Extra Lessons

Coronation Plaza | 2,201 words

To an average 12-year-old girl, numbers like 261, 257 or 282 likely appear large, odd, and difficult to divide. To a 12-year-old Singaporean girl enrolled in tuition classes for every subject, who spends her Saturdays reciting double-digit multiplication charts and asks the dentist who cleans her teeth every four months what she achieved in PSLE (Primary School Leaving Examination)—numbers like these are all she has.

Students across Singapore work for high marks in different ways. They attend Student Care Centres, go to extra classes or simply spend extra hours studying. Many of these activities happen here at Coronation Plaza, a small mall featuring unpretentious hawker center-like restaurants and poor toilet sanitation, a pimple in an otherwise pure and prime neighborhood. It’s situated a few bus stops from some of Singapore’s most fancied and prestigious secondary schools in the Bukit Timah area. On the outside the place is a kampung, a dilapidated if homey place. Somewhere that, at first glance, may be easily dismissed as just another hub for your everyday FairPrice shopping or quick coffee. But once you step in and allow the chilly frost of the air-con to hit you, you’ll see that Coronation Plaza is a factory.

Each day between 2pm and 8pm, students in uniforms from nearby high-profile schools—Hwa Chong Institution, Nanyang Girls’ High School, National Junior College—flock in and out of Coronation Plaza, all for the same reason: Tuition.

People fight to step within the walls of those schools, to wear the uniforms those teenagers do. Often the formal education system doesn’t do enough to create students with high-enough marks, neat-enough notes, or thick-enough glasses to be satisfactory-enough students of such “elite schools”, so tuition is a student’s—or more likely, a parent’s—greatest weapon.

I took one class in Coronation Plaza: Mathematics. I wasn’t exceptionally good at it, but my father was a computer geek. He told me that one day numbers would rule the earth. Just as God gave birth to man, he said, man has given birth to mathematics. My mother, meanwhile, called it a gateway for women, a secret language we studied to free ourselves from being trapped by stereotypical “female” jobs. “You have to be smart,” she said. “You have to live a good life, and to do that, you need maths.”

As for my tuition teacher, she once said this: “Life is difficult, but with maths, you get to try and solve it.”

I gleaned that mathematics stands on foundations and formulae, dispassionate and impersonal.

Good Score + Good School + Good College = Awesome life.

*

I secured entry into one of Singapore’s best high schools. On the first day, we talked about aspirations. The art kids were gambling on the next decade to turn their hobbies into jobs while those taking biology counted their cents for med school. The literature students, meanwhile, were eyeing law or psychology—so long as it paid more than teaching, they said.

“Well, tuition centers pay a lot,” Miriam said. “Mostly because students pay a lot.”

Many students like to think of school as a small-scale simulation of an adult world where people only have one thing to worry about, grades, instead of taxes and money and BTO flats. Despite wide variation in parents’ income classes, students’ professional aspirations level the playing field. I knew Miriam was born rich. But no one knows what will happen to people in ten or fifteen years. Everyone wants to go as high as they can, to be the sharp point of the knife. In a meritocracy like Singapore, money only gets you so far—the real currency in school is marks.

So:

Good Score + Money = Good School

Good School + Good College = Awesome Life

Awesome Life = Money

Money = Awesome Life?

Right.

When Miriam spoke I thought about Coronation Plaza, specifically about the restaurant stall owners in their greasy aprons. Surely they wouldn’t be considered “rich” compared to those around me at my school, but even so, they mustn’t have bad lives if they continued with their careers.

A school teacher once told me that people in his generation were considered workaholic lunatics. They wanted, more than anything, to get out of education and into the workforce to immediately support their families. I wanted to know if it was the same for the stall owners I passed by each day. Were their restaurants passed down, generation to generation? How proud were they to own them?

I felt my pockets, which had only a few coins left in them. I thought about the bus to Coronation Plaza that I’d be riding later. The only food I could afford for now was precisely the food from those cheap, LED-lit stalls. I didn’t doubt that money was a consideration when it came to happiness. But I also wondered just how much happier those aunties behind the stall counters would be if they could seriously rack their profits up.

*

A month after starting at my new school I returned to the bright, office-like surrounds of my tuition class as usual. I scanned the room for a seat, spotting the jar of untouched sweets in the corner, a fellow student sitting at her desk with her shoulder hunched against the wall, my teacher absentmindedly trying to set up the projector but unsure of how… And right in the corner of my eye, a familiar face.

Miriam had come to my class.

We sat next to each other in school but Miriam only ever spoke to her friend, who sat immediately behind her. The way she twisted her back to talk to her reminded me of a marionette with metal strings.

Miriam was good at maths, I didn’t understand why she needed this class. If whatever she did previously was enough to get a good grade, why spend more money on yet another class? Was she lying about her scores? Did she attend another, more expensive tuition class previously? Was she secretly going broke?

The teacher stared at me, but I was staring at Miriam. What the teacher was saying interested me less than whatever my aloof deskmate had going on. What dreams did she have? How close was she to achieving them? How much did she really get for that quiz yesterday? What was her family like? Separated parents? Neglectful ones? Just thinking about it all got me going.

Secretly, I hoped that whatever was going on in Miriam’s life, it was bad.

*

Huh?

The toilet closest to the tuition class is a place full of mystery, I’ve found. On an escapade there, I heard something crazy: Miriam was the dating type.

