It felt like my family had travelled full circle when I saw my sweet little niece Megan in a blue pinafore on her first day of school.
The year was 2005. I remember - or romanticise - that day as a rain-fresh January afternoon when the year was bright and new, and never more so for Megs.
Her mum, Annie, is my sister. Both of us and another sister, Ping, went to the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus Primary School. Now, it was Megan's turn.
But it had been a little bit of a jagged journey to CHIJ. My Dad had actually enrolled me at a different mission school for the first two years of my primary education.
It was a good school. But he had heard about the high standards at CHIJ, and was set on getting places for us.
He was a man with no connections, only great persistence.
For one year, he'd walk purposefully from his Empress Place office to CHIJ, then located in Victoria Street, to coax the principal to enrol Annie and me.
Some days, he popped by for only a few moments just so Mrs Seah would not forget him and his quixotic petition.
The statuesque cheongsam-clad principal would smile, and say in crisp tones that she had no places. Sometimes, she'd add that she would look into it.
Now, we all looked upon the fierce Mrs Seah with fear and trembling. I wondered later how my father could encounter her non-stop, and why she humoured him.
But then, my Dad had shown the same dogged determination as a 13-year-old.
He defied his parents, who were struggling to make ends meet in the post-war days, and insisted on starting school as an overaged kid.
He simply kept up his stubborn refrain in Teochew: 'I want to go to school.' I don't know how he discovered ambition in those desperate times.
When his parents finally relented, he used his fractured English to convince a kind principal to admit him.
The principal might have taken pity on the handsome ragamuffin on an old bicycle, or seen some spark in him.
My Dad got his dearest wish. He started school and the other children, cruel to outsiders, taunted him just for being the biggest boy in class.
But he was never one to give up. He cleared exam after exam, and skipped grades.
I imagine it was just a mini-hurdle for him to confront one more principal, Mrs Seah, and to politely bulldoze a way into CHIJ for his precious daughters.
Because of his insistence, two generations of girls have enjoyed the convent education he so prized. Unborn generations after us may do the same.
All this reinforces the truth that we leave legacies big and little.
The school itself has left huge imprints on me. Reconnecting with former school friends at a 2006 reunion, and in several smaller circles after that, I realised that so much of who I am flowed from those colourful convent days.
My friends and I discern the same sense of playfulness and purpose in each face, years later.
For convent girls can be so vocal and ebullient that the noise is unbelievable each time they're in one place. But in parallel, they have deep roots in the community.
The school, for instance, idealistically took a Toa Payoh site instead of a plusher district. It hoped to reach out and uplift young girls in the estate.
This was the very same high purpose that spurred enlightened Irish nuns in a previous century to leave for swampy Singapore. They brought the gift of education to girls in Asia who never enjoyed much stature.
In that way, they blessed the nations.
One of my young colleagues was a Toa Payoh girl in the first cohort, when CHIJ relocated to the heartland some years after I left school.
She's a talented journalist with a heart, and I'd like to think our school played a role in her story.
Meanwhile, I'll always remember Megs on her first day of school. In that mental snapshot, she is forever skipping, pony-
tailed and fresh-faced, holding her mum's hand tightly as they hurried to the school bus.
The air is full of the sweetest expectation of what school - and life itself - will hold for one little girl.
This article was first published in The Straits Times on Sep 7, 2008.
