high school memories
It has been almost two decades since I left high school, and whenever I tell other friends about my four years there they always end up laughing with a mix of disbelief and wonder. It's not surprising, because if you compare the rules, traditions and the actual school building itself using today's standards it would seem amazing that they let any students attend it at all. The old campus which I attended was torn down almost a decade ago to make way for a newer branch of the school, so any memories of it only exist in photographs and anecdotes from ex-students. Before the building was demolished, my friend JL and I visited the campus one last time to take photographs and reminisce about our time there. We would have been about twenty-one then, so this would have been five years after we left and the memories still fresh. Too bad the photographs I took are in storage back in Singapore - it would have made this post more interesting because trust me, when I describe the place as crumbling, it was really falling apart.
For the record, although I had the usual teenage angst during my time there and often loudly proclaimed my dissatisfaction with the school, twenty years down the road I do grudgingly admit that I also had quite an experience there. JL and I still talk about 'those days' and like wartime survivors, the experience has bonded us through the decades. I am not going to name the school in the post but it may become obvious, particularly to those in my age group, which one it is from my descriptions. Or perhaps not. It doesn't really matter now anyway, because the school has moved past all this and modernized. Would I still send my daughter there, assuming she had the grades to enter? Not really, unless she wanted it for herself. My experience of the school, even if it is considered a prestigious one in Singapore, has not exactly made me a proud alumni member. I don't own a graduation yearbook because I very dramatically threw it in the bin in front of the teacher one minute after it was handed to me, not bothering to open it at all. Yeah, I was that kind of teenager.
I could add a disclaimer here saying my experiences of the school are solely my own and probably of my own (angsty) doing, but I won't because I. don't. care. (Yeah, that teenager is still alive inside me.)
The basics
- a Chinese girls' school with a long history
- well-regarded in academics
[no prizes for guessing which one now!]
The campus
- so badly-maintained that every time it rained heavily, the outdoor basketball courts would be completely flooded. One memorable flood reached the top of the tyres of the cars in the carpark. I have a dim memory of sitting on the steps of the building facing the water, waiting for everything to go down so I could go home.
- if I remember correctly the building was 60 or 70 years old when I was a student there, and it was clear from the cracks in the walls and the broken tiles in the bathrooms that renovation plans were a long way away. On hindsight I now know that they didn't want to sink the money into renovations when a new campus was about to be constructed, but tell that to the students of the time, who still used squatting toilets (and VERY grimy, ancient ones at that), wooden desks with the tops that opened so that you could store textbooks inside (circa 1950s, one teacher mentioned), and a canteen that was dark, dank but still a welcome relief from the classrooms.
- the toilets, oh the toilets! Every class was assigned a specific stall to use, ostensibly so that they had ownership of it and would keep it clean. Once in a while a teacher would gather some unfortunate students to hose the entire place down and clean it. JL reports that there were stories of a ghost woman that haunted a certain toilet who ate the blood from used menstrual pads, but I don't quite remember this tale. Some of the massacres that took place during the Japanese Occupation in WWII took place in the school, so maybe that's how the story got started.
- the hallway of the science floor was creepy. It was lined on both sides by classrooms or science labs, and along the corridors were several old wooden cabinets with many, many preserved insects, snakes, fish and varied strange creatures. I remember a huge snake curled up in one, taxidermied birds in another. These specimens are possibly more than a century old today.
- during my time there, the caretakers had two mixed-breed dogs that had ran freely around the campus. They had typical but funny names: Xiaohei ('little black') was a huge black dog that was by no means little, and Xiaobai ('little white') was a smaller dog which had patches of black, brown and yes, white (but very little) on him. When I was taking my O-level exams in the school hall, the doors of the hall were all opened for ventilation. During one particular paper, Xiaobai, who had a bell on his collar, kept walking up and down along one end of the hall all morning. This would be the end of the hall that I sat at, and the persistent ringing of his bell drove me half-mad with distraction. I wanted to launch a complaint, but finally Xiaobai decided to go somewhere else, and I finished my exam in peace.
School rules
- no long hair. Hair could only be grown to about 3cm below the earlobes. Sometimes during assembly, the discipline mistress would march around checking girls' hair. She would pull the ends of their hair to check the length. This is the reason I looked like a boy for most of my teenhood.
