Confessions of a Cat-holic (25)

I was quite nervous because I wasn't at the level which I could call myself a master of Guzheng yet. My parents were sitting in the audience, together with my maths tutor Mr Tsang Fei Lung. The chosen playlist was not a challenging one but my hand was trembling and I was at a relief to finally finish my performance, only to find out later that Claire Tsui was making fun of my stage show the entire time.

How did I find out? Claire was loud enough for anybody sitting behind her back to overhear her laughters and chatter with a few other girls, specfically Jean and Nelly from SPCC. My mother told me about her disrespectful behavior immediately as I went back to my room when they called it over. Apparently, Nelly said it out loud that I had some unspeakable sexual affairs with my maths tutor Mr Tsang Fei Lung, a family friend whom I could not afford to offend. And the worst thing was that my maths tutor Mr Tsang Fei Lung heard her controversial conversations. Gosh, would high school ever end for me? These people were so simple, sometimes naive.

How did I feel? I felt somewhat angry and insulted, but I held it in. That was just my way of handling things. When I hated someone, I wouldn't show it on my face. I chose to take revenge, by sneaking in and dropping a bomb which they wouldn't find out even after they died. Instead of yelling back at them or being overly confrontational, I manifested the tension and esculated the matter to a level which a third party would intervene, but I guaranteed I chose my third party carefully. I liked to complain, but that didn't mean I would complain to anybody. I usually only complained to someone who cared and powerful enough to do something real bad to my foe.

It took me a year to plan out my college application essays and I decided to write about this incident to all the top colleges in the U.S., so they felt my pain and resentment towards a small group of people in my surroundings. A friend of mine from SPCC, Jessica Mak, tucked in a few pages of application essay samples and showed me what my classmate wrote to colleges when she applied a year earlier. This classmate's name was Ling Lee, which literally mean smartie. Okay, so this smartie who resided on 64 Victorian Road ended up going to MIT and later continued her PhD studies at Princeton University in the department of Financial Engineering Operations Research. As of now, she disappeared in all social media channels and the last time I saw her pictures was just her wedding show-off with my other classmate Justin Xiang from Washington U in St Louis.

There were around 20 students from SPCC with 8As or above in HKCEE that year of 2001. That was already over 60% of my classmates who scored high enough to make it to headline and qualify in getting into medical school. I was one of them. Actually, I was quite surprised to have scored 8As in the public exam, given that my academic standing was only mediocre in my class. I was not surprised at Ling Lee's seemingly victorious entry to MIT and later Princeton because she had always been a straight As student and, like her name suggested, she was intelligent, evident in her perfect scores inside and outside of school.

But even with such outstanding academic track records at the city's most elitist high school, historically only one person every year could get into an Ivy League college, either Princeton or MIT, from this urban legend school. I wondered why. Ling Lee was that golden nugget of our year. Nobody else succeeded in getting into an Ivy, other than Miss Smartie. The rest of the class, despite having an almost perfect score card, only received offers from University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Madison, University of California San Diego, or University of Pennsylvania as an exchange student from University of Science and Technology Hong Kong.

I wondered why. I wondered why they were hugely unwelcomed by the United States of America. Hong Kong, despite being an island, claimed itself to be the world's financial hub, an international city who had it all. And these people were at the apex of the society, sitting at the mid-levels of Central laughing at everyone else. Even their names suggested that they could be some sort of a genius.