Confessions of a Cat-holic (42)

My new friends called me Gigi. They called me Zoe. They called me Joey. They called me Chloe. They called me Mary. They called me Jane. They called me Claire. They called me Caroline. They called me Belle. They called me Jessie. They called me Serena. They called me Daisy. They called me Tracy. That's not my name. That's not my name.

No, my friends from home called me Louisa Watt. Why could nobody see that? In this new school, my beauty ranking jumped from the 500th in St Francis to almost the first among the Christians. What could I say? Love should look better, no? All I could sense was that there was something wrong with this school when even the Ugly Betty could come to be considered attractive...

They insisted that I was a succession of the head girl a year above me. Her name was Eliza Cheung Leung. Let's just call her Luminous Cheung, for the ease of avoiding confusion. Luminous Cheung was bright and luminous, as her name suggested. She was a transfer student from Marymount and she scored perfectly in all 10 subjects in HKCEE, earning her the official title as "Our mighty Cheung Leung, the 10A(1) Chairlady Your Majesty". She later was admitted to Princeton University and worked at Morgan Stanley as an analyst for many years before she switched to Lehman Brothers.

Marymount and St Francis were located in the same district of Wanchai, but that didn't mean we had the same specialties. Fairly speaking, St Francis produced a lot of Chinese speaking local authors, scriptwriters, journalists and DJs and we had a stronger foundation in Chinese and Chinese debate than our peer, Marymount. We also had different religious philospophies and idealogies. I wouldn't say that we were in any way similar to each other. Did I in any way resemble one of the twins, Charlene Choi?

These new Christians really had no idea about the cultures of different schools in the band 1 circle, and they sucked at reading people, so I observed. I told them with a solemn face, making sure I didn't sound like joking or teasing, that I did not intend to become the chairlady of choir in this new school. I confessed to them that I was not that ambitious. Moreover, I disclosed the fact that I could not read musical notes and could not play any musical instruments.

But my honest confessions did not bring about their disillusionment. The long awaited epiphany that I was just not that special did not come to happen. They did not believe in what I said. Maybe they overheard rumors from a friend of mine, Vicki Chan, that I was Japanese. But hey, Vicki Chan had cognitive problems, remember? I kept Vicki around me to delude and mislead my enemies. But in a simple man's mind, the world had always been as straightforward as Alice's wonderland. That certainly didn't help my new friends realize reality.

So the five peas in a pod were dancing and singing around like the Jackson 5, telling everybody that I was trying to stay low-key and hide my strengths to do something real big later on. So, I played a song on the piano, the only song I could play, which was the Silent Night. And I could only play two lines, that was it. That was as good as I could be in the realm of classical music. No, my new friends assured everyone that I could sing with relative pitch. They added that my fingers were long enough, a feature that only piano experts could possess. I must have been an evasive music prodigy eluding public attention for future success. I must have been a synchronizer back in St Francis. I must have been a talented piano master back in the days.

No, I told them I had no official musical training at all. I had not even heard of the term "relative pitch". I thought I was just out of tune, no? Why did they start hallucinating things? What did I do? What could I have done to help them gain back consciousness? I didn't know any better.

Being biased, being racist, being judgmental, and being convicted in some absurd things were not an issue. These flaws were understandable. Afterall, we were all humans. Everyone was a little racist. A little bit of bigotry and prejudice definitely was not lethal enough to kill us. Actually, many people even claimed that ignorance was a bliss. The fact that they were slightly lunatic certainly was not a fatal one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th4FMmNQpAk