- no earrings or fresh ear piercings, unless you were in the school dance team, where the girls wore earrings as part of their costume. The other non-dancer girls who wanted to pierce their ears had to wait till the school holidays, because when you first pierce your ears, you need to keep earring posts in them or the holes will close up again. The monthlong school holidays were often not long enough for the piercings to heal completely, so the girls who returned to school substituted their earrings with bamboo skewers (yes, the same stuff used in satay) cut into tiny 1cm long pieces. This was before those plastic posts for piercings were common, by the way.
- no expensive, branded school bags. This was a new rule instituted just before I graduated. In a bid to curb material envy and consumerism, this rule stated that school backpacks of a certain brand or price range (e.g. Deuter) could not be used, even if they were gifts.
- no watches with big faces. Watch straps could only be of the following colours: navy blue, black, white, and brown. This was around the period that Swatch first entered the market and was very popular amongst teens, and the Pop Swatch in particular was characterised by an oversized face and bright colourful designs on its straps. Back then, I wore a blue Swatch with a normal-sized face, maybe the size of a fifty-cent coin. One day it was confiscated at assembly and I was enraged. The first thing I did after we were dismissed was head to a payphone and report the incident to my father. (Confronting school management directly would probably have gotten me suspended.) The next day I was called to the vice-principal's office and my watch was returned to me. The VP agreed that my watch wasn't breaking the rules, but informed me that the school preferred them to look a bit more 'ladylike'. I'm not sure if the sneer appeared before my back turned to leave the room, or after.
The things we did
- as part of our duty to the school, every class had a roster of maintenance work that the students did every morning before assembly. We called this 'morning duty' or 'gardening' and it was separate from 'class duty', where students help to keep their classroom clean. I think morning duty began at 7am in the morning and the chore needed to be completed by the time the bell rang for assembly, so maybe 20 or 30 minutes. The chores were things like weeding or raking or cleaning the drains (no lie!) and it was never a good start to the day if it was your turn for morning duty. I remember one year my group and I had been assigned to rake the leaves beneath the enormous rain tree that overlooked the basketball court. Not too bad in general, unless you had to do it on a Monday, when you had to clear a weekend's worth of dried leaves all over the court. If it had been rainy, it was worse because the leaves got soggy and weighed down the many garbage bags that we had to use. We never had enough time to finish the chore before assembly began. I know that I would run at full speed straight to the court on Mondays without bothering to put my school bag in the classroom. I would throw it in a corner and immediately start raking leaves because there was no time to lose. We were usually still hauling the garbage bags to the refuse centre while assembly began.
- to rub salt in our morning duty, the school for some reason thought it appropriate to broadcast 東方之珠 (dongfangzizhu or Pearl of the Orient) over the PA system on some mornings. It was played from a scratchy vinyl record that must have been pressed decades ago. Frankly, the point of playing this song to all the students was and still is lost on me. The song refers to Hong Kong, not Singapore, and certainly not our school, no matter what the management thought back then. Till today, if I hear the song, visions of my mornings in school immediately come back. The rendition we played had operatic trills at some points. Chills up the spine and all that. I do not lie.
- every student also had to participate in something called Mass Dance. That's what it is - an entire year of students performing the same dance like clockwork soldiers. We would gather in the school hall in our PE attire to follow along to the actions and instructions of the dance teacher, a chirpy thing from China who choreographed vaguely acrobatic moves into the dance routine. The songs were all from China (which is different from saying they were all Chinese songs) and I cannot adequately describe the music or the lyrics except to say that they are reminiscent of communist rally songs. The worst thing about Mass Dance was that ultimately, we had to perform it on Sports Day in front of our associated boys' school. In our PE attire. Attendance was very strict on Sports Day because teachers knew that many girls would rather be violently sick than perform the ridiculous dance in front of a school of strange boys while wearing our PE clothes. During practices and the performance, the teachers would march up and down our lines checking that we were dancing correctly and not making a mockery or half-assed renditions of it. I managed to avoid it one year, but that was only because I had broken my wrist.
