Sea Field

They say that most things are popularity contests. Like becoming Head Prefect, for instance. That wasn't the case for me and in a way, this photograph - taken in my senior year in secondary school - proves that.

I didn't look anything then like I do now, but I'm not hard to identify - I am the only one whose face is obscured. I don't know if this was a conscious effort on the photographer's part (since I was an unpopular person in a popular position), or if this had been the hasty pre-actual photo-snap taken as everyone was getting into place.

There is even the distinct possibility that I'd hidden my face on purpose, darting behind the chap in front of me at the last moment because even back in 2002, it might have occurred to me that this middle-fingered moment might one day come back to haunt me on this thing called Facebook.

In any case, it struck me as fitting that only an 1/8th of my face is in that photograph, because in many ways, I wasn't truly present. Oh, I attended an SMK Seafield for five years of my teenage life, but it wasn't the SMK Seafield that my classmates attended.

I was just recently tagged in the photograph you see in this post on Facebook, and many of the comments had gone along the lines of Best Days of My Life and I Miss Those Days.

I've had many dark days in my post-Subang Jaya life, but none so dark that I would ever purport to Miss Those Days. Also, if those were the Best Days of Your Life, it's been downhill from there, hasn't it? That's unfortunate, because death is a rather dishearteningly long ways away, if you don't smoke very much or ride a motorcycle.

In any case, I digress. The photograph doesn't take in the rest of the classroom, but if your mind's eye were to pull back and take it all in, you would see that the desks had bottoms that were splintering, the windows were missing panes and that the brooms were threadbare. This wasn't even a bad school - it was just like any other school in Malaysia - woefully underfunded, unpardonably neglected and laughably staffed.

Subang Jaya had been above-average in affluence, so I don't think we ever felt poor, but the horrible thing was that it'd always felt like our country was. Utensils frequently ran out in schools and you had to eat your nasi lemak with your hands - a landmine-filled proposition when you're a left-handed kid in a Muslim country. (I once handed a teacher a stapler with my left hand and she'd reeled back, calling me kurang ajar - a slur on someone's upbringing to the nth degree. It wasn't quaint then, and it isn't quaint now. If it'd happened to my child, I would have sued.)

In the dusty, choked-toilet days of my schooling life, a nagging sense of lack had prevailed. It is ironic that in the background of the photograph, there is the phrase "Education is the key to success", because it certainly wasn't what our leaders believed. Maybe "Broken submarines are the key to success" or "A delayed RM10 billion Bakun dam is the key to success". But certainly not education.

Our school hadn't been where dreams had gone to die - it had been where they'd gone to be choked in their infancy. In my senior year - the same year this picture was taken, I had approached our counselor for advice on how to apply to Harvard and she'd laughed. "What's wrong with our universities?" she'd said, or something to that effect. Because it is the very height of ambition to be randomly assigned to a bachelor's degree in studying turtles in fucking Sabah or some other similarly confounding outcome.

She'd sneered the sneer of someone who was in equal parts confident that I would fail and afraid that I would succeed. Two years later, while in junior college in Singapore, my home tutor would push me to apply for Oxford and later on in life, a mentor had offered me the means to go to an Ivy League school for my master's - so it is apparently just how we roll back home and not an indictment of teachers in general.

So high school had been a desperately horrible time for me. I'd brought it on myself, partially, because when you weigh 82 kg at 17, the only kind of person you should be is harmless and goofy - certainly not ambitious and obnoxiously impatient with people.

And so that sort of girth had invited a corresponding sort of cruelty - of daily taunts of "Godzilla" (My prefect uniform was green, you see. It was all very droll), of puns about "one-ton noodles" (They were my favourite dish, apparently) and a co-ordinated effort by the senior class to whisper "bitch" whenever they filed past me for spot-checks. It's one thing to call yourself a bitch in Prada, it's quite another for someone else to do it for you when you're wearing scratchy polyester.

