My Journal: A Journey Through My Life as a Teenage Schoolgirl and a Young Adult

I had no authority in the store, by seeing that my mother and my sister always yelled at me. Whenever my mother yelled at me, or when I disobeyed my mother, like one time when I went to the grocery store across from our shop without telling her, Lor Chi would tell me to obey my mother instead of being on my side.

I always wrote diaries in the store. One time Lor Chi took my diary and drew the seventh grade boy she liked on it, with new wave clothes on and his private parts showing. I was very embarrassed seeing that picture. She no longer worked for my parents after that summer. So that basically says it all for Lor Chi.

The girls who worked for my mom in the seventh and eighth grade, a few of whom were from my elementary, and a few from my junior high, had very little respect for me either. Like almost all of the kids in my school, every one of them dressed new wave–teased bangs, baggy, or other fashionable, pants, and new wave shoes. That was in 1987, 1988, and 1989, the new wave era. They always made fun of me for not being new wave. (My mother didn’t let me dress new wave.)

At about the second semester of the ninth grade, my mother told me that she’d let me dress "pretty" because she felt that I was old enough to take care of myself in school, but I still had to let her shop with me and approve everything I bought. So from then on, I dressed nice to school, and naturally became popular as time went on. When my mother started letting me dress fashionably in 1990, new wave first went out of style, both in my school and in the rest of the world. But still, people in my school dressed fashionably, and I wanted to be just like them.

Throughout my whole adolescence, different girls I found in my school worked for my parents. The girls who worked there when I was in high school didn’t see anything wrong with the way I dressed, but they wondered why my mother followed me everywhere and didn’t let me go out even though I was fifteen. Like always, my mother and my sister were very mean to me–they yelled at me all the time and always reminded me that if they didn’t support me, I would be on the streets. My best friend in the 10^th, 11^th, and 12^th grade, Cynthia, saw these things and was very concerned. She had a happy family and had never seen a family like mine.

Cynthia was my best friend in school. She knew that my mother picked me up from school everyday and didn’t let me go out with friends, so she came to my shop with me and my mom after school almost everyday. She said that she wanted to work in our store even though she didn’t need the money. Most of the time on weekdays, when Cynthia came, there wasn’t much to do in the store, so we talked and played instead of working. Cynthia was very smart. She told me that a lot of people didn’t want to work for my mom because she only paid them fifteen dollars a day, and because our store was very messy and dirty and always in chaos. I kept in touch with Cynthia from time to time until October 2000, when I was twenty-five. We went to Disneyland together. Then not anymore because she was married and had a kid, and I felt awkward going to her apartment to pick her up with her husband and kid there. They had indicated to me that we should go on with our lives instead of doing the things that we did when we were younger, even though sometimes it’s all right, to do the things we did when we were younger.

Another school friend who worked in our store until we graduated from high school was Diane, who was Burmese and came to the U.S. when she was in the fifth grade. Like Cynthia, she treated me with respect. We were good friends in school, and she always asked me to go places with her, but I could never go. When Diane worked in our store, she soon realized that my mom didn’t let me go out without her. Because my mom didn’t let me go out, I spent almost all of my spare time in a room on the second floor of our store. My mom put a computer there for me. Almost everyday, I stayed up there to type journals. I accumulated lots of journals there. I did other things there too, including reading, practicing monologues for auditions, and learning how to play an electronic keyboard. Those circumstances benefited me for the rest of my life–I developed a lot of skills up there in that room.

Well, back to Diane, one Saturday I made a notebook out of the blank sides of scratch paper up there, by cutting the scratch paper in half and stabling them together. I took it downstairs and told Diane that I could use that to take notes. She said something like "You always like to waste time, huh? And waste life." Well, actually I did not waste much of my adolescence. I benefited from those circumstances instead. But I’m definitely glad it’s over and I can move on with my life.