3. Lion's Mane Jellies

In elementary school I was very proud of my Chinese skills. My parents had sent me to Chinese school when I was just five, and I was constantly praised by my relatives as well as my parents' friends for speaking Mandarin well. My ego was very boosted as some might say, and fueled by the naivety of an elementary student, my opinion of my own Chinese skills became very high. However, when I got to high school I realized that I was far from superior. I couldn’t read basic characters, much less write them, and even my speaking (my strongest skill) was subpar. The official dialect of China, Mandarin, is also called putonghua, translated literally to “common language.” As with any official language in any country, people who speak fluent putonghua are considered well-educated and formal. Of course, there is an unfair advantage since putonghua comes from the Beijing region, so people in Western China would obviously have a harder time speaking accurate putonghua. Since both of my parents ...

I still hear it, the squeak of my shoes hitting the hardwood floor, the sound of the ball swishing through the net, when the ref yells “Overtime!” The feeling of taking off my shoes, or the roar of the crowd that one time I hit the game winning layup just as time expired. Basketball was my life. For the better part of 12 years I ate, slept, and breathed basketball. It was the only thing I had ever been good at, the only place where I had no fear, where I knew no matter what, every time I stepped on the court, I was the best.  For years I pushed the boundaries of both my physical and mental limits: running up and down Coyote Hills until it felt like the sky was falling, surviving the most brutal workouts that I swear coach Gabe Mercado designed to make me want to die – the only moment of solace was a thirty second plank. The weird thing was, I enjoyed it: the pain, the inability to walk the next day, the black eyes from never backing down from the bullies, and the bruises which ...

I have been hearing the phrase “life’s not fair” more often lately. It pops up when someone loses their Fortnite match or when my sister eats the last donut. What is the purpose of the saying though? It’s supposed to be some universal truth, but the way we use it feels off.  Take a trivial matter. For example, getting assigned a buttload of homework. I complain about the homework marathon ahead of me, but only receive the words “well, life isn’t fair” - great pep talk. Newsflash! I’m only going to be more upset and sour. Plus, small issues like these don’t truly define whether my life is unfair. Hearing this phrase only invites me to sulk over these matters longer. Honestly, in times like these it feels more like an excuse to shut down the conversation instead of listening. In bigger moments, the phrase only takes on a more frustrating tone. When something genuinely upsetting happens but it is out of my control, the last thing I want to hear is “life’s not fair.” It doesn’t c...

Recently, as part of a way to improve my literacy and writing skills, my dad recommended that I read works on economics. One really interesting work that I read was one by Miltion Friedman, called “A Friedman Doctrine -The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”. I found this article especially interesting because it is so convincing yet so concise.  When I read this article the first time, it just kind of clicked—it seemed like what Friedman was discussing was right. Naturally, after reading it multiple times, I can find some holes in Friedman’s argumentation. His reasoning is especially vague and lacks concrete evidence and some of his main points are wrong. I was pretty shocked by this pretty rapid change of opinion, which I now attribute to the “convincing-ness” of the article. This was not a one-off situation, most of the time when I read these works I get the same feeling.  From what I can see, the main thing that I attribute and admire about the “c...

  It’s a chilly November morning, and I’m walking to school with my national anthem on repeat in my ears. No, the national anthem I’m referring to is not the Star-Spangled Banner; I’m referring to the thirteenth track on Charli xcx’s album BRAT, Mean Girls.  For the past year and a half, I have been on the journey of self-discovery, a journey that humans must take twice to become the person they truly want to be. I’m grateful for two things that I discovered during this journey: an eyebrow razor and Charli xcx’s sixth album, BRAT. I have been a fan of Charli xcx long before BRAT. I was such a big fan of her work that I dragged a friend to San Jose to listen to this album before it came out. One song in particular spoke to me, and that song was Mean Girls.  I am going to say it: by society’s standards, I am considered to be a mean girl. I am opinionated, I am not afraid of confrontation, and no matter what the occasion is, I tend to wear a perpetual grimace on my fac...

In the past year or so I’ve been trying to keep my houseplants alive. I’m better at it than I used to be, but not by much. This one plant, in particular, is giving me problems: my seven-year-old phyllostachya.  Over its entire toddler-aged lifespan it has died at least four separate times, having to regrow itself anew from its roots. The stubborn thing follows the same pattern again and again: sprouting, growing upward as far as it can go, flowering with its spiteful purple flowers, and then dying again. I can’t seem to do anything about it. Sometimes in my exasperation I want to give up trying to save it from itself, but I always end up thinking of how I’ve definitely done this sort of thing too. I reach towards something new, becoming leggy—the actual term for when a plant spends so much energy reaching towards light that it stretches itself too thin—and subsequently growing out of whatever phase it was that had captivated me. My best friend of many years (I have known her for lo...

I step into Synergy Badminton Academy’s large gym, my eyes graced with the relaxing symmetry of twenty dark green courts, all forty-four by twenty feet. The familiar scent of sweat and plastic from shuttles wafts into my nose, and I don my Yonex Power Cushions. They squeak across the floor as I fumble with the red rubber grip of my Yonex 5 FX racket, which my father had to drag me kicking and screaming from when I saw it in a shop in Beijing.  As I step onto the court, I hear the chaos, players groaning in anguish as a point is lost, or smiling as they win on match point.  From Monday through Saturday, six to ten in the evening every day, I experience the controlled chaos of seven games, with three sets of twenty-one points each. Badminton, were I to describe it in its purest form, is chess at a hundred miles an hour. I put my pawn on the chessboard as I stepped onto the badminton court, racket in hand, at the age of twelve, and upon internal analysis, I've concluded that Badm...