Under the shade of neron light shedding from the Bank of China tower, the familiar uneasiness that I thought I had overcome and put aside many years ago returned. I have not felt this sickness, which my limited language fail to capture, for quite a while. This is sick. A conversation I was having with an old gweilo whose banking career is as booming as his figure, seemed to be irrelevant. I was asking a gentleman who is entering into the legal industry some advice, and the significance of his words, vanished once I left the Supreme Court Road at Mid-Level. Glasses of red wine, tone of British English, bankers and lawyers laughters - bloody hell, after half a year absence at St. Andrews, I am totally out of place. I literally wanted to step back and take the first train home once I stepped in the reception. Well my pride did not allow me to. After a dinner with friends, I walked through the half-empty PP, squeezing myself into Admiralty MTR Station to catch a train home. It took me to cross the harbour, swish through the mountains and finally I see a jungle of obsolete buildings. A place where I truly belong to, however reluctant I want to admit in the presence of my St. Andrews Colleagues. I got off the West Rail with a crowd putting their head in their phones. Their faces were disfigured with exhaustion and listlessness. I see no purposes in their eyes in their mechanical bodies.
This evokes another trivial thing happened to me the other day - S whom I've recently made acquaintance with on a friend of mine's birthday dinner, asked me how did I celebrate count-down. She was skiing in Japan with her family. I replied her that I went to a local tea-restaurant with a childhood friend of mine. She uttered disbelief, and frowned with a mixture of doubt and confusion, as if asking: "Are you fxxxing messing up with me?" Honesty seems to the best policy only when it is convincing. I did not say much after that. To be fair, most of my 'friends' are either in Europe or Japan throughout the whole holiday. It is quite hard for them to understand that there are people working hard on the last day of the year and their presences are not counted by media, by government, or by anyone.
There are many questions for which I fail to find answers, though I thought I understood them and solved them well. They re-emerged. Dad asks me tonight how was the St. Andrews networking going - I was not in a mood to talk much about it. He tried to offer some advice to me and I cut it off, and I felt guilty for being rude to him. He, with his very limited education, is offering what he knows as the best to me. However I think he did detect a sense of frustration from me. The problem is that, I do not feel comfortable being with these people, these "elites". I do not live in the same world with them. They live in Tai Tam, Repulse Bay, and Mid-Level. I am the only one who take the MTR back to Yiu Shing House, a flat of 350 square foot, housing four adults. I have to do my reading and homework in my bed simply there is only one table and chair.
I could not help being enveloped by a feeling of guilt every now and then. Dad is struggling paying my tuition fees this year and the coming year. Do I regret declining the Law School offer from the CUHK, yes I do sometimes, especially at the high time of present economic crisis. But I am also convinced that difficult phase will pass and a good St. Andrews degree will surely take me a higher level than the short-term comfort of going to a local law school. The cost of the pathway to St. Andrews is so heavy to my parents that I could not help but reexamine and rethink my decisions I made a year ago. At the depth of my heart I still believe that it was a difficult, tough decision that ensures a great pressure to me and my family, however opens a potential of a better-off future ahead. But the pain and pressure causing to my family, to me, is insufferable. I know at the end of the day Dad will be able to collect the tuition fees I need - this is not the first time we walked into a tuition fees crisis. But the pain and cost bother me deeply.