To my birth family,

A lot of Europeans immigrated to my hometown a long time ago, and their grandkids and great-grandkids are the kids I went to elementary and high school with. Lemme share some of my fondest childhood memories with you about friends I met through school.

There was a phase in Grade 1 (we’d be about age 6-7) when half my class brought their stuffed toys to school and played with them at recess. Furry friends were all the rage, including cats, dogs, elephants, bunnies, and even a hippo.

We used to pretend we were zookeepers, and we’d pretend to feed and take care of the animals. If there we felt festive we’d hold weddings for them and pretend they had babies. I remember this one grade-wide event of the marriage between an elephant and a tiger, complete with wildflower bouquets and a grassy feast.

When we grew a little older (around Grade 3, so age 8-9) dating became a most curious thing. I remember a couple of friends who apparently dated, which by their definition meant hanging out all lunch recess, full 40 minutes of them talking only to each other.

Marriage was still a foreign thing for us, but it was something we were raised to set as our ultimate goal in life (thanks to mass media). I’m sure they’ve forgotten about it now, but there was one boy who spread word that he was marrying another boy, one of the popular, smart kids in our grade, at lunch recess in the middle of winter. It was to be a grand occasion and everyone in the grade was going to show up for the “ceremony.”

Back then we didn’t have any conceptions of different sexual orientations, so the only unusual thing about the event was that the popular guy hadn’t been notified of it. It was the equivalent of a certain arrogant hunter proposing marriage to a beautiful bookworm with the wedding party right outside her door.

The poor guy got ambushed when it was broken to him that he’d be getting married that lunch period. He was so embarrassed (especially because the other groom in question was one of the goofy guys who few took seriously) that he fled from the pretend wedding, his “groom” (the goofy kid) and the “wedding party” (everyone else) running after him to get him to come back.

Poor guy. I’m sure if he’d been warned beforehand he would’ve played along. The other groom could’ve chosen a better way to propose!

By the end of elementary school, which is Grade 8 if you go to Catholic school, there was a clear awareness of the differences between boys and girls. Dating and marriage were still wondrous things, though the former was all the rage as people scrambled to figure out if they had a crush on each other.

At that age it was also common to think that boys and girls couldn’t be friends without having romantic interests in the other. As a result I didn’t have many guy friends from then until university.

Oh, the horror of not having a lot of close guy friends. I don’t know how I survived. These days most of the tea (also called “gossip,” “news,” and “drama,” whatever their translations are in Chinese) are about the guys I know. That being said, your guess is correct when I say that my high school life was nowhere as exciting as university.

The high schoolers had long since outgrown weddings with stuffies and epic fights with action figures (unless it was on Nintendo™). For half the grade it was all about enjoying life as it was handed to you, and for the other it was about preparing for the future, sometimes both sides being one and the same.

I was part of those who lived life for the future, studying and always striving for something I couldn’t put to words. Sometimes it gave me tunnel vision, but I tried to participate in the social things happening around me.

And hey, it came to the point where I knew the name of everyone in my grade, regardless of whether we’d talked or not. It didn’t matter if I’d never had a class with any of them. We were the same grade, so we experienced the same milestones like the damned literacy test and overrated prom all together as a group.

And the best part was that I could just exist when I was around them. We didn’t have expectations of each other to be the smartest or the coolest. If we were either of those things then congratulations, but we all just accepted that we were in the same awkward stage of puberty; our bodies and brains were developing, we were all dumb little shits to our teachers, and we were supposed to grow up one day, but not necessarily that day; we didn’t feel like we all needed to be at the exact same state of mind or stage in life.

We also respected each other for our talents (in addition to the socially accepted version of “good-looking”). I guess I was the stereotypical smart asian of the group, but it wasn’t like they expected me to stay that way. They just accepted me as I came, and for that I’ll always be grateful.

So there’s a peek on the life of Lillian the Chinese Adoptee and her White Friends.

For better or for worse, I’d gotten so used to how things were in elementary and high school that I had no premonitions about the storm to come.

The storm that they call “university.”

Sincerely,

Lillian