Non-Fiction

 

In 2^nd grade, I fiddled, cross-legged, as I listened to my teacher mumble about the beauty of books.

“Reading is like giving vague instructions to your mind,” she whispered, “like a coloring book: you give your brain an outline and allow it to figure the rest out by itself.”

I couldn’t help but let her enthusiasm enter me- it was wonderful, what our brain would think, what it was taught to think, with no instruction.

Soon, the bookshelves in my room overflowed with stories I could never forget. At night, I would pray to be those characters, trapped in the confines of pages, fighting evil. I could almost envision my blue eyes twinkling in the sunlight as my blonde hair flew behind me. My long, pale legs would pump faster and faster, leaving the villain in the dust. Maybe this vision of myself was my first mistake.

My second mistake was quite similar: I always imagined myself as princess Ariel, caring and good-natured but just a tad rebellious. In elementary school, at the lunch table, my friends and I were talking about what princess we would be, and I, quite confidently, said that I was Ariel. The reaction, nervous laughter, was not what I expected.

Lyla, a girl with fair skin and dark hair, who we knew was Snow White, responded.

“No, you’re not Ariel. That doesn’t make any sense. She is.”

Lyla pointed a slim finger at a shy girl sitting on the corner of our table. She had fire for hair, light eyes and even lighter skin.

“Who am I then?”

Lyla paused for a little, and looked around at everyone else. “I don’t know, no one, I think. Not everyone has to be a princess. It’s okay.”

After lunch, I immediately approached the girl who was said to be Ariel. I let my mind wander about all the insane adventures we would go on together. I found out soon enough that she was timid, and deathly afraid of the sea and breaking rules. I was confused.

That night I took a good look at myself in the mirror, the conversation still echoing in my head. No one. Not everyone has to be a princess. I was upset, but mainly confused. I looked up to these fictional girls because I saw bits of what I was in them, and pieces of what I wanted to be. I thought that our personalities were very similar. But, everyone else seemed to be drawing comparisons on the basis of something as empty as appearance. It was then that I understood I would never be called Ariel because she was white, and I was not. There was something cynical in reading now; each marvelous heroine was just a character, a figment of my imagination, something I’d never be.

The more books I read, the more I see that authors often stick to simplicity when it comes to detail. For example, everyone has a nose and authors often do not include this detail in a character’s profile because they know that the reader will be able to imagine it. My teacher was right- we, as readers, are able to fill in aspects even when there is no specific instruction. The author only mentions a nose in extreme cases: when he or she believes that without a proper description the character cannot be complete or fully understood (think: Voldemort). Oddly enough, I have noticed that ethnicity in literature works the same way. The standard of race has become so embedded in our head that like an ordinary nose, explaining that a character is white is a waste of words that can instead be spent on painting a better picture of the character. If there are two characters, Sasha who is white, and William who is not, the character development for Sasha is always much more in depth. The reader learns small quirks about Sasha, like how she takes her coffee. William, however, is treated like a character with an extremely unique nose, and suddenly the reader knows nothing about his personality, but rather knows too much about the exact shade of his skin.

When we read about Sasha we allow our mind to think. We know Sasha likes coffee in the morning with no sugar because she is trying to lose weight for her brother’s wedding that’s in two weeks. This detail sparks a flame that allows readers to relate to her. We like her, because she’s like us. But when we read about William we think, “oh that’s the kid who is black,” because that’s the only description we have received. We don’t see William away from his race as we do Sasha. We have confined him.

Don’t get me wrong I believe that race is important in development of characters: fictional or realistic. However, race should help us grow, not stop us. When I was young, what I struggled with most about that lunch table conversation was realizing not that I wouldn’t be seen as Ariel, but that I wouldn’t be seen as anyone. My young mind failed to see me painted as a hero. For the longest time I thought that I was the problem. If no one wanted to write about someone who looked like me, or had parents that looked like me- isn’t that an issue?

Whether we want to believe it or not, there’s something in all of our brains forcing us to perceive some people differently than others due to small, and in hindsight meaningless, characteristics. These unfair stereotypes, which begin as whispers and progress into screams, build a wall that not only divides us but sometimes, in the worst cases, buries us alive.

