Diversity
Berkeley required the following essay. I paraphrased a few sentences of it for UCLA. Hence the entire previous [friends only] post.
In an essay, discuss how your personal background informs your decision to pursue a graduate degree. Please include any educational, familial, cultural, economic, or social experiences, challenges, or opportunities relevant to your academic journey; how you might contribute to social or cultural diversity within your chosen field; and/or how you might serve educationally underrepresented segments of society with your degree.
Growing up in not-quite-rural and decidedly un-urban Kansas, I was the one kid whose grandparents were usually in China, the only kid whose middle name was Liu instead of Lynn, and the only kid who sometimes had a holiday meal featuring Eight-Treasure Rice instead of pie. Yeye, my grandfather who proudly charts his history from “barefoot rice paddy boy” in Hunan Province through the Long March to a successful Chinese restaurant in Indiana, told me he wanted a child at Harvard or Oxford. My parents however preferred that I attend Abilene Christian University in west Texas. This was the culmination of a childhood that also involved going to the church of Christ in Topeka, Kansas, three times a week, sitting in pews, reading the scriptures that announced “I will not suffer a woman to have authority over a man” (I Tim. 2:12), and writing the prayers my younger brother would later read from the front of the auditorium. When the Harvard acceptance letter arrived, my parents forbade me to go to what they deemed “the most atheistic school in the country.” We eventually struck a compromise between their spiritual and my academic aspirations: Pepperdine University.
Now that I am older and more independent, I am much better able to direct my life beyond the consuming religious ideas of my parents that circumscribed my choices earlier. Every family of mixed heritage has a complicated balancing act to perform and mine primarily consisted of negotiating between the protestant faith of my Midwestern family and all the other theatrical, cultural and educational influences in my life. This often painful, often emotional process sensitized me greatly to the dismembering that unquestioned ideology requires of those who don’t comfortably fit into its worldview. Perhaps it was my private rage and humiliation about the rules against women in leadership, against women speaking in church, that inspired me to look into feminist theories. Perhaps it was bewilderment at how the church could valorize some loves and damn others that later led me to my current thesis project that utilizes gender and queer theory in examining the lives of two Victorian cross-dressing men who ran up against the professed Christian values of society. Perhaps it was the overwhelming whiteness of my school and church that led me to question what it was to be a “little” Chinese, to look into critical race theories and post-colonial theories, and to eventually go to East Asia to live and work.
When I moved to Japan in 2001, I worried about what Yeye would think, after having lived through the invasion of China by the Japanese in the 1930’s and being wounded while fighting in Burma. However, he is pleased that I am committed to knowing Asia, and he is particularly happy about my progress in reading Chinese characters. I had already begun studying the Japanese “tea ceremony” (chanoyu) in university, a contemplative and performative art with successive levels of achievement similar to martial arts. I continue studying weekly here in Boulder with an American teacher who spent a year at the Urasenke school headquarters in Kyoto. Over the six years I have been practicing, I have constantly found tea practice groups to be vibrant, welcoming networks of people of all nationalities spread across the world, yet uniquely centered.
Part of growing up for me has been the continuing quest to find the pieces of my heritage that were discarded in adherence to the church ideology. A year ago, my grandfather told me about how he nearly joined a Chinese Buddhist monastery in India after being wounded in Burma during World War Two, before he came to the United States, met my grandmother and nominally converted to the church of Christ. On the other side of the family, I recently learned that my great great aunt Leovicy and her husband were ostracized by their family in Depression-era Kansas because they accepted government assistance. The process of learning to question the official story molded by my family’s Christian faith is the personal aspect of my interest in the politics of making the marginalized visible, or rather, in widening the field of intelligible lives in order to effect de-marginalization.
As I look to the future, my aims reflect this balancing act. Pursuing a graduate degree not only honors my grandfather’s aspirations, but is also a means to explore his lost legacy through my studies in East Asian art and culture. I am also following the example of my mother, one of three women out of ninety-seven students in her optometry class and the valedictorian, and my mother’s mother, the first woman in my family to obtain a graduate degree. My female forebears found different ways to reconcile the demands of their faith with excellence in the secular world. I know it has been hard for them to accept that I have chosen a path much different than theirs. My work in critical gender, queer and feminist theory ultimately affirms a wide range of activities that the church of Christ condemns, while my practice of chanoyu and study other aspects of Asian culture affirms the viability of other religions. Despite our disagreements, I think that they will also eventually understand that I am working, through critical inquiry and artistic work, toward a pluralism that the Bible itself hints at when it proclaims, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female for all are one in Christ Jesus.”
