Chapter 1: Two Worlds To understand why a single senior year at International School Bangkok meant so much, you have to understand the decade long identity crisis that came before it. My childhood was a constant pendulum swing between two worlds, searching for a place where I actually belonged. It began when I was just three years old in a local Thai kindergarten. Thai was my first spoken language, the rhythm of my everyday life, and internally I felt completely Thai. But genetically, I was a luk khrueng, half Thai and half Australian. In the mid 1970s, mixed race children were still an uncommon sight in Bangkok, and my whitish features made me an immediate curiosity. The other children singled me out and teased me easily. Realising the local classroom was simply not the right fit, my parents pulled me out and sought refuge in the international system, enrolling me at nearby Mrs. Clayton’s Kindergarten. Set in a leafy residential house and garden compound along Sathorn Road, Mrs. Clayton’s was an intimate, nurturing sanctuary of only forty to fifty children. The transition was relatively seamless. English was second nature to me because I had spoken it from birth with my Australian mother, who did not speak a word of Thai. In that sheltered garden environment, I found my footing and excelled academically.

Mrs Claytons Kindergarden- out of a collonial styled home.

At age seven, I made the jump to Bangkok Patana School (BPS). Stepping out of the car on that first morning, I felt the sheer nervous weight of scale. Moving from a tiny garden nursery to a campus of several hundred students was overwhelming. In that sea of new faces, I crossed paths with a boy named Louis, who was arriving at the exact same moment. Louis recognised a familiar face from Mrs. Clayton’s and latched onto me as his best friend. We both began the term in our proper year level, but within just a few weeks, the BPS administration noticed our academic pace and pushed both Louis and me up a full grade together. International schooling in Bangkok back then was an untouchable bubble of Western expat privilege, complete with chauffeured cars, sprawling compound homes, and private clubs set against what was still a developing city. Thai nationals faced strict enrollment quotas, but my Australian passport was the bureaucratic key that slipped me past the gates into a world built almost entirely for foreign families. In a Bangkok that still lacked English broadcasts, Western fast food, or imported pop culture, the West seemed modern and magical. Visits to Melbourne felt like entering technicolour: clean air, wide streets, fresh cold milk, soft white bread, and endless shelves of Cadbury chocolate. Surrounded by expat classmates who lived that reality, I desperately wanted to be more Australian than Thai, craving their ease, their accents, and their effortless belonging. Being skipped up a grade only deepened my alienation. I was suddenly the youngest, smallest kid in the room, physically lagging behind older boys who naturally owned the space with their imported toys and confidence. At the same time, while they returned home to structured family routines where parents checked homework and hired tutors, I went home to an empty house with the maids. Without anyone holding me accountable, my focus drifted, my discipline evaporated, and my grades at BPS plummeted into freefall.

BPS, was a vastly larger and different experience where I would remain for 6 years.

