Help Yourself

One thing I’d forgotten about being a teen is how your day is never quite your own. If you have particularly ambitious parents, you’re likely to have activities and events lined up each and every day after school. My cousin, whom I’m visiting this week, is a sophomore in high school and when she gets home at three, she’s almost immediately tossed into a squash lesson, an art class, Chinese tutoring, or perhaps a bit of practice with her pipa. With a bed time of ten o’clock, she has only a few hours to cram in her homework, a bit of relaxation, dinner and shower, her treasured manga comics, and whatever extracurricular activities her mom has planned out for her. George and I had a similar experience growing up.

When I look back, what did the kids who didn’t have an itinerary built for them do after school? They came home in the early afternoon and just hung out? It seems incomprehensible now to me that children would be left to their own devices for such a long time. I realize that this was something my friends and I could relate to: our immigrant parents forcing us into all sorts of activities. We might have griped but we never stopped doing them because that was life as we knew it. Everybody had piano and violin lessons, tennis coaches, Kumon worksheets, and Chinese homework on top of regular homework. The grind of primary school seems incredibly long to me now, even if it’s hard to fault (or thank) our parents for pushing us through those years, trying to cram in as much as possible.

Most of my week has been spent slumped on the couch in front of my laptop, the position Tiana found me after school, after her activities, and before bed. Being an adult means you get to plan your time however you want. In theory.