Becoming an "expert" in being new at school

I went to four different primary schools in total, over the course of six years. My first primary school was in Sapporo, in the north of Japan, while my father was doing his PhD and post-doctorate research. Then we moved to Kanagawa prefecture which is right next to Tokyo when my father started working for an engineering consulting company there, and I transferred to a school nearby as a result. After that, with my father’s career moves, we first moved to Tokyo, then back to Kanagawa once again, and with each move, I went to a new school.

Settling into a new school wasn’t always easy. On your first few days, everyone wants to be your friend. This is your best – and pretty much one and only – opportunity to place yourself into part of an established friendship group. If you miss this chance, you miss it. In a few days’ time, you would no longer be new, and other pupils lose interest in welcoming you to their group. So if you haven’t settled into one friendship group or another by then, it would be pretty difficult to be accepted into one later on.

In my first school, I joined Day 1 of Year 1, so I managed to make friends just like the rest of the kids. In my second school, I was lucky enough to have settled into the existing friendship group of four other girls, and my life was fine after that. Mind you, between different friendship groups there was something close to competition, or even tension – with one group saying bad things about the other at times. When you are left alone and not part of any group, then, well, you are probably the most vulnerable to those bullies who tend to attack those who don’t have a backing from another group. In my third and fourth schools, unfortunately, I fell into that trap. My shyness came out by then, and I didn’t manage to settle into a friendship group in good time. Tough, my school life felt lonely, and I ended up spending much of my break time at the library, alone.

Then comes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy of a shy and quiet person becoming even more shy and quiet, as a result of losing confidence in her friend-making capability. It wasn’t all lonely, though, as I enjoyed those after-school clubs where pupils from outside my class didn’t know I was that shy and quiet girl, unintentionally giving me an opportunity to be a lot more outgoing.

A positive side-effect of being shy and quiet and spending much of my break time at the library is, however, that I came to really really love reading – in the absence of human friends who were close to me, books became my best friends. I kept reading, and reading, and reading, and sometimes wrote my own novels too, although my novels usually had a beginning but no end, as I wasn’t patient enough to finish writing a complete book. I carried that reading habit after leaving Japan, which is probably the reason why I managed to keep my Japanese a lot better than many of my peer Chinese kids who spent their childhood in Japan but subsequently returned to China.

In short, going to four different primary schools in Japan gave me bitter-sweet memories, as well as a strong tolerance to loneliness.