Amalgamating the green luxuriant trees (Part 2)

By SEAN LIM



There was a sense of déjà vu when I wrote this piece in celebration of the 80th anniversary.

After all, it has come one full circle since I was part of the 65th anniversary close to 15 years ago, as an emcee. I still remember it was Mrs Josephine Cheok and Mrs De Souza who mentored me for that event. The guest-of-honour was Associate Professor Chin Tet Yung, who was the Member of Parliament for Sembawang GRC. The anniversary was commemorated with a concert and dinner in the school hall.

I kick-started my journey in Qihua in 2002, when Mrs Bilveer Singh was principal. Both students and staff alike would recall her famous mantra, “Qihua is the best, Qihua is the first, Qihua is number one”. It evoked a sense of nostalgia when Mrs Connie Chan briefly mentioned it again recently on her Facebook.

Going to school was rather intimidating initially because I was pressurised to behave myself. You could say there were “watchdogs” in the school, since my parents had good friends who were staff in the school.

I recall a rather amusing incident when I was in Primary 1. Looking back, it was baffling why I made a mountain out of a molehill. It was during that fateful English lesson I had with Mdm Masturah when I misplaced my eraser. I kicked up a big fuss about it, complained to her and insisted that someone in class has stolen it.

Mdm Masturah relented and wasted close to 15 minutes to do a thorough bag search on everybody. It was only after the bag check when I realised the eraser was misplaced in my pocket all along. It may seem hilarious now, but it was definitely not back then. She was so furious and demanded me to apologise to every single classmate in class individually – yes, individually, which entailed going to each desk and apologise to that classmate. I’m still in touch with Mdm Masturah and every now and then we would bring up this incident again and have a good laugh.

She probably has forgotten about it, but there was another incident where I left the class to go for recess on my own when there were no teachers juggling the class. Afraid of having left with little time for recess, I took matters into my own hands and went down to the canteen on my own. I am not sure where did the typical herd mentality of mine went to, but I went for recess alone, while the rest of my class waited patiently in class for further instructions. Unfortunately, another teacher caught me for doing so, and reported me to Mdm Masturah, who happens to my form teacher. She vowed to punish me at the end of the day, but fortunately, till today, it has not happened.

In the midst of all the hustle and bustle of the classroom, teachers tend to have a goldfish memory. Miss Violet, who was my math teacher in Primary 2, got to be one of them. I still remember it was a lesson on volume, and she brought some glass apparatus to class in order to illustrate the concept of capacity. About forty of us huddled at the front of the classroom where the apparatus was placed on a desk.

As she proceeded on with her lesson, one of my classmates – a class clown, joker, residential fool…whatever you call it – had “itchy fingers” and fiddled with the glass beakers. Perhaps as an 8-year-old kid, it can’t be helped to be inquisitive over everything and anything. Just that this time, curiosity killed the cat, or rather, curiosity killed the class, because the glass beaker slipped from his hand and dropped to the floor, shattering into pieces.

We often annoyed her with our high noise level in class, but the breaking of the beaker has to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Miss Violet berated the entire class – it did not help that she was a plump figure which loomed over us – and demanded us to compensate the next day. Fortunately for us (not the country, though), it was the peak of the Sars epidemic in 2003. Many people in Singapore fell ill and the country was nearly in chaos over the deadly disease.

The very next day after the “breaking of beaker” incident, the Ministry of Education announced the closure of schools for more than a fortnight, from March 29 till April 16, as a containment strategy of the disease. Upon return to school, there was no mention of the broken beaker by Miss Violet, and we were wise enough not to make any mention of it in class.

Speaking about the Sars experience, those were still the days when not every household has a computer, let alone internet access. E-learning, which is ubiquitous now, was unheard of then. Assignments were still given, but not through the internet. My form teacher, Ms Polly Yun (now happily married as Mrs Polly Goh), gave us the work via snail mail (hard to imagine in this era, eh?), and because of the high mailing cost incurred from dispatching homework physically, the workload was light and merely a one-off distribution. The homework was completed quickly and it was a good, restful break for us kids, never mind we had to stay home most of the time due to the Sars virus.

Primary 2 had to be the most memorable year in Qihua. The syllabus was easy, school ended early – 12.55pm every day and 12.25pm on Wednesdays – and we did the silliest and darnest things ever as innocent children. The ultimate one of it all has to be my sham “marriage” with X. It was a crazy set-up by my friends to match-make me and her together. They helped us write invitation cards on foolscap paper and organised a “wedding ceremony” at the eco-garden behind the classroom block (where the hydroponics plants are currently at now) during recess.

