"Look at how Kit wears it. Follow him." the seniors yelled at the struggling group of first year students, or "Frosh" as we were known. I spied a few smirks and not a few annoyed faces. I smiled impishly, half amused at their efforts to mimic my "diaper", half indignant thinking how they must already assume I knew how to tie a loin cloth because I was Asian. Tugging at the cloth for like the umpteenth time, making sure nothing embarrassing was showing past the edges, I re-adjusted the knot, wondering whether what seemed to me the most logical way of wrapping a loin cloth around your bottom was really the actual way Gandhi would have done it. It was my first time wearing one afterall.
It started early one Saturday morning. We had been forewarned a few days earlier that this weekend would be the day the Frosh would be "initiated". I was dreading it and my mind scrambled to find a way to duck what was obviously going to be nothing but an embarrassing day of humiliation, drinking and puking. All the horror stories of ragging and hazing ran riot through my overly active imagination in technicolor.
*knock* *knock* "Get to the TV room" I heard a yell outside my door. "Strip to your underwear and bring your bedsheet." the obnoxious voice added. I kept quiet, hesitating...
"NOW!" he yelled.
Heart racing I half considered not replying and pretending not to be in. But if I was to stay here and face these guys for the rest of the year... fine. Suck it up and let's just do this, I told myself. "O...K...." I mumbled, just barely loud enough to be heard, the banging outside my door already moving on to the other room doors. Yanking my bedsheet of the bed and stripping down to my briefs, I just knew this was going to be painful. The scrawny body of mine would only add to the jeers. Just recently, my neighbour in the room across the hall from mine had already remarked, accompanied by a lot of headshaking, "How the hell can someone (alive) be as skinny as you?" Sigh. This WAS going to be painful.
Assembled in the large TV room was all the Frosh of Cariboo House, the only all guy house in Place Vanier Residences of the University of British Columbia or UBC for short. I apprehensively joined them.
"Mumble *Mumble the low rumble of excited but muffled chatter... "Stop talking!" *grumble *grumble the low rumble of excited by annoyed chatter....
With our loin cloths tied, or rather as the seniors insisted I should say, with our diapers tied, we lined up into neat lines as numbers were painted onto our foreheads and onto our shoulders by seniors with silly grins plastered on their faces.
Suddenly a ragged cheer started from the front rows. Now what, I thought, the drying paint already making my forehead itch but not daring to scratch it in case I smear it and incur a senior's wrath. "Beer!" I heard someone say. Oh right. They did promise as much beer as we could drink all day long as a reward for us if we meekly submitted. Not much of a reward for me though, since I hate the taste of beer.
Large white plastic cups of beer started making the rounds, handed down the lines. Groaning inwardly, I braced myself, knowing this would be hard to avoid. I wondered if I could get away with nursing just one drink the whole day.
"Hey you! DRINK UP NOW FROSH!"
Sigh. *gulp gulp gulp gulp
I was on probably somewhere between my 2nd and 3rd cup of beer when the order came to run down to Wreck Beach, Vancouver's local nudist beach. We were all standing by then outside on the grass field next to Cariboo House. It was a little chilly, me being Asian from the tropics, this being Canada not in the tropics and in Autumn to boot. The beer helped I grudgingly admitted, but I was already getting very sick of the taste and smell of the cheap diluted beer they were drowning us in.
Down to the beach we went. The trail in front of Cariboo House was one of the largest and best frequented trails down the 50 odd metre high cliff to the beach at the bottom of Point Grey, the spar of rock that my university was sited on. Already feeling a little sick from yet another cup of beer thrust into my hands "to stiffen us up" for the run, we pounded single file down the steep slope, the headalong mad rush only made safer by the many trees and tree roots serving as speed bumps and steps. What made the run interesting however, was a parallel line of girls in bedsheets running down the slope with us from Tweedsmuir, our sister residence house! Mmmmm nice. I wondered if they too had to strip to their underwear underneath that white linen. From the many grins and catcalls from the guys, I suspect I wasn't the only one holding that thought.
