Confessions of a Cat-holic (21)

That summer before I officially matriculated at SPCC, I went to Beijing to spend some time with my grandpa. We lived in the suburbs so normally we just stayed home and did some gardening work at the lawn. I had a few dogs at home, together with some ducklings, a cat and some rabbits. I grew up in the city of Hong Kong. Wanchai was as hectic as it seemed and it was one of the oldest and most developed area in town. But that didn't mean I would easily get bored of trees and farms in a city as foreign as Beijing.

My mother specifically told me not to tell any of my friends about my decision to transfer, even after signing off from St Francis. She quoted an example of her friend for reference. There was a colleague named Ms Chu in her office when they were working at the CRC group. Ms Chu, as well as her daughter, was a first generation new immigrant from China in the 90s. How should I call her daughter? Let's just say her name was Vivienne, because she gave off the vibes and impression of the brand Vivienne Westwood, a label carefully designed and manufactured by Great Britain. Something flashy and ostentatious but a bit over the top. I would not want to wear this tag.

According to my mother, Vivienne was a calculating and manipulative girl. She could hardly spell the alpabets right when she first landed in Hong Kong. But she was ambitious enough to enroll in the night schools and somehow managed to communicate fairly in English after years of hard work. Despite her unceasing aggressiveness and an intolerance for mediocracy, she was just allocated to a band three school in North Point upon the lottery allotment for secondary school admissions. She thought that she was out of the league for Fukien Secondary School.

As the salutatorian of Fukien Secondary School, she applied to BPS in the same district with the valedictorian of her school. But the valedictorian did not hold it in and told everybody of her attempts to transfer while Vivienne remained rather secretive. Eventually, Vivienne was hand picked by BPS and her life had since changed course upon her transfer.

If you looked at her profile, even my mother would say that she had quite successfully beaten the odds to climb to the top. She didn't bother to try HKU or CUHK for her university admissions. Rather, she self-studied her way out in SAT and eventually landed in America as a graduate of the University of Michigan. She later worked at Credit Suisse in the Bay Area. After a few years, she continued her graduate studies at UC Berkeley where she met her husband. They now moved to England where she would conduct research and teach undergraduates at a world renowned institution. It was one of the top colleges, either Oxford or Cambridge.

But would you say I was envious of her? Um, no, maybe not. There was always something fishy about her despite her rather successful life story. She was a few years older than her peers because she repeated schooling for a year or two upon her arrival in Hong Kong. She had plastic surgery when she was in middle school. Allegedly, she completed a double eye lid surgery and received a free orthodontic treatment from a public hospital in Shenzhen. Now, given her background and limited resources, I would say her moves were quite strategic. I heard that she went around in her mother's office to show off her pictures and snapshots taken for tryouts in a model agency. Apparently, she told everyone she knew that she was a part-time model in Hong Kong. Well, if you looked at Lana Wong Ha Wai, an old girl and reputable archetype of BPS, you would know what I meant. New immigrant fresh off the boat with plastic surgery and an urgency to ascend as a part-time model, that sounded just like the typical profile of a sex-trafficked underground sex worker in Hong Kong.

That was why I never considered BPS, even though I lived next to it on Fortress Hill in my late elementary school years. My father's office was at Whitfield Center in Tin Hau, and we were within walking distance from its campus. But never ever we had a thought crossing our mind for a second that we would consider applying to that school. First, it was its colors. Its uniform was almost the ugliest I had ever seen in any schools of Hong Kong. It was green and it was not military kind of green. It was teal, a green that tried too hard to be blue that made it look like Breakfast at Tiffany's, almost reminding you of the repetitive Green Sleeves classic overplayed in DSE listening exam. Also, the walls of its campus were painted in a different color year by year. It was either bright pink, bright yellow, bright orange or bright green, all revolting, distasteful and somewhat repulsive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCR6HQ1d1d4