In an essay, discuss how your personal background informs your decision to pursue a graduate degree. Please include any educational, familial, cultural, economic, or social experiences, challenges, or opportunities relevant to your academic journey; how you might contribute to social or cultural diversity within your chosen field; and/or how you might serve educationally underrepresented segments of society with your degree.
Growing up in not-quite-rural and decidedly un-urban Kansas, I was the one kid whose grandparents were usually in China, the only kid whose middle name was Liu instead of Lynn, and the only kid who sometimes had a holiday meal featuring Eight-Treasure Rice instead of pie. Yeye, my grandfather who proudly charts his history from “barefoot rice paddy boy” in Hunan Province through the Long March to a successful Chinese restaurant in Indiana, told me he wanted a child at Harvard or Oxford. My parents however preferred that I attend Abilene Christian University in west Texas. This was the culmination of a childhood that also involved going to the church of Christ in Topeka, Kansas, three times a week, sitting in pews, reading the scriptures that announced “I will not suffer a woman to have authority over a man” (I Tim. 2:12), and writing the prayers my younger brother would later read from the front of the auditorium. When the Harvard acceptance letter arrived, my parents forbade me to go to what they deemed “the most atheistic school in the country.” We eventually struck a compromise between their spiritual and my academic aspirations: Pepperdine University.
Now that I am older and more independent, I am much better able to direct my life beyond the consuming religious ideas of my parents that circumscribed my choices earlier. Every family of mixed heritage has a complicated balancing act to perform and mine primarily consisted of negotiating between the protestant faith of my Midwestern family and all the other theatrical, cultural and educational influences in my life. This often painful, often emotional process sensitized me greatly to the dismembering that unquestioned ideology requires of those who don’t comfortably fit into its worldview. Perhaps it was my private rage and humiliation about the rules against women in leadership, against women speaking in church, that inspired me to look into feminist theories. Perhaps it was bewilderment at how the church could valorize some loves and damn others that later led me to my current thesis project that utilizes gender and queer theory in examining the lives of two Victorian cross-dressing men who ran up against the professed Christian values of society. Perhaps it was the overwhelming whiteness of my school and church that led me to question what it was to be a “little” Chinese, to look into critical race theories and post-colonial theories, and to eventually go to East Asia to live and work.
When I moved to Japan in 2001, I worried about what Yeye would think, after having lived through the invasion of China by the Japanese in the 1930’s and being wounded while fighting in Burma. However, he is pleased that I am committed to knowing Asia, and he is particularly happy about my progress in reading Chinese characters. I had already begun studying the Japanese “tea ceremony” (chanoyu) in university, a contemplative and performative art with successive levels of achievement similar to martial arts. I continue studying weekly here in Boulder with an American teacher who spent a year at the Urasenke school headquarters in Kyoto. Over the six years I have been practicing, I have constantly found tea practice groups to be vibrant, welcoming networks of people of all nationalities spread across the world, yet uniquely centered.
Part of growing up for me has been the continuing quest to find the pieces of my heritage that were discarded in adherence to the church ideology. A year ago, my grandfather told me about how he nearly joined a Chinese Buddhist monastery in India after being wounded in Burma during World War Two, before he came to the United States, met my grandmother and nominally converted to the church of Christ. On the other side of the family, I recently learned that my great great aunt Leovicy and her husband were ostracized by their family in Depression-era Kansas because they accepted government assistance. The process of learning to question the official story molded by my family’s Christian faith is the personal aspect of my interest in the politics of making the marginalized visible, or rather, in widening the field of intelligible lives in order to effect de-marginalization.
As I look to the future, my aims reflect this balancing act. Pursuing a graduate degree not only honors my grandfather’s aspirations, but is also a means to explore his lost legacy through my studies in East Asian art and culture. I am also following the example of my mother, one of three women out of ninety-seven students in her optometry class and the valedictorian, and my mother’s mother, the first woman in my family to obtain a graduate degree. My female forebears found different ways to reconcile the demands of their faith with excellence in the secular world. I know it has been hard for them to accept that I have chosen a path much different than theirs. My work in critical gender, queer and feminist theory ultimately affirms a wide range of activities that the church of Christ condemns, while my practice of chanoyu and study other aspects of Asian culture affirms the viability of other religions. Despite our disagreements, I think that they will also eventually understand that I am working, through critical inquiry and artistic work, toward a pluralism that the Bible itself hints at when it proclaims, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female for all are one in Christ Jesus.”