Writing Warm-ups: 7/31/2011

"A dancer, and gymnast, can never be satisfied with what they can do."

She said it through a chat. I can only imagine what her face was like when she typed it though. Tittering about front walk-overs, handstands, doing lefty splits more easily, she did not sound like a 9 year old, soon turning 10 come September. She was older. She was my age, at that moment. And I, too, was her age.

She complained about how others were better, how she could only do handstands for a few seconds. She did not get what made others better, what made their actions so much more elegant or more gentle. But she knew that it required "lots of hard, hard work."

Even then, she was stretching. "If I don't stretch, everything feels sore." she said. "So, I stretch randomly."

According to her, there was no perfection. Or rather, no one achieved it. After all, the point of dancing is for improvement. What good is something that was already perfect? Perfection meant finality; all you had to do was maintain the state. There was no growth. There was no creativity. There was just...boredom.

At this moment, she stopped chatting, as if waiting for me to refute her. It was not a challenge. She wanted me to understand. And then realizing I did not, she continued on, treating me as if I were her equal, her age, the same type of person. 

But by then, she was older than me. Far older than me. 

Her birthday is in a month's time. I wonder how much older she'll be by then.

Writing Warm-ups: 7/29/2011

"Stop that! It's mine!"
Her high-pitched voice reverberated above the asphalt. After spotting two 8-year-olds screaming at each other more than 30 yards away, I flinched and checked my ears for head-phones. Nope, still there. Either I needed new head-phones, or this conversation was about to get physical.

"No!" came the reply. "It's mine! Give it back!" Yank. I saw the object in question: a small, fluffy brown bear. Looking cuddly, but I knew that if it had a voice, it would be screaming out in agony. Even I was amazed that the bear was still in one piece, cotton filling not spilling out already.

"It was mine first!" A harsh pull to left.

"So? You said I could have it!" Another crude jerk to the right.

"I said you could borrow it! Not have it!" Back to the left. But this time, the bear was twisted.

"Yes! You! Did!"

"No! I! Didn't!"

"Yes! You—"


"Stop it!" I told the both of them, snatching the tortured bear from their wrangling hands. I looked at the both of them. The two smiling, laughing girls I saw the first days, locked in arms embrace, had been replaced with squabbling demons. Sigh. Why did this have to happen on my day? 


"Aren't you two friends?" I asked. Cut straight to the chase. Forget about the whole dispute. Just solve the issue at hand. Now if only I could write essays in the same way. Apparently colleges don't like essays that are longer than 2,000 words.


"No! She's not my friend!" they said in unison. "I don't even know her that well!" 


Irony, at its finest. Or is that tragedy? Whatever.


They continued to argue, calmly at first, but then frantically and with jabbing fingers and squinting eyes. It was all I could do not to try and smother them with my hands.


"Stop!" I repeated. Luckily they listened to me. If they were boys, it would've been completely ineffective.
"What's wrong? You guys know each other for at least—" I made up a number in my head. "—2 weeks. Aren't you friends now?"


They both gave me a glare. "No! Friends aren't made in 2 weeks!"


Exasperatedly, I asked. "So how long is until friends are made? A month? A year?"


They shook their heads, and I did my best not to roll my eyes. But when it was apparent that neither would talk again, I sent them off to opposite sides of the playground. Which left me standing there were a teddy bear in my hands.


In the end, it turned out that  it was neither of the girl's bear. A child had lost it last week, and had been looking dramatically for it as well. It was returned without a single rip, to my relief. Well, that was one mystery solved.


But there was still one more. How long does it take for someone to be a friend? Granted, those two girls could have just been experiencing the melo-dramatic weekly fights all girls have. But still, the question remains unanswered. 


In the end, I can not help but wonder whether the girls have very high standards for friends to meet, or I simply have never had any friends at all.


Either way, I end up worrying about girls that I'll meet in the future, or girls I already know. 


Why do girls have to make life complicated?

Writing Warm-ups: 7/26/2011

She wrote with a half chewed pencil, scribbling words I could never have thought of myself. She was funny; she was poignant; her words drew pictures that could have been passed off as Picasso's. And yet the music her words played was equal to Beethoven. Her mix of abstract personality and traditional style was beyond anything I could try to imitate and anything I could attempt to imagine.

Needless to say, I was jealous. I wanted to stop her. But, the strong dominate the weak, and I knew when I was defeated.

Why is life so unfair?