“Why do girls care so much about men? What good do they realistically bring?” I wondered. I don’t get why people would start dating now, either. Betting on a lasting relationship in secondary school is like betting on wounded dogs. Even if you date the smartest guy you know, most guys tank in JC.

I didn’t know why Miriam was dating. But she seemed like the type to do anything and have it work out.

Good Score + Good School + Boyfriend? = Awesome life?

Good Score + Good School + Boyfriend? = Housewife?

Housewife = Awesome life?

Housewife ≠ Money, though.

At this point, my head was spinning, and the uncleaned Coronation toilet cubicle wasn’t helping.

I stepped out of the bathroom. Walking back to class, I passed by some female cleaners. One of them was sitting with her coworker with her legs spread out on the ground in front of her. Weirdly, they both smelled of frangipani, which I thought was a good choice of scent for cleaning detergent. It reminded me of my mother, who’d often put those yellow flowers in her hair with our neighbors and go walking with them. My mother, who’d constantly emphasized the importance of education, in particular female education, but couldn’t find a job after moving to Singapore.

But my mother wasn’t jobless, I thought.

I stopped in the middle of the mall and took some time to look around, at all the food stalls, student care centers, hair salons, foot massagers.

For a moment, I felt that my mother would do any of these jobs better than anyone. I wondered if Miriam would think the same about her mother, though I doubted that her mother was a housewife.

*

I’ve been thinking a lot about ephemerality, about things that tend to slip through my fingers or walk out of my life.

On the day when my first teacher at Coronation announced that she was leaving, she turned the air-con extra low.

After class, I was packing up my things when Ms Jocelyn called me over. I stopped, watching her stack the chairs on top of each other, pushing the castor-wheel tables to the side, dumping the jar of uneaten candies into a small ziplock bag. I thought she had to print something for me, or needed help with the chairs, or maybe that I had done something wrong and she was waiting for everyone to leave before scolding me.

“Are your parents picking you up today?” she asked.

I told her that I’d be taking the bus.

“Your parents should pick you up sometimes, it’s so late! It’s dangerous to travel alone at night, you know?”

I didn’t know how to answer; there were so many questions stuck in my throat that I didn’t know which one to pick out and ask. In the end, I started crying. Ms Jocelyn spent about ten minutes comforting me, phoning my parents, and figuring out that I was a kid and I was crying because she was leaving.

“Your parents are coming soon. Hey, hey!” Tissue, tissue. “I wouldn’t leave if I had the choice. But I don’t have the choice.” Tissue, tissue, sob.

“Teaching isn’t where my heart is, though I love teaching, I really do. It makes my life feel easier. But sometimes, what makes you feel better isn’t what makes you better, right? Just like practicing maths, you have to keep practicing and practicing and…”

It was around then that I stopped listening to her, and started sniffling from the cold instead of bawling my eyes out.

Suddenly, Ms Jocelyn told me I didn’t need to become anything in particular. Automatically, I agreed with her. But immediately afterwards, I realized that I had no idea what she meant. Before I could clarify, her phone rang. I knew it was my parents.

“Just be patient with yourself, and do what you enjoy,” she said, before picking up the call.

*

Good Score + Good School + Figure It Out = ???

My mother asked me if I had failed a quiz. It’d take longer to explain what had just happened than to simply agree, so I said yes.

Before heading home she took me to get KFC for supper. The KFC at Coronation was like every KFC in Singapore: cold, red, and incredibly mediocre. The place was empty, since it was so late at night. We got the food at the counter, which took a long while because this particular branch was always short-staffed. The wait was freezing in the AC, and silent.

We sat down and began eating. Chewing and crunching and slurping, we didn’t say a word to one another. It wasn’t an exam hall, but the room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

Or maybe this was a kind of exam hall, and maybe I was taking a kind of test.

“Did you fill out your aspiration form?”

I stopped chewing, confused.

“The thing your teacher gave out?”

Right. The aspiration form.

“Do you need me to sign it?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

I knew my mother was trying to figure out what my aspiration really was. Thinking back, I should’ve broken the silence by saying that I wanted to try for med school. Dinner wouldn’t have been any less awkward, but it might’ve helped my mother eat faster.

I stood up to fill my cup. I dispensed a little bit of every drink. Orange juice, Coke Zero, Grape Fanta, etc. The worker caught me doing this but didn’t stop me.

I returned to my mother. I felt a big lump in my throat.

 In truth I don’t know what I want to be, is what I wanted to say.

I also don’t know who I am.

I also don’t know what kind of person my mother thinks I am.

“Your friend’s mom said this other tuition center is really good. We can go there. It’s for Chinese. You need help with your languages.”

??? + ??? + ??? = ???

“Okay.”

*

In the exam hall, I didn’t recognize anyone.

I didn’t see my mother, I didn’t see Ms Joyce, I couldn’t find Miriam. But I thought about them, and about Coronation Plaza, and all the extra lessons I’d had there.

In an exam hall, you don’t have anything. No notes, no glances, no-one to guide you.

As the papers got passed down, I glanced at the scrubbed whiteboard, at the years of equations, instructions, and marks replaced by a clear and pristine white. I swallowed.

I could feel the pressure in the room almost crushing me. But one equation, suddenly sounding in my head, kept me upright.

 Myself = all right.

© Wu Liangyu

Commissioning editor: Daryl Li