Nicole Zhou’s fiction piece, “Against the Wind,” tells the inner thoughts of a narrator when in the wind. Zhou then describes more personal experiences of the narrator with the same passion and vividness as she describes the wind. Zhou unveils a part of the narrator’s past, which describes the speaker as being robotic and empty, which is almost hard to believe, based on the descriptions the speaker gives us in the first few lines. The piece, however, ends on an uplifting note, as she accepts herself and tells the wind “’I am.’”
     The piece describes a change in the narrator that I would not have expected. There are two reasons for not expecting change. When I first started reading, I expected the narrator to always be, and to have always have been, optimistic. The line, “When I open my eyes, there’s a baby blue sky filled with soft, cottony clouds. It feels like an end of a story, a perfect clichéd tale. That’s when I tell myself that I am content with life and take another step toward home,” demonstrates this. We are then told about the speaker’s history, with taking pills, seeming to be antidepressants. After this, I still am expecting another dark turn, as there always seems to be with stories like this one. However, none comes, which makes the story have more meaning. It shows how we can overcome our past demons and learn to grow, more than anything.