T he L og thelog@taboracademy.org
Tabor Academy’s Student Newspaper Volume 95, Number 4
February 2021
Sophomore Wins Writing Award Rayne Xue ’23 Earns Honorable Mention by Tessa Mock Rayne Xue is a talented sophomore from Beijing, China. She turned 16 on February 8, she resides in Baxter dormitory, and her favorite class right now is Honors US History with Ms. Kaplan. In December, Rayne entered an essay she had written for her English class to the annual Scholastics Art and Writing Competition. There were 2,732 submissions in Massachusetts: Rayne’s earned an Honorable Mention. Every year the sophomores write a personal essay about “the things they carry.” Rayne wrote a beautiful piece about her family. She was stuck on campus and unsure of what was lying ahead for her and her family. Rayne was stuck due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Her essay is about an experience she had while on vacation in Sanya, she beautifully ties feelings of insecurity back to the story she now says she remembers fondly. After hitting her head and needing to receive stitches, she shows how her family helped her through a high adrenaline moment in her childhood. The “things she carries” is the “faith in the strength of her family’s bond.” The “Things I Carry” essay asks students to pick a specific object or experience to anchor the essay. Narrowing down to one of either can be hard. For Rayne, though, “Writing the Sanya story out wasn’t hard since [she} remembers the experience quite distinctly, and everything [she] wrote was true. However, it was difficult to make it concise.” To meet the word limit, she “needed to select moments that are indispensable to the story.” She did not have any difficulty recalling such a specific memory: “...I think of it
as a light, funny memory by now, and what rendered the memory not scary was how my family helped me go through the crisis successfully. This is very similar to my experience with the COVID crisis, where I never felt alone because of my family’s support. Both experiences revolved around the theme of the strength of family bonds, and this is why the Sanya memory was the first thing that came to my mind when I decided to juxtapose the COVID crisis with another childhood experience.” While some students find it difficult to figure out exactly what they want to say in their essay, others have too many stories they want to share and it becomes difficult for them to pick one. “Before I decided to write this,” Rayne explained, “I considered writing about how I transition from one culture to another. In the end, I chose to write the Sanya experience because it resembled a story with complete rising actions, climax, and a resolution, which made it fun to write.” Writing in first-person point of view is rare for many students, who have become accustomed to writing in an objective, third-person point of view. Rayne prefers writing in and reading third person POV but she enjoyed experimenting with first-person POV because it conveys the story to the audience in an intimate way.
Rayne wants to continue to become an even better writer than she already is. She is an excellent writer and deserves recognition for the beautiful essay she has written and now shared with the Tabor community.
The Thing I Carry by Rayne Xue
When the Coronavirus began to wreak global havoc in March, I was stuck in America, half a world away from my family in Beijing. In those days, as flights back home to China were canceled, I felt like a fish on a chopping board: tied-up, powerless, awaiting the inevitable blow of a kitchen knife. This knife, in my case, was the imminent closure of my school’s dormitories. Then, I would have nowhere to go.
With so many uncertainties clouding my future, my parents’ frequent video calls offered me a sense of security. On a particularly distressing morning, I woke up to discover that further connecting flights from Hong Kong to Beijing were banned. Amid my family’s discussion about our next move, my mind drifted back to a different crisis we confronted eleven years ago.
Under a horizon blushed with a smooth blend of crimson and orange, my family relaxed on Sanya’s beach. With unfettered glee, my father and I jumped in and out of the waves as they climbed the shore. When the water ebbed, I knelt and scooped up sand with my tiny fists. Giggling mischievously, I splattered the sand on my father’s chest. He bellowed, feigning outrage. Delighted, I sloshed up more sand until both of us were drenched. The pleasure of playing on the beach all evening came at the cost of being commanded to shower. My mother tested the water temperature while I bounced around the room, still elated from my day of raucous play. “The water is warm now, Rayne,” my mother called. “Come here!”
“Coming!” I answered, dashing into the bathroom. But before I could take my mother’s hand, I landed on something slippery and lost my balance. The view of the room contorted in a blur and pain pierced the back of my head. I cried out in agony. Tears obscured the sight of a crimson color seeping into the water surrounding me. I remember being carried by my parents into the backseat of a taxi. On the way to the hospital, I lay on my mother’s lap and watched the passing streetlamps illuminating her anxious face.
“Mama,” I whispered, “I’ll recite some ancient poems for you, to make sure that I’m not going dumb. Listen: ‘Before my bed a pool of light. Can it be hoarfrost on the ground? Looking up, I find the moon bright. Bowing, in homesickness, I’m drowned’……” A small laugh slipped from my mother’s lips: “Excellent. Can you do ‘Spring Dawn’?”
I could. And as my mother listened attentively, correcting where I misremembered, our fear slowly ebbed like ocean waves.
After the doctor ensured us that there was no severe damage, my parents accompanied me into the surgery room, where I received four stitches and a bandage on my head. “My head looks like a pear in the supermarket.” I commented, and my parents grinned in relief. Eleven years later, sitting in my empty dorm room, my parents’ support and reassurance once again became my most potent consolation. That night in Sanya left me with more than a scar on the back of my head. What I have carried since is a faith in the strength of my family’s bond: we had weathered crises before, and we could do so again.