Teaching Cats to Jump Hoops

by You Jin

  I felt I no longer had to worry about him after hearing such thoughtful comments.

  Heng Yong had finally truly ridden himself of the demon in his heart. He was no longer like an ostrich burying its head in the sand to avoid temptation, or a fox dressed in a beautiful coat that lacks real substance. He was an armoured warrior—well-prepared for and unafraid of any hardship or temptation. He would stride confidently and bravely towards his life’s goals.

  “Thank you, Madam Tham.” He reached out to shake my hand. His thick hand was callused, reminding me that his heart was probably covered in a callus thick enough to repel all sorts of venomous creatures.

  With true sincerity, I replied, “Good boy, best of luck.”

  “Take care of yourself, Madam Tham. Don’t work too hard.”

  Through moist eyes, I looked at his receding back, silently reciting, “Good boy, good boy, good boy…”

  He soon reached the gate, where as if responding to my call, he spun around and waved with happiness and confidence.

  Cat and Pottery

  1

  TODAY I DESIGNED a fun exercise for the class. On the surface it was an activity related to Chinese language, but my real purpose was to probe the students’ inner worlds.

  After handing out small slips of paper, I told the students to write a single phrase that best reflected their desires. Before they began, I reminded them to think deeply and carefully and to avoid rash, careless writing. Some scratched their heads, some tugged on their ears, and some chewed on their nails as they searched deep within themselves before putting pen to paper. They handed in their phrases when they were finished.

  When I got home that night, I sat under a desk lamp and gave the slips of paper a good read. The faces of my students, which showed a range of emotions and personalities—happy, sad, quiet, impish, stern or carefree—floated up in my mind. Their desires were simple and direct. Those with low marks wished to be the top student in their class; those from poor families hoped for sudden wealth; homely ones wanted to be pretty; those with a weak foundation in languages yearned for mastery of both the Chinese and English languages and so on; except for one paper, on which only a three-syllable word was written: “Possible”.

  Possible? What did that mean? Try as I might, I could not understand its meaning. I checked the name—ah, Pang Yu Zhou.

  Yu Zhou had caught my attention shortly after the semester began. He had a pointed face which was so fair that it looked like a freshly steamed bun, and his eyes were incongruously black as if glazed. Sitting quietly in class, he resembled a grave-looking snowman on a late winter field. When I spoke to him, he stared back with an expressionless face, but his darting eyes betrayed a highly unstable inner world. This sixteen-year-old boy had obviously donned a mask to cover up whatever was going on in his mind. I tried to talk to him, but he was miserly with his words, as if his every utterance was a rare treasure to bestow. Yu Zhou was always well-behaved, however, and although his performance in class was never outstanding, his homework was always neat and on time. His record was free of infractions such as skipping class or being absent without permission, getting into fights or causing trouble, which was why I made no further attempt to find out what was going on with him. Instead I let him live quietly and peacefully in his little world.

  I did, however, tell him to see me after class the next day. When he arrived, I pulled out his slip of paper and asked with a smile, “What does this word mean?”

  With his head bowed low, he pursed his lips and kept quiet. Instead of forcing him to talk, I sat and waited patiently. What seemed like a century passed before a sudden change erupted on his wooden face. In a defiant and unhappy tone, he said, “No matter what I do, my mother always says it’s impossible for me to succeed.”

  This simple sentence exposed a wound that had been festering in his heart for a long time. Looking at his pale, sorrowful face, I felt a sudden tenderness tug at my heart.

  As soon as he left, I looked up his records to learn his family background. Both his parents were university graduates: his father was an accountant and his mother was a housewife. He also had an older brother. I thought of asking his parents to come to school for a meeting, but quickly changed my mind and decided to wait till the parent-teacher meetings due to take place the following week.

  I met his mother at the meeting. She was in her forties but looked years younger because of her fashionably styled, straight hair and well-tailored lilac dress. An aggressive light shone brightly in her big, round eyes, and strings of words seemed to fill her wide mouth, ready to burst through at any moment.

  Once she opened her mouth, there was no stopping her. “They’re both my boys, but they’re as different as night and day,” she said. “Yu Zhou’s brother is only two years older, but he’s better at everything. After the Primary School Leaving Examination, he was admitted into his secondary school’s Gifted Education Programme, and remained top in his class. He excels in whatever he does and is most impressive. But Yu Zhou is another story altogether. He can’t do anything right. Just think, his brother attends a well-known, top-tier school, while he tested into this average secondary school. What a loss of face!”

  With a stern look, I replied, “Mrs. Pang, even one’s ten fingers aren’t the same length, and here we have two completely different people. To be sure, going to a well-known school shows a student’s ability, but it’s no loss of face to attend an average school. In fact, Yu Zhou is quite talented. His homework is never late and he’s a sensible, responsible boy. It’s just that he lacks confidence and gets anxious easily. He seems unhappy.”

  “Unhappy?” Her voice became shrill and urgent. “He eats well, dresses well, has a comfortable life and is never short of spending money. How could he be unhappy?”

  “My sense is that for kids his age, material comfort may not be the most important thing in life.” I tried to be tactful. “What they need most from their parents is caring and fair treatment.”