I wonder how long it will take until we realize that maybe our instinct is not correct. Maybe, corrupt from the generations before us, our brain is begging for a change-to not only have coloring books but also to celebrate any color that appears. Maybe we need a rainbow of Ariels, and to equally accept those with tails and those with legs.

 

 

Sanya Bery lives in New Jersey and spends most of her time in the city, or the tree house she and her brother found in the woods behind a golf course (very cliché, she knows, but seriously: people underestimate the power of tree houses).
Her writing has won both a Silver and Gold key, and has been published in Creative Communication, Prisms Magazine, Teen Ink, and Canvas Literary Magazine. 
Her creative writing teacher is the wonderful Ms. Tess James.

 

Anyangcheon Stream lies in one of those boroughs in Seoul, just like many other rivers do. It joins the Han River to cut Seoul into two, the north and the south, much like the DMZ, except for the fact that bridges connect the two regions. Every afternoon, when I was eleven, something beautiful occurred on this stream – mallards leisurely floated by the river current, sometimes with their beaks in the water looking for small prey. Schools of carp enjoyed their spring journey, with some of the curious breaking out of the group, following humans walking around the stream, hoping that they would get some snacks.

Tracing the borderlines of Yangcheon-gu borough, the stream was a five-minute walk from my house. I left my apartment with a warning of monsters from cousins who’d rather play video games with me. I ignored them as I descended the U-shaped bike road next to the stairs. Then, I’d turn right to pass by Ginkgo trees lined up among tessellated bluish green precast pavers. I’d turn left after fifty metres to enter a small gate and cycle pass by Yang Chung Middle School; the white square-shaped pavers sometimes out of shape, without any trees, marked the transition between the two areas. I crossed the road, two lanes on one side and three lanes on the other, and there rushed the stream.

Online images of Anyangcheon Stream would always have a luxurious green color. The image of the place that I remember, however, was of humble yellow. Yellow plants, yellow soil. There wasn’t that much to see. People always walked there, mainly women, jogging back and forth. Most of them wore a matching color of caps and hiking vests. The most common colors that could be found included fluorescent yellow, orange, and sometimes even purple. Men sporting polarized sunglasses cycled on their bikes. There descended a vacuum of noise, however. The only sounds that could be heard were the barely audible conversations of women passing by, only heard clearly when I stood right next to them, or people on bikes ringing their bells for the others’ safety. Sometimes birds cried from far distances. The stream was peaceful; there are no other words to describe it. I liked that humility, that quietude. I could empty my mind while I continued my journey, and nothing abrupt existed to distract me.

The part about the stream that I loved the most was the entrance to the cycle lane. I had to pull my bike up a long, quite steep slope, to reach an even longer downhill, where my bike now pulled me down in return of my hard efforts. I didn’t hold on to the brakes while I entrusted my body on the bike. I lost control of myself. I wanted to lose control. I felt the breeze sweeping through my clothes, under my shirt, around the hair, the fluttering sound. I guess at that time this experience best showed the proportional relationship between hard work and high rewards, also one of the most common Korean phrases ‘You reap what you sow’, as emphatically stated by my grandparents every Chinese New Year as well-wishing remarks.

I would keep pedaling along the cycle lane until I encountered a field of galdae, tall, stalks like those of the spring onion, only thicker, with cottony flowers that resembled fern. Then, the smokestacks of factories became dauntingly close. They would start shining and bursting orange at twilight. At that point I would slow down and stop, like a soccer ball stop spinning once kicked into the goal, and gaze at the galdae executing simple harmonic motion – move to the left, slow down, to the right, slow down, back to the left. I wanted to jump in there, walk through them and hide myself. I was too timid to do that, too shy to express myself. I feared that someone would swiftly steal my bike while I wandered around in my own maze. I lost my first bike because of laziness that stopped me from turning the dials on my four-dial-lock by more than one number. I didn’t want to risk losing my second bike because of my laziness, my instincts again.

A flat grey bridge connected the district I was living in, Yangcheon-gu, to some other district, separated from each other by the stream. To go across posed a risk for me. Despite the perfectly same scenery on the opposite side of the stream, the green grass surrounding a trail for walkers and cyclists, all under a road with parked white, grey, and black cars, I always considered that side a completely new place. Only recently did I realize that the other district was Yeongdeungpo-gu, my first real home in Korea, when I randomly searched up a map of Seoul on Google while procrastinating. Whenever I dared crossing that bridge, I always made sure that I went through the very center of the bridge, for I feared that I would fall from my bike, into the river.

