Confessions of a Cat-holic (15)

There was a huge price tagged to being courteous. Very sadly, my community and the enmity in my surroundings did not give me any room to be civil or polite. Soon I learned an involuntary lesson that I had been too nice to strangers. These three fellas from Salesian English School were only there to get me and they thought I was an easy prey.

They didn't call me that night; instead, they got in touch with over ten of my classmates and disseminated a message across many of my friends that I should not expect any calls from them because they were just playing around with me. They were body shaming me and said that my buck teeth was the biggest turnoff for any opposite sex to even show interests in me. They also said that I looked disgusting like a pork chop.

What happened? Have I done anything wrong?

It turned out that they were friends and schoolmates with Anton Lee, a buddy I knew from the Boys and Girls Club Association in Wanchai. My parents sent me there to mingle with other kids in the district. They wanted me to have a place to work on my assignments because my apartment then was too small to have the capacity for a desk to do my homework. I had very humble beginnings and I know it. My parents both had to work in my early years. They did not have spare money to hire a domestic helper; also our apartment was too packed for another bed. This has been part of the reason why I was tone-deaf; we could not afford any music lessons and we also struggled to find space to accomodate the huge piano.

Anton and I used to hang out a lot in my early elementary school years. Sylvia Poon, also from St Francis, used to also join us in all the homework sessions in the afterschool hours. Sylvia and I were from the same school, so we were more in sync working closely as a team. Anton, despite being a supposingly dominant male in the trio, was actually the weaker and shyer one among us but we never meant to push him around. It was only until one time when I asked him to tour around the girls' washroom in the playground after his losing in the paper-rock-scissors game that I discovered that he might have been a misogynist. He came out crying overwhelmingly after leaving the female washroom. He looked hurt, provoked and unnecessarily disgruntled, giving me the looks like I committed the biggest crime in history.

I gradually backed out from the scenes at the Hong Kong Boys and Girls Club Association in Wanchai as my parents' finances improved. We could finally afford a bunk bed and we had the budget to hire a domestic helper to share the room with me. Years after, I got access to Anton's new address through our mutual friend at the center and I wrote to him saying that we should meet in person. He invited me to his new apartment in Quarry Bay and I accepted. I suggested that we played lego together, as my way of communicating to him that he should "let go" of our grudges regarding the female washroom tour incident. I hid and took away one of his plastic lego glassware and indicated to him that he must have lost track of it somehow. But my way of confessions didn't work out quite as I expected. He flipped through his closets and drawers and still could not get hold of the lego glasses, because I was in hold. All of a sudden, he started crying and burst out in tears. The fact that he lost complete control of his emotions over this relatively insequential incident kind of put me off a bit. I realized he was much more fragile than I thought so I gave him a pat on his shoulder and returned the plastic lego glasses back to its pack. I quickly left his new home and never communicated with him ever again. I figured that I was not suitable to speak to him, given his mental sensitivity. I thought it would be better if I could just leave him alone.