A commitment of a lifetime

nobody@vox.com(Guojun) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 03:11:00 +0000

"The United World College Scholarship is presented to Lee Guo Jun, anticipating that through the international education, experience and community service, she will commit to the ideals of peace and justice, understanding and cooperation, and would implement these ideals through action and personal example.

Presented on the 28 July 2008
By the United World College Selection Committee (Singapore)"
________________________________________________________________________________

It went by so fast. It was something I had occasionally tried to picture since receiving the call in April, and once or twice allowed myself to imagine prior to that. "The Award Ceremony will be my marriage with UWC," I would tell my mother jokingly.

But in more than one way, that is true.

A UWC scholarship doesn't come with a bond - an obligation to spend a designated number of years working for the organisation that provided the scholarship - which is true for all government scholarships here of which I know. But being a torchbearer, living by the school's ideals - that is a commitment of a lifetime.

Apart from that, there's the 30 March entry in my diary:
"I predicted a letter from the UWC would arrive in the days following 27 March (if it is to arrive at all). It is 30 March today, and I am a lover waiting for a letter from her love, peering into the mailbox each day with a pounding heart, sweet anticipation and girlish impatience."

Well - if that was courtship - you get the flow!

When you open your album of memories, there will be those that show up in very high definition, those throughout which you had been very focused and grounded. The UWC Award Ceremony falls within the other category - those memories blurred over like a watercolour painting because you had experienced a great part of them with your heart and not your senses.

It began with my journey to the United World College of Southeast Asia with Daniel and Eileen, a journey flecked and streaked with the gold of the sunset (as well as another type of gold), and it united my worlds - different groups of people who mean the world to me - within the same time and space. Throughout the ceremony, I was very much present in the moment, but hardly within myself - which probably accounts for the blur. I was with those worlds, both simultaneously and in turn.

There was the UWC, a dream come true.

There were my parents, sitting in the back row. May I find a way to thank them someday. They came in a borrowed car to witness the ceremony that would take their daughter away from them for the final years of her teens - the final years before she becomes an adult and enters a world beyond their grasp? I imagine their hearts were at once with the ceremony and other concerns - among them the things that will go into my suitcases that have yet to be bought, and how to obtain them, afford them. Just two days ago, I came home to a bundle of fifty miniature Singapore flags. My mother had been present when Kimberley - my Singaporean second year - was telling me about the flag-exchanging tradition at UWC.

And then there were Daniel and Eileen.

Eileen, who had been the first to say, all those weeks ago, that she would definitely be attending the ceremony. Eileen, an incredible source of support, rapport and laughter alongside whom I had navigated the past three years of my life. Daniel, who without making any promises or asking any questions, not even about how late it would end or who else would be there, had came. Just like that. The first person I've met who would say something every so often and I would forget to breathe for a moment wondering how it could have been, that those words could have come from my own mouth - an expected connection I would have been grateful to find if it took a lifetime. Daniel who is also one of the people with the highest, purest soul vibrations I have ever known. And by that I mean a purity that transcends by far what you have printed across the front of your T-shirt. I see him as someone who walks through people's lives and helps them find themselves again, and I am infinitely grateful to have a friend like him.

We found our way to UWC together, Eileen, Daniel and me. The tiny entrance at the end of the long winding Maidstone Road that grew darker as we walked along it (the main entrance was concealed in the name of construction). That, we quipped, was the final interview. Don't expect to receive the scholarship if you can't find your way to the ceremony!

Had I to pick the most unforgettable snapshot of the evening, it wouldn't be that of me receiving the scholarship, but a bus stop in the evening light, with these friends of mine poring over the bus directory and reading off it "United World College".

With me too were Quynh Anh and Yu Neng, who remembered the ceremony even as, late one night a week ago, it slipped my mind (o horrors, how could it have?) as we rehearsed for what might well be the final play I would be part of in TSD. Kris...Daveen...Darren...Elaine...Jnanee...when people of my relative circumstance hear about the things I hope to do or what I believe, or the way I see people, they might frown upon what they see as idealism, but I would tell them one thing...that it's the responsibility of people who can be idealistic to be so.

And what injustice would I be doing to these people if I weren't to be so!

Because where idealism is concerned, it all boils down to people, and people think of people as such an immense, complex, inscrutable concept, but really, these angels on earth right next to me, if they aren't people - if they aren't humanity - who is?

So I shall be going to the UWC to learn more about how I may love humanity. And that's a commitment of a lifetime.

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A commitment of a lifetime