I grew up walking in two worlds. One foot slapping the concrete sidewalk on the way to my thirteen-story apartment in the bustling ocean-side city of Wenzhou, China, and another thudding on a red dirt road to my grandmother’s hut, where I forced down the worst egg soup (because that’s love). I spent years surrounded by signs of poverty in the rusty pagodas from nearby villages that took the loud, crowded train to the big city in hopes of bringing enough home for a meager supper. They were in the shadows of my own home, forcing my father to migrate to Shanghai for a small teaching job and pushing my preschool teachers to wait with me long after dark while my mom rushed to pick me up from her grueling job at the train station. I was in poverty-adjacent.
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I have felt, but never truly experienced life in poverty. I have heard my parents’ stories of how their only meals at school consisted of rice with picked cabbage in a small jar from home. Of how they had to haul baskets of oranges from their farm in the mountain before the sun even rose (that was my mom with absolutely no upper body strength), or of how they sometimes ate chili peppers straight from the tree as their only meal (which sparked my theory of why northern China likes everything ridiculously spicy). So I came from a background where I found myself incredibly lucky and privileged to have all these opportunities ahead of me, all due to the harsh conditions and labor my parents went through. So I figured, I might as well do something meaningful with my career, right? Shouldn’t I make everything my parents went through worthwhile? So basically from the wee ages of seven to sixteen, I spent my time trying to figure out how I wanted to help the world. I was quite adamant about veterinary school until I heard about lawyers, then doctors, and I just spun around and around. Finally, I put together my passion for helping others, my interest in the human mind, and my self-proclaimed empathy for others. I landed at psychology. I may not be saving lives in operating room or by creating advanced technology, but I will be changing lives
I have felt, but never truly experienced life in poverty. I have heard my parents’ stories of how their only meals at school consisted of rice with picked cabbage in a small jar from home. Of how they had to haul baskets of oranges from their farm in the mountain before the sun even rose (that was my mom with absolutely no upper body strength), or of how they sometimes ate chili peppers straight from the tree as their only meal (which sparked my theory of why northern China likes everything ridiculously spicy). So I came from a background where I found myself incredibly lucky and privileged to have all these opportunities ahead of me, all due to the harsh conditions and labor my parents went through. So I figured, I might as well do something meaningful with my career, right? Shouldn’t I make everything my parents went through worthwhile? So basically from the wee ages of seven to sixteen, I spent my time trying to figure out how I wanted to help the world. I was quite adamant about veterinary school until I heard about lawyers, then doctors, and I just spun around and around. Finally, I put together my passion for helping others, my interest in the human mind, and my self-proclaimed empathy for others. I landed at psychology. I may not be saving lives in operating room or by creating advanced technology, but I will be changing lives