Last week, for the first time in three months, I found myself sitting at a table that consisted exclusively of girls.

This wasn’t actually in ACSI, mind you. I was in a canteen outside of school, and it just so happened that all the people at my table were ACSIans, and that they were all girls. In addition, all the girls at this table just so happened to previously be from single-sex schools.

“Do you remember,” one girl asked, “what it was like on the first day of orientation? You know, with all the… boys?”

Indeed, we did.

For most of us at that table, our first memory of that first day of school was standing in the parade square, struck dumb by the fact that in front of us was not a sea of girls, but boys. Standing there for a full minute, taking in the sight of the most boys that we had ever seen at one place in our lives. Standing there with only one thought flashing through our minds: “Oh my God we are the minority here.”

ACS (Independent) is not a junior college. It is a secondary school. More importantly than that, it is, in principle, a boys’ school. In what is probably direct result of this fact, ACSI has a gender ratio of approximately 4:1 – in other words, for every four boys, there is one girl. In addition, owing to the established popularity of single-sex secondary schools in Singapore, most girls that enter ACSI are crossing over from a community consisting almost exclusively of the female gender.

Needless to say, us entering a boys’ school from a girls’ school was akin to a petri dish of bacteria being plunged into a boiling water bath.

The five of us at that table talked for a long time. It’s a loss of freedom, one said, in a way. The loss of the ability to talk about things that we could without a thought in our previous schools. The loss of the ability to laugh or squeal as loud as we wanted to, or even to sit in the ways that we used to (after one term, the average percentage of girls sitting cross-legged goes from 50% to 85%). Somehow migrating from a homogenous society to a more heterogeneous one automatically imposes some sort of restraint upon our mouths and our thinking, that there are some things that are just not done to be thought about in front of the opposite sex.

Or maybe it’s more of the birth of a new fear, said another. The fear of the unknown. The fear that something we say or do could somehow end up offending these marvellous yet strange creatures that we have encountered, and hence remove the pardon that they have granted us to join their numbers. Perhaps it is the sort of uncertainty that comes with learning how to speak a whole new language, that one thing we say that makes complete sense to us might translate to something completely different for them, perhaps something vulgar. We have no choice but to tie our tongues and proceed with an uncomfortable caution.

“I miss this,” said the last girl at the table, with a sad smile on her face. “I miss being able to talk about all this.”

We all nodded slowly. Then we finished our food, and then we left.

There was nothing more to say, after all, and nothing more that we could do. In the end, being a minority was something that we were all going to have to live with.