by Hope Nation- YA Authors Share Personal Moments of Inspiration (retail) (epub)
Everyone else was playing during recess, but she sat me down beside her and asked me to read a passage out loud. Whenever I stumbled on a word, she would cover it up with her ruler, revealing just one syllable at a time, until I managed to pronounce the whole thing.
It’s the first “life lesson” I can remember learning, and I still apply it today. Anytime something feels overwhelming—whether it’s my schedule or my workload or my feelings—I think of that ruler, and I try to break down whatever’s bothering me into the smallest possible parts. Then I address each piece individually, without letting myself think of the larger whole.
If my third-grade teacher made me a reader, my fourth-grade teacher made me a writer.
Every day after lunch, Ms. Liotti would read to us from Shel Silverstein’s masterpiece Where the Sidewalk Ends—and it was in those stories that I truly heard the English language for the first time.
I was nine years old when I discovered that nothing in this world could touch me as deeply as a well-placed word. I don’t think I understood the meaning of Shel’s poetry or prose—since I didn’t hear conversational English at home, I still had a hard time following spoken language. Rather, what fascinated me was the way certain sentences sounded together, the way they could be arranged into symphonies, the way they awoke emotions in me that I couldn’t rationalize.
I immediately began composing sentences of my own. I wrote my first poem—in Spanish—called “Si yo fuera la luz” (“If I Were the Light”), and I was shocked when my Spanish teacher liked it enough to submit it to the local county fair. But I was downright stunned when I won first place.
Soon I was carrying a Barbie binder with me everywhere, filled with my musings and poems and stories, written in both languages. I never shared them with anyone but Ms. Liotti.
In fifth grade, my parents took my sister and me on a trip to Boston, and I fell in love with the redbrick buildings of Harvard University. I was only ten, but as soon as we got back to Miami, I declared to my family that I’d made my choice of where I wanted to go to college.
Sixth grade was an election year, and my social studies teacher assigned our class an essay on the divisive issue of immigration. We were told to submit a page on whether we thought immigrants were a positive or negative influence on our country.
I ruled against them.
In my paper, I regurgitated everything I’d heard on TV: how immigrants were taking away our jobs and our opportunities and our safety. Pretty proud, I shared my finished essay with my mom that night. We read it together so that I could translate any words she didn’t know.
I’ll never forget the look she gave me when we finished reading.
There was so much pity in her expression . . . She must have seen in that instant that over a decade into my stay on this planet, I still had no idea who I was. Then she said, “Romi . . . nosotros somos inmigrantes.”
We’re immigrants.
It was in that moment I realized that I’d been working so hard to memorize the English being spoken around me that I hadn’t slowed down long enough to draw any connections. I guess it never occurred to me that I could be one of those people my new countrymen didn’t want around.
But there was another, deeper realization that came with the label of immigrant: Even if I learned every word in the English dictionary, even if I made it to Harvard, even if one day I became a US citizen, I would never belong to this country. I would always be seen as an outsider who had come here to take away another’s birthright.
If I made it to Harvard, I would be stealing an American-born teen’s place. If I published a book in English, I would be using words that weren’t rightfully mine.
And then came the most brutal revelation of all: Since I wasn’t born here, I could never dream of running for president.
For the first time, my future, which I’d always seen as full of infinite possibilities, became finite. This may sound silly to some people, but for an ambitious person like me, it was a limitation on what I could become. A reminder to know my place in this country.
Even if I got my citizenship, I would forever be a second-class citizen. And all because of something completely out of my control: the part of this world I happened to pop out in.
Something changed in me then.
I began taking everything a little too seriously. I felt like I didn’t have the luxury of being a kid, because I had to work harder to prove my worth and justify my place here.
When I was in seventh grade, my mom worried about how serious I was becoming, so she enrolled me in an acting class that my sister was taking. After my first lesson, my teacher made an offer to professionally represent me as my manager. I booked a handful of commercials that year, and then I spent spring break in Los Angeles with my mom, my teacher, and the other kids she managed for something called pilot season—the period when most TV shows get cast.
During the week I was in LA, I signed on with a movie agency, lined up a number of auditions, and had more fun than I’d had my whole life. When spring break ended, my manager invited me to stick out the full season, a couple of months—with a tutor, of course—to see what happened.
I said no.
I’d had perfect attendance for most of my education, and now that I was in middle school, our teachers stressed more than ever how important it was for college admissions that we not miss a single day of class. I didn’t want to do anything that would put my chances of getting into Harvard at risk.
Maybe American kids could be movie stars, but I wasn’t born here. I was an outsider, and if I wanted to earn my place, I couldn’t make any mistakes.
Thus ended my brief acting career.
That was the first time I’d ever given up on something I wanted—my first sacrifice. And the unexpected result was that I doubled down on my decision to go to Harvard.
Now that I’d made a sacrifice, there were stakes in place. If I didn’t get in, I ran the risk of harboring some serious regrets—and that was a gamble I wasn’t willing to make.
