我最近發覺我的一個來自香港現在就讀grammar school的學生，才是十二、三歲，
於是我在課堂寫了這篇我在牛津讀書的文章，
When I held Oxford’s “You’ve been admitted” letter in my hands
Do a search on “college decision reactions” on YouTube, and you’ll discover a body of high schoolers (most of them US-based) who don’t mind filming themselves live as they find out whether they’ve been admitted into their dream universities. They’ll sit in front of their computers, eyes tense and shoulders trembling, and then log onto a university’s page. You can immediately tell whether a young person got accepted just by looking at his or her face.
Back when it was my lot to brave through the college admissions process, schools still sent out admissions notifications by snail mail. I wish I had kept a copy of the one Oxford posted to my home address in Hong Kong, because that moment turned out to be the happiest point of anything Oxford-related, and so the letter would have made a nice memento.
Without the physical letter, I’m only left with the realization that I should have cherished for as long as I could the illusion that hit me when I held Oxford’s “you’ve been admitted” letter in my hands: from now on, life would be so smooth sailing that I was practically set up for life. In any case, I was unable to indulge in that happy delusion for long. It was shattered on my first day at my Oxford, in fact, at this student orientation talk that everyone had to attend.
When the professor tasked with giving the talk strolled in, he didn’t bother to smile. Nor did he bother to look us in the eye. Also, since his first words to us were “I was once a graduate student at Oxford too, and it was the most miserable period in my life,” he didn’t bother to give us a warm welcome either.
But it was the analogy he cited next that crushed our hope of having a dream life at our dream school.
“Cancer doctors don’t get sued because their patients expect to die, yet obstetricians get sued a lot because every pregnant woman expects to leave the hospital with a baby. Most of you have probably never failed in life – you wouldn’t be here if you did. But some of you will leave Oxford without a degree,” he said dryly, taking perverse pleasure in shocking us into silence.
It didn’t take long for me to see the professor’s harshness actually masked the best of intentions: he was psychologically preparing us for the tough training ahead.
When I held Oxford’s “You’ve been admitted” letter in my hands, I couldn’t have foreseen one of the closets friends I would make there would suffer shooting pains up her back because her thesis supervisor kept telling her she would fail, or that at my first meeting with mine, he would simply toss a copy of my work on his desk, sniffed at it with disgust, and say “Your work is rubbish. Contact me to schedule a meeting when you have produced new work. If you don’t contact me I don’t care.” Nor could I have foreseen that a girl in my dorm would hang herself in her room because of academic pressure.
Most of all, when I held Oxford’s “You’ve been admitted” letter in my hands, I had no idea even after managing to win over my thesis supervisor and examiners and getting my degree, in the world of work, though I could handle people who were smarter, I couldn’t cope with the ones who were devious. Neither did know I would suffer one career setback after another. Despite my younger self’s naivety, however, I’m sure she would be gratified to learn I now know this: turned out that it wasn’t Oxford’s “You’ve been admitted” letter that set up me for life. It was the pain tolerance the school developed in me that did it, for since graduation, no matter how hard the problem I’m encountering, I can rally my spirits just by remembering “You already survived Oxford, so this should be nothing.”
Michelle Ng
英國牛津大學畢業，前《蘋果日報》和《眾新聞》專欄作家，現在身在楓葉國，心繫中國大陸和香港。
聯絡方式： michelleng.coach@proton.me
個人網站： https://michellengwritings.com
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