Packaged Flowers

The owner of these beautiful flowers must have packed them into a pretty box to make it look even more splendid. Sadly, their beauty is covered by a very plain box.

I felt sorry for the flowers because they aren't allowed to grow, now that they're cut off from their body. Furthermore, they're beauty cannot shine anymore. I was staring at this picture thinking this stuff when suddenly my neighbor, Hyun-Hee came into my head.

Hyun-Hee was an 11-year-old girl who was in my class and lived next door. She was a girl not unlike everybody else, who loved to play dolls with her friends, loved reading fairy tale stories and playing outside on the weekends. The only difference she had from her peers was that she was always on the top on every exam in my class. Nobody saw her studying in our classroom, but she was exceptional in terms of grades. I was curious how she had managed to be such a great student even though she didn't have any special feature. And as I was living next door, I found out the secret eventually; her mother was the strictist person I had ever encountered. I could hear her mother yelling at her daughter everyday, possibly because she wanted her to study more and get better grades. Hyun-Hee's schedule was like that of a celebrity. She had a bunch of academies and tutors coming over helping her to study more and more. Hyun-Hee seemed to be really stressed out from this, and one day…

We were playing hide and seek and riding bicycles in the backyard of our apartment, and when I suggested we go home now that it’s getting darker, she came over to me and suddenly started crying. I was utterly shocked at her sudden behavior, and I didn’t know what to say. All I could do was to stare at her vaguely waiting for her to say something.  Half crying, she told me these shocking stuff. For a few days, she stayed up all night trying to figure out the answers of the math problems she couldn’t figure out. She was dozing all night, but her mom kept waking her up, making her get the correct answers before she sleeps. She didn’t want to go home, because everyday, her mom yells at her for playing for so long and not studying enough.

Now, she ended up in a normal high school, being a normal student with normal grades. Now that I’m thinking about her, what her mother was trying to do was to pack a bunch of beautiful flowers in a plain box, labeled “beautiful flowers.” She should have let her go free and let her be the one who decides on her things. She should have let her do things she liked. She should have let the beautiful flowers blossom freely and express their own beauty and talent they were born with. Instead, she wrapped up her talent and her own characteristics with the “standardized features” by giving her so much stress an 11-year-old couldn’t possibly bear.

What I’m trying to say here is that, the real beauty can only be achieved, and a leader of a community can only be reared, by letting the children’s natural talents shine, not by oppressing them with unmanagable workloads.