Non-Fiction

In Chen Chen’s deceivingly simple poem “Chen [No Middle Name] Chen,” names are far more than the words on our birth certificates: they’re insults and affirmations, histories and experiences, intricate portraits of our identities and aspirations. By writing a loose sonnet consisting solely of anagrams of his name — including its “flaw” of having “No Middle Name” — Chen explores his multifaceted Chinese-American self, from the insults he’s received to the surprising adjectives with which he describes himself. Though the words that comprise “Chen [No Middle Name] Chen” may be difficult to find within the poem’s title, they have always been part of Chen’s name — therefore, they are an inevitable and indelible part of his being.

Unfortunately, many of these words are aspersions, ranging from innocent mistakes to microaggressions to slurs. Chen is “called Chad            called mini / called homo” (1-2), words that both define and demean his identity. He learns that he is not who he considers himself to be, but what society views him as; he is no longer “Chen Chen,” but “Chad,” a “homo, a “Chinaman” (1-3). The world turns his simple descriptors — “gay,” “Chinese” — negative, replacing his true identity with degrading racial epithets. In the next stanza, when Chen recounts how “one man called [him]     Hannah / then mad,” simply correcting his presumably White persecutor reveals their racial privilege: that they have a right to be angry when all Chen did was assert himself. The persecutor’s defensiveness is a display of White fragility, but at once it’s a reminder that others’ perceptions of Chen — in this case, as “Hannah,” — outweigh the truth of his name and his being. Eventually, the oppressive name-calling Chen faces in these two stanzas causes him to question: “am I a man?” (4).

Following the tradition of the sonnet form, these eight lines form the octave of “Chen [No Middle Name] Chen” and set up Chen’s internal conflict: his loss of power when both his name and his identity are determined by outside forces. Western sonnets are comparably White and restrictive, mirroring Chen’s own confinement by White, heteronormative American society. However, the next two stanzas show how Chen is able to create something beautiful out of the sonnet’s strict rules, as he breaks free from the traditional rhyme scheme and ten-syllable lines. The poem soars as he exercises the agency taken away from him in the first lines to make this sonnet defined by him, not by straight White men from 400 years ago.

The second half of “Chen [No Middle Name] Chen” begins with a volta, or a shift in the sonnet’s direction, signifying a resolution to the conflict introduced in the octave. By switching from past to present tense, from “[they] called me” (5) to “call me” (9), Chen reclaims his name as something he gets the last word on. He is “mad,” as he should be after facing both racism and homophobia, and he is “mean” because, sometimes, he needs to be callous in order to defend himself. Simultaneously, Chen is “ammo” because of the hostility his assertiveness may cause — like the White man’s self-justifying retaliation in the second stanza. As Chen wields the dual identity of being Chinese-American, he is also “alchemical,” transforming and blending parts of himself depending on the situation. Though these adjectives aren’t all flattering, what’s meaningful is that now Chen is doing the “calling,” not the anonymous figures who called him “Chad,” “homo,” and “Chinaman” (1-3) in the stanzas before.

Chen, however, still knows he deserves complimentary words, despite being forced to see himself through the lenses of racism and homophobia, and despite his “blemish” of not having a middle name, spelled out in the poem’s title as if it is something missing. In the final stanza, in which every word uses letters from the phrase “No Middle Name,” Chen lists a series of beautiful nouns, like “ocean,” “dahlia,” and “eel-dance” (13-14). Through his “blemish” of having only a first and last name comes so much more — the poem itself, these elegant words. Chen may be a “nomad” (14), constantly traveling between cultures, and “loam” (14), split between identities like the soil is split between sand and clay. Still, Chen knows he is more than the negativity spewed at him in the first two stanzas, whether he received it from others or from himself. He knows he is worthy, and throughout this poem, he chronicles his journey towards declaring himself as such. Chen reveals how, though the world may try to restrict our identities, language ultimately prevails. Unlike anything else, as Chen learns, words allow us to claim and reclaim, define and redefine, who we are. By its final stanza, in the tradition of most sonnets, “Chen [No Middle Name] Chen” is a poem about love — not for others, but for ourselves.

