Oxford, Michealmas Term, 2016
Counting Up
I remember my first day of Oxford vividly.
I drove up on a chilly October morning. Fresh off the boat, overwhelmed by the intensity of being in a new country, I was bewildered and awake, for the very first time confronted with no social safety net or fallback.
I recall how the buildings towered over me and how odd the streets looked, a mixture of 1970’s brutalist urban housing and centuries old edifices. A sense of history and terrific importance permeated the colour and I felt equal parts terrified & excited.
A longing for some fresh, new foreign experience had brought me here and deep-down, I was positive that I would get it. This more than anything else in my life was a fresh start. I was 7000 miles away from home and I felt it acutely. My breath misted the still air, and it felt alive with possibility.
It was International Freshers Week at Magdalen College, year of 2016.
On that first day, I remember that it was cold (seasoned as I was to the eternal-summers of Singapore), and that it was dark by early evening. Lost, with the college still near empty, we gravitated towards one another like sailors in the gloom. My first acquaintence was an enthusiastic Polish dude who jammed out to the Hamilton soundtrack at full-blast as we sipped his Polish vodka in his crowded dorm room, replete with garish green carpets and old wallpaper from the 1980’s.
We gripped our plastic cups in one hand while the other was passed around in a chorus of introduction. Some sat quietly, either in shock or drinking in the scene, while others, in a mask of bravado or genuine bonhomie, enthusiastically glad-handed everyone they could. We were from all over the world, united only in our shock and tremulous unfamiliarity, tentatively reaching out for a sense of connection. I bumped into a thin Canadian-Chinese girl who grimaced when she heard I was from Singapore; she didn’t like it apparently. She had spent her formative years there and had found it too judgemental, too claustrophic and unfriendly. She didn’t want to revisit those memories apparently. I wound up chatting to a Cypriot-British girl named Maya, about our experiences before all this. A first-brush connection with a multitude of faces that have receded into memory.
In that moment, we were all of us, completely unknown, a true tabula rasa - a clean slate. This was a chance to reinvent oneself, to begin anew, to be whoever we wanted, if we so chose. In that moment all things were possible. Did we know then, how rare and one-off that was? That it was a time possibly never to be repeated? But of course, young as we were, we never grasped it, much less codified or vocalized it.
In those timorous and tender moments that make up the first days of the first year of university, we were still grappling with who we were.
And who we wanted to be.
The rest of the night passed in a whirl of inconsequential chatter, petering out as the hours drew late, and we filtered out into the dimly lit hallways to return to our rooms, the Polish guy bidding us goodbye. He would be gone by the 2nd year under a cloud of sexual misconduct, but then, he was just a friendly face.
Wandering through the corridor
My dorm room was straight out of a movie from the 1980s. Picture a corridor with fading red carpet, frayed in place by the scuffs of hundreds of graduates from yesteryears. Past the greying walls are doors painted stark green with numbering in brass plate. Inside a dimunitive rectangular room: a small bed, a desk, a cupboard and a mini-refrigerator. Repeat ad infinitum. If you were lucky, a window onto the river, if not, onto the stark brick walls of the adjoining building. It was heaven. A place of my own.
I had gone down there to put my stuff earlier, packing my clothes and meager posessions into the worn cupboards. I was one of the lucky ones, with a room on the first floor with a window facing the river cherwell. I had opened it earlier to air the room. When I returned, the cool breeze left the curtains aflutter. All else was still. My desk still as yet empty, the walls unadorned, dorm parties as yet unheld.
On the stark brown corkboard attached to my wall, I attached the print-out schedule for the week - the first item I hung. Looking closely, I noted that the first week held a curious melange of serious introductory talks and debauched club nights every single day. The dichotomy set the tone for much of my first term.
The First Term
In that bubble of geniuses, misfits, frauds and cranks, I encountered people all across the spectrum of humanity. Rich Russian oil heiresses (unsmiling bodyguards in tow) mingled with people who were the first in their family (ever) to attend higher education. It’s hard to describe. Oxford held such a richness of the human condition, where people came from all walks of life, bonded through that archetypal sheer brilliance that continues to surprise me even now.
We were at the apex of our energy and had this enthusiasm for life itself, undimmed by the passage of time; reality and its attendant disappointments had not yet set its hooks in us, the future was yet unwritten. We were pristine. Immaculate. Armored with the arrogance that only youth can bring.
We could have gone on forever.
Inside, it felt normal. But outwards and looking in, the sheer intensity of it all had pulled normality out of proportion. Everything was stretched out and muddled, the monumental & weighty brushing up against the absurd, with night clubs nestled next to think tanks dealing with the future of humanity itself - the epoch of a thousand years of history embedded into the very cobblestones, stones that lay stinking with the run-off from tottering clubbers every morning. Everyone was a genius, it felt like, and each with a torrent of views and opinions that ran the gamut: from neo-colonial apologists to militant vegans and everyone in between.
