By Zhang Ruihe

It was doomed from the start, a hopeless enterprise. But Xin had always been drawn to hopeless enterprises. Patron saint of hopeless causes. That's what her favourite teacher in secondary school had called her once, her eyes crinkling with amusement. Xin couldn't remember what she had been teasing her about. Over the years, the difficulty of the causes she adopted only increased in magnitude. The only difference was that she got better at recognising them for what they were, and so was able to adjust her expectations accordingly so that in expecting nothing, or less than nothing, she insulated herself from failure, primed herself for maximum gratitude whenever life vindicated her faith.

But all that came much later. At the age of 18, she did not know enough to perceive that the task she had set up for herself was a near impossibility. After all, she thought, Singapore was an island with a 190km-long coastline, and it made perfect sense to do a study on its coastal geology for the Geographica Society's inaugural student exhibition. Everyone else in her A-level Geography cohort was doing studies on Singapore's urban geography. Surely there was space for something perhaps a little different, though no less essential. And her topic proposal had been approved by the teachers, endorsed and deemed "Interesting" by none other than the funky Mr Wong, he of the gleaming Doc Marts, floppy boyband hair, off-the-cuff witticisms and bordering-on-risqué jokes. She didn't have to do what everyone else was doing, even if it was more convenient – that would be caving in to the lure of the merely conventional. And Xin knew she was above all that.

So she flung herself into the research. Not an easy task in the days before the internet, though the librarian at the old Stamford Road National Library's reference section did her best to help. After an entire weekend spent combing the library's archives, squinting at microfilm images and luxuriating in the scent of old books and paper that was to become such a familiar part of her life long after the library was demolished, she found exactly six-and-a-half newspaper articles and a long-forgotten research paper on Coastal Weathering and Erosion in Southern Singapore. It was hopelessly out-of-date: published in 1960, the stretch of coastland it featured had long since been reclaimed. Her other plans, too, didn't work out quite the way she wished. For all her waiting for the postman every day, the geography professors at NUS never wrote back; her phone calls to the Geography Department office went unanswered; and it seemed that her own teachers were all secretly conspiring against her project, scheduling extra lessons and ECA meetings so late in the day, and even on Saturdays, that she was left with no time to make the long journeys from school to the East Coast and the West Coast, not to mention Sentosa, Pulau Ubin, St John's Island, Lazarus Island, Kusu Island.

Three weeks into the three-month-long project, Xin realised that she needed help. This was one project she could not handle alone. But finding a project partner proved more difficult than she had anticipated. And when she had finally recruited a hapless junior with promises of ECA points and a special mention in the Geographica's first annual Yearbook, she found herself saddled with a project partner who did not share her single-minded passion for learning, and there were numerous occasions when Xin had to bite her tongue in frustration at Kathy's lack of initiative. At other times it was simply impossible to coordinate their schedules. The two trips they did manage to make, to Labrador Park and Pulau Ubin, yielded some interesting photos, but not much else.

As the deadline drew ever closer, Xin began to experience sleeplessness and a dull, throbbing headache that became so familiar she almost forgot it was there. This uncertainty was virgin territory. For once, she – Chen Xin Hui, top Geography student at Singapore's top junior college, aspiring Oxbridge grad and would-be geologist – was among the meek of the earth, with no promise of a coming kingdom. Her faith began to waver.

"How's your coast project coming along?" Xin was waiting at the bus-stop with Michael de Souza from the class next door. The bus was taking forever.

"Okay, I guess. It's hard to find time but I guess we all have that problem. How's yours?"

"Not too bad. We're interviewing this woman from URA – she's in urban planning, used to teach here. We just met her for lunch last Saturday. She's really helpful." Michael was one of those – student councillor, two S-Papers, good grades, pretty girlfriend, popular with both students and teachers. Xin wished she could hate him.

So the others were ahead of her. And having an easier time of it. For one fleeting moment she wondered what it would be like to be working on something more like what everyone else was doing. Changing Retail Patterns in the HDB Heartlands, perhaps. She could just see it – a National Geographic-style photo-essay on the disappearing provision shops and kopitiams in the public housing estates of Singapore in the last decade of the millennium. Toa Payoh Central was just two bus stops from her home. She could have interviewed 20 mama-shop aunties and uncles for all the time she had spent cold-calling and writing futile letters to NUS faculty. But it was too late now to start on a new project. With just under four weeks left to the exhibition, the invitation letters and publicity flyers had already been mailed to the other schools, and the teachers were too busy to entertain vacillating students who couldn't get their acts together. Besides, to change her mind would be a capitulation, and if she couldn't even see this one little project through, what of the greater challenges she would face in future? All the truly worthwhile things in the world had been accomplished by people who stuck it out despite the odds. How could she give up now?