What had been worse hadn't been the name-calling, but the crushing awareness that you're living in a shadow of a country when there were actual places to be - Central Park, Wall Street, Fleet Street - places where actual people were doing very big things. At a time when my peers couldn't see beyond their next date or Dota session, I was craning my neck, desperately trying to see into a time when I'd be somewhere and someone who mattered. I don't know why this lack of a future in Malaysia or in my suburb was so hard to see even then - our main language wasn't English, we ostracized left-handed people and when I was just entering secondary school, our deputy prime minister was put on trial for sodomizing someone. I don't know or care if he did it - it was just mortifying that CNN had to use 'sodomize' and 'Malaysia' in the same sentence. We were what Sir Humphrey Appleby of Yes, Minister would have called a TPLAC - a Tin-Pot Little Asian Country.

It also didn't help that I won every book prize worth winning - because when you're fat, you'd better have a damn-fine redeeming quality, and mine was readin' and lurnin' good. And despite a persistent stutter that emerged when I was nervous, angry, excited or on the verge of tears, I got the Head Prefect post, which brought with it the weekly duty of reading the national pledge to the school during assembly.

I remember, at an interview for the Head Prefect gig with 20-odd teachers in attendance, one of them had asked me how a girl could possibly do the job (we hadn't had a single female Head Prefect in the school's illustrious 8-year history then).

I'd trotted out what I see now was a hilarious answer - that being female, my frailty would make people think twice about roughing me up (yes, it was that kind of school). All 82 kg of my "frailty". And a Geography teacher - the kindest one on the staff - had struggled to contain a smirk.

It's funny now, when my BMI is down to 22 and I run 10 km every week, but when you're 17 and have put your heart on the table for a badge with your name on it, you replay that twitching of a teacher's lips many times as you lie in bed the night after that. (If you must know, it was worth it in the end, the many instances of being jeered at while reading the school pledge after that, because I'm a sucker for a shiny badge with my name on it)

It wasn't all bad. In the photograph are friends who made life worth living. In some very dark times, they were the only people who did. There was Tiffany - she's next to me, head half-turned away from the camera - my best friend who was the only person who saw me bawl my eyes out in dark stairwells at 6.30 in the morning when it looked like life was winning. There's Anis - seated on the floor, second last - who was every bit the outsider I'd been and had loved me for it. And there'd been Kelvin - second from the left and on the floor - who had taught me how to focus on a distant point in the horizon, beyond Seafield and Subang Jaya. He is, till this day, the only man I know who can look hot in eyeliner.

Growing up in an underfunded institution in a country rife with corruption and racial politics had its perks - it'd made me incredibly angry. You will see that the funniest people you know (of) are fundamentally angry people - Bill Maher, Charlie Brooker, Chris Rock - these are people who had been subjected to dazzling displays of stupidity and injustice, and now use the razor's edge of that anger on everything that they write. So now I am a funny girl who carries that anger around with me, and I drip it on everything - a roast of Tiger Woods, a profile of Julian Assange, a critique of the BP oilspill. From this standpoint, a happy childhood can be overrated, and I'm glad I'm not burdened with one.

And so I'd cobbled together a joke of an education - of Physics lessons taught in Malay - a language unequipped for the onslaught of the 21st century - of Moral lessons in which the difference in definitions of "berani" and "keberanian" were material - the culmination of which had been a school-leaving testimonial that the teachers had not even bothered to fill out themselves.

I remember that we were told to pick 5 adjectives - any 5 - to fill in the empty field of our certificate describing our respective qualities as the future leaders and workforce of the rakyat. I vaguely remembered going to town and choosing things like "cemerlang" and "berdaya kepimpinan" - assorted bullshit like that. I thought this had been the ultimate betrayal of your nation's youth - that you didn't even care enough about them to make up five stupid adjectives on their behalf.

My boyfriend - who went to school in Singapore - told me that when he left secondary school, his teacher wrote him a glowing testimonial - with actual sentences and everything(!) - that flowed onto the next page. Hearing that made me want to cry.

But I cobbled it together anyway, this joke of administration, policy, outdated textbooks and funding - and left for a country where I wasn't the wrong colour, gender or size, place so central to the region and to the world that my old suburb just seems like a really bad dream, today.

Today, my hyper-planny approach to life is viewed as an asset, I sit in on national Budget speeches where the government has allocated a staggering amount to education, health and workforce incentives and I am in a line of work where everyone speaks English and your article was due yesterday. It is a life of Formula One suites, tete-a-tetes at Fullerton Hotel and 3-beer lunches at LeVel 33.

And so now I run every week. I run like my life depends on it. In a way, it does. My new life does.

Seoul, 2010