American Exsanguination - Joy Ren

Author: Joy Ren

Instagram: @joyrren

The rounded tip of my ballpoint pen swiveled purposefully, picking up momentum with each swing, before coming dangerously close to the edge of the desk and then finally clattering onto the floor. The two heads closest to me flinched, a comforting reminder that I was not the only one suffering. I sighed, bending down to pick up the fallen pen from the floor and continued to aimlessly fill in the oval-shaped obscurities.

The incessant ticking of the clock collided with the five-minute timer at the front of the classroom, producing a leviathan anxiety I had grown accustomed to; I began to furiously complete the rest of the noticeably blank paper. As I slapped down unfamiliar characters and marked random boxes, I reached the end of the packet and flipped back to the first page. At the top of the page, in bold font, signified where I was to write in my Chinese name for extra credit. Desperately needing every additional point to pass, I scrawled the first two characters as legibly as I could, but was abruptly stopped when I got to the final character. I racked my brain, trying to recall the numerous times it appeared on our weekly school newsletters, in black Sharpie ink marking the takeout food from Chinese restaurants, or the paragraph-long texts from my parents only used when they were disappointed in me, yet I could not recall its unfamiliar edges and meandering curvature. Flipping through the papers, I wildly searched for a clue or a trace of evidence - evidence that I had really forgotten how to write my own Chinese name.

This sudden realization felt immensely shocking, but in a way, almost expected. For the past few years, I had never really cared for this language, yet it felt like I was losing something more than mere Chinese characters. Ever since I was little, my parents, uncles, aunts, and grandparents relayed the same message: learn Chinese until high school. Only until then, you can stop. Through the progression of my elementary school years, I witnessed my friends trickle out consecutively. Fewer of us came, perhaps frightened by the arduous vocabulary, compelled by the unwillingness to learn this language, or like me, devoted wholly to the flashiness of our American lives. I was pushed along, doing mediocre at best. With no actual desire to continue to do so, many of my peers believed that this rebarbative skill was required in ‘carrying out our eastern Asian heritage’, whatever that meant. I saw it as a feeble attempt at fulfilling my family’s expectations.

The TA sitting at the front of the room graded viciously, for she too could not wait to be finally released. This was the final obstacle before liberation, until the next fall when we would have to come back again. Once she finished marking my papers, I trudged home with a shining 57 in red ink bleeding from the bottom of my bag.