I began to write before I could talk. That’s quite a stretch of facts. I began to write before I could speak English, real English, is what I really should say.
My parents only spoke Korean to me until I was well into high school for fear that I would forget my heritage, and even now, I still only talk to my parents in Korean (my sister is another story). As a result, beginning kindergarten at an elementary school in Sioux Falls, South Dakota (where the population of Asians at the time wavered close to 0.5%) was quite the experience. Though I was able to understand English quite well, as well as write and read voraciously, it wasn’t easy for me to speak with the same Midwestern accent that my peers had mastered.
I felt stifled socially. I had so many things I wanted to say, feelings that I wanted to express, but after being made fun of on the playground for my lisp (there are no ‘l’, ‘th’,‘s’, or ‘z’ sounds in Korean, so I couldn’t pronounce them correctly and often mispronounced my own name as Thawwy), I didn’t want to open my mouth ever again.
As if that wasn’t enough of a social impediment, I realized that I didn’t fit in at a school that sheltered a sea of blondes. I wanted so badly to be American, to be accepted by my peers as an equal in citizenship and friendship. I wanted to shrug off the title of “Chinese girl” (which I was not, and the title enraged me), to be able to have a voice in which I could condemn Kennedy Dose for sneezing into my canister of mac and cheese at lunch every day for a month just to watch my lip quiver and my eyes melt into a pool of tears. Suffice to say, I began bringing those Smucker’s uncrustable quintessentially American PB&J sandwiches to lunch after that.
I was exposed to the American Girl series in the spring of my kindergarten year. The dolls that corresponded to each of the books became my best friends, and I spent days laying in the grass reading, wondering what quality made the Swedish immigrant Kiersten and American Indian Kaya “American” that I did not possess. I watched the Miss America pageant entranced every year, hoping to see a girl like me on stage, someone with half-moon eyes and black hair. I found myself begging my mom to let me dye my hair bleach blonde (she gave in at the end to a honey gold color) hoping to fit in with my light-headed peers. But as my dark black roots grew right back in, I realized that being American was not something others could thrust upon me, but something that only I could determine (with the help of a Pennsylvania birth certificate, of course).
During this stage of my pre-pubescent life that I realized how much I love to write. Armed with an arsenal of gel pens oozing with glitter and Lisa Frank diaries, I began to neatly print out all of my thoughts, observations, and dreams. I moved on later to floppy discs as I began to learn to type in school with the same outdated program, clicking and clacking until I was able to type at the speed at which I type today without looking at the keyboard.
Second grade rolled along, the first of the four years that I took speech therapy three times a week. It was painful, putting my tongue in the literal hands of my teacher to be contorted into unfamiliar shapes in the hopes of fitting in. By that point of time, I had it in me that I could never go into a career where I would have to talk to people. What I wanted instead was to be able to write, to read, to be alone with the words that I so much adored. And thus came my dream to be a reporter, putting my little pin on my class’s board of dreams on the star that signified New York City. I wanted, I announced, to one day become the editor of the New York Times.
I clamored to write for my first unsuccessful newspaper. After being dazzled by the fact that I was featured in the Argus Leader, Sioux Falls’s newspaper, for my top-winning invention at the Invention convention (pictured above), I decided I wanted to make my own newspaper at the Challenge Center, the magnet school I was attending. I brought together a legion of girls who wanted to write as well, and we soon published our first issue. We ended up being disbanded by the principal after distributing our first issue, because apparently our all-female staff was inclusive and sexist.
It wasn’t long after that that my father was offered a job at several universities across America. I remember him asking me over breakfast where I would like to live. “New York,” I stated emphatically. Little did I know that New York was not just New York City and that my dad’s job offer was in Buffalo, a city that didn’t even sound real (ironically, I saw a lot more buffalos in South Dakota than I did in Buffalo. Actually, I have seen 0 buffalo in Buffalo, if you don’t count that painted buffalo on Student Street and the decorated one at Trader Joe’s).
I met my best friends in Williamsville at newspaper club, early mornings at 7:45 in the Transit computer lab. Julie and I meticulously configured the lunchroom birthday ticker, we made videos for people at Community Day, and once in a while, I would be able to write something of merit. It’s not surprising that I did the same when I entered the wall-less building of East.
My love of writing did nothing but grow in the four years I’ve spent here. For the past five years, I’ve found myself waiting at the mailbox every Saturday with my dog Sophie around 3 PM, hoping to catch the mailman delivering the latest issue of TIME. I would quasi-religiously turn to the back page to read Joel Stein’s column, and soak in his humor (Stein has now been relegated to being the “second back page guy” as he wrote in his article for the week of May 31; however, I still do credit him as being one of my biggest influences even if he is no longer the back page guy). I relished following The Atlantic, Longreads, Slate, Jezebel, Washington Post, Brain Picker,and my favorite of them all, the New York Times, reading articles in bed on my phone and on my computer. I electronically dog-eared them, bookmarking them to my favorites, printing out phrases and collecting the names of my favorite journalists as I myself developed my own peculiar way of writing (I use way too many parenthesis). I’ve become known as the person who sends you an article at 3 AM about a topic you once mentioned your interest about two years ago.
When I hear from my friends at Amherst and South that they don’t have a high school newspaper, or from my friends at North whose newspaper has very limited publishing capabilities, I realize how blessed I have been to be able to participate in this activity I so love. I don’t know how many people have read my articles or my commentaries, nor do I know how many people have read the columns I spent hours laboring over, methodically placing them into Publisher and editing over and over again. But it doesn’t matter– doing so has been one of the best parts of my high school career.
For those of you actually reading this and who have talked to me about things I’ve written, thank you; I hope that you one day decide to write for the East Side News as well. As I venture onto college, I’ve come to realize that life is an accumulation of experiences. You cannot devalue any experience, as each plays an integral part in developing who you are as a person. And that is how I feel about my time spent as a writer and co-editor in chief of The East Side.
by Sally Yi
