This is my essay for the common app, any feedback/comments/corrections would be wonderful and I would love to edit your essay in return :)
A few days into my family trip to England last summer, I found myself sitting in yet another cozy pub, pouring over menu options of mashed potatoes and shepherd's pie. We were staying in Chipping Campden, a tiny town at the heart of the Cotswolds. The main street, really the only street, was lined with golden limestone buildings and shone with quintessential English beauty, and most of the people we'd met were visiting from other parts of the country. Understandably, I was shocked when I was distracted from the menu by my father's choppy Japanese, introducing himself to the Japanese women at the table next to ours.
"Kon'nichiwa, watashi no namae wa Daviddesu."
They looked confused for a moment, and then thrilled at having been addressed in their native language by a seemingly ordinary tourist. My dad explained, with the hand gestures he had acquired alongside the language and the stuttering hesitation that comes with rarely speaking it, that our family had lived in Japan for three years, from 1999 to 2002. The women and my father talked to the extent his rusty vocabulary could handle, and I was secretly ecstatic when I demonstrated my ability to count to twenty, the only part of the language I've managed to hold onto. Their bill came and they finished their coffee, so my father said goodbye and the rest of us waved. The women waved back, giggling and smiling enormously and left the restaurant, waving through the window three of four times for good measure.
We stayed in England for three weeks; we toured castles and gardens, took pictures in red telephone boxes and saw Stonehenge. But my dad's eyes never lit up at those tourist attractions the way they did when we met those women, and our conversation is the most vivid memory I have of the trip. When we moved to Japan, I was only six and understood little of what the move meant. I could never have grasped that this was an amazing opportunity I was being provided: the chance to see the world from outside my comfort zone, to leave the traditional suburban routine and experience the vibrancy and mystery of a different culture.
My father's ability to turn around in the middle of an ordinary dinner and instantly make a connection with someone from across the world makes me realize that so much of myself, from my curiosity to my ability to laugh at myself, stems from those years in Japan. Looking back at my time in Tokyo, I remember little of my first grade vocabulary lessons or learning my multiplication tables. This ordinary schoolwork taught me nothing in comparison with the people and culture in which I was immersed. My best friends were girls from Taiwan, Germany, Nigeria, Utah and Hong Kong, and taught me the beliefs of every religion and the customs of every culture imaginable. We were incredibly different, but there we sat, classmates and friends, wearing the same green kilt, while our backgrounds became the information we shared to introduce ourselves, explain our opinions and learn from one another.
As a senior student today, I can fully attribute my curiosity and personal initiative to satisfy it to my childhood in an international community. Everything and everyone was full of information about which I was ignorant, and once I started learning from these unique sources of knowledge, my drive to answer every question that explodes in my mind became unstoppable. In university, I want to find myself answering these questions through my academics, but also with the opinions and knowledge of my classmates, who I will meet by turning around, like my father did, and asking, "what do you think?"
A few days into my family trip to England last summer, I found myself sitting in yet another cozy pub, pouring over menu options of mashed potatoes and shepherd's pie. We were staying in Chipping Campden, a tiny town at the heart of the Cotswolds. The main street, really the only street, was lined with golden limestone buildings and shone with quintessential English beauty, and most of the people we'd met were visiting from other parts of the country. Understandably, I was shocked when I was distracted from the menu by my father's choppy Japanese, introducing himself to the Japanese women at the table next to ours.
"Kon'nichiwa, watashi no namae wa Daviddesu."
They looked confused for a moment, and then thrilled at having been addressed in their native language by a seemingly ordinary tourist. My dad explained, with the hand gestures he had acquired alongside the language and the stuttering hesitation that comes with rarely speaking it, that our family had lived in Japan for three years, from 1999 to 2002. The women and my father talked to the extent his rusty vocabulary could handle, and I was secretly ecstatic when I demonstrated my ability to count to twenty, the only part of the language I've managed to hold onto. Their bill came and they finished their coffee, so my father said goodbye and the rest of us waved. The women waved back, giggling and smiling enormously and left the restaurant, waving through the window three of four times for good measure.
We stayed in England for three weeks; we toured castles and gardens, took pictures in red telephone boxes and saw Stonehenge. But my dad's eyes never lit up at those tourist attractions the way they did when we met those women, and our conversation is the most vivid memory I have of the trip. When we moved to Japan, I was only six and understood little of what the move meant. I could never have grasped that this was an amazing opportunity I was being provided: the chance to see the world from outside my comfort zone, to leave the traditional suburban routine and experience the vibrancy and mystery of a different culture.
My father's ability to turn around in the middle of an ordinary dinner and instantly make a connection with someone from across the world makes me realize that so much of myself, from my curiosity to my ability to laugh at myself, stems from those years in Japan. Looking back at my time in Tokyo, I remember little of my first grade vocabulary lessons or learning my multiplication tables. This ordinary schoolwork taught me nothing in comparison with the people and culture in which I was immersed. My best friends were girls from Taiwan, Germany, Nigeria, Utah and Hong Kong, and taught me the beliefs of every religion and the customs of every culture imaginable. We were incredibly different, but there we sat, classmates and friends, wearing the same green kilt, while our backgrounds became the information we shared to introduce ourselves, explain our opinions and learn from one another.
As a senior student today, I can fully attribute my curiosity and personal initiative to satisfy it to my childhood in an international community. Everything and everyone was full of information about which I was ignorant, and once I started learning from these unique sources of knowledge, my drive to answer every question that explodes in my mind became unstoppable. In university, I want to find myself answering these questions through my academics, but also with the opinions and knowledge of my classmates, who I will meet by turning around, like my father did, and asking, "what do you think?"