Publish in Newsweek, "My Turn," September 20, 1999
Surviving a Year of Sleepless Nights
by Jenny Hung
"Taking honors classes and getting straight A’s
made me a success. But it didn’t make me
happy."
NOW A HIGH-SCHOOL SENIOR, I still
remember my freshman year with a shudder; it
was the year my friends and I joked about as
the “Year of Sleepless Nights.” It wasn’t that I
had contracted a rare sleeping disorder or
suffered from a bad case of insomnia that
particular year; in fact, nothing could have
been farther
from the truth. I had done what many diligent
students do: sacrifice precious sleep for the
sake of academic success.
Don’t get me wrong; my parents never
mandated that I take all the honors classes I
could gain admission to. No one told me to take
three honors classes. No one, that is, except the
little voice in my head that convinced me
scholarly success was based upon the number
of “H’s” on my high-school transcript. The
counselors cautioned me not to do it, students
who had fallen into the trap before warned me
against it and my parents just left it up to me.
Through it all, I just smiled and reassured them,
“Don’t worry; I can handle it.” The trouble was,
I didn’t have the slightest idea what lay ahead.
I soon found myself mired in work. For a
person whose friends teased her about being a
neat freak, I grew increasingly messy. My
room and desk looked like my backpack had
exploded. There was no time to talk to friends
on the phone, not even on the weekends. Going
to bed at midnight was a luxury, 1 a.m. was
normal, 3 a.m. meant time to panic and 4 a.m.
meant it was time to go to sleep defeated. Most
days, I would shuffle clumsily from class to
class with sleep-clouded eyes and nod
off during classroom lectures. There was even a
month in winter when I was so self-conscious
of my raccoon eyes that I wore sunglasses to
school.
My parents applauded my academic
success, but hardly knew the price I paid for it.
I vividly remember one night when my mother
couldn’t fall asleep. She kept going to bed and
getting up again. Every -,
time I heard her get up, I’d turn off my light so
she wouldn’t catch me still awake. By 5 o’clock
that morning, I was so sleepy that I didn’t hear
her footsteps as she shuffled down the hallway.
When she saw the light under my door, she
came in and demanded to know why I wasn’t
sleeping. That was when I knew I was defeated
for the night. My mother frowned at me with
concern, and I no longer had the strength or
energy to resist the temptation to rest. I woke
up two hours later and got dressed for school.
Despite the sleep-deprived state I con-
stantly lived in, the A’s kept coming home
on my report card, and my homework was
always turned in on time. I caught up on my
sleep in what little spare time I could snatch on
the weekends. I had created my own hell, and I
was determined to endure until I could get
myself out of it.
By the time my freshman year ended, I
was rewarded for my hard work. My school
held an academic assembly in May, and posters
naming the top 10 students in each grade
dangled from the ceiling. And there, on the top
of the freshman list, I saw:
“1.) Jenny Hung GPA: 4.43.” The sight of my
name on that list was gratifying after all the
hard work I had poured into getting it up there,
but it also made me think. Was that position
really that important to me? Did I want to
remember high school as nights without sleep
and days of work? Sure, the weight of the
medal felt good in my hand, but it didn’t mean
much. That I would remain at the top of that list
was doubtful, and in the end, the paper of the
poster was biodegradable. There can only be
one valedictorian in each class, and that person
usually has to work his fingers
to the bone against fierce competition to claim
that position. That life, I decided, was not for
me.
When sophomore year came around, I
chose my classes carefully. The honors classes
didn’t completely disappear from my transcript,
but they weren’t as plentiful as before. I found
myself busy with all the extracurricular
activities that began to fill up my days. My
friends no longer thought of me as the outsider
who slept through lunchtime gossip. I felt the
joy of holding a yearbook I helped to create,
and spent hours on the phone comforting a
friend who had burst into tears over her
dropping grades.
After all these experiences, I frown when I
hear my classmates tell stories about their
parents’ pressuring them to do well in school.
Sometimes I wonder if their parents understand
what lengths their children go to so they can
sport bumper stickers on their cars proclaiming
MY CHILD GOES TO HARVARD! If that’s
the case, they need to learn what my parents
and I have learned: academic success means
nothing if your heart isn’t into earning it, and in
the end, books will always fail to teach you as
much as life itself.
HUNG lives in southern California.
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