I remember a guy in my class, who always seemed out of space amid an overwhelmingly female enviroment, once mentioned Mr. CK's quotes, the content of which I cannot recall, vaguely some quite awakening revelations of life that barely had anything to do with what we were talking about back then. To this day, it's still been clear to me the way he shared those quotes, his tone, his gestures, with admiration and resonance overflowing his entire speech. He and his inpenetrable inner circle seemed to enjoy positioning themselves as a group of sophisticated intellectuals and critics who always had something to say about what was wrong with this system, with their thinly veiled contempt for those who were sweet and naive enough to believe we could and would make a difference. He was talking about how optimistism was an illusion, and how life was so complicated that there was absolutely no fix. In other possibly overinterpreted words, the rest of us, mostly us young ladies across the Pacific, had approached the questions in a rather simple manner which obviously lacked certain depth and feasibility.

It was almost undeniable that on his part, it was a justified observation. We did somehow appear to be idealistic, didactic and overly analytical from time to time. I don't know if it was at some point impressive to them that we could answer every question from the lecturers with such revalence and clean-cut precision that it seemed no wriggle room had been left for any replenishment.

However, it didn't occured to him that we are not naive. We are just phony, because what we were offering was not what we thought but what we thought you'd expect us to think. It was not that we didn't know there was no fix, and quite the contrary, we were so convinced that the pursuit of solution was a doomed quest that we stopped captioning the obvious, like an abandoned baby who finally learnt to stop crying and whining because it didn't work. Most importantly, a part of me was even trying to cover the fact that I was in knowledge of their contempt and to continue the pretence of that overly positive chirp who was just so easy to be figured out.