Writing Warm-ups: 7/24/2011

The dinner table clangs with four dishes and one soup, the perfect Chinese dinner. The children are quiet, as we're supposed to be, while my parents chatter about the summer and the upcoming church retreat. They chew a little, talk a little, and scoop more rice into small plastic bowls. They complain about the air conditioning, but I know their true focus is on the younger children, more specifically, me.

"These kids have never been through—" my dad asks my mom a specific Chinese phrase even I haven't heard of. 

She responds, half-way through swallowing, with, "Boy scouts. But harder."

"Yes, like boy scouts." My dad turns to me, pointing his chop sticks like little pincers. "Except we had to walk for hours every day. It was 6 hours I think." He looks at my mom for confirmation. She's busy transferring laddles of soup into her bowl. Then she nods. He continues. "And we were younger than you. We were about 14 years old.

"I remember walking down in the country side. There were lines of children, some with shoes, some with sandals, none of them fat like you. We had-we had—little bags in the front for food, little ones in the back for water; sleeping bags on the back, and if we were lucky, hats from our parents. It was always hot. And when it wasn't, it was rainy. They wanted to make us into—" he asks my mom another word in Chinese.

She smiles sardonically, and looks at me. "They call it 'iron feet'. They want us have 'iron feet' after 3 months are done." She pretends I understand, and nods to my father to continue.

Helplessly, I watch my father resume his story. 

"I remember the first day—we had water bubbles on our feet—"

"You mean blisters." I interrupt, standing up because I'm done with dinner. He gives me an appraising look.

"Yes, blisters. And at night, we had to pop them with little nails—so that we could walk tomorrow. Every day, it was walking for kilo-meters. And then at night, we were told to sleep there on 干草—hay—even though there many animals all around.

"Sometimes we walk through 沼泽里—" he glances at my mom, but then turns away. "—a swamp. There were many 水蛭, and 水蛇—water snake. There is no feeling like stepping on a water snake. And then we wake up and same thing again. Every day like this for two weeks. Then we work on farm for three months.”

My dad is silent for a moment. He is too busy reminiscing to notice that I’ve already washed all the dishes and packed all the leftover food into the refrigerator. He has this weird grin on his face; as if talking about such horrid experiences gives him superiority.

And when he continues talking, he begins talking in rapid Chinese. He tells me how he once fished for chickens on top of a farm roof, and how he once found rats in the hay he slept on.  He tells me how he was kept a grade back, how my mother never went to high school, how he had to study underneath half-working, dim "street lamps" in order to catch up that last grade. He tells me about how the Cultural Revolution ravaged his life; he had never seen a whole chicken egg before moving to Shanghai, near the end of the Cultural Revolution. He continues on and on, how as a child, younger than me, he has gone through more hardship and more experiences than I ever will. 

When he's finished, he gazes at me intently, and I know what he is getting at. This entire summer, I have been too lax, and too lazy. He doesn't need to tell me to work harder; he knows that I know. He's done this many times before. Only, this time, I know it is not just to shame me about all the adversity he had to face in order to get me where I am. It is not only to tell me to work harder; it's to remind me of my disappearing childhood.

"But this happened so long ago." he finishes, with a sigh. "And I've told you this so many times before. How long before you leave the house and live on your own? Hopefully by then you'll understand that a person's greatest enjoyment is in accomplishment."

He stands up, and without much care, dumps his dishes in the sink, and rinses them thoroughly, placing them on the drying rack. My mom has long since gone to another room, clickety-clacking on her laptop, while my sister has disappeared into her room. I hear the thump-thump-thump of my father climbing the stairsteps, and then I hear him close the door to his office.

The kitchen table is empty, and I'm the only one sitting there. The food is all gone, and the air is all silent, except for the erratic AC. My dad has finished his research involving math and probability. My sister has finished her first story. My mom has finished several projects for her workplace. While I sit here, alone. 

And I can't help but think I've wasted my summer.

Writing Warm-ups: 7/23/2011

Superiority, insecurity and insensitivity. All of these would lead to naivety, ADD and manipulation.

I remember her as a person, not as a girl or a name. Someone with a changing character, a deep personality, and a sense of humor no imagination could possibly replicate. She wasn't outstanding, but she was definitely not normal in any sense, from her dark brown eyes to her heavily scarred legs; she was simply one-of-a-kind.

And I had seen her as a sister I always wished I had had.

When you begin to make realizations like that, everything becomes incredibly awkward. And in this case, it did.