 

 

Lila Raj is a junior at San Francisco University High School with passions for writing, music, and psychology. She is a 2023 Juniper Institute for Young Writers alumna and 2024 recipient of numerous Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. When she’s not writing, Lila can be found curating her many Spotify playlists or playing jazz on the saxophone.

I have to give my school credit for the creative way they caught Richard. The teacher reviewed the history of his edits and discovered the spontaneous appearance of chunks of text. The teacher immediately suspected that Richard had copied and pasted the text in, so she asked Richard for his source document where he wrote the text. He didn’t have one.

Being on my high school’s disciplinary committee, I have seen a lot of students make impulsive decisions and take up four hours of my Sunday afternoon as a result. This one particularly intrigued me because it involves technology, whose usage lacks a clear line of when it is appropriate and when it is not.

Richard was drafting a news story for his journalism class and decided to write about the basketball season. Conveniently, the basketball coach, let’s call him Mr. Lydian, records every game in the form of an email that he would share with the entire school. Richard read all of them to gain inspiration, and he thought that Mr. Lydian’s accounts provided great insight. As a result, he summarized the accounts with ChatGPT and used them as the majority of his engaging narrative.

During the hearing, Richard explained his belief in AI’s increasingly important role in the future, so he perceived the usage of ChatGPT as a skill that he wanted to be proficient at. Richard saw AI as a tool similar to PowerPoint in the 90s—an essential ability that would only benefit him more if he started to develop it earlier. “It’s good prompt design practice,” he argued. If ChatGPT could capture the soul of Mr. Lydian’s emails better than he could, why waste time writing a summary himself that is not only more time-consuming but worse in quality? The sentences that AI generates simply flow.

As a member of the disciplinary committee, although my job was to help Richard recognize his mistakes, I could not help agreeing with many of Richard’s takes on AI. In education, many teachers have thought about the use of AI and embraced the technology as a helper in the classroom. They have used ChatGPT to improve the curriculum, generate examples, and in some cases even grade students’ assignments. This process saves an immense amount of time that teachers can then use to focus more on students. In addition, technologies such as ChatGPT have a level of power that exceeds our control. They “hold authority and influence independent of the intention or control of the humans in charge” (JWU). As a result, given that ChatGPT is already readily available, banning the use of it is immensely difficult.

Prohibition would require that all essays be handwritten, which drastically decreases the quality of essays because, in higher education, everybody types faster than they write. Therefore, even teachers who initially despised ChatGPT are slowly adjusting to the technology. In fact, the Impact Research/Walton Foundation survey found that “88 percent gave the AI program a good review, saying it has had a positive impact on instruction,” and “Thirty-eight percent of teachers say they have given their students the green light to use the program” (Edweek). These viewpoints clearly support Richard’s opinions on AI’s increasing prominence.

To clarify, I agree with the school that this action should be considered an academic dishonesty violation because the teachers wanted to assess Richard’s writing capabilities without unauthorized aid. However, I am guilty of having similar thoughts. He conveyed the most honest and logical thinking of a lot of high school students. Especially since most have realized the inaccuracy of AI checkers, why sacrifice your free time when this magical device can convey your thinking in a more fluent manner? I was actually glad that Richard revealed how widespread and normalized this mindset of capitalizing off of ChatGPT is, and he was just unluckily caught due to not being discreet enough. Then, I suddenly realized how this abuse of this technology can be immensely problematic.

Many believe that AI is a crutch that shields one’s authentic work with perfectly articulate sentences and prevents young adults from actually learning the content. Although these opponents of ChatGPT recognize ChatGPT’s helpfulness in small tasks such as emailing teachers, students fail to learn the interpersonal skills that these tasks provide. Additionally, they doubt AI’s ability to construct complete logical arguments due to the nature of its functionality—text generators don’t critically think like humans. They simply perform probability distributions to complete sentences by guessing. As a result, journalists such as Rodolfo Delgado have realized that “it [ChatGPT] lacked the touch of humanity that was inherently mine… However, I’ve found that in the long run, what truly captivates readers is the presence of genuine emotion. In a digital landscape saturated with grammatically impeccable articles, it is crucial to remember that our audience comprises humans” (Forbes). Currently, phrasing thoughts into coherent sentences is an essential skill for communication, but in the future, would writing and expressing emotions not matter anymore? What about talking? Would people start to use ChatGPT to converse? A wave of dystopian technological possibilities flooded into my head.

