Confessions of a Cat-holic (45)

Brought up with Asian values and a Christian mindset, these new classmates of mine really had the worst of both worlds. On one hand, they were the Asian stereotypes, overly concerned with grades and a heavy tilt towards science subjects. Meanwhile, they were brainwashed enough by Christianity to think that they needed to appear holy and civilized. They ended up growing up to become some monstrous Frankenstein, freaky yet desperate to fit in among the rest.

I wouldn't tell them the underlying problems of their wrong interpretation of Christianity which had in fact helped transform them into a bunch of idiots. Actually, I wanted them to stay that way forever. Our class teacher, Mr. Tai Tuck Ching, who later became the principal of SKH Tang Shiu Kin Secondary School in Wanchai, was our religious studies teacher. He was also the head of the department in school when I was his student. We had an outing to a Christian church sermon once. I just started shedding tears upon the pastor's sharing for no apparent reason, if you could excuse me for my instinctive acting. No, please, I didn't even know why I was crying, like the speechless Jews sobbing in the course of prayers before the Western Wall. God knew why? At that moment, I wanted to look Christian, a fervent one too, not because I wanted to be one of them. Instead, I wanted my new friends to stay in the ivory tower forever, so I purposely manipulated them into believing in God and Christianity, that humans like me were innately good and kind hearted and that the world outside was warm, fuzzy and caring, because love was all around us.

And I succeeded. Even though I was actually a pessimist and a bit of a sadist, thanks to my Italian upbringing, my new friends liked to think of me as the joyful Christian who found showering love in a secluded monastery without any interaction with the society to be aware of the cruelty in the real world. Yes, the wilder their imagination the better; the further away from truth the merrier. Again, I didn't owe them anything, and when I said anything, I meant truth in particular. I didn't like them enough to bring to them disenchantment.

The first semester went by quite quickly. I was sitting next to Clairol for most of the time. I became very close with her and we even shared some secrets and whispers that I had since forgotten. Clairol said she liked Sammi Cheng a lot as an idol. And I would covertly tell her gossips about Jesus Christ and his alleged wife, Mary Magdalene, so that no one knew how much I disliked Christians.

It turned out that I scored the second in our class, right after Clairol, when the report came out. She had always been the valedictorian of the class. As a new comer, I couldn't have asked for more. I never intended to steal the spotlight or outperform my peers in a strange land. Without much effort and outside help, I was quite satisfied with my overall performance.

Passing my exams with flying colors didn't make me lose my mind. I was quite sure that I came second in class with such ease, not because I was particularly smart. I knew I got by alright because the subjects were still half science and half humanities and I didn't have to take home economics, a subject that I hated the most inside out. I had easily surpassed my peers in subjects which they considered "useless", such as religious studies, history, geography, chinese history, chinese and english. But I had also come to realize that I was lagging behind the curve in my physics and mathematics class. I actually hated physics even more so than home economics. I couldn't even solve a simple question over a optic reflection problem set that involved drawing a few straight lines through a focal point.

Overall, academics was still manageable. The level of difficulty of the humanities subjects was comparable to St Francis. I never took physics back in my old school so I couldn't compare. But the mathematics problem sets were significantly harder than what I was used to back in the days. I decided that maybe I should seek a tutor in physics and I found Yoshi Yip, a senior three years above me who scored 7As and was later admitted to Imperial College to study engineering.