Confessions of a Cat-holic (51)

It was Thursday afternoon when I attended the weekly Christian fellowship meeting in one of the classrooms on campus.

Usually, my new friends would be having choir practice in the music room. I wanted to look busy too, in a way to egg them on into engaging in musical activities and, well, believing in God. I also wanted to show some piety, just to please our then class teacher, Mr Tai. Of course, I was clever enough to not be named as a sycophant. Not at all I was a Christian but I guessed I needed to show a bit of faith amidst a bunch of lamblike good eggs. The Christian fellowship meeting ended about the same time as the afterschool choir practice, so I thought that would be a good excuse to walk home together with my "friends" from our mid level campus all the way through the Hong Kong Park towards the admiralty bus and subway stations.

I almost never missed a single Christian fellowship even though I spaced out most of the time during the meeting. I was not paying attention to anything they said, since I figured they had the wrong interpretation about the bible anyways. Actually, it was not just the bible, but Christianity as a whole. They had got it all wrong. Why would I bother to listen to what they had to say about God? I was just there to get it off my list, so I could say one day, alright, I "had been there and done that".

Mr Tai was not chairing the fellowship; he was too busy for it but he encouraged us all to attend, so I did. I wanted to "show" some support to the school's belief and ideologies. Afterall, it was their school motto "faith, hope, love" that kept them going through all the academic pressures in hope of a brighter future. I would say, Christian faith was the pillar of strength that kept most of the students at SPCC motivated, almost like a moth to a flame. I wanted their passion and inner tenacity to burn, like a candle setting itself on fire to light up its surroundings.

It was around the second semester of F.3 when I met an alumnus who recently graduated from university to come to us to share his recent updates and experience of living abroad. I forgot his name already but I would call him Mr Maxim, since his words of wisdom and sharing had taught me a lot about life.

Mr Maxim was in great despair when he came to meet us. He almost burst out in tears when he recalled his days back in Boston.

Mr Maxim was one of the most scholastic students in his year at SPCC. He was smart, hard-working and he had done all the right things. If you had a checklist of what a good and desirable student should look like, he would have got it all. He was engaged in the usual extra-curricular activities and he had almost perfect scores in all the subjects, and of course in maths and physics. His profile was a typical one at SPCC, science majored and maths focused. He could have also participated in the Physics Olympiad, representing Hong Kong to compete on a national and international level. So not surprisingly, he was admitted to MIT to further his undergraduate studies in engineering. As a matter of fact, he obtained a double degree in electrical engineering and computer science, as well as a master degree in applied physics, all within three years.

If you asked me how I felt about him, I would say legendary. And he was not the only one. There was a guy a year about me, who left a legacy that still no one could break as of now. He was the son of our geography teacher, Mrs Shiu. And his Chinese name was Shiu Hongkie. Okay, so Hongkie was admitted to Wharton School of UPenn at the age of 17. He started his enrollment in college right after F.5 as he already finished all the SATs and public exams by then. He finished three undergraduate degrees in finance, accounting and economics within just three years so by the time he graduated from Penn, he was just hitting 19. He later went to Princeton to study a master in Financial Engineering and graudated with four degrees in hand by the age of 20. We were talking about Ivy League colleges, the most competitive programs in America and in the world, not some random third tier community colleges.