Senior column: Vash Chen

Vash Chen, Photo Editor|May 17, 2023

I know what you’re thinking and I wholeheartedly agree: I didn’t think it was possible. But with a 3.87 GPA and several new mental illnesses, I’m finally walking free from this nicely decorated rye field.

I want to talk about my favorite bildungsroman (it’s a fancy word for coming-of-age story)—J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher In The Rye”—yeah, that book you read if you decided to do English III Honors instead of AP Lang. For those who haven’t read this novel, our main character Holden Caufield has this recurring dream of blindfolded children stumbling through a rye field only to fall off a cliff edge unexpectedly; our title drop happens when Holden talks about becoming the one who saves these helpless children when they fall, hence he becomes the “catcher in the rye”.

To save you a whole SparksNote analysis, the entire dream is an extended metaphor of losing childhood innocence, or as I interpret it: the very sudden transition from childhood to adulthood, like falling off the edge of a cliff blindfolded.

What makes “Catcher In The Rye” my favorite bildungsroman is that Holden fails; he utterly, entirely and irrevocably fails to reach his dream. His utopian vision has never and will never come true. Despite this, he becomes the victor in the story—not through luck, deus ex machinas or coincidences; Holden wins because he realizes that moving on from one’s childhood is an inevitable fate, but not an inherently malicious one.

Now I want to bring up a theory of grief by author Lois Tonkin. Tonkin wrote that it is not our emotions of grief and loss that get smaller as time continues, but that our experiences of life allow us to grow around our grievances, like how over time kudzu will overgrow a wall.

I think one feeling all of us seniors shared this year was grief: we grieved over friends we no longer talk to, we grieved over the loss of half of our high school years staring at a rectangular screen in our rooms and we grieved over what our futures could look like and our past regrets. But despite that, we’re here, aren’t we? Half the battle is showing up after all, and much like how Holden had to grieve and ultimately move forward from the losses in his life, I believe that there’s a chance for all of us to grow around our strife, like the beautiful flowers that grow from the hard labor of gardeners.

I’ve grieved a lot these past four years over what seemed like life or death, but the thought that there’s more to life out there—outside this “bubble” we’ve created for ourselves—helps me move forward. Loss is difficult, but difficulties are relative. So to anyone who has read this so far: do not let your grief stop you from meeting new people and experiencing new things because you will never know the person you become.

And now I leave you with a quote from Azar Nafisi that embodies my feelings wholeheartedly: “You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people you love, but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place because you’ll never be that way again.”