2009 Winner
Mingzhu Li
Amherst College
“Believe in yourself; the strength is in your heart!” I heard these words from an ice cream commercial on TV; they became my motto when I walked into my first day of high school in America.
Skateboarders, cheerleaders, jocks, and math geeks — all of these were what I had imagined about American high schools. I felt like I was filming a foreign movie, and couldn’t believe I would be in the same school for four years with these curious creatures, much less become great friends with them.
I searched furiously in my mind for something to say to an exotic girl sitting next to me in homeroom, and the only things I could remember from my four years English experience is: “Hello, my name is Michelle. What is your name?” Remembering that “the smile is the universal language,” I added a big grin to the end of my question.
“Hi, I’m Jennie,” she answered me nervously, obviously scared by my flamboyant smile.
Wow, she understood my English! I was so proud of myself that I didn’t pay attention to her surprise.
“How do you do?”
My English teacher had taught us that it’s polite to say this when meeting someone for the first time. I was happy I could use the English I learned.
“Eh, what? Oh, yeah, how do you do?”
This time, I clearly detected the expression of puzzlement that crossed over Jennie’s face. Did I say something wrong?
Throughout my first day of school, I would talk to everybody I met with the too-formal English I learned in China, but fortunately, communicating was not as hard as I thought it would be. Either people in New York were very tolerant of bad English, or I was too excited to notice their disapproval.
This euphoria dissipated as soon as I entered the classroom. While I found all of my classes hard to understand, my English class was by far the worst: the English teacher clad in black told us that she would give us an in-class essay the next day to test our proficiency of the English language.
Oh Great! I certainly would get a zero on that essay. Then, my teachers would realize it was a mistake for me to be in this specialized high school; they would call my mom to ask her to take me home; my mom, in turn, would fear that she wouldn’t be able to find a school that would accept me, and would decide to send me back to China; all my friends in China, who had just prepared a farewell party for me, would be surprised to see me back in school; I would not catch up with the lessons I’d missed… As my imagination raced, the seemingly inevitable future grew more and more foreboding. When the class bell rang and all the students started to walk out of the room, my heart had already sunk to the bottom of the ocean of desolation.
What should I do? What should I do? I started flipping through my English textbooks from China the minute I got home that day, but, clearly, these conversational books could not help me.
Like a French aristocrat walking toward the guillotine, I walked into my classroom the next day with a heavy heart. I stared at the cryptic words of the assignment blindly and tried to believe that some magic would happen and those words would start to speak and tell me their Chinese definitions. When no magic happened after five minutes, I gave up and closed my eyes—the blade of the guillotine would fall any second; there was nothing I could do.
For some mysterious reason, the names of great Chinese poets jumbled through my mind as I closed my eyes: Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Juyi… I started to recall all the beautiful verses they wrote—the blue mountains of the evening, the long road of the river of stars, the grass as green as jade, and the dark lake representing the depth of friendship—suddenly, I realized I could write about the beautiful images created by Chinese poets. Even though it probably had nothing to do with the essay, which I later found out was about personal heroes, it was better than doing nothing. After deciding this, I started to gather all my English vocabulary and tried to recreate, in English, the beautiful images that Li Bai, the god of poetry, captured in his poems.
When I received my red-ink covered essay from the English teacher, I was shocked by the big scarlet “37” on my paper. “Thirty seven!” I said to myself, “some miracle must have happened for me to not get a zero!” Like amateur who beat a master chess player in his first game, I suddenly felt that there is hope.
When I nervously asked my teacher if my essay really deserved that score, she explained to me that she loved my imagery, despite the fact that she couldn’t understand half of them. She surprised me further by telling me that I wrote a great essay and that I would get a much higher grade if the assignment was different. Like a kid who learned how to make a compass in a huge maze, I began to realize that I had the ability to do well in this school. Certainly, I would have to work harder than everybody else just to pass a test. At least I knew I have a chance. Coming to America was not a total disaster any more; I started to have faith in myself again and worked to improve.
Two years later, I take the most demanding English course in our school. Yes, that desperate girl still come out sometimes when a difficult assignment is given, but I have the strength now to fight her back.
“Gold will shine no matter where it is,” my friend wrote this old Chinese saying on my hand when I was leaving China. Yes, I am gold, and with strong confidence at heart, I will shine wherever I am!
