Junior College

As expected no one really knows me. I don't know why I agreed to join a small group of 3 to the junior college 1973 cohort having a 60th Birthday bash. I told my friend I'll tag along and in its literal sense.

I thought I had better recall some names by going through the year book. After flipping through the pages with photos of various club activities, school events, prize winners, I really began to feel sad. It was indeed strange that after 40 years I was kind of reliving the teenage angst. I recalled those days when I was torn between trying to blend in and avoid looking awkward on the one hand and being blighted with green eyed envy of other youngsters who seemed to move with such ease and seemed as sure as themselves as the red blazers they wore against the grey uniform. I remembered feeling very alone in junior college and once wrote in my diary I was like the weeping willows that hanged over the school pond.

People came up to me "Yes, yes, I remember your face". "Yes, yes, I recognise you straight away, what's your name?" "Hey, isn't that XXX?" "Isn't that YYY".

Of course I didn't cared a damn about XXX and YYY now. Neither did I feel awkward even though my lip muscles felt a bit stiff from prolonged smiling throughout the evening. Honestly, catching up on lost years with people whom one are never close with doesn't really excite except for the wonder of how life offers diverse trajectories.

We recalled that it was the best college then, in fact the only one. We had the best teachers. We did modern history that no other pre-U school offered ( which actually stirred my lifelong interest in modern Chinese history and the Russian revolution). We also did D.H.Lawrence and Great Gatsby for literature,quite a forerunner in those days. Great stuff I now recall. I now remember learning a lot from the brilliant students especially during General Paper discussions. Yet the teenage angst overshadowed my memories of college life all these years, an example of how feelings always stays in the mind.

In one of his book, Cotzee once said "We have been given a chance to live and we have accepted that chance. It is a great thing to live. It is the greatest thing of all".

If at 17 I have the wisdom of age, I would have said "We have been given a chance to school here and we have accepted that chance. It is a great thing to school here. It is the greatest thing of all".