每年，快要開學，我都觀察到一個現象：讀本地學校的學生，
我是本地學校的產物，屬於痛恨上學那一群。
Do you like school?
“Michelle, don’t work too hard!” my thesis supervisor at Oxford Dr Timothy Endicott urged me with avuncular concern as I was about to leave his office.
I was so startled that for a moment, I stopped shoving my notebooks in my knapsack. For the better part of the past year and a half, he had been voicing a very different judgement, delivered in the manner of a judge announcing a death sentence: “Your work is so bad that you’ll never graduate.” No matter how cruelly my writings were dismissed, however, I somehow found the strength to salvage my work enough to warrant another meeting with him (only to have him dismiss it once more of course). I therefore took his “don’t work too hard” remark as an acknowledgement of my abilities – exactly what I wanted to hear for so long.
But what I wanted most was for Mrs Chan, a teacher from my primary school, to become aware that I had an Oxford professor seeing me as a student who was so wrapped up in her work that she deserved a break. Mrs Chan was that chilling figure from my past who once caught me off guard by suddenly asking me to stand up in class. “Michelle Ng is the laziest student I’ve ever taught,” she proclaimed with a faint smile, her teeth and tongue lingering over each syllable, a spectacle that reminded me of the witch in Hansel and Gretel salivating at the thought of feasting on children. Admittedly, I had been a very indifferent student, waiting for the last minute to rush through my assignments on the rare occasions when I did do them, but it wasn’t as if humiliating me this publicly could help. Quite the contrary. After what Mrs Chan did, I doubled down on my efforts to be lazy, with even less guilt or shame, because idleness was the only form of protest left to me against an education system designed to bore students to death.
Ironically, the one and only time I really did take my studies seriously was when I was at the end of my second year studying law at the University of Hong Kong. By then, I had fallen in love with legal philosophy; I spent all my hours doing independent research on it instead of the required coursework, submitting my writings to the handful of professors interested enough in the subject to comment. “You know, Michelle, you have what it takes to get into Oxford,” one of them told me the summer before I was to begin my third year. “But your grades in your first and second year are too average. I suggest you study hard in your third year, so that you can have a better transcript to send to Oxford when you apply.”
I took his advice because I really did want to go to Oxford; some of the best scholars in legal philosophy taught there. So, for the first and last time in my student years, I revised far ahead of exam time. When the results of my third year finals were released, I came first among the 100+ students, sweeping not one but two medals (Simon K Y Lee Medal in Law and Rowdget W. Young Medal in Law ). This accomplishment remained one of my proudest ever, because it was my way of saying “F–k you” to the likes of Mrs Chan – I could have done what you wanted, but I chose not to, because neither you nor the school system had earned my respect.
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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