You've Won, By Lightyears - About My Primary School...and those Mates Lazy and daunted as I'm, for years a nanogram of competitive fire managed to survive in my rusty tank...whenever my primary schoolmates surface in my memory. It's an ultra-competitive private school, with 95% of its attention drawn to academic results. Attitude? Morals? Nothing - as long as nobody went physical or churned out the usual 4-letter words, they allowed anything, including verbal abuses of any sort. Of course, "anything" was under the condition "not inappropriate as adjudged by us (the school authority)", presumably with some criteria that I didn't, ain't and won't know or comprehend anyway. Such an environment may look familiar to many of you, I suppose - that bloodless Darwinist 21st century battlefield called "Hong Kong" is its adult version. With its elite classes full of students from aspiring/rising middle-class families soaked with excessive confidence and belief in their moral and intellectual superiority, life could be hard for the poor also-rans who didn't excel - and more so for that ugly, bitter, rough eccentric in me. But like what you can see in the average Marvel or DC superhero comic, there's always an alternative way of "empowerment": excel. Be Strong. Become "their" equal, or at least something. And I made it - all it took was just a bit of effort, taking the dumbest but most effective way of reciting every page of the textbooks and joining that thin layer of "cream" with good results. Alas, the ugly, bitter, rough eccentric was still despised by a good many, but at least as a troublesome force to be reckoned with. Sounds pretty bad, but it wasn't all that bad, actually; thanks to that FaceBook thing the primary school fellows managed to find one another, me included. As I glanced through the name tags under the P6 class photo, it seemed that maybe I didn't have that so many enemies - thought most of those fellows only took me as an eccentric with any one or two of the adjectives "ugly", "bitter" and "rough". So it really wasn't that bad, really. Then of course, those I added on FB might only regard me as an eccentric at most, without those adjectives...or just didn't know enough of me to classify me as anything; or even didn't find anything wrong with me and treated me as a friend. I felt, and feel, grateful to these fellows. Still, a good while ago that bitterness was more prevalent and every time I looked back, that "fire in belly" thing was there - hey, for a time I went neck-to-neck with the bigwigs; and if you look at what those bigwigs turn out to be in school you would call that race "Breeders' Cup Juvenile". For juveniles, of course, but still a Group 1 race; and I was among the "contenders"! Just that I turned out to be a "pretender" only; the champion juveniles pulled away, while the pretender(s) bled or finished with cuts on the hoof, losing by lengths. That bitter taste, either from blood or mucus (!!!), lingered on, and on, and on. There's no such bitterness when I look at those LSC fellows - I was never in the same league, after all. No match. And the current gap between them and me is already smaller than expected, which is something to be happy about. It's just another matter thing with the primary school people, because for just a couple of years it seemed there could be a fight. How wrong I was. Again, thanks to FB and some other sources I get to know how things are going for many of those fellows; in any sense these fellows are an outstanding bunch, excelling in different ways and, more importantly, many of them finished that "Breeders' Cup Juvenile" behind me. And more, more importantly those fellows did change, or more accurately, grow up. Gone were the caustic tongues, the indifferent bookworms, or whatsoever; now there are only healthy and nice individuals. In the meantime, they still do accomplish a lot, as healthy and nice individuals, on different fronts; among them counts an acclaimed harpist in Asia, a sub-3 hr marathoner, a platoon of medical doctors, some architects, engineers, i-bankers, lawyers, civil servants (Colleague, sort of!!! Haha.), a bit of everything. For a bunch of "elite" students one may not find this really impressive, but it IS impressive - as these fellows manage to accomplish while making that Darwinist past irrelevant, one way or another. In short, they've become better persons, but I haven't. Then not to mention the fact that my 100% only brings me this far, while theirs have taken them lightyears ahead. So that's it; you've won, mates - even though it doesn't mean much to anybody, if at all. | 
