Suyouping--The Place of Youth: The Place of Youth

Author: Suyouping
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-08-01
Features: Cherish the courage of growing up, witness the power of youth, "Good Tiger" shares the emotions along the way: from the overnight fame of "Little Tigers" to the fifth prince in "New Journey to the West," to the currently filming "Love in the Aegean," spanning fifteen years, transforming a naive boy into a mature man. Over the past 15 years, Suyouping has earnestly recorded the most chaotic and obscure high school life in his life, honestly facing the bitter youth. Accompanying the book are more than 100 close-up behind-the-scenes photos and exquisite collectible posters. Be Yourself, happiness is the most important! If I reflect on my current level of self-awareness, I might constantly ask myself why I took the college entrance exam? What does the college entrance exam represent? Why study? Thinking about these questions one after another, my college entrance exam scores wouldn’t have been this good. Fortunately, I didn’t think too much and blindly listened to what others said, focusing solely on studying. This is actually not that bad. If there are too many doubts, one has to spend time first to overcome those psychological barriers. In the end, the conclusion I reached was to live for myself, not for others. Why must I bear such great pressure? The outcome would have been completely different today. It’s hard to say what decision is the best, after all, time only moves forward, and nothing can be repeated from the beginning. History has no "what ifs." Writing this, I suddenly remembered what I wrote in my graduation album in senior year three: "Be Yourself, happiness is the most important!" Isn’t that right? Life is just like this. This sentence is actually also a way I encourage another version of myself to be more optimistic and open-minded. My grades in freshman and sophomore years were very poor, always ranking at the bottom of the class. Since math and English were my strongest subjects in middle school, I didn’t think there was much difference between high school math and middle school math. I believed that doing well in the exam was easy and that I could just read casually. However, my freshman math teacher didn’t follow the textbook and started teaching logic, things like "if P then Q" from the beginning. I was very careless and missed the early lessons, so I couldn’t keep up with the later ones and suffered great frustration, feeling very tense. Every time there was an exam, I had to ask classmates for help, trying to break free from the shadow of this nightmare. As for publicity and fame, I could let them go without hesitation. At that time, the company was about to release the "Story of the Stars" album by "Little Tigers," while also filming album covers, recording, and appearing on shows. I was very reluctant to participate in these activities. I thought, I could give up all these activities and just focus on studying, just like my classmates, studying hard. There was a classmate in my class, who is now in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at National Taiwan University. Later, I learned that he had a very "impulsive" personality. During high school, I felt he looked down on me everywhere, didn’t like me. But the more he ignored me, the more I sometimes tried to please him. I even unconsciously imitated his walk, how he slumped and was carefree, sometimes admiring his handwriting and trying to imitate his style or handwriting, taking him as an example. On one hand, I really wanted to get close to him and be friends with him, looking for opportunities to talk to him during dismissal or when playing sports. On the other hand, I also saw him as an imaginary rival, which stimulated my competitiveness. I refused to lose, secretly setting him as a benchmark, determined to surpass him one day. During the winter vacation of my junior year, I started studying from the second day of the Chinese New Year, and my mood had stabilized. In the second semester of junior year, the first major mock exam was held. After each major mock exam, the school’s academic affairs office would post the ranking list of students, and everyone would eagerly gather to compare their scores. This time, although my study progress hadn’t fully caught up with the mock exam schedule, the results showed that I was around the top ten in the class. As I was looking at the list, I heard some classmates from other classes pushing in front, saying, "Don’t study so hard, a little more time won’t make a difference!" and casually urging others to go play sports. The teacher, hearing about this situation in the class, repeatedly told us that we should treat students from other classes as rivals, not to fight among ourselves, and to make our class’s mock exam scores better than those of other classes. Only by all passing university together could we achieve true victory. To put it clearly, my effort was very simple: I wanted to prove to everyone that I could also get into a good school. Beyond pursuing this idea, I didn’t think about anything else—whether studying was meaningful, which path to take in the future, or what my main interests were, etc. Under the premise of entering university, those were fundamentally not issues. When I was promoted from freshman to sophomore, I faced the choice of grouping. Like most classmates, I thought that choosing medical, agricultural, or science and engineering majors usually made people seem smarter. After the grouping form was handed out, I didn’t realize it was still in my desk drawer until the seventh day. The person collecting the forms kept urging me, saying it was mandatory to submit. So, I casually asked a few classmates who were usually close to me, and they all chose the medical, agricultural group, which is the third type, requiring one more subject than the first and second types. Since my grades were very good in middle school, I thought I was smart, and having one more subject wouldn’t matter. I was full of ambition and filled out the form the same as everyone else. Now, thinking back, choosing the group was as reckless as filling out my college major later. From the college entrance exam to when the results arrived, there were still ten to twenty days to wait, days of complete mental emptiness. Although I thought I did well on the exam