I tried. I tried to be cool, and nice and amazing—I tried to be a brother. But 14 years of being one really hadn’t given me any real experience at all. I became different people: exciting, but matter-of-fact; hyperactive, but gentle; harsh, but vulnerable; a friend, but someone more.  By the end, I had forgotten who I was. And I had long-since forgotten who I had originally seen her as.

She pushed me away, with disgust and annoyance at whatever effort I made. I don’t blame her for it. Wouldn’t anybody, when some creepy kid, two years older than you, began acting strangely? I would too. In fact, I would’ve gotten a baseball bat for protection.

Desperately, I managed to excite her into an accountability “contract”. It was futile. And I knew it. But rather than sustain a dwindling friendship, I decided to break it abruptly. I broke the “contract” and gave her a cold shoulder for the rest of the school year. 

Obviously I haven’t had enough friends to know from the start, to know that this was such a bad idea.

I didn’t care what she thought, what she felt, or what she wanted. She wasn’t important; it was my thoughts and desires that were priority, that changed the storyline of my life. After all, wasn’t I the main character?

It’s thoughts like those that really reveal who you are. Unfortunately, there are relatively few things that can let you realize it. Luckily, one of them is a raging friend.

“What the hell?!” he wrote. Even though it was a chat, I cringed. I knew he was restraining himself from saying harsher and more meaningful words. Ouch. The Internet didn’t stifle the power of writing at all; with all the emoticons, I thought it made it more powerful. Especially since I had a chatbox full of symbols that eventually showed a large middle finger.  Well I had to give him points for creativity. I never thought brackets could be used like that.

Skipping all profanity, his statement was pretty much: “Stop making a jackass of yourself. Cool off.”

If I had known it was that simple, I could have saved an hour of watching chat messages expand on my monitor.

But by the time I decided to follow his advice, it was already over.

And now I wonder, which stage of loss am I in right now?

Denial, probably. After all, isn't replacement a type of denial?  

Writing Warm-ups: 7/22/2011

When I woke up today, sunlight had already burst through my windows; the excited, Ridalin-addicted wind rammed against the sides of my house, and when I open my windows, hot, humid hair slapped against my cheeks and face. Looking up, I saw a clear sky. No clouds, only sun. Birds chirped and flew, so high and so far, becoming small specks in the distance. I blinked. I could have mistaken this morning for yesterday's or the day before's. This entire week had been like this, and had been absolutely the same: hot, humid, and windy. It was predictable like a soap-opera.

I grinned to myself. The sky was just like a person. There is always a specific pattern it will follow. I roll my eyes. Everything is so simple, easy to explain. I laughed and made myself breakfast, expecting more clear skies and ruffling wind. Coarse air and blinding sunlight. Sharp shadows. This time I agreed with the weatherman; it was clear skies all today.

But at 9 it changed. I looked up; muscled clouds drew maps across the sky. Rumbles groaned in the distance.
I blinked in disbelief, but it was true.

Then, it begins.


Droplets splatter, smacking the ground. From far away, it just looks dark. But the thundering rain pounding against the window and the pavement tell me differently. The wind pushes and shoves the trees and branches, making the plummeting rain come in ebbs and flows. I watch the drops slap the grass. I see the rain draw patterns on the ground, weaving in waves and currents, thickening and thinning carelessly.

It's rain. Bouncing and leaping. Irregular beats.

A complete change of pace. The rain doesn't stop for more than an hour, unleashing more pouring, scalding rain upon the ground. And I can't help but be shocked. Not only did the weatherman lie, but I was wrong too.

Something in me makes me laugh. Of course it would rain. Just like people, the sky can only hold up a facade for so long. After the mask wears thin, the people reveal their true selves. I look at the sky again. It is dark and furious. I turn away. I don't expect the storm to end for more than a few hours.

But slowly, the pounding softened, quieting as the outside gradually brightened. The wind sighed and drifted to sleep. Then, the air was free of any rain. Dry patches colonized the road. And within moments, the sky began to clear, the sun began to shine, and the only sign there had ever been a storm were the slowly diminishing puddles, scattered on the sidewalks.

I was wrong again. Perhaps the rainy side of the sky wasn't a facade after all. Maybe it was the temporary mask. Maybe.

I don't know. I think in reality, there never was a "mask" for the sky; being sunny and rainy are both what the sky is. And yet the sky is neither all sunny nor all rainy. They're both.

But one thing's for sure: I'm definitely not cut out to be a meteorologist.