During those vulnerable years, the myth of ISB was born. In those days, Bangkok Patana only went up to a certain grade level. Once you reached the end of the BPS years, you were either packed off overseas to boarding school or you transferred across to ISB to complete high school. Because of that progression, many of the older ISB students were actually former BPS kids who had walked our corridors just a year or two before us. Seeing them return to visit was a complete revelation. Free from the standard school uniform, they showed up radiating an effortless, unbuttoned American cool. They would hang out in their everyday casual clothes and those black varsity jackets with yellow stripes running along the collar and wrists, with BANGKOK emblazoned across the back. From the first time I saw them, I dreamed of owning one, imagining myself on the school basketball team being cheered on by those pretty cheerleaders. Basketball was my best sport at BPS, which made those visiting ISB kids look like absolute giants to me. That obsession was the exact reason why visiting their Sukhumvit Soi 15 campus for an indoor soccer tournament hit me with such force. At BPS, our basketball court was small and strictly outdoors on the asphalt. Stepping into Rajendra Hall was like entering an arena from another dimension: a massive, fully air conditioned complex featuring a full sized court with gleaming polished wooden floors, towering bleachers, and the electric spectacle of genuine American sports culture. Expat parents in the British system whispered nervously about ISB’s notorious reputation as “Heroin High.” It was a dark nickname lingering from the 1960s and the Vietnam War era, when drug use was rampant in the city and the school was not immune. There were even grim campus legends of kids getting high and jumping from the upper floors, which is exactly why ISB’s multi story outdoor hallways were famously enclosed in floor to ceiling wire cages. To American kids, ISB’s culture was just the natural way to be. But to conservative parents at British schools like BPS throughout the 80s, ISB still carried a dangerously rebellious reputation. They imagined the student body was entirely populated by kids like John Bender, the delinquent rebel from The Breakfast Club. For British expats, the standard playbook was to bypass Soi 15 entirely and ship your kids off to strict boarding schools in Australia or the UK. My own parents were not thrilled by ISB’s reputation, but they probably still would have sent me there had my grades not been so disastrous. Ultimately, the decision was taken out of my hands when BPS sent home a formal letter explicitly recommending I be sent away to boarding school. With that letter, my dream of going to ISB slipped completely out of reach. But to a small, isolated boy sitting in his stiff school shorts, that edgy reputation and vibrant American spectacle had felt like pure, magnetic freedom. Chapter 2: The Long Way Home My academic slump brought exile. Believing I needed rigid discipline, my parents packed me off to boarding school at the United World College of South East Asia (UWC) in Singapore. Arriving in survival mode, I kept my head down with the boarding house nerds. Culturally, UWC stripped away my childhood illusions. Free from the BPS expat hierarchy, the desire to chase an Australian identity simply evaporated; instead, I gravitated naturally toward the Asian kids and realised just how deeply Thai I actually was. That appreciation for home hit me sharply in the dining hall over dessert, where we were strictly rationed to a single banana. Bartering with peers for basic fruit made me think of the overflowing bunch of bananas always sitting on our dining table in Bangkok, opening my eyes to the sheer comfort of home. At the same time, being unable to connect with locals in Singlish or Malay made me realise how much I had taken speaking fluent Thai for granted. Though UWC lacked an arena like Rajendra Hall, it was on the Singapore courts that I found my athletic footing, working hard to successfully make the school basketball team. In hindsight, UWC was an accidental act of salvation. It provided the maturity and moral anchor I needed so that I could eventually handle the freedom of senior year without self destructing. By the end of UWC, my sights were firmly set on studying Architecture in Australia. But transitioning across international school systems left me facing a bureaucratic nightmare: an agonising one and a half year delay behind my peers. To beat the calendar, I enrolled at Peninsula Grammar in Melbourne. On paper, it was the logical move. In reality, it was a cold, austere disaster. Deeply isolated and miserable, I ground to an absolute physical, emotional, and academic halt. I caught a cold and simply refused to get out of bed. That was when my parents did the best thing they ever did: they let me come home. With their blessing, I packed my bags to return to Bangkok for one final, high stakes gamble: Grade 12 at International School Bangkok.

Arriving at ISB in August 1989 felt like coming home in every sense. It was not just being back in my home city where I could speak the language effortlessly, but even the student body itself felt remarkably familiar. Many of the high school students were kids I already knew from BPS and UWC. Incredibly, I even crossed paths with a childhood friend from Mrs. Clayton’s; discovering him again in the halls of Soi 15 after a decade apart was a surreal, full circle moment. Because of that shared history, it was utterly alarming when the ISB administration calculated my credit deficit and tried to place me into Junior year (Grade 11). For a teenager, that would have been devastatingly embarrassing, being visibly held back while my original BPS cohort graduated. Refusing that humiliation, I pushed hard to enter Grade 12 directly, taking on the massive challenge of clearing all my remaining graduation requirements at once. I stacked my timetable wall to wall. Zero free periods. Zero study blocks. Zero margin for error. Most seniors had years to ease into ISB. I had exactly nine months to survive it, savour it, and earn my way out. Because my stay was so compressed, I walked onto campus with a heightened, electric awareness of time. Looking back, it was telling that for my seventeenth birthday, the only thing I asked for was a 35mm camera. Subconsciously, I was acutely aware that I needed to freeze this extraordinary world on film before it slipped away. I even engineered my daily logistics to buy more time. Instead of carrying a regular backpack, I brought a beat up cardboard box that had originally held my very first Denon CD player. It started as a temporary fix, but quickly turned into a masterstroke of efficiency: it was wide and deep enough to carry my supplies for every single class at once. While everyone else lost precious minutes fighting the hallway traffic to visit their lockers, I carried my locker in my arms. Every day, I walked the corridors carrying both my camera and my cardboard box. Skipping locker stops bought me vital extra minutes between periods to socialise and snap photos of friends in the height of our youth. Over time, I covered that box edge to edge in sketches, doodles, and graffiti until it became a travelling piece of personal pop art. It also nearly got me suspended. During security jitters preceding the Gulf War, I left the box unattended outside the library, triggering a campus wide bomb alert. Rushing past the perimeter of sweating guards and a tense administration, I opened the cardboard flaps to reveal sketchbooks, pens, and markers. The principal just sighed with a grin: “Can you not afford a bag?”

