A friend in my orchestra class once asked me, "How do you know that you have courage? Why try something if you know you can't do it?"
She's only 14 but already she's one of those people who feel they're the worst at everything. Even when I tell her she's improving at her music, she simply can't believe it. We spend hours arguing about whether it's really possible to make our dreams come true.
I refused to believe anything is impossible and raise my sister as an example.
My twin Alice Chen, 17, is legally blind and an amazing artist.
While we both love art, she puts a lot more effort into it. Her art teacher at Cupertino High School adores her work, and she's begun entering competitions, winning one honorable mention and passing the first round of the InSights Art Exhibition, an art competition for visually impaired students hosted by Lighthouse for the Blind.
Every piece of art has its own feeling, an emotion she is trying to show by drawing it. When she places a stroke on paper, she may not see it but she knows where it is and what's supposed to come next --- the whole and the heart. It's about taking the image in her head and translating it onto canvas, so it doesn't matter if she can see it or not. After the rough outline, she'll refine the details under an electronic magnifier, and no one will ever know that the artist is disabled.
Still, my friend remains skeptical. She plays the violin but is so afraid of sounding terrible that she never dares to volunteer for more prominent roles in our orchestral concerts. She wants to be a great musician yet she can't come to terms with the fact that she has to start somewhere.
It's embarrassing how she idolizes my violin skills as First Chair. But she's never dared to ask me straight out how I do it -- people are always afraid of offending me by bringing up such matters.
You see, like my twin, I am also a legally blind student.
Learning pieces takes me two to three times longer than it does other people. All my music has to be enlarged to two or three lines a page. Before we could afford one of those hulking old copy machines, my parents had to draw every note by hand on huge sheets of construction paper. I have been frustrated and tired. Notes sometimes mix themselves up in my vision and I can't play anything resembling music until I have everything memorized, but I never give up.
Music is the universal language, and I love being able to express my emotions through my violin. I work hard and worry harder, but it all pays off when I step onto that stage.
As a violinist, I have attended three competitions alongside people with healthy vision and walked away in the top three every time, as well as with an award for best Chinese piece for a folk song called "Yu Zhou Chang Wan," or "Singing the Night Among Fishing Boats." If I had never tried to play violin because of my visual impairment, I would never have known how well I could play.
Everyone has their weaknesses, whether it's my eyes or my friend's lack of confidence. It is different for everyone and we each have to find our own ways of dealing with it.
Besides, exceeding expectations is half the fun.
When people look at me and my twin, they see people with serious problems. We're legally blind so they don't expect us to excel at anything. We delight in showing them how wrong they are.
Being better than average is satisfying enough. Being disabled and knowing that they didn't think we could do it makes the victory that much sweeter.