The School I Went To

Hong Kong

My classmate Anil passed away in Bangalore from an epileptic seizure two weeks ago. I didn’t know him at all. To be honest I had to go into my year book and find his name to remember which Anil he was. But what it did do was make another person in my year stop me in a cafe to tell me the news and we spoke for a good half hour. We probably talked more then than we ever did in the seven years we were in school together. We actually had a very good conversation, it is nice to sometime acknowledge your school years. I spend a lot of time denying it existence or least I feel defensive about having gone to the school that I did, as it was up a cul de sac, private, uniformed and zoned in a certain part of town and people always have a lot of assumptions about us who went there. It’s like a cookie cutter mode that we are all branded with. A picture forms in people’s head when they find out because what they can conjecture is where you lived, what kind of life you had, and all the impressions, much of it negative that they assume you must be.

I caught myself doing it a while back. I had a few nasty words to say about someone, and one of the things that came shooting out of my mouth was, “You know, he went to boarding school in the east coast, and you know, what they are like.”

“Yeah, all those private school people.” My friend replied, and I stopped.

“Can I take that back?” I said,

“Why?”

“Because I went to a private school, with uniform up on a hill for god’s sake.”

“You guys are so funny.”

“What do you mean?”

“All of you, the boarding school, private school, international school crowd, you all have this thing…”

“What thing?”

“I can’t explain it, it’s just this thing… you all have, like you all pretend it doesn’t matter, and it’s not who you are, you’re not like how people think you should be but you all know. Like you size each other up or something. You talk about it among yourselves, but not really with other people, Anthony is like that, Kristen is like that, you are like that.”

“You know why?”

“No.”

“Because it’s embarressing. Because somehow you’re supposed to be this person, and none of us are those people. I don’t think we ever felt like we were part of it when we were in it, and now we’ve been out of it longer than we’ve been in it, it still kinda get dragged around. It’s kinda like people always say, “I was from Cheung Chau, the Wong Tai Sin Projects, the Bronx, or Harlem, or Bedford, or Liverpool.” and it means something to them, and how it’s always where they are from. But with us, it’s true but it means certain things, that you don’t want to talk about because it seems like you’re showing off or people don’t like you. So you don’t talk about it unless the other person knows in their own way, and won’t judge you.”