Confessions of a Cat-holic (82)

I didn't like Keith at all, partly due to his not so enticing looks, and mostly due to his baseless pride. He repeatedly asked me to watch his news report on Cable TV like I was his fan. I really didn't know where his narcissitic ego came from, after graduating from the journalism department at CUHK and working at Cable TV as a reporter on 12,000 monthly salary. Nevertheless, he was practical enough to ask his father to sell their flat to give him the down payment for a home in Tsing Yi so that his father was living on rent for the rest of his life. Um, I wouldn't want to be his friend nor his lover.

Adam So was another Mr Popular at SPCC. Vivian and Tracy called him by his nickname, So Sing. He was a Canadian and you might think we were very much alike. No, that was almost like saying everyone in America was Sylvester Stallone. Allegedly, Adam So was born in Toronto where he spent his childhood. His father owned a few listed companies and supposedly Adam should have had a very good life to start with. But one day, his father suddenly disappeared and escaped into China so he was officially untraceable, leaving his wife with Adam and Adam's younger brother, Jonathan. Adam’s mother suffered from mental health issues as a result and they had to come back to Hong Kong where he enrolled in local schools to continue his studies. But Adam was a hard worker. Through undue diligence and intelligence, he finally achieved 6As in HKCEE, but he sobbed on the day of public exam announcement. He was not happy with the results and he insisted that my 8As achievements were purely out of luck.

He was elected as the chairman of the Student Union of our year. It was the first year that SPCC ever had a Student Union. With a rather satisfactory HKCEE certificate, a good track record and applauding teacher recommendations from the staff, he was just accepted to University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Madison and University of California, San Diego. Did he deserve all this? Why the hell did I end up at Columbia with a scholarship? Hey, he played basketball too.

Adam insisted that I must have got in with my fake, plastic and artificial looks and a killer body. Jesus, American schools were hella superficial. A Russian-Japanese spy like me could get into all the Ivies with a lucrative scholarship package, too? What the hell was wrong with this world? Why had Cornell, Brown, Columbia, Duke and UChicago accepted me to upend capitalism and distrupt American economies? Didn't Americans hate PRC and USSR? Something didn't make sense.

It must have been my appearance. If not my looks, what else did I do better than the rest of the flock in the system? So Adam So matriculated at HKUST's Global Business Program, went out with a girl from Heep Yunn from the HKUYL program and introduced me to my sweetheart Edmond Tin. He even chose UPenn as his exchange program destination and put its name on his linkedin and facebook so that he felt belonged in the world's most uninviting network. If I could get into Columbia, why couldn't Adam do the same, or even better? Goldman Sachs became a magnet for all the athletes and wannabes from SPCC, including Lucy Luo and Adam So. All my haters joined the firm to oppose my matrix circle at Lehman Brothers. The rest was history.

So here was another thing I didn't like about SPCC. That would be their superficiality. They judged people based on looks. If I looked like Charlene, I must be her long lost twin, that we shared the same appearance, personalities, disposition, and even fates.

No, I didn't think so and I couldn't agree on that. Among my fellow SPCCers, I was clearly good for nothing. I was not a violin player. I was not a chairlady. I was not a choir member. I was not a student union member. I was just prettier than my peers in the SPCC community. I was just an athlete but only idiots and dumb people engaged in sports. I was just another jock. Only idiotic schools liked jocks and Columbia must have been one of them. SPCCers liked to put everyone down, including the Ivies. Afterall, HKU carried a better brand than, say, Harvard or Cornell, right?