It was winter break, about three days before Christmas, and my dad decided that now was as good of a time as any to reaffirm his Asian-ness. So, he signed me up for an SAT prep class.

I'd been slipping academically quite quickly that semester. My semester grades were lower than ever; my first SAT score was hideously ugly; my essay score was poo; my PSAT score didn’t qualify me for National Merit. I was far out of the running for the title of "Most Asian of Asian Kids," and my dad was panicking because that meant he was out of the running for the title of "Most Asian of Asian Dads."

And thus, three days before Christmas, I found myself outside a sketchy-looking office building behind Pike.

The sky was gray, and the weather sucked.

But my last SAT reading score sucked even more, so I hauled my a*s inside the building and found the office that Dr. Wang*, a middle-aged, graying Chinese man, had converted into his SAT reading and writing classroom.

I had arrived early, and there were only about three to four other people in the class when I sat down, including two guys in the back who had clearly signed up together and a scrawny, fidgety, monkey-ish Chinese kid with a bowl haircut. Other students started arriving pretty quickly. Each one of them just as yellow as the next. I assumed that all their dads were competing for the "Most Asian" title, or maybe they were just genuinely intelligent and hard-working students.

Anyway, as class started, Mr. Wang had us quickly introduce ourselves. There were a great deal of underclassmen taking the class (I honestly wish that I started SAT prep before my junior year- then maybe I wouldn’t have even been there to begin with), and I was actually one of the considerably older students. Every single one of the students there was Chinese-American (plus the one Korean-American girl sitting next to me) and had come from a nearby high school.

Every single one except for the scrawny, bowl-haired kid who sat with slumping posture in the back right corner of the room. We’ll call him Hanlu (named after my bae, Luhan-- though he in no way bore any resemblance to Luhan whatsoever). He was a short high school junior who wore thick glasses and had a high-pitched, excited voice that was as fidgety as his fingers. He spoke in a very, heavy, stereotypical Chinese accent with slightly broken English. Unlike the rest of us, he looked happy to be there.

It was clear that he was one of those kids who had only just come to America from mainland China. I thought of my cousin, Max, who similarly had come from China only a year ago in his junior year just to study here. I remembered talking to Max about his PSAT testing last year, about how he found the math section to be ridiculously easy but the reading section to be difficult due to his lack of English fluency.

I felt pity for Hanlu. As we checked over the diagnostic test as a class, he asked more questions than everyone else asked combined, questions that, to the rest of us native English speakers, seemed basic.

“And- And number 15!” He’d say in that excited, accented voice of his. “Number 15 is hard.”

A couple of us snickered or smiled a little at the way he phrased some of his concerns and at the way Dr. Wang would mercilessly roast him for asking about such easy questions (“Come on, Hanlu! This is third-grade question!”), but the smiles had faded at the end of the lesson when Dr. Wang began to read off each of our scores, in the order of lowest to highest (it soon became very clear that none of these kids actually needed the "prep" except for me.) Naturally, mine was always one of the first to be announced.

For the most part, he kept them anonymous. “If you got three wrong in writing and six wrong in reading,” he said, in his own slightly accented voice “Your score is 730. If you got two wrong in writing and two wrong in reading...”

Until he reached the very last score, where he looked up into the back right corner of the room, put down his pen and say, “Good job, Hanlu. You got 800.”

A full score.

“What?!” And we all snapped our heads back and stare at that small, bowl-headed boy, who was giggling silently to himself in his seat.

What the actual heck.

It was so unexpected, that for the first few days in class, that was all that we’d talk about.

“That Asian Kid is actually so smart.” Darren, the tall guy who was sitting behind me, was saying when I had arrived to class early one day. I always found it ironic how he referred to Hanlu as “The Asian Kid” even though, technically, all of us were Asian.

“The Asian Kid” heard him. He seemed to have taken a liking to Darren (it was actually kind of funny- to me as a spectator/eavesdropper at least. I don’t think it was funny to Darren.) and would often try to talk to him before class.

“Are you junior?” He asked Darren.

“Uh, yeah.” He asked Darren what school he went to, and Darren told him.

“What 数学 do you take?”

Darren looked confused. “Huh?”

“数学.” Hanlu repeated again. “数学.”

Darren looked at his friend George who was sitting next to him. George didn’t know either.

Hanlu couldn’t seem to grasp the English word for it. To prevent further awkwardness, I heroically stopped scrolling through Instagram to step in.

“Math.” I translated, turning around to face them. “He’s asking you what math class you take.”

“Yes.” said Hanlu, his eyes still fixed on Darren. “Math. I’m take B.C. Do you think B.C. is hard?”

“B.C. wasn’t that har-”

“What about World History? B.C. is harder than World History right? I’m take World History next year. Is World History har-”

“Well, you can’t really compare World History and B.C. since they’re two completely different subjects.” I said, welcoming myself into their conversation.

But my welcome was not accepted as Hanlu was completely and utterly fixated on Darren and seemed to not have heard a word I said, so I turned back around in my chair and went back to my phone.

My phone will always love me even if no one else does. :’)

I went back to scrolling through Instagram, but found myself liking photos emptily, without really looking at them.

How is it that a kid who couldn’t even think of the English word “math” beat us native speakers to tears at SAT reading and writing? How is it that someone like Hanlu gets consistent 790s and 800s on these practice tests while my dumb, fluent ass is still praying to reach that 700? (My score started improving a lot early on in the class, but then towards the end it started getting worse again until my score on the last practice was the same as my score on the diagnostic.) How did people like him do it?

And then I thought of my parents.

How did they even do it?

In a way, Hanlu was quite similar to them; they were just from different generations. My parents are first generation immigrants. When my dad decided to come to America, he left behind everything. His family, his friends, his language, his culture... He spent his first Christmas and his first Chinese New Year in America alone, thousands of miles away from home, in a foreign land because he had a vision. He wanted success, and he was motivated to work hard to achieve it against all the odds that this strange land had thrown against him.

Hanlu was no different. English wasn’t his native language, yet he still worked hard to learn the ins and outs of its grammar and its usage. He, too, sees the possibility of a bright future ahead of him, and he’ll stop at nothing to achieve it. And he knows what difficulties he has to face to achieve it. He knows how much is riding on his SAT score. A whole nation full of kids who grew up speaking English? Why, that’s nothing. He’ll still strive for that 99th percentile, and he’ll work until he makes that 99th percentile. That 800. That near perfect score.

That kid is kind of my hero.

*Names have all been changed to protect the privacy of these individuals.