(Written by a Chinese girl while on summer vacation from a school in England)
In the UK, I have a friend named Suemian. She comes from Korea, has been in England only two years, and is very smart looking. For 8 years, she had played the piano, but she gave it up this summer because she thinks people her age don’t need to go higher than level 7. She’s also an amazing singer and is already at level 5. The most important thing about her, however, is that she’s always nice to everyone.
She has long black hair, wears glasses and is really skinny. She looks anorexic to most of us. She is funny, loud, musical, and greedy. She’s also gullible for she believes everything people say.
Now that she has gone to another school I realize that she is a true friend. We shared things like tuck and things like that, but the two of us don’t do things by ourselves often because I have lots of other friends and seem to forget her every time I’m making plans.
When she is with me, I’m always conscious of the fact that she is the only person I know who is always willing to be nice to me.
I’m going to tell you something that happened about four weeks ago. I was in the same house with her for the weekend because we share a guardian. We were watching a film, and she was eating cookies at the same time, as she says eating is a hobby and she never wants to stop doing it. When I went upstairs, she continued to watch the worst film ever made in history, and she probably kept on eating the cookies, too.
A little while later, she came up with half a cookie in her mouth, and I was really angry at her for eating all the time, so I ignored her for about 3 minutes.
She kept asking me what was happening, and I could see she was upset and really didn’t know what she had done wrong. That made me even angrier, of course, but I looked at her, and it was obvious that she was confused. I didn’t want to be horrible and ignore her, but I chose to anyway. She had no idea what she had done wrong.
Then I looked at her again and she was making up her mind about what she’d say to me. It took her awhile, but she finally said, “Well… I came up here to give you a cookie. …I ate half, and here is your half.”
I felt so bad, so embarrassed for not understanding what she had intended to do. She had treated me like a real friend. I know that’s what friends do. I can’t believe I didn’t give her a chance to explain what she was doing. I felt as if I had done something really horrible, but the cookie was yummy. I don’t think I’ll ever tell her why I was so angry with her.
But all of that isn’t the point of my story. My point is that she’s just so amazingly nice. She acts that way with everybody. It forces you to love her to bits in return.
On the other hand, there is a really difficult, even contentious girl named Bronte that no one seems to like very much. One day she was crying because her dog had died, and every one just laughed at her - and that includes me - but Suemian became really angry at those people for doing that. She was mad at me, too, and she’s such a popular girl in school that everyone stopped laughing and went away.
That was the first time I’d seen her so angry, and after it was all over I asked her if she thought it was worth it to act like that. She answered that she always wanted to treat everyone fairly. She said, “It’s not fair to laugh at someone whose pet has died. I just don’t think that anyone should be treated unfairly.”
I didn’t really understand her, I mean, is it worth it - for someone like Bronte – to shout at all your friends? So I asked again why she did it, and she answered, “Let’s put it this way; you don’t want to be treated like that, do you? If you don’t, you shouldn’t treat other people like that. Yes, It’s worth it!”
That’s my Suemian. She’s such a nice girl, and a smart one, too. Everybody is just forced to love her to bits. I’m glad that she is my friend, as she has taught me two very important lessons” 1) to treat everyone as you would like to be treated and 2) to put trust in your friends and your family.