In Continuum.

Some time before noon today, my mother probably thought that it was high time for her to clear out the room down the corridor. By "the room down the corridor", I really mean the room that used to belong to me, which was turned into a storeroom after the real storeroom was filled up with stuff. The family needed more room to store more stuff, which was why I was evacuated from my old room into the room that I am sleeping in today. Anyway, the stuff inside my old room got a little out of hand, like stuffs do when they get piled on after years and years of tossing. So, the room is filled with old children's books, tissue boxes, a collection of paper bags from a bunch of different branded shops, boxes of old textbooks and homework, a toy sewing machine, a real sewing machine, two closets full of clothes, old CDs, and a whole lot of other embarrassing things from the family's past, but mostly mine. So as she was clearing out some boxes of magazines and books, she stumbled upon a pile of homework that she asked me if I wanted. I didn't want the magazines, I didn't want my social studies textbook, and I certainly wanted the civics and moral education book thrown away because, well, I am civil and I have morals. But it was probably the dumbest subject I have taken in my life. Then, we came upon two particular books that, though embarrassing, I certainly want to keep for a while.

I have on my table right now, two chinese composition books all the way from my high school days. They were written about seven years ago, according to the dates, and I must say that they are some of the worst stuff that I have ever written in my life. I think I am a decent writer, or blogger, or just a decent person who writes stuff. I think anybody who has a "body of work" to boot probably has some pride as well. In this case, I have a couple of years of writing up my sleeves, I think I have some kind of pride when it comes to my "body of work" as well. However, when you show me something I wrote from eons ago, something as horrid as what I read today - the horrors of my chinese composition. Actually, I think my writings in english were a whole lot worse back then. But, as some of you who went through the same education may know, english compositions back then were mostly written on paper and then handed up to the teacher. After the school year is done, you pack the compositions into boxes, and you don't really think about whether or not you want to throw them away - you just do it. But chinese compositions were written mostly in books, like the ones that I found today, and they tend to be given more attention when it comes to the "to throw or not to throw" question. So, most of these finds are usually chinese compositions, which is a good and a bad thing at the very same time.

Anyway, one book is basically my essay book, while the other includes a couple of letters that we were supposed to write with a certain format. But those really weren't ordinary letters you write to your girlfriend or your parents from faraway. A lot, if not all of them were complaint letters written to police stations or government agencies about a variety of things. They aren't real complaints really, but topics that we were supposed to write as dictated by the teacher. It's interesting to note how mundane the topics were at that time, and that made up the bulk of the flaws that the education system has. I mean, looking at the topics, a right-minded person is not going to expect any kind of creativity out of the students at all. We have a topic about what it takes for a family to be a loving and happy family, we have a topic about how to keep HDB blocks clean, we have a topic about the experiences during a flag day, and one more about whether or not parents have the right to invade the privacy of their children. These are the kind of topics that I had to deal with back in those days, and no wonder I hate the version of myself back then. Cultured with this kind of education system, no wonder I was the kind of student with no life and no character. I had to do everything with a format, and anything that is out of the format was criticized and penalized.

Let's begin with the book with the essays, because I find it a lot less interesting than the other one with the complaint letters. Throughout most part of my education life, I have prided myself as being pretty decent in the language. OK, I was very good in the language because I am, after all, a Taiwanese. I speak mandarin at home all the time, and everybody at school pretty much expect me to do well at the subject - and I do rather well for the most part. I am in the top three all the time, switching places with Mark and Anthony (they are two separate people) when it comes to the first place. However, despite the decent track record, my compositions back then were all pretty bad in terms of the grades. I mean, we are talking about the fifties and the sixties here, and never anything above a sixty-three. I probably didn't know why back then, but I have a clue right now - I really sucked. The content of the compositions aside, I made glaring mistakes that I really shouldn't have been making. In chinese, you probably have a few hundred different characters sharing the same pronunciation. Sometimes it is easy to confuse the characters, but there are a couple that are just so obvious that you really shouldn't be making those mistakes. It is difficult to explain some of the mistakes I made here, but let's just say that it is like writing "fuck" instead of "duck", something like that.

