She remembers every score. Not because she wants to. Because her body won’t let her forget.
92 for English.
87 for Science.
95 for Math.
78 for Chinese.
She remembers which ones made her mother smile and which ones made the car ride home silent.
The line was 90.
Below 90, the car was quiet.
Above 90, her mother asked if she wanted McDonald’s. That was the system. Four subjects. One threshold. And a nine-year-old girl learning to read her mother’s mood from a number on a piece of paper.
Her name doesn’t matter.
She could be anyone’s daughter.
She’s eighteen now.
She got into the school.
She got the results.
She got the A-Levels.
She got everything the schedule promised.
And she feels nothing.
It started in Primary One.
First assessment.
She came home with 74 for English.
Her mother looked at the paper. Then at her. Then at the paper again. She didn’t say anything bad. She said something worse.
“Next time, we try harder.”
We.
Not you.
We.
As if her name was also on the paper. As if the 74 was a shared failure, a family project that came back under budget, and now the whole team had to recalibrate.
That “we” followed her for twelve years.
We need to do better.
We’re going for Chinese tuition on Saturdays.
We’re not going to Jia Ying’s birthday party because we have revision. We got 87 for Science and that’s not where we need to be.
She was never alone in any of her results.
Her mother was in every paper, every score, every correction. The mother sat next to her at the dining table every night from 7 to 9pm.
She bought the assessment books.
She marked the practice papers.
She timed the compositions with her phone.
She circled mistakes in green because she’d read somewhere that red pen damages self-esteem and green is “more encouraging.”
The green circles didn’t feel more encouraging.
They felt green.
She doesn’t blame her mother.
She told a friend this once, over kopi, and the friend didn’t believe her. “How can you not blame her?”
But she meant it.
Her mother did what every mother in Singapore does.
She looked at the system, understood the rules, and played to win. And she won. They won. The girl is in a good JC.
Her L1R5 was 7.
Her A-Level results are the kind you put on a resume.
She’s applying to NUS and NTU and she’ll probably get in because her grades are excellent and her CCA record is impeccable and her personal statement says all the right things about leadership and community service and passion.
Passion.
She wrote that word in her personal statement and she didn’t feel it in her chest.
She wrote it the way she writes everything: correctly.
That’s the thing about this girl.
She does everything correctly.
She answers correctly.
She studies correctly.
She sits for exams correctly. She scores correctly. Her entire life has been an exercise in correctness. And correctness, it turns out, is not the same as caring.
She doesn’t care about anything.
Not in a dramatic way. Not in a depressed way.
She’s not sad or angry or rebelling. She’s just empty. The way a room is empty when all the furniture is in the right place but nobody lives there. Everything arranged. Nothing felt.
Her friends talk about what they want to study.
Medicine. Law. Business. Computer science.
They have opinions.
They have preferences.
They have a thing they lean toward, a subject that pulls them, a future that feels like theirs.
She doesn’t have that.
When people ask what she wants to do, she says “I’m still deciding” which is the polite version of what she actually means: nobody ever asked her what she wanted and now she’s eighteen and she doesn’t know how to want things.
She’s good at everything. That’s the problem.
Her mother made sure of it.
Every subject covered, every weakness tutored, every gap filled. By the time she sat for PSLE, she was a machine.
Not a prodigy.
A machine.
She didn’t love Math, she solved it.
She didn’t love English, she scored it.
She performed everything and loved nothing.
And nobody tells you this about performing everything well: you never discover what you actually like.
Because liking something requires time.
Time to try it.
Time to fail at it.
Time to try again without someone timing you. Time to sit with a subject or a hobby or a question and feel it pull you, the way gravity pulls, gently, without a grade attached.
She never had that time.
Her schedule was full from Primary One to JC2.
Twelve years.
Every afternoon accounted for.
Every weekend filled.
Every holiday structured around revision or enrichment or “getting ahead.” There was no space for discovering what she liked because there was no space for liking things. Liking was a luxury. Scoring was the job.
So she scored.
And the scoring ate the liking.
And now she’s eighteen and she scores everything and likes nothing and she doesn’t know how to fix that because fixing it would require the one thing her schedule never included: time to figure out who she is when nobody is measuring her.
Her mother is proud of her.
She tells her friends.
She tells relatives at Chinese New Year.
She posts the results the way proud parents do. And her daughter smiles in the photo. The same smile she’s been giving since Primary One. The one that says “I got the score you needed.”
Not the one that starts in the stomach.
She doesn’t remember what that one feels like.
Her mother sacrificed for her.
The girl knows this.
The evenings given up. The thousands spent on tuition. The driving to every class, every enrichment, every exam. All of it done out of love. Real love.
The kind that fears for a child in a competitive country and decides that preparation is the only defence.
But the mother did everything right.
And that’s what makes this complicated.
Because if she’d done something wrong, there’d be something to point to.
A clear break.
A moment the system failed.
But the system didn’t fail.
The system worked. The girl is the proof. She got the grades, the school, the results, the resume, the personal statement with the word “passion” in it.
The system produced exactly what it was designed to produce: a high-performing student with excellent scores and no idea who she is.
They were in the car once. After her A-Level results. Her mother was happy. The girl was quiet. Her mother noticed.
“Why like that? You did so well.”
“I know.”
“Then? You should be happy.”
“I am happy.”
But she wasn’t.
And her mother knew she wasn’t.
And she knew her mother knew.
And neither of them said anything else because the car was the wrong place and the feeling was too big and the distance between 92 and 95 had become the distance between two people who love each other and can’t find the words to say what’s actually wrong.
======================
I think about this girl because she scares me more than the boy who scored 78.
The boy with 78, you can see the damage. He’s crying. He’s exhausted. The red pen is on the paper. The adults in the room can see that something is breaking and they can choose to intervene.
But the girl with 92? She’s fine. She’s performing. She’s scoring.
She’s smiling in the photo.
Nobody intervenes because there’s nothing to intervene in. The grades are excellent. The system is working. The child is succeeding.
And underneath the success, where nobody can see because success is the best camouflage a struggling child can wear, she is completely and quietly empty.
That’s the version of the story that keeps me up at night.
Not the child who fails and breaks.
The child who succeeds and feels nothing.
Because by the time anyone notices, by the time the emptiness becomes visible, the child is eighteen and the schedule is over and the damage isn’t a broken bone. It’s a missing self. And there’s no tuition centre for that.
If you’re a parent reading this, your child might be scoring 92. They might be scoring 95. They might be smiling in the photo and getting into the school and making your relatives nod at Chinese New Year.
But ask yourself one question.
Not about their grades.
Not about their PSLE score.
Not about the schedule.
Do they know what they love?
Not what they’re good at.
What they love.
The thing that pulls them when nobody is measuring. The thing they’d do on a Saturday even if it counted for nothing.
If they don’t know, the schedule might be working perfectly.
And that might be the problem.
3am Stories. Pass it on.
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