Confessions of a Cat-holic (40)

Not only we were asked to each do an individual project on our favorite torture treatment, we were told to make a presentation based on our research and findings. We were expected to share on why and what we liked most, in terms of the blood-shed torture treatment methods. If you could imagine, that just toughened us all up. When I said all, I was not exaggerating. Life in a Spartan camp was certainly no picnic. The consequences attached to it were that we became all kind of ruthless and cold-blooded. I didn't remember crying at all in my school. We were taught to fight back and take revenge at all costs, because others would do that too. That was how we became more mindful about our own actions because we never knew what might end up as a backlash.

I remembered chatting about these with my best friend, Karen Lee, in elementary school. We loved talking about black magic, witchcraft, homicide methods, criminology, and of course, torture treatments too. I told her about the term "21 grams experiment" which referred to a scientific study published in 1907 by Duncan MacDougall, a physician from Massaschusettes. MacDougall hypothesized that souls had physical weight, and attempted to measure the mass lost by a human when the soul departed the body. With a series of experiments, he concluded that the human soul should weigh three-fourths of an ounce (21.3 grams).

Even though many people reacted to his experiment with disbelief and skeptism, Karen and I were quite amused by it. And then she told me about this experiment called the Milgram experiment. It involved a group of people being told to perform electric shock experiment on another group of individuals. Obviously, they were not shocked but for the experiment's sake, they had to act in pain. This experiment measured and observed how far we would go in terms of inflicting pain on others under the influence of authority. This experiment was done by a Yale professor, namely Stanley Milgram.

Karen's intelligence was no less than me. Actually, I would say she was even smarter, with a master and bachelor degree in Chemistry at Cambridge. She was a scholarship recipient too, and she was sitting on the Cambridge Overseas Trust having a say over who got to attend Cambridge. I was always proud of this dear friend of mine.

I heard about this Milgram experiment quite early on but it was until I transferred school that I came to see the potential it could realize. I thought to myself, why not conduct a Milgram experiment on my new friends and see how they ended up doing. Afterall, I had had enough social experiments done on myself, I figured it was my turn to be in control.

I would play victim in the new school. I would cry in the classroom for no reasons to see how they reacted in the face of their innocuous bantering. Just like the Milgram experiment, I was obviously not hurt on an emotional or physical level, but I would pretend to be "shocked". Some of them were happy to see me cry, while others would stop their bantering. Daryl was one of them. Daryl was a good friend of Keith. He liked to tease me with Keith in the first semester but somehow he changed his attitude towards me entirely for the rest of the school year before he transferred to Kent School, a prep school on the US east coast, just north of New York City in an hour drive. Did I tell you that he went to this same prep school with my husband?

Keith, on the other hand, remained a hillbilly. He thought he was the hot shot in SPCC. Actually, I thought he was confident to a level where he could be delusional. First, he was ugly. His facial features were unpleasant and he didn't have a cool vibe. All he bragged about was his violin skills. Okay, so he could play violin. So what? He later became the chairman of the choir department, which would be equivalent to the title of a head boy in other schools, as SPCC only put all of its resources on choir and orchestra practice. Okay, so he was a choir chairman. I gave him some credits for his musical talents but he was definitely not any way more desirable than the average Joe in Hong Kong.