I went to St. James myself by the only means possible—a schol- arship for my entire first year. The challenge was maintaining the grade in order to keep the scholarship for the rest of high school, a not-too-hopeful prospect under St. James’s standards. Before St. James, I only had known Tonsuya Elementary, a public school where education was free for children of the barrio for which it was (and remains) named and of three or four neighboring barrios, including my own, Niugan. Tonsuya Elementary had prepared me well, to be sure, for high-school math and science, but not for St. James altogether. Tonsuya Elementary spoke the vernacular Tagalog. It did teach English, but only superficially, in a course called Language: it didn’t provide a working knowledge of the language; one got one’s idea how English sounds from unsure and affected tongues, and one learned to arrange English-worded thoughts from the scarcest vocabulary and in the simplest forms. St. James demanded more. Indeed, it seemed to me to demand more than expectedly merciful or even reasonable. Not only was St. James foreign territory, it existed under a rather closed regime—apart from being strictly English-speaking, it was exclusively Roman Catholic and severely sex-segregated. It had its own uncompromising system of crime and punishment: anyone caught mouthing a non-English word was fined. And deficient as I was in both medium and means, I felt doubly disadvantaged in a class composed mostly of graduates of St. James Elementary. The choice for me was as easy as the alternative was impossible. Unless asked and required by propriety or rule to open it, I kept my mouth shut in the classroom (except, naturally, in the native-language class, Pilipino) and elsewhere within St. James’s confines. I must have appeared an especially woeful
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker