#amwriting

I don't know what tickled me as a kid at the age of eight or nine that got me so engrossed in learning English. Unlike other children who had a head start with having paid tutors come into their home three times a week helping them learn, I was on my own mostly attending public school in the middle of Chinatown. All I know was, I craved the English language. It was (and always will be) beautiful when spoken to my ears. It had always been eloquent when written in proper form. And then, in a separate category, dialogue written in English comes through as art for me. I love every word, every punctuation, every part, every detail of it. Yes, that's right, I love conversation.

I wonder if the contrast between the humdrum of Chinese Cantonese talking and English learning in school that made the difference in my tender childhood. Chinese characters were considered art and fixated per word or meaning, while the English alphabet was the supreme code to a world of possibilities.

I'm old enough to remember line-writing as a punishment in school. And the easiest way for me to get in trouble was talking in class with my friends. It wasn't a bad punishment; just humiliating was the whole point of it. The teacher had me writing lines repeatedly out of a textbook. The first time was embarrassing for five minutes during recess. My friend was quick with her penning six pages which were mainly two sentences repeated on three each. She finished within fifteen minutes, turned in her lines, and went off to play. I was not as good. I was struggling to make sense of what I was writing. I read the sentences again and again, word for word as I wrote them. As my friend escaped punishment, I stuck to it finding solace in the lettering. I took so long that I continued into the next day, which eventually earned having my teacher walk across the schoolyard and check over my shoulder quietly. After a few more times of that, he actually stopped punishing me that way. Instead, he had me sit in the back of the classroom stationed with textbooks and headphones. I was to learn to read in my head with the help of the audio version of the chapters recorded on cassette tapes by him. Oh, now that's even more like it. I loved sitting there while the kids were learning other good things such as the multiplication table and music and practice math. After a couple of weeks, the other kids stopped talking to me. I was the problem child, apparently.