Four

Nan Chiau Primary School was my school for 6 years. It was small, very simple, and everyone knew each other. It was a comfortable place to grow up in. After graduating from primary school, everybody went their separate ways. In the leaving cohort there were only around a hundred students, so people were lucky if they went to the same secondary school.

I wasn’t so lucky. I was the only person from Nan Chiau Primary to be posted to Boys’ School X. I haven’t heard of it before and I didn’t even know it was an all boys’ school (till days before the first day of school). It turned out to be a huge school with over 400 students per cohort. It was also a mission school (religious education was part of the curriculum in school).

All along, my parents have been rather open with my choice of religion so I’ve never had any form of religious education before. At the same time, both of them are Buddhists, so you can roughly guess which side I’m skewed towards. So imagine how it was like for me to attend a service and be told that it was compulsory, and to bring a hymnal along to sing songs of praise every Tuesday, and stand through long “sharing” sessions by the teachers every single morning during assembly.

The worst part of it was: I was alone. Only some weeks later, I made some friends and things weren’t as bad as before. There was this boy, Eugene, who was going through the same patch as I. We took it up to the Head of Level (Secondary One) and asked her why the Indian boys were excused and us, not. She gave us the mission school reason and we were simply defeated. After that, I gave in. I sat in services with an open mind and enjoyed all the morals of the stories.

All till Mrs Icantsayhername, my Literature teacher, got off the wrong side of bed one morning and came into class with a mission of her own. She wasn’t into teaching that morning; she simply came and preached to us in an awfully misleading manner. She was trying to put across a simple message: Non-believers convert or you will be going to hell. That hour of lecture was etched deeply in my memories.

Nicholas asked me later during recess, “Roy, how? Are you converting?”

“No, are you?” I asked.

“Yea, don’t convert will go to hell eh,” he replied.

She managed to intimidate a few of my classmates into converting. Nicholas was one of them.

Later in life, I’ve had friends bringing me to services at different churches; I even went to some on my own accord. I’ve come to know the meaning of service and preaching, of hymns and of prayers. I believe Mrs Icantsayhername meant well, but she let her emotions get the better of her and chose to spread the word in a not-so-subtle way.

Is there something else in her behavior that I’m not seeing?

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.