I cheated. The order was for us to run down the trail to the beach, run all the way to the water, take a gulp of the Pacific Ocean, or more accurately, the Strait of Georgia, then run back up the cliff again, back to the house. Well, who's ever known me to completely obey anything. Run, run, run, then around the tree about midway down the slope I went, like the big bossomed Indian actress in a Bollywood movie, only I wasn't singing Hindi love songs, high pitched or otherwise. Back up the slope I went, intentionally slowing down, easily done since this was now UP HILL, and allowed some of the faster guys on the return trip to pass me. Up we went and back to the grassy field and... yup, another rewarding cup of beer! Oh yay, and all this before breakfast. Oh what joy. *Gulp *gulp *gulp
By then I was really feeling sick and my head was spinning. The lack of food, the alcohol coursing through my veins, coupled with the slight shivering from the chilled air and not to mention the oxygen deprivation of my brain from the run... I bulldozed through the seniors blocking my way and ran up the steps to my room, thinking to laydown and rest, but only managing to get there just in time to puke all over my nice carpeted floor. Ewww... That was and still is the very first time I've ever puked from drinking alcohol. I don't think I was drunk although for the rest of my time at UBC, my good friends never failed to tease me and remind me of the time I got so "drunk" that I puked all over my room.
I used it as an excuse to stay out of the next "festivities" and armed with a few tissue rolls, started cleaning up my carpet. A few resident advisors (RA) came by to check on me, I waved them off, saying I'm fine, secretly happy to be able to skip whatever joyous activity the other Frosh were going through but not relishing having to smell the puke in my room for the next couple of weeks especially with winter approaching and with it the ability to adequately air the room without turning it into a refrigerator.
One of the seniors came by later and asked if I was ok and if I was up to rejoining the group for lunch. Nodding my head, I re-tied my diaper and off I went, back into the TV room. I didn't really have much choice since they had already taken all our meal cards that morning, but I was feeling much better, and not a little sheepish from having puked after only 3 or was it 4 beers. Everyone was in good spirits, jovially laughing and chatting away and drinking still more beer. This time however, I successfully declined the offer for another cup of beer. Yay!
In single file we marched out the house door to the cafeteria where the very lovely sight of Tweedsmuir girls greeted us, already in line at the cafeteria and like us, still in their bedsheets and a little drunk. Not for the first time I thought it a little unfair that we had to wear loin cloths and bear the cold while the girls get to wrap the sheets practically over their whole bodies, and following up on that thought, letting the mind wander to ponder again over that most serious of questions, as to whether they were also equally in their underwear. Grinning, happy with those thoughts of gender equality in my head, I followed the herd up into the cafeteria to get my food.
Lunch was a little awkward, each one of us seated as it was facing a Tweedsmuir girl. Speeches were made, and like in a 3 course meal, we were to eat our food in sequence and with the right utensils. My lunch partner ate quietly, not saying a word to me and I reciprocated, happy to just get food into my tummy but feeling a little self conscious from having the girls in front of us as well as from the very obvious grins and giggles from the little group of familiar Singaporean and Malaysian students watching me from the next table who had drifted in with the usual lunch time crowd.
We dispersed after lunch, allowed to dress and wash off the numbers written in permanent ink on our foreheads, the "initiation" over, the beer kegs all empty. There was a distinct change in camaraderie after that. The seniors more friendly, the other frosh with more ready smiles. I was one of them now, a full fledge resident of Cariboo House.
All in all, that was a rather tame ragging compared to the horror stories of ragging I've heard, some of which ranged from the obscene with unmentionables tied to ceiling fans with strings, to seniors dropping freshmen naked in distant parts of town for them to make their own way home. It was however, my first and I dare say, I'm happy I went through it, not so much that it was relatively mild but that it seemed to bring an added skip into our steps, adding a couple of inches to our heights whenever we looked out at the residents of the other houses. Ours, with the Tweedsmuir girls were the only houses to hold such public and elaborate initiations. It did wonders to my confidence, like a rite of passage into the life of a university residence student.
The house bound together well after that, its members sharing in movie nights, room parties with way too many people crammed into a tiny residence room and dancing/bouncing on the bed to overly loud heavy metal music, guitar jamming sessions that literally shook your walls till you learn never to place anything breakable in contact with certain walls, all night RISK gaming sessions that usually saw players screaming themselves hoarse for nights on end, undeclared competitions to top each other building "mysterious" sofa-henge formations in the TV room in the middle of the night, ball hockey games or "gymnastics" jumping off the 2nd floor at the old Armouries building, public service activities helping the RAs carry in drunks who fall asleep outside so that they don't freeze in the night, to simple riotous shared laughter when indulging in our favourite spectator sport of watching people with one too many bounce off walls all the way down the corridor.
Ragging, hazing, and puking. That was my first experience as a Frosh, living on a campus halfway around the world from home. It set the tone for what was to be some of the best fun filled years of my life, years fill with the smell of stale puke on the weekends, classes on the weekdays and lots of new experiences in between.
