A girl who plays with boys.

I always thought of myself as a special case when I was in elementary school. I was alone and shy when I first entered kindergarten. I wore jeans and didn’t like to talk to anyone but if I had to, I’d rather to talk to a male. At home, I was heavily influenced by my brothers who always did “boyish things” like play video games and wrestle. Other than that, I didn’t really talk at home either. Whenever I spoke, I was ignored so I realized I should just save myself from embarrassment and keep myself shut. It easily became a habit to be quiet but I really wanted to speak out and tell everyone my opinions. It was hard to express my opinion in my family when the closest person to my age in my family is seven years my senior. So at school, I couldn’t speak or associate myself with others; there were no video games or wrestles after all.

When I entered Grade 1, I learnt something called recess where I met my first “friends”. Naturally, they were boys and they were all wrestling with each other. They weren’t tough at all and most were afraid of me. I could withstand a lot of physical pain from the boys and some of their older brothers, but I was emotionally weak. I felt like I belonged with those people I fought with because that was how I got along with my brothers. But as I glanced at the other girls and boys, they were playing ball games or chatting happily. I never understood how to do that or why they did. To them, I was an oddball who couldn’t do more than fight. Even though I was somewhat a tomboy, I did develop some crushes but even the slightest intimacy was never reciprocated because of my reputation and personality.

The boys later developed a code of conduct that they “must not hit girls”. At the time, I knew they were trying to be gentlemen. I tried to reason with them, telling them not to look down on me because I was a girl. It didn’t work out, because they’d just play somewhere else if I was around. Most girls would take advantage of this and not get hit, but I felt this was the only way I’d belong. I started to hate recesses because I would just stray around the playground. I spent a great deal of my recesses watching others chat and play games. Sometimes, I would play tag with the rest of my class. The game would always have one gender chasing the other; I don’t even know why. I have a feeling it’s because of the tag games we’d play during phys. ed.

The hatred towards Chinese people.

I’ve heard it all–Chinese people are rude, bad drivers, immoral, greedy, thieves, employment thieves, dirty, and cruel. Even though I live and was born in the heart of the supposedly multicultural Canada, I often feel unwelcomed. When I was learning to drive, sometimes people would give me dirty looks even when it was their fault. It’s unfair when they should be excused for their faults and we should take the blame. It’s unfair when they think they know who I am or how I act.

Today, I believed there was hope. I believed that maybe people would stop thinking of Chinese people as merely pigs, dogs, and rats. At the Beijing Olympics 2008, every nation looked up to China as a beautiful and aspiring country. I was impressed with the effort and results of the opening ceremony. I thought that for once, every nation had set aside their negative impressions of the people of China. Maybe people would begin to acknowledge the Chinese, but I was wrong.

Driving for the very first time.

I’ve always believed that if I could drive, I would be able to accomplish more–including independence and freedom. And to accomplish those things, I thought any price, with the exception of my life, would be worth it. I still haven’t changed my mind on driving, but I feel like people are really pushing it and not taking it seriously enough. We are future drivers and without proper driver’s education, who knows what the roads will become? I’m not a fan of speed or horsepower; I’m most concerned about safety, and I don’t think I’m very well-informed as of yet.

Today was my first lesson with my driving teacher. He is a nice man and enjoys talking, probably to make me feel more comfortable. The problem is that he talks way too much–no, he asks too many questions about my family. He already knows that my mother does not like to drive and that my father extremely enjoys golfing, but why should it matter who walks the dog? Why is he constantly asking about my brothers’ careers and lives, and how my father is in his spare time? I feel like evading these questions and telling him that it is none of his business, but he is my teacher. I understand that teachers may talk about other things to make the student more comfortable but that was too much. That was an invasion of my family’s privacy, and a poor attempt at that. In fact, he never really talks about driving which begs the question whether he is there to teach me or not. He holds onto my steering wheel (I haven’t grasped the concept of my placement of the car yet) and just keeps talking about irrelevant things. Actually, I feel really discouraged whenever he holds the steering wheel a bit. I just want him to tell me what I should be doing instead of just tugging along. When he’s correcting me with his movements (at least, I think he’s correcting me), I just want to know what I’m doing wrong or how I could do better. I don’t even know how to tell him this; he’s my teacher, after all. He could possibly be a pervert too; why the heck was he looking up and down at my body when we first met?!

I was driving for about two hours today, completing one out of the five behind-the-wheel lessons. We made a stop to register for my classroom lessons. According to the Ministry of Transportation, I must complete at least 25 hours of classroom lessons and 10 hours of behind-the-wheel lessons. This is what bothers me the most: I will have to stay for at least six hours per lesson in a day. My teacher explained to me that I will attend four classroom lessons in total. 25 divided by 4 is 6.25, equivalent to 6 hours and 15 minutes. Each lesson begins at 4:00pm; thus, each lesson ends at 10:15pm. If these lessons took place in the morning where I could compensate for the lost time and meal(s), I wouldn’t mind. If everyone else had to do this, I would say it’s only fair–but it’s not. As for the behind-the-wheel lessons, I have to attend five of these. The duration of each will be approximately two hours to meet the requirements. Simply put, my brothers were required to attend 10 behind-the-wheel lessons and 10 classroom lessons. That decreases the hours within days students must sacrifice in order to complete their driver’s education. Additionally, there are no other alternatives unless you can entirely understand Mandarin. The English lessons only take place on Tuesdays and Tuesdays alone. If you can’t afford to spend 6 hours of a Tuesday, that’s really too bad. It looks like you’ll have to wait four weeks until you can attend that class. After all of this, we can all safely assume that this is for their own convenience because of the expanding population of student drivers seeking driver’s education. Many of these students probably aren’t even concerned with the rules but are forced by their parents to complete driver’s education. After all, completing driver’s education will decrease the insurance premium. I admit, driver’s education is a great idea but people are not taking it seriously.