Confessions of a Cat-holic (154)

Quite early on at the start of the semester, I found myself quite assimilated at Columbia. Even though there were a lot of new faces, I was not at all culture shocked by New York, which could be because I had the same religious belief system as many of the Jews on campus.

I saw flyers floating around on campus about my school and the Engineering Student Council. At first, I was just curious about what was going on in my school so I dropped by their information session. There I met my second best friend, Natalie Leong, who persuaded me to join the election with her as a team.

I had always had a thing about student council. We always had a student council among the sixth formers at St Francis. I remembered their election names even. It was called "the Dream Team", and "the Innovators" one year. And Polly Cheung was part of the elected team. I believed she was the treasurer, but I could be wrong. She looked like a treasurer to me. Polly Cheung was not pretty at all, and she actually looked kind of like 張達明, as a girl though. She had short hair and she was not very outgoing. But she was one of our student leaders and I really looked up to her. I even sent her a card that was written in codes to congratulate her upon her election as the student council treasurer. Polly was a good student. I believed she had achieved 7As in her HKCEE. As I said, SFCC was not an all-As power house but we did have quite a few overachievers getting 6As or above every year and Polly was one of them.

I had a lot of 大姐姐 at St Francis and Polly was not the only one. My alma mater gave a lot of respect to seniority. Janice Tsang, a UCL law graduate and a legal counsel at Herbert Smith and Porsche, was my mentor for Chinese and English debate. Macy taught me how to recite unrelated materials with initials-short-term-memorization techniques. She even handed me a book at a book fair which included sample essays for applying to prep schools in the states, which I believed was a foreshadow to my landing in America, and at an Ivy League college too. If not Macy, I would not have noticed books that were in the likes of "A for Admissions". Janet Lam was a good friend of Cheuk Wan Chi, the author, DJ, scriptwriter and broadcaster. Carol Chow, on the other hand, shared ambiguous affinity with Sylvia Lam and they were the basketball team captains, as well as the heart and soul of their respective houses, St Patrick and St Valentina.

I always could see myself becoming part of the student council, had I had stayed at St Francis. But unfortunately, upon transferring schools, I found that both SPCC and LPCUWC did not even have such a thing that was at all similar to a student council so I just had to push aside my dreams for a bit.

I accepted Natalie's offer to try out for the Engineering Student Council, partly because it was somehow my unfulfilled dream, partly because I figured the school was predominantly non-white and I believed that my status as an Asian and a Canadian would not be that much of a problem. I didn't join the student council to test my popularity for god's sake. But the election results turned out to be better than I expected. Natalie didn't get elected as the president but I was elected the class representative for my year with another girl from Boston, Amanda Li. The class president was Jared Were and the Vice President was Daniel Okin, who finished his medical degree at Yale after college. Out of the elected members, I particularly liked Amanda Li, and I even named myself after her sometimes. Oh and I liked Jared Were too. I liked his name, not Jarvis, not Travis, not Jarod, but JAR-ED. I liked the people who got elected with me that year.

Even though Natalie lost her elections, she seemed to have found better things to fill up her time, and we had since become each other's best friend (after Kelly) in school. I was quite pleased to find her pretty welcoming, given that I didn't grow up in the states. She even invited me to her homes a few times during thanksgiving so I got to have a lot of turkey with her family at Oldbridge, New Jersey, otherwise I could be just all by myself with other international students in an empty and lights-out city.