Counting Potatoes

From the Frying Pan into the Fire

...let NatGeo Take you to a place where conformity is a way of life and blind obedience a norm...

... Inside North Korea, saturday 9pm..

An ad about a NatGeo special documentary goes..

But for a moment there, before the country was mentioned, I was almost expecting a natgeo documentary about our chinese grade/highschool.

You see I've spent 12 years of my life in a closed system Chinese catholic school and in all my 12 years of study there, we've had a total of 2 new classmates who have transferred in from another school.

Needless to say, we had to make do with the same people and faces for almost half of our entire lives: 12 freakin years 8am to 5pm. The same girls we've seen from kinder pee or poo in their skirts became the same girls had our first encounters with love with and took to the prom. It was like a survivor series that ran 12 years long: 2 years kindergarten, 6 years grade school and 4 years high school.

The school graduation song even goes "recall the first time you entered school, you were barely 2 feet tall..

...Now look you've grown so tall"

I wonder if prison mates or residents of the gulag have similar versions of this song?..

Back to my story..

Our school were run by Chinese Catholic Priests with kung fu skills. Imagine karate chops, flying blackboard erasers and walking canes that suddenly transforms into wicked fighting sticks and you get the idea. Some local schools boast of student discipline. Well, of course, there is the Filipino definition and there's the Chinese one. Imagine a school where everyone moves around as if they were on the deck of Darth Vader's Star Destroyer - that's Chinese discipline. In fact, we even used to hum the Darth Vader tune (complete with Darth Vader's breathing sounds ) whenever we were in line and the discipline coordinator was moving around. We may not have CAT then, but we lived and breathed its essence everyday.


Regulation haircut for boys was the Jose Rizal hairstyle, for girls it was maria clara. Uniforms had strict length requirements, go a bit overboard and you just might find yourself in your briefs in some hole in the wall room furiously sewing your pants to regulation length.


Any form of intimacy was frowned upon. Holding hands in public was seen as indecent (kissing was porno) and going to a movie when on a date - a mortal sin. Thus you either wind up as a prude or a sex maniac in college, he he.


There were no student councils, no organized protests, no union, no school paper, nothing whatsoever that would serve as the seeds of a school revolution. If you had a complaint about how the school was run, you file for transfer to another one. As the borgs say "Resistance is futile". It was that simple.


Well, those 12 years have come and gone - along with 5 near expulsion incidents. Add 10 years more and I look back and sometimes wonder how it would be like to wake up one morning back in 1995 to the smell of an early breakfast and the sight of freshly ironed brown khaki pants and white polo?


How would it feel to attend the 7am flag ceremony, 8am-5pm classes especially the Chinese language subjects, take part in laboratory activities, first Friday masses, or the bedlam of recces?


How would it feel like to go back in time before bills, work, car gas, rent, medical insurance and baby diapers - when life revolved around allowance, love life and friends?


For all its drawbacks, somehow I miss the simplicity of school life.


This must be how Adam felt when he ate the forbidden fruit. ehe he he..

	From the Frying Pan into the Fire