And so it is the end of a decade, one that molded me into the person I am today - imperfections, disproportions and all. The start of 2010 shall not be marked by resolutions - I hardly ever keep them - but in retrospect will I journey back through the first decade of the new millennium.
2000
My time in primary school was drawing to a close with the impending PSLE looming ahead. Several people had been worried that the passing of my mother the year before would affect my performance in school. Instead, I made a vow to myself that I would work so hard that I would be able to land myself in my mother's alma mater,
Tanjong Katong Girls' School. I more than just "made it". I scored 3 A*'s, with an A in Science, and a Distinction in Higher Mother Tongue (to this day I am amazed at how quickly my grasp of Malay Literature had eroded over the years), awarding myself with an aggregate of 262. I remember how TKGS wasn't "good enough" for my father, further emphasised when he saw the form that allowed me to apply to Raffles Girls' School. To appease him, I decided to apply to RGS, invalidating my application to TKGS as my first choice. Never have I been so happy to get a rejection. However, the fields of green would have to wait; my dad got an offer from Singapore Airlines to manage the station in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. With the application to save a space for me in TKGS signed and sealed, we packed our bags and headed for the island of Borneo.
2001I was enrolled in Lodge International School - the preference of a British/Cambridge syllabus over an Australian one. I got my first taste of a global education. The classes were so small that each level was one whole class. It went Grade 1, Grade 2, Grade 3 and so forth. I landed in Grade 7 and Nurul in Grade 5. This was also where I got my first contact with
angmoh boys. There were several in my class. The rest of the class was mainly made up of Asian expatriates, or rich Malaysians, or Malaysians who'd been living overseas prior. It was also a period of typical girl crushes, with possibly sprinklings of amateur "flirting" thrown in along the way. My first Valentine's Day chocolate was given by a boy called
Muhammad Rahmat - Mo for short. He and I had a weird friendship, and not necessarily in a bad way. His uncle was the Chief Minister of Sarawak, making him Exhibit A of the Rich Malaysians category. My goodness, he was chauffeured to school by an
angmoh driver in an awesome shiny black four wheel drive. He also enjoyed calling me Singapore Airlines, and had a bizarre affinity for airplane food. My family and I lived in Village Grove Condominium, and as I frequented the pool, I also learnt how to swim, made possible by the maid bringing us to the deep end one day. I also remember a colony of bees that decided one fine morning to make the piping outside my bedroom window their home. I never drew open the curtains for at least a month, until the hive had been completely removed by the pest control unit. I also discovered makeup. Our time in Kuching would not go beyond December, however. After the disaster of 9/11, the airline industry suffered a tremendous blow, and in a race against plummeting sales and revenue, costs had to be cut. The Kuching station had to be closed. It was then announced we would move to Cape Town, South Africa.
2002
My first view of the Mother City from the airplane window was of vast green plains and sparkling cerulean waters. My first thought probably was,
'Wow, there's so much open space!' And then I saw Table Mountain with its layer of white chiffon revealing glimpses of the mountain top, and I was amazed. Table Mountain had a plateaued peak, hence its name. Our home for the next two years was gently nestled on the slope of Table Mountain in the mostly-expatriate-and-bordering-on-touri
sty area of
Camps Bay. The Atlantic Ocean greeted me from my bedroom window every morning. I had pleasant neighbours, with whom I grew close to in the later part of the year. The
International School of Cape Town was where I would be studying; it also had a Cambridge syllabus, and offered IGCSEs, AS Levels and A Levels. Again a tiny close-knit community. The school building, which used to be a hotel complete with chandeliers and sinks in each room, could house students from the Primary School all the way to the matric students in their final year of formal education. Because Nurul and I were able to skip a grade after taking the proficiency tests, we found that we were the youngest in our respective classes. Even then, the coursework was more than easily manageable. I have never scored so many As in Mathematics in a single school year before. I took up tennis - and loved it, even when many a time the balls went over the net, over the fence, and dangerously close to the swimming pool. (YES MY SCHOOL HAD TENNIS COURTS AND A SWIMMING POOL AND A BEAUTIFUL GARDEN! It even had its own family of "gooses"). This is also the year that sparked my passion for theatre. That year's production was
The Importance of Being Earnest. Too shy to try out for an acting role, I joined the crew as a prompter. Basically, I
prompt whenever someone forgot a line. That also marked the expansion of my social circle. You see, ISCT also had its cliques, and the seemingly "cooler" and "more interesting" people were the ones involved in theatre. After that, people like
Andreas Riegel,
Jo Cordner,
Thomas Dreyfus, and
Ben Stevenson-Wright were saying "Hi!" to me. The guys even did the whole kiss-on-the-cheek-to-greet thing! So many good-looking
angmoh boys I tell you. This was also the year I became a proud momma to two beautiful and adorable kittens, Tyger and Sheena. Tyger was a grey tabby with white socks, and Sheena had a shiny black coat with white socks and a white tummy. I loved it when they slept in my bed; it's like having a hot water bottle underneath the covers during those cold nights.
