Only on the second Friday of July did I witness the momentous strength of empathy––no matter how hackneyed. Before the second Friday of July, I thought that these heart-wrenching confessions only happened in fiction, but they don’t. 

On that day, I had a public-speaking ZOOM class with four middle-school girls and our teacher, Ms. Sullivan, who all lived in Alabama and me, the only boy and only one from New Jersey. Our regional differences actually enticed me to share myself and be open to hearing their stories from living in a drastically different part of the country. Therefore, I highly anticipated my turn to speak. With my foot tapping like a jackrabbit on the floor, fingers drumming on the desk, and my heart bouncing around in my chest like a ball in a pinball machine. 

 We were already into our second speech of the session: a squat girl who emigrated from China to the U.S. With the dark, irregular lighting on her face, her face appeared scrunched-up and emotionless, the edges and lines drowned out by shadow. As she spoke, it became obvious that she led a charmed life! Full of frequent visits to various branches of her family tree living in China, delectable homemade food made by those family members, and timeless days of joy and excitement with friends. But when she began to speak about how most of her family members, all of her friends, and the many places in China that held countless memories, her voice drifted into nostalgia and wistfulness. She was homesick. But I was so involved in relaying in my head what I would say, I didn’t absorb her stories and the emotion compacted within them, allowing the possible connections I could have drawn between her life in China with my experiences with family and food there to fade. And then I missed the cues on what was coming next. 

Glancing at the girl’s face through her blurry, pixelated camera, I saw her eyes droop. In fact, every feature of her face turned upside-down like drops of rain sliding down a windowpane during a storm. As her expression fell millimeter by millimeter, her voice shuddered as if it were a wine glass sitting on a smooth, polished, marble tabletop during an earthquake, threatening to fall and shatter.

As soon as the rain drops reached the bottom and the wine glass shattered to the ground, the sobbing erupted. If I did not have respect before, I certainly had it now. I soon could see how overcome with pangs of homesickness she was, to the point where I could feel the pain. Along with my indifferent first reaction, my anxious manner was replaced with silence and surprise.

Before this moment, I was oblivious that people around me could become sentimental to the point of tears and sobbing from simply thinking about the past. Sadly, in order to recognize the scope of the situation I had to witness her complete mental collapse before my eyes.

Novels and stories create magnificent representations of emotions and their changes in people from experiences, but they’re just compilations of words. I felt the overwhelming nostalgia written plainly on the girl’s face and heart thereafter whereas before I was unaware of her background, ignorant of her feelings, and unfeeling of the emotion behind her words. After the girl teary-eyed finished her speech, we all extended our applause as I sat back in my chair, back bent, arms crossed, fingers numb and cold at the tips, feet planted lightly on the floor. An allotted time of a few minutes was set for comments and questions, but when Ms. Sullivan saw the girl’s teary face in her hands, she decided to move on and give the girl some time.

My speech was next.

But no anxiety racked my brain then. No matter what I presented that day about myself, I realized more about that girl and learned how our brains can unearth telepathic connections. Slipping into the forefront of my mind were images of my own grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins stuck in China, a couple of whom had passed. I knew her natural compulsion to want to return to China and visit my family and just spend some rare, peaceful moments with them, enjoying steaming plates of family-specialty food. Seeing the pain of the past lifted a shroud from my eyes, which were then inundated with a wave of bubbling, bursting awareness and compassion. I was consumed, but I stepped out reformed. 

Abolished was my ignorance, and through the cracks left behind, flooded-in the empathy.