To satisfy my curiosity, I have to know the appropriate uses of ChatGPT, but my judgment requires a deeper understanding of how well ChatGPT writes in reality. Since it is unfair to compare the work of a robot to that of authors and professors, I decided to use myself, an average high school student, as a benchmark. I spent my entire Thanksgiving break drafting a paper analyzing AI’s effects on work, so I wrote another paper in five minutes on the same subject with ChaptGPT. Then, I compared the two works. The initial AI draft took a completely different approach than I did, making an objective comparison difficult. Thus, I entered my thesis as part of the prompt. The length of the essays was also problematic for ChatGPT because it only outputs a maximum of about 600 words at once. I had to force the machine to split the essay into ten parts and write each one individually.

In short, despite being easy to read, I can confirm Delgado’s claim that generative AIs’ analytical writing is awful. The robotic, formulaic paper overemphasizes summaries that lack arguable content, provides minimal references to studies or statistics, overuses subheadings that destroy continuity, and repeats information it has already mentioned.

After this experiment with ChatGPT, I developed a framework to decide whether an assignment should incorporate AI’s help. For homework that is focused on content and facts, ChatGPT is really helpful as a teacher’s assistant to summarize complex events, concepts, or philosophies. Although the tool is infamous online for hallucinating and consequently providing false information, I haven’t encountered any cases while researching straightforward high school material such as Lincoln’s approaches to the Civil War or photosynthesis explained at a molecular level. In these cases, we can use ChatGPT like a search engine. However, unlike Google, where we can get an infinite number of unsatisfactory outcomes from a search, ChatGPT provides a concise response that usually answers the question directly. Even if we are still confused, we can reference ChatGPT’s previous answer in my next question. This process of learning can save us a lot of time from scouring dense research papers on specific topics such as the Cultural Revolution’s effects on Chinese feminist movements.

However, we should rarely use AI when assignments shift away from simple summaries and explanations, requiring us to make connections and apply critical thinking. When attempting to generate thoughtful answers to more analytical prompts, ChatGPT tends to output complex sentences with abstract nouns with an assertive tone, yet when we try to decipher their meaning, we realize that the machine is simply stating the obvious. In fact, to avoid biases, OpenAI specifically programmed their chat bot to express few opinions—it wouldn’t say anything substantial. Thus, in these cases, using the technology is instead a waste of time.

Educators should not dissuade students from using ChatGPT because there is definitely space for such technologies in today’s education. Banning AI in learning is like scrapping the invention of nuclear power because of atomic bombs. In fact, treating ChatGPT as a taboo would only increase students’ curiosity to explore it themselves (as I have), and many would not consider the ethical implications. We must teach students the proper applications. I have benefitted too much from ChatGPT’s intuitive interface and coherent clarifications to disregard it as a gimmick that causes harmful reliance. I remember when teachers despised grammar checkers such as Grammarly a couple of years ago. If that could integrate so well into the curriculum that my school now offers students free subscriptions, I believe ChatGPT can do it too.

 

 

 

 

Being his class’ representative on the Disciplinary Committee, Harry felt the urgent need to reflect on a student’s recent academic dishonesty incident. Due to a strong interest in the ethics of technology, Harry saw the case as an opportunity to express his opinions on ChatGPT, raising awareness of its effects on education while accurately reflecting his peers’ thoughts on AI text generation. Outside of school, he is also passionate about playing tennis, producing music, and writing blogs on Medium (@Harrycats2019).

 

 

—this essay was previously published in the Santa Barbara Independent

 

 

 

 

References:

https://www.axios.com/2024/03/06/ai-tools-teachers-chatgpt-writable https://www.edweek.org/technology/what-do-teachers-think-of-chatgpt-you-might-be-surprised/2023/  03#:~:text=Thirty%2Deight%20percent%20of%20teachers,ChatGPT%20without%20their%20teachers%27

%20consent.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/07/11/the-risk-of-losing-unique-voices-what- is-the-impact-of-ai-on-writing/?sh=3dba63914db6

She will bite an aching neck and an arm that always reaches out and will hold a child when they need to be held and will grab that child when they need to be held back. When children hit their heads on a rock or a table or the thinly carpeted floor, she runs to them and holds ice to the pulsing bruise, and in the back side of your left cheek a bulge of your will burgeons. She is power, though she does not always know it. She is sparks and mirror neurons and a life force throbbing to reach the future.

