The Singapore A-levels lobotomised me.

It’s quite fashionable to say that every Singaporean student carries a secret second life, a hypothetical self of the person they might have been. People visit these other selves the way you visit a friend studying in another country, wistfully, with no intention of moving in. This capacity for imagining oneself otherwise is close to the definition of an inner life. Which is an uncomfortable thing to say, because I can tell you the exact period during which I had none.

Now I tutor General Paper. For years I’ve built a tuition centre preparing Singaporean students for the A Levels. People assume the business was a stroke of entrepreneurial genius. But at 18, fresh out of junior college, I took inventory of my assets, and the list was short and damning: studying, writing, sitting examinations.

I was immediately embarrassingly good at tutoring. Students flocked in groups. Parents referred me to their friends. Within months I had a waitlist, and I realised why: I knew the maze from the inside because I had never found the exit. The parents could smell the fluent competence on me, the lobotomy scar tissue, my perfect AAAA/A A-level transcript still warm.

I did my time at Raffles Girls' School and then Raffles Institution, which Singaporeans call an elite school. People say it with such reverence. They picture some special strain of child, hand-gathered into a hothouse of small geniuses humming like reactors. Maybe you imagine that a school full of the nation's brightest would be a carnival of strange ambitions; future poets, apostates, visionaries, submarine engineers. But the students in Raffles were perfectly ordinary. All of us wanted exactly the same thing. The same As. To study law, medicine, finance at NUS, SMU, NTU. The gleaming ones wanted Oxbridge or an Ivy or a UC. A thousand of the country's most capable teenagers were ringed around a single future, pressing our TYS into it like votive offerings. That is the definition of elite: a machine so efficient it can take a thousand ordinary adolescents and dream through them in unison. Calling RI an elite school is like calling an abattoir an elite farm.

The belief that anything less than perfect was failure condensed out of the atmosphere in Raffles Institution like dew, and I soaked in it. I remember sitting in assembly and CCE periods, doing arithmetic. 90 minutes of the principal's speech was a full practice essay. A one-hour talk on character was almost a literature paper, with time left over to review. I sat in that hall vibrating with resentment. I want to reach back in time and shake that girl.

At nineteen I started university in Los Angeles, which is Singapore's photographic negative. This city has no interest whatsoever in efficiency, stuck gorgeously in the 90s and sprawled where Singapore is stacked, advertising itself on every available retro surface with a shamelessness that took my breath away. I arrived bewildered and embarrassingly easy to impress. Sometimes a billboard had a lawyer on it, forty feet of teeth. Sometimes an entire diner portion arrived before me that could feed the Lee family of four back home. For the first time ever, I had to tip and sign off on a receipt. I gawked at the botox and lip filler, and above all at the students. I met my first Persian classmate and Jewish sorority girl. The people in those rooms were so intelligent and eager, hands up because a question had occurred to them. During my first lecture at UCLA, I sat very still and felt grief for the student I could have been had I not been lobotomised in Singapore. Why do I want the girl in front of me to put her hand down?

Being the only Singaporean in the American room meant fielding questions about chewing gum, caning, whether Singapore was in China. Is it true Singapore executes teenagers for vaping? The questions were so ignorant they defeated me. When I tried to explain this to the Americans, they laughed at me. Ridiculous authoritarian country. Disneyland with the Death Penalty. The sanitised city, the airport with the waterfall. All my attempts to explain home were met with cheerful ignorance, which made it very hard to teach them about Singapore. Our public housing. Our language politics. Our new prime minister. What colonialism left in our mouths and our street names. I studied all of Singapore feverishly in California.

You already know why you follow me even if you’re not a junior college student in need of GP tuition. There is little else out there. The tired national commentary has gone rote: even the complainers are complaining on autopilot. Even influencer scandals can't interrupt the tedium of Singaporean life, the chilli-crab listicles, the ten-types-of-Singaporeans-students, everything pre-chewed so that nobody ever has to taste. If you have read the things I post about Singapore and Asia, the essays on hawker centres and the MRT, on Singlish, on the Sarong Party Girl, on feminism and relentless consumerism, you have been reading the long tail of those library nights. Every take is written from nine thousand miles out: my insider memory fitted with the outsider's focal length.

My classes run on the same engine. I’ve read and written and taught almost every day for the past five years. Students keep showing up because my classes are excellent. I don’t sell tricks. I teach argument, the anatomy of an essay question, how to think about water politics and language death. My students leave more enlightened than they arrived, and their parents get every dollar's worth.

Then there is the other level. Tuition is an edge, which is a relational good. When one student buys it, it works. When every student buys it, the edge cancels out and everyone must continue paying just to stand still. The Chinese call this neijuan, or involution, effort intensifying endlessly inside a system whose rewards do not grow. My excellence is the problem, because it keeps the arms race credible.

Every time I take an ordinary student and make her extraordinary on paper, I confirm for a hundred watching parents that you can purchase academic excellence. The queue outside my digital tuition centre stretches out, and a family that cannot afford my classes concludes that the A-Level game has moved further out of their reach.

You could call me a hypocrite, and you might be correct, but we could read this further. Singapore’s tuition industry has replaced every public thing in education with a private simulation. A velvet rope instead of a door: prestige for the privileged, figure-it-out-on-your-own for the rest, just enough scarcity to keep prices alive. Tuition is a glossier, sexier ersatz risen from the corpse of MOE’s classroom. Parents will cheerfully confess that tuition has obliterated their savings, but it has really obliterated the idea that a seventeen-year-old's future should not be auctioned off.

When I think about my own place in all this, the invoices, the fact that I can grade all of my students’ essays within 24h because I’m paid enough to, there is guilty Marxist gargling from the back of my throat.

So I did the one thing a tutor can actually do, which is to offer cheaper classes. We call them Open Classes and they cost $38 per head, the same teaching rigour made financially accessible. I teach to a bigger student audience instead of ten small, boutique classes. The scholarship kid and the girl from the neighbourhood school are mixed together into one general-purpose classroom, and I teach in the glow of the mass lecture until the sky darkens and everyone is one essay closer to exam-ready. I have seen what the premium centres charge: my Open Classes undercut them. They dig a hole in the paywall. The students are no longer standing outside the castle. They are seated inside my classes, and they lap up knowledge like milk.

Soon my students will graduate and they will not need me anymore. Soon they’ll find out that throughout adult life, the lobotomised and permanently examined will swear off leisure, mortify her weekends or become an anchorite, walled like a mosquito into a miniscule cubicle at her local MNC. The graduate can never really stop; we were surgically prevented at seventeen from valuing anything that does not count. Instead we run breathlessly on a treadmill of currencies: the GPA, then the job title, then the salary, the revenue.

Unlearning this has been the slowest work of my post-college life. Singapore does not make it easier, because our nation of former candidates has built an economy in which everything is assessed, and then wonders why nobody here can relax. There is nothing Singaporeans find more repulsive than performative relaxation. Ministers who decide to tell the population to start living more holistically are frequently reminded, in the comments, of their own PSLE scores.

So what was in the tissue that came out of my lobotomy? For two years, the only alternative person I could imagine being was myself with better grades. Even now, when I try to picture the other branches in the fig tree I might be living, the pictures arrive suspiciously well-structured, with an introduction and a clear thesis, as if somewhere in Cambridge a General Paper marker was waiting to give me an A.