A stack of black-and-white marbled notebooks held reused pages filled with copied Chinese texts and anecdotes. Textbooks sent by a cousin in China contained handwritten notes that revealed school life in China and served as learning material. A determined mother acted as a teacher in reading and writing Chinese. Years of meticulous hand-copying built advanced language proficiency and earned social approval, but produced physical pain—red crescents on the palm and scraped knuckles. Occasional physical discomfort became a durable memory linked to characters. Early learning paired spoken dialogue with subtitles, fostering a reliance on subtitles as an anchoring aid.
Frugality meant that notebooks half-filled with math, science, history - or frankly whatever notes that I had taken during the school year - were finished with pencil scribbles of informational texts and anecdotes in Chinese. It started with textbooks shipped to us from one of my cousins in China, filled with little notes from him that offered a glimpse into the life of school in China, a life so similar yet so different from my American experience.
Hours and hours spent copying over the texts over the majority of my childhood became the building blocks that lifted my proficiency high above my peers. In the era when people's approval and admiration of me defined my ego, this was the perfect subtle flex to fulfill that need for respect. The price was the pain of the red crescents in my palm marking where my nails had dug in from me gripping the pencil too hard
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