- a little way across the road from the school gate was a little zinc-roofed hut that sold titbits and snacks. We called it 黒店 (heidian or 'black shop') because this place was clearly an illegal operation that thrived nonetheless thanks to the many students who patronised it for chips, grilled (?) cuttlefish slices on sticks, and pot noodles. I think it closed down soon after I left school, and it is one of the things I remember fondly. I doubt any such operation still exists for students today.
- more nostalgia: some friends and I used to climb down into the huge storm drains that surrounded the school estate. There were ladders at certain points so that you could get in or out. We would walk along the network of drains and sit around in the empty fields surrounding them, looking at the back of bungalows and expensive houses. Otherwise we would sit along the top of the drain, kicking out legs above the water and sharing snacks. I don't think we were aware of how potentially dangerous this was; if it suddenly started raining, the drains would fill with surprising speed and we would drown. I was recklessly confident because I spent part of my childhood at my great-grandfather's house nearby and was quite familiar with the network.
- I failed most of art class because I couldn't grasp still-life drawing, which formed a big part of the course. We were just placed in front of a group of objects and told to draw it. Since all the instructions were given in complex Chinese (my understanding of the language only goes so far), I never understood what I needed to do and all my perspectives and shading always came out wrong. I dreaded art class because I knew I wasn't good at it but had no idea how to improve and no way to ask questions in Chinese to the teacher. By the way, most classes were conducted in English, on par with government regulations, but certain classes like PE, dance or art (and maybe part of home-ec, if I remember correctly) were still taught in Chinese. Part of the art curriculum involved traditional Chinese calligraphy. I just couldn't get the angle of the strokes right because I am left-handed, so I was told to use my right hand to write instead. Pure torture, going through pages of homework calligraphy every weekend. At one point I gave up and wrote everything quickly with my left-hand. Considering my non-dominant hand was doing such crap writing, using my left-hand couldn't be much worse.
______________
I have memories and stories to tell about certain teachers but I think I shall just stop here. To end this very wordy recollection, I think I had antagonistic feelings about this school not specifically because of the way it did things or because of its rules, but because we were just a very poor fit for each other. I came from an English-speaking family with a poor command of Chinese (I scraped through exams through sheer memorisation) and my values and interests were at stark contrast to the school's ethos. Undeniably, I did get a good education in my four years there (which is why my parents sent me there to begin with), thanks to the teaching staff, and my friends and I did enjoy some good times too. Still, I have never returned from a visit (apart from that time when the school was about to be demolished, but it was empty at the time) and have never set foot inside the new campus. I was just so glad to graduate and get out and not look back, except tonight, two decades down the road, on the other side of the world, on a chilly night revisiting memories like these.
For the record, although I had the usual teenage angst during my time there and often loudly proclaimed my dissatisfaction with the school, twenty years down the road I do grudgingly admit that I also had quite an experience there. JL and I still talk about 'those days' and like wartime survivors, the experience has bonded us through the decades. I am not going to name the school in the post but it may become obvious, particularly to those in my age group, which one it is from my descriptions. Or perhaps not. It doesn't really matter now anyway, because the school has moved past all this and modernized. Would I still send my daughter there, assuming she had the grades to enter? Not really, unless she wanted it for herself. My experience of the school, even if it is considered a prestigious one in Singapore, has not exactly made me a proud alumni member. I don't own a graduation yearbook because I very dramatically threw it in the bin in front of the teacher one minute after it was handed to me, not bothering to open it at all. Yeah, I was that kind of teenager.
I could add a disclaimer here saying my experiences of the school are solely my own and probably of my own (angsty) doing, but I won't because I. don't. care. (Yeah, that teenager is still alive inside me.)
The basics
- a Chinese girls' school with a long history
- well-regarded in academics
[no prizes for guessing which one now!]
The campus
- so badly-maintained that every time it rained heavily, the outdoor basketball courts would be completely flooded. One memorable flood reached the top of the tyres of the cars in the carpark. I have a dim memory of sitting on the steps of the building facing the water, waiting for everything to go down so I could go home.
- if I remember correctly the building was 60 or 70 years old when I was a student there, and it was clear from the cracks in the walls and the broken tiles in the bathrooms that renovation plans were a long way away. On hindsight I now know that they didn't want to sink the money into renovations when a new campus was about to be constructed, but tell that to the students of the time, who still used squatting toilets (and VERY grimy, ancient ones at that), wooden desks with the tops that opened so that you could store textbooks inside (circa 1950s, one teacher mentioned), and a canteen that was dark, dank but still a welcome relief from the classrooms.
