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Here is the rough draft of my Harvard Supplement. Any feedback will be greatly appreciated!
Dear Future Roommate,
When author Cathy Bao Bean visited my school in 2007 to speak about the Asian-American cultural divide, my lanky 8th-grade self was sound asleep in the back of the auditorium. I awoke - quite fatefully, I would later realize - just in time to catch her final sentence. "If each of you were to remember only one thing from this talk," she was saying, "let it be this: no matter how difficult or crazy a challenge may be, at least one day it'll make a hell of a good story." I'll never know what brilliant things Mrs. Bean said in the other 39 minutes and 45 seconds of her speech, but I took her advice: her final line stuck with me ever since.
About half a year after settling down in Johns Creek, I decided to build a personal memorial to Mrs. Bean's words. After some industrious digging through old folders, an inordinate amount of Blu-Tack, a long trip to Costco, and the patience of an entire afternoon, my creation was complete: 134 photographs spread across an expanse of wall, arranged in chronological rows and event-based columns. As my Johns Creek memories grew, so did the collection. Mementos from tournaments, souvenirs from trips, and favorite poems by Dickinson and Yeats all found their ways into nooks and crannies, knitting themselves into this anthology of good stories from even greater moments. Now, in this amalgam of emulsion and gloss and colored ink, I can trace the tangible components of my own journey - where I've been, how I've changed, and most important, where I'm going.
Pretty soon, I will have to start taking it down. The globs of Blu-Tack will leave small, circular stains on the wall, the pictures and ticket stubs will tumble together in their shoebox, and my young selves and their counterparts once tacked on opposite ends of the wall will finally find a chance to mingle. That is, until we reach my new dorm room.
There, it will all go up again, meticulously tacked, both an extension and a reflection of who I've been and who I am. With any luck, you will ask about the fried crickets you see me holding at a food booth in Beijing, or the unicycle you see me riding in the lobby of my Shanghai home, or the speech you see me giving next to a young boy at a Latin Convention in Georgia. And I will explain to you that the crickets, though salted, didn't taste nearly as good as the fried scorpions, and that unicycle hockey, which I took up in sixth grade, is still the strangest sport I have ever encountered, and that the candidacy speech, which I gave in rap form, could not have been done without the young beatboxer by my side. Who knows? We might discover a mutual fondness for bizarre foods, or a shared penchant for freestyle rapping. Or, just as well, we might discover that we have nothing at all in common.
Regardless, whether or not we end up discussing Walden over Boston's weirdest burgers, or scouring (on unicycles?) Harvard Yard for a glimpse of a certain baseball team, I'll be sure to leave ample room on my dorm wall for photographs to come. And even if we have no idea what sort of good stories we want to tell, or what opportunities lie up ahead, at least we have four years at one of the world's greatest universities to figure it out.
Your soon-to-be confidante, ally, and partner-in-crime,
Peggy
Here is the rough draft of my Harvard Supplement. Any feedback will be greatly appreciated!
Dear Future Roommate,
When author Cathy Bao Bean visited my school in 2007 to speak about the Asian-American cultural divide, my lanky 8th-grade self was sound asleep in the back of the auditorium. I awoke - quite fatefully, I would later realize - just in time to catch her final sentence. "If each of you were to remember only one thing from this talk," she was saying, "let it be this: no matter how difficult or crazy a challenge may be, at least one day it'll make a hell of a good story." I'll never know what brilliant things Mrs. Bean said in the other 39 minutes and 45 seconds of her speech, but I took her advice: her final line stuck with me ever since.
About half a year after settling down in Johns Creek, I decided to build a personal memorial to Mrs. Bean's words. After some industrious digging through old folders, an inordinate amount of Blu-Tack, a long trip to Costco, and the patience of an entire afternoon, my creation was complete: 134 photographs spread across an expanse of wall, arranged in chronological rows and event-based columns. As my Johns Creek memories grew, so did the collection. Mementos from tournaments, souvenirs from trips, and favorite poems by Dickinson and Yeats all found their ways into nooks and crannies, knitting themselves into this anthology of good stories from even greater moments. Now, in this amalgam of emulsion and gloss and colored ink, I can trace the tangible components of my own journey - where I've been, how I've changed, and most important, where I'm going.
Pretty soon, I will have to start taking it down. The globs of Blu-Tack will leave small, circular stains on the wall, the pictures and ticket stubs will tumble together in their shoebox, and my young selves and their counterparts once tacked on opposite ends of the wall will finally find a chance to mingle. That is, until we reach my new dorm room.
There, it will all go up again, meticulously tacked, both an extension and a reflection of who I've been and who I am. With any luck, you will ask about the fried crickets you see me holding at a food booth in Beijing, or the unicycle you see me riding in the lobby of my Shanghai home, or the speech you see me giving next to a young boy at a Latin Convention in Georgia. And I will explain to you that the crickets, though salted, didn't taste nearly as good as the fried scorpions, and that unicycle hockey, which I took up in sixth grade, is still the strangest sport I have ever encountered, and that the candidacy speech, which I gave in rap form, could not have been done without the young beatboxer by my side. Who knows? We might discover a mutual fondness for bizarre foods, or a shared penchant for freestyle rapping. Or, just as well, we might discover that we have nothing at all in common.
Regardless, whether or not we end up discussing Walden over Boston's weirdest burgers, or scouring (on unicycles?) Harvard Yard for a glimpse of a certain baseball team, I'll be sure to leave ample room on my dorm wall for photographs to come. And even if we have no idea what sort of good stories we want to tell, or what opportunities lie up ahead, at least we have four years at one of the world's greatest universities to figure it out.
Your soon-to-be confidante, ally, and partner-in-crime,
Peggy