Nostalgia Overload

Lee Su Kim (right) with her friends at the Back2BBGS event.


It felt like walking through a time tunnel ...treading on what was once BBGS soil, then emerging in the huge cavernous main plaza to see so many familiar faces - of old friends, school prefects, house captains, school captains, teachers, ( Mrs Boler, Mrs Simon, Mrs Thanen, etc) the school jaga, the school clerk and Ms Cooke, the living legend herself looking frail but still feisty -- it was Nostalgia Overload.

So many of us had tears in our eyes. I couldnt stop tearing up myself. I wondered why. It wasn't that we were weeping for our school anymore - that is past and gone and we have accepted it if never quite reconciled with the way it was downed. A quiet heartache is that its existence is still not memorialized in some form or other and we wait patiently for that recognition of a great school.

I think the tears were for our youth, for a time when we were innocent, carefree schoolgirls, for a time that can never be again, but always treasured in our hearts. As we reach middle age and beyond, we are astonished that feeling of being and feeling young is still there bubbling away inside us, and it all came alive again that special day.


Professor Madya Dr. Lee Su Kim, School of Language Studies & Linguistics Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, is from the Class of 1972.