- the toilets, oh the toilets! Every class was assigned a specific stall to use, ostensibly so that they had ownership of it and would keep it clean. Once in a while a teacher would gather some unfortunate students to hose the entire place down and clean it. JL reports that there were stories of a ghost woman that haunted a certain toilet who ate the blood from used menstrual pads, but I don't quite remember this tale. Some of the massacres that took place during the Japanese Occupation in WWII took place in the school, so maybe that's how the story got started.
- the hallway of the science floor was creepy. It was lined on both sides by classrooms or science labs, and along the corridors were several old wooden cabinets with many, many preserved insects, snakes, fish and varied strange creatures. I remember a huge snake curled up in one, taxidermied birds in another. These specimens are possibly more than a century old today.
- during my time there, the caretakers had two mixed-breed dogs that had ran freely around the campus. They had typical but funny names: Xiaohei ('little black') was a huge black dog that was by no means little, and Xiaobai ('little white') was a smaller dog which had patches of black, brown and yes, white (but very little) on him. When I was taking my O-level exams in the school hall, the doors of the hall were all opened for ventilation. During one particular paper, Xiaobai, who had a bell on his collar, kept walking up and down along one end of the hall all morning. This would be the end of the hall that I sat at, and the persistent ringing of his bell drove me half-mad with distraction. I wanted to launch a complaint, but finally Xiaobai decided to go somewhere else, and I finished my exam in peace.
School rules
- no long hair. Hair could only be grown to about 3cm below the earlobes. Sometimes during assembly, the discipline mistress would march around checking girls' hair. She would pull the ends of their hair to check the length. This is the reason I looked like a boy for most of my teenhood.
- no earrings or fresh ear piercings, unless you were in the school dance team, where the girls wore earrings as part of their costume. The other non-dancer girls who wanted to pierce their ears had to wait till the school holidays, because when you first pierce your ears, you need to keep earring posts in them or the holes will close up again. The monthlong school holidays were often not long enough for the piercings to heal completely, so the girls who returned to school substituted their earrings with bamboo skewers (yes, the same stuff used in satay) cut into tiny 1cm long pieces. This was before those plastic posts for piercings were common, by the way.
- no expensive, branded school bags. This was a new rule instituted just before I graduated. In a bid to curb material envy and consumerism, this rule stated that school backpacks of a certain brand or price range (e.g. Deuter) could not be used, even if they were gifts.
- no watches with big faces. Watch straps could only be of the following colours: navy blue, black, white, and brown. This was around the period that Swatch first entered the market and was very popular amongst teens, and the Pop Swatch in particular was characterised by an oversized face and bright colourful designs on its straps. Back then, I wore a blue Swatch with a normal-sized face, maybe the size of a fifty-cent coin. One day it was confiscated at assembly and I was enraged. The first thing I did after we were dismissed was head to a payphone and report the incident to my father. (Confronting school management directly would probably have gotten me suspended.) The next day I was called to the vice-principal's office and my watch was returned to me. The VP agreed that my watch wasn't breaking the rules, but informed me that the school preferred them to look a bit more 'ladylike'. I'm not sure if the sneer appeared before my back turned to leave the room, or after.
The things we did
- as part of our duty to the school, every class had a roster of maintenance work that the students did every morning before assembly. We called this 'morning duty' or 'gardening' and it was separate from 'class duty', where students help to keep their classroom clean. I think morning duty began at 7am in the morning and the chore needed to be completed by the time the bell rang for assembly, so maybe 20 or 30 minutes. The chores were things like weeding or raking or cleaning the drains (no lie!) and it was never a good start to the day if it was your turn for morning duty. I remember one year my group and I had been assigned to rake the leaves beneath the enormous rain tree that overlooked the basketball court. Not too bad in general, unless you had to do it on a Monday, when you had to clear a weekend's worth of dried leaves all over the court. If it had been rainy, it was worse because the leaves got soggy and weighed down the many garbage bags that we had to use. We never had enough time to finish the chore before assembly began. I know that I would run at full speed straight to the court on Mondays without bothering to put my school bag in the classroom. I would throw it in a corner and immediately start raking leaves because there was no time to lose. We were usually still hauling the garbage bags to the refuse centre while assembly began.
