Education: The Pain and Pleasure
Cheah Wui Jia
My ten-year-old mind attempts to manage, amidst the
sensory overload from a clutch of unfurling magenta
peonies on a blue blouse, those words that escape
my grasp – what it means to be good, or what it
means to be unlike my brother or sister. Dread is a
dull ache in my stomach, but I can’t name what I feel.
I’m a kid, and I have a problem with words.
We do what children do, our feet filling up those
shoes, even though the shoes don’t really fit.
Sometimes they bite.
I’m sixteen, a Malaysian, homesick in Singapore, and
I can’t pass the standing broad jump test for NAPFA.
The front of my shoes chafe my toes too often. I bend
my knees and command the flesh and muscle of my
thighs to obey, but as my calves squirm and squeeze
and I make the leap, I fall on my face, with as much
grace as I can muster.
It irks my PE teacher to think that I can’t master
something “so simple”.
“You’re quite useless.”
I’m sixteen, and words bother my porous and
vulnerable self. I lack the emotional armour to cope
with the rigour of evaluations and tests, or the muscle
to jump through hoops of performing excellence with
grit. As I run to the bathroom to bawl like a baby, her
words ring in my ear like the blood rushing to pound
my temples. “You’re quite useless”.
The next class I have, right after PE, is Math. The
faint garlic of collective sweat from the aftermath of a
group of girls leaping repeatedly across a pit of sand
lingers in the air, as the Math teacher prattles about
permutations and combinations. I’m sixteen, and my
neurons do acrobatic leaps of connections, bend,
squirm, squeeze, as I attempt the problem sums like
how my muscles work up the strength to jump and
jump. The series of numbers and flighty arrangements
confound me, and I cannot comprehend the chaos
embedded in the order and sequencing of items
organised and reorganised, over and over. It is like
deciphering coded language used by a particular
exotic species of aliens to communicate with other
colonies of fellow sentient beings. To cope, I draw, for
dramatic measure, little ducklings weeping puddles
of quiet sorrow. My Math teacher frowns at my self-
absorbed squiggles, her dangly earrings swinging in
the breeze stirred by the whirring blades of the fan
above that revolve in cyclic insanity.
The weight of adulthood swings in its pendulum.
My father observes that his temperamental daughter
could benefit from a double major in Psychology and
Writing. I’m twenty-one, and the writing exercise that
Dr Sharon gives in her creative writing class excavates
from memory things I want to forget. The word
association exercises that emerge from free word
connections revolve around the anguish of lovelorn
adolescent desire, childhood fears of abandonment
and other unresolved, psychological messes of
unbelonging. They spring to my consciousness in
bursts of rhythm. I’m twenty-one, and I give shape to
the insurmountable feelings that arise in their abstract
haze. Articulating them in words is cathartic, like the
warm scent of rain in the late afternoon when I open
the door to the laundry room to unload my bucket
of clothes into the common washing machine. I’m
97
We do what
children do,
our feet filling
up those
shoes, even
though the
shoes don’t
really fit.
Sometimes
they bite.
I’m in Primary Four, and I have a problem with words.
Tight, crimson-lipped Ms Clyde uses them with
insensitivity. “Not good enough! Unlike your sister or
your brother. I had no problems teaching them back
then.” Her upper lip trembles, and sweat soaks her
blue blouse of enormous flower patterns.