Confessions of a Cat-holic (23)

I wished Jun all the best and I hoped that she would not repeat the tragedy that happened to one of their BPS alumna, Amy Lam, who unfortunately lost her life giving birth to her first born in the city of New York just as she was looking forward to starting a happy brand new life in holy America. That Amy also graduated from Columbia University, a place where all your fantasies and American dreams could come true.

If it was just one or two cases I overheard about a school, I would not make a conclusion to determine its school culture. That could be a low hanging fruit ready for your catch or sometimes a black sheep to tell you the opposites of what the majority was like in that group. But there were more than a handful and a sweeping majority of the students I knew from BPS that displayed an alarmingly common trait of dodgy misdeeds.

My first year roommate at Columbia, Claire Tsui, turned out to be my biggest nightmare. Gosh, these BPS girls were dancing around me like some yellow dung flies. How could I get rid of them or at least make them vanish from my sights? Clara didn't look like she was from the poorest shantytowns of Hong Kong. She actually tried very hard to get rid of her Shanghainese accents and deliberately displayed herself with an elegant demeanor and sophisticated etiquette. She looked above average, while some even acclaimed her resemblance with Song Hye Kyo from South Korea. But in objective reality, she was more like Keung To, a member of Mirror and currently the most popular idol in town.

I didn't know she grew up in the partitioned flats in Wanchai. She told everyone, including me and my parents, that she lived in a decent apartment at Tonnochy Towers. I only found out years later that it was just a fake address, an address her parents borrowed from their friends for the sake of passing applications for high school and university admissions. I didn't want to appear discriminative towards a certain segment or class of citizens in Hong Kong. But somehow, her desperate needs and undying hunger for money just somehow sneakily spoke up for her and revealed her skanky upbringing.

No, that was not the end of her treacherous scams. In order to survive in Hong Kong, who could afford to be honest? Integrity was too high of a price to Ms Claire Tsui. It turned out that she was infected with chlamydia, as a result of unprotected sex trades with her landlord in her teenage years. She really should not have passed the health test required for LPCUWC. But she did anyways. She was complicit with a friend who ended up taking the blood test on her behalf so she appeared just alright and healthy enough to blend in the community of this one and only boarding international school in Hong Kong.

Claire Tsui was deceitful enough to also send off a fake HKCEE certificate to the US colleges, as well as a fake Columbia diploma to her employer by hacking into the school account. If you looked at her grades, she was just average with 20 or so points, barely passing the minimum of a typical band 1 school scholar. But she refused to be defeated despite her circumstances, only because she had been the valedictorian for 6 consecutive years at a school as prestigious as Hennessy Road Government Primary School. No, surely, being the best in Hennessy Road Government Primary school should guarantee you a seat at the elite circle in Hong Kong, and eventually a ticket of admissions to an Ivy League college too. Might our city of Hong Kong and the prestige of BPS and Columbia continue to overshower her with grace and honor so that Claire Tsui could continue to be the legendary aegis of our time.

Again, I didn't know anything about her hideous past when I went to the same school with her. All I knew about her was that she was a Shanghai native who claimed to have come from a city more prosperous and modern than Hong Kong. She called me a retard behind my back but she was not intelligent enough to not let me find out. She also went around spreading rumors about me in claiming that I was fed up with my friend Serena's self bragging about how much love and praise she received from her suitors as if I was jealous of her.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVB-h5nwMGs