book of the week

differential equations

T I T L E

differential equations

A U T H O R

cloudygrayskies

S Y N O P S I S

My only problems were supposed to be the ones in my Calculus book.

In which I narrowly avoid high school drama, get sucked into a whirlpool of it anyways, and hope that I can escape without failing my AP tests or jeopardizing my GPA.

The contemplation of death has never seemed so sweet.

T H O U G H T S

Guess who got a 5 on the AP Calculus AB exam?

Not Riley Chang; at least, not yet.

In the list of this week's other, irrelevant news, I did! That's one thing I don't have in common with Riley, the main character of 's "Differential Equations". One thing I do have in common? Being an "Asian disgrace" who can't read or write Chinese properly to save my life. (I can speak. Not well.)

Riley Chang, like most of my school's 250 or so students enrolled in the calc division, is 110% sure that she's going to fail the AP Calc AB exam---110% out of a maximum 100%, because that's just how bad she's convinced her math skills are.

Sitting in the shadow of a younger sibling who seems to be absolutely perfect, Riley is convinced that she is doomed to be a disappointment to her family with her sub-4.0 GPA and her B- in calc. Because, after all, in an Asian family, A is the average. Not an anomaly. An average. Avoiding her apparent enemy, Sarah/Dennis, and a school filled with too many people with the same name, it's easy to see how Riley gets lost in a crowd, a haze of thoughts that do nothing but drag her down.

Riley is a representation of the danger of culturally-produced stereotypes, ones that affect our mentality and lower our self-esteem to see ourselves as something much worse than we really are. "Asians are nerds with no social lives," people say. For Riley, that flies out the window as she focuses more on her friends and her social lives than her academics because as humans, in the end our emotional connections mean more to us than our scores printed in black on a College Board website.

To put it simply, Riley is the antithesis of the stereotype, and that's why I've chosen to talk about her for #projectasiangirls.

From childhood, Riley is pressured to be the best, to excel at everything she does, something I relate to deeply because our parents want to be proud of us and know that their child will be successful in the future. After all, isn't that what we all want for ourselves and our families? To know that our legacies will continue safely and that we will be remembered, if not by our own actions then by our children.

That may be an extremely "Asianized" way of thinking, but it's the one I grew up with, a secret knowledge of that idea always buried in my mind.

Enter Matthew Nguyen, Riley's ex-friend who has suddenly struck up conversations again. After middle school, the original friend group scattered to the winds (sound familiar? basically the story of every middle school friendship), and apparently something went down in freshman year that our narrator unabashedly skirts around every time it comes to the table.

Maybe this is a California girl thing (oh yeah, another similarity to check off the list), or even a school thing, but what happens in freshman year never stays in freshman year. In any case, it's like a total guilt-trip, bringing up memories that you imagined to be hidden away long ago and forcing you to do things you may have never imagined---ergo, confronting Matthew Nguyen.

But after all this gibberish and rambling, I'm not exactly explaining why I love this book so much, am I?

This recommendation is much more personal than some of the previous ones I've done because I can relate on such a deep level with Riley---and that's why I've chosen to show this story to everyone, because for me it feels like giving a piece of my soul away in someone else's poignant words.

Our author has painted the image of a girl who feels so real and so tangible because Riley represents real people, people like me and not an idealized or stereotyped person who will never really exist or whom I will never really meet. But Riley is like so many of the people who I pass by in the hallways every day at school that I can imagine sitting in class with her, exchanging jokes about the latest calculus exam and moaning about an English essay on To Kill a Mockingbird.

By recommending this story to you, I recommend the story of what it truly means to be an Asian high school girl in California, living in a stereotype and yet constantly breaking the box open.

This is a real story, and I know that because in a way, it is my own.

...

written by teamiyazaki