Her description of swallowing a leaf is given among the experiences of a miserable cycle from being unable to speak, to making her dad angry because of her impediment, to the beginning feel of pebbles in eyes, to crying and back to the origin of the story. The sentences are very abstract, especially when she says “I was not even really alive.” (Zhang, 2012) Nevertheless, in fact, this poem is related to one of her emotion described in her fiction Other Girls. It is a metaphor reflecting her memory when her riding instructor mistook her shyness for not knowing English (Zhang, 2012). This explains the cruel cycle that many Chinese are facing — they are not being dumb as many radical American view, but they act they way as the subsequence of how
