I know social media doesn’t always get the best press and as
a parent to a teenage girl, I dread the fact that the kid used to spend an
unholy amount of time chatting on this or that web application instead of
getting out to enjoy life with actual people (the joke being, I was actually
looking forward to holding a shotgun at the head of anybody she might bring
home).
However, I actually have pretty good reason to be thankful
to social media, especially to Facebook, thanks for a few incidents. The first
came from a customer who walked into the Bistrot and told me that he had been
sent to the Bistrot by someone who was my junior at Churcher’s College. The second incident was the fact that it was
my class reunion’s 25th anniversary and I’ve been stealing precious moments
looking at old photos of the reunion and our final school leavers ball (a night
I will never forget thanks for a friend emptying the contents of his drinks
onto me). Finally, I also received a text asking for help from a blogger to write
about “overseas education.”
So, it seems only
fair that I should try and pen down a few thoughts about the seven years that I
spent in Churcher’s College (five of those years were spent as a boarder).
Going to boarding school meant that I had a particularly interesting
relationship with the school in that it was not so much just a place where I
went to study; it was a place where I called home.
I’m not going to chit-chat about the “great” education that
I got from studying overseas. While the academic results I achieved were
respectable enough to get me to the next level, they don’t tell the entire
story of being educated away from your “motherland” (and as my mother reminds
me so often, I lived in England for those crucial years, there is a question of
what is my motherland.) The real story of going to school outside your “motherland,”
comes from the life experiences that you gain and the people that you meet and
develop a human relationship with.
I start with the joke I have with many of my associates that
the best thing that came out of those years in England was the appreciation of
rugby (union) and cricket. Although I never made the school rugby or cricket
teams, I played rugby at house level for three-years and I can talk
intelligently about both. I didn’t know it then but a good portion of the
people who would pay me in later life would be cricket mad Indian nationals and
understanding the laws of cricket was an asset in sealing relationships. I
would also end up befriending a large number of Kiwi’s, Australians and South
Africans. While it’s often said in jest, understanding these two games from
going to school in a small town in England equipped me with the ability to
network on a fairly international level.
Incidentally, one of my closer friends from that period of
my life was the captain of the rugby team and he was also captain of both
senior and junior boarding house, while I was the one who won the award to
biggest contribution to both boarding houses.
The second but more profound part of my life came from the
friends that I made. In this respect, I am truly grateful to the invention of
Facebook, which allowed me to stay in touch and to share lives of the people
were part of my life for that crucial period. I mean, it’s been more than 25-years
since we left school and I’m a few thousand miles away from them but being able
to say hello once in a while is one of the things that make life so much
better.
I suppose the main question that people would ask is, how
was it for me, obviously an ethnic Chinese, living in Southern England, in a
town filled with WASP. My answer remains on two levels:
Firstly, I’m probably not a great test case for East-West
communal relations. My main language is
English and the language at home is English (though I speak Cantonese with my
aunt and with my new family, the main language of the house remains Vietnamese,
though I communicate with Huong in Mandarin and Jenny in English).
Secondly, while my stay in England wasn’t perfect, I never
actually had people ganging up on me because I wasn’t the right skin colour. I
was probably a disappointment for not being “foreign enough.” I remember writing
a piece for “Independent.sg” and thanking the friends I made in Churcher’s for
looking at me as a mate rather than as someone from outside the community. The
most exotic that I got was the fact that I could order at the local Chinese in
a different language (while I had good mates at school, I thought the owner of
the local Chinese was a conman –but then again, he had a monopoly on Chinese
food in town, which wasn’t that bad).
More often than not, I was an accepted part of the
community, where people saw me as either a “good bloke” or a “shit,” and not
because I came from elsewhere and each of the people that I met at school in
that small town of Petersfield had a role in shaping the way I look at life. I
even had a few visits from old school friends.
I’ve pretty much settled in Singapore and the South East
Asian region and with the exception of the odd Christmas visit to Mum in
Germany, the furthest I’m likely to get is the Middle East. There’s very little
reason for me to go back to the UK, other than the fact that it would be nice
to say thank you to this group of friends who made a special part of life –
special.
No comments
Post a Comment