LINDA

 

INTRO

 

Linda is one of my student assistants, responsible and caring. Collecting assignments from her classmates and shuttling between the classroom and my office never tires her. Once I asked her to hand out some printed exercises to the students. She took the trouble to sort the loose leaves into 72 equal shares. Each student received a stack of ten sheets at one go instead of being handed out one sheet at a time. The sorting took her over 20 minutes but her job saved her classmates each about 10 minutes. Very boring work but Linda took it seriously and enjoyed it.

 

She was born in a county town called Zhuxi, where there are plenty of mountains and forests. The county borders Chongqing on the west. It takes her hours to travel by coach between her hometown and the school. So she does not go home very often during a term.

 

THE COUSIN

 

Linda has a cousin, her uncle’s son. This cousin of hers is a problem child. Showing no interest in school, the boy played truant and ran away from home a lot of times, without telling the parents.

 

Last term, the boy left his home again. The parents searched for him all over town; he was nowhere to be found. Later the parents found his diary at home, and from the entries they learned that the son had travelled with his gang pals to the city for fun. The uncle and aunt asked Linda whether she had seen the cousin in the city.

 

Linda was worried about her cousin. Yet she could not help at all. “My cousin has behaved in this manner many times. He has broken my uncle’s and my aunt’s hearts,” she wrote.

 

THE UNCLE

 

This uncle is Linda’s mother’s younger brother. Tragedy struck him.

 

It happened when Linda was in middle school back in her home county town. One day her aunt, the uncle’s wife, came to her home, panic-stricken. She came to break some bad news. Her husband had been missing for two days. A search party was organised to look for any trace of him, but the effort was in vain.

 

Linda’s mum was worried about her brother. “Where is he?” all the family asked.

 

Linda said that her uncle used to be a Chinese language instructor in middle school. A talented writer, he created good essays. Later he gave up his teaching position and became a civil servant.

 

While working in the government, the uncle developed a condition—depression. Insomnia beset him. He started to go missing from his home from time to time.

 

Did the uncle come back this time? Never. About ten days later, his body was found in a stream close to the town. It had started to decompose by the time it was located.

 

The tragedy weighed Linda’s mum down. When the uncle was a boy, she, as a sister, had adored him very much. Linda’s mum wept bitterly over the loss.

 

DEPRESSION

 

Depression has been established as a widespread mental condition around the world. I consulted some references and found some important facts about it.

 

Depression is marked by long periods of melancholy. Those who suffer from it also show some physiological symptoms. They lose their appetite and are tormented by insomnia in most cases. They lose interest in people and things around them.

 

It used to be thought that depression was caused by psychological problems only. However, scientific research has found out that there is more to its cause than that. Some cases are triggered by psychological problems. Some are caused by some abnormal structure of the human brain itself. Some are actually written in the genes of the sufferer. It has been found that some families have members from different generations with this condition. Still some cases are caused by a combination of all or some of the factors mentioned above.

 

Modern life fast-paced, urbanites are under greater pressure than before. Learning how to cope with a hectic life and stressful patterns of existence is a safeguard against depression.

 

OPTIMISM

 

At the end of Linda’s journal entry about her uncle, she came to a conclusion that nothing counts more than health itself. “Nothing will take away my happiness. I know why it is that I live in this world. And I will stay optimistic no matter what,” the teenager declared.