But sometimes she forgets this. Sometimes she lies in bed, or wishes she were lying in bed, or wanders through the rooms of a dark house, a dark cave. Sometimes she pushes your fingers deep into rocky clay soil, so deep she cuts her finger on stone, and still the barb at the back of her chest is a barb, and still her mind is full of voices that conflict. Something pulls her elsewhere, and something holds her here, and she does not know which is the better choice, and so she stays.

Mothers have lost themselves in this space. Hands-on children. Hands in the sink. Hands in water turning red and then clear and then frothy. Mothers have brushed their children’s hair and seen themselves spiraling upwards, like the strands of a spider web, filaments floating and breaking in a breeze. A snail crawls across red bricks on the sidewalk, grit on grit. A blue egg cracks in the gutter. Where is she now?

Oh, mother. She won’t believe me. I see her caving in, like a carcass, so full of fear she’s already made herself dead. I see her eyeing the white cloth, the small sock, and the twisted clasp of the bra. She doesn’t believe me that the anger in her is part of being a mother. She doesn’t believe she will remain a mother just the same. She doesn’t believe that the eye-flash, hiccup, aching longing to be elsewhere, is the same with the hug so tight she feels her child’s bones.

Oh, mother. The time will come when the belly will glisten, the sky will open and the mud will seep to her ankles. The time will come when the den is empty and the nearly grown daughter will stand at her side. The time will come when the leaves crackle a message and she will let go of the things she needs to let go of, and her body will lighten so much she will fly.

But until then, lean close and listen. Hear the fervent scratch in my voice. In the center of that hardened fist, she has always known the answer. She has always made the choices she needed to make. She is not stupid. And when the next choice comes, she will gather herself—milk, bones, and bristle—and she will go.

I let a squirt of Purell cover my palms. I punch in the code to open the locked ward door and let myself in. 758219. An aide is loudly calling bingo numbers, competing with the din of the Boston Philharmonic on the television. Of the eleven people in the room, only one is even looking at her bingo card.

I find my mother in her room, in her bed, as usual. I take a moment to watch her sleep, practicing my deep breathing to match hers and prepare myself to be mindful. Being present in the moment, even if I have the power to do this only in small snippets, helps us both. When I wake her up, she is so excited to see me, clapping her hands in front of her face when she spies the jelly doughnut I brought for her.

I answer her questions about who I married, what I do for a living, where I live, and how many children I have. I check all her drawers and her walker basket for contraband: dishes, napkins, utensils, and other people’s greeting cards. I get her out of bed and we walk to the dining room, where I sneak the stolen items into the sink. We sit at a table and eat our donuts.

I am entering a writing contest, I tell her. “Oh, are you?”

“What should I write about?”

“Whatever you want to write about. What do you like to write about?” “I like to write humorous pieces, like Rana Balasubramanian.”

“I don’t think I know her.”

I brush the crumbs from her chest. “This is a contest sponsored by a group devoted to Connor G. Huang.”

“I don’t think I know him.”

“You do. When I read him in high school, we talked about his books.”
“I knew him in high school? I don’t remember.”

I put the dirty napkins in the doughnut bag and crumple it up. We sit quietly. “What do you do for a living?”

I tell her about my paying job, but add, “I’m trying to be a writer.” “Have I read your work?”

“Yes.”

“You must be good.”

“You have to say that; you’re my mother.”

Pain and confusion cross her face. “I must have been a terrible mother.” Her chin trembles. “Why didn’t my mother tell me I had children? I would have taken care of you if I’d known about you.”

“Mom, shhh, it’s OK. You were a wonderful mother. I’m here to take care of you because you were a wonderful mother.”

She’s shaking her head, muttering, “I don’t understand this. Why didn’t my mother tell me? How did this happen?”

