Finally, after nearly six grueling hours, four of them before a panel of six judges, on the fateful day of Saturday, December 2… I passed my first-degree black belt test.

(哈哈，對了！你們沒有聽錯！My new belt even has my name embroidered on it!)

However, I must confess. Up to the beginning of this school year, I had never seriously envisioned myself wearing the coveted first dan black belt. And during the test, a part of me continued to pessimistically maintain that the instructors would fail me. But I still made it, miraculously. And my Taekwondo school is supposedly one of the toughest and most prestigious in our state, if not the entire nation.

Still, do I completely and wholly deserve this honor? Probably not. I mixed up two of my knife defends during the test, and my free sparring was… lackluster. They somehow escaped the judges’ notice, apparently (but I doubt that, seeing as they would have to be complete dunces to do so). I’m assuming that they chose to overlook it, either generously attributing it to nerves, or because they simply weren’t willing to refund the testing fees.

Anyway… today is my sixteenth birthday. Students under sixteen years of age receive poom belts instead of the regular ones, so I technically was a first poom for one day, although the school went ahead and ordered the first dan belt for me instead. Phooey.

最後，謝謝妳，K-chan！Many thanks for watching me test, as well as the congratulatory hugs.