Miss Seetoh in the World

Catherine Lim

Description

Miss Maria Seetoh, a teacher of English and Literature in St Peter's Secondary School in Singapore, sees herself as a 'simple soul who only wants to be a good and happy person', and has a dream to write stories about 'simple, ordinary people going about their daily lives'. However, God/ Providence/Fate/Chance, etc. decrees otherwise. She is thrown into the tumult of a disastrous marriage that begins as strangely as it ends, a failed love affair that 'hollows her out', and a controversial teaching career that ends with her abrupt resignation. Most of all, she is caught in a political event as shocking in its causes as in its consequences. Set against the backdrop of modern-day Singapore, a hugely successful city-state grappling with changes and challenges that could corrode the very soul, the novel ultimately examines, with wit, wry irony and warm understanding, the unchanging quandaries of the human condition, when love and sex, religion and politics, tradition and modernity, can all come together in an unruly mix, to show human nature at its most depressing and its most inspiring.

Informations

• Publié par: MarshallCavendishM
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789814351928
• Langue: English

Extrait

© 2011 Catherine Lim
 
Cover art by Opal Works Co. Limited
 
Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions
An imprint of Marshall CavendishInternational
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eISBN: 978-981-435-192-8 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
One
 
In April 1993, barely a month after herhusband’s death, Miss Maria Seetoh reverted to her maiden name. It was surely aslight to the sanctity of the married state, endorsed both by her church in amajor sacrament, and by her society in a major economic policy by which onlymarried women qualified for government-subsidised housing. Moreover, it spoiltthe good name of the quietly, properly mourning widow.
Miss Seetoh made her students use thedesired name when they stood up to greet her as she entered the classroom eachmorning. It had to be a carefully considered, systematic re-training of fortyyoung voices to make the switch from the old address, after such longhabituation, but she succeeded in a week. If a few forgot, the rest wouldgiggle and watch for her reaction, a full-blown ritual of pure entertainment.She would instantly, in frowning protest, step out of the classroom, waitoutside for a few seconds, and then re-enter to face, with calm severity, theforty boys and girls still standing at their desks. Magisterially erect, shewould wait for the little ripples of giggling whispers to subside into onehushed enveloping silence, and then, as the last act of the elaborate ritual,cup a listening hand to her right ear, now fully turned towards them, for thecorrected greeting. It always came in a perfectly synchronised roar of ‘GOODMORNING, MISS SEETOH!’, upon which the sternness vanished, and with a broadsmile and theatrical bow she acknowledged their success, and the students – oh,how she loved them! – broke out in loud applause and laughter.
Many years later, long after Miss Seetoh hadleft St Peter’s Secondary School, one of her students who became a well-knownSingapore artist held an exhibition which included a portrait of a young womanleaning against the wall, her arms folded across her chest, her face lit up bya smile that was the total glowing configuration of skin, mouth, teeth, eyes,eyebrows. Miss Seetoh’s smile was ever unique. The nostalgia of memory hadperfectly reproduced her trademark turned-up shirt collar and slightlyrolled-up shirt sleeves which together with her ponytail gave an impression ofperky confidence that some of her female students tried to copy. Less imitablewas that dazzling smile, also the tiny bird-like waist discernible in theportrait.
The principal of St Peter’s Secondary Schoolliked to speak of its portals of learning and tolerated their occasionalbattering by the seismic eruptions from Class 4C on the third floor. The effecton school morale, though, had to be carefully monitored and assessed, for thewalls separating the classrooms were thin, and already some students wereasking their teachers why only Miss Seetoh’s students were having all the fun.In the staff common room one floor below where the teachers went betweenlessons to mark students’ homework or sip coffee, some would ignore the ruckus,and a few silently roll their eyes upwards at the antics of St Peter’s maverickEnglish language and English literature teacher. Collectively, they were dull,dowdy and dour, beside the effervescent Miss Seetoh.