It consisted of a wedding march, where I had to walk down the garden, and some friends helped pull the back of X’s skirt, imitating an actual wedding with long gowns. Living up to our school’s previous vision, “Creativity is the birthright of every child”, my friends creatively crafted a wedding ring out of a pen spring, made me put on onto X’s fingers, and say the wedding vows. We adjourned to the “banquet hall” for a “feast”, which is actually the school canteen and we had our usual meals.

When Ms Yun found out about it, we were chided by her for being so ridiculously playful, but I guess she found it funny as well. This story stuck with me till today, more than a decade since I have graduated. Friends still talk about it during our regular catch-up sessions, even though X already has a boyfriend since our junior college days.

Alas, life is not a bed of roses. If Primary 2 was the zenith of my time in Qihua, then the following year was a nadir. Maybe my lucky stars were not aligned, I don’t know. There was little to take comfort in that I remained in a best class – Primary 3/10 (prior to 2006, the best classes were at the back numerically) because I was unlucky enough to have an irresponsible form teacher (whom I shall assign the pseudonym H). Not only she was unreasonable and took extremely long to return our marked homework, H also discriminated the class into “first class” and “second class” citizens – these were the exact terms used, I recall vividly. It was a living hell in H’s class. I understand that many complaint letters were lodged against her (my mother was one of them).

Fortunately, H went on a maternity leave and she was not around for a good half of the year. She was temporaily replaced with Mdm Aernie, Mr Roslan, Mrs Guna and Mrs Sharon Tan, who were very good teachers. H left Qihua soon after I graduated in 2007, and she is the only teacher till date whom I did not send a single Teachers’ Day card or gift to.

Fast forward to 2016, I returned to Qihua on an ad-hoc basis as a relief teacher. It was a surreal feeling returning to my alma mater close to a decade after graduation. Inevitably, Qihua has changed throughout these years, such as the addition of the indoor sports hall, conversions of certain rooms to classrooms, etc. But as a whole, it is still more or less the same Qihua I knew. Seeing familiar art pieces (art pieces that were hung there for more than 15 years and I grew up looking at), hearing the same chime of the school bell, walking past the same corridors, canteen, music room, and of course, the same parade square and school hall. It felt as if I was relieving my primary school days all over again.

Most comforting of all is definitely seeing familiar faces in the staff room. Teachers have come and go but the core is still there. Hearing familiar voices in the room and the same naggings to the kids evoked a sense of nostalgia. It was great reuniting with my teachers and assume a different role (no longer as a student, but as a grown-up), listening them share their experiences and giving me advices, just like the good ole’ days (different kind of advice from the past, of course).

Surprisingly, despite the generation gap, the things Qihua pupils do remain the same, which brings me back to childhood. Let me list down a few:

1. Playing with flag erasers (a “vice” that seems impossible to eradicate)
2. Folding paper planes
3. Using the foolscap paper to fold all sorts of origami, and do all sorts of doodling…everything else except using it for work.
4. Drawing on the mini whiteboards
5. Passing handwritten messages to their friends because (fortunately) the use of mobile phones is still prohibited during school hours
6. Volunteering to help the teacher clean the whiteboard, carry things, sweep the floor, give out worksheets etc … which can even result in quarrels among them

(Somehow, I like the fact that the use of mobile phones is still not allowed during school hours, because the introduction of it will destroy the sacrosanctity of a primary school environment. Currently, you still see primary school kids doing kiddy stuff, which is comforting because that is what they should naturally be doing as children)

I enjoyed the whole experience thoroughly, and typing this out makes me feel nostalgic. The decade after Qihua was life changing – making many new friends and experiences in secondary school, the dreadful A-levels in junior college, getting grinded in NS. Then, after these momentous waves of change, I’m back here once more – the place where it all began. I have changed and grew up, yet Qihua gave me the same vibes as it did more than 10 years ago.

At the end of the day, it is these little things that matter. It is these little snippets of seemingly trivial recollections that form up the main bulk of my days in Qihua. These are memories and friendships that will stay, long after the concepts and formulas taught in the classroom has been forgotten.

I was 8 when I was involved with the 65th anniversary. Now I am 23. Happy 80th Birthday, Qihua!