Mark Jenkins (SEA 73-80) was born, raised, and educated in Southeast Asia. He now lives with his partner Patty on the Island of Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts, USA. He is the author and co-author of 13 published books and has written for publications as diverse as Rolling Stone and the Wall Street Journal. Mark also writes humorous commentaries for public radio.

 

"In 2001 I returned to UWCSEA for a reunion. I found myself standing on the driveway looking at a couple of the older boarding houses which were soon to be demolished when the ACS took over that part of the campus. It all looked exactly the same as it did when I was a student all those years ago, and I felt transported back in time. I experienced a powerful sense of nostalgia for that period in my life. I shouldn’t be surprised: I lived on that campus for seven years, and I was formed by those experiences.

 

"I arrived at UWCSEA in 1973 as a ‘first year’ – an 11-year-old at the bottom rung of the ladder. I stayed all seven years, and along with my Malaysian friend Paul Willoughby, was the first boarder to do so. When I arrived, the school was transitioning from Singapore International School to UWCSEA. I was one of hundreds of boarders living on the campus. There were four boarding houses, crammed with at least 80 students in each, and we slept 8 to an open-air room with one ceiling fan to keep us cool.

 

"Thirty-five years ago Singapore was a very different place, and so was the school. The campus was enormous – much larger than it is now with not nearly as many students – and was considered to be in the ‘ulu,’ or backcountry. Pocket money was S$4 a week in Junior House, and we’d save the ten-cent bus fare by walking back and forth to Holland Village through the huge monsoon drains. We were in the middle of nowhere.

 

"It might seem strange in this era of cell phones and e-mail, but in those days if you wanted to speak to your parents you’d have to place a ‘trunk call’ home. The operator would call back after some time to tell you they had made the connection. The word would go out through the boarding house and everyone would start yelling like a version of bush telegraph – “Phone for Mark Jenkins, Phone for Mark Jenkins!” - and you went rushing down to the phone booth! On Sunday evenings it was compulsory to sit down and write a letter home to your parents, and a stern matron in her starched white uniform would make sure you had done it.

 

"As boarders we considered ourselves kings and queens of the campus. That’s because when the ‘daybugs’ left at 3 o’clock – the place was ours. My step kids love stories of the raids we’d make on other boarding houses in the middle of the night, ‘armies’ of 20 or so of us crawling across campus to attack the other kids while they slept.  Sometimes they’d get wind we were coming and a huge battle would break out as 50 or so kids would try to repel the raiding party, sometimes with pillows, other times with the trusty firehose! Inevitably in the middle of it all the lights would come on and the boarding house master and his wife would be standing there in their pyjamas, absolutely furious from being woken up. You knew then you were going to be confined to campus – ‘gated’ – for at least a couple of weekends.

 

"In that pre-computer age, mischief reigned, and the pranks we’d play on each other and the staff got very imaginative. We were merciless. One of the teachers had a tiny sports car that at the end of every term, in the middle of the night, a group of us would pick up and  move somewhere silly – like to the middle of the dining hall. It became a tradition. 

 

"For all the rough-and-tumble, we had hours of enforced homework and had to wear ties to dinner six nights of the week. We made our own fun. There were tournaments for everything from table tennis to soccer within the boarding houses and between the boarding houses and we organised all this ourselves. During the monsoon season we’d ride the torrent of water through the drains all over campus, or play British Bulldog in water up to our knees. War Games were the rage – simulated guerrilla battles using flashlights as ‘guns.’ Again, because the campus was so large and covered mostly in open fields, this was the perfect setting.

 

"I can’t say I was the best student. I scraped by and passed the IB. I worked hard at the extracurricular stuff though, and was the captain of the rugby team, editor of the school newspaper, and did a lot of theatre. That served me exactly how it was supposed to, and gave me confidence way beyond my academic achievements. That’s my advice to kids at UWCSEA who are perhaps struggling academically – take advantage of what’s available beyond the classroom.

 

"After I graduated from UWCSEA, I went to the University of Kent at Canterbury. I had hardly spent any time at all in England. Talk about a fish out of water! I stay in touch with friends from college and they still give me a hard time about how I would wear a sarong in the English winter. Hey, that’s what we wore hanging around the boarding house at UWCSEA! When I graduated from college I went to the States to visit some old friends from UWCSEA. I ended up staying. I now live on the beautiful island of Martha’s Vineyard.

 

"I’m still in touch with people from UWCSEA, especially friends from the old boarding houses. In 2001 I organised a reunion of my class that took place here on Martha’s Vineyard, and two of my oldest friends from UWCSEA – Sue Ayres and Kris Gourlay – hit it off and got married a couple of years later. How’s that for promoting alumni relations! 

 

"Social service was something that was emphasised when I was at UWCSEA, as it still is today. I continue to ‘give back.’ I am on the Executive Committee of Vineyard House, an organisation that offers safe and sober housing for people in early recovery from substance abuse. There are other forms of social service I perform. This is the least I can do when I consider that I had a privileged upbringing. Not from a material standpoint, because goodness knows, sleeping eight to a room and eating boarding house food for seven years isn’t exactly what people have in mind when they think about “privileged.” But from the standpoint of incredible experiences, learning how to get along with dozens upon dozens of other people living in close quarters, getting to travel by ourselves and make our own fun – that was something that was unique and invaluable.