Writing Warm-ups: 7/21/2011

A sudden shriek and then the following ripples of sobbing. Most heads turn, most people walk towards the sound. But three kids don't. Three boys grinning and talking nonchalantly. I hurry.

"What happened?" I spill out. But it's self-explanatory. Small hands cradling a small bruise over his right, tear-soaked eye. More tears leave snail-tracks on his rosy cheeks. His mouth firmly sticks as a black arch. I roll my eyes. A fight.

"Who hit you?" I ask. He points to a boy, flinching as he does. Before the kid can run, I grab him by the shoulder and whip him around.

"Why did you do it?" I demand. He doesn't bother feigning innocence. But he doesn't answer. I shake him again. "Why did you punch him?"

"I didn't punch him." He says to the floor.

I pull his chin up and look him in the eye. "So why did you hit him?"

He says nothing. His eyes try to look away, but I won't break eye contact. Other people try to intervene, but I brush them off with a wave of the hand. This is between me and him.

Ten seconds pass. Twenty. Now thirty. Everything restarts around him, and savagely, I won't let him be join in. And then  he cracks.  His eyes begin to bubble up. A short sniffle. And then more tears.

Groaning inside, I tell him some words how it's not his fault and how everything is OK, even though he was the kid who punched the other one. Something irks me though. I tell him to sit next to his victim, side by side, and then I leave. Before I'm finished turning, I hear someone whisper "sorry", and the other say "It's OK." They make up. They laugh. And everything's back to normal, as if nothing had occurred in the first place.

And I'm not satisfied.

At its simplest, this is the story of a bully forcing his will upon a younger child, savoring the fact that he can make the kid cry without hitting him. Screw justice and reconciliation. I did it because I wanted to. And I'm not ashamed. There were thousands of ways to do it without making him cry. I knew this the instant the situation occurred. But I wanted him to cry. And I would not be satisfied if there were no tears. How could I let a kid go who punched someone and within a few moments afterward, is talking with his friends without a conscience? But maybe that's my falsely righteous side rationalizing. After all, I am such a hypocrite.

Moments after I'm done with the two kids, I sit down, lean back, and begin a nonchalant conversation with another Teacher's Assistant. I crack a joke. We grin. We laugh. And everything is forgotten between us.

But when I look to the side, I see a few pair of eyes on us; no, it's me they're staring at in shock. Those eyes aren't from the kids who were crying, nor their friends. They aren't even from the teachers. They are from the other children, with a look that is a mixture of anger and horror and fear and disgust. And its only because of their looks that I can remember this instant now.

And I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Because I can't tell: is my life a comedy or a tragedy? One thing's for certain though: it's definitely a drama. But I sincerely hope it's not a tragedy because I would really hate for my life to be a copy of Hamlet. Not because everyone dies in the end, but more because Shakespeare has at least twenty different swears that I've never heard of. What the hell is a 'huggermugger' supposed to be? Am I a Fustiliarian? I give up.

Writing Warm-ups: 7/21/2011

A sudden shriek and then the following ripples of sobbing. Most heads turn, most people walk towards the sound. But three kids don't. Three boys grinning and talking nonchalantly. I hurry.

"What happened?" I spill out. But it's self-explanatory. Small hands cradling a small bruise over his right, tear-soaked eye. More tears leave snail-tracks on his rosy cheeks. His mouth firmly sticks as a black arch. I roll my eyes. A fight.

"Who hit you?" I ask. He points to a boy, flinching as he does. Before the kid can run, I grab him by the shoulder and whip him around.

"Why did you do it?" I demand. He doesn't bother feigning innocence. But he doesn't answer. I shake him again. "Why did you punch him?"

"I didn't punch him." He says to the floor.

I pull his chin up and look him in the eye. "So why did you hit him?"

He says nothing. His eyes try to look away, but I won't break eye contact. Other people try to intervene, but I brush them off with a wave of the hand. This is between me and him.

Ten seconds pass. Twenty. Now thirty. Everything restarts around him, and savagely, I won't let him be join in. And then  he cracks.  His eyes begin to bubble up. A short sniffle. And then more tears.

Groaning inside, I tell him some words how it's not his fault and how everything is OK, even though he was the kid who punched the other one. Something irks me though. I tell him to sit next to his victim, side by side, and then I leave. Before I'm finished turning, I hear someone whisper "sorry", and the other say "It's OK." They make up. They laugh. And everything's back to normal, as if nothing had occurred in the first place.

And I'm not satisfied.

