An Annual Get-together Lunch On 5 February 2011, we had an annual get-together lunch for the ex-pupils of the Class of ’69 of the Technical Institute of Penang at Goh Swee Kee Restaurant 5, Sri Bahari Road, Off Penang Road.

This was the first time I took part in this lunch gathering although Tick Lay had told me about it without fail for the past two years. Seventeen of us who attended had two tables to ourselves. Many among us did not meet one another since we left the Technical Institute more than forty years ago. However, we shared the same yearning of catching up with one another with news after all these decades. As Kim Piaw puts it, “Even though we might have changed in physically, our friendship remains intact.”

The attendees of this function were deeply indebted to Herman Teoh and Lye Choon Sheng for their enthusiastic and untiring effort in organising this annual gathering and to the others who tried to contact and canvass for the rest of school mates to grace the event.

At the gathering,when I was initially introduced to some of the gentlemen, I couldn’t recognise who they were as they definitely looked nothing like what they did forty years ago! It was only after I dug down deep into the recesses of my memory and during our conversations that I was able to piece together who was who. If all of us who had not met before for a long time were to bump into one another in Penang Road, we would have most likely treated one another as total strangers. Even though Tick Lay and Seen Moun were room mates in the school hostel when they were in Form Five, could not recognise each other when they met at the gathering.

I supposed it was the same with Soek King who could not make out who I was although we were in the same class during our Sixth Form years. It could be that her busy working life had resulted her ‘memory card’ being re-formatted many times over the years that ‘some of the older files might have been deleted or chucked into the trash bin’.

One particular file which Soek King still retained had aroused the interest of everybody at the gathering. It was a love story that is worth mentioning here.

This love story started during our school year in 1968. The main actor, the ‘Romeo’ of our school, was staying in the hostel - in the room next to mine. At that time some of us were already aware that he had to take his medication to help him sleep. But then no one would have suspected that he had fallen in love unilaterally with his classmate, Juliet.

Persistently Romeo would find every opportunity to stick around Juliet in school just like ‘bees swarming around a hive’. But Juliet did not want to have any affair with Romeo then . She got very annoyed and upset to the extent that she told her friends that one day she would not hesitate to give Romeo a huge mirror for him “to take a long look at himself in the mirror”.

Whether one would consider it lucky for Romeo, or otherwise for Juliet, fate had charted the destiny of this love affair. As if with the divine intervention, both Romeo and Juliet went to the “same” university, took up the “same” course, attended the “same” church, taught in the “same” town in a Northern state of Peninsular Malaysia and finally got married and lived happily as a family. The story definitely had a fairy tale ending.

Our conversation hovered around topics such as ways of maintaining a healthy lifestyle; means of reducing stress; recommended reading and selected places of interest worthy of visit.

The two hours of lunch together was hardly enough for us to catch up with one another. So we adjourned to Coffee Island at Gurney Drive, for another round of conversation and a free flow of beer and coffee. We lingered for another couple of hours. All of us enjoyed the companionship, especially when we had a few “jokers” among us.

Before we bid farewell to one another, Lye Choon Sheng had made a proposal to have our next annual Chinese New Year gathering at Chiang Mai. Hopefully it would materialize with a better response from our school mates and their family members.