A couple of days ago I saw a video of pink galdae swaying under an azure sky. That reminded me of Anyangcheon. But from the way the tall grass swayed, came a foreboding. One summer night on Naver, Anyangcheon Stream appeared as one of the ten highest trending search words. Out of curiosity I clicked on the link, finding articles and reviews by bloggers of the new water park opening there. It was mainly a place for children, utilizing the empty space near the parking lot to add in pools and fountains and showers. But trees were cut down. Galdae were weeded out. Dirt has been replaced with manufactured pieces of monotonously equal, grey rock to sustain the water in the pools. Videos showed that the humble noises of birds and bicycle bells were now non-existent, but replaced by frivolous laughter of kids and columns of water hitting the ground. Yellow was a color obviously absent, but instead a spectrum of colors, starting from bright neon green to dark black with an orange touch, from the tents and cars populating the area.

I still think of the stream at times. Sometimes I dream of an old man on a bike, whizzing past the reed that clung to the mud, followed by a small boy with a blue helmet in a blue tricycle. This is the only image of Anyangcheon I want to remember.

 

 

Mingoo Kwon is a senior student at International School Manila. He loves to play video games and listen to early 2000s music at home, or spend his time outside with his friends. He loves writing about nature, his surroundings, and relationships. His poems and writings have been recognized by Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.

The college application process has been a long, grueling, and arduous one, but the singular upside is that it’s given me a litany of new adjectives to add to my vocabulary list: enervating, ignominious, execrable, rebarbative, esoteric, insouciant, supercilious, doctrinaire, persnickety, facetious, pontifical, and, perhaps in the moments when my sarcastic sense of humor helped me find irony in the seemingly constant difficulty, risible.

I consider myself an intelligent person. More than just smart—smart as to be defined by good grades and external academic validation—I genuinely care about and have the capacity for learning, devouring books in my free time, reading political articles in the car to keep up-to-date, having intellectually stimulating conversations with friends and teachers about anything from metaphysics to mathematic modeling. Knowledge excites me; I’m constantly engaged in the world around me, and I subsist on taking in experience from it and contributing positive influence outward.

I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember; at eight years old, I owned a book set of classics, and I spent free time reading Great Expectations, or Black Beauty, or my favorite, Oliver Twist. I didn’t understand why adults gave odd, squinted-up gazes when they saw what I was reading. I could think through complex set theory in eighth grade as part of a college-level math course I signed myself up to take outside of school. I raised my hand in all my classes to ask the most obscure of questions, seeking to elucidate more information and more analysis in every subject.

It wasn’t odd in itself; it was odd because my family was not like me. My mother had read only People Magazine since my conception, and my father judged success based on financial state, not ability or intelligence. Neither came from a background of academia. My father was, and largely still is, the only person from either familial side to attend college, and it was a small, local institution nameless outside the Buffalo area. Certainly this isn’t bad—it was just different, and I was the family black sheep. My mother and father were fine not knowing the answers to questions; they were fine not even asking the questions. They could blindly accept that they didn’t even know what they didn’t know; I never could. They wanted to please God; I wanted to be God.

Intelligence often hurt. I had few friends as a child, not because I was rude but because I engaged with different interests than almost anyone else my age I knew. I carried stress in my shoulders and it snowballed into headaches, dull aches thickening my skull with their reverberations. My parents picked fights with me when I intellectually questioned rules that didn’t make sense, and I didn’t understand why they’d rather leave things be, complacent, than create radical progress. The sensitivity I felt to knowledge and intellectual stimuli I also felt to daily activity and emotional stimuli, and small events wore me down. It didn’t take a lot to make me cry, though I did that all at night, silent and hidden. It was a kind of shrouding.

I held tight to my intelligence with the dream that someday, it would bring me somewhere better. I would, with my own merits and efforts, find a community of like-minded scholars who could share my willingness for discussion and excitement for the world. I would travel abroad; I would visit city after city; I would soak in what the world had to offer and learn—because I knew I couldn’t ever know everything—with what skills to analyze and use what I did know. I would create something meaningful: bonds with people, literary art that breathed hope and an original ideology, movement towards a better political and societal future.

