The Tutoring Center

April 21, 2025

the Tutoring Center came in many forms. there was the one lodged between the barber and the nail salon with the drain that flooded from next door's keratin and whiteboards decorated with the unerasable marks of names of past students, the single digit number of their AP Biology scores, and the three digit number of their corresponding SAT subject tests scores (ranked from highest to lowest, of course). there was the one with walls of polaroids of current students and a physics teacher who was convinced i'd be a great engineer because i was a girl who also happened to be good at physics, except for the times when i'd accidentally write my variables with the wrong capitalization and a scolding remark would ensue. there was the one run by the teacher who supposedly boasted an IQ greater than 150, classroom walls decorated with testimonial letters from past students, fake currency awarded to the top scorers on exams (of which i was consistently one) used to purchase sour patch and Cheetos from the front desk that would also confiscate our phones in a set of drawers and give us keys like gym lockers. (said teacher also tried indoctrinating us with his spiel that if we majored in anything another than engineering or food sciences or medicine and instead went for "anthropology" or "sociology," he'd say in a mocking lilt, we'd have no life. i still occasionally fume thinking about him.) there were the ones that offered free SAT exam practice trials and intentionally skewed my score lower to convince my parents to send me to their boot camp-esque programs -- "your score is...interesting," said the "counselor." there was the one in a garage packed with chemistry flasks and chemicals. there was the one who would rap disobedient students on the knuckles with a ruler for talking too much. most of them had simple but straightforward names, like an autogenerated combination of adjectives like "smart," "alpha," "elite," and a noun phrase of "test prep," "institute," "college prep," or, most literally, "tutoring center." but there were the ones without classrooms, the ones that would find a place in the public library and instruct us to read from whatever textbook they believed would optimize our grades, of which the Tutoring Center was named the teacher or tutor themselves, like 张老师 or Ms. Dana or Mr. Hsu. all of them claimed to be in my best interests. all of them were, as my mom claimed, for my own good. 30 miles west of college was home. and it was also home to the tutoring centers and its walls of students distilled down just to the test scores they received and the colleges in which they were admitted.

maybe this i why i need to get out of LA; that the long days in high school during which my mom would drive me from center to center after school and on weekends resulted in long hours in the car, tracing the miserable outline of the mountains to the north against drowsy sunsets, and every time i'm in the passenger's seat of someone's car in LA with mountains and sunsets, i suddenly remember the incessant presence of the Tutoring Center and its concomitant pressures. i wish i could say that i'd broken free of them, but as i think about the years i'd spent in the Tutoring Center, i can't help but wonder if the very places that i'd end up despising are the very places that made me who i am today.


and sometimes i wonder what would happen if i ever confronted any of these tutors and stepped back into one of these centers and if any of them would recognize me. and if they ever knew about all the pent-up silent rage i carried about all these places. but what am i even supposed to say? the tutors run these places because they need to make money and survive. parents send their kids to these places because they think their children can't survive without them. i'm no more right or wrong than they are.