2003Nurul and I both earned our very own cell phones. Nokia 8310, I think, and it was considered pretty new back then in Cape Town. Although I think Cape Town was just a wee bit slow. Going into Form Four, we had to choose subjects for IGCSEs, and that was when the class started to split. Although I had adored every minute of Art, spending Monday afternoons in the Art Studio while waiting for Nurul to finish dance, I decided to choose Music, even though I did not have any music theory background. That proved disastrous during the mid-terms. In retrospect, I should have stuck with Art. My techniques were developing nicely, and
Ms Cameron was the loveliest teacher one could have. Other choices included French (vs. Afrikaans) and Biology (vs. Environmental Studies) in addition to the core subjects like English Language and Literature and Math. I joined netball, but began ditching practice for the year's production,
The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940, hopping on board once again as prompter. Saw the same faces, but the director was an alumni, who had graduated the year before.
Clare, her name was. I became quite close to the theatre group of people, some of them even striking conversation with me in between classes. So many good-looking
angmoh boys I tell you. However, I only cared for one and his name was
Lenny Rojas. He was two grades above me, and he was awesome. He was funny, caring, sweet and I had such a hopeless crush on him. I remember one morning we were late for school (which occurred pretty often) and I was mad at my dad for...
something. I was already missing half of homeroom and was scrambling up the back stairs. Lenny popped up at the top of the staircase and said
"Good Morning!" in that delightfully cheerful voice of his. I barely managed to choke out a
"Hi". He saw that I was upset, grabbed me by my shoulders, and pulled me in a warm comforting hug that didn't seem to end. It was as though time stood still, and I wasn't late for homeroom, and I didn't have lessons to rush to. After what seemed like an eternity, he pulled back, looked into my eyes and kissed me. Okay, so it was on the forehead, BUT IT MADE ME FEEL SO MUCH BETTER! Needless to say, I was in a daze that whole day. I also remember dreary mornings when Music was our first lesson and we had to work on our compositions and Lenny would come down (Form Six students had a lot of study breaks due to the fewer subjects they took) and entertain me, taking away my attention from the jumbled mess of sharps and flats on the score sheet in front of me. I think we grew pretty close that year. We would have pleasant conversations in the garden as we tried to disguise our walks as part of his recess prefect patrols. I think it was pretty obvious to people I had a crush on him. What to do, I'm an open book.
I have so many more wonderful reminiscences of the most close-to-perfect two years I have ever had, that it would take forever to recount them all. So many firsts Cape Town had given me: first movie outing with friends, first singing performance, first taste of frozen yoghurt (Marcel's ftw!), first crush, first pets, first snake and scorpion encounter, first winter, first live concert (I stood up for more than 12 hours at this super long concert that featured Usher, P. Diddy and Alicia Keys), first real best friend. I WOULD LIKE TO REWIND NOW, THANKSVERYMUCH. Sadly, 9/11 delivered a more long-lasting blow than people thought. We had to move back because Singapore Airlines was carrying out its retrenchment exercises, and my dad was being replaced by a middle-aged bachelor with no additional family expenses to burden the company with. And so I bid the best two years of my life goodbye.
2004
Well, I did get my initial wish of getting into my mother's alma mater. However, because I didn't take Secondary Three subjects in Singapore as part of the O Level course, I had to repeat Secondary Three instead of being allowed to advance to the final year of Secondary School. It would be the start of numerous questions and baffled reactions I'd get whenever someone noticed the discrepancy between my age and my level of education. I unknowingly landed myself in a class that had been given the stigma of the "hopeless last class" due to my desire to take Pure Literature, and 3/9 was the only class in the entire level to offer that in the class combination. Being in the "last class" did have its perks, however. The pace of study wasn't a frantic rush like how the Triple Science classes were conducted, and the people I surrounded myself with were unique and amazing in their own right. I also had a very competent A Math teacher,
Mrs Geh, and a remarkable Social Studies/History teacher by the name of
Miss Hamidah. She had a distinctive character trait of never calling any of us by our names, but instead, by our register numbers, and in my two years at TKGS, she had only been wrong twice. She also had an eclectic fashion sense, with her wardrobe mostly consisting of bright, attention-grabbing colours. I did pretty well that year. My starting L1R5 after the first examinations was 20, and it continued to drop all the way to O Levels. I also saw my favourite band,
HANSON, in concert for the very first time, in Jakarta. I was in awe the entire time because I couldn't believe they were performing right in front of me. HANSON's music symbolises a very carefree time and I loved that. This was also the year Lenny got sent to Iraq after he had signed on to the US Marines upon the completion of his AS Levels. It marked a huge shift in the dynamics of our friendship, to the point where I don't know who he is anymore other than a soldier, a husband and a father.
2005
O Level year! Initially I had wanted to drop Biology because I wasn't doing well in it.
Mr Peh was a very encouraging man, also with his own special idiosyncrasies (he loved plants so much we could predict what the Prelim lab practical was going to be), and he told me to stick to Biology because he believed I could get an A1 in the end because I was consistently hardworking. My goal that year was to enter
Victoria Junior College, a goal I shared with
Claire, a friend I had gotten pretty close to during the O Level period, but unfortunately drifted away from during the JC years. Our numerous study and stayover sessions were filled with notes-sharing, question-predicting, and answer-drafting. My Prelim results did not deem me good enough to gain entrance to my first choice however, thus clearing the path for me to head to
Anglo-Chinese Junior College, a very rewarding turn of events, now looking back.
Second half of the decade to be continued...
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
markccy's Friends Page
giddy
content
WANT UR BAD
i have no idea
blank
thoughtful