Running Water by Lena

Running Water by Lena - November 2023 Scholarship Essay

The rice porridge bubbled over the pot’s rim and dried like paper flakes. I scooped spoonfuls into a metal bowl, the bottom burnt my fingertips as I splat out more of the goopy rice. I finally got to visit my grandpa after nine years, his hair streaked gray and white like a monochrome photo. He hollered out for help, his voice full of desperation. I turned and watched him fall to the hollow ground and hear his fragile knees echo through the wooden planks like marbles hitting the walls. Dazed, my hands shook as I grasped my phone and dialed 911. I am stuck. I am stunned. I am lost. My eyes stung the same way the rice porridge burnt my fingertips. Arriving at the Flushing Hospital, a nurse practitioner met my eyes, a pair of eyes that somehow told me all the answers that I needed, like a PSAT Answer Key. My grandpa will be ok. She jumps in with a heart monitor; she appears sure of herself. Unlike me, she isn’t stuck; unlike me, she has answers.
I told my mother that day that I wanted to be a nurse practitioner. She snapped her neck with anger, like I had cursed in the name of Buddha. She told me that I do not deserve to be educated because I am a girl. A girl is like a bucket of water and that water is poured over the balcony and deemed to land in the sewer. We have a Fuzhounese Tradition: on the day a daughter gets married, water is poured out signifying that she leaves her family permanently. She leaves everything behind: her last name, her family’s legacy, her home. The family shouldn’t cherish a child who cannot bring recognition to their family’s name.
I was constantly held up to high standards and shamed for not completing them better. Spelling tests at five no matter how many perfect scores I backpacked home, the problem was that I wasn’t speaking in complex sentences. Interpreting doctor’s notes at seven, the problem was I wasn’t translating them with fluent Mandarin. Waiting on twenty tables at twelve, the problem was that I wasn’t speedy enough. I was drained dry like an overused, yellowed rag, twisted and turned to remove every drop of grease.
I seem to prove my mother’s point when I am at a disadvantage. I attempt to transport a mattress to PaPa’s room but my mother bitterly comments in Fuzhounese, “If you were a boy, you would be able to carry this yourself.” I failed my first physics test and my mother details that if I were a boy, I wouldn’t have failed the test. I laugh now; if I could really let a gender decide what I’m capable of, then might as well give up. Instead, I like to challenge those beliefs. If someone as close as my mother cannot believe in me, then who will? I will. The bucket of water was carelessly poured over the balcony, but I’m a stubborn, thirsty shrub lying right where the water was tossed.
My potential is not cut short because of my lack of a Y chromosome. Why should I abide by those traditional beliefs? That Y chromosome isn’t the reason I got the opportunity to assist elderly patients at a clinic after-school. It isn’t the reason that I am able to help my dad maintain the restaurant during COVID when there was a lack of employees. It certainly isn’t the reason I joined our local teens to write a guidebook to implement inclusion in our community. My mother doesn’t influence my thoughts, instead her words are like caffeine injections entering into my blood streams and up into my nerves begging me to move, to run, to sprint towards my 12-year-old goal. A nurse practitioner, that is what I want to be.