I redirect. “Look at your fingernails. What a pretty color!” We spend a few moments admiring each other’s manicures, leaving the issue of motherhood in the immediate forgotten past.

I get up and go into the kitchen to throw away our garbage and get a wet paper towel to wash my mother’s hands. When I sit down, she is so excited to see me. “When did you get here?”

“Just now. I couldn’t wait to see you.” “What have you been up to?”

I tell her again about my work, about my family. I mention, again, that I’m entering a writing contest.

“What should I write about?”
“I can’t tell you.”

“What would you like to read about?” I think of her old reading habits, filled with mystery and suspense. “Life. This life.”

I pat her soft cool hands, squeezing the bony fingers gently. “That’s just what I’ll do.”

With her idea clasped in the depths of my mind, “Oh, mother.”, I think to myself taking in every breath that she does.

 

 

 

Jude Al-Mufti is a current junior in high school residing in New York and is interested in literature, STEM, art, & global affairs. She has been writing poetry for five years, as well as exploring the world of filmmaking and screenwriting.

In my fishbowl town, there wasn’t much to do but play in the woods. As usual, my friends and I walked along the creek until it led into town. We saw a swing on our way back, and excitedly, we rang the doorbell.

The door burst open, rattling as it slammed against the side of the brick house. The overwhelming smell of cigarettes flooded my nose as the homeowner stepped into the doorway. The man wore a wife-beater soaked with sweat stains. My eyes followed from sunburnt shoulders to his thick fingers gripping his handgun. My friends and I stared down the barrel. His phone rang, and I looked at the rest of my friends’ jaws dangling open. We ran.

My calves felt like they would catch fire as I raced from his yard. We stumbled over leaves and tripped over branches as we bolted through the woods and back into town. My heart was a bass drum, thumping in my chest and through my ears. I couldn’t hear anything over my fear until the sirens sliced through the rhythm of my footsteps on the pavement and wailed through the air.

The police stopped us outside the grocery store, and soon, three more police cars arrived. The officers towered over us, questioning us with cold expressions and tough eyes. I squinted up at them through the bright August sunlight, trembling with fear. Though my friends and I stood shoulder to shoulder, I’d never felt so alone. We were too young for them to run our IDs: we didn’t have any. The officers took our names and parents’ phone numbers, —then left, leaving us on the curb. I called for a ride.

My sister drove me home, stoic and gripping the steering wheel like she unlocked my jail cell. She glanced at me at the stoplights, her eyes filled with worry and unspoken questions. Before she went to her room, she hugged me.

The police called my parents to explain the situation. When my parents asked about the gun, the officer uttered coldly, “He had a right to defend his property. He didn’t know if those people were criminals or not.”

“Those people? They’re kids,” my mother retorted.

“Ma’am–” the officer sighed, but no words left his mouth.

He echoed the man’s fears but sat silent for me. Fog clouded my brain, snatching away my ability to think.

My mother hung up the phone with the officer, stood up from the couch, and walked into the kitchen. As she wrapped her arms around me, she whispered, “Girl, you’re beautiful. Your skin, your hair, your nose, and your lips are perfect. Don’t ever forget it.”

But at twelve years old, my hair, nose, and lips all spelled danger. My skin was weaponized to justify someone’s brutality. Since that day, my reflection in the mirror changed, and my innocence vanished. I learned that being Black meant being hyper-aware of my existence. I stood in the center spotlight in a play I hadn’t auditioned for, and that truth suffocated me. The smell of violence was tattooed on my mind.

I laid in bed that night, curled up like a baby. I buried my face into the sheets, as I muffled my sobs, aching to be anywhere else. This town wasn’t safe. My mother told my father I cried because the police scared me. But I really cried because I didn’t understand how the police  couldn’t protect me, how my skin was a threat, or how anyone could survive in a world this cruel. I had never felt so visible.

 

 

 

Rainey Reese is a high school student from Chicago, Illinois, whose writing reflects the intricate experiences of Black youth in America. Drawing from personal encounters and the collective history of her community, Rainey captures the raw emotions and complex realities in “On Innocence and Black Youth” as an exploration of the loss of innocence. Her work has been previously published in Teen Ink Magazine, Write the World Review, and Blue Marble Review.

