, for some very good reasons. I was not sure if there was a term in English for it. The closest I reckoned would be "slick". Obviously, they were more than "young and dangerous". From what I knew, Rex did not like talking about himself at all. He never told me anything about his childhood, his background and what his father did for a living. The only thing I knew was that he was the only child in his family and that he had a godbrother whom he called the "big brother". This "big brother" of his looked very mongkok with punkish fashion style and light dyed hair. It was obvious that his network of friends and brotherhood was not limited by kinship.

To me, Rex was like a needle in a hay stack, even though in reality, he was more like a hay in a needle stack, literally. He was so hard to come by in a school like SPCC, where most people cared more about cracking calculus equations than paying attention to what was going on in this world. He had a lot of friends in class D, which was known to attract the not-so-academically-competitive students. His best friend was Jeremy Tam, who was recently running a talk show on Spotify that was among the top 30 in popularity chart. I liked hanging out with Rex and his friends because they talked like me, or the me before I transferred school. Obviously, I could not quite be myself and continue to swear in the new school, given that I was a transfer student but that did not mean I changed on the inside. I just wanted to get by and live by the rules, at least on the surface, despite my transcripts with flying colors.

Jeremy Tam was a seasoned marketing professional but he was not the norm in SPCC. The typical SPCCers were risk-averse, anything that deviated from accounting or professional jobs like dentistry and medicine was considered insecure and unsophisticated. Interestingly though, marketing was the norm in my alma mater.

Then there was Ukio Chan, whose English name sounded exactly like my Chinese one. His original name was not Ukio but he somehow changed it after leaving SPCC. According to official rankings in public profiles, SPCC had a staggering 97% of its graduates successfully getting into universities, which already made it top of the league. If you compared it with other Central band 1 schools like Raimondi in the lesser tier, you would be able to draw conclusions that SPCC certainly outperformed its peers. Hey, Raimondi students were not at all nerdy and they were known for producing exceptionally good looking models, athletes and rich second generations. As I said, every school had its profile and character, it was give and take afterall. Not one school could say they had it all.

And Ukio Chan, along with Rex and his cohort of friends, were among that 3% who could not make it to university. It was no surprise that Principal Henry Poon wanted to get rid of all of them, because he was a eugenics from the village, remember?

As far as I knew, it took Rex over 10 years to complete his bachelor degree at Simon Fraser University. The last time I talked to him when I was working as a manager in Beijing, he told me he was still struggling to graduate from university, and in Canada too. He was about 27 at the time. Yeah, so you could imagine why I loved him so much.

Ukio, the owner of UCCA studio, on the other hand, also could not make it to college. He was enrolled in HKU Space for a certificate course in interior design. But I guessed he entered the right field. Ukio had become one of the most accomplished interior design talent in town, with projects all over the world and in China. He was also a member of the International New Age Lions Club of Hong Kong.

I was good friends with him because we were both enrolled in the drama club in school. Apparently, he was good friends with the actress Rain Lee (李彩華) because they went to the same elementary school. He was said to have a secret crush on the medicine graduate Loretta Chu from True Light, who looked a bit like Gaile the supermodel, for over a few years.