我们从今年第七期开始陆续刊登第二届“北外杯”中学生英文写作大赛的部分获奖作文。本期选登的是北京市人大附中秦苏同学的文章。

Why can't you ever be like Yang Fan?" That's what I've heard most from my mothersince I went into the junior high.

What can I say? Yang Fan is my classmate and my friend. She's good, impossibly good. She always gets good grades in every subject, but she never gets a single minute to play. Whenever I see her, she's doing her homework. Whenever she sees me,she says: "Hey! What are you fussing about? Go and do your homework!" One day, after a tough examination, all of us went to the nearest Starbucks except her. But I can't be her. I even feel sorry for her because her life is tedious and tiring and it's a torture. Giving all of her time to math problems makes her look older than she is. I may wish I could be like her. But I don't think it's worth it. And I think I'm doing quite well. Sometimes I work on hard math problems, well, som etimes. Quite often I read an English storybook, well, quite often.

Or maybe... I've started to search for a new world deep inside my heart. Would time go back to that month when I was in the United States? My mother was a visiting scholar in an American university and I joined her during the summer. There I met Julia. Her teachers were so nice that they never gave her much homework. Even till now, through her emails, I can see that she's just as happy as usual. She is like that, always waving a small flag on the street and telling people not to eat tuna because they are getting fewer and fewer on our planet. That's her, free to do whatever she wants. Perhaps too free? Her math is a mess, her grades aren't very good... but she cares little about it and still believes that she can save all the tuna in the world. A few days ago, she sent me an email and asked me to help her with a math problem. I laughed. A kindergarten kid in China can do it!

Just a few weeks ago I went to Singapore on an exchange program. I stayed with a local family and Sarah was their only daughter. A girl of fifteen years old. She was incredible. She got up at six every morning, made her bed, had her breakfast, and then went to school. I felt ashamed when I compared her tidy room with my little messy den. She worked hard, but not as hard as Yang Fan. She played baseb all after school every day for an hour. Like every high school student in Singapore, she took an active part in community and campus activities (CCA) organized by her school. She told me that she liked these activities. Her parents also believed that community work was important because the CCA was part of the grades students needed to get into a good senior high school. She obeyed her teachers, followed the rules, and behaved properly. She never threw the smallest piece of paper on the ground. No wonder Singapore is extremely clean everywhere.

Yang Fan, Julia, and Sarah are all my friends. I like them and they like me. But they are so different that sometimes I think they are living in three worlds. Occasionally I wish that I could be as hardworking as Yang Fan, as free as Julia,and as well-disciplined as Sarah. But me is me. Whenever I close my eyes, I see
comics, storybooks and a big TV set waving to me. I read English stories and draw cartoons for the whole Sunday, only to find that I have little time to do my homework. I play volleyball until it is completely dark. I laugh with Zhou Xingchi in front of the TV set and cry with Zhou Xun in the theater. Three times I have run for monitor of our class and three times I have succeeded. I still remember when I could barely reach the edge of the kitchen sink, I managed to wash my own hands. I felt proud of myself because I made it.

We have one world and our world is big: when my mother studied on the other side of this world, she couldn't come back to see me for a whole year. But, in this big, big world there are so many small worlds where Yang Fan, Julia, Sarah and I live. Each has its own color and each has its own way. They are coming together to make the one big world.