I was the stereotypical nerd, but I revelled rather than felt ashamed of my status. While cooler girls (including my sister) were trying to find ways to hitch up their skirts over their knees without getting caught, or roll down their socks to bare their ankles, I loved receiving new pinafores that covered my knees when a growth spurt hit. I always proudly pulled up my socks. I was even a school prefect. I loved the authority of monitoring people in the morning assembly, making sure they were reading books. Not my proudest memory — but I recall shouting at a hapless student in the school hall for talking during assembly; a flagrant abuse of my power.
I also proudly patrolled the staircase landing during recess, making sure no students would go up to the classrooms during recess. Sometimes my best friend Eugenia would accompany me. I remember some young rascals provoking me on purpose, making me chase after them by attempting to run up the stairs, like a game of catch. Back then even I knew it was less about disobeying the school rules and more about provoking this prudish and uptight girl.
There was another girl in my class called Celeste. She was a cooler version of me, a naturally popular girl. I still remember confidently approaching her and asking, “Can we be friends?” to which she replied, surrounded by friends and slightly surprised, “Yes”.
This Celeste excelled me in every aspect except for grades. Like me, she was also a school prefect, but was the head prefect. She stood in front of the hall every morning to lead us in saying the Singapore pledge or sing the national anthem. She was also in the school choir, but while I stood all the way at the back of the ensemble because of my height, she was always the lead singer. She was even the lead in the drama-musical that my school staged in 2005. (Come to think of it, it was so ambitious for a humble primary school to stage a production like that) She played a princess who was trying to find her way back to her parents, meeting interesting characters in her journey. Through that play, I learnt the song “It’s a Hard Knock Life” from the musical Annie.
I recently checked Celeste’s Facebook profile. Once the star of the school in our childhood years, she has quietly faded into the anonymity of the masses. Like the Janis Ian song, “Stars… they come and go, they come fast, they come slow…”.
There was another traumatic (second-hand trauma in my case) incident about a bright star whose dreams were blown out like a candle by the harsh breath of adults. One of them performed a rendition of Mulan’s Reflection at the school’s talentime. I remember being quite impressed when she accurately hit the high notes, but when we got back to the studio, she got such a dressing down from our conductor. The conductor peeve was her supposedly ruining her voice box for singing in the style of pop stars rather than choir. As an adult who wanted to assert authority over hapless children, she turned something sweet into something sour. The tyranny of adults, which Roald Dahl expertly captured in Mathilda.
I loved being in the school choir (though I hardly admit having once been part of the choir as my singing voice has deteriorated to near tone-deafness). I joined the group at a relatively young age, perhaps in Primary 2, devoting nearly 5 years to this extra-curricular. It must be because of the devotion of being in the choir, performing for the national SYF (Singapore Youth Festival), and for plays — that I ended up shunning most extra-curriculars secondary school, opting for the nerdy but low-commitment Infocomm Club. Anyway it was the best decision of my life for through the Infocomm Club I met a girl with a mind and life of her own, Trisca.
Back to choir practice. The ‘music room’, where we had our choir practice in, was at the end of a long corridor. As a kid, that was the spookiest part of the school, all the way at the back of the school, always damp and slightly musty. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was found to be haunted. Painters tried to enliven the area by painting the wall purple and depicting a ballroom dance, but it did nothing to change the fengshui.
Was it in choir, or in my primary 5/6 class, where we were returning back to Pasir Ris from a school excursion? It was raining that day, we were all sitting at the back of the school bus. Hilary Duff and Avril Lavigne were the rage back then. We would go to someone’s house and a music video would be playing on their TV, and we would sit in front of it and sing. Anyway, that day, we were all singing to Hilary Duff’s Wake Up, released in 2005. We must have felt pretty cool singing about visiting London, Paris, maybe Tokyo back then.
