In Continuum.

He never allowed anybody to call him "mister", because he was a doctor - like a real doctor in a hospital who treated patients. For his sake, his name shall remain unknown, but I am sure my friends from high school probably knows who I am talking about. He was the kind of colleague you wouldn't want to have, and he always placed himself on a higher pedestal above everybody else. He was my chinese teacher, and his first appearance through the doors wasn't welcoming at all. He had a stack of books and papers in one hand and the free arm was folded behind his back, and the arm with the books and the papers joined the other arm once he placed them on the table at the corner of the classroom and remained that way for the next year or so. That was how he talked, with his arms folded to the back unless he needed to write something on the board or to point accusingly at a student for being a typical teenage idiot. He wasn't very tall, and most of the high school kids were already as tall, or taller, than him by the time we were fourteen years old. His padded leather shoes failed to make any differences, but his arrogance and his pride more than redeemed his lack in height. 

He was a man that was full of pride, and he had a lot of those in everything that he was. He was proud to be a doctor, or a physician as he preferred to be known, and he was definitely proud to be a teacher as well. More than anything, however, he was proud to be a Chinese, and he'd go on and on about the glory of the Chinese people and the wondrous history that is unique to our race. There isn't anything wrong with being proud to be your own race, but the way he puts his pride across to the rest of the class never failed to make us cringe, like nails scratched over a bathroom sink. You know how it is when you hear a group of people singing some patriotic songs about the country, those cliche advertisement on the television when the national day is approaching. You cannot help but shutter at the thought of a hundred thousand people out there being proud of an intangible thing such as a country. What really is that, anyway? So, the doctor used to lecture us about why we should be proud to be a chinese just like him, and he'd say that while reciting a poetry from the textbook or looking out through the windows and into the crystal blue skies. He was dramatic, perhaps overly so - and this is coming from a drama club president, and that is saying a lot. 

I am guessing he was secretly perverse, I am not entirely sure. After all, he was the same teacher that gave the class graphical details about castration in ancient China, how the eunuchs were forced to castrate because the kings back then didn't want them to have any affairs with their queens. Anyway, he kept telling us about the details with that glee on his face that it made us all feel sick, and he should count himself as lucky that none of us decided to sue his ass off for verbally harassing us with his perverse and twisted thoughts. He started telling us about cutting off testicles, or the penis itself, or the whole thing and then use a bamboo stick as some kind of substitute, or something. It was disturbing, and I'm sure we all felt our balls ache that afternoon in class. 

I never actually understood his professional, how he claimed to be a physician practicing at a neighborhood hospital in Toa Payoh. On one hand he was a teacher at a high school, and the other he was a practicing physician? Something was very wrong there, but it's not like he bothered to explain it to us anyway. He was always promoting his hospital in class, and telling us that he'd give any student free treatments at his clinic if we encounter any forms of illnesses or stress from school work. It is nice to know that the teacher is going to take care of your physical welfare in one way, but the doctor left out the part about poking needles into your body to ease your pain. He was not just any kind of doctor per se, he was a certified chinese medicine physician, and he would not hesitate to stab a needle into the back of your neck if he had to. There were murmurs about him knowing black magic and kung fu amongst the students, and nobody doubted the secret abilities of this doctor. After all, his checkered shirt was already rolled down to his wrists, and nobody knew what he had hidden underneath those sleeves. We suspect thousands of needles hidden underneath, or perhaps some chinese herbs to drug the students into straight A churning machines. Either way, we didn't want to mess with him - until I did. 

We had a chinese paper this one time, and I think it was the mid-terms or something like that. It was a major paper of course, and everybody wanted to do well. The top three in chinese for the class were always the same people: Mark, Anthony, or myself. We would switch positions, but there weren't a lot of possible permutations back then, because we were all equally good and equally bad at chinese. Anyway, the school decided that it'd be neat for the students to memorize definitions for individual words from the dictionary and then test them in the papers, and they actually made the effort to extract these words from a standard dictionary and then reprint them into a book for us to memorize. So the lot of us got the book for free months before the paper, and we were asked to memorize the definitions of the given words, one by one. It'd be absurd for anybody to memorize every single word of every single definition, but that was exactly what the school wanted - as ridiculous as it sounds. They wanted the students to remember every single word, and to regurgitate them in the exams. It was meant to be a try-out they say, to see if this new section in the paper would help the students understand the words better. Of course, when you require the students to just blindly feed themselves with definitions, they are only going to be brain cell killing whores. 

So I did the paper according to my own definitions, but of course they didn't stray too far away from the original meaning. I mean, not to boast or anything, but my chinese was one of the best in class, no questions about that. When the papers were returned, my grades were certainly not up to my expectations, and certainly not up to the expectations from the rest of the class. Everybody tanked, including me, and I was really pissed off by it because that whole section with the definition memorizing was marked wrong with big giant crosses unique only to that doctor of ours. I walked up to the front of the class with my test paper in hand, and his gaze followed me as my shadow loomed up against his body. He was overwhelmed by my shadow and my raging anger, but his chin was perked up high and he was looking up at me from the top of his glasses, as if he couldn't be bothered with what I had to say - although he already knew. 

I told him that my definitions were not very much different from the ones given in the book, and giving me zero for every single question was just completely absurd - I said so in chinese, of course. The entire class held their breaths, and I could hear the silence in between the pauses of our debate. He smelled funny, like old people, but worse. It was perhaps a strange brand of cologne mixed with some strange chinese herbs, or a blend of all of the above and tigers' testicles. If his lips weren't converged together to form a weird wrinkly pout, he'd have an odd smirk on his face couple with the word "schmuck" written all over his face in invisible ink. The latter was the look that he had when I presented my argument, saying that what I wrote in the paper was, in essence, no different from the standard that he used. He just smiled, that ridiculous smile, and he told me this," If your definitions are correct, then maybe you should write a dictionary and not be a student". I wanted to murder that midget son of a bitch right there and then, like put chalk through his nose and then force him to snort them up or something. I had all kinds of murderous and evil thoughts running through my head back then, and all I wanted to do was to throw him into a bed full of his acupuncture needles. 

My defiance was short-lived, but then it spurted a series of minor chaos in classes that caused him to lose his cool. His hands weren't behind his back any longer, and he always had a handkerchief back then to wide away his cold sweat. I don't think he is teaching in my high school right now, he probably retreated into that neighborhood hospital of his, a hospital that looks more like a giant grotesque temple more than anything. I haven't heard from him for some time, and I am wondering why I am blogging about him as we speak. Perhaps it was how hateful he was, or the act of defiance in class that gave me my fifteen seconds of fame. Whatever it is, I hope that he is doing better with his doctoring profession than his failed teaching career, at any rate. At least being a doctor, he wouldn't have to pretend that he knew anything and everything in this world, even when his world really was filled with castrated testicles and bamboo sticks.