Mile 1
In fifth grade I concocted an in-depth plan to fake sickness and skip my grade-wide mile run, because I felt ashamed I couldn’t keep up with other kids. I look back at that now and smile a bit, one mile is just one third of my warm up. It mattered so much to me that I sobbed a devious confession to my Mom, “Eomma, my stomach hurts” or “Eomma, I feel light-headed”. She just shook her head, smiled and made me eat a banana. How I have grown, and how trivial my worries were! Today, I have laced my shoes extra tight and they feel like wings under my feet.

Mile one feels like“a sleepy summer Sunday and a sweet, untroubled mind.”

Mile 2
When I think about why and realize it was because I didn’t want to look weak in front of the boys, my smile sinks. Little perfectionist me had wanted an airtight persona. If I was the top of my class in ELA and math, how would it feel to be mediocre at best at running as everyone sprints ahead? I imagined them zooming past me, making that whoosh sound effect that they put in cartoons as they leave me in the dust. Embarrassing in bold red letters burned holes into my mind.

Research shows that girls in classes with high-achieving boys tend to set their academic goals lower and lack confidence in their abilities than girls at all-girls schools. Those same all-girls school students are also more apt to perform athletically. When I found that information, I immediately thought why my parents didn’t sign me up for an all-girls school, how could they withhold the benefits from me? It turns out I just needed a fat lesson on smashing patriarchal and heteronormative myths and I’d be fine. Mile two feels like fire, gets me riled up a bit and the anger builds.

Mile 3
I don’t think I ever learned how to fail and be okay with it. It’s still something I work on everyday. Self love needs comes first. Mile three feels reflective.

Mile 4
How can I love myself when I don’t trust myself? Mile four feels raw.

Mile 5
Here’s where I convince myself that I am a mess. You are a loser and nobody loves you. Your best friend secretly talks shit about you, that’s why she hasn’t responded in three hours. You don’t work hard in school or outside, so you will never achieve what you want. You keep on making mistake after mistake, please try harder next time. Your body could be a lot better, why is it so heavy to run with? Why do your inner thighs hit one another when you step? Why can’t your lungs keep up? Aren’t these shorts a bit too tight? What’s going on with your acne? You definitely run ugly. Mile five feels like a stubbed toe against the wall of reality.

Mile 6
Italy, 2017, we went to a small beach that was supposed to be the clearest along the coast. Our tour guide told us it was a bit strange because it was a stone beach instead of sand. It was indeed beautiful, so breathtaking that when I fall asleep six years later to the mediation sound of waves crashing, this beach is painted across my eyes. Painted there is ten-year-old me, dashing in and out of the water relentlessly. My feet became cut, bruised and bleeding but I was proud of my battle scars. Mile six feels like rocks.

Mile 7
Seven has always been my favorite number. Christian theology says there are seven deadly sins: pride, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, sloth, and wrath. Seven was the age when I started sewing, my favorite thing to do in the whole wide world. In China, the stages of female life are denoted as multiples of seven, like age two times seven at puberty and seven times seven at menopause. My birth numbers are 02/05/07, the two plus five making the year ‘07. In Iran, a cat has seven lives.

I was seven when I learned that pulling your eyes back so they look like slits wasn’t such a funny joke. For as long as I can remember, I’ve spent my summers in L.A. swimming, sweating and eating sweets with my seven cousins. In ancient Egypt there were seven paths to heaven and seven halls of the underworld. Seven is the name of my favorite song by Jungkook, who is in a band of seven mates. Seven was the amount of mornings I couldn’t get out of bed because my heart felt too heavy. Mile seven feels like tip-toeing on a tightrope between love and hate or a line between sweets and sins.

Mile 8
So close yet so far. My mental strength comes out to play around this time. The ground is moving under me, and each step forward repeats again and again. I can control something when I know what’s coming next. I start converting my pain into fuel. Each movement is both powered by releasing tensions one step at a time. Mile eight feels the beginning of proud.

