Writer: Michael Zhong
Graphic Designer: Deeksha Reddy
My face was as blank as the eight-by-eleven paper in front of me. The cheap fluorescent lights shone in my eyes while, from somewhere, I could hear the faint sound of my fifth-grade teacher yelling. Mrs. Dapelito was a “let me talk to your manager” type of person, and this seemed like yet another pointless assignment. My eyes started to lose focus, and as they did, the paper began to fold in on itself. Little stalks grew out of the paper pulp; a field of rice started to wave and sway beneath a blazing sun.
“Today, we’re going to write about heroes... but not just any heroes. Who is your hero?” Judging by the pro athletes, pop stars, and superheroes plastered all over their folders and backpacks, most fifth graders spent a lot of time thinking about their heroes — but I couldn’t come up with anything. Who was my hero? Nobody came to mind.
All of my friends wrote about their favorite characters from books and movies but, although I like lots of the same ones, it didn’t feel right to describe any of these characters as my hero. To me, a hero isn’t just somebody that an entertaining story happens to; it’s somebody I wish I could be like. Ten-year-old me barely knew who he was, much less who he wished he was.
I considered the issue on the bus ride home. While I absent-mindedly picked at a hole in the cheap leather seat-back in front of me, it occurred to me that my sister had faced her own case of writer’s block when confronting her college application essays. She had gone to our mom for some inspiration and got detailed stories about our family’s history. My sister and I were close — so close that a few years earlier, there was an incident involving a pen and my right eye (I still have the scar to this day). When I got home, I threw caution to the wind, crept up to her room, and knocked carefully on her door. An ominous fog seeped out of her den as the door opened; just daring to enter her lair sent a chill down my spine. Trembling, I held out an offering — a bag of Sweet and Spicy Doritos — so I wouldn’t be viciously attacked. She sat in the corner of her bed, wrapped up in blankets so only her head could be seen. She snatched it, miraculously failing to tear off my arm in the process.
“Ugh, whadda ya want?”
“C-could you t-tell me about g-g-grandpa?”
“No!!”
“Then I’m taking the chips back.”
“Wait, wait, ugh, fine.”
Maggie eyed me warily, drew herself up onto a heap of pillows, and began the story.
Deep in the farmlands of China, in a one-ox village in the Hunan Province, grandpa was always the oddball in his family: his arms were too long, his ears were too big, and he was just… different. His family wasn’t wealthy, but they loved him, and they raised him to be the filial son they had always wanted.
On his 16th birthday, he sat down to dinner with his parents around the small rickety wooden table in the kitchen. A smoldering fire crackled under a large steel wok filled with cooking rice. They began to casually mention how different he looked compared to them. His ears drooped, and his earlobes were unattached. They danced around like this for a while, before hitting him with the news: he was adopted. His birth family had lived in a small town west of their village, but they weren’t ready to have a child and decided to put him up for adoption.
Grandpa was dumbfounded. His entire life had been a lie, and everything that he had known and loved was falling apart.
That night, he grabbed a small sack of rice and left to find his biological parents.
Maggie stopped. “I’m hungry.”
“Wait, what? Dude, I literally just gave you a bag of chips. Keep going with the story.”
“Yeah, so? Eating chips is like stretching for me. Plus storytelling is hard stuff.”
“Ugh, fine.” I walked downstairs, grabbed a handful of assorted snacks — dried seaweed, shrimp crackers, almond cookies, roasted sunflower seeds, pretty much anything that was edible — walked back up, and threw them down on the bed. “Alright, you gremlin. Keep going with the story.” She stared back at me with eyes that could pierce steel.
Grandpa trudged west, into the outskirts of the Hunan Province. Every night before sleep, he’d have to wring all the sweat out of his shirt. Limestone towers dipped down into low valleys that nestled gushing green rivers. Mountainsides had been eroded over millennia to make way for them. The rivers flowed from the peaks of the spires and collected into basins. Lily pads were sprinkled across the surface; willow trees arched their wispy fingers to dip them down beneath it. Clouds coated the tops of the jagged rocks. Pine trees reached out from the edges of cliffs to grab its light.
