The Fish Bowl — Author's Notes
The Fish Bowl — Author's Notes
My Maths Teras tuition teacher had a koi pond in her living room. Looking back on it, I wonder whether she actually had it purely for its ornamental value. My mother made the immediate practical-minded assumption that she was rearing the koi to sell on.
I had a hard time in Form 4, though not nearly as hard a time as Su Yin. My violin teacher dumped me because I wasn't practising. I remember being mildly surprised by this because I hadn't practised for the past five years and it hadn't seemed to bother her before. If you're a bright kid who's been trained to do exams you can skate through school for quite a while, but at a certain point things start to require actual work, and a system that's focused on exams and ticking boxes and jumping through hoops doesn't prepare you all that well for that humbling.
Su Yin is very sheltered, of course. But you can be sheltered and still suffer a lot. I guess that's what this story is about.
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