Confessions of a Cat-holic (190)

Honestly speaking, the HKCEE exam was very demanding and SPCC's internal exams were hugely out of CE syllabus and unnecessarily esoteric so I really could not afford to devote any time on activities other than studying when I was in SPCC. Plus I couldn't play any musical instruments or sing. The only thing that I continuously engaged in from middle school onward til high school was drama.

I signed up for theatre arts as my sixth subject for IB, and I was given a 4 out of 7 by my teacher Maurice. He was a publicly gay teacher from New Zealand who also taught me English. Maurice gave very special attention to Ivan all the time, not sure if that was because he grew up in Australia. Ivan scored 40 out of 42 easily in the first semester, while I got a pathetic 32, with a 4 in theatre arts, 5 in Chinese and English and a 6 in my maths higher, chemistry higher and biology higher. A 32 in IB was kind of pathetic; no one on earth would believe that I was an almost straight-A student from St Paul's Co-ed. Claire Tsui called me by her name and said that I was a retard, so everyone referred to me as low-b Amy. Some even said that I was dyslexic and ADHD.

Within days of showing interests by sending me a gift of engraved silver sterling keychain with my name in the first week of school at LPCUWC, Pierre went out with Janet Mui, a 10A student from Maryknoll Convent School in my year. Another 周芷若, the typical girl you would expect in a girls' school: overachiever who would 搶婚 at all costs. But not every girl was like her in girls' school. Janet was the valedictorian in her class who also competed in inter-school track and field. But Mandy the volleyball player, also from Maryknoll, was much more like me. She was the one who taught me the gags of 蝦你波凸 and 靚仔到流曬gap水. We almost went to Thailand together in year 2 with Stephanie Cheng (鄭融), but somehow we ended up going with Kenneth, a wealthy New Zealand Hong Kong student from 鄧鏡波, a school located in the middle of Kennedy Road right between my alma mater and our feud Wahyan. Mandy took us to a local night club in Bangkok. I was reluctant to dance at the time but I guessed when I didn’t have a choice, I might really have to put on a show and pretend that girls just wanted to have fun.

Ivan was really smart and he seemed to do everything better than me, and with such ease too even though he came from a school I never heard of (Lam Woo) before I met him. I later found out that his school was the best in his district, but we were all indulgent in our own little bubble at LPCUWC, a boarding international school that took the best from every band 1 school. Ivan was one of the very few people who was willing to share with me his tactics in tackling IB. That was particularly helpful because I could not find any tutors qualified or familiar with the IB syllabus for external help at the time. My writing in Chinese and English was awkward to begin with and my chemistry lab reports did not look well put together. Ivan spent a week on average on his lab reports with fancy excel bar charts and expressive and thoughtful comments. With the help from Ivan and a few other pre med upperclassmen, gradually my HL scores were up from a low 6 to a solid 7. But I didn't start out like that; I tried taking 7 subjects with 4 HL courses in the first semester because I was told by my peers that IB was mad easy (especially when compared with HKCEE). My 32 IB score did crash my overconfidence a bit; I even attempted to take the SATs by just walking in with no revision (裸考). Of course, I did poorly in my first try of SAT I and SAT writing, which might have explained why I got rejected by all the top schools. I toned down the intensity of my IB curriculum a bit after receiving my underperforming predicted grades and dropped my extra 7th subject in theatre arts. I still had economics as my HL 4th subject and took english with Maurice but he constantly gave me a low 5 for 2 consecutive semesters so in the end I switched to economics standard level and dropped Maurice to take the class with Ana Kelly, so technically I learned two sets of fictions (different teachers picked different collection of literature books for instruction), hence double workload of other students. My roommate Joyce Wu shared with me her essays in Chinese literature analysis; I started to write like a humanities student too, bearing in mind that I was no longer a STEM student under the local HKCEE system.