I finished watching Quantum of Solace a couple of nights back. And it was when James Bond finally caught the villain and said goodbye to the girl and the credits rolled up the screen that I realized that I could no longer avoid writing about the STPM. Things started two years ago had now come full circle with the movie. I couldn’t ignore those things, and I was by then sick of waking up from repeated nightmares of the STPM Math T paper. So here I sit: pen in mouth, screen on word processor, trying my best to relive - in paragraphs - a very personal hell that ended two or so weeks ago.
The story of a Malaysian public exam begins not with the first day you enter the exam hall, IC and exam slip and pencil-case clutched to your pounding chest; but in the moment you decide to sit for it. I can tell you that there are a hundred alternatives to taking one: some of my privileged friends jump ship (quite literally) onto the sandy beaches of Australia or New Zealand. Others run away to Singapore, that eternally kiasu land of the underperforming birth register. For the Form 6 student the decision to sit for the STPM is often a bitter one by the end of the year: all of us had had the opportunity to go somewhere – anywhere – and to carry on with our lives without ever sitting for another bloody Malaysian paper. But we made our choice and we picked that path. Or perhaps someone picked it for us.
A person wiser than I am pointed out to me a long time ago that certain individuals lived their entire lives in the shelter of one institution or another. These were the people who would grow up under the shelter of school and would later skitter, when it was time, under the open sky the same way a rabbit might cross a meadow: fearful of the hawk and the eagle; fearful of death from above. The shelters that would invariably follow would be predictable and safe: the University, the Company, eventually the Retirement Plan, sometimes the Hospice. Form 6 was a way to stretch the first shelter, and stretch it I did.
The STPM is tough. Some say that it is the third hardest pre-U examination on the planet, though I cannot find any evidence that actually proves this. (Most of it is I think nothing more than hearsay, passed on in kopitiams and Internet forums. There's a thread on a student forum somewhere that eventually spirals into a heated rhetorical discussion on why the education system sucks and why our keris-weilding education minister should be fired. Very Malaysian. Yes). But the STPM is hard, I'll grant it that. But it's also public, and it is free, and you cannot really argue with free.
There is something inexorably sad about a Malaysian public exam. Thousands of our students go through them every year, but very few talk about it in gatherings beyond the uncomfortable shrug and a singular wave of hand. Our newspapers are comfortable with writing about the success stories, the girls and the boys who achieve ever-escalating numbers of A1s and A+s. We are happy to indulge ourselves in newspaper ads advertising 'the secrets to success' for students, filled with glowing pictures of parent and child and some equally glowing statement (eg: Student Success Program has enabled my darling Tiffany to score straight As for her UPSR/PMR/SPM! Thank you so much Student Success Program!). We also have television ads selling us 'exam grade' stationary, acted out by bookish smart-looking students who jump in the air with pencils and erasers clutched in their hands, or who look up from an exam paper and flash us a megawatt smile and a thumbs-up. Which is really, totally, surreal.
But our society is a strange one, and we are used to keeping mum about the most obvious of things. Nobody - and this is also strange - has actually written about the experience of sitting for a major public exam. We regard our exams as a necessary rite of passage in our society - we treat it like puberty and sex: human experiences that everybody would go through sooner or later. So I suppose what happens after is perfectly natural: we get everything over and done with, and then we fast forward the next few months in the hopes of erasing all memory of what went on during the bloody thing.
A Malaysian public exam begins in the choice to sit for it, and in my case I chose Form 6. As a whole those two years taught me - more than anything - how to be lonely. My schedule for a good part of 2008 went something along the lines of Monday: Judo; Tuesday: Judo; Wednesday: Tuition; Thursday: Judo; Friday: Tuition; Saturday: Gym; Sunday: Judo/Stamina Training. I now have no idea how I survived all that, but three months ago my father attended an Old Thomian dinner and sat next to my Math teacher, who was a school mate from his era. They talked, and eventually he turned to my father and demanded to know why I was sleeping so much in class.
Other things changed. My friends eventually stopped asking me out for movies and drinks; I found that I could no longer identify with many them. Most were more interested for me to hear about their lives, rather than to listen to me talking about mine. I was also lonely because I was the only Form 6 student on the state team, and nobody else could identify with the academic and physical workload I was carrying for half the year. The pressure was intense. I looked for empathy, but it was very hard to find: very few people around me could understand the fatigue of what I was going through. I remember thinking once that I could share my problems with the Thomians on the state bowling team, but then I realized that most of them were staring whenever us Judo guys came to the gym. We screamed with our squats; they did dumbbell rolls.
Sitting here, writing this, I guess that maybe I tapped into mental reserves I never knew I had; but I believe I also got through because I learned to draw upon the strength of a few of my friends. Most didn't listen to me, or didn't want to - I often directed our conversations to their lives, their problems. And, yes, while it wasn't perfect it was very soothing: talking to them about inconsequential things reminded me that there was a world out there, and it wasn't all Judo and exams. The talking about myself I left to God - He was probably the only empathetic person who knew what I was going through, and I worked out most of my frustrations through Him. Form 6 was a year where I became Christian again, in an inward way, a quiet way.
There is a very specific kind of panic associated only with exams. It is a kind of guilty, flighty weight that drops onto your lap when you're not busy studying for one subject or other. Before a public exam any time not spent in front of a book is time wasted, and every Malaysian student knows this instinctively. But your panic only gets worse when when you cannot for the life of you bring yourself to start. Once you do start, however, a different kind of torture emerges.