Then I have a strange habit of not finishing sentences. What I mean is that I tend to leave out characters for no apparent reasons. For example, in english, if I want to type a sentence that says "I think sushi is very nice, but I despise octopus tentacles", I probably wrote it as "I think sushi is very, but I despise octopus tent" or something weird like that. I left out boxes without writing anything in them when I really should have. I don't know why I left them out in the first place, because they aren't particularly difficult words. I just left them out because, well, I have no idea why I left them out. It looks as if I was trying to set up some kind of code for future-me, or the me right now, to read or something. You know, like if you fill in the blanks and you take all those words and piece them together, you get some kinda secret code to a treasure buried somewhere or something. But I never found anything worth going through the trouble, and I still wonder why I didn't just keep whatever that I found and got rich or something. Maybe I really didn't find anything, and probably just thought that it'd be neat to leave a message for myself in the future. In that case, it sure was on the expense of my grades, and definitely not worth all the corrections that I had to go through at the end of each assignment.

And as for the other book we talked about earlier, the quality of writing isn't really any better for the most part. But what makes this book a little more interesting are the personas that I had to take up to write these complaint letters. It's funny how much was dictated and how little was left to our creativity and our imagination back then. In this format, we were supposed to have our address at the top right hand corner (faked), the name, title and address of the person you are writing to diagonally left of your address (faked), and then the letter itself as the body of the letter, ending off with your own name (faked) and a date (real). The topics were usually complaints, and the first letter here is a complaint about stray cats in the estate and something about how it has become a problem to the neighborhood. Once again, I seem to display the problem of purposefully leaving out words with no apparent reasons. Anyway, for the length of this complaint letter, I took up the persona of Chen Ming Qiang (陳明強), an unimaginative and boring name that must have been the idea of my teacher back then, an equally unimaginative and boring person with a little more personality than a piece of rock.

The same trend goes on for the rest of the book. We have one more complaint letter about people gambling underneath HDB blocks, which I really cannot care less about because I don't live in one, and I don't see gambling being anything bad at all if you ask me. It's a small social activity, give them a break yeah? Anyway, apparently I live on Sunset Way in this persona, and my name this time is Zhang Zhi Zhong (張志忠), yet another unimaginative and boring name. You can really see how the education system is trying to condition and program us into believing that we are mundane and mindless machines, just writing things based upon instructions and even more instructions. Leave only one line after the body, leave two boxes from the margin before you write your name, and all those kind of rules that nobody ever really follows in real life. Besides, let's be honest here: how many of us are going to write letters in Chinese now anyway? I mean, we have a letter here complaining about crows being a problem in the neighborhood? I seriously think, if we want to encourage some form of creativity out of these mundane assignments, at least allow us to come up with topics ourselves and write about it. Personally, I don't see crows as problems until they start to peck the back of my neck for no apparent reasons. Oh, and I am Lin Da Ming (林大明) in this letter. That is like, the epitome of stupid and fake Chinese composition names.

After reading through all these old materials from the past, I cannot help but feel thankful for the fact that I am in an entirely different education system now. You know, I am no longer bound to the british system of things, whereby everything is bound by two parallel lines, and you have little room to extend your mind at all. I felt stifled in that system all through high school and the junior college afterwards, when everything had a format and everything had instructions. Sure, it was easier to have a sort of guideline to follow, because you knew where to go after step one. Step two was the natural step to take, and then followed later by step three - easy. But then once you get into that routine of following from number one to number three, once you get used to following from A to C, you start to become unable to stretch further and go deeper into a subject. Right now, in the American education system, they always encourage you to think, to question, and to be flexible with the kind of answers that you might come up with. There are little guidelines to the kind of things we do in school, and we are always encouraged to work things out on our own. If you want a guide, approach the lecturer yourself because you are not going to be spoon fed with them in class.

Sure, every system has its own set of problems, you know. I mean, you always hear about how bad the American students are at geography or mathematics, or basic science and biology. These topics are always the butt of the laughter on the internet, and it is not exactly uncommon to hear about those things. But you cannot deny that under this rigid system that we have right here, you cannot expect our children to develop and grow. We become conditioned individuals who are always going to work in line, within the confines, never outside the box. Every once in a while, of course, you get a handful of people who dare to dream big and think bigger. But I don't see myself growing and improving under that kind of system, you know. I mean, I remember a class that we had in high school called "Creative Thinking", and even that class had a structure and a format to it that just felt incredibly pretentious and stupid. It was like trying to encourage self-expression in North Korea or something like that. Of course, if we weren't creative, we weren't pulled out of the classroom and shot behind the soccer field. But still, it wasn't the most conducive environment for learning, and I hated it. Most of all, though, I hated the fake names that I had to come up with. I mean, Lin Da Ming? Give me a break.