Confessions of a Cat-holic (92)

Many of their boys lived in my apartment building. My nextdoor neighbour, Sunny Ng, who lived on the same floor in my complex also was one year younger than me from St Joseph. We had been good friends since middle school, even though I never had his contacts.

Actually if you asked me in a free world where I could date anyone in Hong Kong, without a doubt I would say St Joseph and La Salle guys would be my top choice, for apparent reasons. St Joseph guys were known to be good looking, athletic and well put together. La Salle guys, on the other hand, were more gangster, while being academically competitive. That was some twenty years ago. Things might have changed now but secretly I had a thing for the St Joseph guys in my neighborhood and the gangster-cops from La Salle, whom many of my friends had dated.

But I knew very well that ever since I was a kid, there was a transparent wall amongst all the single sex schools in Hong Kong. While St Joseph's primary school sat next to my home in Wanchai and its secondary school was opposite to SPCC, I sensed that none of us could quite be free as we wished to be. Jeff Leung wrote me a love letter with a gift from Jean Paul Gaultier, wrapped in a box that was obviously from one of the knock-off milan-stationish shops in Island Beverley Shopping Centre. He told me that he knew almost 80% of the girls in his year from Marymount as they were known to share a bond, that was very much like SFCC and the notorious Wahyan community. I was not sure whether it was a perpetual bond or the longest living vendetta but this kind of unspoken ties among the single sex schools was very common. We were not the only ones. St Paul's Boys had St Stephen Girls; St Mary's with WYK; Raimondi had St Clare's; Ying Wa Boys and Ying Wa Girls; Maryknoll was associated with La Salle; DBS was supposed to be a match with DGS.

Back to academics now, for mathematics and additional mathematics, I was attending private lessons with Uncle Tsang's cousin, so it was cost-effective too. For English, I tried one of the really local tutorial centers and to be honest, I didn't recall having learned anything substantially helpful, since my English was not bad anyways. I tagged along my friends’ tutorial classes because I didn't want to sound obnoxious by rejecting them. Tutoring was the norm in my new school, as many of the teachers were not quite good at teaching. No, it was not about their qualifications. They were good instructors, some with a phd too. But they were either too scholarly or too advance in their fields while some of them talked like a bird in class.

Mr Yim was our physics teacher. He got on the press once for stealing a pack of battery from supermarket when I went there. He never talked. He murmured facing the chalk board. And when he wrote, his handwriting was so small that it was almost illegible. Mrs Murray was my favorite teacher. She was the wife of a bomb disposal expert from England. Mrs Murray had a very thick Scottish accent, which was fine. She introduced me to the series of Harry Potter, which was still a name known to very few at the time.

It was through Clairol and Daryl that I first heard about the PSAT and the SSAT. From the letters I received from Clairol and Daryl, I had a feeling that their vocabulary bank was really a few levels more sophisticated than mine.

They told me they had attended a few courses at Kaplan and Princeton Review for TOEFL and SSAT in preparation for applying to the prep schools. If Daryl could sell his Jaguar for 20,000 HKD, I guessed a test-prep course in the top notch tutorial centers that costed 20,000 and more for each would not be much of a surprise. At that time, I knew very well that I could never even afford to take a course at these American institutions. The best I could do would have to be self study. Afterall, my family was not ready to spare that much money for these American public exams. 20,000 HKD was quite astronomical to me back in the late 90s. Since I was a good student anyways, I figured I really should just work a bit harder and take the exam without outside help.