Xin decided they had to take stock. The next day, waiting for Kathy in the late afternoon at her favourite study table next to the bastketball courts, she opened the shoebox where she kept all the photos they had taken and spread them out on the dark-grained wooden surface. A few panoramas of the Labrador Park shoreline, pieced together from individual shots, the sky, sea and shore merging into a leaden anonymity broken only by the remains of tropical jungle growing on the cliffs. Some photos of the grubby beach at Ubin where everyone went for their school camps, patches of sand blackened with the remains of old campfires. She didn't know if the beach was natural or man-made. Close-ups of coastal rock formations at both Labrador and Ubin. They had taken special care to capture both the dark, moist band of rock that lay between the high and low water marks, as well as the lighter grey rock above it.

"The weathering happens faster in the intertidal zone," Xin had told Kathy confidently as they waded in the shin-deep shallows at Labrador beach, gingerly picking their way between the algae-covered rocks. "We need photos of both to show the difference."

Kathy had taken this in, the way she took in everything else Xin told her, cheerfully, unquestioningly. Now, recalling that exchange, Xin felt a twinge of irritation at how easily Kathy had let her get away with making something up. Of course, there was a good chance she had been right. But she didn't know for sure, and Kathy should have called her bluff.

What next? All those photos were nothing by themselves – they needed captions: labels, names, histories. The entire project needed a narrative arc, to give it the broad epic sweep of the best geological studies. But that was what had eluded her from the beginning. She couldn't even tell which geological processes to call upon to explain the individual landforms they had photographed, let alone figure out the bigger evolutionary picture these landforms were pointing to. The disparate sections of coastline did not add up to a coherent story.

She watched the boys on the basketball courts, their movements fluid, the hollow thunk of the balls bouncing off the backboards mingling with the quiet, precise swish as they slipped through the nets, the hooting shouts and laughter. It reminded her of the sea: the murmur of waves washing on the shore.  She had a sudden impulse to abandon her photos, abandon the whole project, and join the rest of the world in its carefree games of basketball and shopping and eating. A heavy sigh escaped her lips.

"Why so glum, chum?" It was Kathy, chirpy, ponytail bouncing, and fifteen minutes late, as usual. She plopped herself down opposite Xin, planting her can of Coke at the edge of the table, positioning a bag of Famous Amos cookies right in the centre, like a peace offering.

Xin sighed again. Things wouldn't be so bad if you could actually understand, she wanted to say. Kathy was pretty, outgoing, got so-so grades but didn't seem to care one way or the other. Xin, on the other hand, was quiet, almost withdrawn, with puffy hair that enclosed her face like an astronaut's helmet. People treated her with a grudging respect because she got good grades, had interesting ideas, was different. This project was her responsibility, something she had committed to doing well. To fail at it would be as unthinkable as failing at marriage. "Look, this is just not working. I mean… look at these photos! They don't mean anything! And we haven't spoken to anyone, no one's helping us. Michael de Souza's group – they've got this URA woman who's helping them with interviews and stuff. And all we have is these photos that don't make sense…"

It was odd – how articulating all this was such a relief, and yet also reinforced her despair.

"I just don't know what to do anymore, and you're not…" Xin allowed the words to trail off. Kathy bit her straw as they both stared at the graffiti on the table.

"Xin." Kathy's voice was unusually quiet. "Xin. Listen. I think you're taking all this a bit too seriously. It's an ECA exhibition, for crying out loud. In the school hall. Our booth is gonna be one booth out of, like, ten? Fifteen? No one's gonna look at this stuff. Don't stress yourself out over this, okay? It's not worth it."

"I'm not… I... No, you don't get it!"

"What don't I get?"

"It's not whether it's in the school hall or the National Museum or whatever. It's… We're… We're doing this thing, and it matters, because… it's real, and it's … our country, and we need to study our natural coastline cos it's all gonna disappear soon, and no one's done it before, and…"

"Precisely cos no one's done it before." Kathy interrupted Xin's halting attempt to explain herself. "It doesn't matter. No one's gonna care. I mean, do you actually think Donald Wong cares what the hell we're doing with these projects? He's doing this for show! And he's probably too busy reading his comics or going to the Boom Boom Room or wherever he goes to get his stupid jokes…"

"That's not fair! Mr Wong's a good teacher!"

"Okay, okay, sorry. You don't have to defend him all the time." Kathy paused, ignoring the flash of protest in Xin's eyes. "But you know, I've been wanting to say this to you… I know there's all this stuff you want to do with this project. But look, we only have three months, and now we've got less than one more month to go. It's an ECA exhibition that's not even getting much support from the school. It's been so hard to find info on this – there's hardly any existing research. There's no way we're gonna be able to do all that you want to do."

