Valediction

I was just rummaging through my papers at home, finding more stuff to recycle, and then i saw this. Well, i think it would be familiar to all those under Miss Sie for English, but since majority of you shouldnt be, here goes:

I don't know about you, but my idea of a graduation was one outdoors where the sun shines and the soft breeze blows. And the ceremony would end with mortar-boards filling the skies. But since it's evening, and dawn for all the insects, I guess we’ll settle for air-conditioning and comfortable seats.

Family and friends, we are gathered here today to end a chapter of 203 individual paperback novels. This particular chapter of our lives spans a period of 10 years for some, 4 years for others.

Lightweight and compact, it serves as a reference material for our later lives. This chapter contains phone numbers of friends, memories of true friendship; the anguish and frustrations of growing up, failures and bad grades; the happy times we smashed birthday cake into each others faces; the times we played ‘zero-point’ on the front porch after school; the art of mimicking teachers; the location of the best ‘mee pok’ stall in Singapore, and the meaning of being a person.

Such a valuable book, you say, and the publishers didn’t bind it in leather with gold trim? No, this book is not to be treated like a set of Brittanica Encyclopedia, this book is not for display; it is to be read to shreds, doggy-eared, underlined, high-lighted, commented on, carried around, soaked in the rain, quoted from like an O’level literature text. The only thing that we cannot do to it is rewrite it.

No other book, I guarantee, will teach us to be frank and laugh at ourselves. Which street directory will give you the exact locations of the ‘red bricks’, ‘stone tables’ or ‘yellow railings’—where one is likely to find a SC girl doing last minute homework as she is to hear the latest local gossip. This sacred book will tease your imagination into remembering the horrors of handing in late-work, and og course instruct you, step-by-step, on fool-proof methods to getting out of trouble.

SCGS is a microcosm of the real world. It is the training ground of a privileged few who are brought together by fate and welded into one soul by the SC spirit.

There is no secret to success. SC’s success is due to Sincerity, Courage, Generosity and Service. No one person is responsible for the growth and cultivation of an SCGS ‘Kim Gek’. Many thanks must be given to the people who made the buds blossom.

Thank you teachers for rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty in the process of sculpting us. Thank you for paying attention to the details we always leave out. Thank you for instilling that we not only know how to buy a drink from the vending machine, but also learn how a vending machine works, so that we can get a drink even without money. Most of all, thank you for caring enough to scream, yell and shout at us; we know it’s your indirect way of saying you love us very much, but you honestly shouldn’t feel shy about saying how you really feel.

We must not, of course forget our non-teaching staff. The office-staff who print all our much-dreaded exam and test papers, and also hide them with so much skill that we can’t put fire to them. The cleaning ladies who keep our school cleaner than our bedrooms despite the fact that we spend more time in school than our bedrooms. To the gardener who keeps the school’s padi-field’ neat, tidy and free of dog turd. And not forgetting to mention the canteen stall- holders who make school food with breaking our day-old crash diets. Thank you, all of you.

As you can see, everyone in SCGS is involved in polishing the jewels that leave Emerald Hill. From the school cat, to the always underfoot primary school girls, to the teachers, to the non-teaching staff, to the sexually curious secondary school girls, to the principal. Should one fail to do his or her part, the whole structure will crumble – this interdependency is what makes the SC spirit so undivided, a single unit, a family.

Today, 203 young ladies will be unleashed into the world they have been prepared for. Although each is an individual who will follow her heart and pursue her own goals and ambitions, they all share a common spirit, the SC spirit, which will always be a part of them where ever they go – for now and forever.

Caroline Lee
Sec 4/1
29th September 1993

Well, it seems so different from the last time I read it. Then, we were sitting in our wonderful 4 gy classroom, complaining that we had to write some silly testimonial, but now after graduating, and changing the tense from being 'in SCGS' to being 'from SCGS', this valediction seems so much more genuine and true. though it was meant for the graduation sec 4 batch of 1993, these emotions are certainly not to fade with time. After the loss of our wonderful Mee Pok man a few weeks ago, dear do we miss that mee pok. My order would be : "Hi uncle!! err kuai ban kway teow gan ($1.50 dry), bu yao la jiao (no chilli) , jia duo dian chu (add more vinegar), hai you jia san mao rou!(and also add 30 cents worth of meat)". Thank you uncle for totally being able to understand my almost incomprehensible chinese. Sometimes we do have to no longer possess something before we feel the pain of losing it. Well, Ms Caroline Lee ( not sure of her status now) has mentioned, some girls have spent 10 years and some 4 years in SC.

For me, it would have to be only 4 years, but my SC life has and will certainly neither be --lightweight, nor compact.