The paved roads gave way to dirt paths, the days to weeks, and the prosperous farmland to a barren, echoing wasteland. His arms grew heavy, and his legs shook with every step he took. His vision blurred; he could barely keep his eyes open until one afternoon when the blazing fireball in the sky was blocked by a large cloud. It let him widen his eyes, and as they cracked open, he saw a small town. Mustering the little strength left to him, he stumbled towards it. The center of the town held a dry market. Dingy stalls with old drapes for roofs protected the hustlers from the afternoon sun. People were trying to reach over each other yet somehow managed to haggle at the same time.
Through a crowd of people, he caught a glimpse of the corner of a man’s face in the center of town. His face looked old and hardened, yet soft. His ears dangled, his earlobes were unattached, and he soon disappeared into the endless crowd that filled the town square.
Grandpa slipped through the crowd, following the man. He had never seen this man before, but he felt a strong connection to him. The man made his way to a small wooden home, one that seemed somehow perfectly organized among its neighbors randomly scattered across the land.
Our grandpa made his way closer to the house and peeked inside. He saw the man hugging a woman who must have been his wife. She was holding a baby. Seeing them, our grandpa felt he saw his own family, the one he had always known, one that was also full of love and devoid of troubles until he had decided to run away. He thought of his parents, how much they loved him, and how much they sacrificed for him. He sank to his knees, crouching in front of a small wooden shack miles away from them, and thought about his parents, worried sick after their only child had run away without warning.
He knelt in the strange dirt, thinking about the parents who loved him so dearly, tears flooding from his eyes. He understood that his world hadn’t fallen apart until he ran away from it, and that everything he had ever known was still back at home, with his mom and dad. He got up, dusted himself off, wiped his eyes, and began the long walk back home, to his real parents.
“Why’d you stop?”
“I mean, that’s all there is to the story. He got his happily ever after with his adoptive parents.”
“Yeah, but Mom is always saying that he was the first one in his village to go to college. Isn’t there something with that?”
“Dude, why are you asking me all this, I don’t know!”
“I gave you food; now you give me the rest of the story.”
“I just told you that I don’t know!”
“If I give you more food, will you miraculously remember?”
“Maybe...”
Two years later, grandpa had finished his high-school education. It was unusual for people in his village to have any more education than that. Most became farmers or left the village for work in the cities, but grandpa wanted to go to college. This wasn’t purely out of self-interest — he was motivated by the prospect of giving his adoptive parents a life he believed they deserved. In the meantime, however, his tuition would eat up all the money they could spare. College life would not be easy, but he was willing to do what it took. Simply to feed himself every week, he would have to carry a huge sack of rice from his village to the college, miles away. Typically, college students took the train, but our grandpa refused to let his parents pay for an expensive train ticket every week on top of his tuition. He walked back and forth to school and from his village, following the tracks of the train he refused to ride.
One day, our grandpa was taking his weekly route with his sack of rice and collapsed from fatigue. He fell right on the train track just as a smoke-belching 200-ton “steel dragon” headed toward him! Mustering all his strength, he pushed himself out of harm’s way with only moments to spare. The train missed him, but it obliterated his bag of rice! Still, grandpa didn’t give up. He went up and down the track and picked up every last grain. He had to; if he didn’t, he would starve for the next week. As he continued to pick up each grain by hand, the amount of rice seemed to spread into a white sea, never ending.
I walked out of my sister’s room and into my own as I plopped down onto my seat and took out a piece of paper. It stared blankly back at me as I thought about how much struggle our grandpa had to endure just to make his dream a reality. I sat there, slumped over my desk, hands on my head. I kept staring at the blank page, like I expected the words to magically appear. I kept wondering how I could write about what my grandpa and his struggle meant to me. I read the words engraved into my pencil for the eightieth time: CONDEROGA, NO. 2. Why is every single one of my pencils covered in bite marks with a gnawed-off eraser? I held the dull tip and the eraser between my fingers, imagining a line of train tracks on top of the pencil and my grandpa throwing himself out of the way.