College was that dream. I would find a place that fit the attributes I so wanted someone else to understand, and I’d fully use the resources there to accomplish my full potential. I’d relish in everything the school had to offer and in return, leave it better than I found it. Despite everything—poring over every small detail of essays and wondering if officers would even read them thoroughly, stressing through the long waiting periods required, deferrals, waitlists, rejections, so many no’s I can’t help but wonder who actually are the people they accept—I still want to believe in that dream. I don’t want to give up the hope that community is out there, and out there for me to join, waiting. More than just optimistic, I want that scrap of a desire I have left to be realistic; I still want to find a place that recognizes the type of intelligence I pride myself on consciously trying to create, every day, and join a supportive, creative community of capable individuals.

 

Courtney Felle is a high school senior. She has been writing for the majority of her life, in most every genre. Outside of writing, she enjoys hiking, reading, and volunteering in the greater Buffalo area, particularly with kids. She was named “most likely to start an argument” in her high school yearbook, and she plans to keep starting arguments that create progress in society. For this reason, she wants to study political science in college, hoping to someday work with government in bettering the communities around her.

 

If you read that title in a mocking accent, then you may be guilty of this. Somewhere along the timeline of immigrants spilling into America, English became the landmark of culture and intelligence; accent a caricature for heathen and lazy. If you thought of that title with derision, then you might be unconsciously harboring society’s draconian eye.

It seems that English has grown into a necessary component of intellect. And while I have only had fourteen years of experience with this, I know that there are thousands more who have had lifetimes.

 

*

 

When I first came to America, I didn’t speak English. The few words I knew–“hello,” “goodbye,” “sorry”–came out in chopped bits, the words lurching on my tongue like clumsy rocks.

I flushed red with embarrassment when the teacher asked me to read passages aloud. My kindergarten classmates stared and whispered. Their English was perfect: smooth r‘s, quick l’s. When I sat with my friends at the round blue tables, they would ask me, “Why do you go to this school, anyway? You just came from China. English must be hard for you.”

They’d laugh like it was a joke, but I could sense the question simmering beneath their smiles.

I’d tuck a hand under my uniform skirt, picking at my Lunchable, and try to laugh back.

So I worked. I borrowed novels about time travelers and fairies from the library and took them home. In my free time, I’d thumb through them until they were so full of dog-ears that the librarian told me to just keep them. I’d whisper the words to myself until they felt like smooth pebbles. At home, my Mandarin came rapid-fire.

During the summers, we visited my father’s hometown in China, Zhijiang, where I had grown up, and I could be another Chinese girl picking at the roasted oranges that her aunt prepared for her. The dialect spoken there, zhijianghua, charged forward at twice the speed of Mandarin and rose in different cadences. I could converse freely in both Mandarin and zhijuanghua, interchange Mandarin and zhijianghua in sentences, and mesh the two dialects to create a hybrid that only my relatives and I understood. I came back from China each year with a mouth full of the language.

In America, most of my closest friends were Chinese. We wore our culture with pride on the sleeves of our red silk qi paos and laughed while our parents fought over the bills at cheap restaurants. And at school, I had finally smoothed out my English. Nobody snickered when I read passages out loud anymore. My best friends through my early life switched from being Japanese, Vietnamese, and then Indian—but none seemed to last, because they didn’t really understand. They ate their spaghetti with forks and watched football on the television.

By the end of elementary school, I had won a few small school-wide awards for my writing. My parents promptly encouraged me to apply to a private school in the area, and lo and behold, their middle school campus accepted me. But this was different from my public elementary. This school was intensive when it came to language arts; the grammar training was breakneck and ruthless, and the teachers treated essays with hawk-like, iron-fisted attention. In the first few months of school, I helplessly lagged behind. The only grammar I’d learned from my public school consisted of ‘noun’, ‘verb’, and ‘pronoun.’ I knew how to write with things like appositives, subordinate conjunctions, and dependent clauses, but I didn’t know how to name them.

Everybody at this school was white: in my eyes, they were big smiles and confidence and American flags flashing in their eyes. Subconsciously, I pushed myself twice as hard to catch up to everybody else, and I began to float to the top of the rankings every time we had a grammar test.

