Full Why I Write
I believe that there are three main reasons for anybody to do anything:
1. Love
2. Money/Attention
3. Spite
Love
I remember how I learned to read. I remember being four years old at a fancy preschool that my family couldn’t really afford. An older girl took me through the shelves of toys to a dusty, unloved corner. On the dustiest, saddest shelf were piles of small cards with illustrations of farm animals and fruits with their names written underneath. She grabbed a stack and held one card up. “Cow,” she said. “Cow,” I repeated. I remember being tragically uninterested.
A recent immigrant from China, my mother believed that the way a capitalist society worked was that the more money you spent on something, the better it would be. Alas, it seemed that even a fancy preschool would not go as far as teaching a four year old how to read and do simple arithmetic. Once my mom realized that a six year old was the only person at the school who was trying to get me to learn things she deemed important—reading, math, geography...basically anything except what I was actually learning (how to eat snow on the playground)—she dedicated herself to teaching me at home and put me in public school at the same time because the fancy private school teachers had let her down.
Because I both loved and feared my mother with the irrational emotion capable of a four-year old, I went along with the learning how to read thing. She would come to the TV room and pull me away from my toys and we would sit together on the couch reading books. She would say one line with her finger following along underneath the words. I would repeat. She would point at individual words and test me until I remembered their letters, shape, and meaning. Then, we would move onto another line.
It was painful.
Once I started being able to read the books on my own, my mom would get new, more complex books. As the stories grew more interesting, I grew more willing to read on my own until the point where I loved reading beyond anything else. I begged to go to the library often enough that my mother started to cut me off because the gigantic stack of books I would check out was becoming unwieldy. Somehow, my mother came upon a goldmine of chapter books and I soon amassed the largest collection of anything that I’ve ever had. Satisfied, my mother left me on my own with my chapter books and library visits.
Spite
After the fancy preschool upset, my mother’s faith in our schooling system was so shaken that she started teaching me things before I learned them in school. I would bring all of this new, advanced knowledge with me to school and show the other kids my skills of long division. Some teachers thought it was annoying—they didn’t appreciate my mother butting in and taking charge of my education.
My first grade teacher criticized the way I wrote (the only thing she could criticize). She didn’t like that I lifted my pencil when I wrote my lower-case a’s. She hated that I wrote the belly of the number 5 before I added the roof in the end. It was probably the only thing my mother had taught me that didn’t coincide directly with the school curriculum. It was also probably one of the most insignificant criticisms I have ever received (my handwriting wasn’t that bad). But, my teacher wasn’t really criticizing me—she was criticizing my mother.
I don’t think the dots connected at the time, but that teacher always hated how I would try to show the other kids how to do multiplication and long division. I showed it to them because I understood how it would feel. The ability to multiply large numbers together is the epitome of magic when you’re still learning how to add and subtract. It’s the same feeling you get when you’re young and you don’t know how to read, but you hold a big book up and pretend to understand what it says. The teacher didn’t see it that way. She saw it as me bragging. And maybe it was bragging, but who judges a six year-old for being happy that she can do math?
My favorite classroom activity was to hold my index finger and thumb up to my eye and squeeze her as she walked around the room. I wanted to make her feel as small as she tried to make my mother feel. When she asked us to write sentences about our weekend, I fit in as many lower-case a’s and 5’s as I possibly could, writing them the way my mother had taught me when she wasn’t looking. Ignoring the teacher’s advice was the first rebellious thing I had ever done. I still write my 5’s the same, stupid way and I turned out just fine.
Love
I learned to write at some point. I probably hated it. I didn’t see the beauty in linking words together to create intricate meaning. I saw a cow. I wrote “C O W.” There wasn’t much majesty in that.
When my teacher pulled my mother aside to recommend a special summer workshop to help me improve my writing, we shouldn’t have been surprised. My mother, in her infinite quest to provide me with the tools for academic excellence, enrolled me without hesitating.
I spent that summer in a classroom where the sunlight touched every corner of the room. The teacher was a fan of story-starters where a story was half-written and left on a cliffhanger for the writer to finish. It was the first time that someone had brought up the possibility of not only reading stories and books full of beautiful words but also being the one responsible for writing them. Having the power to decide where stories would end up was something that had never before occurred to me.
Money and Attention
When I was eleven years old, my mom emailed me a link to a story-writing contest for young voices. The first prize was $100 and your picture on the main page of the website. $100 seemed like a mythical amount of money. I wanted it bad enough to do something I had never done before—finish a writing assignment outside of school. For the next few months, I took a story that I had started and abandoned months ago and reworked it into a twenty page masterpiece of preteen angst.
I won second prize and $50. I was just as happy.
The high I got from winning inspired me from that point on to enter contests as often as I could. It became a full-out extracurricular activity. I participated in speech competitions and math competitions and science competitions and even more writing competitions. I probably lost more than I won, but the hurt of losing was always leveled by the sight of my victories hanging on our wall.
My mom made sure to save and frame every single one.
Love
My mother’s college degree from China was not enough to qualify for any professional jobs here. After staying at home involuntarily because of her unexpected pregnancy (me), she went back to school when I was six.
Some say that the plight of the children of immigrants is that we see through our parents’ imperfections at an earlier age. I think that’s bullshit. Yes, we answer the phone when strangers call because it’s hard for the uninitiated to understand the meaning in our parents’ accents. We cut in their conversations with cashiers to save time when their internal translators are buffering. We edit their papers. Though they teach us as much as they can, we become their figurative life-savers as they float through a strange new culture. But, they’re the ones who jumped in the first place. They’re the ones giving us the ability to change our own stories for the better. They’re not invincible, but they’re pretty damn strong.
Without my mother’s stubborn refusal to stop pushing me to succeed, I wouldn’t be here. Yes, I write because I like it. Sometimes, I write to receive praise and attention. Other times, I write to regain control of my thoughts and feelings and my story. Writing has opened so many doors for me. Without it, I would not be here. I would not be a student at a school where the keys for success are served to you on a silver platter if only you would just try hard enough to deserve your beautiful future.
But that’s not the point. The point is that I only realized my love of writing because my mother loves me enough to make me keep trying.
I remember my mother’s long nights spent writing essays in a language that was unfamiliar to her. My father was her only proof-reader and he too had a tenuous grasp of the English language. At some point, she started asking me for help too. In the beginning, I could only let her know when a sentence was worded awkwardly or if she had misplaced an article. By the time I was ten, my mother had graduated and started work. She would sometimes bring home work correspondence and ask me to check her grammar.
Every now and again, she asks me to edit something for her. I think that there must be many things she doesn’t ask me for help with. I am always grateful when she does.