Writing and me

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I always aspired to be a writer.

I started journaling when I was five years old, even before primary school started and before I could fluently express myself in written Chinese words, since there were still many Chinese characters that I did not know. As a child, I always loved to write and such love was inexplicable. Now when I think about this, maybe I should thank my mom since she intentionally filled my childhood with all kinds of interesting books and often took me to the library with her, which cultivated my love for reading. I could immerse myself in the world of books so much that I became detached from the reality, and when I finished a book, which was also when I was forced back to the mundane reality, I always felt tremendous sadness since I therefore lost track of the fate of characters in the book. I often read the stories I liked over and over again and told them to my friends. Moreover, I often aspired to write a similar story and actually put in efforts in doing so. However, I was often disappointed to find out that my work was no more than a clumsy imitation of the original work, even though ironically, my work was supposed to be just an imitation. As a fifth grader in primary school, I began to write a novel about a fifth-grade-girl’s friendship and drama with her classmates, which was totally based on my own experience as you might guess, and I gained much excitement and pleasure in the process of writing it. Eventually I finished my work, which was about 20 pages. I printed it out and then started to sell it to my close friends, which means that they would pay me a small amount of money for reading it, and I regarded such transaction as my small business. However, my novel was not written for the sake of being read but rather just for pure self-enjoyment. Here I want to thank my mom again since when I was a child, she always encouraged my writing and offered sincere suggestions rather than blaming me for ‘not concentrating on my schoolwork’ as many Chinese parents might do.

Another reason for my love for writing is simply that I am good at it. Here I mean writing in Chinese, given that I am not a native English speaker (but I believe my English writing will soon get pretty good too). Both in primary school and middle school, I received many compliments from my Chinese teachers and also much admiration from my classmates. My essays were often read out loud in class or posted on the wall. One time during 9^th grade, an essay written by me on an exam was even required to be memorized by other students word by word as a paragon for ‘good-exam-essay’.

Every time my essay was publicized by my teacher, I felt a mix of pride and embarrassment. It was embarrassing because my writing is always personal. In order to write a good essay, you need to be sincere and insightful, and having my insights revealed is awkward because in daily life, I always pretended to be innocent or even silly around my friends, while I was actually very attentive to all the small details and analyzed them deeply. For example, I always knew if someone liked another person in a romantic way, or hated her, or envied her, but I would pretend not to know anything and just quietly watch how things would turn out. Some of my mom’s colleagues once went to my blog and read the things I wrote (when I was 9 or 10), and they expressed concerns to my mom that I was too precocious as a child, in a bad way. I knew this because later my mom told me, in a disinterested and nonchalant manner, about her colleagues’ concerns toward me. She said, “Just to let you know that my colleagues have access to your blog and they can read your stuffs.” It was also funny that by that time, my net-name was 'decadent angel', which sounds dark and pretentious.

I always knew that I was precocious. I was precocious in general simply because I was smart and thus could see through the surface of things. On the other hand, my parents always accused me of being too immature because I was excessively emotional and egocentric in their eyes, or maybe in general, parents just underestimate their children’s maturity level and want to exert authority over them throughout the course of their life.

My Chinese teachers often sent me to all kinds of essay competitions, which I never liked. I did not like and did not know how to cater to those objective standards for writing ‘a good essay’. I never took those competitions very seriously and wrote whatever I would like to, but surprisingly, I still won some awards. But anyways, the point for me to tell you this is that I dislike writing essays for reasons other than just writing it, which could explain why I always procrastinate on my academic papers, lol. Writing for me is a catharsis experience. I am not sure whether writing is always an objectively good thing for me, especially when writing down bad things, since the process of writing them down is to groom them over again, and it makes getting rid of the negative moods more difficult to me. Writing is also biased in nature, since I am always selective in what I want to write, so I selectively remember the things I write down, which is not the whole picture and my whole memory may therefore be distorted. However, I like writing so much that I do not care whether it is good or bad for me.

Do I still want to be a writer? Yes. ‘Writing’ is such a broad term and it encompasses many genres you can write about. Maybe the question is strange in itself, since as I am writing these, I am already a writer. I always aspired to be a writer throughout my childhood and adolescence, but I never dared to admit to other people about it. Maybe I cherished this dream so much that I was afraid of any tiny bit of negative judgment. Therefore, I often lied by saying that I would like to be a singer. I am not a talented singer by the way.