Miss Seetoh in the World (27 page)

Maria Seetoh knew a couple from the Church
of Eternal Mercy who had four school-going children and systematically
organised their priorities for allocation of resources and attention around the
child who happened to be preparing for the examinations. Thus, at the beginning
of the month, when the father handed his pay packet to his wife, she would
instantly rip open the envelope and count out the exact sum needed for the
child’s examination fees, private tuition fees, cost of exam aids and
guidebooks, and dozens of bottles of ‘Essence of Chicken’ as well as the best
Korean ginseng for the long hours of night study; it did not matter how much
money was left for the entire household expenses and needs of the other
school-going children who were by no means resentful since each would have his
or her privileged turn. By the time the last child sat for the examinations,
the father who had suffered a mild stroke and had been given a job with a much
lower salary, was in debt. The mother who had little education understood its
value enough to be ready to take on a part-time job washing dishes in a
restaurant if it helped in securing a place for her child in that special crash
course, conducted outside school hours by enterprising teachers-turned-tutors,
that were guaranteed to improve exam results.

Meeta told the story of the mother of one of
her students who, after having done all that was humanly possible for her son,
went on to secure the help of the supernatural. Moreover she wanted to maximise
that help, thus adopting a shrewd eclecticism by visiting, in turn, her church,
an old Chinese temple reputed to have a thoughtful, motherly goddess, and an
ancestral tomb, and returning home with, respectively, a bottle of holy water,
an amulet and a joss-stick. It was only in the examination hall that her son
noticed a small cloth amulet sewn into the sleeve of his school uniform, which
was really at odds with the wooden cross he carried in his wallet. Which of the
two forces proved to have the greater influence on his G.C.E. results was not
known.

The G.C.E. phenomenon could be explained
simply by the fact that Singaporeans took the cue for much of their behaviour
and thinking from the great TPK. For some reason, the prime minister had
settled upon the possession of a full G.C.E. O Level certificate as the
starting benchmark for personal worth and integrity, as was demonstrated in two
major policies. Firstly, the government organisation that had been set up to
matchmake single Singaporean men and women, made it clear to them that to
benefit from the various free matchmaking activities, such as tea dances, they
would have to possess that certificate; the condition was clearly based on the
assumption that below that educational level, young Singaporean men and women
were incapable of producing and raising intelligent children for the country’s
economic future. Ideally, parents should be graduates; realistically, the
organisation was prepared to settle for less. Secondly, if a Singaporean
aspired to join the government political party, the certificate was again the
very minimal qualification for entry; unless supported by incredible experience
and sterling qualities, it would not have stood a chance beside the plethora of
competing academic qualifications from Harvard and Cambridge.

TPK and his ministers had drawn scathing
attention to the fact that V.K. Pandy had to sit twice for the G.C.E. O Level
examinations to secure a partial certificate, whereas their own party
candidates could boast of distinctions in a wide range of subjects, which in
turn had opened the doors to the highest institutions of learning, both at home
and abroad. Following the shameful revelation of his low academic standing,
V.K. Pandy wrote a letter to The Singapore Tribune in which he reminded
Singaporeans that a former protégé of the prime minister, a Dr Yong, whose
academic credentials blazed with a PhD degree, two Masters’, a First Class
Honours and an eight-distinction G.C.E. O Level, had been on the run for years
to escape corruption charges involving millions of dollars, whereas he, V.K.
Pandy with no G.C.E., had, with patience and hard work, successfully built up a
business that would still be running if he had not been prosecuted and fined
several hundred thousand dollars on charges of defaming the government. When
his small printing shop had to close down, V.K. Pandy’s wife, it was said, put
on a white sari of mourning, let down her long hair, stood in front of the
closed shutters and threatened to commit suicide. The letter was not published
by the newspaper, and V.K. Pandy put it up, in enlarged print on a placard
mounted on a stand in his favourite spot in Middleton Square. ‘No G.C.E.
doesn’t mean No Integrity!’ was the caption.

 Employers who, like the schools, were ever
alert for signs from the leaders, also demanded good G.C.E. results before they
would even call up applicants for interviews. Thus the position of an
examination which continued to be designed, set and marked by examiners of a
former colonial power, long after that power had left, became unshakeably
entrenched in the national landscape.

One of Maria’s friends, Emily, had one day
brought along a young, pretty relative who worked as a sales assistant in a
departmental store to join them for lunch. Swee Hoong needed urgent advice for
a problem related to the G.C.E. She was being courted by three men: one was
fairly well-to-do, being a contractor and driving a Mercedes, but he had no
G.C.E.; the other, a technician, was far less wealthy but much handsomer, and
had only a partial certificate, scoring a credit only for Chinese language; the
third was reasonably well off, lived in a semi-detached house, drove a
Mercedes, had a full certificate and a very successful business as an
undertaker, revealing that last, discomfiting fact only very late in the
courtship. Despite society’s top ranking of the G.C.E., it occurred with just
too many competing variables in the young woman’s calculus to sort out and come
to the best decision.

‘Well, which one do you love?’ Maria had
asked.

‘I don’t know, it depends,’ she replied.

‘Which one is most likely to be unfaithful?’
Emily asked, remembering her own husband’s disgusting infidelities.

‘I don’t know,’ she said gloomily.

‘Tell you what,’ said Maria brightly. ‘Why
don’t we do things systematically, like the government’s systems engineers,
that is, we assign a value to each of the attributes of wealth, looks,
possession of Mercedes, G.C.E. O Level, character, etc., add them all up, and
see who scores the highest!’

