While teaching in Taiwan, Ah-Young Song found that asking students for midterm self-reflections helped them to be more attuned to their distinct educational trajectories and that their comments provided useful insights into adjustments that could be made as a teacher. This article describes how two of those English language learners from the creative writing unit approached a poetry writing assignment and used the occasion to advance biographical counternarratives, positioned against assumptions made by adult figures in their lives. The writers, despite being regarded as less capable, supplanted imposed narratives with more self-empowering conceptions of identity grounded in a recognition of their ability to exceed expectations.