Photo credit:Joannafox

A bit late to the party – apparently everyone and their mother now has opinions on SOTA students and their futures. Time to add my own into the mix.

Picture this: your 6-year-old kid passionately wants a bicycle and swears he’s going to love it for the rest of his life, so you buy him one. Next month, he swears that having a kiddy scooter is going to make him happy for eternity, and the bicycle lies forgotten (to be ridden maybe every few weeks, because he really does love it, even if the scooter is shinier and newer). Is this child immediately branded an indecisive brat, the spawn of Satan himself? No. He’s a kid.

Now me. I’m 12, I’m in the school drama club and I think it’d be pretty awesome to become a #seriousactress. Off to SOTA I go. Cue a 6-year montage of me discovering things about theatre (some that I love, some that I hate), and about myself – among them, a steadily growing love for linguistics.

I emerge from SOTA with my love for theatre stronger than I could have imagined, having made my professional acting debut in 2015. But I also emerge having accepted an offer to study linguistics at university.

And immediately, I become a huge waste of resources, an ungrateful child who should have thought harder before committing to becoming an artist – as if SOTA had only equipped me with the skills I needed to become an actress, and nothing else. I become a testament to the immaturity of youth, with no regard for my fellow citizens who were, apparently, counting on me to single-handedly revitalise the art scene with my IB Theatre Diploma.

Yes, I changed my mind about what I wanted. So did that 6-year-old. So did thousands of people who got an engineering degree and then didn’t become engineers, so did thousands of people who started off in civil service and ended up in law, and yet I don’t see anyone desperately reaching for statistics to condemn them.

I’m not trying to justify the choices of SOTA alumni – there’s nothing to justify. I’m saying that there’s a right and there’s wrong – and if you’re in the camp that says it’s okay to blame kids for wanting one thing at 12 and another thing at 18, then you are in the wrong.

You are wrong for holding children accountable for wanting things that make them happy at a given time in their life, and you are wrong for telling children that changing their minds is a sign of weakness, and you are wrong for making children think that they shouldn’t dream because your dreams are only worthwhile if you get them right the first time around.

Lots of people are up in arms at seeing their hard-earned taxpayer money go to waste because SOTA students don’t end up in the arts. ‘We gave them so much support,’ they cry, ‘and they still let us down.’ Yes, it’s because of you that we had facilities to practice in, but let’s talk about the psychological bashing that every SOTA student is subjected to. It’s a given that every child who enters this school will, at some point, face the well-meaning discouragement of someone close to them.

Every student has heard routine expressions of disbelief that they actually study subjects other than their art form. Every student has endured pointed comments from neighbours about how uncertain artist’s lives must be and how brave we are to want to go into a field where we’ll have to live hand to mouth for the rest of our lives. And every single student has gritted their teeth, smiled away the condescension, and gotten the hell on with rehearsal. Here’s the funny thing.

SOTA kids learn from the moment we enter the school that people won’t be happy if we go into the arts, and then we learn the minute we leave that people won’t be happy if we don’t, either. We face constant opposition on all fronts – from our families, from our friends, from vicious strangers who can’t wait to watch us fail – and yet the second we decide that we’ve had enough and that maybe a future in the arts is just as bleak as everyone always made it seem, it becomes our fault for not being strong enough to withstand ‘a little healthy dissuasion’. It’s our fault for not appreciating the ‘huge amounts of moral support’ that we’ve apparently always been given.

So to all these people who are so quick to crucify SOTA students for being too ‘feeble’ to pursue their passions – how many of you have recently bought tickets to a show or an exhibition?

How many of you have encouraged your children to go for dance lessons? How many of you have done anything at all to convince aspiring artists that the arts is a viable pathway in Singapore? How many of you have, instead, painted a grim picture of the local arts scene for your nieces and nephews, quashing their half-formed and not-yet-articulated dreams of becoming the next big thing on the Singapore stage?

How many of you have basked in comfortable cynicism, preaching about how the arts is a waste of time and money, and then turned around to point fingers at kids who’ve decided that maybe they don’t want to become artists anymore?

And even then, claiming that SOTA students have wasted resources because they didn’t go into the arts is ignoring the fact that we study 5 other subjects at the IB. Come on, if you’re going to criticise me for not doing theatre after SOTA, the least you could do is also criticize me for not doing math, Chinese, chemistry, literature and history – your taxpayer money went towards that too. My SOTA education doesn’t get validated the day that I become an actress. It doesn’t even get validated if I decide to become a mathematician. My SOTA education is valid because I was there, and I learned. Education is not, and should never be, the means to an end.

I’m from the class of 2016, and this year, I’ll be going to a regular old academic university to study a regular old academic subject. And I know I’ll be lambasted for ‘not being brave enough to follow my acting dreams’, but the joke’s on you because I’m still going to love theatre with every beat of my heart. Theatre is for me. So is linguistics. So is every other discipline I’m going to fall madly in love within my lifetime, because (shocker!) I’m allowed to have more than one passion. And you don’t get to tell me that I can’t have it both ways.

So, no, I’ve never met a SOTA student who gave up on their ambition. And that’s because SOTA students understand that it’s human nature to have more than one. And we’re never going to play the zero-sum game with our dreams.

Source: FB Post by Claire Chung