At its simplest, this is the story of a bully forcing his will upon a younger child, savoring the fact that he can make the kid cry without hitting him. Screw justice and reconciliation. I did it because I wanted to. And I'm not ashamed. There were thousands of ways to do it without making him cry. I knew this the instant the situation occurred. But I wanted him to cry. And I would not be satisfied if there were no tears. How could I let a kid go who punched someone and within a few moments afterward, is talking with his friends without a conscience? But maybe that's my falsely righteous side rationalizing. After all, I am such a hypocrite.

Moments after I'm done with the two kids, I sit down, lean back, and begin a nonchalant conversation with another Teacher's Assistant. I crack a joke. We grin. We laugh. And everything is forgotten between us.

But when I look to the side, I see a few pair of eyes on us; no, it's me they're staring at in shock. Those eyes aren't from the kids who were crying, nor their friends. They aren't even from the teachers. They are from the other children, with a look that is a mixture of anger and horror and fear and disgust. And its only because of their looks that I can remember this instant now.

And I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Because I can't tell: is my life a comedy or a tragedy? One thing's for certain though: it's definitely a drama. But I sincerely hope it's not a tragedy because I would really hate for my life to be a copy of Hamlet. Not because everyone dies in the end, but more because Shakespeare has at least twenty different swears that I've never heard of. What the hell is a 'huggermugger' supposed to be? Am I a Fustiliarian? I give up.

Writing Warm-ups: 7/20/2011

"You shouldn't be mixing tea and milk. It doesn't taste too good."

I ignore her. After all, kids have the attention span of half a second, right? Wrong. Not this one at least. 

She puts a confident hand on my forearm and clearly says. "It's better if you don't. It's not as good."

I look down at this 4th grader. She has a wide forehead, stubby legs, but a toothy smile that makes you ashamed of doing what you call smiling. But her eyes radiate pure determination. It takes me a while to realize she's more than half my age, and not a high schooler like me. Such mature eyes, and a mysterious personality; she likes to talk, and is eager to impress, but is not willing to compromise any values for any reasons. 

And she is absolutely unpredictable. "You're so silly!" she says while giggling at something I hadn't known I had done. "..." is the silence she stabs into me when I actually try to make her laugh.

"Ann!" one of the other Teacher's Assistants call out. She quickly turns and runs towards the Teacher's Assistant, but gives me a last, nerve-quaking glance. Was I like this back then? I can't help but think. All my memories are too bright and happy to be true. So, in the end, I watch her skip off, excited for the afternoon.

It is computer day today. This means 15 computers are shared among 30 kids. Sometimes one kid gets a computer all to his or herself. But more commonly, groups of kids are hypnotized by a single monitor, while vagrants wander around the room.

Not more than five minutes into the room, kids start arguing and shouting. Among the cacophony, I hear a shrill voice cry out:
"Don't be so stupid! It's not your turn anymore!"

It's Ann. She's telling her sister off for trying to play the computer all by herself. At the word stupid, her sister was already leaking tears. By the time Ann was finished, her sister had already begun crying.

Hurriedly, I pulled Ann's sister over to the side, quickly telling her some meaningless, but comforting sounding words. Soon, she was only sniffling. Then I pulled Ann to side.

"Was that necessary?" I asked. To her it wasn't a rhetorical question. She nodded, annoyed, and got ready to take off again.

"Not so fast." I said, grabbing her arm. "Did you really have to call your sister 'stupid' in front of everyone? Did you really have to be so loud?"

She glared at me, but my grip was firm. Finally she sighed and said, "She doesn't care what I say. She'll still do it. She's doing it right now!" She pointed at the computer her sister was at. Sure enough, her sister was once again trying to take someone else's turn. I rolled my eyes. 1st graders. Such a handful.

But that didn't excuse Ann at all. Saying that her sister didn't take her seriously was an obvious lie, only she didn't know it yet. I opened my mouth to rebuke her, to say that it wasn't so much about her sister, or others, than about herself. Then I stopped.

If it wasn't how I was in the past, it most certainly was how I am today. I am exactly the same. It's not that others don't take me seriously; it's that I don't care what they think. And so, I'll do whatever I feel, whenever I want.

"Apologize to her." I ordered. Giving me a filthy look for a few seconds, she stalked off to her sister, glanced at me a few times, and then mumbled something. Before the minute was up, her sister was smiling with her, and they were both laughing and grinning and giggling, rocking on their chairs, while avidly clicking with the computer mouse. I sighed. All they needed was one apology and everything was fixed. They were so lucky.

