Jiang is telling her own story in this personal narrative, and she carefully nurtures the impression that she is narrating each experience as it happened to her. However, there are a few basic narrative tricks she uses to create this impression and to make her story seem simple. The most apparent, after the fact that she narrates in the first person, is to tell the story chronologically. At the end of her narrative, she explains that this story as a whole covers her life from the ages of twelve to fourteen, as she waits to move from primary school to junior high school. She carefully identifies the period of time she is describing in each section so that it seems like we are following a strict progression through time, but she starts out by using seasons: the first year starts in the spring with her discussion...