For our Happy and Long Life

Everyone thought I was an extrovert.

Since the day I was born, I was the loudest baby in the house. I had two older brothers who gave me all their love and everything they had. I am the youngest baby in the family, and also the youngest in my generation, therefore I had all the love I could possibly have. I have a very big family, therefore every special occasion, I could get a lot of presents from my relatives and a lot of celebration. It was always happy moments in my childhood. However, as the more interactions with people, I gradually realize that being nice to people is the key to be treated equally good. If I behaved well and nice, I could get treated better, just like training a dog now I remembered. As a result, I was trained to be always smiling to people, always saying good words and nice things about people, so I could get more good stuffs and treats from people. I started to realize this was such a brilliant idea and I was growing up with this. But deep inside, I despise of being surrounded by people. I longed for quiet moments when I didn’t have to smile to just enjoy what I had.

Remember in primary school, I was actually pushed from an introvert to be an extrovert. I was a hardworking learner, and I liked being quietly reading my books. However, my teachers and classmates were so active and always asking me to play with them. I didn’t want to play the performance in the anniversary event of our school, but I just had to dance the ABC letters in the show; I didn’t want to play the basketball and represent the class to be in the team, but I was made to sign up to be a backup of the class team; I didn’t want to be one of the columnist in school, but I just had to be writing the annual book and the monthly newspaper for students. I was supposed to be an introvert, who always enjoyed eating vegetables, being quiet and slow, enjoyed being a turtle deep inside my heart. I didn’t want to be so outgoing but I just had to. However, later in life I realize that they were actually doing something good to be as I learned many useful life experience if I just locked myself inside my own head without interaction to others.

Remember in middle school, I was in a boarding school and I would confess that, I was feeling very lonely in this school. In this school I would have to wake up at 6:30 am everyday and start to study from 7:30 am to 11 pm in the evening. It was like hell to me at such a young age of mine. I was a genetically introvert I would say, in this boarding school situation where I was isolated from my parents and made me put in a bunch of weird kids around me, I was kind of scaring them. This was such a pool of animals. I couldn’t cry and I couldn’t fight, because I had exhausted all my energy to just to keep up to the school work; I couldn’t surrender, because I knew I was locked and stuck in this confined space with these weird people and a bunch of ridiculous rules. I was feeling like in a Nazi concentration camp where I was told that “work will set you free” kind of situation you know. I am not sure what I am feeling right now it is the result that I was constantly talking to myself to go through this and survive, but this is definitely a very unforgettable experience to me that life was kind of feeling cold to me. I would never sent my children to a boarding school which was so far away from me in the future. It is such a complete disaster to my childhood memory.

However, if I think differently, my parents were uneducated normal people but very successful business people, they sent me to an area just to test what will happen if I was pushed to my limit. I actually feeling kind of interested about this. Like being expected to bring back something different from the outside for the family instead of just something money could buy, something intellectual. However, they just didn’t know, if I was growing up in a family that was so highly educated and excel in academics, I could have done a better job and enjoying more intellectual stuffs instead of just aiming to get a bunch of aces on my transcripts. Thank you my parents for making such an ingenious decision for me.

Now I feel this unique experience was like a huge roller coaster for me and I had always been trying to use this experience to get me somewhere positive. I learned to respect people who were like me, didn’t have much choice about their education. During my time in boarding school, I didn’t have much time playing my piano and violin, and I didn’t have a lot of resources in artistic stuffs such as doing some more paintings, so when I grew up and graduated, I always wanted children like me could have more opportunities to explore artistic stuffs instead of memorizing textbooks. Since then, with this thought, I joined the school and started clubs for students, and started to advocate for students who didn’t have much financial support in the family to develop some new interests and needed help in art supplies. I want to emphasize the importance of a happy childhood and the critical role of mental health in the society. I became more outgoing while using myself as an example of a tragic childhood, I didn’t want any more children to be like me, to suffer from doing something they didn’t really enjoy and live a meaningless life. Now I am glad that I had this terrible past.

I would never blame anyone that life is difficult, no one has ever promised me that life could be easy, but if you love it, it would become easier to live, and with hate, life is impossible.

Wish everyone to have a happy and long life.