For the past 19 years of my life, I have lived in shadows. My family adopted Asian values and as you may know about Asian families, they tend to compare a lot. No matter if it is comparing among their kids, comparing their kids with other neighbors’ kids, with their friends’ kids, and with their relatives’ kids. Asian families compare almost everything. To most traditional Asians, for example, a family like mine, academics is very important in their student career. Thus, Asian families love to compare among their kids or with other kids in the area of academics.
Of course, my family was no exception. Among my family, I am the third child of four kids. As you can probably guess, I have felt that I have mainly lived in the shadows of everyone, which includes my friends and my siblings. Especially my siblings, who are far more superior in academics than I am, have always caused great pressure for me. My eldest sister skipped four grades and finished her high school career at 14, college at 18, and graduate school at either 21 or 22. My second oldest sister graduated high school with a valedictorian title and went to Yale University for her college career and Columbia Business School for her graduate school career. Lastly, my younger brother, who just graduated high school last year, also graduated with a valedictorian title. However, as expected, I was a very plain and average kid my whole life. My GPA in high school was not terribly high nor was it terribly low. My rank in school was about the same – average. Moreover, not only to my siblings, my mom likes to compare me with my second cousin, who is about the same age as I am but skipped a year and is very successful and ambitious. Thus, because of those events, I promised myself that I wanted to be different and be what my siblings and cousin didn’t really do – to be sociable and friendly. I didn’t want myself to wander in the shadows of loneliness; I wanted to breakthrough.
All these aspects of my life prompted me to apply to UCLA for college; at first, my whole family thought it was luck that I got into such a good school. As a second year right now, although I am still struggling to succeed among all my intelligent peers, I wonder maybe I was able to show my parents and other people that I am just as capable as my siblings and other kids. I do not ever want others to look down at me. Therefore, the reason for everything that I do is because I don’t want to feel lonely and I want to be acknowledged as who I am for the things I have done.
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