- to rub salt in our morning duty, the school for some reason thought it appropriate to broadcast 東方之珠 (dongfangzizhu or Pearl of the Orient) over the PA system on some mornings. It was played from a scratchy vinyl record that must have been pressed decades ago. Frankly, the point of playing this song to all the students was and still is lost on me. The song refers to Hong Kong, not Singapore, and certainly not our school, no matter what the management thought back then. Till today, if I hear the song, visions of my mornings in school immediately come back. The rendition we played had operatic trills at some points. Chills up the spine and all that. I do not lie.
- every student also had to participate in something called Mass Dance. That's what it is - an entire year of students performing the same dance like clockwork soldiers. We would gather in the school hall in our PE attire to follow along to the actions and instructions of the dance teacher, a chirpy thing from China who choreographed vaguely acrobatic moves into the dance routine. The songs were all from China (which is different from saying they were all Chinese songs) and I cannot adequately describe the music or the lyrics except to say that they are reminiscent of communist rally songs. The worst thing about Mass Dance was that ultimately, we had to perform it on Sports Day in front of our associated boys' school. In our PE attire. Attendance was very strict on Sports Day because teachers knew that many girls would rather be violently sick than perform the ridiculous dance in front of a school of strange boys while wearing our PE clothes. During practices and the performance, the teachers would march up and down our lines checking that we were dancing correctly and not making a mockery or half-assed renditions of it. I managed to avoid it one year, but that was only because I had broken my wrist.
- a little way across the road from the school gate was a little zinc-roofed hut that sold titbits and snacks. We called it 黒店 (heidian or 'black shop') because this place was clearly an illegal operation that thrived nonetheless thanks to the many students who patronised it for chips, grilled (?) cuttlefish slices on sticks, and pot noodles. I think it closed down soon after I left school, and it is one of the things I remember fondly. I doubt any such operation still exists for students today.
- more nostalgia: some friends and I used to climb down into the huge storm drains that surrounded the school estate. There were ladders at certain points so that you could get in or out. We would walk along the network of drains and sit around in the empty fields surrounding them, looking at the back of bungalows and expensive houses. Otherwise we would sit along the top of the drain, kicking out legs above the water and sharing snacks. I don't think we were aware of how potentially dangerous this was; if it suddenly started raining, the drains would fill with surprising speed and we would drown. I was recklessly confident because I spent part of my childhood at my great-grandfather's house nearby and was quite familiar with the network.
- I failed most of art class because I couldn't grasp still-life drawing, which formed a big part of the course. We were just placed in front of a group of objects and told to draw it. Since all the instructions were given in complex Chinese (my understanding of the language only goes so far), I never understood what I needed to do and all my perspectives and shading always came out wrong. I dreaded art class because I knew I wasn't good at it but had no idea how to improve and no way to ask questions in Chinese to the teacher. By the way, most classes were conducted in English, on par with government regulations, but certain classes like PE, dance or art (and maybe part of home-ec, if I remember correctly) were still taught in Chinese. Part of the art curriculum involved traditional Chinese calligraphy. I just couldn't get the angle of the strokes right because I am left-handed, so I was told to use my right hand to write instead. Pure torture, going through pages of homework calligraphy every weekend. At one point I gave up and wrote everything quickly with my left-hand. Considering my non-dominant hand was doing such crap writing, using my left-hand couldn't be much worse.
______________
I have memories and stories to tell about certain teachers but I think I shall just stop here. To end this very wordy recollection, I think I had antagonistic feelings about this school not specifically because of the way it did things or because of its rules, but because we were just a very poor fit for each other. I came from an English-speaking family with a poor command of Chinese (I scraped through exams through sheer memorisation) and my values and interests were at stark contrast to the school's ethos. Undeniably, I did get a good education in my four years there (which is why my parents sent me there to begin with), thanks to the teaching staff, and my friends and I did enjoy some good times too. Still, I have never returned from a visit (apart from that time when the school was about to be demolished, but it was empty at the time) and have never set foot inside the new campus. I was just so glad to graduate and get out and not look back, except tonight, two decades down the road, on the other side of the world, on a chilly night revisiting memories like these.