When Siew Li got into Nanyang Girls’, her mother was nothing as demonstrative as thrilled, just quietly proud. The very best school, in her eyes. Those crisp white uniforms. All that history. There’d been that unpleasant incident when some students flung acid in their principal’s face, but there are bad apples in every community, and they probably did sincerely believe she was a government stooge. The years after the war were rough for everyone, and things seemed to be calming down. She thought her daughter would be all right.

For her own part, Siew Li was happy enough to be in a good school—or rather, not having a clue what one school meant over another, she was happy that her mum was pleased. It was a long bus ride to King’s Road, but she enjoyed those stretches of time, nothing to do but read till she got carsick, then stare out the window without taking in anything in particular. She didn’t have many friends—too many of the girls felt like they were from a different world, from the big houses around Bukit Timah, with their businessman dads and tai-tai mothers. Even the ones with less money, like her, seemed somehow sharper, as if they knew things about the world she did not. On her first day at school, she’d tried to talk to the girl at the next desk, but then the conversation had turned to popular music. “You haven’t heard of Yao Lee?” sneered the girl. “You must be really stupid.” That pretty much set the tone for her life at this school, which was why she knew no one and was wandering round Happy World on her own.

It wasn’t that she needed friends, as that she wanted to be a part of this thing that was happening. She had a sense of something big coming, a huge shift in the way the world was ordered, made possible by the chaos of war. Her childhood fantasies had been of heroism. If only she’d been old enough, during the war, what wouldn’t she have done! Withstood torture, like Elizabeth Choy or Sybil Kathigasu. Gone into the jungle and waged guerrilla warfare, like those brave people in Force 136 and others whose names would never be known. She learnt all the stories.

Only now was it striking her that she was in her own time, the only vantage point she had. She knew what was happening around her, had even been present at the May Thirteenth incident, so many of them gathered to support the boys taking a stance against the government, which was conscripting them without taking into account that their education would be interrupted. The police had turned violent without provocation, and she had no doubt that the government saw people like them as worth less, if not worthless. It was important to fight back. What was she actually doing?