Back to School...

Not sure if I have mentioned this on my blog before, but I was on a almost 2-month long holiday before starting the second semester of grade eight. That made me lose the "school feel" or in other words, how it felt of being back at school. However, after two weeks, I am now finally ready of getting back into motion.

The night before I went back, I started to miss Beijing really badly. I missed the familiar school campus, the friends that I could always count on and say hi to in the hallways and stuff, the teachers who were all great friends with me... It was such a cool environment that I took for granted! I will be mentioning this in one of my vlogs that I will post later on the Unit-E YouTube channel, but I think this is where growth is really happening--I have started to learn to be more open and inclusive towards all the changes that is happening in life and less skeptical and judgmental about them in the process of experience. When I was in Beijing in the home that I was living in, I am not ashamed of admitting that it was a period of time that I wished I had more opportunities to really be "in it" more, rather than simply being in it for the sake of destiny. As what I have experienced becomes more diverse and more uniquely shaping my own identity if that makes sense, I have started to realize how the "past" you have been through is really the origin of yourself and that the "present" that you are in, is simply the past you are going to miss in the future.

My identity, as I have discussed in an article I wrote for Jingkids, is quite complex, as I do not come from this one city in China or have lived in the city where I was born for even more than 6 months. I was born in Suzhou, an elegant city in Jiangsu province in the southern part of China, and stayed there for the first one hundred days of my life, before moving to Zhenjiang, another city in the province for the next 4 years, before moving to Wuxi for the next 2 years, where I finished kindergarten, before moving to Hefei for the next 2 months where my parents planned for me to start elementary school but because we got the notification to move to Beijing, I started primary school in Beijing, which is the place I lived in for the past 7 years. I finished elementary school and the first semester of the last year of middle school in Beijing and now here I am in the most Southern part of mainland China (supposedly, due to me lacking some geography knowledge), in Zhuhai, ready to finish middle school and presumably high school as well. For the next period of time, no matter how long it is, I promised to myself that I will be enjoying it regardless of the environment, and the other external factors of my life that I cannot control yet.

This may sound like a pretty radical article, but hey, teenagers are pretty spontaneous aren't they? So, why not share your ideas on change and growth in the comments?