Maxon Li   2024-6-15

Celebration of Life

Hi, I'm Maxon. I'm flattered to be here. Congratulations. We made it!

Frankly speaking, even as this day approaches, I’m not entirely sure why graduation is intended to be celebrated. It is as though we need to forget about the departure from what we have already gotten used to, the goodbye we need to say to our friends, and the flight that will leave our family behind three months later. They say we celebrate because graduation marks the start of a whole new adventure. But I dare bet, if this is a Q3 prompt and you answer it that way, you're not getting that thesis point.

In recognizing complexity, please allow me to start my response with a personal anecdote. Eight months ago, I was singing right there, in the middle of this stage, and I broke my voice. I thought, “That’s it, this is gonna be the last time ever I’ll ever step onto this wooden platform.”

But YOU proved me wrong. I received some of the most uplifting encouragements that night. Looking back at the three years that have just gone by, I believe we all had moments like that. Moments of accomplishments, moments of remorse, memories of bitterness, memories of gratitude: some of it we managed to navigate through on our own, but for the most part, we did not fight alone. The Pythagorean Device project for Y10 Math always fell apart, so WE stayed up all night to re-design, rebuild, and re-record its video. Physics summative were too hard, so WE crammed together in front of iStudy desks, asking each other questions until we could at least get those answers memorized, only to find a new set of questions on the exam, without a curve. The New Year Party, Voice, and Fine Arts Week are all hard work, but WE managed to practice together in 207, in that studio atop China Plaza, or in that insanely small piano room out the school back gate, even when we were caught up with that deadline on Turnitin and Common App. There were so many moments of finding that mesmerizing number in PowerSchool not starting with a "9", or getting caught not wearing uniforms for three consecutive classes, or genuinely feeling sorry for that teacher but still falling asleep in class anyway. These are THE collective experiences of OUR high school life.

As we all sit in the same hall right now, this is one of the reasons we celebrate graduation: It is to celebrate the most beautiful coincidence that this has always been about us, instead of someone else. It was us who shared instant noodles in the dorm, us who tried to fix that jumping washing machine on the seventh floor.

Speaking of "collective experiences", we have been, inevitably, and collectively, anxious for the past three years. We were anxious about getting marked the fifth HW, anxious about getting a 5, and anxious about whether we had italicized all the book titles in an AP Lit essay. To some extent, this is a good thing: it is wonderful to be motivated to work hard and reach our goals. But I guess what I have been trying to convey with all those anecdotes is this: looking back, we have fully had this three-year experience together, and that's probably all we need. What has been carved into our brain is not necessarily Taylor's Series or two-sample z-test, or what we wrote in our application essays and the rejections we got. What we will carry with us, though, are the characters developed through the enduring warfare with Common App, the values formed through knowing about the world beyond our eyesight, the methodologies learned in science and literature, and the self-knowledge that we all uniquely gained.

I always stumble upon encouraging words on Instagram, but this one in particular I couldn't get out of my mind. It says, (quote, end quote) "If you always have that feeling that you are not good enough, please remember, where you are right now, is where your younger self had longed to be.” We celebrate graduation, to celebrate the fact that we have come this far, and with all these experiences behind us, we can work better in discovering a truer self, regardless of how we look at our current achievements.

And of course, if we look around the room, we can find all of those who made these experiences possible. Our stories would have been vastly different without Jojo who always brings us treats, or Mr. Six who always greets us at the door, or Toby who arranged an actual meeting with Ly Tran, the author of House of Sticks, the first memoir we read. Our three years would have been a lot less without Vicky playing pipa or Yolanda playing accordion, Matt reading stories with full emotion, or Wendy talking about astrology. This is a big thank you to all the teachers who helped us along the way. Thank you for sitting with us during office hours for some in-depth talks about FRQ, about college essays, about life philosophy, about how humankind is doomed, and about two old men fighting for presidency. And there is also a special thank you to my mom and dad and sister, who have always been there for me regardless of what happened or who I longed to be.

You are also the reason why graduation is worth celebrating: to celebrate your support, which is really the reason why we could sit here today.

This is our life. Sometimes as I look into the news, I see people no different from us in other parts of the world victimized by inequality and violence. In those moments, I wonder, why is this my life, and that has to be theirs. To a huge extent, education is a blessing. As we go out with these precious experiences behind us, with all this time spent together figuring out who we are and who we long to be, we have the potential to try to make a difference, and in a world like today’s, we need to.

So this is my answer: we celebrate graduation, because we celebrate life, a life that stands with so many others as the building block of this marvelous civilization, a life that is made more wonderful with support and friendship, a life that is empowered by the experiences of the past three, or twelve, years. And yes, this is the start of a whole new adventure.

So, thank you and happy graduation to us all, the class of 2024!