Hi everyone! First and foremost, I'm really humbled and thankful for you guys to take your own personal time to read my essay. Essentially, having a tendency of writing long-winded essays, I'm mainly looking for suggestions on how to perhaps make my essay more concise, but still retain its full impact and significance. :) HOWEVER, any suggestions on grammar, diction, syntax, etc. would be greatly appreciated and welcomed! If you have any suggestions, compliments, or even constructive criticism, I am grateful for all insights. Once more, I'm extremely thankful for you guys to read and review my essay. :)
Here's the prompt:
Topic A: "Write an essay in which you tell us about someone who has made an impact on your life and explain how and why this person is important to you."
And here's my essay:
My Mother, the Woman Who Forgets, Yet Remembers
By: Paul Tran
"Dearest, have you seen my glasses? I swear I had them with me just a moment ago!"
Imagine hearing this phrase about three times a day, five days a week; imagine always forced to halt whatever action one was doing, begin hunting for one's mother's glasses, then repetitively tell her to leave it at the designated spot; rinse, dry, and repeat. Within only a few weeks, one simple, innocent sentence has morphed into the perhaps the most cruel, painful method of punishment through annoyance. This train of thought is quite sinister and selfish, yet it can be related to the minds of countless youths entering the era of pre-adulthood, of the start of independence. I was a member of that youth, an associate ignorant of others and simply absorbed in my own ambitions for personal gain of prosperity and own conscience. For the majority of the years of my life, I was that selfish adolescent, incapable of understanding why my mother could never remember such simple tasks, ultimately labelling her as an object of inconvenient hinderance than a supporting parent. Oh, how I regret my childhood years of stupidity and selfishness.
On a humid, easily irritable evening, my mental pot of water could no longer hold its boiling steam; pulled out of the realm of literature for the countless time by the exclamation of the "mysterious" disappearance of her glasses, I slapped down my novel, stomped to the glasses' location, dragged my mother there, and pointed them to her, with intent to humiliate her. As her eyes innocently darted from the glasses to my glare, my eyes seemed to scream out the message, "How can you not remember such vital objects that allow you the sense of sight?" Sinking back into my bed and attempting once more to dive into my novel, I was once more snapped back into reality by my mother; expecting to hear another declaration of an object being lost in the house, my ears were instead impacted by words I had neither expected nor had comprehended before. What exactly were the words of my mother that so captivated yet pulverized my ways of comprehension? What meaning and purpose was carried out through the soft voice of hers?
Imagine being mentally hammered with nails whenever attempting to read a simple passage or novel; imagine being on the highest pillars of academics, able to conquer all educational tasks thrown at you, but ultimately forced to resign due to the horrendous pains acquired through a simple lesson of mathematics or history; imagine to be stripped of one's identity, for sleep to be a forgotten ability of the past, of no longer fathoming how to communicate; imagine fearsomely fleeing from the grasps of death of the Vietnamese Communists, all while not even having the slightest clue of what is actually happening; imagine essentially rebuilding, relearning all the fundamentals that allow a human being to be human on a crowded, raggedy vessel in the Pacific, surrounded by refugees similar to oneself. Imagine. Throughout my youth, I had never been given neither the opportunity nor reason to ever conceptualize such morbid, climatic circumstances; my pains, stress, and sufferings all originated from going through a day without lunch or forgetting to do my homework. It was through these minutes of my life that I had truly recognized the inferiority of my first-world problems. The ultimatum of my enlightenment did not stop there, however; unable to fall back into the realm of my novel due to the unknown uncomfortableness evoked from my mother's epic tale, my perspective and thoughts upon the annoyance of my mother all crumbled as I heard the single sentence that would forever remain in my heart, "Son, dinner's ready! I cooked your favorite, phá»."
The sentence crashed upon me like a tsunami, pounding waves and waves of realism against me. Here exists my mother, a woman who could not even accomplish the simple task of remembering her glasses, yet who was able to perfectly recite the beloved meals of her son. Here exists my mother, a woman who had essentially forgotten how to be human during her escape from the Vietnam War, yet was always punctual with feeding her child, giving her child medicine when ill, caring for her child. Here exists her son, a child who cared, thought, and did only for himself, pushing all others out of his way under the name of ambition. Never had I ever felt such shame and disentitlement at a dinner meal before.
To this day, my heart still burns with the fiery fuel of avidity, passionately desiring to climb up the high rungs of society and prosperity, and to also conquer the fields of academics. However, my drive for such successes has digressed from the path of selfishness. From the night that I had realized my mother's ability to always remember her unconditional love for her child, despite the undeserving consternations she had to endure through, I saw no justification for such egoism as my own to exist; I saw no righteousness existed in the belief of self-prosperity. Because of my mother's forever-engraved affection for others, I beheld the purpose of one's life: to aspire to greatness, then to give it all back for the purpose of promoting humanity's prosperity. So the next time I ever hear my mother cry for help to search for her glasses again, instead of displaying to the world a ghastly frown of frustration, I'll instead possess a simple smile, happy to assist my mother, the mother who forgets herself, yet always remembers others.
--Essay owned and written by Paul Tran
P.T.
emilyc28, is this better?
"I was a member of that youth, an associate ignorant of others and simply absorbed in my own ambitions for personal gain of prosperity and own conscience. For the majority of my life, I ignorantly never was able to fathom why my mother was unable to remember such simple tasks, ultimately labeling her as an object of inconvenient hindrance than a supporting parent. Oh, how I regret my childhood years of stupidity and selfishness."
And programmer, instead of saying: "
remember her unconditional love for her child
, is saying it this way better?
"From the night that I had realized my mother's ability to
never lose possession of her unconditional love for her child"
Also, thank you both for the insight and help! :D
