An essay from one’s elementary years, as a part of a homework assignment during the long holidays, translated…
In the New Year’s holidays in my second grade year, there was an assigned writing topic of “Trip We Took”. It’d sounded, quite romantic, but it’s just having the students write about a trip they had during the break. And so, on a bright and early morning (of course, that was the beginning that my mother taught me to write), I was forcibly taken by my parents to the wild outdoors, to start off on this “happy trip”.
and here’s, what a “sample” of that looked like, image from online…
wth a scrapbook and a Chinese workbook assignments…
Normally, on the trips, it’d only, taxed out my physical energies, but that time, I’d, severely, damaged my spirits. My parents seemed to have turned into reporters, and would ask the person they took constantly, “How do you feel?”, and honestly, I’d, wanted that mic to get off of me, it’d, chased me so hard. As I’d finally gotten home, I was, so wiped, and I’d still needed to face the demands of the three-hundred character essay (back then 300 was an impossibility for me). And I’d, turned into Dorothy, took along my brain, my one true heart, and my courage, plus a pencil, moved along between the characters, attempted to, defeat the wicked witch of the writing papers, to return back to the realms of my happy vacation.
Recalling this history of my blood and my sweat, rather than calling it a “trip to Oz”, it was, more like, “The Tears I’d cried out of pain”, perhaps, it would’ve been, more fitting.
And so, this, is the ANNOYING part about Chinese education, when we get our long holidays (summer vacations, winter vacations, spring breaks), we always have those huge assignment books to fill up, and sometimes, there were, ART projects assigned that we children didn’t even KNOW where to begin working, because the system of education here believed, that if we’re given too much free time (like all those holidays with nothing to do???) our minds would get wasted, and children should BE allowed to ENJOY their vacations from their school days, shouldn’t they???
Life, the Obstacle Course 