Suddenly, I understood so much more of her than I had before. She didn't care what others thought of her because she was selfish. She wanted attention. She wanted someone to think of her no matter what. And when she found no available candidates, she stopped caring about others. She was lonely, that's all. Just a lonely girl.

And it makes me wonder; am I really any different from a 4th grader? Besides gender of course. But it's embarrassing to think that the darkest sections of your personality can be so easily reflected in the face of a young girl whose name you can hardly remember. 

Writing Warm-ups: 7/19/2011

She looked at me with firm eyes, a pursed mouth, clenched fists. Oh no, I thought. She probably needs to go to the bathroom. I knew it irked her to ask me for permission to go to the bathroom. 

And soon enough, she came over, and through gritted teeth, narrowed eyes, she growled. "I'm going to the bathroom." And without a glance from me, she walked right through the classroom doorway.

Her name was Melissa, but I would've guessed it to be 灾难,  which means catastrophe in Chinese. I couldn't imagine such a troublesome 4th grader was anything but a ferocious tiger in the guise of a human child. I still had scratch marks. Tiger indeed.

The room was crowded, the children noisier than they had been during lunch. They were clambering over tables, climbing across backpacks. Begging for snacks and dealing out playing cards. Jumping all over the place.

"大班，洗手!"  a voice cried out. Immediately all the kids from the oldest class lined up at the door, following the teacher’s instructions. It was immediate. I didn’t have to look down to know I was being glared at. I led them to the bathroom.

“Psst,” said someone. I turned around to find Michelle, one of the older girls that I knew from volunteering here last year. She had grown older. At least now, she was nearly at my shoulder.

“What do you need?” I replied back. She was grinning. Shivers attacked my back. I had accepted that this was generally a bad omen.

She glanced around, but her eyes strayed a little at where the teachers stood. Three girls talked avidly with them. Melissa was with them. I groaned; what had I done wrong this time?

Michelle noticed I had noticed them, and quickly asked, “I need you to—one of my friends needs—she needs your email address.”

That was weird. Especially since Michelle already had my email address; she somehow stole it and had emailed me occasionally throughout the past year. I grinned. So that’s how it is. I thought.

“So, Iris wants it?” I asked. Iris was one of the girls near Melissa. I flicked my eyes over to where Melissa was. And as busy as she was talking , I knew she was listening attentively to what we were saying.

“No, its—never mind, just right it down, ok?” Michelle said, not really getting what I was asking.

I wrote down my email address, but paused, before handing her the sheet. It’s always a weird feeling when someone 7 years younger than you asks for your email address. I would know. I didn’t know whether I should feel happy that someone had actually asked for my email address, or ashamed for being so happy. There was one thing I was definitely ashamed about: I didn’t know anyone else desperate enough to actually give a 4^th grader his email address.

I handed the post-it over to her. Carefully, I watched it pass through a number of girls’ hands before finally reaching Melissa, who skillfully, folded it without glancing down, and put it into her left shorts pocket.

And that was that.

Hours later, past midnight, past the bedtime of chirping crickets and the howling wind, I lay on my bed, worrying. Had I given her the wrong email address? What if she couldn't read my handwriting? I had, after all, been told that my handwriting was worse than a drunk surgeon's. Only now did I really begin to worry that it was true.


And what if she did make contact with me? Would she still want to talk to me after she sees the "original" me?   The creepy kid who hardly knows what life is supposed to be about? Cold sweat drenches my pillow. I check the clock. It's still 4 a.m. I haven't slept at all.


I get up and take a walk outside. It's humid, and the air drags you like several weights. But its quiet. No cars, no birds, no wind, no people. It's quiet enough for me.


 And I simply don't know what to think, what to do, how to react to this situation except walk away, forward in some direction I don't know until I reach some landmark I might recognize and know where I am. Quite simply, I'm afraid.

I'm afraid of making mistakes, breaking social cues, embarrassing myself in front of her. I'm afraid of what I see her as; will she be some acquaintance with whom I occasionally reminisce with? Or will she hopefully be some sort of a friend, despite the age difference?


5 a.m. passes without stopping. 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. follow suit. Before I can stop it, I hear birds chirping; the sun is up; the cars noisily stream down the road. And still I have no answer. I wish I could apologize a million times in the future for all the mistakes I would do to her, but I'm almost certain that wouldn't be enough. Especially since I've made about 100 mistakes since I first met her. 