The rest of my school days were a blur of sacrifice. Studying came before everything and anything else. There got to be so many books in my house that my mom wouldn’t give me any more allowance unless it was for food or clothes. So at fourteen, I began working an after-school job, and I didn’t stop working until the week before I left for college.
I didn’t have a boyfriend in high school until the end of senior year, once my future was secured. I remember a Friday evening my junior year when a persistent boy from my Spanish-for-Spanish-speakers class showed up to my house unannounced and told my mom he’d like to take me out, and she came to my room to beg me to go.
I said no.
I didn’t expect her or my dad to understand my sacrifices because they’d grown up in Argentina, the country where they’d been born. They couldn’t help me anticipate college requirements or fill out the right forms because they didn’t know this new educational system. They didn’t hear my teachers’ warnings that things like too many absences or missed tests or Bs could be grounds for rejection.
Looking back, I wonder if it’s because English is my second language that I’ve always taken its words so literally.
In eleventh grade, my family was finally approved for US citizenship. We each had our own separate appointment to get sworn in, and mine happened to coincide with the timing of one of my Advanced Placement exams.
If there was one test I’d heard over and over and over again that we could not under any circumstances miss, it was an AP.
So when the day arrived, I went to school to take my test and blew off the INS.
The second the exam was over, the principal spoke over the intercom and called me down to his office.
When I walked inside, I was mortified to see my mom waiting for me and mystified to find her in a rage. How could I miss that appointment? What was I thinking? Didn’t I take ou
r immigration status in this country seriously?
But I did take it seriously. In fact, I took it so seriously that I didn’t dare miss my unmissable test.
I looked to my principal, hoping he could explain the way things work to my mom, but he was staring at me with her same concerned expression. So I reminded him of how he and the other administrators warned us that we could not miss an AP test—it’s administered only once, on the same date, nationally.
Then he said to me, as though it were the most obvious thing, “Well, of course there’s a makeup day for extreme circumstances like these.”
I was astounded.
At no point had any of my teachers mentioned a potential makeup day. At no point had any of my teachers mentioned that some absences were justifiable. At no point had anyone ever mentioned to me that I was allowed to prioritize anything over my schoolwork.
In twelfth grade, I got into Harvard.
And I felt like I could exhale for the first time since my immigration essay.
I’d done it. My sacrifices had paid off, and now nobody could claim I didn’t deserve to be here, because I’d just proven my worth to the world.
As far as I know, only two members of my class of 800-plus students were accepted to Harvard—the salutatorian and me. When word spread that I was the second admission, I learned that my classmates had found a different justification for my achievement: They were whispering “affirmative action” behind my back.
The word I’d sacrificed so much to compensate for was still the only part of me people could see.
And in my moment of lucidity, I realized how foolish I’d been to ever let others determine my worth. No matter what I do, or how hard I try, my dual labels—“Argentine” and “American”—will always make me powerless to define myself, because people can assign me the identity that best suits their narrative at any given time.
I never should have accepted that I couldn’t be president; I should have decided that I would be the one to change that law.
I never should have accepted that I could either be an actress or go to Harvard; I should have Natalie Portman-ed it and done both.
I never should have tried to fit into an existing and outdated system; I should have fought to modify that system to fit me and everyone else like me.
In today’s America, we immigrants feel an even bigger push to justify our presence in this country. But just as it was with me growing up, this pressure isn’t real; it’s only perceived. It’s just what some small-minded and misguided people want us to believe. People who are driven by their fear and not their faith. People who are afraid of the change we represent.
And these people know the only power strong enough to hold us back is our own.
We are so powerful. I’m a girl who had a hard time learning how to read who somehow wound up writing a best-selling book series in her second language and saw it translated into eight others. Imagine what more I could accomplish if I directed that power toward the world around me, toward those things I think I can’t change.
Imagine what you can accomplish if you dare to believe in your own power.
Within each of us lies infinite potential.
Don’t ever let a label take that away from you.
DAVID LEVITHAN LIBBA BRAY ANGIE THOMAS ALLY CONDIE MARIE LU JEFF ZENTNER NICOLA YOON KATE HART GAYLE FORMAN CHRISTINA DIAZ GONZALEZ ATIA ABAWI ALEX LONDON HOWARD BRYANT ALLY CARTER ROMINA GARBER RENÉE AHDIEH AISHA SAEED JENNY TORRES SANCHEZ NIC STONE JULIE MURPHY I. W. GREGORIO JAMES DASHNER JASON REYNOLDS BRENDAN KIELY
RENÉE AHDIEH
Chah-Muh
I STRUGGLED A LOT WITH how to write this.
It seems simple enough to talk about oneself—one’s likes, one’s dislikes. One’s dreams and aspirations. But whenever I’m faced with a situation in which I have to share a part of my past or a truth of my present, I find myself struggling for the right words. Perhaps this is why I tend to write fiction. It seems easier to share who I was and who I hope to be through the filter of characters, both large and small.