“Hey, bud.”
I explained how hard it was to grasp such struggle as a child and that no one had ever struggled as much as grandpa had. In true parental fashion, my father tried to prove me wrong.
“Ha! You think that's a struggle? Let me tell you about what I went through.”
“I mean... I kinda have to do this right now. I don’t really have the time.”
“Too bad, I’m telling it anyway. Write this down.”
Deep within China lies a town called Wuhan — or, he likes to call it, home. Wuhan is split into three major sections based on economy and wealth. In the poorest part of town, there was a boy: a mistake, an aberration, never planned. He was born into a family that never felt like family. His father and mother no longer loved each other. By the time he was in middle school, his brother and sister were settling down and making a family. He’d pass by hundreds of people, all living in those same alleyways, and he’d sympathize. He got familiar with the street vendors to the point where they were his family. He scraped his way through school, not through talent or by being at the top of his class, but by giving all of his effort. Like most kids in Wuhan, he finished high school and moved on to college — a cheap one, yes, but college was college in his eyes. His classes were boring; his professors, stuffy. Science was the only class he really looked forward to.
One day, the professor assigned a lab to the class, and every student got a partner. The project was simple: inject a live rabbit with a sedative to see the effects. By chance, this student’s lab partner wasn’t anyone he knew. She was talented, smart, and at the very top of the class; she had never gotten a grade lower than “A” and wasn’t planning on starting now. When the experiment began, he was given the job of holding down the rabbit as his partner administered the injection.
“Ugh! You had to stick needles into a terrified rabbit?!”
“What? It was part of medical school and we needed to learn this before we graduated! You’re going to have to do that when you’re in school.”
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t know one of the requirements to graduate medical school was to be on PETA’s radar.”
“What’s PETA?”
“Nevermind. Could you just keep going with the story?”
The rabbit squirmed in his hands, and he felt as though his soul were being crushed for holding down a defenseless animal. She, on the other hand, was cold and precise. Without hesitation, she took up the needle and positioned herself to make the injection. Just then, the rabbit writhed its way out of the boy’s hands and ran away. His partner gave him a deathly stare, as she knew that he had just cost her her perfect record. He nervously chuckled and ran after the rabbit to try to preserve their grade — and possibly his life. The professor failed them on that experiment. My dad’s lab partner hated him and thought that he was an imbecile. She thought his carefree attitude towards school was the cause of their failure, but he thought it was her stern attitude that scared the rabbit away.
A few years later, somehow, they were dating. Due to the fact that my dad was never near the top of the class and had a horrible work ethic, her parents didn’t think that he was good enough for their daughter. They would date in secret, hiding their love from the world. Naturally, she continued to spend all the rest of her time on academics and kept excelling in all her classes. She was as uptight as ever, but he was determined to loosen her up. Spending time with him reminded her that her self-worth was not determined solely by a grade on a piece of paper. She felt as though she could live her life to the fullest with him — for the first time, she was free from parental expectations and was truly happy. For his part, spending time with her brought his head down from the clouds. He realized the importance of grades and worked much harder because of her. As their love for each other grew, their ambition for learning did likewise. Once they graduated from college, they began medical school. The time they spent together grew shorter, and the stress grew larger, but less time did not mean less passion: they still loved each other with everything they had.
After their last day of medical school, she decided to move to America to begin her residency. While he had decided he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. Having finally obtained the blessing of his parents, he wanted to use his mother’s ring to propose. She had gotten her train ticket to the airport in Beijing and was ready to begin anew. He was ready to begin the rest of his life. As she was boarding the train, he was looking everywhere for her. He had gotten word of her plans to move to America.
