The educational system in Hong Kong was very stressful and competitive. Students were forced by their parents to have tutoring in almost every subject, just to make it to the top tier. My parents wanted to shield me from that environment. Further, Hong Kong was scheduled to be handed over from the United Kingdom to the government of China in 1997. This created a lot of uncertainty as to what Hong Kong would become. For all these reasons, my parents decided to move to Canada.
At the age of 15, I had a lot of anticipation about senior high. Feel free to call me naive, but I thought it would be something lifted out of a scene from High School Musical and My Super Sweet 16. Everything I had learned about Western teen culture had come from TV and movies, so I was certain that the formula for social success was (athletic + good-looking + fashionable + eloquent) x popularity = hot girlfriend + happily ever after. Notice that I took the time to factor my equation—Math 9 was not completely wasted on me.
To my horror, high school was not at all like a Disney movie, and for some reason, I had received none of the variables on the left-hand side of the equation. First, I wasn’t athletic. As a matter of fact, I was kind of a wimp. There I was, with skinny legs in gym shorts that didn’t fit right, doing the old 12-minute run … dying. I wasn’t good-looking. I knew very little about how to live in my skin, so to speak. No grooming skills. No confidence in my stride. And then there was my haircut—skillfully supplied for 10 dollars cash by some neighbour-lady who had a barber chair in her basement. I wasn’t fashionable. My entire wardrobe was from Wal-Mart. I wasn’t eloquent. My English was broken and heavily accented. I could never even finish an English phrase without punctuating it with so many “umms” and “uhhhs” that people did not want to take the time to listen.
Lacking all of the necessary ingredients for popularity, not surprisingly, I wasn’t popular. All of this led to a paralyzing self-consciousness and the complete inability to engage any girl, never mind the pretty ones, in any form of meaningful conversation.
Moving to Canada was like moving to another planet, except on this planet. Culturally it was so different. Even the Asian kids did not act like they did back home. They had been “bananified,” as they say. They still held on to some aspects of Asian culture, but they seemed to blend in pretty seamlessly with Western culture also. I didn’t know how to interface with people. It was like having the wrong power cable for your cellphone: it just did not work. In my primary school in Hong Kong, things had not been this way. I had friends, and I was not the quiet one. I seemed to be able to make friends with everyone. Even the principal seemed to like me, and I was the prefect for my grade level and had been nominated for head prefect before my departure.
Being able to express yourself in your native tongue imparts a confidence that you can’t appreciate until you have been parachuted into a place where you barely understand a word. Back in Hong Kong I had it all together—fearlessly ready to conquer the world each day. Each morning I’d show up early for school in my neatly ironed uniform, proudly displaying my prefect patch on my lapel. I was like a little hall monitor, and I wasn’t afraid to confront troublemakers, even ones from a higher grade. Although there was the odd person who didn’t like me that much, they still had to show me some respect because of my title. Generally I was liked by my fellow students, and, I have to admit, between the popularity and the fact that I was an only child on whom my parents doted, I had a bit of a swollen head. My parents tended to heap praise on me for my every achievement, which eventually turned me into an overconfident brat.
But that world came to a rapid demise after we moved to Vancouver. I was now a victim of culture shock, just another one of thousands of clueless Asian kids trying to figure out how to be in a place that had an entirely different set of rules. Despite the fact that there were lots of kids in my situation, I felt totally alone. My support network had bid me a final farewell at Hong Kong International Airport. In this new land, nobody knew who I was, and no one particularly cared.
As I mentioned, the language barrier was a big blow to the precocious Poon ego. Nothing that I said would come out smoothly, and every English-speaking listener would ask me to repeat it three or four times. It was completely debilitating—all of this social isolation was simply because my first language was Cantonese. The part that quietly irritated me the most was that my teachers would treat me like a kindergartener and give me Walt Disney books for homework—all this in front of the class. The other kids would snicker while I died the same thousand deaths many other Asian immigrant kids had died before me. Only, I did not know any of my fellow martyrs, so I just swam around in my tears and felt pity for myself.
Even choosing my clothes was a big deal. In Hong Kong I wore a uniform, but in Canada I had to pick my own outfits five days a week. Even this small task intimidated me. Bosco Poon, former grade six socialite, graduates to the status of mute loner. Even though eventually I strived to maintain really good marks in school, I still couldn’t completely adapt to the Western culture. I was desperately homesick for my former life.
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Everything changed the day I met Blade in the English as a Second Language (ESL) class in senior high. He was about my height (which is kinda short) and came from Hong Kong, just like I did. He was built like a tank and had a big black dragon tattoo on his right arm. Against the backdrop of quiet, demur, studious-looking Asian immigrants, Blade really stood out. I watched him interact with his friends. They were all pretty cool looking: stylish clothes, edgy haircuts, and boisterous confidence.
Even though Blade had a strong Cantonese accent, like I did, the Caucasian kids didn’t laugh at him. They actually seemed to respect him. Wherever he walked, he was flanked by at least two guys—like a pair of bodyguards but without the earpieces and billy clubs. Blade exuded authority. It seemed to me that Blade had all the elements of the formula–and whatever he had, I wanted it! Quietly, over the course of a few weeks, Blade became my role model.
Despite all the social turmoil, my grades were good, and I was actually excelling in school. In fact, I was on the honour roll and remained there from Grade 9 up until the second semester of Grade 11. That was the point when Blade and his friends fully brought me under their wings. In addition to the cool factor, Blade offered me something very practical: protection from the bullies. I got to take advantage of the bodyguard types.
One of the many reasons for my intrinsic trust of him is that we both spoke Cantonese—I knew he understood all the things that I had gone through during the prior three years. This created a special bond between us. I started to hang out with him and his friends at the smoke pit, and then after school we would go to the arcade. Recognizing that I lacked a certain je ne sais quoi in the fashion department, they dyed my hair blond—well, that kinda orangey blond that dark-haired people get when they use peroxide. Then they took me to the mall for their impromptu version of What Not to Wear. They were systematically purging me of my nerdiness like some kind of upside-down version of My Fair Lady. House parties, rave parties, hip-hop, cigarettes, booze, weed, and ecstasy.
Twelve months later, the old Boz was gone, and the new Boz was suddenly surrounded by friends of all nationalities. And, at long last, girls finally started to show an interest, and just about everyone at school was treating me like someone who mattered. I was no longer an immigrant geek. The formula had worked. Though it had taken longer than I anticipated, I had successful engineered my social life back to something I was happy with, with the help of Blade and his friends.
While my social life was soaring, what with all the partying and dating, my marks were really tanking. Not surprisingly, my parents, being Asian parents, were doing the usual Asian-parent-flip-out about getting into university and becoming a professional. Professional was a secret code word for any one of the following: doctor, lawyer, accountant, businessman—in order of relative importance.
They warned me over and over about my friends, who were never going to amount to anything, and begged me to