Fiction: Group 4
The Presidential Boy
Chinese International School, Cheah, Yew San - 15, Fiction: Group 4
he moonlight gushed into the balcony like silver water weeping cold as sin into a vast, desolate
ocean, and, as a consequence of the door being left open; the hotel room was filled with the rich
scent of chrysanthemums. Inappropriately, he had flung himself on the wicker divan outside,
though it was after dark. Defiantly, he knew if his mother found out, she would surely ground him (the
family was departing the hotel first thing in the morning). However, in the ecstasy of lying there and so
breathlessly, on that last summer’s night, catching the winter gleam of the stars, he wrote, very romantically
(for he had developed the habit during CTY):
The Sheraton Hotel,
Sanya,
August
25--26
Dear Cecile:
When I think about not being with you at freshman year prom next June, as well as all those inexhaustible,
wild-lovey-dovey dances (especially Christmas) that exist only to “get in” (organized by one hierarchical
arts committee or the other), I feel I should only want to draw up a bath, lie down in it, and
die
. My father
and mother are of the more radical variety, and feel it would be best if I went to school up north in the
Mainland after the summer’s over. When I think about you wooed by some other superficial, sentimental
rhetoric and held tenderly in the arms of some other evening-clothes boy (someone from the Island
schools? Or maybe Chinese Int.? German Swiss...?), I feel I should be there instead of him; holding you;
loving you; breathing the same air and being in the same world as you; for your hushed and
remarkable
eyes
are even more beautiful and bright than the snow-filled stars I so carelessly feed upon now - they scatter
the night with a melancholy brilliance and make the day worth living. But without you, Cecile…! Without
you! Oh dear…!
P.S. Visit me at Badminton (the school) — IMPORTANT!! Find the address on the envelope!!
Yours Faithfully,
STEPHEN CHINA
He was to spend a little more than a year at the Badminton School. With the fading scents of late-
summer still whispering, Stephen had appeared at the train platform, shy but earnestly heroic, in his first
tailored trousers, complemented by a fern-green tie and a “Shanghai-Tang” collar with the hems facing
upright to one another, and brown brogues made more exuberant by green socks. But even more than that,
the ecstasy of entering an unknown, teeming world rife with unfulfillment and ambition stirred a
steadfastness in his heart; for his “abstract” interests, he formulated one of many romantic beliefs that he
would have to go to a place where things “didn’t happen”, as generations of unimportant statesmen and
poets had done before him. Stephen was proud of the fact that he was a man-of-letters (he decided a
month into his fourteenth birthday) - rather than a mathematical or scientific genius.
Unsuccessfully, his parents had tried to temper his egotist tendencies, where he would always get in
petty, verbal scrapes with the “older boys” - but only resolved to increase it; he worshipped success, fame,
and to be on the vague top of the world more than anything else; therefore selfishness and a self-suspicious
conscience was one of the developing Stephen’s many introspective debates — he found himself suppressing
his intellect for the sake of social interests and curious skirmishes with love. This was Stephen floating about
the gust and whirlwind of adolescence.
T