I never did liked studying. When I was 9 or 10 I came up with the ingenious solution of putting a novel in the centre of an open Chinese textbook, and I lifted the book to my face so that anybody looking from afar would assume I was studying Chinese. I completed quite a few novels this way, including perhaps a quarter of the Hardy Boys series. I had a fantastic time, until my parents caught me.
Serious studying for a public examination differs from person to person. Some of my friends study best when in a group, and they stay back in the libraries of their respective schools, poring over books and memorizing equations into the wee hours of the night. I learned very quickly that two things were problems for me: 1) I was easily distracted, and 2) I wasn't a reader.
The first I solved by downloading albums and listening to them on my iPod, playing them on constant loop until they blotted out the sentient sounds of any study area. There are now several albums I will never touch again, chief amongst them TV On The Radio's seminal Dear Science. The second problem I solved by doing exercises on sheaves of paper, crumpling them en masse at the end of the week and tossing them into my bedroom's wastepaper basket. My bedroom itself became a place I could barely recognize: I rarely did any studying there, chiefly because it was filled to the brim with distractions any geek would immediately love - novels and magazines and my writing notebooks, plus little puzzles and Pokemon figures that you couldn't help but mess with.
No, I did my studying at the dining table, under a freezing air conditioner. And later on, when my youngest sister finished with her PMR and began watching TV and generally started to have a good time I began to study at my aunt's place, at an uncomfortable dining table where I would occasionally set my head down against my textbooks, earbuds playing Radiohead, and sleep.
My study patterns changed because of one other thing. Some idiot at the top of St Thomas's administrative piramid thought it was a good idea to keep all the students in to the very last day of school. It was a logical failure on many fronts: most of the teachers had no idea what to do with us, and very few of the exercises they gave (save perhaps Chemistry) we finished. But the bigger problem with such policy was that each of us had different problems at that stage - some of us were weaker in Math, and some of us were weaker in Physics, and the only people who really did know and could affect change were ourselves. What we needed was the freedom to divide our time amongst the subjects according to our strengths and weaknesses, but what the school forced us to do was to sit and follow all the subjects, according to a rigid school timetable. I was beyond tired of arguing with the administrative office by then, so I changed my study patterns to suit my school days. Every night at about 11 I drank coffee, and turned in only around 2 or 3. I would then stumble through school and collapse at home in the afternoon, before beginning to study all over again at 7. It was a horrible study schedule, but it had to be done.
There is a very surreal quality to the opening minutes of your very first paper. It's a little like an out-of-body-experience: you open the question booklet and some part of you knows that these are the very questions coming generations will study and will attempt to trump. That same part of you can't believe you're actually sitting there, writing answers to questions that collectively, when finally marked, will determine you your future. But of course such thinking is counter-productive, and all of us learn to shut out that little voice very quickly in the opening minutes. The invigilators tell you the same things before each and every session: that cheating is not allowed, that you are only allowed to leave for toilets after the first 30 minutes and before the last 30. They don't talk about exits and life-jackets, but it's a close thing. Sometime during the Physics paper 2 I forget the toilet injunction, and I finish my last essay with my legs crossed so hard I had to take a couple of minutes to uncross them in a toilet cubicle later.
The STPM has papers divided over the space of three weeks, with two papers per week. I suppose this was to make sure you would go crazy long before the exams were over, and it was very effective in that regard. The second day was Math T, paper 1. I couldn't do half the questions, and I came home to a week of no-exams, half of which I spent staring at the ceiling, or the wall. I was depressed. I called my friends. Nick told me that it still wasn't over, that I shouldn't give myself room for regret. Horng Eng told me stories about her STPM, stories that both scared and provoked me. Paul told me to stop acting like an idiot.
My last paper was Physics paper 1. It was an objective paper, and it was a subject I sucked at. My friends were going to Richmond's Place later in the evening, they invited me but I could see they weren't convinced I would go. I didn't. I stood under the school hall, the sunlight gold and the shadows long, and I stared out at the empty carpark for a long time.
I enjoyed Quantum of Solace. Bond was still recovering from Vesper Lynd's death, and he had already turned into a man scarred by duty, one who never wanted to fall in love again. And at the end of the movie the beautiful Camille leans over to Bond and says to him: "I wish I could free you from your prison. But your prison is in there." And then she kisses him. I don't know what this says about me or pop culture, but I found myself identifying with it.
Two years ago when the SPM ended I shouted for joy. Garrick and Paul and I walked down McDougall road and made the crossing to the cinema. We were going to watch Casino Royale and we would be introduced to the world of Vesper Lynd and James Bond and the Aston Martin DBS for the very first time. The sunlight was gold and the shadows were long, and we were laughing and walking and talking and we had not a care in the world. It was a happy time, and why shouldn't it be? Our future was bright before us, like the evening sun that illuminated our faces; the same sun that lighted mine after the STPM, the sun that was the ending of a Malaysian public exam.
Writer's Note: This piece took an unbelievably long time to write, involving one draft and 5 unfinished ones, plus a semi-serious edit and polish. And I don't think it's very good. It seems that after every public exam I suffer a short period of writing depression, where I just can't seem to produce good stuff. Blasted exams. That being said, I hope to never revisit the months I spent doing the things I talked about above, so I beg your forgiveness if I leave this piece as it is.
