Peeling Back the Mask of My Past: A Personal Essay

Personal Essay
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Peeling Back the Mask of my Past
As the plane got airborne, I looked through the window at the city I had called home my entire life. It had a thick fog which hovered over it making the skyline hardly visible beyond a few hundred meters from the airport. A few minutes the city was sinking into the horizon and I sunk into my seat, and I clenched my face mask. At that moment I remembered my family and I felt I was abandoning them when they needed me the most.
I am the only child to Mr. and Mrs. Xi thanks to our government for making sure I never knew what it feels like to say ‘my sister’ or ‘my brother.’ it is something I felt carried much meaning but just like many of my friends, we were all the only children in our families. I was born and raised in Beijing. My parents were a factory worker in a nearby textile factory. We lived in a small apartment in the outskirts of the town where housing was affordable for our family. My parents struggled to ensure I got a good education and often took several jobs to earn enough to send me to better schools. Every day my mother would prepare me for school and remind me to wear my face mask to ‘prevent bad diseases’ because of the city’s pollution. I was not any different from my friends, and we all met in school looking like toddler surgeons. Since we lived near the industrial area of the city, the pollution was higher and often foul smoke from a textile factory nearby would even fill our class during the summer and our teachers ushered us to open up the windows to wear our masks and open up the windows to let ‘fresh air’ in. It was a normal experience which we were used to.
Our homes were not any different. We were used to a foul smell emanating from a nearby river which was too polluted. Our parents and teachers warned us off ever going to play or swim in it. They scared us of stories of people who dipped their feet into the river and the skin on their legs peeled off. Later, after a few years leaving China the narrative to deter children from going into rivers is very different; it revolves around being attacked by alligators or piranhas. Well, that narrative cannot ...