Confessions of a Cat-holic (18）

My academics was going well in school. I came first in my class without much effort, although I occasionally still suffered from stomach pain due to stress. As I repeatedly emphasized, I was never the valeldictorian of my year. Jane outperformed the salutatorian for over 30% in grades. No one had ever succeeded in replacing her in the school chart.

Our salutatorian alternated, unlike our dear Jane your majesty. Eunice Loi was one of the salutatorian waitlist. I always felt kind of distant with her because she was pro-Taiwan. All she talked about was the Taiwanese flag and what hidden messages it conveyed. She liked to quiz me on random facts about Taiwan too. So I got to become more knowledgable than an average layman in that regard and I told her that I had been reading Qiong Yao's novels too, just to make her happy.

I remembered visitng her home in City Garden when I lived in Fortress Hill. We used to take the same school bus together so that was some solid time to get to know each other. Her Chinese name was 來堃塋. But she looked more like her English name because she looked unusually nice. She never yelled at anyone and she had that Christian looking face. Not sure if it was her poker face, but she looked too innocuous to be true. I ran into her at IFC once when I was working at Lehman Brothers. She looked just like how she used to when she was a kid. I asked her where she ended up working. To my surprise, she actually became accountant upon her graduation at University of Wisconsin, a school that attracted many SPCCers. Well, Eunice had always been diligent and intelligent. I never doubted her caliber but she was the only girl in our year at St Francis who ended up working in a field that had anything to do with mathematics. As far as I knew, she was later married to a white guy she might have met at work and moved to the United States for good.

Back to the old days, Sharon came second in class for one semester and she was furious about her drop in ranking. She didn't like to be defeated and specifically, she didn't like to be defeated by me. She always saw me as the underdog, lagging behind her in all aspects of life. Actually, she might be right. I was not as pretty, not as skinny, not as trendy, not as wealthy, not as competitive, not as smart, not as stylish and not as classy as her. But then again, I didn't care about beating everyone else as much as her either. I just simply didn't want to be exceptional.

My grades were just good enough to send off to St Paul's Co-ed. If I applied in grade 6, I knew I wouldn't stand a chance to get in. So I received an invitation to sit for a written test together with 80 other students applying for a transfer. I showed up quite prepared. I pre-learned and self taught myself some mathematical concepts not covered in my school and I made sure my problem solving skills were up to their standards. English and Chinese would be my forte, so I was not too worried about that.

I came out of the tests alright that day. I didn't remember anything too challenging in particular. The questions were about the same level as the ones I encountered in St Francis. Even the mathematics questions were not as hard as I thought. I was later shortlisted for a second round interview.

I remembered waiting outside of the room with 6 or 7 other candidates that day. I was wearing a pink Guess tie-dyed t-shirt with a heart shaped white pattern on the front and a pair of white pants I bought from underground market in Nagoya, Aichi, matched with a Seiko watch, a pair of glasses and gelled hair again. I really would not use pretty to describe my looks. Not trying to downplay myself or pretend to be humble, I was actually very, very, very, very far from pretty.

I was summoned to a panel after waiting for more than half an hour. There were three teachers sitting on the panel. I could only remember one of them, which was Mr Lee Chak Keung. Mr Lee later became my Chinese teachers for two consecutive years out of the three years I spent in St Paul's Co-ed. But that was not the reason why I remembered him. He was the toughest interviewer and the only male out of the trio and he gave me the hardest time in the 30 minutes meeting that was pivotal in rescuing my Wanchai escape to Central.