I have safely returned from Chinese language camp in Minnesota and am now thoroughly enjoying all of the pleasures denied me there.

I am glad to report that I received no less than 26 letters from my friends and family while I was away. Some of my now most coveted commodities are pizza, cake, good food in general, telephones, my computer, and clean feet. However, I do miss the company.

In my particular cabin, there were nine girls about my age from Oklahoma, Florida, New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and (including myself) Washington. Our three counselors were all from the general area of Beijing.

A few of us knew each other from the previous summer, but many of the girls in my cabin I did not know - or I at least did not know very well. First impressions are often retrospectively amusing. One of the girls introduced herself by informing my friends and I that she was only speaking to us to "find out how much we were going to annoy her later." As it turned out "later" we were all referring to her as our camp "mamma bear."

I found it often the case that those whom I was closest to at the start caused me the most anguish, while those people I met as time passed, made the best friends. Many people I only came to know through a long chain of others. They were people that I never really thought would speak to me let alone become my friends.

The camp as a whole was very small. There were only about 100 or so campers on site at any given time. Of that number, only a little more than half were four-week campers (the rest belonging to one of the two two-week sessions going on at the same time as the four-week program). And of that number, about 60 percent were girls - so there were truly only around 30 girls with whom to gossip and share space for the continuous four-week period. Needless to say, no secret remained so for long.

On one hand, this created a sense of family and belonging that wouldn't have been possible at a larger camp. On the other hand, I sometimes felt cramped by it - and by having to share a very open living space with many other girls. Everyone is completely involved in everyone else's life whether they mean to be so or not.

I would describe it as a micro world moving at hyper speed. I am reminded of an episode of "Star Trek Voyager" where the crew discovers, and is able to observe, an entire planet from the start of its civilization to their invention of deep space travel because its surface time moves extremely fast in relation to the rest of space.

The drama was magnified by everyone's close proximity and the four-week time constraint. By the end of week two, everyone's annoying habits were beginning to surface and other people's tolerance was beginning to wane. Some put up with the strain and stress with an impressive laidback carelessness, while others exploded in Oscar-worthy tantrums that the whole camp was sure to be whispering about. That's when we realized that we all still had two more weeks to go.

An interesting observation made by one of my cabin mates was that there was so much tension in our particular cabin because we lacked testosterone. To translate, many of the girls in our cabin had boyfriends back home and so were unable to participate in the longstanding camp ritual of finding a camp boy.

That isn't to say that girls need boyfriends to get along. What we need is something to direct our energies at whether they be positive or negative and gossiping about boys is one thing that girls can expend much time and energy upon, making boys a very important, estrogen-uniting factor.

Sure enough, one of my best friends finally gave way to the pressure and nabbed a boy by the end of week three. Suddenly we had much more important things to discuss than our Mandarin homework, tests, projects, and their accompanying stress.

Everything is relative. What's important is remembering and appreciating why. After all, we are just teenagers having a good time away from home at summer camp.

Our goodbyes were said with small sighs of relief, but not without a twinge of sadness and nostalgia. We all felt sad to leave the forest campground that had, for a month, been our home.

Kyra-lin Hom is a West Seattle high school student and can be reached at kl_hom@yahoo.com