Piece By Piece: Discovery Through Community Service and Cultural Exploration by Kaitlyn

Piece By Piece: Discovery Through Community Service and Cultural Exploration by Kaitlyn - July 2021 Scholarship Essay

Buried behind a book in Mrs. Larson’s third-grade classroom, I was determined to do everything in my power to go unnoticed. I was already the only kid in my class with ink-black hair, bronze skin, and dark, almond-shaped eyes, and far different from the other eight-year-olds who had the odd luxury of being able to compare sunburns and freckles. In order to escape nasty playground comments and stereotypes, I resorted to being “the quiet girl”; I was not bothered by that label - it felt comfortable and easy. However, at the beginning of my high school career, I realized I was meant to be more than the student everyone had to lean in to hear. I knew that my hope was for those around me to feel loved, cared for, and important. It was renewing to take those desires to my community and begin to make them part of who I am.
As the only freshman who decided to attend the first Interact Club meeting of the year, I stood out among the sea of upperclassmen who were familiar with all the ins and outs of the club. The older students all had voices, passionate and defiant voices. Meanwhile, I could easily be pinpointed as the doe-eyed freshman who happened to roll in. Despite my uncertainty, I stuck around and eventually participated in an unforgettable first service project with the club: Christmas caroling at a nursing home. We were not good singers, yet somehow, we still put genuine smiles on the raisined faces of those who spent their days at Forest Plaza Assisted Living. Although I was only a freshman in a high school club, I knew that instance of a sense of purpose in my community would be an important first piece to the puzzle of who I am.
Sophomore year, I moved away from a small-town high school consisting of a copy-and-paste student body to a wildly diverse high school in a big city. I felt like I was swimming with the sharks, every turn was dangerously unfamiliar with no idea of where shore was. This turned out to be a necessary step in finding direction and discovering the pieces of myself I had lost in the years of hiding from the person I seemed ashamed to be. I was thrilled my new school already had an established Interact Club, but I knew there were more pieces of me that I had yet to find.
I was once the girl who blew off Chinese superstitions and pretended Chinese New Year was some fairy tale my parents tried to entertain me with. However, my newfound value of togetherness in a community helped me eventually find a sense of pride in my culture. Many of the other Asians at my school seemed more comfortable to be themselves than I was. However, it can still be very isolating to be a minority group in a predominantly white school. I did not simply let myself and other like me continue to feel lost, instead I took action. As a new student, I established my school's first Asian American Student Union. At my club, it was a safe space, we shared our stories and felt free to invite our friends of different cultures to learn and enjoy the foods and traditions we loved about our culture. Through these moments I became more comfortable being myself: I started bringing ethnic foods for lunch, I held a spicy ramen and boba sale at school, and even chose a Chinese-American memoir for my senior research text. I became unashamed that part of me is being Chinese, proud that my ethnicity sometimes may set me apart, and proud that my story has allowed me to begin to see what I have missed out on over the years of feeling silenced by judgment.
I have pieced together who I am and have clearly made out who I am not. I am not timid. I am not exotic or strange. I am not automatically intelligent because of a box I have to check for statistics. I am somebody who speaks loud with actions. I am passion-driven and come alive when I am able to serve others; I value connection and making a difference wherever I can. I am educating myself on not only my culture but the cultures of those around me. I am confident in my identity when serving my community and embracing my culture. I am continuing to grow, change, and piece my own puzzle together, and even with all the unique intricacies, I can already see that I am a world-changer.