R.I.P.

It has been a tough week for me.

A student of mine committed suicide this Wednesday.

The principal called an urgent meeting in the middle of the lesson and announced the news.

My heart stopped for a moment.

He was a charming, helpful boy and was among the last ones I could think of to end his life in this way.

Shock strafed me hard and deprived me of speech. For an instant, coldness ran through my body. I found myself kept trembling throughout the meeting and tears burning in my eyes. I tried to take slow, deep breath to calm myself down but it couldn't make me feel any better. My mind whirled round and round searching for possible reasons, but no... it couldn't be true... I still can't believe this. He didn't leave any notes or so. The whole thing remained a mystery.

An image thrashed in my mind—he was standing on the brink of a building overlooking the town, wind riffling his hair. Icy night air ripped at his lung and froze him to the bone. He looked confused and stranded. Then he made a decision, an irreversible one.

I couldn't shrug the image off my mind. And when I thought of that, I could feel a mix of fear and chill from the very depth of my heart.

I couldn't recognize such an emotion and physical reaction. That's completely novice to me. It all happened at a sudden.

However, I had no time to take in the grief. I had a more important job to do.

I listened carefully to the principal about what to do next. Still trembling in shock, I then shuffled back to the classroom with the bad news.

I stopped at the door of my classroom and kept taking deep breath. Each breath I took echoed loud and slow. I told myself repetitiously not to lose control over my emotion and be strong.

My students were laughing and joking but the moment I stepped into the classroom, silence fell over. I must have looked terrible.

I did not say anything. I didn't even look at them for I feared I would burst into tears. Until the principal announced the news through the PA system.

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They were calmer than I thought. Some of them even worked on sakudo on newspaper after the announcement as if it was the death of an Afghan on the other side of the world. Yes, the boy was in 7B (not in 7A which is my class). But they have been studying in the same school for 7 years and some of them worked very closely together in Form Six. Couldn't they feel some kind of connection between them?

Was it defense mechanism? Sad but true, I don't think so.

They laughed their way home after school. And on the other day, the first 2 lessons were held by the class teachers so as to help the students ease through the grief. I shared my view with them and asked them to write down their feeling. Yes, it's not compulsory but some of them were too busy doing their revision for tests to give a fig for the passage I gave them or to write anything.

That was not the case when Mr. Leung, a teacher of this school, died.

I did feel a bit angry of their apathy even though my rational self told me different people have different reactions to death, in particular, death of different ones. That's rather personal and I couldn't expect everybody cried over the deceased ones—let alone that's not what I want.

But that kind of apathy scared me. It was eating us bit by bit.

We are not Jesus Christ and I know that it's quite impossible to love every single one on Planet Earth even though they are not our enemies.

But I have never thought that our love or mercy is so limited that it only applies to those whom we know really well and for a long time.

Death of care is even more scaring than death of a person we know.

I might have misunderstood the whole thing. But all of a sudden, things that happened didn’t make sense to me.

I was confused.

Anyway, I feel much better now. That's why I can reorganize my own feeling and write something that long-winded.

If you have finished the whole entry, I really thank you so much for your patience. I am really touched.

Get me out of here... please...

I'm depressed.

And I mean it (This term has been pretty much overused in this century). I'm not upset. I'm not just feeling blue.

I am d.e.p.r.e.s.s.e.d.

School and work keep flooding into my life like Hurricane Katrina trashing Gulf Coast and flooding New Orleans.

I can't go on.

I really can't.

I just want to leave everything behind and claim my life back.

* * * * *

After attending a few lectures of my Master programme, I really think I've made a terribly wrong decision to pursue a Linguistics degree in Chinese University.

The department is dominated by Mainland professors and Mainland students. Don't get me wrong. It's not a racial issue. But as my major is English, I do prefer a mix of professors with different ethnic origins so as to gain a more extensive exposure.

Moreover, the Mainland professors would naturally switch to Putonghua during the lecture not for the sake of giving a linguistics example but because they went short of English to express themselves.

And tonight, I attended a compulsory core course about phonics and phonetics, however, ironically, the lecturer kept making unforgivable pronunciation mistakes: she said "systim" instead of "system", "syllable" instead of "syllabus", "pronounciation" instead of "pronunciation", "read" (/ri:d/) instead of "read" (/red/) in past tense, "semister" instead of "semester", "sitress" instead of "stress", "situdy" instead of "study"; she couldn't pronounce /th/ and her /d/ was tooooooo strong...

The list went on...

Prof. Barley (who is an *cough*expert*cough* of the benchmark test and taught me how to handle it in PGDE) suddenly looks charming when standing next to her. The only pronunciation difficulty she has is with /j/ and /g/ (and maybe some intonation problems as well).

I can assure you this is not a problem with the accent. And I don't want to be mean. To be frank, I don't care about these things if it's just another course about morphemes and things like that. But this course is about phonics and phonetics and the lecturer couldn't even make a good demonstration of how to accurately apply the skills in real-life communication. I dare say some of my students can do a better job than her.

She said she was going to teach us how to pronounce some 300 IPA in this course. I'm sure she can pronounce them all well. But I doubt if being able to pronounce every single existing IPA correctly means being able to pronounce a single word properly.

When I looked at the lecturer (who is a PhD degree holder), I'm not convinced.

I really have had enough of all these unprofessional professors and lectures. How can I tolerate them for 2 years!

A second home

I will officially move into the dorm on Monday evening but its condition does not look fit for habitation. The renovation work of the dorm is still in progress and they're building something bridge-like next to it, so the whole area looks like a construction site.

In fact, the scaffolding is still clinging to the building and its interior smells of strongly acidic, cancer-causing substance. I had a quick look of the apartment on Friday but I felt like being on ground zero of a sarin gas attack. I tried to hold my breath when I got into the building but it didn't help much as the situation in the apartment was just as worse. My eyes watered fiercely the moment I entered the room. There was no fan installed in the room (there was ONE in my undergrad dorm!) and wind could not rush in as it was blocked by the green net (the construction thing) hanging on the scaffolding, so the odor was trapped in the room. I could only stay in there for some 30 seconds before I rushed out of that.

There was no drinkable water provided (again, we had it in undergrad dorm! I had to bring in my own kettle), no guard or janitor (that means nobody knows even if you got killed in the apartment. The acidic odor would mask the smell of corpse decomposition), no computer room (I can lead a Zen-like life) and no working light bulb in one of the toilets (luckily there are 2 washrooms).

So far as I observed, only a Mainland student has moved in and she told me that it took at least 2 weeks to get the whole thing ready. Anyway, I moved in some personal stuff which could sustain at least a week of survival on Saturday and will stay there on Monday after the orientation talk.

With a lovely roommate and a very friendly flatmate (so far), I'm sure I can have a happy time at dorm despite the chaotic surrounding. : )

PS Special thanks to Cath, hohoho...