My Untruly First Steps in English

Writer: Hang Yu

To be honest, the little "mischiefs" I’ve pulled in English class could fill a whole mini drama.

While others memorized words, I sneakily browsed Stranger Things fan art under my desk. While others practiced listening comprehension, I scribbled down Lady Gaga’s lyrics in my notebook. When it was time to hand in English homework? More often than not, I’d “forget to bring mine.” My poor English grades were never because I couldn’t learn it — deep down, I just thought those textbook dialogues were painfully boring.

“Hello, how are you?” “I’m fine, thank you.” Who even talks like that anymore?

Oddly enough, my English teacher’s surname was Yan. Just like her name implied, she was in her early thirties, always wearing thin-rimmed glasses. Every class was meticulous, her blackboard notes neat enough to look printed. Her lessons were my worst nightmare. She loved calling on students to make sentences, and she had a strange gift — no matter how hard you tried to hide, she’d single you out without fail.

“Li Ming.” Ms. Yan’s voice was soft, yet piercing. “Make a sentence using the subject-linking verb-predicative structure and a polysemous word.”

I stood up slowly, my mind racing. Recite some textbook sentence? Boring. The words slipped out before I thought:

“The past is never dead. It is not even past.”

The whole class fell silent for half a second. Not the tense hush before laughter, but genuine stillness — no one even registered it as a sentence at first.

Ms. Yan froze for a moment.

She pushed up her glasses, walked straight to my desk, her tone unreadable. “Do you know who said this line?”

“William Faulkner,” I replied.

Ms. Yan stared at me for two full seconds. Other teachers in the office lifted their gazes.

“Come see me after class,” she said.

When the bell rang, I dragged my feet to the teacher’s office, fully prepared for a scolding. Ms. Yan was grading papers. She glanced up, gestured to a chair beside her desk. “Sit down.”

I sat nervously, waiting for the lecture to start.

But her first words left me completely stunned.

“You play Rusty Lake too?”

My eyes widened. “How did you know?”

Ms. Yan pulled a sticker out of her drawer — the doodle I’d stuck on the cover of my English textbook, the classic black cube symbol from Rusty Lake. She flipped through my book and pulled out a scrap of paper, where I’d jotted down a line from the game, specifically one spoken by Mr. Crow in Hotel.

My tattered English textbook was covered inside and out with my secrets. The cover was plastered with Eleven stickers, a hand-drawn black cube tucked in the corner, topped with a faint eye-shaped sketch. Inside, every blank space was filled to the brim: character backstories from Stranger Things, episode summaries of Wednesday Season One, Lady Gaga’s lyrics, lines from Friends, plus detailed timelines and character relationship charts for the entire Rusty Lake series.

“Your textbook,” Ms. Yan murmured as she flipped the pages, “has more annotations than my lesson plans.”

She stopped at a page covered with a full character map of Rusty Lake, spanning Seasons all the way to Paradox. Every character — Detective Dale, Mr. Crow, Mr. Owl — was labeled in English with brief biographies beside their names. I’d spent an entire weekend drawing it.

“You know the creators of Rusty Lake are Dutch, right?” Ms. Yan said. “Their English lines are exquisitely written. Take the family tree tree in Roots, for instance — every name carries double meanings.”

I nodded eagerly. “Especially that line from Hotel — ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ It pops up so many times throughout the game, tied to different puzzles. Sometimes it’s a hint, sometimes a warning. The first time I saw it, the words blared blood-red on screen. I jumped so hard I dropped my phone right off the bed —”

I stopped mid-rant, realizing every other teacher in the office was staring over. Ms. Yan stayed calm, raising an eyebrow faintly. “You just spoke roughly a hundred and fifty words per minute.”

I froze.

“Do you have any idea what level that is? Perfect score level for TOEFL speaking.” She picked up a red pen, scribbled a line on a sticky note, and handed it to me. “If you can memorize Faulkner this easily, reciting this textbook passage shouldn’t be hard at all.”

After that, my English classes shifted in subtle, gentle ways. Ms. Yan began leaving tiny doodles only I could understand on my homework: the alphabet wall from Stranger Things, a cello from Wednesday, the iconic black cube from Rusty Lake, its drawn eye always carefully detailed. Her essay prompts also grew delightfully unconventional:

“If you were trapped inside Rusty Lake Hotel, what items would you use to escape?”

“What do Dale’s choices in Paradox reveal about human nature?”

When I showed these prompts to my mom, she frowned. “Is your English teacher feeling alright lately?”

