I Quit Chinese School. Then I Got a 5 on the AP Exam.

I quit Chinese school at the end of middle school. Not because I didn't care about being Chinese — I just couldn't see the point of showing up every Saturday to copy characters I didn't understand into a notebook I'd never look at again. It felt like homework for a subject nobody had convinced me mattered yet. So I stopped going.

Then high school happened, and something shifted. I started thinking more seriously about where my family was from, what I actually knew about it, and what I'd let go of by checking out. I decided to try studying Mandarin again, but this time on my own terms. No classroom, no weekly drills, just me working through the language because I actually wanted to.

I ended up self-studying for the AP Chinese Language exam. When the scores came back, I had a 5. That score meant more to me than almost anything else I'd done academically — not because of the number, but because of what it represented. I had walked away from the language and found my way back to it.

Shortly after, I applied to become a Teacher's Assistant for an AP Chinese class. I got accepted. The thing I had once dreaded going to on Saturday mornings was now something I was voluntarily showing up to teach.

I'm not telling this story to suggest that quitting and coming back is the right path. For a lot of people it isn't. But I think about it a lot when I think about why AHC exists. The traditional model of cultural education wasn't working for me, and it isn't working for a lot of kids. We started AHC because we think there's a better way. I'm still figuring out what that looks like. But it starts with making cultural education something students want to come back to.