I used to finish 1,000-page Chinese novels in two days. In Canada, I couldn't get past three pages of an English short story.
I was a top student in China. At 14, I immigrated to Canada, expecting better opportunities. What I found was a classroom where I couldn’t follow a single discussion, where I needed to look up five new words per page just to understand our textbook. My confidence collapsed. My grades slipped. And for the next decade, I lived in silence—between languages, between countries, between expectations.
In sixth grade, I devoured novels thicker than bricks—1,000 pages of plot twists, metaphors, and ancient proverbs. My eyes danced over every character, every line. Chinese felt like silk between my fingers: intuitive, soft, and endless. I wrote essays praised by teachers and feared by classmates. My identity was tied to my intellect—my ability to grasp meaning, articulate arguments, and win every classroom competition.
Then came the move.
Fourteen years old, uprooted. My parents called it a "better future." Canada sounded like freedom, quality of life, a place where effort was rewarded. But no one told me what it felt like to walk into a classroom and not understand a single joke. To freeze when called on. To spend hours reading and rereading three pages of an English short story, and still not know what the main character wanted.
It wasn’t just a language barrier. It was the collapse of a self-image. I wasn’t the smart kid anymore. I was the quiet one, the awkward one, the “potential ESL case” sitting in the back row hoping no one would notice I didn’t know what "irony" meant.
I remember the first time I tried to write an essay in English. My hands trembled. I translated every sentence in my head, then typed it, then reread it and doubted everything. Every word felt like betrayal—like I was tearing a piece of myself off just to fit into a place that didn’t know what to do with me.
People say teenagers are resilient. But what happens when your resilience becomes silence? When your dreams shrink into survival?
The teachers were kind but distant. The system was forgiving but unstructured. For someone used to rigor, routine, and memorization, the freedom felt like a void. In China, you studied from morning until night. Here, people drifted between subjects and social circles like it didn’t matter. I envied their confidence, their ease with the language, their ability to speak without shame.
I went from being the one who helped classmates with math to the one who avoided eye contact. I stopped raising my hand. I stopped reading out loud. I stopped believing I was going to be someone special.
Meanwhile, back in China, my classmates prepared for the gaokao. They joined math Olympiads, wrote for student newspapers, competed in national science contests. I watched them from afar—on social media, through relatives' updates—like someone peering through glass at a life they once belonged to. But I couldn't go back. And I couldn't go forward.
It took me years to understand that I wasn’t alone. That thousands of us arrived here in adolescence, caught in the in-between. Too old to adapt like children. Too young to have a choice. We didn’t migrate. We were moved.
And we fell.
We fell through the cracks in the education system. We fell out of sync with our peers. We fell from one language into another and lost something on the way. Sometimes, what we lost was visible: grades, awards, confidence. Other times, it was hidden: the quiet ache of not being able to express love in English or grief in Chinese.
But we also endured.
We learned how to explain doctor visits for our parents. How to translate report cards. How to file taxes before we could vote. How to sit at the dinner table and answer family friends who asked, "So what university are you going to?" when we weren’t even sure we were going to graduate.
We learned that silence is not stupidity. That intelligence can look like patience. That strength sometimes sounds like a heavy accent.
I still read slowly in English. I still reread sentences three times. But I write now. In both languages. And sometimes, when I finish a page, I remember that girl who couldn’t make it through a short story. I want to go back and tell her: You’re not broken. You’re just becoming.
To those who recognize this journey: You’re not alone. The path is longer for us, and lonelier. But every sentence you finish, every form you fill out, every job interview you survive—they count.
This is our education, too. Just not the kind measured by grades.
