Taste

I am so close.

It’s six in the evening, and I am in my room, a disgruntled array of crumpled papers littered across my desk. The remaining rays of sunlight stream inside, obstructed by the sepulchral shadows of the old green trees outside. Gusts of wind sporadically whoosh in through the open window and whoosh out through another. I’m facing layers upon layers of geometrical constructions, of wildly scribbled symbols of tangents and arctangents, cosines and arccosines, hastily written in pencil in a fit of joy. None of those paroxysms have worked, and I am stuck in the liminal realm between problem and solution, between joy and disappointment.

I am so close.

I can almost feel it! And it is on days like these where all the nebulous doubts and insecurities come creeping in like the timorous puffs of evening wind through the window, secretly, quietly. I’m not good enough, they say, this is all just a sick, sadistic joke. I’m tempted to believe these seductive thoughts of nascent surrender and defeat. Frustration and confusion clamps onto the air and envelopes the atmosphere in a suffocating veil of viscousness. Inspiration! Why is it so evasive, so sporadic? It’s at times like these where you have the time and the complete ignorance to commitments and deadlines that you start to think about how ironic it is to think of a solution after the final tick tock of the clock strikes and your pen leaves your hand. Tick tock tick tock. I sometimes think of screaming at the invigilator in exams – for why in hell don’t they get a clock that doesn’t make your heart pulsate, the strict rhythm of the seconds ticking off as you grab at your hair in absolute frustration.

This is it, I tell myself. One decisive day stands between me and a ticket to Amsterdam, for the chance to bond, the chance to meet and talk to people who can solve triple integrals in their head from all over the world. I keep telling myself that I won’t make it, that I’m not good enough, that this is as far as my tired legs will take me. But these words haunt me in the night in a prevalent sense of deja vu; weren’t these words the exact ones which passed my lips for the last three shortlist decisions?

Chinese

“It’s your culture!”

And it always begins like this.

There’s something very captivating about the way people splutter these words, holding exam papers marked with a striking 90, circled with red ink. “It’s your culture!”, and it is always at this moment when I quail inward and smile. “I’ll do my best”, I say in return, politely darting away from all these unanswered questions that they have yet to bombard me with. The absolute zenith of the conversation is when they start feeding my voracious ego with reassuring statements, saying “You’ve never got a B in two years!”, “You got a 27 for your last essay!”, and of course the prevalent, above-all-rationale reason of “You attended a vernacular Chinese primary school!” Evasive action is always the easiest way out. I thank them for their kind words, then shuffle away quickly, clutching a maudlin exam paper, with a tiny 76 circled at the top right corner.

“You can do it!”

But how do you know? Since when have results been predetermined? With me it’s like entering a lottery with thousands of odds stacked against me – a complete crap-shoot. Everything is nebulous at this particular moment in time, and results are secondary. I can’t even understand why people have the temerity to bring up this clearly clandestine subject in otherwise perfect conversations, insisting that I take it up in the first place, this dastardly paper with an absurd level of difficulty. I scrape through exam papers holding barely acing grade point percentages – and it’s not even out of love for the language. I can’t understand this. It doesn’t even stem from a fear of holding a result paper, counting A’s from the top down and hitting a B somewhere in between. It’s just because I don’t have that passion for those complicated characters anymore. I’m tired of writing essays and belligerently trying to squeeze some eye-catching proverbs into an otherwise dilute essay as a veneer of byzantine assiduity. It’s not just Singaporeans who’s kiasu, sure, but it’s not even about marks anymore.

Don’t I have free will? I have a choice to choose what I want. But at this juncture, words are useless. Power is lost, the battle is over, deadlines have passed.

And it is at this very moment when I wonder why in the world I let words influence me when I re-took Chinese as a subject.