With my Card board school bag/box and camera at all times

Chapter 3: Corridors and Canteens Suddenly, the identity crisis that had haunted my entire childhood simply vanished. At ISB, none of the old divides mattered. Being a luk khrueng was no longer a split identity to hide; it was my ultimate superpower. Puberty had done its work; I had grown to a solid height of five foot eight, fit and confident, carrying the natural charm of a bilingual local. I held the true home court advantage. I could banter with the Americans, speak polished English with the Westerners, joke with the local Thai students, and charm the canteen staff in fluent Thai to score the legendary, off menu three scoop ice cream cone. Without any middle school baggage, I had total mystique, moving seamlessly across every social circle. That social freedom was magnified by a core tenet of the American educational system that I can only describe as the right to fail. In the British and Australian systems I had endured, you were trapped on an institutional conveyor belt. Teachers nagged and forced you through the syllabus. The American system treated you like an adult with total agency. If you chose not to study, nobody held an intervention. You simply took the failing grade. There was a quiet, strange freedom in that, placing the burden of ownership squarely on your own shoulders. Of course, sometimes I took this newfound agency to an absurd extreme. When it came time for my IB Physics exam, I completely botched my calendar and missed Part A entirely. Realising my mistake the next day, I quickly did the teenage maths: Part A and Part B were each worth fifty percent. Therefore, if I simply showed up for Part B and scored a flawless 100 percent, I could theoretically still scrape a passing grade. Armed with this bulletproof logic, I strolled into the exam room. The teacher looked up, absolutely bewildered. “Why are you here? You missed yesterday’s Part A.” “I am here to do Part B,” I replied casually. He was totally shocked. “You cannot just pick and choose which part you want to do as if this were some kind of buffet examination service!” Fully leaning into my right to fail ethos, I shrugged. “Well, why not? I paid for the course, so I can do it how I like.” The teacher turned furious. “I have already deregistered you.” “Why did you do that?” I asked, genuinely annoyed. “I still had a small chance to pass.” Around me, the class started laughing in disbelief. Realising there was no exam paper coming my way, I started to walk out the door. “Where are you going?” the teacher snapped. “Do you not have something to say for yourself?” I paused, looked back, and offered a final shrug. “What can I say? You said it is over, so… I guess it is over. Good luck, everyone.” It became an instant campus urban myth, but it was completely true. Fortunately, my grand, buffet style failure did not derail my future. In a twist of supreme irony, I still got into university and successfully became an architect without needing that IB Physics exam anyway. Yet the real brilliance of the American system was that it worked just as powerfully in the opposite direction. If you showed genuine passion, the school actively pushed you as high as you could climb. At ISB, an English literature class that could easily have been a dry slog became a vibrant canvas. When standard essay prompts left my attention wandering, I began translating the books into sequential art in the margins. My ISB teacher recognised the genuine comprehension behind the sketches and gave me complete creative license: “As long as it demonstrates how you process the material, I do not care if you hand your homework in as a comic strip.” For the final project, instead of handing in a sterile stack of A4 sheets, I sourced scraps of cardboard, tore them into irregular shapes, and bound them together with rough string. Across those weathered panels, I laid out intricate illustrations and hand lettered text. Receiving an A for an artistic, string bound sculpture proved that my non linear visual thinking was actually a superpower. When the school learned of my ambition to study architecture, they went a step further. They offered to let me design an independent technical drafting course tailored specifically for myself. I was a class of one, working directly with a single teacher on a custom syllabus I had structured to hone my spatial design skills, and awarded full academic credits toward graduation. Before long, I leaned entirely into that identity, becoming widely recognised as the senior class Art man. I was brought in to illustrate features for the school newspaper, The International, and handed prime real estate to design both covers for the literary magazine, Panther Pause. When the drama department put on The Princess and the Pea, I crafted the promotional posters. The ultimate validation came when I was chosen to design the official Senior Class T shirt. For a guy who had arrived carrying an embarrassing credit deficit, seeing the entire graduating class wearing my artwork was unforgettable. I had gone from an overlooked transfer student to someone helping shape the visual legacy of the school. Chapter 4: Mortals Exclusive If my academic life at ISB was a triumph of self direction, my athletic life was a brief, spectacular miscalculation. I still desperately wanted one of those legendary BANGKOK varsity jackets I had dreamed of since I was a little kid. But I had already proven myself on the basketball courts at UWC, and honestly, I just wanted to try