18 years in reflection

“Picture her in that nasty hospital room, crying, wailing with her ugly pink face, smushed in like a fat slab of raw hamburger meat. Dad scampers around uselessly with the camera he’s filled with new film just for the occasion. The flash goes off: “Baby’s first poo!”

The pink face unsmushes, grows into her skin. At nine months she is walking and falling and walking and falling until she is running and maybe still falling. It’s okay. She just gets back up. At nine times five months she is standing in front of the closed bathroom door that screams of half-adoration and half-exhaustion, counting loudly and boastfully to her mother, “...ziu-shi-ba, ziu-shi-ziu, yi-bai!”

Yi-bai. One hundred.

One hundred times two minutes of utter silence everyday, prefaced by a nice bout of crying and wailing, just so we don’t forget where it all started. Those are the younger years, silent agony broken perhaps only by the safety net of home. Together, her and her brother have four moon craters, two each, one on either side of their grinning mouths. The Moon, the Sun, and the Earth, all in one little bubble. Bubbles are elusive, fleeting things.

Summers are made for blowing bubbles from wands that never seem to work, drawing chalk tracks for her and her neighbor’s Ripstik races, and listening to Fireflies by Owl City after catching real fireflies in the evening. Her goodnight lullaby is the gentle rubbing of her thumb against the soft, embroidered corners of her grandmother’s pillowcase, matched by bedtime stories, which are her hungry eyes worsening with every scan across a dimly-lit Harry Potter page.

One day that pillowcase disappears, and despite how much she searches for it, so very desperately, she cannot take a thirteen-hour flight back to China to find what has been lost. Like many things, she comes to learn, it will remain gone forever.

And then she is growing up, spiraling upwards and upwards. There are first crushes, and first periods, and first friendship heartbreaks. She is a 5th grade pageant queen, waving her spidery piano fingers elegantly at the crowd. She is a ballet dancer, but not a ballerina for how unelegantly she trips across the studio floor. Piano turns into violin, which turns into singing, and winters are filled with lots of drama club rehearsals.

Fall comes around every year, and there are first days of school, soon to be followed by first tennis seasons, first trips to 2 Alice’s, first drives, first kisses, first regrets. Hard work doesn’t always beat talent, it turns out, and all that music seems to fade out, replaced by the looming pressure of life-after-childhood. “You want to be a doctor, right?” they tell her. She doesn’t tell them that.

Now she is seventeen, a dancing queen, but neither still dancing or queening. Seventeen is special. Seventeen is first trip to Europe, first college applications, first projects, first rejections, first acceptance, first love. She is the nerd running around with ten notebooks and folders in her hands and pushing up her glasses every five seconds, and she’s proud of it. She still likes numbers. She is the girl who gets things done, and realizes that music was never it, anyway.

She is on her way to eighteen and then she is there. Childhood is an optical illusion, so close and so distant all at once. There are a million more firsts to be had.”

My mother was telling me stories from her childhood— life before I was born — today, during those few minutes before I had to run out the door again, this time for a writing workshop (where I was inspired to start the above piece). As birthdays go, I’ve been feeling very introspective lately, and her stories were a very fitting reminder of how differently we’ve grown up. The amount of opportunity I’ve been given my entire life in comparison to my parents never ceases to baffle me. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always felt so compelled to make the most of everything offered to me; maybe not the fairest logic, but nevertheless one I’ve lived by.

Eighteen is a big milestone in American society. It’s the age at which you can begin to vote, finally drive (legally) at 3AM without having taken Driver’s Ed, and be tried as an adult. It’s the age we use to mark the end of childhood.

My childhood was, is, dysfunctional, as I’m sure virtually everyone’s was in some way or another. I don’t want to talk about that stuff today, although it is undeniably integral to who I’ve become. I just want to talk about the good stuff, which I’ve certainly had plenty of. Reflection like this affirms my belief that there are two things that determine so much of the direction of our lives: education and money. They often go hand in hand, and they both mean opportunity. I don’t think I’ll be sure for a very long time what I want do with my life, but I at least know it has to do with giving back to people who haven’t had the same opportunities as me. With the right resources (and the right will), children can grow up to transform their lives in a generation.