Kathy's words spilled out of her in a breathless rush: weeks of pent-up frustration finding their sudden release.

"You're stressing yourself out over this, Xin, and you're stressing me out too."

Now it was Xin's turn to pause. If only Kathy knew what a burden she was with her constant late-coming, her flippant attitude. She looked at Kathy again, taking in her babyish eyes earnest with pleading, then took a deep breath, exhaling slowly.

"I'm sorry if I stressed you out, Kathy," she said, weighing each word as she spoke. "It's just that… knowledge, and learning, and… intellectual integrity, they mean something. To me. And we need to do this properly. It's just… I can't figure out how."

A ball flew towards them from the nearest court and ricocheted off the wall behind, hitting the table leg before slowly thumping to a halt on the edge of the grass verge beside them. A long, skinny boy with his shirt plastered to his back loped towards them to collect the runaway basketball. Xin could see his skin, tanned like sunburnt sandstone beneath the sweat-soaked white fabric. She blinked back tears. This was the first time anyone had ever challenged her conviction that knowledge mattered for its own sake, that anything was possible if people would just put their minds to what they wanted to do. What made it worse was the fact that she had no answers. For the umpteenth time, she regretted roping Kathy into the project.

"Look, Xin – I know you want to do this well. But let's admit it – it's not an easy topic."

Xin opened her mouth as if to speak, then thought better of it. She fixed her eyes on the basketball players, envying their ease, their freedom.

"Okay, look. We've got some photos. We've got that research paper. We know about coasts. We'll find some way to work something out. Maybe we'll have to scale down or something, let's see how it goes. But we'll do this, okay? We'll do it. Just don't get so… intense about it. We'll work something out."

Kathy nudged the pack of Famous Amos in Xin's direction. "Come on, try these. Chocolate chip with macadamia. They're really good. I got them from Orchard just now."

The school hall was more crowded than either Xin or Kathy had imagined it would be, and buzzing with a low-intensity drone of voices. Donald Wong had managed to hustle his fellow Geography teachers from the other junior colleges and a few of the top secondary schools into sending their students to the exhibition – and they had come by the busloads. Xin weaved her way back to her booth, past the moveable notice boards and the navy-blue plastic desks arranged in neat rows of three and decorated with colourfully painted cloth banners. It was like being adrift in a sea of school uniforms – white, blue, beige, grey, green.

"The machine ran out of Coke," she said as she handed Kathy a cup of iced lemon tea. Xin looked again at the information leaflets on the table. The Coastal Geology of Singapore – An Investigation, the title proclaimed in bold black font. Less than half of their original stack remained at the end of Day One of the week-long exhibition. Their work was getting a much wider circulation than they had expected.

"Hey, good job on your project!" Michael called over from two booths away, flashing Xin a brilliant smile and giving her a thumbs-up sign. Xin blushed. She had been blushing a lot since the exhibition opening.

Mr Wong had been very pleased with their work as well, praising the "stunning visuals" and "concise write-ups". "I knew you could do it," he had told them as they set up their booth, pinning the laminated photos onto the movable corkboard. They had smiled their thanks, suddenly shy at their teacher's enthusiastic appraisal.

Xin looked again at the notice board showcasing their project. Mr Wong was right. It did look quite stunning. They had enlarged their original photos to poster size, and Kathy's artistic genius had done the rest, so that even the most unspectacular rock formations struck the viewer as special, worthy of attention. Most of the other booths had the usual funky hand-drawn graphics that adorned most JC student projects; but Kathy had come up with a quietly classy design concept that captured something of the in-between-ness, the indeterminacy, the waiting-on-the-cusp-of-change, that had drawn Xin to the study of coastal geology in the first place. One could almost sense the ebb and flow of the tides in the soft fluid lines that criss-crossed the display board, dividing it into blocks of aquamarine and burnt sienna, like idealised visions of the land and sea. Xin had noticed many visitors to their booth, standing rapt before the display board long after they had finished reading the accompanying write-ups.

Having Kathy on the project had not been such a bad thing after all. Xin had realised over the course of their work together that Kathy – frivolous, unpunctual Kathy – provided a good counterbalance against her own tendency to excessive anxiety and perfectionism; and after what they now called 'The Famous Amos Conversation', she had culled Xin's page-long to-do list down to a half-page of 'Things We Die-Die Must Have For This Show To Happen'. Xin recalled her initial resistance with embarrassment. If not for that paring down, their exhibit would never have gotten off the ground.

"Hey, Xin, why are you standing there like that? Can you take over for a bit? I need the loo."

