I wrote this for my english class (9th grade)
Not looking for anything, just so you can read it.
A Wasted Summer and Communism.
As however Asian I appear to be, I assure you I am not. Despite these accurséd eyes, eye color, and hair, I dislike Asian music, culture, food, and most of all, the people. My parents, after seeing what an abomination of Asian culture I am, decided I needed to “get in touch” with my Asian roots a tad more. Their answer? To spend my entire, well-deserved, and most of all, well-needed, summer in a communist hell-hole known as (guess what?) China.
As I woke up on that fateful July 4th (I woke up with the intention of seeing the Macy's Fireworks Spectacular), I arose to my mom and my dad standing in my doorway, eagerly.
“What is it now mother? Have I done something wrong again?” I said, still recovering from my morning stupor.
“Nothing, we’re just here to tell you that we’re going to be visting China for the entire summer.” (They said this in chinese)
“What!? What is this, I prote-“
As I was in the middle of the word “protest” they promptly took out a blowgun, blew into it (with great expediency I must add), and shot a dart into my arm (at least that is what I remembered)
After several hours or so, I woke up, probably from the great rumbling of me being trapped under some luggage within a China-bound airplane. After several loud cries for help, an employee took note of my presence, by digging the luggage out of the way. Only for him to have shot me with another dart (probably due to my parent’s request).
After another couple of hours, I finally awoke in one of our two illustrious apartments bought in Beijing.
“What the hell mom”
“Well, we, as a family, decided you needed to get in touch with your heritage” (In Chinese of course) “And you kept me in the dark about this?”
“Well we shot you with a blowdart for a reason, because we already knew what you were going to say”
After about spending a half-week in Beijing, my mother also decided it was time for me to know that we were visiting her relatives in north-eastern China. Seems to be no little problem, considering I’ve been shot twice and kid-napped to China. Well, it turns out my mother is from a rural background, and I, being accustomed to the city, have no desire to be sent pack for a week to some remote village.
As usual I protested and got shot, waking up in front of a gloomy, under-maintained rest station. Turn out it was my aunt’s house. Now I am told that we are here because my cousin (who lives in our apartment in Beijing) and his girlfriend are getting married, and that the other 6 days I spend here are for “cultural reasons”.
So as nature goes, I had to relieve myself.
“Auntie, where are your bathroom facilities?” (In my fractured Chinese)
And with that, she takes me to a clearing, with a little hole in the middle, flies swarming around it.
“Haha, I see what you did there, now please, take me to your proper bathroom facilities.”
“This are the bathroom facilities”. And with that, I drew in air, and screamed, “FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-“(The rest was interrupted by my aunt, who didn’t understand what I was saying).
No. 1, I don’t mind, however No. 2 is another story. So I stopped eating for 3 days as to avoid the inevitable “debacle” if I was to do this act using these primitive bathroom facilities. But nevertheless, just the day before the wedding… I went… like a filthy, filthy animal.
Now, being as un-Asian as one can be, I did not speak Chinese, and understood small portions of it. In other words, I had no friends. So being the loner (in china), I sat on the porch, for most of the day,sitting there in the baking, yellow, Chinese sun, thinking about philosophy, and economics. Tanned me a great deal, which actually helped, since my relatives (who are a great deal “darker” than me, kept commenting on how pale I was).
Now onto the actual wedding itself. After picking up the bride (quite lean, nice dress however), we arrived back to the “shack” as I like to call it. Complete with a DJ, and red carpet (nice!). My cousin, in his factured English said,
“You… follow… me?”
I did not understand, until I realized he was trying to tell me I am his best man. In the 14 years of my existence, I was never a best man until, one of my 593 cousins, in some shack, in the middle of nowhere (in china) decided, out of all the people he knew, I was destined to be his “man”.
After some staring and averting looks, the DJ, looked at me and said (in chinese)
“You! Foreigner, do you have anything to say?”
“Uh…. Good luck? It was great being your cousin?”
“No, no, in Chinese silly boy”
“Ni hao sheh sheh noodles”
And at that moment… I became a MAN. My voice decreased by 15 octaves, at that very moment. I saw my heritage in a new perspective. Something to be embraced! Something revel in! Not that much though. But I do enjoy being Asian.
Nice, I don't get why he 'suddenly becomes a man' at the end though.
What?
I don't get it... Are you even really Chinese? Did you go to China? I don't get what's true and what's not, it was also not funny, I more cringed when I read your dart jokes and the bathroom joke. And the turning into a man joke. I don't understand the point of this, there was no real narrative or idea behind this, and apparently the point of this is that nothing really happened. Maybe you became a man? But you made fun of that at the end like you didn't really.
Try again.
Yeah, other than being whimsical and leaving me with the impression that you really didn't think much of that English class, the story didn't do much. Funny at parts. It has potential. You also switched tenses several times, from past to present, which threw me off. Probably a bit of revising would make this a lot more enjoyable.
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