Days Like This

Elaine Chung

The day has arrived. The head teacher calls out my name and I am up, walking towards the stage. Embarrassment surges through me as I trip. I blunder on. All eyes are on me. She smiles as she hands me my certificate, a passport out of here. This is it. I've achieved it. This modest white sheet of paper with a few words and a grade. It is proof of my achievement. This rollercoaster has finally come to an end.

Friday nights were depressing for me. Why, you ask? The main issue which disheartened me was the fact that I had to attend Chinese school from 10:00am till 2:00pm.Happiness and contentment were a rare delicacy on Friday nights. I would have to bottle up my feelings of unwillingness, to survive the impending weekend. Chinese homework would be unearthed from the bottom of my bag, along with a rotten banana from, the week before. Its pungent aroma would assail my nostrils until I will be physically sick of the idea of attending and it was times like these that I would have traded places with anyone else in the world. Dinner would be a frantic affair, as I would try and create more time for homework. Everybody else in the world, except me, enjoyed their Saturday mornings having a long lie in.

Saturday mornings came ridiculously swift. Glorious sunlight would penetrate the curtains of my room and bathe it in melted gold as if to mock me with what I was going to miss and what I would have to endure. Every Saturday was the same: "I don't want to go Mum" I wailed every morning since the age of five. But I knew that it was inevitable.

"What's the point of going anyways?" I whinged.

"You'll understand why. It's very important for your learning."

She was always encouraging me to enjoy Chinese school, but how could I? It was the last place on earth that I wanted to be. In fact, my parents required me to go every Saturday. It was not really encouragement .I had no choice.

"Good morning class," smiled the teacher, when we eventually get seated. "Today we will study p9 and then have a test on your writing and memory skills. After that I will call each of you out to recite p9 to the rest of the class."

Fear would crawl its way up from the bottom of my spine to the nape of my neck. Public speaking! How am I supposed to handle that? The misfortune of being there was not enough. I had to painstakingly make a fool of myself in front of the whole testosterone fuelled class, and forced to communicate with the teacher who was unrelenting in making me feel humiliated. This would happen on a regular basis. Anxiety was my best friend most of the time.

All the students were very clever but egotistical in my eyes. Competition between each of them was undeniably strong. The tension on the final day of the exams proved their arrogance and contempt for one another. Each of them was, determined to outshine the other. If only it could be said of me. I knew that I was near enough the most dense student in the class and it did not help that I was quite timid and reluctant to ask questions if I did not understand.

Homework was another matter. On top of all the English school work I got a week, I also received a copious amount of Chinese homework to complete. The result of all that homework is not, excessive knowledge of the Chinese language but in fact, the dark eye bags which is the consequence of staying up late into the night to finish the homework I mentioned before. The fact that even though I was not the brightest student, I was never late at handing a piece of homework in and that is demonstrated consistently, in whatever I do. School work has always been kept up to date, for I have learnt to meet deadlines, which will prove to be invaluable in the future.

A recurring problem which many of the students had to face was the Chinese exams. The dreaded feeling of being contained, wormed its way into my head on every exam date. A sense of foreboding crawled its way into my soul for I knew what lay ahead of me and I was reluctant to meet it. But I gave it absolutely everything I could give. For me, it was a blood, sweat and tears scenario, with more emphasis of the sweat. But I've learnt to get through these things. My last Chinese exam was remarkably a great success. A*. I will treasure that result for the rest of my life. It was the pinnacle of the whole experience of school. However not all my results have been like that, unfortunately, but I'm human and I learn from my mistakes as I have been finding out these past few years.

Now that we've graduated and achieved the same results, I don't feel that my classmates were any cleverer than me. The long and severe suffering journey that we have shared has created new branches of friendships. We even go out and socialise.

Walking from the stage back to my seat, I felt free and excited. But contained within those feelings, there was a tinge of sadness. I would never get to go through those stressful Fridays again, never have to be subjected to read a Chinese passage again and I would not, see my classmates as often, if ever again. It dawned on me that I would genuinely miss all that and the emotions that came with it, and that confused me, because I hated it so much before. But now, I've realised that ,you should endure something even if you hate it at the time, because in the end, you'll realise that it will be one of the best this that could happen to you.