Graduation speech Maya Chen (Summary)

Teachers, principals, parents, siblings, coaches, and if we really want to go there, the amazing Lawson staff, thank you for giving us the motivation, the strength, and the opportunity to plow through the past couple of years. If only we could have the same group of people next to us forever…we could do anything!

My parents, probably like everyone else’s, have already started preparing me for the big, scary world where anything can happen. So far I’ve been given the “college survival” master class, which is basically don’t drink, don’t join fraternities, don’t eat junk food, and wait for the water to boil over three times before taking the dumplings out of the pot. It’s nice knowing that my parents think that I am fully liable to becoming an uncontrollable, hot-cheetos-consuming partier, because that means I have some room to improve. The truth is, I will not become an out-of-control, raging partier, and I trust that most of you, if not all of you, will not as well. But what can I say about the future? No one knows that much.

No one should try to know that much. I say this because after four and a half years of trying to keep my head just that much above the tumultuous currents of high school, I’ve realized that no amount of preparation will ready us for the things to come.

When I was still about this tall and this shape, and couldn’t hit a single shot to the backcourt, one of my most beloved and dedicated coaches took me aside and told my frustrated self that one day, I would be able to. One day, I would wake up, go to training, and suddenly feel like I had the power to move mountains, much less a small thing covered in feathers. Now, looking back, he could’ve easily been describing how one feels after taking steroids, but at that age, I took him for his word. And so I waited. And that day never came. Instead, it was a few years later, probably after I came to SHSID, that I stopped and stared at how far I was hitting into the backcourt. It was a pretty cool feeling. Sometime between this and this, I had crossed that threshold, the one that I had been looking forward to crossing for all those years.

Things rarely work out the way you picture them to (and if they do, I commend you). When we first walked through those gates, we all knew that at one point, we would be here. Except there was that hazy, annoying gray area between here and there that we had no idea how to deal with. And so we put our heads down. We fought that gray thing; we fought to clear it up like our acne and the skies over Shanghai. We fought through one U.S. president’s administration into the next. We grew closer and became strangers, then grew close again. We held hands and jumped. And wait—WHAT? Now we’re leaving. I signed up for this, but I did not sign up for this. Seeing Director Liu, my homeroom teacher Ms. Wu, Principal Ma and Principal Feng and Principal Wang. My subject teachers. Ms. Zhang and Ms. Zhang. My parents and my grandma. My coach, 邱导. MY FRIENDS. They’re all getting ready to say goodbye, and I’m not ready to hear it. None of us, or mostly none of us, are ready.

When battles are fought hard and won, time goes by quickly. Jason, in his speech, was so accurate when he said that “time works in unfathomable ways.” I would like to add to that. Time works only in unfathomable ways. I don’t think we would have been as emotional as we are today if we hadn’t opened ourselves up to imperfection and failure. If we hadn’t been willing to forge our own paths and shun the shortcuts. If we hadn’t allowed ourselves to be pushed by the strong, protective hands of our school’s faculty. This punch-in-the-gut feeling we’re all experiencing right now? That comes with vulnerability, not with a wish for things to work out well.

I believe that our guiding figures in this school deserve a lifetime of thanks for their sacrifices in getting us to this point. Think about it. We only have to go through one high school graduation. They have to go through dozens. I’ve used this analogy before, but they are like mother hens, pecking this way and that, worrying their hair gray about us.

If you can rewind all the way back a hundred years to the beginning of this speech, I mentioned that no one should try to know too much about the future. Okay. No, definitely read up on the AI Revolution, and climate change, and foreign policy, etc. because those things are important to our responsibilities as global citizens in general. But I think our strongest supporters and our souls would benefit if we remember to (wisely) explore the limits of what we can do, wherever we’re going.

SHSID class of 2017, there is no mold we must fit or threshold we must be aware of. Because we are not just baby chicks, who grow up and leave their homes, never to come back. We are an ohana, and ohana means family. And family means no one gets left behind, or forgotten. Congratulations, class of 2017! Thank you for everything, and good luck!