‘Come and look,’ said Mrs Neo one morning.She was the longest serving teacher in the school, with thirty-four years’service, just one short of earning the Golden Merit Medal from the Ministry ofEducation, and she courageously defended her traditional teaching methodsagainst the newfangled methodologies that the younger inspectors at theMinistry were sometimes emboldened to pass on to teachers in their trainingworkshops. It was said that after each workshop, she made a show of throwingaway the folders of teaching guides and notes, being completely secure, as therest of her colleagues were not, in her white-haired seniority and status asthe widow of one of Singapore’s most revered wartime heroes during the JapaneseOccupation. His heroic underground activities and eventual execution by theJapanese merited some paragraphs in the history textbooks used in the schools.
Mrs Neo was just now standing at a window inthe staffroom that looked out on the school grounds. Two colleagues joined her,and all smiled to see the strange scene in the distance. Under a large shadytree, earnestly watched by Miss Seetoh and a group of students, two boys,dressed in oddments of clothing meant to pass off as ancient Roman garb, wereengaged in a fearful struggle that ended with one falling to the ground with aroar of ‘Et tu Brute!’ and the other triumphantly standing over him with adagger realistically smeared with red ink. A third student, in a borrowedsarong worn toga-style, stepped out for a full oration over the corpse of themurdered Caesar before it suddenly sprang up from the grass, in an unscriptedfrenzy of crotch-pulling, screaming ‘Red ants!’, and then all was pandemonium.
The creative eccentricity of Miss Seetoh’steaching methods could be copied, but not of her married life which had endedas sensationally as it had begun, creating little private stirrings of gossipthat were not allowed to disturb the smooth surface of life at St Peter’s.
Once the principal came to investigate, probablysent by the surly discipline master who did not want to confront Miss Seetohhimself – Miss Seetoh of the refined manners and classy way of speaking thatexposed the fumbling inadequacies of the adversary.
‘What was that noise?’ the principal asked,and Miss Seetoh said, her eyes sparkling, ‘The noise of being happy, sir.’
Her new bright world would exclude thejudgemental and censorious, the dull and the lackluster, and would be confinedto her students, fresh-faced, eager-eyed, pure-minded, in their ridiculousuniforms matched precisely to the pristine sky blue and white colours of theVirgin Mary as she stood in her shrine in the school grounds.
For the few laggards who forgot the newaddress for their teacher, there was a penalty: each had to pay a fine of fiftycents, which Miss Seetoh promised to double or triple, for the amount tosnowball into a grand prize that would go to the student who had made thegreatest improvement in English grammar by the end of the year, just before theexams.
‘There you are,’ whispered Miss Teresa Pangto the colleague sitting beside her at the staff common room table.
She was the other English language teacher,secretly seething from the invidious comparisons, even if implied only, withMaria Seetoh. A school day was too long to sustain the appearance of cool,unconcerned professionalism, which consequently broke into little sharpcomments to whoever was around to listen: ‘Breaking another school regulationwith all those money transactions going on in class! Doing it with impunity, inher high class English.’
The famous carrots and sticks usedeverywhere in the society, from the government downwards, to get people tobehave – Miss Seetoh used both with equal ferocity, the school being society’smicrocosm. She was in a witch-hunt, she told her students, to drag out anddestroy every one of their grammatical mistakes. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘it’simportant for you to secure good grades in the O Level exams. But it’simportant for me to do something when I see you mangle and murder the languageof Shakespeare and Milton and Jane Austen!’ Miss Seetoh knew all the plays ofShakespeare.
A poster hung on the classroom wall, done bythe same artistic student whose interest then was only in cartoon caricatures,showing Miss Seetoh in black witch garb riding on a broomstick, carryingsomeone behind her, a man recognisable by his pronounced forehead dome, beardand ruffled Elizabethan neck collar as the revered Bard, cheering her on as sheused another broomstick to put to flight a giant octopus with a dozen wavingtentacles. Each deadly tentacle carried a sentence that carried a commongrammatical mistake, coloured bright green, to suggest a venomous snake. Thedouble deadliness, explained the artist, was to reflect the seriousness of theproblem, for according to Miss Seetoh, a composition with just three majorgrammatical errors would instantly earn a poor grade from the examiners in theCambridge Examinations Syndicate.
One error which most certainly origin