something different. I thought: What about the swim team? My teenage logic was flawless. Swimming would build that ripped, wide, V shaped upper body, and as a bonus, I would get to hang around and check out the girls in their swimsuits. I signed up with absolute confidence, having zero idea what I was actually in for. Because ISB did not have a pool on campus, the team had to be bussed off through the Bangkok traffic to a public facility. When we arrived, the coach blew his whistle: “Alright, jump in and show us a few laps!” Now, it is important to note that I was not a strong swimmer. I had not even learned how to swim until I was eight years old, and had never taken a formal lesson. But I was fit, so I dove in and went absolute full throttle. I thrashed through the water, sprinting to the other end and back as fast as humanly possible. I touched the wall first, incredibly pleased with myself. Then I noticed that nobody else had stopped. This was not a race. It was just the warm up, and it was scheduled to go on for ten continuous minutes. Everyone else was simply cruising at a steady pace. I managed two more laps before my energy completely gave out. I was now dead last, forced to cling to the edge of the pool while the rest of the team glided effortlessly past me. Then the coach clapped his hands. “Okay! Now we get down to business.” He started running us through gruelling drills. My body simply gave out, and I started to feel violently physically sick. Defeated, I dragged myself out of the water, retreated to the change rooms, and spent the entire bus ride back to Soi 15 desperately trying not to throw up. That single afternoon abruptly ended my attempts to join any sports team, and seemingly spelled the end of my decade long dream of ever wearing that elusive varsity jacket. Instead, my focus shifted to music. Our secret weapon and third band member was a freshman named Philip Low, and our meeting was pure serendipity. During my boarding school days in Singapore, I had noticed this prodigiously talented younger kid jamming effortlessly on the display Yamaha synthesisers at Plaza Singapura. Fast forward to August 1989 on Soi 15. Philip had moved to Bangkok and entered ISB at the exact same moment I did. I walked straight up and caught him completely off guard: “Hey, you are the guy who plays keyboards, right? From Singapore!” With Louis on board, the trio of Mortals Exclusive was born. Piling into the car after school, we would drive around the corner to Philip’s apartment on Soi 13. Packed into his bedroom surrounded by synths, sequencers, and tangled audio cables, we spent hours writing and programming our own original compositions. In 1989, an all keyboard lineup was practically unheard of. We were like the Pet Shop Boys, but as a trio. Playing live on stage had been a bucket list dream of mine ever since I first set foot in Rajendra Hall. When the Battle of the Bands arrived, we took that stage playing purely original music. The crowd did not quite know what to make of three guys standing behind a barricade of synths without a drummer or guitar player. To make matters worse, our electronic setup could not interface with the school’s house PA. In a frantic backstage scramble, we routed our entire mix through Philip’s single stage monitor speaker, turned the master volume to ten, and crossed our fingers. It vibrated so violently throughout the set I thought the cone would blow straight through the grille. From behind the keys, I strongly suspect our set blasted out as a blown out, heavily distorted wall of synth noise. We certainly did not win. A rock band called Wasted Youth took the crown that day. But seeing a pocket of friends down in front dancing and cheering through the distortion was all the validation I needed. We had brought our own music to that stage and crossed off a dream on our own terms. Outside the gates, Saturday nights often meant heading into the neon glare of Patpong to Gold Fingers, a go go bar that served as the senior class’s smoky clubhouse. It was there that I started dating an American cheerleader whose parents worked at the US Embassy, giving me a fun window into expat American life while I showed her around my hometown. And then there was the sheer, intoxicating freedom of driving. By spring, I was driving my father’s black sports Mercedes. Denied a student parking pass because I was seventeen, I parked right on Soi 15 outside The Townhouse and Poncho’s, ensuring that seniors walked past the car every day at lunch. While underclassmen were trapped behind the perimeter wall, I had the wheels and the local fluency to disappear into the city grid for an unforgettable local lunch before gliding back for afternoon art class. The final piece of the decade old dream fell into place when my girlfriend reported her black and yellow striped BANGKOK jacket as lost, ordered a replacement, and handed the original to me. The circle had completely closed. The boy who was once teased in Thai nursery for looking white, who struggled as the skipped grade, smallest kid chasing the Western dream at BPS, who realised the abundance of home through a rationed banana at UWC, and who nearly broke under the cold misery of Peninsula Grammar, was now cruising down Sukhumvit in a black sports Mercedes, driving off campus to his favourite local food haunts, fronting an all synthesiser band at the Battle of the Bands, designing the official Senior Class T shirt, and walking the halls of Soi 15 with that legendary black and yellow striped jacket on my back.

