Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

The newsletter devoted to spreading love and cultural awareness around the world.

Jan 13, 2007

Wonders of the Orient – A Jastine Leung Column

I am proud to offer a new column by a young 18 year old Chinese young lady writer.  Jastine Leung, becomes writer # 393 for Storytime Tapestry. 

I am impressed with her ability to write not only as someone so young but as a young person writing in an entirely different language. Please email her and encourage her to write about China and her life and introduce us to the wonders of the Orient in all its splendor.

                        What’s wrong with the V word?

                        Jastine Leung

I was let down again by the approaching New Year holiday.

Though I’ve lived a busy high school life for almost two years, I still think like a kid when it comes to vacations. It’s not just the yearning for attractive destinations but the fact that my body feels a raging thirst for relaxation.

When I was a kid, I reported to my pals on my minor and major breaks which allowed me to retreat with a stack of books to Lushan Mountain, trek across the Inner Mongolian plateau on horseback, and still get away to ski Tibet. A few days’ respite enabled me to return to study brimming with energy. In high school, however, students are seldom given more than seven days’ vacation, even during the most impressive May Day holiday.

It has been hard to break this habit of shortchanging my personal life. I can count on one hand the number of vacations I have taken since I enrolled in high school. As a poor student, I would have more flexibility with my time (if worse grades). As a promising student, I could barely have stayed with my family for more than two hours each day, for classes begin from seven in the morning and last until nine in the evening.

Meanwhile, the effects of vacation starvation are all around me. For many w, 50 weeks of the year are used up in a blind struggle to get to study, retain a foothold and move upward. There’s hardly a spare hour for pursuits that remind them they are more than class ciphers.

While our scores may be going up, we are not. Anger, depression, exhaustion, and stress-related illness are epidemic.

Yet the V word is almost never mentioned as a solution. Like sleep (another  don’t get enough of), vacation is a remedy without harmful side-effects. But because it’s considered an indulgence, it doesn’t fit well in our busier-than-you culture.

Of course, the spirit of hard work is part of what has made China great. But there’s                                      another side to that coin: we work too hard and may die under the strain.

For me, what’s died is my belief in finding a balanced existence in high school life. I  ar about my European friends’ escapes. Imaging them from my little study, vacation seems less a ticket to paradise than the claim check to a parcel of lost life.

Jastine Leung:  Ghoul_pink_fantasy@yahoo.com