Confessions of a Cat-holic (73)

Another thing that kinda bothered me about Rebecca was that she talked to me like I was a retard. Of course she didn't say it to my face but she made it clear enough that I was not worthy of success by repeating a Chinese idiom about enlightenment. It said that once you reached success, it didn't matter whether you came late. （學無前后，達者爲先）

Then it was followed by Samantha's unceasing echos. She and her husband, Tim Lee, emphasized again and again that I was a loser at the starting line, although I caught up towards the end of the race. Quoting her, it would be 輸在起跑線. They were obviously mocking me that I only came to be valedictorian or salutatorian in high school, which should be a shame. I should be regretful that my grades in kindergarten were disastrous, as if it mattered.

Prior to SPCC, I never met a person crazy enough to compete with others in academics since the age of 3, except of course my dear Jane. But Jane was the least popular figure in my alma mater. Nobody wanted to be like her. All of a sudden, I found myself in a sea of Janes in the new school. I was then the slacker and jock who deserved nothing but failures. So I guessed having studied with early prodigies had opened up my horizons.

Yes, perseverance was crucial for success. But I was not sure being constantly overstretched for excellence would make or break you. Life was a marathon, and I didn't think competing with your peers since kindergarten was a good idea, unless they wouldn't mind the burn-out. Would they still have the stamina to cope with life once they left the ivory tower? Being an anesthesiologist wouldn't help much, so I reckoned.

But I had fond impressions of Plato Wai. I was not particularly familiar with him but judging from his articles which he currently and occasionally submitted to the columns on Ezone, I believed he was a decent guy and somewhat different from Rebecca. Plato was a few years ahead of me and he moved on to study at Carnegie Mellon University after F6. His grades were good, but not exceptional. He achieved 4As in the public exam, which might explain the fact that he didn't get into an Ivy.

After he graduated, he coldcalled all the banks in Hong Kong and landed a job at Lehman Brothers as a structurer in the equity derivatives department. We actually sat on the same trading floor, a few rows in front of him facing the harbor at IFC. But I never bothered to talk to him personally. I chose finance and business not to mingle or fall back onto the egotistic circle of chartered professionals. Actually, it was quite the opposite.

After the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Plato continued on working in the same department at Nomura. I heard he received a good package, too. A few years after that, he set up an online platform for private educators, namely iTutor. The last time I checked up on him, he was the general manager of an online shop provider, Shopline.

Wouldn't that look like a profile parallel to what I had been doing?

Objectively speaking, there were actually quite a few exceptionally smart people in my class, qualified for the title of a special talent. I obviously was not one of them. It was only through Rebecca that I knew about Alex Lam's specialties. Rebecca complained to me that her computer was hacked by Alex. He had a nickname, "godly-person", for apparent reasons. Like many other guys in the class, Alex never had a conversation with me even though he sat in front of me for a brief period during my two years spent in E class.

Overheard from gossips and other sources, I was informed that Alex had disappeared from public radar after F7 and successfully matriculated at Cambridge University as a computer science major.

I, too, was of course aware of the fact that my computer could be hacked by my peers in class. There was this guy named Sawlyn Chan (a metonymy since I did not recall his English name) who asked me what an IP address was. I told him, I never even heard of it. He said there could be many things done to my computer, if one had control over my IP address.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uQgMZ3w9No