At about 9, I finally ask myself why I care so much. Just another question I can't answer. Only this one I get to blame my parents for. 

At the very least, I'm glad I’m not a pedophile. 

Writing Warm-ups: 7/17/2011

She stood in a busy crowd at her church. She was only four feet tall, but had small, flickering, round, brown eyes that seemed to wash you in an eerie but comfortable glow. All around her were bumbling adults talking in blurry and sporadic Chinese with a distinct haste to eat lunch. She looked like she was eight. She frowned, but that was more her normal face than anything else; whether she doesn't smile because she is not used to doing it, or because she has forgotten to, I don't know. But she looks lonely. Her mouth half-open, showing rows of petite teeth guarded by gentle pink lips; her hair braided and combed carefully, her clothes so clean and unruffled; a necklace of fake flowers around her neck; she constantly looks around from face to face, almost as if unsure of where she was, or what she was wearing, or what she was doing at all. Her pink rabbit doll hung limply in her hands, but all she thought of was trying to find her way through this massive maze of people. Finding, frowning, wondering. This girl was certainly quiet, confused and lost.

The area was so crowded, she couldn't tell which direction was to the exit and which one was to the entrance.
She trembled in noisiness, looking, sometimes colliding with walking adults. A rush of chasing boys made her stop briefly in front of a large doorway.
The conversations were louder now, the hardly coherent flow of experienced Chinese. She heard shouts from kids, laughter from adults. Gossiping and chiding. Eating.

Her name was Renee. I had seen her at the Chinese camp I volunteered at. She never talked to anyone. Ever. She wasn't with the excitable girls; she never watched other kids play with a DS. She sat in a corner, braiding the fur of the toy she had brought to camp that day. No one waved at her. No one greeted her with a smile. No one tried to talk to her for even the slightest. And yet, she looked content, even though she never smiled either.

That all changed when I greeted her once. A smile lit up her face, and she carelessly waved her hand, sporadically, and off-rhythm. She recognized me; she even knew my name. It was as if she had been waiting for someone to talk to her, to begin a conversation with her. She was not desperate, though. She was merely a girl, a bit quiet, a bit innocent, but content nonetheless.
I think I finally understand what Holden Caulfield  wanted, how he wanted to protect little children front the "phoniness" of the world. It's sharp. It's painful. But it's certainly real.
And I think I also understand what J. D. Salinger felt too. It's quite simple: the feeling that you have absolutely nothing interesting to write about.

Writing Warm-ups: 7/16/2011

Drip. It's hot outside; nasty gnats and stale air; radiating heat and sweaty self. Dry dirt and sickly warm pavement. Yuck.

Cars zoom by, generating gusts of wind that do nothing but tease me. Looking up, I can only imagine what the shade feels like, and what its like to stop working. My heart pounds, and I brush sweat drops from my eyelashes as the seconds tick by. It's disturbing. It's disturbing that pedestrians can walk by without batting an eyelid towards my direction. Slavery. That's all this is. Publicized slavery in the form of child labor. And for some reason nobody seems to notice me. They continue to listen to their MP3 players and I-pods, walking cheerfully on their way. They walk their dogs. They whistle and grin. The one thing they don't do is notice me.

Ugh. I can feel bile rising in my throat. My head's beginning to swim; my hands are blurring and although I'm standing still, it feels like I'm standing on ocean waves. Dropping to my knees, I breathe heavily, curling my hands into fists as I tell myself to breathe in, and then breathe out. Inhale, exhale. Slowly.

When I finally catch my breath, it is all I can do to keep myself from raging at the gods for such injustice. This is horrendous; it is evil! Forcing a young, bright boy into the fields to work away his talent and potential—this is abominable. It's inhumane. I won't stand for it. Something needs to be done. What we need is a revolution.
To overthrow the monsters who allow such pain and suffering! To destroy the system that enforces such a society! To usher in a new world of peace and love and cookies! That is what we need; and who better than me to start the rebellion?


I throw myself down on the grass, and turn off the lawn mower. I am a mountain. Nothing, not even a typhoon could move me. Well, maybe a typhoon, but short of that, nothing.


It's really sad to think that I've only gotten a tenth of the lawn mowed. 

Writing Warm-ups: 7/15/2011

I’m sitting in this room; clear glass in front and behind me, sunlight streaming alongside shadows, bouncing wall to wall. Cables are tangled; I’m certain my headphones are somewhere. The chairs are all turned sideways because they’re my foot-rests. My back lays sprawled in the chaos I call my work: SAT books, AP books, papers, a time magazine article, an ESV bible, and the scraps of packaging from my newly bought headphones.

