In first or second grade, I was detained after school because I had written my name of 3 characters too large, covering the whole exercise book. My family had to send my sister, Mai, to fetch me.
The other time was when I was a couple of years older at the Chinese section of St. Louis School. I was expelled because I did not pay attention in class and disturbed other children. That was what the prefect priest told my mother when she begged him to take me back. After that was not successful, my parents put me in Chung Cheng Middle School (named after Chiang Kai Shek’s other name). That school was halfway up the hill, which allowed me and three of my classmates to play ‘battle’ with rocks during lunch hour. We had fun until one of the kids got hit on the head. I don’t remember what happened next and how we explained his bloody head to our teachers. But we never did this again.
Regardless, the above was just background of my preteen and early-teen years.
The life-changing episodes are the following from Chapter 1. Growing up in Asia (pp. 27-44) of my newest book, My Life & Rollercoaster Career (my Memoir + Newsletter) published in 2018 by CreateSpace/Amazon.
The following are the life-changing episodes reprinted:
THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE STARTED MY SERIOUS QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE
During the year when I was attending the Chung Cheng Middle School with fun-filled lunch breaks while they lasted, my parents hired an English tutor for me. She was a chubby Chinese girl in another Terrace (To Li Terrace) perpendicular to ours who was maybe three years older than me and a student at a well-known English girl’s school run by Maryknoll nuns. She was a good teacher. Finally, I seemed to have found my calling, and I picked up English fast and was at ease with it. For some reason, I felt like a new door to the world had been opened to me. And I actually enjoyed reading English books on my own. It seemed I had struggled all my life (all thirteen years of it) with the Chinese language and finally it was great to find something that came easily for me and learning was fun…
MY HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE YEARS
After my year at Chung Cheng Middle School, I passed the entrance exam to the English section of St. Louis School (about a mile from home) and now I was on my way to be a good, and eager student! Life was much simpler in the 1950’s, no computer databases to cross check ‘trouble-makers’ like me. The English section might have no idea that I was expelled only a year earlier from the Chinese section. Yet I recognized the same prefect who refused to take me back when my mother pleaded.
I loved my new English school at St. Louis where all the instructions were in English, except Chinese subjects. My favorite subjects were the sciences (biology, chemistry, physics, math, and geography) and of course, English too. Right from the beginning, I found myself in the A class, out of classes A, B, C and D, with A being the best academically, each up to 45 students. I excelled in all science subjects and math. Then, after one summer break during which I read 30-35 abridged versions of English classics by authors like Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, H.G. Wells, and many more, I went back to school and found myself excelling in English as well. However, reading so many books, sometimes late into the night on dim light, ruined my eyesight… Soon, I had to start wearing glasses.
Although that summer of intensive reading had ruined my eyesight, it made me one of the best in English ‘overnight’ in my grade from Form 1 to Form 2 (comparable to Grade 8 to Grade 9). During my last year (Form 3) at St. Louis, I was selected along with a classmate called Tong Yuen-Yao to represent our school at the Hong Kong Catholic Schools/Students’ Press Club, or something like that, as I can’t remember the exact name; nor can I remember what magazine or newspaper they published. Tong was consistently the Number 1 student at our class, while I was somewhere between 2 and 10 or a little further down there, because some boring subjects dragged my overall grades down. Last time I heard, probably twenty-five years ago, he was married to a Quebecoise and was a professor in Quebec somewhere…