Confessions of a Cat-holic (74)

That sounded like a conversation with Neo from Matrix. Red pill or blue pill, so I thought? I was too busy coping with my academics to be mesmerized by information technology. But I was aware of the shadiness in the virtual world.

The class was usually divided into two euqal halves by gender. The boys were clustered in a group which elected Alex Ng as the leader. He was the most active and verbally engaged one in our class. If you asked me if there was anyone I would consider going out with, I guessed I would give him a vote. But too bad he was taken, by the time I got to know him. He was not just taken, but perpetually occupied. I never saw him alone without Jacqueline ever since F3, aka the year I got in.

He initiated a thing called "the suckers club". I wouldn't know why they called themselves that. But they were a unified one. Many of the guys were mathletes for the Maths Olympiad, and wouldn't engage in musical activities. What a surprise. But the time they freed up was not spent on the usual activities, like chitchatting or watching basketball games. They invented this game called "24 points", which aimed to shuffle four numbered cards and the players had to figure out a way to make them equal 24. They were also playing something that looked like Dungeons & Dragons. I only came to know about this game through The Big Bang Theory. I could be wrong. Looking from afar, they looked captivated with the card games. I'd better leave them alone.

So the guys would be cracking calculus and solving rocket science questions during recesses and lunch time. The girls would be showcasing their singing skills, as if they looked attractive, by swaying their bodies and limbs to the rhythms as a way to allure the future doctors.

What was I doing?

I wasn't singing, of course. Because like I said, I was tone deaf. I, too, wouldn't be playing the card games with the boys. I was a spectator. But I was glad that there was always someone around me who shared my glee. That was how I became good friends with Vivian Kwong.

Vivian Kwong was not a member of any of the choirs and she didn't spend her recesses and lunches on solving equations. Nevertheless, she was good enough in it. She grew up to be an accountant at the Big 4 and rose to the rank of a manager by the time I was a marketing coordinator at Skadden. She graduated with 6As in HKCEE and was admitted to Poly U through advance entry. In other words, she finished her college degree three years earlier than my graduation. I would not be surprised if I was coined with the term "idiot" or "chump" by my peers at SPCC.

Accountants were the norm at SPCC. It paid well and was perceivably a stable profession, at least in my standards. I worked as a sales in bank so you could tell me about job security. Vivian's hard work paid off eventually and I was not surprised to find out that she was one of the earlier ones to own a home in Tai Koo Shing by mid twenties. I had been to her place once. It was nicely furnished with an obvious thai decor. I felt like going to a spa upon arriving at her home. Shortly after I left my job at Skadden, she wedded an Asian American from deep south, who seconded to Hong Kong for a few months. I heard she moved to Texas with her husband afterwards. Quite an enviable life, so I thought.

Through the daily conversations with Vivian in high school, as well as interaction with her friends, I found out that Vivian was not the usual MK wannabe. She actually was MK to the bone. She was not the typical old school MK gal who would dye her hair and wear those color cons. Although her friend, Tracy, was one. Vivian dressed herself like an emo, or goth even. She had thick bangs and clippers all over her head and she told me her summer job was working in a salon as an styling assistant. That was some obvious hint that she was associated with the triads. Most other SPCCers would not be working cash jobs in a salon after school.

She liked to invite me to sing karaoke with her friends. But everytime I went, I was taken by surprises.