Kathy's voice shook her out of her reverie. Dear Kathy – ever ready to trumpet every last detail of her personal life to all and sundry. This was one thing about her that Xin felt she would never get used to. Xin settled herself behind the table and idly thumbed through the info leaflets. These were her contribution to the exhibition. She had given Kathy more or less free rein with the photos and graphic design, taking upon herself the more difficult task of doing the write-ups for both the display board and the leaflets. It had taken a long time, and the leaflets had in fact been printed only at the last minute, just the day before. Xin read the introduction again, feeling curiously distant from the spare, elegant prose, as if it had been written by someone else.

Singapore consists of some 63 islands, including the main island itself. Over the years, land reclamation along its coast has expanded the main island, while reducing the number of smaller offshore islands surrounding it. The coastline of Singapore is thus always in flux, sculpted not only by natural forces but by man-made ones as well…

"Excuse me…" Xin was interrupted by an earnest-looking, bespectacled girl in a sleeveless sky-blue pinafore, pointing at one of the paragraphs in the leaflet. "Excuse me… I was wondering… Where did you find all this information on the coastal weathering and landforms? Because I wanted to do a project on Singapore's coastline once, but I just couldn't get enough material." 

Xin hesitated. Almost stopped breathing. She had feared this would happen, had in fact worried that Mr Wong or one of the other geography teachers would query her like this. Now the moment had come. She did not know whether or not to be grateful that the question had come from a visitor, a secondary school student, instead of one of her own teachers. She tried to imagine what might happen if she told the truth. If she confessed that yes, the information had been hard to obtain, in fact, impossible to obtain; that it had been too late, by the time she realised this, to backtrack on her project; that she had been at the end of her tether; that she didn't want to let down her teachers and her project partner; that, if she was really honest about it, it wasn't the fear of letting others down that had forced her to do it, but the fear that they might think less of her; that she really had no choice; that the reputation of the Geographica Society was at stake; that the reputation of her school was at stake; that her parents would be so disappointed; that she wanted the ECA points for her scholarship applications; that the chances of discovery had been so low compared to the certainty of humiliation if she did not complete her project… That she, Chen Xin Hui, top Geography student at Singapore's top junior college, aspiring Oxbridge grad and would-be geologist, had fabricated the statistics and research findings printed in the info leaflet; that she had picked, as carefully as she could, likely explanations for each coastal landform they had on record, and written them up in as professional-sounding a language as she could; that she had passed these off as the truth; that she had betrayed her own best self and crumbled under the pressure of circumstances that had not even been totally beyond her control.

Tiny beads of water slid down Xin's cup of iced lemon tea. 

The girl in blue was still waiting patiently for an answer. Xin could feel a headache starting up. Actually, it wasn't so much the beginning of a headache; for the last two months, the dull tension in her temples had never quite gone away. But it intensified now to a throbbing pain that left her eye-sockets and cheekbones feeling worn out, exhausted, as if the flesh that covered them had withered and shrunk in the short time since the girl had asked her dreaded question. She looked at the sky-blue school uniform again, distracted by its red-and-yellow collar-pin, and heard a voice, not unlike her own but seeming to come from a great distance, explaining that, yes, the information had been hard to find; that it had taken her weeks of research; that she had been lucky enough to come across an old research paper in the National Library archives; that her uncle knew someone who knew someone who taught coastal geomorphology at a Malaysian university; that she was sorry she didn't have his contact details with her right now but she could always pass them on some other time. She scribbled the title of the research paper on the girl's info leaflet, forcing a smile when the girl thanked her with a quick bob of her head and took her leave.

"You did an amazing job, you know that?" It was Kathy, dear, bubbly, clueless Kathy, back from the loo, apparently having overheard the conversation. Xin forced herself to look at her. "I mean, I knew it was tough on you, but you didn't tell me it was so tough! We really must celebrate when all this is over. Let's go Häagen-Dazs, okay? I've been craving their rum-and-raisin for the last two weeks!"

Xin nodded. Yes, some nice, cool, refreshing Häagen-Dazs would be so very welcome right now. The heat was stifling, unbearable.

"Let's go today," she said, putting her arm round Kathy's shoulder. "After this. My treat. You've done so much and I want to thank you properly."

Kathy grinned, looking pleased to be acknowledged at last for her work. The echoing voices of the crowd in the school hall closed in upon them, wave upon wave – and Xin found herself thinking of the afternoon, just a few weeks ago, when she had sat with her legs dangling over the edge of a breakwater at East Coast Park, waiting for the tide to turn. She remembered being mesmerised by the waves along the beach, advancing and retreating, advancing and retreating – white scalloped edges creeping imperceptibly up the glistening sand, till the sky turned a soft burnished gold, and the first errant wavelet broke over her sandals, leaving her flinching from the cold.

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