Jenny Zhang

I worried about how I was seen, who I was seen with, and what kind of abysmal creature other people thought I was—these fears disfigured me though the damage was invisible to my parents, whom I could never compete with as they were always a hundred times more worried, more fearful, more occupied than I could ever be.

That was the secret to being me back then: if you never say a word, people will think you don’t know anything, and when people think you don’t know anything, they say everything in front of you and you end up containing everything. On the inside, I was vast. But on the outside, I was a known idiot.

“You always go against me.”

“It’s not that. It’s just if everything is easy we’ll never learn. It’s supposed to be hard. That’s how we know we’re learning.”