Confessions of a Cat-holic (14)

So what happened to my unspoken gayness? Was it nature or nurture? As I repeatedly said, I had been a product of my alma mater. I hated to admit it but I had to say my school molded my personality, my skillsets, my way of reasoning and even my sexuality. I didn't want to say the L-word, but you would know what I meant.

I had always smelled something fishy about our dear old neighbour, Wah Yan College. If you cared to pay a visit to the McDonald's at Hopewell Centre, you should be able feel the ineffable tension between Hong Kong's two biggest opposing religious camps. The McDonald's at Hopewell Center was our mid-point with almost the entire space in between, and the distance among us was comparable to parallel universe.

Wah Yan remained a taboo in our community and we were not allowed to speak of any remote fantasy with this school. Therefore, many innocent-minded and cluelessly young marginalized girls from our school still fell for their games in the hope of a true romance. That being said, the closest we ever got with this school was just Mrs Fu's tear-shedding confessions about how she preferred to stay home and take care of her son from Wan Yan than to tame us little monkeys in our mathematics class. Mrs Fu also never shaved her armpit so we used to publicly make fun of her unsophisticated demeanors.

There was a student from Wah Yan who walked up the Kennedy Road every day to take the minibus home across the street from our entrance. It was obvious that he was a terminal cancer patient. He was hairless, bald and his skin color suggested that he was suffering from vitiligo. Yes, at the age of teens in high school, he was already an obvious case of overdone chemotherapy and radiation. Not only that, I heard Hong Kong’s biggest dump of radioactive wastes also lay underneath their campus.

We the Franciscans did not have a choice in being overly protected. Not only were we not allowed to leave campus during lunch breaks until F.6., we were shipped back and forth our homes by officially run schoolbuses like an army truck. For the longest time, I was wondering why the hell my mom insisted me to take schoolbus home when my school was within walking distance. The schoolbus that travelled through Wan Chai was packed with baffled students like me. There were more than 20 of us, each with an overweight schoolbag that took up half of the seat in a hot and stuffy gogo van in the 90s when air conditioning was not an option. But still, we didn't dare to question authority in trusting our school to act upon our benefits; so, we just went with the flow. At the back of our minds, we always knew there was something hideous with our district. It could be that we were surrounded by either rape criminals or some serious sex addicts, if not pedophiles.

There was a particular friend whom I needed to give my utmost gratitude in shaping my apathy and affectionless attributes. She was Rita Chow, a girl who helped carve the path on my way to St Paul's Co-ed. I was guessing she must have known my decision to transfer after I submitted my application to the new school. One day, she called me on the phone and we chatted for hours, as usual. Then three guys suddenly spoke up, not surprisingly. They said they had been tapping our conversation since the inception of our teleconference. Of course, they muted their lines so I did not know of their sneaky efforts to listen in. I was caught a bit off-guard by their invasive behaviors, but I gave them my number anyways when they asked me for my contacts. Needless to mention, that was out of courtesy despite the fact that I never met them in person.