In the end, the undertaker was the loser;
not even his valued certificate combined with his semi-detached house and
Mercedes could trump the yuk factor of his occupation, which, however, might
conceivably convert into an eager wow, if he had possessed, additionally, a
penthouse, a Lexus and a verifiably huge bank account.

Over the years, the more enlightened among
Singaporeans had drawn attention to the flaws of an educational system so
dependent on paper certifications and called for urgent redress if young
Singaporeans were ever to become creative, independent-minded and in tune with
a rapidly changing world. ‘Are we aware,’ went an anguished letter in the Forum
page of The Straits Tribune, ‘that while our students abroad excel
academically, they rank appallingly low in creative thinking and personal and
social skills?’ But fear was too valuable, indeed, too essential an instrument
to discard: take it away, dispense with the exams, said the teachers, and
students would no longer have any motivation to learn.

In any case, the fear of exams was of a
piece with the political climate in the society; without fear, said the great
TPK, nothing would get done, people would slacken, they would spit on the
streets and litter public places, unruly elements would come out of the
woodwork to cause disruption and disorder, opportunistic foreign elements would
enter and create mischief, and Singapore, from a much admired city-state, would
be no better than the many failed societies in the region and the world,
permanently mired in chaos and corruption. Use the cane, said TPK, and if it
doesn’t work, get hold of a bigger one. His most quoted pronouncement was that
he would rather be feared than liked.

Singaporeans, are you aware that forty years
ago, you lived in slums that had no proper sanitation?

Are you aware that our streets are among the
cleanest in the world?

Do you know that every one in three
Singaporeans owns his home?

Aren’t you pleased that we have the lowest
crime rate in the world?

Aren’t you delighted that Singapore has been
ranked as the most successful economy in Asia?

We are Number One!

Are you happy?

Nobody thought to ask that question; instead
of the enthusiastic ‘Ay, ay!’, Singaporeans might have looked puzzled, or
looked uneasily at each other. Maria thought, maybe I could write a little
collection of satirical stories, beginning with one on the decreed power of the
G.C.E. O Level Certificate: a school principal, against the promptings of her
heart, turns the school into a virtual boot camp to secure good exam results,
the students suffer enormous anxiety, and the school suddenly finds itself in
the midst of a political storm when its poor exam results coincide with a spate
of student suicides.

I will have to persist in my hypocrisy and
use the very instrument I despise, thought Maria Seetoh, if I want to get my
students to pass those wretchedly intimidating exams. As English language
teacher, she felt the brunt of the intimidation, for English language had
highest ranking among the subjects; a poor grade in the English language paper
would render the entire certificate quite worthless for getting into the junior
colleges, and thence into the university. The road to higher learning, a good
career and a happy, successful life in the society was unremittingly laid out
for the young Singaporean, and the burden of launching him upon that road fell
largely on the English language teacher.

There was also the plaque presented to her
as a token for her role in improving the English language results of St Peter’s
Secondary School over the years; now she would have to outdo herself. Her
special concern was for a group of students who came from purely
dialect-speaking homes and environments; they were sure to do badly in their English
paper, being incapable of writing a grammatically correct sentence if it
exceeded ten words.

One of them whose name was Hong Leng, a very
thin boy with a large Adam’s apple and grave-looking eyes behind his thick
glasses, stopped her one afternoon as she was walking to the staffroom and
said, ‘Miss Seetoh, I very scared. I can get distinction in maths and science
and commerce but I sure to fail in the English paper. That mean I fail whole
exam. Can you give me extra homework? Or extra coaching?’

The boy was one of those desperately
hopeless cases every English language teacher invariably encountered and
eventually gave up on. Maria looked at him sadly, already seeing the
ignominious F9 in the certificate when he came to school to collect it some
months after the exams.

She said lamely, ‘I’ll see what I can do,
Hong Leng,’ meaning she could do little. It was difficult to shake off that
look of despair which followed her all the way home.

The next day, as she was walking out of the
school gates, a very thin, worn-out looking woman approached her. Speaking in
dialect she introduced herself as Hong Leng’s mother, and then, to Maria’s
horror, she whipped out of her tattered handbag a large envelope, half opened
to show the wad of dollar notes inside, and tried to press it into her hand.
Bribery of a teacher in any form was a highly culpable act, to be reported
instantly; Maria felt nothing but pity for the woman who was probably a cleaner
at some restaurant or shopping centre.

She said severely, ‘You must never do that
again,’ walked on miserably and in that moment was fired by the determination
to do whatever it took to get Hong Leng to achieve at least a passing grade in
the English language paper of the G.C.E. O Level exams.

The examination system had suddenly become
that monster in the cave, which, if it could not be slain, could at least be
avoided and outwitted. Maria Seetoh, she told herself, Hong Leng’s mother has
thrown at you the greatest challenge of your teaching career, and you have to
accept it. The greatest challenge, she suddenly realised, had nothing to do
with the ideals of her chosen profession and everything to do with brute
bread-and-butter realities.

What she called the Eureka Moment, when the
odd bits floating about in her imagination suddenly came together to form a
complete story, sometimes happened when she was doing the most mundane things,
such as sweeping the floor or brushing her teeth, as if her wildly soaring muse
needed to be dragged down to earth. She would then pause, wide-eyed, to let the
newly born story scroll through her mind, committing it to paper, in quick
notes, as soon as she was free of the day’s tasks. The equivalent of that
magical moment came as she was sipping coffee, well past midnight, after poring
over a stack of past G.C.E. O Level English Language papers, scrutinising the
wide range of composition titles and topics offered to candidates to see if she
could comprehend the unruly foe, study its every sinister feature and come up
with a method to dodge its moves. Feeling that delightful cartoon flashbulb
lighting up inside her head, she said excitedly to herself, ‘I can help poor
Hong Leng.’