Mile 9
In my room, I had an empty wall. It was naked and I wanted to give it clothes. Since I could read, my Mom wrote notes to my brother and me for any occasion ever, or just for the hell of it. I dressed my wall in these notes, arranging and taping them spaced appropriately apart. I’ve hung over nine notes up there now. In different words on different papers they all say, “Hey baby! I’m here for you always”. Mile nine feels like it’s finally coming together, fully dressed for the occasion.

Mile 10
Mile ten feels hard.

Mile 11
I’m now in eleventh grade and I’ve signed up for my first marathon with my Dad. I can run over ten miles consistently. I started training seriously a year ago when I was tired of always being tired of my anxiety. There were a million problems going on, running through and around my brain.

Imagine a room full of little people talking, but you don’t know what they’re saying or how to help or make them listen or how to shut them up. I needed a way to turn it off, an escape. I found that when I’m sprinting the last mile, music on full blast, playing the song run BTS, all the little chatters float up and fade to dark. So everyday, I lace my shoes extra tight and call out to my mom, “Eomma, I’m headed to the gym.” I run and run and run and I can’t breathe and I’m flushed a hot burning red. But I am free. Mile eleven feels pretty nice, right?

 

 

 

Riley Young is a Filo-Chinese High School student based in San Francisco. Apart from creative writing, she likes to run long distance, work with kids, sew clothes and eat lots with her family. Mahal Kita!

 

 

 

SOURCES:

 

https://genius.com/Genius-english-translations-bts-run-bts-english-translation-lyrics https://www.britannica.com/topic/number-symbolism/7 https://www.dictionary.com/e/religion/the-seven-deadly-sins/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/womens-issues/201909/what-is-the-one-overlooked-a dvantage-all-girls-schools#:~:text=Girls%20in%20same%2Dsex%20schools,a%20lot%20of%20 individual%20attention

1. You suck and you know it. You will watch Stuck in Love on your laptop that afternoon you were too sad to take a nap. You will fall in love with Lily Collins. You will tell yourself: I think I want to write in English…so people from all over the world will understand me. Haha. No. You will only want that because you wanna be cool.

2. You’re not cool. That’s why all the kids hate you. So you will spend your free time on one of the benches at the forest park, scribbling poems on your composition notebook. You love rhymes. So you will keep making rhymes even though the grammar is off. You will write sonnets about fall – even though you live in the Philippines, for heaven’s sake. You will pen haikus starring leaves. You will curate verses about shiny rocks and flowers kissed by bees. It’s funny how when you will most want to die, you will find life in almost everything.

3. You will dream of getting a poetry book published. You will browse international magazines and press on your three-year-old Samsung phone during Physics. You will think about the reading fee and count how much you’ll need to save each day to make 10 USD by the end of the year. You will walk your way home to school every day, bearing the heat of late afternoon and the worry that your parents might find out–news flash: they will find out. And then you will spend your savings on something stupid like a skater skirt.

4. The summer after your ninth grade, you will send two poems to an online magazine. You wrote them years ago but never dared to take them out of your diary. One day, for some reason you won’t remember when you’re writing a feature article about it, you’ll be brave enough to take that chance. You will write an email, attach the files, then hit send. They will get back to you six months later. Then, you will squeal at the acceptance email and run to your mother: I did it, Mommy! I freaking did it! Loooooook! You will be the happiest you’ve ever been since you were thirteen.

5. You will dream of bigger horizons. You will chase brighter skies. You will turn your trauma into masterpieces and think: Damn! Look at this fine piece of art! (Don’t worry, this one will be addressed in therapy.) You will send out emails in magazines with big names and fancy promises. Months later, they will reply with various arrangements of words to spell rejection. Your Submittable account will resemble a broken stoplight. You will start to believe you’ll never reach your destination. Maybe, you never even left home.

6. In spite of life happening—or maybe because of life happening—every now and then, you’ll be off your rockers and go into a submission spree. You will never get lucky.

7. Somewhere in the middle of the pandemic, your poem about self-harming will be featured in a mental health journal overseas. You will be paid for the very first time. You will buy some ice cream and think of your words printed somewhere in Saskatchewan. While the vanilla melts in your tongue, you will stare outside your windows and whisper: I think I can do this. I think I want this life.
8. You will apply for a writing scholarship offered by a professional poet. By some kind of miracle, you will get in. You will attend Zoom meetings every 7 in the morning in a state of utter disbelief. You will treat every session like a grand occasion. To be fair, it is a grand occasion.

