The First Virtual Pet Game

When I was in fifth grade, it was my third year back in Taiwan after living in South Africa for six years. Those years were very difficult for me, both academically and socially. My level of Chinese was significantly behind all my peers, and my grades were very poor.

Back then, there would be Chinese quizzes where each time you wrote a character incorrectly, you needed to write a full column of the same character as punishment and practice. Most of my classmates only had to write two or three columns of “punishment practice” after each quiz, but I often had to write three to four pages of them. I remember when I was in third grade, I would be writing these penalty characters until 3AM in the morning with my mother next to me, with constant tears on my face. To my knowledge, this was not typical for most third graders.

To add to the difficulty, I was always the odd one out because I came from a different culture. I didn’t really fit in...