And amidst this, all were looking for that peace and serenity, a place of belonging. Some tribe to call their own.
That early journey took the form of many vignettes, sitting next to a friendly Gloucester-boy on a bench that smelled vaguely of piss during Halloween, his friendly arm around my shoulder and sincere tones lancing through the waves of imposter syndrome I was caught up in at the time. My Asian friend, crying on the sidewalk as we walked from the club after his girlfriend had left him, gin-tears leaking down his face into the gutter.
Our days were spent cheaply, spoiled with choice with regards to events, outings, networking and the like. If felt like if I closed my eyes for a second, a dozen opportunities and invitations would flash and vanish before my eyes. The tide swelled, threatening to swamp us if we let it, if we stopped at all, even for second it felt.
We dived into that first term bubble - a whirlwind of stress, laughter, panic, joy and ambition. Whether by our own volition, we all in our own way caught up in the swell of that singularly unique “Experience” with a Capital E, one that marked us long after we left it all behind.
Finding that niche
For some of my Singaporean friends, it was liberation. The chance to cast off the claustrophobic confines of a society born of competitiveness and Confucian ideals of conformity. They disappeared into the wilderness, never to be seen again except perhaps for the Oxford Singapore Society’s annual Chinese New Year banquet.
For most, it was bewildering and exhilarating in equal measure, as we assimilated rapidly into British culture, with mixed results.
I soon found my niche early, running with a close group of British people from my college. There were around 10 of us, with a mix of 8 Caucasians and 2 Singaporeans. It was admittedly an odd group, ranging from painfully shy, introverts more at home staying in and reading a novel, to the most wanton of partiers.
Looking back, it was circumstance that threw us together. Whirlwind chance meetings at freshers parties and events where wide-eyed introductions turned into tagging along for the rest of the evening, arms grasping and wrists tugged as we navigated through the pounding haze of a dozen dance floors and career halls, slowly agglomerating as people introduced others - a friend here or there met at archery tryouts or the harry potter society open day or a relatively sober picnic - slowly coalescing into a critical mass. In a way, they had become the closest thing to family.
But I also soon found myself straddling the line, existing in the grey between many worlds.
I made friends in the strangest places. I got to know a goth-punk chemistry student quite well, who bought lousy, cut-rate drugs off the street and synthesized it into a purer form with her lab equipment, pawning it off to Eton and Harrow kids at exorbitant prices to pay for her student loan. She was disabled, had synesthesia and played the violin. She had was singularly unique & tender soul, and her outlook on life was refreshing.
Yet at the same time, I was friends with some of those in the Oxford University Islamic Society, those rarest of souls, who refused to participate in the quotidian rituals of pub culture, constant carousing and student nightlife, standing apart from the rest of us, for whom clubbing / going ‘out’ had become at least a weekly occurrence, if not at least a permanent fixture in our lives. They existed in a parallel world that I never fully entered into - with one friend even going to the extent of putting an industrial freezer in his room to fill with a terms’ worth of halal food.
Counting Down
In that halcyon, liberated first term we let time drip through our fingers, unfettered by any real responsibility. Sure there were lessons and classes to attend, but as the consequences for absenteeism was nil, we were content to the clock tick down.
We didn’t care for we had people to kiss and hands to hold and raise high to the beat of the snare and the kick of the drum - a dozen parties, a hundred events, a thousand-fold encounters and limitless potentialities to choose from, if we but reached out and grasped them.
As term wound down, I remember walking through the deer park1 at Magdalen College one midnight after a college ‘bop2’ to cool off. It was always a pleasant walk, our arms interlinked as we chattered in multiple groups, ambling slowly around the path that circled that deer enclosure. Somehow, I fell slightly behind. Perhaps I had stopped to tie a shoe-lace or a pebble had gotten in but I stooped to clear it. And when I got up, I was momentarily alone. My friends were beside me yet eons away, with naught but the yawning moon before me as their chatter spun off amidst the dark. I remember marveling at how I had gotten here.
I was happy.
I had found my tribe, but in the quiet moments, my mind was aflame.
My college had a deer park that was free to access at all hours of the day by students, complete with its own proud collection of in-bred deer.
A monthly (I think), party hosted in our college’s bar that revolved around themes (from clowns to cross-dressing) and very affordable alcohol prices, as well as awful music choices.
Great post! Such vivid descriptions and memories of your time in Oxford you had. I'm glad you found your tribe eventually :)