A C H A P E L TA L K
by Ruohong “Iris” Wu ’22 May 16, 2022
Speaking in Three Dimensions “I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted to capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.” —Amy Tan, Mother Tongue
I
often reminisce about my life before Groton: it’s like recalling a dream as it slips from my waking mind, or like watching an old movie tape starring no one but myself, whom I can barely recognize anymore. My middle school was smack in the middle of Xidan, Beijing’s busiest commercial district. Every morning I would gather my hair into a sleek high ponytail and slip into one of the three identical sets of baggy tracksuits I owned (if you’re wondering, that is my school uniform). While flying down the creaking stairs, I would yell to grandma that I have no time to eat the sunny-side up egg she made. To her chiding, I would shout back as I leaped out of our apartment door, “Love you, see you soon!” By the time the first golden ray escaped the horizon, the wheels of my mountain bike would glide along the wide asphalt avenue that traverses Beijing city. My Chinese public school had more than seven hundred kids per grade, divided into eighteen homerooms. The whole campus was a single brick building hugging a playground. Between the second and third class blocks was exercise period, when lucky residents of nearby apartment buildings get this comical sight: seven hundred kids in a rigid formation, robotically moving to the
64
Groton School Quarterly
•
Fall 2022
beat of blasting radio gymnastics tunes. Lunch block was short but precious; I would take a few bites of the consistently unappetizing boxed lunch, and a swarm of us would sprint downstairs for ping-pong, basketball, or a game of tag. I took eight classes in total, and school ran from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day with eight class blocks. The biannual exams always set off schoolwide panic attacks, when scores, class rankings, and even grade ranking were announced and compared with each other. I know, I still sometimes wonder how I managed to survive that. To your surprise, the subject that brought me the most pride was English. You see, I come from a place where “How are you?” had one standard response (“I’m fine, thank you, and you?”) and where English “essays” were one paragraph answering the prompt “describe your day.” Every day, I could spend the forty-five minutes of English class reclining comfortably in the air conditioned teachers’ lounge, because despite being able to give the perfect answer whenever being called on, I was either fast asleep or being the biggest distraction to the circle within a one-desk-radius of me. So, when I was packing for Groton, I felt confident. After all, I got 29/30 in the speaking section of TOEFL (Test Of English as a Foreign Language). What could go wrong? Somehow, I managed to ignore something: At one of the most academically rigorous private boarding schools in the U.S., English wasn’t a foreign language, and I wasn’t held to the standard of a foreigner. For the first weeks of Groton, I was too embarrassed to have someone explain slang phrases like “low-key” and “legit” in plain English, so I low-key abused those enigmatic terms in legit all the wrong contexts. It unnerved me how class participation actually mattered for my grades. I had google-translate open at all times during biology so
