{"id":2092,"date":"2019-10-18T21:10:23","date_gmt":"2019-10-18T21:10:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/?p=2092"},"modified":"2019-10-18T21:15:13","modified_gmt":"2019-10-18T21:15:13","slug":"looking-past-the-surface","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/2019\/10\/18\/looking-past-the-surface\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking Past the Surface"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Helen Liu (V) <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The speaker at the podium\u2013\u2013let\u2019s call him A\u2013\u2013gave his speech, charged with emotion. I never knew he could write like this, I thought, as I clapped along with my friends at the particularly touching parts. I didn\u2019t know A that well\u2014he was in a separate friend circle at that point\u2014but the works he shared in our summer writing class had always been deeply personal. They were sharp and honest declarations of his cultural identity and body image, but they had never been as carefully planned and brilliantly executed as this one.\t<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later that night, after everyone finished presenting, my entire friend group crowded into one room and started discussing all the orations we\u2019d heard. We loved Elijah\u2019s speech, Annie\u2019s story was beautiful, and A did so well; did you know he could write like that? Those that had presented were congratulated, and those that hadn\u2019t yet were encouraged to do so next week. This was a writer\u2019s workshop after all. Nobody would judge us, as long as we did our best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a knock on the door and a classmate stepped in, looking frazzled. \u201cUh, hey, sorry, I didn\u2019t want to bother you guys, but my friends are getting all caught up in drama right now, and I don\u2019t really want to get involved.\u201d She shut the door behind her, looked around, and continued in a hushed voice. \u201cDid you know that A plagiarized his entire speech off Youtube?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was true. The word choice, the inflection in tone, the pauses every few sentences.\u00a0 A had copied almost every single thing. He didn\u2019t own up to it fully; when the truth caught up to him, he claimed that he found the speech online in his native language and had translated it. He apologized for plagiarizing and promised that he wouldn\u2019t do it again. Yet a week later, when we were sharing pieces for our class anthology, he read a piece that one of my friends had previously shown me online. After finishing, he looked at me with a smile and said, \u201cI spent a lot of time on this, taking inspiration from all different parts of my life. Did you like it?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\tI smiled back, genuinely, but a little sad. \u201cOf course. It\u2019s beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I should\u2019ve been angry. He was lying straight to my face; he broke his promise and my already-wavering trust in him as a friend. Though, with A, I realized I couldn\u2019t even be annoyed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the first pieces he had shared in class was one he had written during a free-writing session. He talked about his childhood as an immigrant and the self-hatred that developed because of it. He wished he had blonde hair and blue eyes when he was young, and later he despised his body altogether. He was insecure about his English and had always felt out of place. It wasn\u2019t until high school, he said, that he began to understand that he should love himself for who he was; in his words, he was \u201ca star that shone and could help other people shine too.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He would randomly compliment people in class and was always the first to declare with a grin that our writing was beautiful or that we were the nicest people he\u2019d ever met. The last night at the workshop, he hugged me, urged me to stay in touch, and thanked me for being his friend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, even though A plagiarized and lied, all I could do was hope that he became more confident in himself. I\u2019m sure he knew what he was doing was wrong\u2014he was just too insecure to stop. After all, in class, he\u2019d always jokingly-but-not-so-jokingly deprecate his own work. The idea of showing it to other people, let alone presenting it to an entire camp, must have been terrifying. I couldn\u2019t be angry at him. Sure, I was a little disappointed, but mostly, I felt bad for him. Taken without context, this seems ridiculous. Why would I feel bad for someone who plagiarized, promised he wouldn\u2019t do it again, and then broke that promise?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I felt bad because that\u2019s not all who A was. I barely knew him, yet I could tell he was optimistic, cheerful, and the type of person who wanted to make those around him happy, even while struggling with his own happiness. To reduce him to a plagiarizer\u2014that<\/em> would be ridiculous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


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Helen Liu (V) The speaker at the podium\u2013\u2013let\u2019s call him A\u2013\u2013gave his speech, charged with emotion. I never knew he could write like this, I thought, as I clapped along with my friends at the particularly touching parts. I didn\u2019t know A that well\u2014he was in a separate friend circle at that point\u2014but the works […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":2122,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[30],"class_list":["post-2092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-summer-experiences","tag-summer-experiences"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2092"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2158,"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2092\/revisions\/2158"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}