He is more than six feet tall with a long body that is rather thin. His head is set forward on his shoulders and his neck is long, so that it seems to stick forward all the time when he is walking and talking. He has a full head of hair. His eyes and noses are small and his nose is regular in shape with slightly flaring nostrils (鼻孔). His mouth is well formed and his teeth are good; this gives him an expression of contentment and benevolence (仁慈). He has rather a long chin, but it is not pointed. A distinctive feature is that his arms and legs are unusually long; his hands and feet, and especially his wrists, are very large. The length of his limbs has a strange effect — when he sits down, his body seems short in contrast to his long arms and legs. He walks in an easy, swinging way, with none of the stiffness of the army officer; this, too, gives him the appearance of being very relaxed. His general appearance suggests an extraordinary degree of health, vitality, and spirit.

4 . In English, my name means hope. In Spanish, it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican record my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing.

It was my great-grandmother’s name and now it is mine. She was a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse — which is supposed to be bad luck if you’re born female — but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don’t like their women strong.

My great-grandmother. I would’ve liked to have known her, a wild horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn’t marry. Until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. Just like that, as if she were a fancy chandelier. That’s the way he did it.

And the story goes, she never forgave him. She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best of what she got or was she sorry because she couldn’t be all the things she wanted to be. Esperanza. I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window.

At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish, my name is made out of a softer something, like silver, not quite as thick as my sister name — Magdalena — which is uglier than mine. Magdalena who at least can come home and become Nenny. But I am always Esperanza.

I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something like Zeze the X will do.

Ann Wells,     1     Grade 10 student at Lakeside High School, is from USA. She is active and curious     2    everything. She likes asking questions, and believes that she can learn best by     3     (do). Physics is her favourite subject. Besides reading short     4    (story), dancing and skating     5     (be) also her hobbies. Her dream is to become an engineer in the future.