Hoarding Ivy Huang I am known to many as a hoarder. At dinners, aunts and uncles would always tease about the stockpile of food I had gathered on my plate. At home, my mom always nagged about the piles of books and pens I refused to put away. My fifth-grade desk was infamous for its seemingly miscellaneous isle of garbage. I was obsessed with preserving the world around me. I just couldn’t throw away the pieces of myself.
My family moved around a lot. I was born at a hospital in Brooklyn, but my parents sent me and my younger brother to live with my aunt in China because they were not financially prepared to raise us yet. Shortly after, my brother and I moved back to New York with my aunt. Today, I can only vaguely recall my time in the Fuzhou village. It was a part of me that only appeared in the form of a mist, and quickly disappeared as soon as I tried to chase it. All I can recall are the sword fights with the other village children, and running across busy streets with cars racing by. Everything else I know comes from stories my cousins and aunts tell. They told me of the time my brother and I had to flee to a family friend’s house because robbers with guns had come in the middle of the night. I have no recollection of this event to this day. I beat myself up for not remembering. I tried mourning the loss of these memories, but it is hard to say goodbye to someone you’ve never met. When my parents finally raised enough money to support us, we moved with them to Mississippi. We then moved to Colorado, and then back to New York. Everything was a blur. I had no friends, but that didn’t matter because nothing seemed to last. I discovered my love for writing when I was in seventh grade. My English teacher had assigned us a realistic fiction assignment. For once, I didn’t have to write a personal narrative about memories I could not access. The assignment allowed me to deviate from my chaotic life. I wrote about a girl named Stephanie Peralta, who’s super smart and goes to Stuyvesant and eventually gets into Harvard. I was unaware at the time, but Stephanie Peralta is not entirely different from me. Even though she is everything I am not (besides the Stuy part), she is a figment of my dreams and memories. I wanted to be smart, and as a seventh-grader preparing for the SHSAT, I wanted to get into Stuyvesant High School. I named my character Stephanie after a tutor I looked up to, who also went to Harvard. After this realization, I became infatuated with literature and writing. It was a way I could resurrect my lost memories into being. I began reading books like The Stranger, Hard Times, The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, and Blood Meridian. When diving into this literary journey, I discovered the power writers had. The images they paint, and the techniques they use can elicit certain feelings and ideas. For the first time, I was in control. And this time, no one can throw away the memories I could hoard within paper and ink. While writing wasn’t a part of my identity growing up, it has certainly become a part of who I am today. One of the many reasons to write fiction, as C.S. Lewis says, is to let ideas “steal past those watchful dragons” that guard our hearts. For me, it is a way to reconstruct memories I had lost, and chase away the demons that have lived in my mind rent-free. I could store anything I wanted in paper and ink; they were the vessels that safely stored my memories. Some call me a hoarder; I consider myself a writer.
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