  “Humph.” She sniggered. “He has whatever his brother has. Isn’t that fair enough?”

  What could I say? This was truly a case of a scholar not being able to reason with a soldier. I decided to help Yu Zhou build up his confidence instead.

  A few days later, I showed him a blown-up photograph that made his eyes shine with puzzlement. He was quiet for a while before asking, “Is that a cat?”

  I nodded. It was a photo I had taken the year before while I was travelling in Myanmar. I’d heard about a temple on scenic Inle Lake where they kept cats with special skills, even though scientific research has shown that cats cannot be trained. After a long, exhausting journey, I finally found the temple and told a monk my purpose for visiting. Without hesitation, he whistled, drawing one, two, then three, and eventually over a dozen cats out of various nooks and crannies. The cats stood in a neat row before us. The monk held a rattan hoop high and called out in Burmese, “Jump!” Seeing was indeed believing, for one cat took the lead and without hesitation, it leaped unerringly through the hoop. The other cats followed suit, jumping again and again with apparently high spirits. Not a single one missed. Later in my conversation with the monk, I learned a touching anecdote related to the unusual cats. There was once an abbot who had spent thirty-nine years alone in the temple with cats as his only companions. As someone who believed that faith and willpower could conquer any difficulty, the abbot began training newborn kittens, trying to turn the impossible into the possible. First he put the rattan hoop on the ground for the kittens to crawl through. Then he slowly raised the hoop little by little, day after day, month after month, and year after year. Years went by and the hoop was gradually raised until he finally succeeded in getting the cats to jump through the hoop. An unusual phenomenon occurred. When the kittens saw the older cats jump, they believed they could do it too and so, without much effort, they learned to jump easily through the hoop as well. People from neighbouring villages heard about the cats and sent their own to the temple, but strangely thes
e outside cats never learned to jump, no matter how long they stayed at the temple or how often they watched the temple cats jump. The reason was quite simple. Since the day they were born, the temple cats had seen the older cats jump, so they thought they were born to jump. With no psychological block, they learned naturally, while the village cats could not because they were not prepared mentally and lacked faith.

  As I told Yu Zhou the story in great detail, he listened with rapt attention, a bright light shining in his eyes. Not letting up, I continued, “Remember, Yu Zhou, heaven helps those who help themselves. You have to depend on yourself if you are to show your true worth.”

  In life’s long journey, we often unconsciously lock ourselves in dark, sunless corners where we suffer alone. However, a well-intentioned and well-planned conversation can sometimes turn things around. I hoped that what I had told Yu Zhou would have the same effect.

  2

  Our school was organising a funfair to hone the students’ ability to work independently. They were to pool their money together for a commercial enterprise and on a particular date, stalls would be set up on campus for games or the sale of food. After deducting the money spent on materials, whatever the students made would be added to their class fund.

  I divided the thirty-odd students in my class into three groups: one would be responsible for setting up the stall, one would take charge of publicity and one would coordinate.

  I also made a daring decision. I wanted Yu Zhou to be the leader of the first group in charge of stall setup. When I mentioned it to him, however, he responded with his usual dubious, uncertain look and turned me down.

  “I can’t, Madam Tham. I’ll mess it up.”

  “Yu Zhou, if you say that before you’ve even started, you’ve already suffered psychological defeat. Didn’t you make a wish to reach any goal and accomplish anything you set your mind to?”

  With his head bowed low, he revealed his hidden worries. “The other students won’t listen to me.”

  “Don’t worry. I will help you convince them,” I said, patting the back of his hand.

  It was not an easy task—everyone in his group objected. I tried appealing to them with emotion and persuading them with reason. I did this many times until they finally consented. In private I also met with Teo Rui Qi, a well-liked student in class, and told him frankly about Yu Zhou’s situation. After hearing my plan, Rui Qi nodded and readily agreed.

  “Please don’t worry, Madam Tham,” he said. “I’ll help him out.”

  I was in attendance when Yu Zhou held the first meeting. It didn’t start out well. He was so nervous that his face turned bright red and he couldn’t articulate his thoughts. Some of his classmates began to whisper among themselves, others sniggered, while some simply turned to look out the window. Then Yu Zhou took out a box of chocolate with nuts, everyone’s favourite candy, and placed it on the table. He stammered, “Here, please, have some, everyone. Just to thank you for your help.”

  Everyone stared at the box of chocolates wrapped in shiny gold foil and turned to look at one another. Things were getting awkward. I was about to say something to smooth the situation over when Rui Qi spoke up. “Put the chocolates away, Yu Zhou,” he said. “We’ll work together. First we need to decide what we want to do—a food stall or game booth?”

  Once Rui Qi spoke up, the atmosphere in the room quickly went from freezing to boiling point. Now everyone was talking at once. In the end, the class made a unanimous decision to run a food stall at the funfair.

  Yu Zhou, who had been a bundle of nerves, began to relax and even made a suggestion about what to sell. “There’s a coffee shop near my house,” he said. “Their otak-otaks are very good. I can order them.”

