Notes

In my town, kids are dying. Not literally, but they might as well be. Everyone thinks of my neighborhood as a quiet place with the grassy expanse of nearby Rainbow Park and the shiny new schools. Perfectly trimmed cherry blossom trees and flowering bushes grow around every house. The homes are mostly new, some large, some small, all painted in a variety of tan colors. Here, the traffic comes from the neighbors going to or from work, or driving kids to school, or picking them up from after-school activities. It is a neighborhood full of practical cars like Toyotas, Hondas, and Mazdas. It is full of child prodigies: pianists, flutists, Science Olympiad winners, American Invitational Mathematics Examination qualifiers, tennis champions, ballerinas, and national golf champions. My adult neighbors work mostly in Silicon Valley, all of them computer hardware or software engineers or doctors. People drive by my house with twenty cameras on the tops of their cars, each camera pointed in a different direction. What are they doing? Who knows. Google cars drive themselves while their passengers nap. Down the sidewalk, people ride homemade personal transportation systems, the likes of which have never been seen before—half-bicycle-half-motorcycle or half-Segway-half-motorcycle. People stroll by wearing virtual reality glasses, but how do they see where they are going? Everyone has to make a contribution to the world in order to be worthwhile. The adults here are raising children who will no doubt attend Ivy League universities someday. “If you don’t get into an Ivy League, you’re on your own,” parents say. In other words, we will be disowned.

In my neighborhood, adults like to walk their dogs after dinner when there is still light. I often see their dogs yanking the leash, forcing the owners to hustle after them. On holidays, I smell grills roasting hot dogs, steaks, and chicken. At Christmas, everyone puts up decorations and flashing lights, attempting to outdo their neighbors. One house had five speakers playing “Jingle Bells” twenty-four seven. Noise in my neighborhood is constant: I often hear the screeching of violins, the banging of piano keys, or the screaming of angry babies. It all seems very normal, but behind closed doors and at quiet gatherings, something menacing is happening.

Here, mothers gather in kitchens to strategize. Children dream of calculus problems, not monsters. No one watches the news or keeps up-to-date on world events. A tsunami could be on its way and we’d never know. World War III could happen. The zombie apocalypse. We would be too busy to notice. The last movie I saw was a science documentary about absolute zero. I can’t even remember the last time I was happy. But I’m not alone. In my neighborhood, all the children are miserable.

They wake up at four in the morning and stay awake every night until after midnight. But no worries. It is worth it, the adults say. From my room on the second floor of my house, I can see the little desk lamps in other kids’ rooms. I can see those children bent over their desks in the houses across the street. Like me, they are always scribbling on pieces of paper or typing away on their computers. How do I know they are not texting their friends? Because we all get As. We don’t want to disappoint. From the minute we kids get home from school, we have maybe twenty minutes to read National Geographic, grab a bowl of instant noodles, and then the drudgery begins. If we waste minutes chatting on our phones, we’re one step further away from getting into Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, MIT.

Recently, my history teacher Mr. Miller instructed my class, “Create three hundred index cards on significant events during the Civil War and present them to the class.” I knew this request would amount to many all-nighters. I raised my hand and asked, “What if I can’t find three hundred events to write about?” Mr. Miller looked at me with a harsh, icy stare, sighed, and said, “Get your act together, Beatrice.”

“My name’s Allison,” I replied.

On the way home I thought about getting my act together. I thought about pulling all-nighters for a month studying in my room. Who needs food? Or sleep? Or companionship?

I keep telling myself that this will all be worth it in the end. That someday I may find a person on a street corner who is lost and speaks only Latin. That someday I will be forced to state all the orbitals in chemistry or face death. That someday I will know why I had to dissect a baby pig, why I had to find equations of parabolas, and why I should never start a sentence with “Because.” But hopefully, I will gain admission to a top university, because, despite the 5,300 colleges in the United States, only five are worth attending—according to everyone in my town. For now, all I know is that the children are miserable.


Evelyn Hsu
Grade 8
Joaquin Miller Middle School
San Jose, CA 95129
Educator
Hiroko Niksch
Award
Gold