There are so many things I could talk about with respect to my identity and how it has shaped me. I’m not alone in this; everyone has memories from their pasts—epochs, if you will—that are bends in the road on their life’s journey.
Identity is just one facet of it.
For me, it has become a huge part of how I perceive myself as a woman, as a writer, as a child of mixed race, as a wife, as a sister . . . I could go on forever. It’s one of the first things I ask myself whenever I’m faced with difficult decisions.
Who are you? How does this choice shape who you are?
And who do you want to be?
When I was a child, I remember always wanting to be someone else. It carries over today. When I’m with my Korean family, I want to be more Korean. I want to know what they know, speak how they speak, and be comfortable as they are around each other.
It took years for me to realize that this will never happen.
I will never be Korean enough. I will never be American enough.
When I was twelve, I went to visit my mom’s family in Seoul for an entire summer. I went with several goals in mind, many of them silly, some of which continue to make me smile to this day. I wanted to lose weight, because I was never thin enough, especially in Korea. My thighs were too thick, my backside was too round, my stomach was too soft; everything about me was “too” something. I laughed too loudly, ate too much, argued with my elders too frequently. So many things I wanted to change when I was twelve but wouldn’t change now for all the world.
I also wanted to get new clothes. I know, I know. But I was twelve. Everything about being on the cusp of young adulthood is focused on the here and now. The immediacy of everything, especially emotions. I think that this is one of the reasons I so passionately love writing young-adult literature. Everything—a hand to hold, a look in the hallway, a pair of jeans with the tag still on them—everything has that delicious newness to it. A wonder I often think is all but impossible to achieve as an adult.
I wanted new eyeglasses too. Mine were horribly old and out of fashion. I’d chosen them when I was ten and thought purple was the be-all and end-all of colors. Tortoiseshell purple, at that.
My memories are also full of regrets.
Again, I know I’m not alone in this.
The next thing on my wish list was a new, Korean haircut. I’d sported long, unruly hair for most of sixth grade, and I wanted something fashion forward that would place me firmly among the ranks of stylish seventh graders at my new school.
Bear in mind, I was twelve. Sometimes I miss the time when those were the most important things to worry about.
Whenever we visited my mom’s family, we would all share a room and sleep on the floor. Every morning, we would fold up our bed pallets and put them away in these huge, scented chests that left everything smelling like cedar, with a faint touch of my aunt’s perfume. My brother, sister, and I would try to find American TV shows—often on the army network—to watch together. Or even simply try to find an American movie that wasn’t hilariously dubbed. Family friends of ours had the Anne of Green Gables miniseries on VHS. I think we must have watched that at least ten times that one summer.
I think about this fact often.
I think about how we all could understand Korean television but still chose to watch something in English. Just as I think about how, when we were at home in America, my sister and I craved watching Korean dramas. Almost as though we were reaching across a void, trying to fill some unseen part of ourselves and make sense of our now—who we were and who we wanted to be.
I still remember what I was wearing the day we flew back from Korea. It was an outfit I had specifically planned, which I find comical, because a twenty-four-hour plane ride pretty much negates any attempt to look cute. There wasn’t anyone I was specifically trying to impress.
My dad was the one picking us up from the airport, and he would love me no matter what I looked like.
I picked that outfit for me. So I could come back home a new, better version of myself.
I’d also found a new pair of eyeglasses, which had been an amazing adventure all on its own. My second aunt had taken me to the underground market, a place that opens when the sun goes down and closes as its light peers over the horizon. Deep in this labyrinth of stalls and fluorescent lighting, she’d taken me to a small booth. In its center sat a wizened gentleman with stooping shoulders. She gave him my old purple tortoiseshell glasses—complete with a scratch through the right lens—and told him I needed a new pair. All he did was check the prescription. Then he told me to choose a set of frames.
I went with gold. Something that made me look older, wiser.
When he gave them to me, I felt like the sun’s first rays peeking over the horizon.
I had my new outfit. My snazzy new haircut. My gold glasses.
Of course I hadn’t lost weight. But we can’t have everything.
Our flight into LAX from Seoul was horribly delayed because of some technical malfunction. When we deplaned, we were told we needed to go through customs, grab our bags, and have them rescanned and rechecked through security before we could proceed on our flight home to North Carolina.
Even though the woman at the gate assured us that our connecting flight would wait for us, my mom knew we weren’t going to make it. She had the three of us throw our luggage onto two carts and haul ass through LAX. When we arrived at our gate, we were relieved to discover that our outbound plane was still on the tarmac.
It was clear our fellow passengers were not so relieved.
Their flight to North Carolina had been delayed, and they saw us as the reason why.
Our luggage had to be checked at the gate, which further delayed our flight. My mother’s chest was heaving. We were all sweaty and tired. My brother had tripped during our run through the hell mouth that is LAX.
