monkey nonsense

in cleaning my room at my parents’ house yesterday, i discovered a folder of old chinese school awards. straight to the trash, right? so i decided to flip through and attempt to decipher the chinese characters on it (i had been doing this all afternoon - preschool book about being happy - ~20% character recognition; essay that i wrote in middle school about my mom being a “45 year old girl” - ~40% character recognition; those awards - i only recognized my name, the chinese school name, what grade i was in and the date… my chinese is going down the drain)

then i noticed. i have THREE awards from 5th grade. granted, i can’t tell what the awards are for (d’oh chinese language barrier! ironic), but they appear, through my keen pattern matching abilities, to be for the same thing. the dates span over a year, beginning when i was in 4th grade, and are signed by two different teachers (chen and hsu) and two different principals (chu and tao).

FINALLY. proof! for years, i argued with my parents and chinese school friends over having to “repeat” fifth grade! noone believed me and even when i was able to name the 2 fifth grade teachers i had, they dismissed it as a result of me switching between morning and afternoon classes. but HERE, finally, i have proof! i was always convinced that they had a school-wide “reboot” of the grades because most kids somehow ended up being a grade ahead of their english grade. i say this because 1. both of my fifth grade classes consisted of the same kids… granted all our chinese levels were bad, but if it were NOT school-wide, we would’ve seen the people a year younger than us in our second fifth grade class. this was not the case. 2. my abc-posing friends with awesome chinese (and friends just older than me by one year) were still only ahead of me by one year. there would be a 2 year gap if they didn’t have to repeat. so the school either had to make every class throughout the school repeat their current grades or there would be a 2 year gap at the cutoff point. i don’t recall seeing such a 2 year gap.

something shady happened between 1991 and 1992….! my dad says i should go demand my year’s tuition back since i ended up having to pay for an extra year!