He ran across town with his mother on his back as fast as his legs would allow, and when he arrived at the train station, with the train just about to depart, his intended was visible, just barely, from the very end of the last car. He barged his way through crowds of people and jumped onto the train tracks. His feet blistered, and his knees buckled; streams of sweat and tears trickled down his face. He blasted off after the 200-ton “steel dragon,” barely keeping one foot in front of the other. With every step he took, a wave of fatigue blasted him, but he kept on pushing. He yelled out at her with all his might despite barely being able to breathe. She caught him in the corner of her eye and knew immediately what he had been doing. The gap between him and the train widened. She realized that moving not only affected her but everyone around her; she had forgotten all about him, once again only focusing on her academics and learning. Realizing the mistake she had made, she stuck out her hand to try to grab onto him. Tears formed at the edges of her eyes as the love of her life was literally slipping from her fingertips. His body had reached its limit and collapsed; he fell flat on his face and lay there on the track as the love of his life disappeared across the horizon.
Several years passed.
On the corner of a street intersection lay a dingy, hole-in-the wall restaurant; small fluorescent light bulbs flickered, plastic lawn chairs scraped against the old floor that hadn’t been cleaned in a few years. The food embodied the chef’s passion, and the atmosphere was homey. A satisfied family walked out and disappeared into the streets while an overworked busboy stumbled over himself to clean the table. He scrambled dirty plates and dishes into an old gray bin. He used dirty rags to wipe down the table. He worked for days on end and was barely paid minimum wage. His shriveled hands only received a crumpled handful of money for the hundreds of tables that they wiped. He shoved his moneyed fist into his pocket and walked down the street. He walked past dozens of streets and alleyways before the neighborhood became familiar. He walked through an alleyway that cut the sidewalk of the main street in half. It was always pitch black at night except for a few candles placed along windowsills in a haphazard manner, as electricity was too expensive. He’d walk up cold stairs that were almost as high as his knees. The old floorboards creaked as he made his way to a worn-down door frame that had the words “Zhong Family” on it in Chinese. His hand brushed against the characters; they were the only thing that made his home feel like a home. When he made it to his room, which was barely larger than a closet, he retracted his fists from his pockets and shoved the money he had been holding onto for dear life and put it in his drawer for safekeeping. He spent tireless months repeating this cycle, day in and day out; every day his wrinkled fingers would tightly clasp the scraps of money he had earned.
When he had collected enough money, he said his goodbyes to his family, got in a cab, and watched as the streets that he grew up on blurred by. The taxi had arrived at the airport. He got out and bought a ticket to America with all the crumpled up bills that he had been holding onto so tightly. He boarded the plane with only one thought: “I won’t let go this time.”
Tears filled my eyes as my pencil stopped writing. I wiped away the tears and sniffled.
“This sounds like something straight out of a sappy movie”
“Well, this sappy movie is how your mom and I got married.”
I couldn’t believe that I had come from a long generation of struggle and conflict. How could I compare or even live up to the struggles of not fitting in with my own family or leaving everything I have ever known for the love of my life?
“Dad, who do you think I should write about to be my hero?”
“I don’t know; that’s your choice. Give it some time.”
The bell rang as I scrambled into the cafeteria with my lunchbox and notes. I plopped onto one of the hard plastic seats at one of the long tables in the cafeteria and took out my lunch — a tupperware container full of noodles. I mumbled half-ideas to myself and stared blankly at the marbled pattern on the shoddy cafeteria tables. The story of a man who felt like he did not fit in with his own family and the story of a man who struggled to build his own family interlaced together. I caught a glimpse from the corner of my eye of two people who were whispering back and forth to each other.
“What’s that? It smells gross!”
“It looks like he’s eating worms!”
“Why doesn’t he use a fork?”
The bell rang, and the period was over.
I sat down at my desk. Mrs. Dapelito was on another one of her rants. I didn’t bother to listen, folded my arms, and rested my head on them. The only words I could make out were “decide your hero today…” Walking around the classroom, Mrs. Dapelito recorded everyone’s heroes: professional athletes, pop stars, and superheroes. When she got to my desk, I lifted my head; the cheap fluorescent lights shone in my eyes.
“So, who is your hero?”