My Maturity
I used to like the number zero. It neither belongs to the set of real numbers nor that of composite ones. It is not positive or negative. It can be divided by any number, but still stays the same. It exists in its own universe, impervious to all external controls or interdependences.
For a while, I thought Zero resembled me. In other words, I thought it was me. When I was four, my mother told me about how my brother had been locked in the wardrobe at the kindergarten for not finishing his lunch in time, and decided I was not going there. From that moment, perceiving the giant world outside filled with viciousness, like Zero, I created my own tiny world covered by a thick self-protecting haze. During five years of primary school, I made friends with only one girl, who sat next to me and was also a "Zero". We kept quiet in the midst of all avid discussions, never went to any birthday party and sat inside while others were playing hide and seek on the schoolyard. Although our world abounded with aloofness, we both appreciated it since it brought about immunity from peer pressure. Unlike other young girls who strove to get the most precious doll collection, every afternoon, we competed to finish homework first and shared our lucky money envelope collections.
But then, in June of 2005, I went to a soccer match with my brother and for the first time in my life, other than the giant chilling world I had so deeply engraved in my mind, I saw a brand new world. To me, the match was a motion picture made up of separate patterns. During 95 minutes, it was filled with a cacophony of hysterical screams, applauses and drums. When Red Eagle scored a goal, my brother and some strange men next to him sang out loud and danced together, while another group above me started screaming a stream of obscene words in frustration. However, for some unfathomable reason, I was neither vexed by those noises nor offended by those men at all. In contrast, I felt the excitement of the audience penetrating into my body, stirring inside. My cheeks started getting hotter. My skin had goosebumps. And I felt more hysterical than ever. I also applauded, screamed and laughed out loud to encourage Red Eagle. Never before had I truly left my tiny world and mixed myself in the enormous world I had always been striving to recoil from; never before had I felt such an invisible yet firm string connecting thousands of people that could turn strangeness into brotherhood. Those 95 minutes gave me a fresh insight into the picture of life: The enormous world outside was actually not as frightening as I had imagined. My world, on the other hand, lacked some essence.
It still took me a long time to figure out how my world really looked and what essence it lacked until I saw its reflection in J.D.Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye. I happened to find it while working on the Book Donation Campaign for Orphans in the summer of 2006. When I read the novel, ironically, I felt such an intense empathy with Holden's fear of adulthood and how he resisted his own maturity. He and I shared the same illusory conceptions of life's bitterness, therefore, confined ourselves in protective shells. But, more importantly, Holden's life full of confusion made me truly cogitate on the pros and cons of my seclusion. Since I was seven, my preferred companions had been books. My impressions of the vicious world, from the books I had read and frivolous scrambles I had observed, gave me a strong sense of training myself to become extremely independent and competitive. Nonetheless, the more I proceeded with the story, the more it enlightened me that like Holden, all my interactions with people around got loosened because I didn't grip on to them tightly. Gradually, I would cease to have any real relationship and lag behind. I was disappointed by this fact. I had fooled myself that my world acted as a perfect motivation for me, but it wasn't. Instead, it reflected in the book as a deterrent to my self-accomplishment. My tiny world collapsed. And I was exposed to the giant chilling world.
It is actually not scary at all, as far as I can see. Now I perceive it as an endless book to learn. It taught me about interaction, empathy and protection. At grade 10, I had to do a project about numbers for the School Mathematics Club. What interested me the most, however, was not the numbers, but their similarity to our lives. We are actually natural numbers connected by addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. We will become much stronger if we know how to add and multiply our strength together. Conversely, when we do not tighten our connections, it means we are subtracting or dividing our strength into smaller pieces. In a society where addition and multiplication surpass subtraction and division, our community will become a powerful exponentiation function. At the same time, I realize Zero cannot be a part of the community. It cannot be added or multiplied to get a bigger number. It even cannot make a number less powerful. Zero just stays in the middle of positive numbers and negative numbers, acting as a boundary between the powerful community and the world of people like Holden Caulfield or me before. Now I no longer exist on that world and no longer like Zero.
It isn't me.
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