Confessions of a Cat-holic (78)

It was another Saturday afternoon. The karaoke session started after lunch but Jessie came by at around 5 and she stayed for just half an hour before she headed to her "date".

She said she was supposed to hang out with another friend, so she didn't want to linger around for too long.

Jessie was a trendy girl. She was super skinny with clearly seen collar bone underneath her camisole. She put on make up with brown shimmering eyeshadow and contoured powder when seen outside of school and she cut her hair like a jellyfish head with highlighted wispy bangs and irregularly trimmed hair ends. Not sure why she also wore those Native Indian feathered earrings and necklaces like a dreamcatcher, as an American citizen. But overall, her vibes were pleasant and well put together.

Jessie had her own cohort. She liked to hang out with the pretty girls, like Serena, Za, and a few others. She was a typical class B student, academically okay but appearance-wise, she could pass as outstanding.

If you asked me whether I considered her pretty, I would say yes. Her facial features were distinct and proportional but I wouldn't call her attractive just yet. Hey being pretty wouldn't neccessarily mean you could be attractive.

She looked like the celebrity Shirley Sham, blessed with a pointy nose, fine eyes and tanned skin. I was not surprised to hear that she had been crowned as the beauty pageant queen of our year. Girls in SPCC were all malnutrious and underweight. It was easy to stand out as long as you looked decent. But I was pretty sure she would just be a nobody if put in my alma mater with 1000 other hot girls. Oh well. The fate of a rat born in the mills could be drastically different from that of a rat born in a toilet, according to Chinese ancient wisdom by Confucius, if you knew what I meant.

I heard she went out with a lawyer's son, aka Alan Yung's elder brother, after college. Alan Yung was my classmate at LPCUWC. He was the goalkeeper of the football team at La Salle. He and his family lived in a three storey mansion with a garden in Kowloon. I told you there were more rich people outside of SPCC in the band 1 circle, not some transcendant co-ed school flooded with people like Joe Chiu from a Shatin public estate calling Wanchai the new Shum Shui Po.

Alan Yung was the husband of Jasmine Chan who was a year above me from St Francis. Jasmine was not the prettiest in her year. Alice Wong was. Alice went to SUNY Buffalo for college and she worked as a flight attendant at Cathay Pacific before she transferred to Apple as a store manager. Nevertheless, Jasmine was smart enough to capture the heart of the golden nugget from La Salle with her posh etiquette and good fashion sense. Jasmine enrolled at Oxford University as a computer science major and worked as a sales at Barclays under my former boss Kirk Sweeney for the longest time. Small world, huh? Sure enough, Jessie confessed to me that she was bullied by Jasmine when she went out with Alan's brother.

Jessie told us that she would be departing SPCC in the middle of F4 at a karaoke room. Tracy and Vivian ordered many drinks with champagne to farewell her with best regards. When I asked her why she was leaving Hong Kong for America, she told me she was just joining her relatives at New Jersey to further her studies.

I was pretty clueless about foreign affairs at the time and I remembered I said that Jessie was going to Jessie state when she told me so. That was how "international" and "American" I was. I never heard of New Jersey prior to Jessie's departure. I thought New Jersey was New Jessie.

Well, all that had past was gone. Jessie was enrolled at one of the state public schools before getting accepted to Carnegie Mellon where she studied business. She worked at JP Morgan in Japan and Hong Kong as a research analyst for some years. At that time in F4, neither of us knew we would both attend Columbia University. I went to Columbia as an undergraduate and Jessie later on enrolled at its business school where she met her husband.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoIsoDf1vhI