The Catherine Lim Collection by Catherine Lim

Author:Catherine Lim [Lim, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish Internationl (Asia) Pte Ltd
Published: 2011-10-04T10:31:22+00:00

Lee Geok Chan

Lee Geok Chan was one of my students in pre-university. One of the many for whom long hours of study ensured, at most, a scraping through the examinations. She was a pale, small-sized, earnest-looking girl, always seen with a book or a sheaf of notes in her hand. Her father was a tailor, her mother a washerwoman; there were three brothers and two sisters. Geok Chan was the second in the family and the eldest girl.

Her desire to pass the examination, get a job and help the family put her in a constant state of nervous effort, so that she was to be found at all times blinking anxiously as she took down a teacher’s lecture verbatim, copying notes from the blackboard with extreme diligence, or writing an essay with a concentration all the more remarkable for the noise and complete abandon of those around her in the classroom.

I always found it painful to have to tell Geok Chan, in response to her timid inquiry of how she could improve in her written expression, that her English was rather weak, her use of words frequently inappropriate, and that she often strayed off the point in her essay. She would nod in docile agreement, but at the same time the disappointment showed visibly on her face. Additional lessons did not seem to have helped and each week it became a special pain for me to hand back a piece of work, to see it snatched up eagerly and checked for its grade, and then to see the crestfallen look on the thin, pale face.

Like so many others, Geok Chan was preparing for the A-level examinations at the end of the year. In the last month before the examination, she often came up to me with a quick nervous smile and handed me a sheaf of essays to mark.

One of the essays caught my attention. It was better than the others; in fact, it was the best she had ever written, and there was hope yet, for her, if she could produce something like that in the examination. I forget the exact words of the essay topic she had picked from somewhere, but it was about happiness. Geok Chan had written simply and with conviction about her concept of happiness; some parts of the essay were, I thought, beautifully lyrical. I suddenly realized that, freed from the constraints of conventional essay topics, she wrote with ease and obvious pleasure.

I called her up and commented favourably on her essay. She glowed with pride. “If I write like that in the General Paper, will I get a credit?” she wanted to know. I had to warn her, rather sadly, that the essay topics in the General Paper were not of the kind that permitted this spontaneity. I encouraged her, though, to go on expressing her innermost feelings.

“They’re in me all the time. I couldn’t express them before, now I think I can,” she said, blinking not with nervousness but, instead, with a kind of feverish joy.

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