Month: September 2022

One fun fact about me is that I absolutely despise summer. 

I hate the way the heat leaves my skin feeling sticky and how the air feels so thick it’s hard to breathe. To tell you the truth, I don’t even know where my hatred for hot weather came from. I was a pretty big fan of summertime when I was much younger, loving the way that the sun beat down on my skin like a warm embrace and the way that everyday was filled with joy and excessive indulgence of ice cream. I guess I eventually just grew out of it, like most people do with things they used to like.

I don’t think I’ll ever quite understand why people love summer or hot weather so much. When it’s hot out, everything feels miserable. I can’t put lotion or sunscreen on my face without having it feel greasy and melting off the minute I walk outside, and I can’t enjoy the comfort of baggy sweatpants and hoodies unless I plan on getting a heat stroke. Even the idea of summer bothers me like no other.

With hot weather comes plenty of struggles. You sweat more often, the sun burns your scalp, and most importantly, trying to fall asleep seems like the biggest challenge in the world (in my opinion). My nights consist of tossing and turning, giving up, watching TV, then trying to go back to sleep, failing, then repeating the whole process all over again. Every time summer rolls around I have to mentally prepare myself for the loss of sleep that I will be experiencing due to the heat and deal with the fact that my eye bags will eventually be taking over half of my face in the process. I honestly don’t know anyone who enjoys sleeping in the summer and if you do, I don’t really know what to say. I’m baffled.

Something even more upsetting is the fact that once summer comes along, the bugs also come. I will never fall in love with the idea of having strange 6 legged monstrosities crawl through the windows and cracks and flop around on the ceiling or lurk in the shadows. Perhaps it is to try and catch my attention. Maybe they want to be friends, or maybe they’re taunting me. But all I can do at that moment is think of all the hundreds of different scenarios in which I can smack them with my little bug swatter so I can peacefully go back to being miserable in the heat. Similarly, I will never find joy in the idea of mosquitoes flying around buzzing in my ear trying to suck the blood out of me like greedy little thieves and leaving itchy, bumpy spots all over my legs. If there’s one thing that I’m absolutely terrible at, it’s controlling the urge to scratch the bites until I’m satisfied. The randomly scattered pale scars on my legs are testimony to my itchy suffering.

The only good thing that comes with summer is the fact that we get summer break, but even that isn’t really all that exciting to me anymore. My summers always seem bleak, everyday consisting of staying in the house studying, lying around watching TV, or taking random naps. Everyday seems like clockwork, constantly doing the same things over and over and over. Occasionally I might go out with a friend or two, but even that is quite rare because I can never fully enjoy going out due to the heat.

Summer brings me a whole bunch of unnecessary stress and as much as I try to like it, I don’t think I ever could. I’d much rather just stay indoors until October rolls around, when the leaves are falling off the trees and the air is filled with promises of cold temperatures (and no bugs).

Believe it or not, English was not my first language. When I first moved back to America at 4 years old, I had no understanding of the little printed letters marked all over the airport telling you where to go or how to read the green signs that signified the names of the streets. Attempts at learning English were aided by my sister and a CD that we owned called Salad English. I was only able to learn how to ask for the bathroom and a few other terms before my first year of school started. I found it hard to communicate with classmates and because of my lack of English comprehension, I was placed in ELL. Trying to speak English was nowhere compared to trying to read it. The ink blots on the papers had no meaning to me and it was hard for me to understand what point the stories were trying to get across, and with all of the kids in my class growing up in an English speaking household, I easily felt left out. I became overly frustrated with myself and wished that I picked up English sooner because maybe that way I would have had friends in class to talk to. In an effort to try and fit in, I chose to lessen my use of Chinese around the house and speak only the broken, strangely pieced together English that I knew. 

My earliest memory of reading was when I was around 4 years old and much to my dismay at the time, the book was in complete Chinese. I recall laying on the floor in the living room of our old house after school flipping through an old poem book that my grandpa had given me, works written by a plethora of famous Chinese poets, and having to memorize them one by one, day after day. Usually, my grandpa would have me read through the poem a couple times and then afterwards he would have me recite what I read back to him. When I failed to properly recite it, he would have me reread the sections that I missed and then tell me to recite it again. This would go until I made it all the way through without any mistakes, and I would be allowed to go and play or watch more Salad English. I’m not all too sure it’s what the classic definition of reading would be, but all I remember is the poem book that I spent so much time reading as a child and spending the time reciting it with my grandpa. At the time, I never knew what the point of doing all that was. All I wanted to do was watch TV to learn more English or try and practice with my sister. Now that I’m older and looking back at the situation, I think that my grandpa worried that I was eventually going to leave my roots behind in order to fit in, whether it be intentionally or unintentionally, and so he did what he could to connect me to the language as best as he could and show me the beauty of artistic expressions in literature through the poems that I was memorizing.

Unfortunately, after my grandpa left to go back to China, I began to stop reading the poems and started to read short stories written in English, and with the exception of reading short texts in Chinese school, my reading consisted of all English books and short stories like Junie B. Jones and Geronimo Stilton. My love for books and English literature have slowly dissolved over the years and unfortunately I no longer hold the same passion and love for literature as I did when I was younger, but I am grateful that I had the motivation to learn and improve my literacy knowledge because without it, I think I would be in a completely different position today.