My Class of 90 Senior T-shirt design

Chapter 5: Full Circle Graduation arrived in June 1990. I cleared every single credit, secured a strong GPA, successfully conquered the high school deficit, and finished on time. Because Australian university intakes did not begin until the following year, a six month calendar gap opened before I could head south. I spent those months biding my time, assembling applications, and drafting in the architecture department of my father’s property development firm. Looking back, staying committed to a long distance relationship throughout that gap was an unexpected lifesaver. At eighteen, with a sports Mercedes, family resources, no daily school routine, and total freedom in Bangkok, the temptation to dive headfirst into wild nightlife was immense. Remaining committed gave me a genuine reason to stay grounded on weekends writing letters and making phone calls. It acted as an emotional seatbelt that kept me safe from reckless partying, messy entanglements, and the very real dangers of late night Bangkok. It ensured I honoured my mother’s only golden rule: “do not get expelled, do not get a girl pregnant.” Keeping my slate completely clean so I could board the flight to Melbourne with unblemished momentum.

Years later, hindsight would occasionally whisper a few quiet what ifs. I found myself wishing I had returned to ISB as a Teacher Aide during that six month gap just to steal a stress free victory lap. I wished I had taken the time to know my teachers as people beyond the classroom. I wished I had lingered over a few more bowls of noodles in that buzzing canteen, and I wished I had explored every forgotten nook of Soi 15 before the campus was packed up and moved to the suburbs.

Yet those are not genuine regrets. They are simply the lingering side effects of having loved a place so intensely that, deep down, I never wanted the curtain to fall. They were the subconscious bargains of a boy trying to find any excuse to stretch out the magic just a little longer.

Deeper reflection reveals that my story ended in absolute harmony. I conquered every goal I set for myself and left nothing on the table. Sukhumvit Soi 15 was never just an international school. It was the sacred ground where all my fractured identities finally united. It was the place where an insecure boy conquered his past, claimed his rightful place, and lived out the golden masterpiece of his youth. All those rolls of film shot on that seventeenth birthday camera were once just teenage snapshots taken while wandering between classes with a graffitied cardboard box. Decades later, they have turned out to be pure gold, now finding a second life as the heart of our class tribute video.

The further I go on with my life, the more I find myself wanting to go back. It is not because I am dissatisfied with the life I have built today, nor is it a simple desire to relive the past. It is born of a profound and ever deepening appreciation. With each passing year, I realize just how much that single, fleeting window of time shaped the man I would become. The creative artist and architect, the confident romantic, the adult with the courage to fearlessly pursue his dream career, his dream wife, and his family. The foundation for all of it was poured on that campus.

I am no longer that seventeen year old high school senior, but standing where I am today, I can still look back across the decades to honor and thank him. I thank him for refusing to be held back, for leaving nothing to chance, and for living those nine months to the absolute maximum. On Soi 15, he lit the fuse and launched a bright rocket of dreams. Looking up now, all these years later, I can see that it is still flying.

Lost my hair but still have my jacket.