Undergraduate /
My Seventh Continent. Commonapp essay showing that I am suicidal? [10]
heehee yes my screen name is a derivation of jessica : )
ok heres my essay but its pretty long...
and english is not my first language so there will be bad wordings and grammar mistakes
THANKS!!
The Seventh Continent. My Seventh Continent.Among the colorful 3D fonts, the photoshopped faces of celebrities, and the nicely packaged DVD boxes, its simplicity stood out like a rock in a sea of diamonds. A picture of a beach first jumped into my eyes. On the black space that was below the picture were printed three stark red words: "The Seventh Continent". My hands were drawn towards the DVD and the next thing I knew I was at the cashier. That night, I could wait no longer so I called my friends over to find out what was beneath that seemingly dull cover.
The Seventh Continent tells a tragedy of an affluent family which commits suicide for no apparent reason. The first part of the movie depicts the family's daily life in which everything is repetitive and insipid. Ann and Georg, an optician and an engineer respectively, never communicate with their clients; their hands are always swiftly moving over the cash register or the computer and their faces are devoid of emotion. Their daughter Eva, on the other hand, desperately seeks attention from her parents by lies and self-destruction. In the next part of the movie, the family decides to move to Australia. One day Ann and Georg start destroying everything in the house and later commit suicide, through which they wish to be liberated from this world to the Seventh Continent, their dream land.
When the movie was over, I glanced sideways to find my friends either sleeping or playing with their cell phones. But I was jolted by a sudden realization: this movie is a mirror which not only reflects the defects in the society (such as the isolation people experience under capitalism) but also some of the flaws in my way of living.
A complete and caring family, entertaining and loving friends, and a prestigeous school. I had them all. And yet from time to time I felt something was wrong. What was it? I had been asking myself for a few years. Now the answer was exposed before me. It was the monotonous pursuit of meaningless achievement. I saw myself wake up every morning, go to school, sit at the back of the class and stare blankly at the teacher; as long as I kept silent and did not interrupt the lecture I would be considered a well-behaved student. Besides, everything the teacher taught is in the books. After school, classmates and I started entertaining each other with trivia in daily lives; we laughed for 30 minutes and we departed for home. When I got home, I walked straight to my room to do homework or cram up answers for questions on past exam papers. I found myself used to or, even worse, complacent about this way of living, so accustomed that I was oblivious to the real world which can be dynamic and vital.
Despite the epiphany I experienced after the movie, I did not sympathize with Ann and Georg; in fact, I despised them for choosing self-destruction as their last resort. I understood that the dreadful and disturbing ending was an artistic device used to highlight the despair in Ann and Georg and the only way to force the audience to reflect. I must admit the film achieved its purpose. However, self-destruction was deplorable to me. It was a sign of weakness and immaturity. It was the same as children pulling their hair out because they could not play with their favorite toys.
I did not want to be anything like Ann or Georg. Merely watching news or documentaries on TV and reading TIME or National Geographic could no longer satisfy my desire to crush the wall between the world and me. Every night I craddled myself to sleep by imagining that I was lying on the tundra in Northern Canada or trotting through the deep sand of Sahara desert. Every day when I took the bus, I envisioned how my life might change when I grew up and underwent successes and failures. But there is no point dreaming if the dreams can not come true. So when a chance I decided to get out of my castle by changing my learning environment: from my present school to an international school.
That was the first step and it was never easy for me. I was torn between deeply rooted traditional Chinese culture I was comfortable with and the multi-variegated cultures that I was not used to. For the first time I had classmates of different ethnicities and nationalities. In class, there was never an answer waiting to be found at the end of the book or in the teachers' manual. Sometimes I had to come up with the questions and methods of investigation myself amd sometimes there was not always an answer in the end. Some of my friends asked me why I made the choice if I knew that I was not going to feel comfortable about it, calling me a masochist because I like to put myself in discomfort. I said no. I like the process of overcoming discomfort and becoming a new person. As I learned to accept different peoples, viewpoints, and ways of doing things I started to enjoy the excitement that the new environment brought through activities such as exchange trips to Vietnam and Japan and volunteer work at the Spastics Association in which I was always surprised to see a different facet of the world.
The wall is starting to crumble. I now see the world through various small peep-holes. But no matter what, I am already one step closer to my own Seventh Continent, in which I can embrace the world as a whole, sooner or later.
thanks !!
