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.

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