My chair feels weird. Looking down, I find a smelly, black shirt that I had lost a week ago. That's where it was. I wince; it smells awful. That reminds me: laundry time. Plop! The clothes go into the all-consuming watery monster. Scoop! I pour a load of Tide. Clang! The lid goes down, condemning those vagabond clothes to a stormy, spinning hell for an hour. Or maybe more, considering that I'll forget about it. I listen the rumbling machine, imagining the dirty clothes screaming for release from their torturous dungeon, realizing that I had just mixed my red clothes with my white underwear.  Yeah, maybe more than an hour.

"Joseph! What is this?" I stop moving. Instantly.  For an moment, I consider jumping out the windows, or racing out the front door. But it's too late; I can already hear the sharp sound of tearing envelopes, the harsh thumping of "surprised" feet, and the door slamming shut behind my mom as she walks through the front door, with an envelope in her hand. An envelope with two prominent letters on it. AP.

Crap. I flick my eyes around, looking for shelter to survive the bomb known as my mother. I pick up my backpack on the floor just as I hear her take two steps into my room. 

"Your AP Score come in mail today." she announced, glowering at me. I suppress a whimper. Sometimes I wonder if my mother is human or not. And then I remember: Asians aren't human in the first place.

"It is strange. You seem to have gotten a low score. Very low." she looks at me with knives for eyes. 

I cringe. Which subject? Was it Bio? I remember writing the wrong answer for the free response. Stupid Amoeba. As useless as it sounds. Ameeeeeba. Sounds like something a cow would say. Stupid cows. I think I got a question wrong on cows too.

"What this? You got a 4 on-on what this subject called? Eng Lang/comp?" 

A 4? I sigh in relief. How could I forget? My mom's definition of a low score was a 4. Briefly I lower my backpack.

"That's AP Language; you know, the class that's not important; yes, English class." I reply.

"Oh." she gives the paper a bit of thought, and then asks me. "So I paid 86 dollars for you to get a 4 on this test? Might as well not pay at all!" Huffily, she turns away. And then, almost as if this wasn't important at all, she says, "At least the rest of them were 5s. Could be worse."

The rest were fives? I can't repress the grin from surfacing on my face.  Alright! 

For dinner, we celebrate my scores by eating yesterday's leftovers. Obviously, my mom is the one who cooks in the house. Eating microwaved rice and chewy vegetables and funny-tasting tofu, I quickly look around; everyone is busy. My sister is drawing on a newspaper; my dad is watching something on his PDA; my mom is on the phone. There's no "how was your day?" or "did you do all your work for today?" In fact there's not even the barest hint of "I don't care what you're going to talk about but I'm going to pretend I'm listening."

I really want someone to ask "what's wrong?" or "are you ok?", but then I realize I'm hoping for a bit much there; this is my family; I should know better. All they see me as is a child that will give them money every year until they retire. And if not giving money, giving free labor, while living in their basement. And when I die, free meat.

But honestly, I'm saddened, strangely. Considering that I wake up at noon, go volunteer from 1 to 5, come back home and watch TV from 6 to midnight, then rinse and repeat, I don't have very much to be upset about. I should, as College Essays and deadlines will be coming up soon; but I have another four weeks to worry about that. And yet, I am upset. The place I volunteer at—this Chinese camp for little kids—is full of funny people. And although I tease them, play with them, probably annoy them, I enjoy their company, and I'm hope they enjoy mine too—which really tells you how hopeless I am, that I need to talk to kids half my age in order to be happy. And one of the girls who I talked to, Sara, is leaving and won't come back for three weeks. 

She said to all of us "See you in three weeks!" and then to me "I won't be missing you at all." As utterly comeback-less as I am, I reply, "I know you will; everyday for the next three weeks you'll be thinking of me." 

She glared at me, and repeated again, "See you in three weeks!", turned, and then left.

The problem is, I won't be here in three weeks. Or next year. Or the year after. And all I can do is wish that Sara grows up to be a great person, and will have a fun and exciting life. Oh, who am I kidding? All I can really wish is that someday, whether it's in the near or distant future, we'll meet again, and hopefully, she won't mind me saying "Three weeks sure was a long time; but I remembered you every single day."

And hopefully, she'll smile like I've seen her do so many times before.