My phone began to glitter in the darkness. Who was so impertinent as to send a message at midnight?

     I dragged myself out of bed, shuffled to my desk and snatched my phone in annoyance. The glistening white rectangular box read, "Are you available for a video chat?" A teary face emoji followed it.

     It was Celine, a friend who was studying at Harvard Yenching Academy on a full-ride scholarship.

     I replied "Yes" and agreed to her call.

     Her face loomed large on the screen. Sallower and more edged than I had last met her.

     "I am an idiot."

     Without any pleasantry, she dived into whining.

     "My paper was rejected again. The Korean girl sitting next to me. She coasted through the year with open arms by three journal committees. I have nothing published. My academic career is doomed."

     "Celine don’t exaggerate. You are already more accomplished than 90% of the population." I made up the figure, but I meant it.

     She ignored me and went on a self-pitying and self-loathing harangue. I waited impatiently for suitable junctures to interrupt her, and seal shut the conversation.

     "I am a defenseless fish caught amidst a sea of sharks and whales," she doled out a verdict on her life, absorbed in her failures.

     It is hard for children growing up like we did to get accustomed to being an ordinary person, and to accept that we cannot be an outlier all the time. We are pitted against each other till someone wins.

     The tension was often carefully tucked, but there were moments when it was let out, unmasked.

     Once, I was all by myself in the classroom when a middle-aged man sauntered in.

     He was a blunt-featured, stock man in a cocoa brown jacket. His wandering gaze piqued my curiosity.

     "Is there anything I could do for you?"

     "Where is the ranking for mid-terms?"

     I ushered him to the back of the classroom, where various rankings were plastered on the wall – overall ranking, ranking by subject and by progress.

     The man bent forward; his eyes glued to the sheets.

     "Excuse me, but who is your child?" I used the respectful form of "you" in Chinese.

     "Gunyao’s."

     "Wow. Gunyao ranked 18th in the grade. He came first in Math and Physics. He is a phenomenon. You must be so proud of him."

     His son was considered as a geek-kind of wunderkind in class: socially impaired, but genuinely bright.

     "How is your ranking?" the man said abruptly.

      His directness startled me. I felt threatened by his bulky frame. I obediently showed my name on the sheet to him.

     "You ranked 12th, above him," he sneered, "shouldn’t you be more phenomenal?"

     "How did you make it? Which junior school are you from?" He stared into my eyes unflinchingly.

     I was engulfed by the strident icicles of his enmity. After I came back to myself, I forced a smile, mumbled some noncommittal words, then excused myself to my seat, my heart pounding.

     It was true that classmates did not feel like friends. Instead, we were more like frenemies. But I did not expect him to disgorge it, unmasked. The animosity among adults slid into our world and hung over it like sulfuric acid. Everything was contaminated by it.

     It was a dog-eat-dog world, a zero-sum game.

     I was taught that there was only one standard of success, a one sanctioned lifestyle. My mother often chanted, as other mothers would do: "If you cannot test into an elite middle school, then you cannot enter an elite high school. In the end, you cannot make it to a prominent college, and in the end, you have nothing going for you in life." For a long time, I subscribed to my mother’s causal thinking. I believed that I cannot lead a decent life if I failed at any baby step. The terror of losing grew as my accomplishments grew.

     I was fatigued and on the verge of my breaking point. One holiday, I visited an aquarium. I trod beneath the arched tunnel where light shone from above. Everything was encased in a halo. The rouge coral reefs, the ragged pale stones, the leopard-specked fish, the black-dotted ones, the checkered and the humpy. I lost count of the various species of fish flopping their tails past me. According to Darwin, they survived because they were the fittest in their habitats. Natural selection does not wipe out diversity but manifests it to a dizzying height.

     I stood in awe. A sandy tiger shark emerged from one corner, careered past the tunnel, and hurled towards clusters of tiny fish like a wrecking ball. Fish scattered in all directions, like a sudden explosion of a firework. Some outran the shark; others hid themselves in the nooks and crannies of the stones and reefs. Ferocious as the shark is, it failed to catch any fish. It made a clumsy pivot and continued to chase in one direction. As I beheld the shark’s hunting, it dawned on me that the primitive ecosystem left a place for the seemingly weak and frail. The tiny fish got to co-exist with their predators. They occupied the lower rudder of the food chain, but the mechanism of natural selection offered them enough room for a living.

     Human society is less cruel than the primitive environment in the sense that it was not a life-or-death question that concerned us. My friend Celine may fare worse than those she looked up to, but she still had an array of positions to apply her skills to. The sharks did not obtain the monopoly of the marine system. Neither did the academic big guns in their fields.

     I let out a deep breath, allowing myself to loosen into the space around me. At this time, the predatory shark was scurrying in the left wing, rummaging through the plants and stone piles, while some schools of fish ambled in the right wing, unrumpled. There was place and time for each of them.

Author Bio: Lam Wai is a final-year English major. She believes in the power of art to facilitate contemplation and dismantle preconception and dogma. Writing is thinking to her. For her, every life story is a farewell ritual she performs for herself. When she completes them, she hopes they could stop haunting her.