9. You will keep on submitting to magazines hoping for acceptances. The answer will be no or static silence which is, you know, still no, just more brutal. Once, your mother will find you sulking in the darkness of your bedroom and even before she asks anything, you’ll say: Everyone rejected me. She will give you a hotdog on a stick and a cup of hot chocolate. You will ask her to turn the lights off when she leaves.

10. You will wake up one morning and decide to reject your rejections. You will stitch a book of prose and poems out of your failed submissions. You will remember what your kindergarten teacher used to say: you can either find treasures in the trash or make treasures out of it. You will spend the next three months over caffeinated, sleepless, and drunk in the dreams that keep you off the ledge.

11. You will tell yourself you deserve to be heard. You will convince your inner critic you are competent enough to stand on your own. You will think of the child you were and the empty shelves in the library she ran her fingers across and think: someone needs to hear these stories crowding my head. So, like the crazy girl you are, you will self-publish your chapbook. You will put it out online, but that won’t be enough so you will have it on paperback, too.

12. People will pay you for your book. You will pinch yourself so many times. No, you will not wake up. No, you do not want to.

13. You will write for online magazines, journals, blogs – you name it. You will still get rejected. But there will be days when an acceptance email sings its way into your inbox and the stings of the rejection slips go quiet just for a while. You will write truly, madly, deeply. For yourself. For your friends. For strangers. You will write to bury skeletons. You will write to perform exorcisms and resurrections. You will write to escape reality and also to face it. You will twist words into anything you want them to be. You will get paid for this sometimes. You will be able to take your mom out to dinners because of it. You will be tired. You will be sick. You will take your antidepressants and stare at an empty page for the next five months after your diagnosis. When your drive returns, it won’t be in downpours, but in drizzles. You will be thirsty. But you have a kinship with waters. Before you know it, you will be flooded again.

14. You will never stop writing. You will never stop submitting. You will never stop getting rejected no matter where you are in your career. You will be twenty with another collection. You will thank God. You will thank your mother for her genes. You will thank Rad Bradbury for saying that you only fail when you stop writing. You will thank every victory, every fall, every road that brought you here.

15. At twenty-one, you will become a staff writer of the online magazine where you began your journey. You will be working with your favorite author on projects. In fact, you will be mentored by several authors from all over the world and you will wonder why at thirteen, every Friday in that forest park, you ever thought you’d be alone.

16. You will host your first writing workshop for the the youth from different planes of the globe. You will announce your mentorship program. You will break down at 2AM in your hotel room and fall to your knees in gratitude. Again and again, you will thank your angels. Again and again, you will thank your stars. And again and again, you will pick up the pen and go back to a blank page where you began.

17. Hey you, little dreamer. Who loves language the way she wishes she would be loved. Who tears into novels during lectures, lists collocations in another notebook, and searches for the meaning of the words in the dictionary instead of relying on context clues. Who thinks of a thousand ways to say “I love you” and “I’m sad” without actually using those words–because then, what else is poetry for? To the girl who should be in therapy instead of at the forest park every freaking Friday. Who seeks the wisdom of classic writers rather than asking her mom to find her a creative writing teacher. Hey you—yes you—with scars on your wrists, stories under your tongue, and dreams by the tip of your fingers…you will make it. You will save yourself with the lifeline of your verses and you will do the same to others in the future. Just give it time. And yeah, kiddo, your peers don’t like you right now but one day, they will ask for your autograph. So go, just go home.

18. Go home and watch Stuck in Love.

 

 

 

Fransivan MacKenzie is a storyteller born and raised in the Philippines. She is the author of the books “Out of the Woods,” “Departures,” and “i remember that it hurt.” Her works also appeared in Transition Magazine, The Racket, Abandon Journal, CP Quarterly Review, and more literary journals all over the world. In 2023, she became a staff writer for Germ Magazine, the platform that provided her first international exposure. She founded the Fransivan Mackenzie Poetry Mentorship Program to promote literacy while breaking financial barriers.