I never told her the truth. She wasn’t in a bad mood. She’d simply found the perfect way to reach me.

The real turning point came on a Friday after midterm exams. Walking down the hallway, I ran into Ms. Yan carrying a paper bag, looking lighthearted. I was about to greet her when she spoke first. “Finished your exams? How did it go?”

“There was a reading passage about indie games that mentioned Rusty Lake,” I said, a hint of pride in my voice.

Ms. Yan nodded calmly. “I picked that article.”

I blinked in surprise.

We chatted as we walked out of the teaching building, drifting naturally toward the bike shed at the school gate. Ms. Yan paused suddenly and pulled an envelope out of her bag. I opened it to find a photograph: a younger version of herself standing amid crimson maple leaves, a red-brick concert hall behind her flying an American national flag and another state flag I couldn’t recognize.

“This was my first year studying abroad in Boston,” Ms. Yan said softly, speaking as if recalling an ordinary memory. “That building was a concert hall near my dorm. I went every Friday night for free jazz performances.”

Staring at the photo, something clicked quietly inside me. She too had once stood facing an entirely foreign culture, equal parts excited and uneasy.

“Which university did you attend?”

“Boston University. I did my master’s there for two years.” She leaned against her electric scooter and pulled out a USB drive from her pocket. “This has photos I took back then, plus materials I collected on indie games — including an interview with the Rusty Lake studio. You can take it if you’d like.”

The setting sun dyed the bike shed warm orange that evening. Leaning against her scooter, Ms. Yan told me stories of her Boston days: getting lost in a blizzard for the first time, nearly choking on Thanksgiving turkey, the awkward panic of realizing her vocabulary fell short during class debates with American classmates. There was no pride in her tone, only gentle nostalgia.

“You know,” she said quietly, “my spoken English was terrible when I first arrived. I’d memorized endless vocabulary and written high-scoring essays, yet when it came to real conversations, I’d rehearse ordering a simple coffee three times beforehand.”

I laughed softly, yet a strange tender feeling welled up inside me. In my eyes, Ms. Yan had always been the flawless, omniscient figure standing at the podium. I’d never imagined she’d once been the awkward outsider in a foreign land, fumbling through simple conversations just like anyone else.

“What happened next?” I asked.

“I made a promise to myself,” she smiled faintly. “So what if I made mistakes? So what if strangers laughed? Once I went back home, who would even remember?” Her gaze settled gently on me, holding a warmth I’d never noticed before. “Do you know why I started paying attention to your hobbies? It’s not that I’m obsessed with American dramas or indie games. It’s because you have something I lacked back then — you never fear making mistakes, never fear being seen as odd.”

The evening breeze brushed the strands of hair across her forehead.

“Do you know the next line to Faulkner’s quote?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“The full line goes: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’” She repeated it softly. “I never forgot that sentence you said in class.”

That sunset stretched endlessly long. We talked from the bike shed to the school gate, then to the bus stop. She told me countless untold stories: the first oil painting she saw at the Museum of Fine Arts, the two-dollar copy of Faulkner she’d bought from a secondhand bookstore, the American classmate she’d bonded with over debating whether Mr. Crow was truly a villain.

“That boy lent me a collection of Faulkner’s works,” Ms. Yan recalled. “I read Requiem for a Nun cover to cover that semester. Only then did I learn that line wasn’t from an essay — it was dialogue straight from the novel.”

Her understanding of Western culture ran far deeper than I’d ever guessed.

That night, I plugged the USB drive into my computer and flipped through her old Boston photos one by one. Snapshots on the Harvard Bridge, casual bites of lobster rolls at Quincy Market, a classroom group photo where she stood beaming brightly between a Black classmate in a Superman tee and a Korean girl holding a Starbucks cup.

The very last file was a handwritten note in English:

Li Ming, next essay prompt: If you could step into the world of Rusty Lake, which door would you choose to walk through, and why?

I stared at those words for a long time, then opened a document and began writing.

That essay stretched to nearly two thousand words. I chose the door from the Birthday chapter — not because it was the creepiest scene, but because in that story, a little boy witnesses death on his birthday, yet still finishes eating his cake anyway. To me, that’s how people confront their past: acknowledge what happened, then keep living on.

Ms. Yan gave me full marks of twenty-five points. At the end, she wrote a single line of comment:

The past never dies. It lives in every sentence you write.

And I knew perfectly well who had given me the courage to put my past into words.