Undergraduate / Common App: ~My dog-eared volume of yellowing papers holds my adventure in life [3]

Hey guys! PLEASE help me out with this main essay. I already sent it to my January 1 schools, but I have more schools to apply to, and I need it to be good (for top schools)! I know some of the transitions are awkward! Tell me your overall impression and how I can improve it please!! Thank you so much, I really appreciate it in advance!

Prompt: Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?

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At 8:00 in the morning, the aroma of stale puddles and Chinese sage hovers above the babbling buyers and vendors of this morning marketplace. Wai Puo, my grandmother, chooses from an array of cow carcasses that hang along the wood panel wall. A butcher faces us, holding a large knife in one hand and holding his other hand open.

I fumble to pay him for the beef, but as I rummage my fanny pack, I scrutinize the vendor's face. His face is covered in wrinkles and old laugh lines. His skin is pigmented by years of farmwork. Under his face sits a plain garb, a stained, threadbare collar.

I spent the summer of my sophomore year in Baoshan, China to help do house-chores for my sickly grandparents. In the quiet lifestyle, I aimed to find true contentment in my environment and to capture this spiritual journey in my journal. Without internet, television, or washing machines, I approached a new world with my pen and paper.

The world was alive. Just as I had since fifth grade, I recorded all of my experiences and thoughts, and scrutinized the most charming details to take away. Many people didn't know I could understand more Chinese than I could speak, so my "foreigner" status lent me a closer perspective in their culture. To express as fully as possible, I implemented the advanced literary techniques that I had honed in fifth grade. I only use pens with black ink (to show confidence). I loop l's, e's, and J's when I'm feeling breezy and girly. Colored pens, pencil sketches, and 18-point font adorn the paper when plain words don't do justice. If people find my journal in 100 years, they must read and follow the inner-front-cover blurb to "decipher the verbiage, syntax, and aesthetic flair to understand me." I spend hours tenderly molding my sentences with precise wording and penmanship; and when I've expressed what needs to be expressed, I look at my masterpiece, give an imagined kiss, then close the cover and await my next revelation.

One night as I opened my journal, Wai Puo remarked to me in Chinese, "You write so much. Your mind is everywhere but here!" I paused. Is she right? I came to China to fully experience another lifestyle. If I stopped trying to translate a real world into inked words, then perhaps I could be truly alive. Suddenly, my dilapidated journal represented my failure: I had been a tourist. My mind still wasn't here.

For the next few days, I tried to ignore any impulse to record a thought. Ideas and insights sparked in my head, begged to be engraved and analyzed -- Don't think too much. Be here. The sparks sizzled and fused out. But, the culture around me began to morph into something lesser. The faces in the marketplace lost their wrinkles and laugh lines. Social customs became ordinary, mundane, and I stopped thinking twice about the street vendors and straw cone hats that filled the streets.

Most of all, I was voiceless.

With my journal, I observe the world with a child's eyes. I identify my life's variables through writing, and my insights enliven my environment. Wai Puo was right: my mind wasn't truly in China like hers was. However, I appreciated China more than she did. If I hadn't been thinking and writing throughout my life, I would be one-dimensional. I certainly would not have had the aspiration to leave my small, rural hometown to adventure into boarding school.

I sometimes steal away to journal in the middle of dinner, or I hop out of the shower to record a philosophical treatise. I never try to stop it. My dog-eared volume of yellowing papers holds my adventure in life. True contentment does not lie in an environment. It lies in my own love for living, my black pen scribbling on blank pages.