  Otak-otaks are traditional cakes in Singapore made of fish and shrimp paste mixed with coconut milk and spices. Wrapped in banana leaves, they are slowly baked until their aroma becomes irresistible. Yu Zhou’s idea was quickly accepted. The students also decided to sell other food such as fried chicken wings, fish balls and fried rice, each under the charge of individual students.

  The students began to work in earnest. Like a snail sticking its head out of its shell for the first time, Yu Zhou was dazzled by the outside world. At first he was fearful and timorous, and the pressure turned his bony face thin and pointed like a shoehorn. But little by little, through frequent contact, the other students got to know him better, and they felt his sincerity more keenly. His behaviour was still immature in many respects, and his ideas were not always well thought out, but his classmates’ attitude towards him was visibly different. Their disdain was gone. Sometimes they even joked with him and he would smile shyly, looking quite happy.

  With full cooperation and participation from everyone, the preparations for the funfair were soon complete. During this period of eager anticipation, no one suspected that a particularly outrageous and shameful incident was about to occur.

  Shortly after the principal had commenced festivities at the funfair, the school was swarming with visitors. Parents, friends and relatives of the students all came to show their support. I went to check on the stalls early in the morning to make sure nothing was amiss. The students were creative and had decorated their stall beautifully. The smooth, round fish balls were so plump and enticing that no one could pass them up. The golden fried chicken wings looked as if they might take flight with the people’s fancy. The fried rice resembled a large plate of sparkling jewels. The rice looked like pearls; the sliced carrots, red rubies; the snap peas, emeralds; the sliced eggs, thin gold filigree. The two hundred otak-otaks were piled high, and their alluring aroma lingered in the air.

  Visitors crowded around the stall to buy the otak-otaks. Some bought five, some bought ten, twenty, thirty, and others, many more. As the pile shrank, the students congratulated Yu Zhou on his foresight. He smiled happily, showing his sparkling, porcelain-white teeth. It dawned on me how nice he looked when he smiled.

  Just as everyone was cheerfully making sales, a spine-tingling scream sounded not too far away. Before we knew what was happening, a woman had raced up to our stall. Bam. She slapped a partially eaten otak-otak on the table, yelling and screaming with terror.

  “There are worms in this otak-otak! How dare you sell stuff like this?”

  Everyone’s eyes were now fixed on the same spot and more onlookers crowded around. It took just one look to make people retch. One after another, fat, white maggots were crawling merrily in and out of the otak-otak. I grabbed it and dumped it into a plastic container intended for the fried rice, before taking the woman aside and apologising profusely. I said and did all I could to appease her, short of bowing and scraping. We had purchased the otak-otaks from a coffee shop, but were ultimately responsible for the condition of the food and should have checked it beforehand. Other customers soon found maggots in their otak-otaks as well, and came back to return them. Some even cursed us loudly, which drew an increasingly large crowd. Without hesitation, I told the students to collect everything and to shut down the stall to avoid angering any more customers.

  The fiasco resulted in a lot of wasted effort and a huge loss of capital for us. There were other problems as well. The school intervened to investigate, and Yu Zhou was questioned. Then the administration sent someone to deliver the remaining otak-otaks to the Consumers Association of Singapore to report on the shop that had sold us the otak-otaks.

  I knew that Yu Zhou felt bad, but so much was going on that day that I was unable to find the time to speak to him. The next day, he didn’t come to school. When I called his house, I learned from his mother’s tiresome chatter that he wasn’t feeling well.

  “You see, what did I tell you? Even though he’s incapable of doing anything, he still wanted to participate in the activity. See what’s happened? Now he’s turned into an ostrich, afraid to go to school. If this had been his brother, it would have turned out different—”

  Unfortunately I had no earplugs to block out the non-stop crackle of verbal fi
recrackers, so I had to rudely interrupt her. “Can I see him?” I asked.

  “Don’t,” she replied at lightning speed. “He’s not really sick. He’ll be back in school tomorrow. He’s just a worthless kid who can’t do anything right.”

  At that moment, I felt that Yu Zhou was like a piece of pottery. He looked fine on the outside but was crisscrossed with internal cracks that put him on the point of imminent breakage, all because of a mother who was like a series of minor tremors. I hoped to be the super glue that would keep the pottery whole.

  He came to class the next day with a sallow, grey face and eyes that were glazed over. His head drooped when he saw me.

  “I’m so sorry, Madam Tham,” he mumbled.

  I looked at him and said gently, “Listen, Yu Zhou. I never thought it was your fault. When you do something, you give it your all, but after you do your best and something out of your control happens, that doesn’t mean you’re incompetent.” I paused and continued, “Remember the cat, Yu Zhou?”

  “What cat?” He looked up listlessly.

  “The hoop-jumping cat.”

  He nodded eagerly.

  “Before it could jump through a small rattan loop, it must have suffered thousands of setbacks. Do you lack the courage and determination of a cat?”

  A faint smile appeared at the corners of his mouth, which had once been drawn down by gravity’s pull.

  A month later, the school was plunged into intense preparatory work for our thirtieth Founder’s Day celebration, and I called Yu Zhou to the staff room.

  “Yu Zhou,” I said, “I’m going to form three preparatory units in our class. Would you like to lead one of them?”