At the outset I should say that this is a Minz-Mama story and includes an announcement at the end. Now read on.***
On Chinese New Year’s Eve, 1992, which was the 3rd of February that year, my mother gave to each of her students in her three Sec 4 Chinese classes at RI a red packet containing a pair of chocolate coins and a letter. In her letter she urged all of them to reevaluate their lives, values, and ambitions, and for them to set their life goals for their future. In it she recounted the story of a Japanese classmate she had as an undergraduate, whose worldview inspired her to live her life in a way that gives back to society. She then asked them to reply to her letter as their first composition assignment of the year. It was a teaching experiment, for she was meant to be teaching 私函, and why shouldn’t they write a real letter to her than to that much-maligned fictional 小明, whose mailbox must be overflowing with reproaches from his imaginary cousins？ Besides, these were ‘O’ Level students, and it was timely for them, as they went on to specialisation in JC, to be considering their future paths.
Years later, meeting a lady who in conversation turned out to be the mother of a student she had taught that year, my mother came home, opened up a huge yellow ring binder, and removed a photocopy of that student’s reply letter. Give this to your son: this was his ambition when he was 16. In the letter he had written to my mother that he wished to do “something to do with computers.” And what is your son doing now, my mother asked. Answer: he works with an IT company.
Another time, seeing in the papers that a former student was standing as an MP, she looked in her binder for his letter. It seems incredible, but there it was already, in the letter: back then even as a 16 year old, he told her he wanted to be involved in public service, that he’d set his heart on being someone who can serve his country and his people.
That she has a binder of these replies isn’t accidental. She got the idea of keeping them from Edmondo de Amicis’ book Cuore, a family favourite. In the Amicis, the narrator Enrico’s father reads in the paper of his old school teacher, whom he had long assumed to have passed on. The father takes his son with him to pay the teacher a visit. Towards the end of the visit, the old man opens a drawer filled with bundles of yellowed papers, searches within, removes a sheet, and hands it to the father. It is an old exercise the father had done. The teacher had kept one piece of homework from every single pupil he has ever taught.
***
Rummaging in the binder, turning over pages and pages of boyish handwriting on RI composition paper:
some students didn’t have much to say, some clearly thought of it as just another homework assignment requiring a dutiful response, but there were also those who were inspired and wrote pages in response (one: “no teacher has ever sent us a personal letter before!“), speaking about their aspirations and anxieties about their futures, their life goals and career choices, the tug-of-war between their desires and their families’ expectations, perplexity about the world at large, even some skepticism about my mother’s friend (but he doesn’t really exist, does he?).
To those who responded with fledgling aspirations and timid hopefulness, she responded at the back of their essays with encouragment. To one who said he thought getting through life was like having to unlock an endless series of complex locks, she wrote this ringing reply: “虽然人生又开不完的锁，但我们不怕开锁，因为在开锁的过程中，我们培养了信心毅力，我们累积了经验，我们的生活也变得多姿多彩，甚至我们自己也变得更成熟。” (It may be true that there are endless locks to be opened, but we are not afraid of unlocking them (are we?). In the process of unlocking them, we are building confidence and perseverance, and we are accumulating experience. Our lives will become more colourful, more interesting, ad we ourselves will grow more mature.“)
To another lamenting that his peers were all doing so much better than he was, the admonition: 临渊羡鱼，不如退而结网。现在不抓紧每一分一秒，振作，发奋，尚待何时？(Rather than sitting by deep waters wishing for fish, better to retreat and weave your fishing nets. If you will not seize the moment now to reinvigorate youre life, what time are you waiting for?)
To those who spoke of specific material ambitions and their longing for success, she endorsed their desire to have 一番作为 but cautioned 我们不能在世上白走一遭，一定要对社会做出贡献。 To some she responded more playfully. To one considering architecture school: I hope you’ll be as great an architect as someone like IM Pei one day.(像贝聿铭一样了不起！ — I didn’t even know the mother liked IM Pei.）
Above all, she affirmed human effort over fate, the will to do and to be. The ones who were most rebuked were those who said that 命运是上天安排的 or something along those lines about come-what-will and best-laid-schemes gang-aft-agley. She disagreed vehemently — true, there are many things that life sends and that we have no control over, but what she is talking about was not what we achieve but how we prepare ourselves for the future we want. That regardless of such twists and turns in our destinies, we should, for our own part, work at “肯定自己的存在，超越自己的弱点，创造自己的风格” — by now you will have surmised the mother likes anaphoras and parallel constructions — (to work at reaffirming our being, overcoming our weaknesses, and creating our own style or signature of living in this world — an adaptation of 刘墉.)
Wondering too, where each of these people are today — they must be 38 now if they were 16 in 1992 — and how many of these letters can be matched to their present careers and way of life. My mother says that she’d like to return these letters (there are slightly over 100 in the binder) to their writers, so that they might look back on themselves as teenagers, and to track their life trajectories from that february in 1992.
So, this is the announcement:
If you were (or know someone who is) an RI boy in your Sec 4 year in 1992 (specifically 4A, 4B and 4F), and were taught by Mrs Heng Geok Hoon，or 郑玉芬老师 as she would have been known, please contact us (see main webpage) with your current address, and we will post you a copy of your letter.
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird