Everyone just knew I was amongst the lucky few who'd be safe from 'failure'. What happened after that was nobody's concern just yet. I was one of the students everyone knew would take the O Levels to junior college to university route, and we didn't have a remarkable number of those. Again, I was never as clever as Frances, but in that small community that was my secondary school, I did have occasions when I felt it would've been invalid or even insensitive for me of all people to be upset about not performing 'up to standard' or fretting over how I'd do in a test because at least I was performing better than a lot of my classmates. After all, she is incredibly clever and her worry is about being rejected by Cambridge there are a lot of other options for someone as brilliant as her. As the narrator, she shares her worries about not getting into Cambridge, and acknowledges that the reader would think she's being unreasonable, annoying, and highly privileged, and that her anxieties are invalid. It's the practical choice (though I think many people in Singapore would disagree), especially compared to pursuing art, which is what she enjoys.

Even my being a fan of Harry Potter probably came as a surprise to some people at first, as if they couldn't comprehend the idea of me being 'a fan' of anything that wasn't in a school textbook.įrances Janvier wants to pursue a degree in English Literature at Cambridge, not because she's passionate about or even properly interested in it, but because that's what she thinks is expected of her.

I liked the music, I liked watching the variety shows, and even though I wasn't fully aware of it then, I was getting girl-crushes all over the place. From 15, I was very invested in whatever fandoms caught my eye, be it Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Disney, or, yes, Kpop.

When I mentioned it to one of my then-classmates, what he said after getting over the shock of that revelation was, 'You're one of the last people I would expect to be into Kpop.' I guess my showing the slightest interest in pretty boys (and girls) dancing in sync or playing musical instruments, with elaborate sets and high-budget music videos, just didn't fit the image of the uninteresting study machine whose only future was a good university.

Just like Frances, I also had something I loved a lot, which didn't fit the impression that most of my schoolmates had of me, because it seemed so incongruous: I was into Kpop.

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