As we labored away on our expository essays, my thesaurus became my Bible. I could use words like undermine, insouciant, and apparatus. Nevertheless, I floundered helplessly when it came to words like dais, linebacker, and Kanye West. I realized that if I wanted to speak—not just write—like an American, I was going to have to be friends with more Americans. I watched my first football game and started using forks to eat my spaghetti. By the end of sixth grade, I published my first novel and won my first cash award for writing.

In the summers, I still visited Beijing, my mother’s hometown, and Zhi Jiang. My uncle spoke to me in zhijianghua. I asked him to slow down, please, and I forgot the taste of roasted oranges. Avoid stigma, earn respect: I traded my qi paos for Brandy Melville sweaters, my Chinese for my English, and it was—is—infinitely more painful than any cut or incision I have ever experienced. This is the price I am still paying to fit in at a white-majority school: dissect the Chinese parts of me and make them accessories rather than organs.

In eighth grade, I was awarded the prize for the best English in the grade, out of all my white classmates who were born and raised with it. People respected me—but the question was buried deep in their throats. I could feel it simmering under their skins again, even though they never spoke it out loud. There were big smiles and confidence and American flags flashing in their eyes. But they respected me, and that was all I wanted: to perfect my English so I could earn their admiration.   In the summer, I visited China, and I realized that it had been years since I could understand zhijianghua. When I started preparing for the AP Chinese exam, I found that now the rocks wobbling in my mouth were Mandarin.

 

*

 

Today, I have made a sort of turbulent peace with the split inside of me. It almost never comes out anymore, but in Chinese class and in Zhi Jiang, sometimes it’ll rear its ugly head.

At his farm in China, my great-uncle will ask me a question, beckon me to squat and feed the chickens in his pens, pluck the plums from the trees. My cousins with sun-hardened hands do this perfectly, and I struggle, because my fingers, suited for the cold metal of a pen, fumble with the pulpy pits of fruit.

There is always a moment of blank, white-hot panic—and shame, too.

My great-uncle will smile patiently and guide my fingers forward, but still, I would not wish this on anyone.

Now I’m a freshman at the same school, and a boy came this year. Just arrived from China. And when he introduced himself, I saw the words like heavy rocks on his tongue, lurching into each other. The class was silent, and after class, my friend snickered, “I couldn’t even understand him. Could you?”

In literature class, the teacher asked him to read a passage from The Odyssey, and I saw his face turn red. I saw myself. Slowly, he began to read, tripping over the Greek names and Homeric terms. The class was silent.

“My English not very good,” he had said afterward, face burning.

At the end of class, the girl next to him spoke.

“Hey,” she asked him curiously, “why do you go to this school? Why don’t you just go to a math school—or something? It would be lot easier for you.”

Because this school is too hard for you, was the unspoken end.

The bell rang. His eyes dropped to the ground. He put his copy of The Odyssey into his backpack and laughed back, but I saw myself. I saw every child with yellow skin and brown eyes who wanted big smiles, confidence, and American flags flashing in their eyes.

The boy is a genius at math and physics, and yet all people can see is his crude English—coming out in chopped bits, the words lurching on his tongue like clumsy rocks.

 

*

 

I try my best to help the boy. I cheer the loudest for him after he presents his literature project, even when the teacher sharply corrects his pronunciations of Telemachus and Ithaca. I laugh the quickest when he stumbles through a joke in English, and I always say hello to him when he walks into the classroom.

We are not close friends, and I can’t be sure if he’s thinking of shedding his skin or burrowing farther into it. But at a white-majority school, birds of a feather have to flock together sometimes. So when he lowers his literature book and says, “My English not good,” I tell him, “No. Your English is very good.”

*

Please. Don’t let English become a landmark of culture. I don’t want the boy at my school to have to do the same thing I did.

 

 

Sarah Feng is a freshman at Pinewood School (Los Altos, CA), where she is studying the chemical composition of words. Her works have been recognized by the regional Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the California Coastal Commission, the Write the World Novel Writing Prize, and more, and are published or forthcoming in TAB: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Moledro Magazine, and Write the World Best of 2015 Anthology, among others. She reads prose for Glass Kite Anthology and reviews for Write the World.