They did a big jump-rope event at the elementary school. I didn’t join them, and just sat in the back and watched. I felt like my world is so far from the real world: my world is about reliving the past, and the real world is about jumping the rope.

The reason why I wrote a script about my experience is I want to remember it and understand it. I read a manual about how to write a script, and then I just wrote it. I needed comments, so I wrote it in Chinese to show it to my friends. I got some feedback from them, such as the details about what floor the characters are on, and the flashbacks. I think it was good to get comments.

The first person whom I showed my work to was R. He hated my story because he thinks there is no need to write about one’s mistakes, and he was honest to say that. I would appreciate a negative but honest comment so much more than a “look away” reaction. I mean, people don’t want to see ugly things. People wouldn’t take time to look at a beggar if they could look at a flower. That’s just how we are, and I don’t expect people to like my story because I know it’s not pretty., but I hoped to hear any kind of constructive criticism, anything other than “let’s forget that you’d ever showed something like this to me.”

Even though people who read my story might think my experience is a shame, I need to write the story for myself to see what had happened. My need to understand my experiences and see everything work in a coherent way might be a problem, but it’s also my source of creativity.

The professional writer whom I tried to get a comment from through my friend never returned anything. Was my work so bad that he wouldn’t care to give me any piece of advice? I felt disrespected, but there was nothing I could do.

My Japanese is broken, but I don’t have any other choice to show my work to a professional, so I translated the script into Japanese to show the story to the teacher at my writing workshop for children’s stories. The teacher at the workshop read it, corrected my grammar, and said, “Is there anything interesting you want to write about?” I was speechless, but I could also guess that she felt sorry for me after knowing my experience. I started to think I couldn’t have my work reviewed without empathy from the people I know.

It is hard to take the emotional burden from seeing another person’s dark side; I wouldn’t want to take it myself. It’s pretty arrogant to show someone your ugliness and expect them to be objective. I should have warned them at least.

After everything is said and done, I come back to my story again and again. I made gigantic progress for the story today by giving it a structure. I changed my thesis of the story so many times because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. “A person can get what she wants unconsciously.” is what I want to say with the story. This simple yet bizarre truth is what I felt to be what has happened to me.

Now I have figured out the structure for my old story, I will find the scenes which fit into the structure, and make a detailed outline. Then I will turn the outline into a screenplay. I am also working on my next project by writing a journal everyday. Hopefully, I will get a thesis for a new story. I just need to keep working until I get them done.