drei-3

“Keep you in the dark

When you know they all pretend

Keep you in the dark

And so it all began”

Lessons start today. It feels strange sitting in a classroom in your coats and books. And when mr chua calls out my name in class, everything for a while feels like I’m sitting in the 1H12 lecture group and he catches me for not paying attention. 

Until everything starts to sink it and I find myself looking at the discounted pencil case, discounted backpack, discounted class size and discounted classmates. And I remember that I’m not in Singapore anymore, and the co-op is a few thousand kilometers away. So is the regular girl’s bathroom. I walk in through the freezing corridors towards it. It isn’t as bad as I thought. My record was a squatting toilet w/out the door. You’re not in a position to preen yourself up in front of the mirror. Unless you like standing in front of a dingy mirror and an old sink, go ahead. Maybe it’s these little things that they don’t have that make them adapt to the lack of luxuries in their life. And they do have a lot of fighting spirit and drive, and that makes them so adaptable to their surroundings. 

I still think I lack that spirit of fighting. I still slack about, daydream, blah blah. The mould of a model student does not fit me. 

Compared to these students, I have not achieved anything impressive or worthy of mention. I’m just a Singaporean girl who spent her 17 years quite comfortably. Nothing to be proud of. The only “qualification” to deem it worthy is when it gets mentioned in the newspapers for the right reasons.

We had a lunch break before attending the first IS class module

Topic for IS: Tianjin introduction.

Yes, it’s true. The teacher was kind enough to prepare us a variety of slides regarding almost every aspect of Tianjin. Unfortunately I was already switched off despite her best efforts to engage us in her presentation. 

Until she started to the play the speech that I then started paying attention. I was interested in how the news analyst did his take on the major revolution events that happened thorough out his life. I do enjoy a good story, and I think the best way is to hear a person’s experience of having gone through it, I’m thinking of a way to get my hands on a copy of his speech. Many points he mentioned, coupled with his own experiences, they tell a story not in the books

Not those books were present during the Cultural Revolution. They burned them all. Sometimes I wonder what these people are thinking